Artistic judgement

5 February, 2010

On reflection
Project: Contemplating the void exhibition, Guggenheim museum, New York
Client: Guggenheim, NY
Designer: Bruce Munro

Bruce Munro’s design for an installation for the New York Guggenheim may feel to some like being stared at by thousands of scifi insects. That’s because the surface of his 18m-high, 12-sided column Beacon is covered in 36,000 bugeye-like, hexagonal mirrored lenses.

‘I wanted something that would make the building the subject, ’ says Munro. ‘I wanted it to reflect the building – literally. I’ve designed this hexagonal lens and thought I could use that as the base and make it mirrored.’

The idea is that during the day these would reflect what’s going on in the museum while at night, thanks to fibre optics and one-way nature of the coated lenses, Beacon will begin to light up. It will reflect the shape of the glass cupola of the Guggenheim, and the plan is for the Beacon to be programmed so that a wave of light washes around it, like a lighthouse. The movement is also a nod in the direction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling architecture.

The Beacon is a concept, created along with 200 other ideas from designers, architects and artists by the Guggenheim for its Celebrating the Void exhibition, part of its 50th anniversary celebrations. Others involved in the project include Anish Kapoor, Sarah Morrris, RachelWhiteread, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Daniel Libeskind and Toy Ito.

Munro says: ‘I could have been a bit more bullish and been a bit more over the top, but I wanted to be slightly pragmatic about it. With the Guggenheim I was thinking, “It’s great fun, but ultimately I’d like to go and build this tower”... You never know, there may be some mad American out there who wants to put one somewhere else!’

Current projects for Munro that are less blue-sky and more than likely to see fruition include a possible installation in Salisbury Cathedral and his Field of Light installation in San Diego.

Panel of experts
Project: The Langley academy
Client: DCSF and Langley academy trust
Designer: Foster + Partners

A building and cladding material since early days and now more popular with designers than ever, wood has a timeless quality, yet is directly affected by time.

A new project that embraces all of wood’s properties, including its eco-friendliness, is by Foster + Partners for The Langley Academy school, in Slough.

Its curved facades are clad in panels of Western red cedar, which has strong renewable credentials as well as the high-level of performance needed for such a scheme, including durability and natural, inbuilt repellency against rot and insects.

It’s also relatively lightweight, helping with transportation costs and carbon footprint. The wood has also been used on a series of horizontal and vertical louvers that have the double role of being both highly sculptural and providing shade.

Nigel Dancey, a senior partner and design director at Foster + Partners, says: ‘Environmental performance and appearance are indivisible at The Langley Academy.

The school pioneers a revolutionary new educational concept which draws on the theme of museums and galleries, so that the school itself is like an exhibit, with its physical manifestation a showcase and educational tool for environmental design.’

He’s referring in part to the school having been designed so that its energy use, from solar panels to grey water collection, is all open and transparent and will be used to help teach the 1,100 students it houses about science and environmental issues.

Copperload of this
Project: Glendale community college life sciences building, Glendale, Arizona
Client: Glendale community college
Designer: Gouldsevans

Copper seemed the natural answer when architect Mark Cone of GouldsEvans was faced with the question of what material to use for the new, 5,850 sq m, three-storey Glendale Community College Life Science Building in Arizona. It fit the context. Copper is a local material which Cone felt ‘would resonate with the desert context, and complement the colours and textures of campus’.

What’s more, it worked within the framework of other recent building additions which had ‘introduced a variety of metals to the original material palette of clay, masonry, and painted concrete.’

The GouldsEvans design team worked with metal fabricators to develop a kit-of-parts using manipulated standard panel profiles, so that they ‘were able to provide considerable design permutations’. These were then used to articulate the building according to how the sun hit it and what shadows this would create.

The north side is smooth and highly glazed. On the sun-drenched south side the panelling is more ‘animated’, with more panels and fins, and hence more shadows playing across the surface.

‘The copper panel facades behave as a living element in their own right,’ says Cone. ‘Left to patinate, the copper components provide a fitting architectural expression for the Life Science facility, and the various widths and depths of the copper components create dynamic compositions of light and shadow. ’

The building was recently a winner in the North American Copper in Architecture Awards.

Lessons in rust
Project: £22m regeneration of stoke Newington school, hackney
Client: hackney council
Designer: Jestico + Whiles

It may have surprised the 1,500 pupils of Stoke Newington School in Hackney, that, after having lived with a massive year-long project of building, revamping and refurbishing, when the new part of their school reopened, it was rusty.

And it’s getting worse – up to a point that it. By way of a nod to the Brutalist style of architecture of the school, which was built in 1967, architecture firm Jestico and Whiles clad the refurbished building in Corten steel, as well as materials such as ceramic brick.

But it’s the facade of Corten steel that delivers the major impact. When the school opened after the summer holidays, it was looking, well, just a little shabby, but now the full burnt-orange glory of the rust is beginning to come to the fore. The Corten steel will continue to weather until it has a strong layer of rust, which will then form a protective layer thanks to the steel’s alloying elements, and stop well short of eating into the frontage.

The architects say this cladding will ‘provide robustness and complement the red brick and bush-hammered concrete of the original school building. The elevation features elegant, offset, strip windows raised above black glazed brick at the entrance.

‘The design of the school is expected to receive a BREEAM rating of ‘Good’. The windows are high performance in terms of thermal loss and solar admittance, and unglazed areas are highly insulated to limit solarheat gain and retain naturally generated heat.”

It’s all part of the £22m regeneration of the school for Hackney Council in a mix of new construction and major internal restructuring.

Circulation has been completely remodelled and disabled access improved with ramps being added along with four lifts.