By Joann Gonchar, AIA

Photo © Yale School of Architecture, Susan Surface

Archigram founder Peter Cook gave an energetic keynote address as part of the symposium.

In conjunction with the symposium, an exhibition of the drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings of Massimo Scolari opened in the Yale Architecture Galleries.

Judging by the number of attendees at a recent Yale School of Architecture symposium Is Drawing Dead?, many architects fear that the computer, and the increasing sophistication of tools for modeling, parametric design, and construction documentation, have made hand drawing obsolete. The event, held February 9 through 11, attracted more than 450 students, academics, and practitioners, making competition stiff for a spot in the 175-seat Hastings Hall—the auditorium in the school’s recently restored Paul Rudolph-designed building. The rest of the audience was relegated to several overflow spaces with audio and video links to the auditorium.

The roster of speakers was diverse and included Archigram founder Peter Cook, neuroscientist Marvin Chun, and Andrew Witt, director of research at Gehry Technologies. The presenters didn’t answer definitively the question posed by the symposium’s provocative title. However, several passionately defended the role of hand drawing in the creative process. Michael Graves, who focused on the drawings he made in the early 1960s of Rome’s historic monuments, advocated sketching from life as a form of note taking. “We never remember unless we draw it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the drawing is good, bad, or whatever.” Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa made the case for hand drawing as tactile tool for discovery. While drawing, an architect isn’t focused on the individual lines he or she is creating, said Pallasmaa, but is instead “occupying that space, as if touching all its surfaces.” Such a connection is “difficult, if not impossible to simulate with computers,” he said.

For some of the symposium’s participants, digital tools offer just as much possibility for generating form and for investigation as sketching. Greg Lynn, for example, said he could model an idea more quickly than draw it by hand. Lynn does sketch, but typically after modeling first with a computer. He relies on drawing as a means to clarify his designs, he explained.

A few of the presentations missed their mark, including that given by Patrick Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects. Schumacher spent about 45 minutes constructing an argument that compared the role of drawing and digital models in architectural practice to the role of money in an economic system. He could have better used his allotted time explaining how his firm designs, documents, and realizes its buildings.

The most intriguing presentations showcased work that merges the creative potential of drawing with digital tools. Los Angeles-based artist Casey Reas, for example, sketches, but not with pencil and paper. Instead he draws with computer code. In Java, he develops a set of instructions defining the behavior of lines and shapes, and then the computer displays a piece on its screen that continuously changes but possesses an evident underlying logic. Julie Dorsey, a Yale professor of computer science, demonstrated a tool with a more direct link to architectural practice. She is developing “Mental Canvas”—software that combines the ease of hand sketching with the visualization capabilities of computer modeling and rendering systems. Users will be able to assemble sketches—either drawn on a tablet or scanned into the program—and then reconfigure and study them in three dimensions or virtually place the building on its site.

Timed to open with the symposium is an exhibition mounted in the Yale Architecture Gallery that affirms the value of hand drawing as an art form. The show, which remains on view through May 4, is a retrospective of the work of Italian architect Massimo Scolari, featuring 160 of his oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Scolari’s fantastical compositions take their cues from industrial scenes, landscapes, classical architecture, and contemporary cities and are remarkable for their precision and detail, not because they depict buildable form. The work, explains Scolari, “is more related to painting than to architecture. But it is what I do.”

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By Tom Ichniowski
This article originally appeared in Engineering News-Record

In a victory for architectural firms, the Small Business Administration has backed away from a proposed major boost in the revenue a firm can have and still be rated “small.” That ceiling governs eligibility for small-business programs, such as contracts set aside for such firms.

Last year SBA proposed hiking the “size standard” for both architectural and landscape architectural firms to $19 million in average annual receipts, from $4.5 million for architects and $7 million for landscape architects. Under the higher caps, small firms would compete against much bigger ones for small-business set-asides. After architects flooded SBA with criticisms about the $19-million plan, SBA retreated. In a final rule printed on Feb. 10, SBA raised architects’ ceiling to $7 million and kept landscape architects’ cap at $7 million.

SBA lifted the engineering services limit to $14 million, from $4.5 million. It had proposed $19 million. The American Council of Engineering Cos. “raised numerous concerns” about the proposal, says Steve Hall, vice president for government affairs. “Some of those concerns apparently struck a chord.” The new caps take effect on March 12.

“I think we’re very excited that we got them away from that $19 million,” says Jessica Salmoiraghi, American Institute of Architects director of federal relations and counsel. The $7-million cap covers 95.5 percent of AIA members, up from 91.7 percent at the old mark. The American Society of Landscape Architects was “extremely pleased” that SBA agreed with its recommendation to keep the $7-million cap, says Roxanne Blackwell, ASLA federal government affairs manager. “It keeps more landscape architecture firms active and viable in the SBA procurement arena,” she adds.

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By William Hanley

Image courtesy BIG

Kimball Art Center Expansion. Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

Rising star Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm BIG have won a competition to greatly expand an art center in Park City, Utah, the ski town that hosts the Sundance Film Festival every January. The firm’s preliminary design for the Kimball Art Center—a 35-year-old, non-collecting institution currently housed in a two-story former garage—calls for renovating the existing space and adding an 80-foot structure that resembles two blocks of wood, stacked one on top of the other, with the upper section twisting away from the base.

The design for the new building, made from lengths of railroad lumber stacked at subtle angles, torques as it rises from the street like a game of Jenga. Its corner elevations evoke the downward-facing gables of an inverted log cabin. The form is a playful reference to a long-destroyed storage facility that was once a town landmark. The 30,000-square-foot scheme encloses exhibitions spaces, a restaurant, and gift shop on four levels inside the wooden hull, capped by a roof terrace.

Working with Salt Lake City firm Architectural Nexus, BIG beat out competing proposals by Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Sparano + Mooney Architecture, Will Bruder + Partners, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The project is expected to break ground in 2013 and cost upwards of $10 million, though fundraising has not yet begun.

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At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream proposes five solutions to the disconnect between the housing Americans need and the housing America offers.

By Fred A. Bernstein

Image courtesy Studio Gang Architects

Rendering of Studio Gang Architects’ The Garden in the Machine project for Cicero, Illinois. Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS Architects present at the Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream Open Studios at P.S.1 in 2011.

At 2,500 square feet, The Museum of Modern Art’s Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, site of the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, is about the size of the average suburban house. But while that may be too much square footage for the typical family, it is too little for a show this rich. MoMA should consider rehousing “Rehousing.”

The theme of the show, which opens February 15 and runs through July 30, is the disconnect between the housing Americans need and the housing America offers. It opens with an installation by Estudio Teddy Cruz on the absurdities of the McMansion. From there, it turns to presenting new options for America’s inner-ring suburbs, overlooked by developers and abandoned by the affluent for more urban, or more rural, locations.

Foreclosed had its origins in a research project initiated by Reinhold Martin in 2009. Martin, who directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, wondered whether the foreclosure crisis could have a silver lining, by giving Americans reason to rethink one of the most impractical (and wasteful) aspects of the American dream. That, he argued, could lead to the proliferation of new housing types that blur lines between public and private spaces. With Anna Kenoff and Leah Meisterlin, he produced a book, the Buell Hypothesis, last year.

Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design, saw an opportunity to test the hypothesis and at the same time create another exhibition in his series of issue-oriented architecture shows. (The last was Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement in 2010.) He and Martin commissioned five architecture firms to tackle the problems of specific suburbs identified in the “Hypothesis” as crying out for reinvention. The architects assembled teams that included not just the usual suspects (landscape architects, structural engineers) but also economists, community activists, journalists, climate scientists, and in one case, advertising gurus, who created TV commercials for a reinvented suburb outside Portland.

That proposal is by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac, for a section of Keizer, Oregon that would be five times as dense as neighboring suburbs, but with three times as much open space. A gorgeous, dome-shaped structure contains a community composting plant. Around it are buildings that recall the best work of Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, and MVRDV. One imagines a developer seeing Andraos and Wood’s elaborate 1:250 model, depicting a gently futuristic suburb, and wanting to break ground tomorrow.

The other star of the exhibition is Jeanne Gang, the Chicago architect. She and her teammates tackled the problems of Cicero, an older Chicago suburb that is filled with rotting industrial facilities but not the kind of housing needed by its large immigrant population.
They decided to play to Cicero’s strengths, as what Gang calls an “arrival city,” by creating modular housing that can go up or down in size as families evolve. They also reclaimed industrial facilities as gardens and, like most of the teams, came up with an unconventional financing scheme. Like the very different WORKac proposal, Gang’s Cicero proposal seems practically shovel-ready, even though, as she pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, it remains illegal under Chicago’s zoning code.

The most provocative idea in the show may belong to MOS—the firm headed by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample—which focuses on East Orange, New Jersey. The plan acknowledges the lack of pedestrian life in today’s suburbs and reclaims the streets themselves as building sites. That allows increased density without the need to demolish existing housing. But if the idea is strong, details, of what the “ribbon” buildings” would look like and how they would function, are sparse.

Less developed is the plan by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Song to revamp parts of Temple Terrace, Florida, near Tampa. The models and renderings are colorless—if the goal was to avoid tropical clichés, the architects succeeded. Andrew Zago went to the other extreme, covering the houses in his proposed development (part of Rialto, California) in patterning so bold, it recalls the work of Ettore Sottsass at the giddy height of Memphis. One extraordinary rendering appears to have been printed out of register (so that colors overlap in unexpected ways), symbolizing the desired blurring of lines between public and private property.

The Buell Hypothesis—that the American dream is big enough to encompass more than one housing paradigm—gets a big boost from MoMA. One leaves the show with newfound optimism about what architecture can do. As Wood put it in an interview with this writer, “Somehow the American dream became about houses in the suburbs. That’s not the real American dream—the real American dream is about imagining a better future.”

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Article source: http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/02/Foreclosed-Rehousing-the-American-Dream.asp?WT.mc_id=rss_archrecord

At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream proposes five solutions to the disconnect between the housing Americans need and the housing America offers.

By Fred A. Bernstein

Image courtesy Studio Gang Architects

Rendering of Studio Gang Architects’ The Garden in the Machine project for Cicero, Illinois. Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS Architects present at the Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream Open Studios at P.S.1 in 2011.

At 2,500 square feet, The Museum of Modern Art’s Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, site of the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, is about the size of the average suburban house. But while that may be too much square footage for the typical family, it is too little for a show this rich. MoMA should consider rehousing “Rehousing.”

The theme of the show, which opens February 15 and runs through July 30, is the disconnect between the housing Americans need and the housing America offers. It opens with an installation by Estudio Teddy Cruz on the absurdities of the McMansion. From there, it turns to presenting new options for America’s inner-ring suburbs, overlooked by developers and abandoned by the affluent for more urban, or more rural, locations.

Foreclosed had its origins in a research project initiated by Reinhold Martin in 2009. Martin, who directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, wondered whether the foreclosure crisis could have a silver lining, by giving Americans reason to rethink one of the most impractical (and wasteful) aspects of the American dream. That, he argued, could lead to the proliferation of new housing types that blur lines between public and private spaces. With Anna Kenoff and Leah Meisterlin, he produced a book, the Buell Hypothesis, last year.

Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design, saw an opportunity to test the hypothesis and at the same time create another exhibition in his series of issue-oriented architecture shows. (The last was Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement in 2010.) He and Martin commissioned five architecture firms to tackle the problems of specific suburbs identified in the “Hypothesis” as crying out for reinvention. The architects assembled teams that included not just the usual suspects (landscape architects, structural engineers) but also economists, community activists, journalists, climate scientists, and in one case, advertising gurus, who created TV commercials for a reinvented suburb outside Portland.

That proposal is by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac, for a section of Keizer, Oregon that would be five times as dense as neighboring suburbs, but with three times as much open space. A gorgeous, dome-shaped structure contains a community composting plant. Around it are buildings that recall the best work of Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, and MVRDV. One imagines a developer seeing Andraos and Wood’s elaborate 1:250 model, depicting a gently futuristic suburb, and wanting to break ground tomorrow.

The other star of the exhibition is Jeanne Gang, the Chicago architect. She and her teammates tackled the problems of Cicero, an older Chicago suburb that is filled with rotting industrial facilities but not the kind of housing needed by its large immigrant population.
They decided to play to Cicero’s strengths, as what Gang calls an “arrival city,” by creating modular housing that can go up or down in size as families evolve. They also reclaimed industrial facilities as gardens and, like most of the teams, came up with an unconventional financing scheme. Like the very different WORKac proposal, Gang’s Cicero proposal seems practically shovel-ready, even though, as she pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, it remains illegal under Chicago’s zoning code.

The most provocative idea in the show may belong to MOS—the firm headed by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample—which focuses on East Orange, New Jersey. The plan acknowledges the lack of pedestrian life in today’s suburbs and reclaims the streets themselves as building sites. That allows increased density without the need to demolish existing housing. But if the idea is strong, details, of what the “ribbon” buildings” would look like and how they would function, are sparse.

Less developed is the plan by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Song to revamp parts of Temple Terrace, Florida, near Tampa. The models and renderings are colorless—if the goal was to avoid tropical clichés, the architects succeeded. Andrew Zago went to the other extreme, covering the houses in his proposed development (part of Rialto, California) in patterning so bold, it recalls the work of Ettore Sottsass at the giddy height of Memphis. One extraordinary rendering appears to have been printed out of register (so that colors overlap in unexpected ways), symbolizing the desired blurring of lines between public and private property.

The Buell Hypothesis—that the American dream is big enough to encompass more than one housing paradigm—gets a big boost from MoMA. One leaves the show with newfound optimism about what architecture can do. As Wood put it in an interview with this writer, “Somehow the American dream became about houses in the suburbs. That’s not the real American dream—the real American dream is about imagining a better future.”

Reader Comments:

Article source: http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/02/Foreclosed-Rehousing-the-American-Dream.asp?WT.mc_id=rss_archrecord

[ Page 1 of 3 ]

By Katie Frasier
This article originally appeared in ENR Mountain States.

During the past several years, the green building trend has soared, with an increase in government incentives and availability of affordable supplies driving a huge growth of U.S. Green Building Council LEED-certified buildings. With the LEED program ambitiously hoping to certify one million commercial buildings by 2020, it’s no surprise that this trend has come under some scrutiny. And while most great rewards often have a price, in this case it could be at the expense of the safety of construction workers on the job.

When Matthew Hallowell, assistant professor in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, became aware of a study that found evidence of a nearly 50 percent increase of injury rate had occurred in LEED-certified projects over traditional construction, he found himself wondering about the cause.

“That original work was the catalyst,” Hallowell says. “What we proposed to do was a comprehensive analysis where we looked credit by credit at the construction and design for this type of building and how that compared to what we traditionally do. LEED is growing very quickly, but prior to this, no one had paid much attention to the safety involved.”

The team’s greatest challenge in conducting the study, titled “Identification of Safety Risks for High-Performance Sustainable Construction Projects,” was gathering empirical data rather than opinion-based anecdotes. To do this, Hallowell says the student researcher conducted site visits, observed construction processes, obtained and analyzed project documentation and reviewed job-hazard analyses and injury reports—in addition to conducting interviews at multiple organizational levels.

With the information gathered, Hallowell and his team of researchers were able to identify 14 LEED credentials that may create heightened risks to construction workers. Most notable risks include a perceived 41% higher risk associated with installing sustainable roofing, a perceived 37% increase in risk from installing PV panels for on-site renewable energy, a perceived 36% additional risk of cuts, abrasions and lacerations from construction waste management and perceived 32% heightened risk of falls from installing skylights and atriums to meet the daylight and views credit.

“I was very surprised when I read the conclusions,” says Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED Technical Development at USGBC. “LEED buildings are substantively different than non-LEED buildings and while there are risks in all construction, we did not expect green-building construction would have higher incidence of accidents. I don’t know that a lot of people would have held an opinion that was different than mine prior to this report.”

The fact that the LEED rating system had yet to identify how to improve workers’ safety was something the USGBC had already been working closely with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for several months to evaluate.

“We understood there were opportunities to learn from the safety community and help take their expertise to understand where we could create LEED credit language that inherently values the mitigation of risks to the constructors,” says Owens. “Still, it’s helpful and important that people are studying these issues and identifying opportunities to get better.”

One question that arose from these studies was whether a building could truly be considered sustainable if the health and safety of its constructors were at risk. “Worker safety and health must be considered as an integral component of sustainable building design, construction and operation,” says Hallowell. He reasons that adding LEED credentials based on safety measures would be beneficial to maintaining worker safety.

But Owens notes that rather than putting in place a credential that recognizes regulations contractors should already be complying with, LEED officials are looking to evolve the rating system as a whole.

“Right now we’re trying to understand where the leverage points are within the rating system for opportunities that will allow us to make it better,” says Owens. “If we can become better informed about risks involved, we can improve the requirements of the rating systems and enhance safety. This study is an initial step in that direction.”

Whether the findings of this study have surprised or validated opinions of individuals around the industry, Owens asserts that the information is useful for everyone to consider. “I really hope that people will be looking at this study and learning from it. That’s certainly what we’ll be doing.”

Examples of Identifying and Reducing Risks

In addition to identifying the increased risks in building for LEED certification, Hallowell and his team followed up with a study (due to publish in February) that found suggested mitigations for the added risks. It’s important to note that though these are listed under the LEED credential the construction methods meet, many of these risks are not unique to green building. Prevention efforts can also be applied to construction of traditional buildings that might incorporate one or more of these elements.

LEED Credit: Brownfield Redevelopment

Identified Risk: Extensive earthwork operations create a higher risk of falling or collapsing and hazards from the disposal of contaminants.

Suggested Mitigation: Workers could use impermeable plastic liners in the beds of heavy equipment and thoroughly wash all equipment at the end of each workday to reduce contamination.

[ Page 1 of 3 ]

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By Carolina Worrell
This article originally appeared in ENR New York.

New York City’s adoption of new green building codes are expected to result in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5% and saving $400 million by 2030, says a recently released report from the Urban Green Council, the U.S. Green Building Council’s New York chapter. The codes are also expected to divert 100,000 tons of asphalt from landfills each year; reduce greenhouse gas emissions citywide by 5%; and lower the costs of lighting energy by 10%.

The city has so far enacted 29 of 111 recommendations made by a task force established two years ago to detail steps the city should take to increase sustainability in the buildings sector. Eight more recommendations are in the process of becoming codified, the city says. The new codes will help put the city on track to meet its PlaNYC program goals, says Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who launched the green initiative in 2007.

 Buildings account for 75% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions and 95% of total electrical consumption, the city says. The task force’s proposals address issues including carbon emission rates, public health and safety, and costs associated with wasted energy and other resources.

Under PlaNYC, the city has planted 500,000 trees, constructed new parks, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions since 2007. Projects under the plan include a 13-acre park stretching from Beach 11th Street to Beach 17th Street and Beach 28th Street to Beach 32nd Street in Far Rockaway, Queens and the $150-million, 62-acre Willets Point redevelopment project, also in Queens.

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By Beth Broome

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While satisfying the stringent requirements for a protected monument in Denmark, SeARCH architects has unabashedly reshaped a historic farm 25 miles north of Copenhagen. The Amsterdam-based firm has converted the estate—called Favrholm, or “beautiful island”—into a corporate conference center for global health-care company Novo Nordisk, balancing an extreme intervention with restoration work on the original building. The design asserts the property’s new identity, bridging the past and the future—an important gesture for an 89-year-old company dedicated to research and innovation.

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The site’s history is long and varied, dating back to 1364 when it was pledged to Danish king Valdemar Atterdag. For centuries, the property on the outskirts of the small city of Hillerød belonged to the throne (and was lent to vassals for farming and then used for hunting) before becoming a stud farm and, later, a research farm in 1917. The whitewashed brick building with a thatched roof that stands today was built in 1806 and declared a national landmark in 1964. In the 1980s and ’90s it housed refugees. And in 1993, it was purchased by Novo Nordisk to expand its Hillerød campus, which includes a production facility and offices across Favrholm Lake. Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest insulin producer and a company with a rich history itself, appreciated the significance of the agricultural connection because of its own beginnings rooted in the use of porcine and bovine pancreases for synthesizing its principal pharmaceutical product.

SeARCH was one of four firms to participate in an invited competition to transform the estate into a training complex that would engage both the mind and body and foster reflection as well as networking. The brief called for a conference center with meeting, dining, and fitness spaces, as well as guest quarters. The goal, says Isabelle Petersen, manager of the Favrholm Campus, “was to create something exceptional”—a dynamic and interactive facility for employees and guests. “They wanted it all—all kinds of styles, a mix of this and that,” recalls SeARCH principal Bjarne Mastenbroek of his client. “They also wished to recreate the historic, formal rectangular layout of the old farm. There were many limitations and ambitions.”

The team, closely overseen by the Heritage Agency of Denmark (KUAS), gutted the existing west wing and fitted it out for guest rooms and a fitness center. Then they renovated the central building to accommodate a lobby, dining hall, and administration, and converted former haylofts above into lounges and meeting rooms. According to preservation requirements, virtually nothing on the exterior could be altered. The rules also guided interior work, preventing changes that were not historically accurate, like leaving brickwork untreated or opening up the ceiling above the dining area. “Our aim was to maintain the atmosphere of a farmhouse—to keep it rough—to demonstrate that the building had another function before,” says project architect Kathrin Hanf. So the team kept as much original structure as possible and used thin chalk stucco (instead of an opaque version) to emphasize the old masonry’s texture.

While KUAS closely guarded existing components, the architects were free from the shackles of historicism with regard to their additions. They did not want to build one overpowering extension. Instead, they split different functions between two new volumes: a wood-clad east wing, which restores the courtyard’s original form and houses an auditorium and kitchen; and a north wing for meeting rooms (Phase II will include more guest rooms at the court’s south end). For the east wing, they mirrored the west wing’s curve to create symmetry, and then riffed with the roofline, starting with a gable profile and morphing it into a different shape. Referencing barns that once occupied the site, the architects employed wood slats, though they applied them vertically, as a rainscreen that extends up the roofline. While respecting the old farmhouse’s scale, geometry, and organization, the extension’s modern lines and material treatment emphasize a friendly tension between new and old.

In sync with SeARCH’s philosophy of strengthening rather than dominating the landscape, the team nestled the 18,000-square-foot steel-and-concrete north addition in the hillside, abutting the existing structure. By doing so, they preserved views of the historic building from across the lake, while maintaining the old farmhouse’s dignity and standing as the complex’s focal point. Extensive glazing renders the new wing as a kind of viewing platform for looking out to the water and the teeming bird life there. To counter ornithological and environmental associations’ concerns, the architects limited lakeside activity, minimizing operable windows and providing no entry points on the north facade.

Novo Nordisk requested meeting rooms in a potpourri of styles—from classic to minimalist—but the architects resisted. Such an approach would have been easy to do, says Mastenbroek, but “it doesn’t work—it’s too banal.” To redirect the client’s wish, the architects instead proposed a “family” of volumes. The final design takes visitors down stairs from the original central building to a cluster of meeting rooms, lounges, and patios at grade with the lake. The architects related the meeting spaces to one another by designing all of them in the shape of a leaf (or “cow-ear”), while varying them in size, relationship to the landscape, and material palette. The scheme creates the diversity and “style with humor” that Novo Nordisk wanted, while maintaining a distinct though cohesive aesthetic. The spaces, with their furniture-showroom-gone-wild decor, are a bit bombastic, but do impart a pleasant frisson. Still, says Mastenbroek, the focus was on opening to the landscape, not playing with forms: “We worked a lot on reshaping the levels of the complex. You are always able to orient yourself—you always know where you are relative to the old building.”

On a recent brisk December morning, Favrholm hummed with activity, and guests used the building as if on cue: holding breakout sessions in small meeting spaces and intent conversations in hayloft lounges. The center is a poster child for an idealistic new brand of corporate labor that is proliferating in privileged enclaves, and is a welcome antidote to soul-killing hotel-conference culture. In line with the values of the company it serves, the building reflects both a deference to the past and a sense of optimism for the future.

Owner: Novo Nordisk A/S

Architect:
SeARCH bv
Hamerstraat 3
1021 JT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T: +31 (0)20 7889900
F: +31 (0)20 7889911
E: info@search.nl
W: www.search.nl

Location: Hillerød, Denmark

Completion Date: May 2011

Gross square footage:
Building area: 7.000 m2
Conference: 1.670 m2
Auditorium: 700 m2
Hotel: 2.050 m2
Restaurant: 1.080 m2
Fitnesscentre:  500 m2
Exterior space:  50.000 m2

Cost: withheld

Article source: http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/Building_types_study/adaptive_reuse/2012/Favrholm.asp?WT.mc_id=rss_archrecord

[ Page 1 of 4 ]

By Nadine M. Post
This article originally appeared in Engineering News-Record

An old Chinese proverb sums up several projects that mark the dawn of seismic-resistant design and construction in earthquake-devastated Haiti: “If you give a person a fish, you feed that person for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you feed that person for a lifetime.”

The aim of the projects—one of which concentrates on training for seismic design of commercial buildings and the other on the manufacture of hurricane- and seismic-resistant manufactured single-story buildings—is to prevent a repeat of the kind of death and destruction that occurred on Jan. 12, 2010, when a magnitude-7 quake killed an estimated 316,000 people and turned most buildings into rubble.

New York state’s University at Buffalo, through its Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, and Shelter2Home LLC (S2H)—a building systems manufacturer—are “teaching people to fish” in very different ways. Since May 2010, UB/MCEER, in partnership with the private, non-profit Université Quisqueya (UniQ) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, has held four of five seminars on the fundamentals of seismic design.

Shelter2Home, a for-profit enterprise, is fabricating hurricane- and seismic-resistant houses and simple, single-story buildings based on its patented light-gauge steel framing system, engineered and constructed for seismic resistance. The firm hires and trains local workers to assemble the units.

Starting From Scratch
The UniQ-UB program has trained more than 500 architects and engineers, which is about 50% of the designer population in Port-au-Prince, a city of three million people. “Earthquake engineering and seismic design were non-existent in Haiti,” says Andre Filiatrault, curriculum coordinator for the UniQ-UB/MCEER seminars and former director of UB/MCEER. “We were starting from scratch.”

“Rebuilding in Haiti is a difficult, painful process,” adds Filiatrault, who is also a UB professor of engineering. “The infrastructure is not there, and there’s lots of inertia and corruption. … People don’t always want to hear about earthquake engineering.”

“One has to have a thick skin and a durable stomach to be in business in Haiti,” says Donald A. Stevens, president of Shelter2Home, Winchester, Va. “It’s a challenging environment.”

UniQ-UB seminar attendee Yves Osias agrees that the environment is challenging. Materials are expensive and often substandard, and there is no enforcement of quality, says Osias, a Haitian structural engineer with the non-governmental organization Compassion International, Port-au-Prince. Reinforcing steel does not meet international standards, and workers are not qualified because there is not enough training in seismic construction.

Haitian native Gael Lamothe, a junior in civil engineering at UB, knows about materials firsthand. He recently completed a research project that compared 15 concrete masonry units (CMUs) produced by several suppliers in Haiti to six made in the U.S. Only one sample from Haiti met the U.S. standard. The other 14 had much lower compressive strengths.

“Engineers, architects and contractors are aware of the importance of seismic designs throughout Haiti,” says Evenson Calixte, dean of UniQ’s school of sciences, engineering and architecture. “However, the government has not yet shown any public policy toward the enforcement of seismic design in new construction.”

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By Fred Bernstein

Henry Urbach
Photo © Winni Wintermeyer

Henry Urbach, a one-time gallery owner who most recently was curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will be moving to New Canaan, Connecticut. He has just been named director of the Glass House, the Philip Johnson estate now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. (He succeeds the interim director, Rena Zurofsky, and founding director, Chisty MacLear.)

Fred Bernstein: Did you visit the Glass House while Philip was alive?

Henry Urbach: In 2001, when I was running the gallery in New York [Henry Urbach Architecture], I was invited on a Saturday morning. It felt like I was being summoned, which I was. I brought a portfolio of work from the gallery, to present to Philip. He was extremely interested in the work, especially that of LOT-EK and some of the younger architects. And then we walked down to the lake pavilion. I had of course known it from photographs. But nothing had prepared me for the impact.

FB: And did you return?

HU: Last year, I began research on the Glass House as a curatorial project. Johnson, of course, was the founding architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art. But the Glass House, too, can be understood as a curatorial space, where art, architecture, landscape and people were brought together, recombined and displayed in ways that were influential. So I made a visit to explore that aspect of it, and one of the staff members, who was kind enough to take me around, mentioned that there was a director’s search.

FB: With the new job, will you have time to complete your book Installation Architecture: A Primer?

HU: Most of the research is done. There are about 40 featured architects, starting around 1970, with Coop Himmelblau, Ant Farm, Florian St. Florian, and moving on to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Lebbeus Woods, Juergen Mayer H., Alex Schweder, and others.

But it’s not just history. There’s an argument to the book, too, about understanding installation architecture as a way of producing an actual spatial experience at full scale. It’s a response to the problem of showing architecture in a museum or gallery.

FB: Do you think you may bring installation architecture to the Glass House grounds?

HU: Once I get settled in, we will begin a looking at the best ways to bring forward new work on the site—with an eye to what Philip and David [Whitney] did, including commissioning site-specific sculpture.

FB: Will you live in the Glass House?

No, the Glass House will remain a precious historical artifact. But I will be living on the property, in the house known as Colluna Farms. I can’t tell you how exciting it will be to occupy one of modern architecture’s hallowed grounds. 

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