SIMPLICITY + CLARITY
Informing design 2.1 Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic and curator as well as an educator and publications director at Yale School of Architecture. She has published a book about her research on the engineer’s role as a designer and written numerous arti cles on the topic for magazines and journals. Her current work focuses on the intersection of engineering and factory design for the future of urban manufacturing.
Structure expressed as form The Center for Character and Lead ership Development of the United States Air Force Academy in Colo rado Springs comprises an architec turally exposed diagrid of painted structural steel plates that forms a dramatic 32-m tall inclined skylight aligned with the North Star. Like for the Fishers Island Residence and the Roche Learning Center, the structural components and connec tions were developed in close col laboration with the architects and express the sharp corners and structural logic of structural steel. In the final form, architecture and structure are indistinguishable.
The idea of communicating a clear and legible structure has many implications for an archi tecture /engineering firm such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Historically, the company has approached both engineering and architecture with the respective teams collaborating from the outset of a project. The joint expertise of engineers and architects has been applied in developing innovative design solutions that have met numerous challenges with inspiring results. The collaborative dialogue results in a clarity of structure. Projects in which engineers interact not only with architects but also with artists or other designers are evaluated from both the design and structural perspective with a shared language and design vocabulary. The architects’ and engineers’ methods of work ing together on parallel but separate tracks, with numerous interwoven points along the design path, enable them to reveal elements of a building, bridge or art installation that inform their design. The collaborative process is evident even in the SOM office, where it is hard to tell which is the engineer’s and which is the architect’s workplace, as both display struc tural drawings and models, building details and design sketches on their walls. The office also has conference tables where the teams sit to work together on a project from the outset of a commission, rather than one taking the lead and calling in the other after the design has been sketched out. A fundamental struc tural conception is developed in which form relates directly to function, based on a deeper reading of a building. Yet, that does not mean that SOM sees the design as simplistic or obvious. Rather, the design unfolds as each layer is further explored, giving clear purpose to structure. Typical questions arise in engineering struc tures. For example, what is the engineer’s role in design? Where do points of innovation exist that contribute to a project’s design from an engineering standpoint? And what parts of the problem-solving process are creative? Just as
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architecture has multiple vocabularies, so does engineering have a grammar, the elements and syntax of which can be shifted and manipulated, stretching the norm and making invention pos sible. Structural typologies can be categorised in a new lexicon of forms, such as new types of truss and frame, cantilevers, tube extrusions, cable-net facades, column and mullion combin ations, and exoskeletons. When engineers com bine their calculations with intuition and experi ence, these give form to the structure [1]. These efforts, among others, to refine structure and integrate it into a holistic design are exemplified by the SOM projects featured here. At certain times during the history of architec ture, a building’s structure was hidden by stone, metal or other type of cladding or element in line with the prevailing design aesthetic. In the modern era, the structure and its direct exposure have offered architects the means to achieve their design goals. Structure and design are stripped down and their intrinsic value is seen in buildings in the same way as it is in nature – through the bones supporting a shell or skin, or a self-supporting shell. Structure is inte grated, not as an afterthought, but seamlessly into the design. In the recent engineering work of SOM, two aspects, which are explored here, continue to provide a valuable focus: that of simplicity and clarity, and that of structural expression. Structural simplicity and clarity Carefully considered functional elements guide and express form with effects that are poetic and sometimes even sublime, as engineers rise to the challenge of simplifying complexity in an efficient way. This simplicity and clarity becomes a driving philosophy of the firm in terms of a theory of structure [2]. The conscious clarity of structural language produces an elegant form that allows articulation of the archi tecture in an efficient structural design reso lution. This is seen in the exacting details of many smaller projects, such as Fishers Island