New Technologies, New Materials, Current Concerns
13.2 New Technologies, New Materials, Current Concerns
Like all areas of human creativity, architecture has been affected by the evolution of digital technologies. This section looks first at some of the possibilities opened up by using computers to link design and fabrication. Then it turns to examine how modern fabrics are being used to create lightweight, portable structures; how architects are responding to the needs of communities; and the ongoing challenge of developing environmentally responsible buildings.
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Digital Design and Fabrication
Also known as computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), digital design and fabrication is very much what it sounds like: Digital technology is used to help design an object; then digital design data is fed to computer-driven machinery (computer-numeric-controlled, CNC), which automatically fabricates the object.
Linking design and manufacturing by means of computers was pioneered in the 1960s by the electronics, aeronautic, and automotive industries, which could afford to invest in the large, mainframe computers of the day. With the development of personal computers during the years around 1980, digital technology was adopted in numerous work environments, including architecture studios. Many architects began to use two-dimensional drawing programs to help generate the thousands of drawings that guide construction. Today most architects work with more powerful three-dimensional modeling programs as part of the design process. Linked with the potential of digital fabrication, these programs have expanded the possibilities for the forms architecture can take.
One of the first architects to take advantage of digital design and fabrication was Frank Gehry. Gehry had become interested in complex curving forms, but he didn't know how to communicate them to a contractor so that they could be built. A search for solutions turned up a three-dimensional modeling program called CATIA, which had been developed for the French aerospace industry. The world got its first look at what CATIA could do for architecture when Gehry unveiled his next major project, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (13.31).
13.31Frank O. Gehry. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain. 1997.
Gehry's design for the building began with gestural sketches on paper and proceeded to the construction of a wood-and-paper model. The model was scanned into CATIA, which mapped it in three dimensions. CATIA enabled Gehry's team to work within the construction budget by allowing them to follow every design decision through to its practical consequences in regard to construction methods and exact quantities of materials. In essence, the program built and rebuilt a virtual museum many times before the actual museum was begun. Information from CATIA then guided the digital fabrication of building components: CNC machines milled limestone blocks and cut glass for curved walls, cut the titanium panels that cover the exterior, and cut, folded, and bolted the underlying steel framework of the building.
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The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a satellite museum of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Another famous museum of modern and contemporary art, the Pompidou Center in Paris, recently opened its own satellite museum in Metz, France. Designed by Shigeru Ban, the Centre Pompidou-Metz is another example of the new architectural forms enabled by digital design and fabrication (13.32). The most spectacular element of the Pompidou-Metz is the undulating white canopy that shelters the center's galleries and atrium spaces. The canopy is supported by a structure made of laminated wooden ribs woven in an open, hexagonal pattern. To create the wooden structure, the curving geometry of the roof was digitally mapped. Sections (slices) were automatically derived to profile the rise and fall of each individual rib, then translated into instructions for CNC wood-milling machinery. All in all, some 1,800 double-curved segments of wood totaling over 59,000 running feet were individually fabricated to create the structure. Ban took his inspiration for the unusual roof from a Chinese woven bamboo hat that he had found. Weavers have produced such hats for thousands of years, but only with the development of CAD/CAM technology has an architect been able to imitate them.
13.32Shigeru Ban. Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France. 2010.
Fabric Architecture
Shigeru Ban's ingenious wooden lattice is covered with Teflon-coated fiberglass fabric. The stain-resistant, self-cleaning membrane is translucent, allowing daylight to filter into the interior. In the evening, when the building is lit from within, the silhouette of the wooden structure shows through the membrane to the outside. The fabric Ban used is a modern invention, but the idea of fabric architecture is an ancient one. Stone Age peoples first made tents of tree branches covered with animal skins as early as 40,000 years ago. Later, as the first cities were raised up, nomadic peoples continued to live in tents. The yurts of Central Asia, made of felt over a wooden framework, and the tents of Middle Eastern Bedouin peoples, made of fabric woven from goat hair, are two examples of nomadic dwellings with roots in the distant past. Today interest in lightweight, portable structures and the development of stronger synthetic fabrics have inspired a new wave of fabric architecture.
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The key to fabric architecture is tension: For fabric to bear weight and resist wind, it must be pulled tense. For that reason, fabric structures are also known as tensile structures or tensile membrane structures. One way to tense fabric is to stretch it over a framework. The most familiar example of this principle is the umbrella: When you open an umbrella, the fabric is drawn taut by slender metal ribs, creating a portable roof that protects you from the rain. The tension of the fabric in turn prevents the ribs from buckling and constrains their movement, allowing them to be much thinner and lighter than they would otherwise need to be.
Zaha Hadid's innovative Burnham Pavilion is made of panels of fabric zipped tight over a framework of bent aluminum and steel tubing (13.33). Fabric is stretched over the inside of the pavilion as well, where it serves as a projection screen for videos. Light-emitting diodes (LED) set between the inner and outer fabric skins illuminate the pavilion at night so that it glows in a sequence of colors—green, orange, blue, violet. A product of computer-aided design, the curved form sits lightly on the ground, as though it had just touched down and might soon be off again. We could think of Burnham Pavilion as contemporary nomadic architecture. Built on-site for a centennial celebration in Chicago in 2009, it was designed so that it could be dismantled after the festival and erected elsewhere as desired.
13.33Zaha Hadid Architects. Burnham Pavilion. Installation in Millennium Park, Chicago. 2009.
Another way to tense fabric is with air pressure. Anyone who has ever inflated an air mattress will understand immediately how rigid and firm an air-filled structure can be. Air was first used as a structural support in the 19th century, with the invention of the inflatable rubber tire. The development of synthetic fabrics in the mid–20th century led visionary architects to experiment with inflatable structures during the 1960s. After a lull, inflatable architecture is today undergoing something of a revival.
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ARTISTS Zaha Hadid (b. 1950)
Z
aha Hadid does not shy away from strong statements. “I don't design nice buildings,” she told an interviewer. “I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.”3 Indeed, “nice” is a word that critics have never applied to Hadid's work, reaching instead for adjectives such as spectacular, visionary, futuristic, sensuous, and transformative. “Hadid is not merely designing buildings,” wrote one critic, “she is reimagining domestic, corporate, and public space.”4
In some of her designs, how does Hadid capture “raw, vital, earthly quality”? Why did the architect have so much difficulty getting her projects realized early on in her career?
Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 into an intellectual and resolutely secular family. After schooling in Iraq and Switzerland, she attended the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, where she studied mathematics. Then it was on to London for advanced studies at the renowned Architectural Association School of Architecture. There, she became fascinated by the Russian avant-garde painters of the early 20th century, and her conviction grew that modernism was an unfinished project. She took up painting as a design tool and adapted the formal vocabulary of the Russians she admired. Her paintings so little resembled traditional architectural renderings that many people had a hard time understanding them as buildings at all. Hadid insisted that they could be built and that her unusual technique allowed her to express more complex flows of space and the dynamism of fragmented and layered geometric forms, characteristic elements of the architecture she envisioned. After graduating, she worked for two years in the architectural firm of one of her teachers. Then, in 1980, she set up her own practice.
The decades that followed were difficult. Hadid's firm entered competition after competition, winning several, yet almost nothing was built. She reached the 21st century with only one significant building to her name and a reputation as a “paper architect”—brilliant in theory, but impractical and untested. Hadid looks back on this period philosophically: “During the days and years we were locked up in Bowling Green Lane with nobody paying attention to us, we all did an enormous amount of research, and this gave us a great ability to reinvent and work on things.”5
Then, finally, her luck