ANNE EBERY ARTEFACT

KNIT SKIN ANNE EBERY - MAJOR PROJECT 2021 S2

CONTENTS

1. Why Knit?

2. Why Re-Skin?

3. Early Work 4. Re-Focus

Page 03 Page 10 Page 15 Page 26

Knit Skin reskins a modernist, curtain-walled skyscraper in Melbourne’s CBD using an architectural knitted membrane. A knitted membrane is a meta material, emergent from the combination of fibre and stitch morphology. It’s a material of structural contingency and limitation, so baked into the design process is a consideration of material and its manifold specificities.

The project engages with Melbourne’s already built, mid-century office towers, not as reified heritage ‘icons’, and not as ecopathic stumbling blocks in our vision of a utopic sustainable future, whose riddle we might solve if only we came up with the perfect new build.

Rather, these buildings are an already-existing ecology to team up with. Knit Skin proposes the knitted membrane as a lightweight, ultra-strong solar array and sunshade, an energy source for the city, draped on and between existing towers, exploiting and being exploited like lichen on a log. The knitted membranes define social space, dapple light, and provide a radically different street level experience.

The project explores the opportunities in an architecture of strategic weakness and material constraint, and aims to eke more pleasure and utility from an already existing urban ecology.

1. This project is about knitted membranes in architecture. Why?

2. knitted textiles are meta-materials. The combination of a technique and a material. The materials can be photovoltaic, air filtering, solar active, carbon fibre or combinations thereof.

Knitting gives us the opportunity to create complex double curved geometries, lightweight and customizable. Those properties come hand in glove with constraints: how do you make it

2_1 Hyrbid Textile Tower, CITA Denmark, 2017 image: Anders Ingvartsen

stand up for example?

3. In the garment industry a distinction is made between “cut-and-sew” and “fully fashioned” garments. One is subtractive and necessarily creates waste, the other shapes the material, in the making, and is additive.

1_16

228 Queen Street

FULLY FASHIONED

NO WASTE

CUT-AND-SEW

SAMPLE 1 WALES: 40 COURSES: 60

SAMPLE 2 WALES: 40 COURSES: 60

4. What makes knitting “knitting” is the convoluted loop-in-loop structure made up of wales and courses, that you can think of like courses of bricks. On the right are samples; same number of courses and wales, same yarn fibre, very different performance.

COURSES

5. Facing page: On the left of each these panels is the knitting code. Increases and decreases are shown in purple and green.

WALES

code

knitted panel

code

knitted panel

code

knitted panel

increase decrease

1

direction of fabrication

2

3

6. Contiguous ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ surfaces; complex double curves.

1. Why Knit?

2. Why Re-Skin?

3. Early Work 4. Re-Focus

Page 03 Page 10 Page 15 Page 26

7.

This project tests the possibilities and aims to push the limits of

architectural knitted materials by reskinning a building in Melbourne’s CBD.

8. Between 1960 and 2000 Melbourne CBD had a surge of building, mostly of office towers skinned with curtain walls. So that’s condition one: Melbourne is basically built. Condition two is a heating biosphere and consequent weather extremes, exacerbated by the city’s heat-island, in turn exacerbated by ubiquitous curtain walls. The city’s facades may not be best equipped to weather our near future, but they’re what we’ve got and they embody a lot of carbon and capital. I was inspired by Donald Ryan’s Shearing layers of change: A building Is always tearing itself apart.

1_1

480 Collins Street

1_2

99 William Street

1_3

350 Queen Street

1_4

473 Bourke Street _1970

1_5

333 Queen Street

1_6

555 Lonsdale Street

1_7

200 Queen Street _1993

1_8

575 Bourke Street

1_9

530 Collins Street

1_11

228 Queen St

1_12 339 Lonsdale Street

1_10 Bourke Place

Embodied _Carbon _Capital _Labour _Culture _Technique _Assumptions _Logistics _Values

1_13 550 Lonsdale Street

1_14 440 Elizabeth Street

1_15 483 Swanston Street

1_16 40/140 William Street

1. Why Knit?

2. Why Re-Skin?

3. Early Work 4. Re-Focus

Page 03 Page 10 Page 15 Page 26

2_3 Isolate Surface

2_4 Define cast-on; edges, and cast-off

2_5 Define wale count

2_6 Define density

2_1 Concept; views

2_2 Exploded Parallel Projection

2_7 Get stitch directions

2_8 Final knitmesh

9. It was important to establish a method for creating accurate physical models from the CAD geometries to establish a testing and feedback loop.

2_9 Translation of mesh into code for production

ELEVATION 1

ELEVATION 2

20 mm

0 333 mm

1000 mm

333 mm

333 mm

20 mm

100

200

0

2_2

550 Lonsdale Street

side A

side B

Knit stitch - standard

Tuck stitch Allows two materials simultaneously

10. Different techniques allow us to combine two or more materials with different transparency and strength. the sample at top right produced with consistent courses and wales throughout, the sample at right also with consistent total courses and wales, but with a randomly generated pattern of increases and decreases every fourth course.

increase decrease

11. During the first phase of the project, the site chosen was a chunk at the Western end of Bourke Street, encompassing Eagle House, the RACV club and the former BHP House, now called 140 William.

1. Why Knit?

2. Why Re-Skin?

3. Early Work 4. Re-Focus

Page 03 Page 10 Page 15 Page 24

13. The project re-focssued on 140 William Street, aka BHP House, on the corner of William and Bourke.

14. Built between 1969 and 1972, designed by Yuncken and Freeman, modernist, and heritage listed.

Beautiful, laconic. The rational 4x4m grid style implying a logic, implacability; a givenness.

Strong foreground/background distinction.

15. 2700mm floor to ceiling, uninterrupted free space on every floor, circulation and services in the core; hidden. To paraphrase ecology writer Timothy Morton: the smooth hidden functioning of smooth hidden functioning.

16. Allowing extraordinary climactic conditions to exist, almost imperceptibly. An aesthetics of invisible utility. Making a show of not making a show of the fantastic amounts of energy it takes to keep on keeping on.

17. There are opportunities inherent to this already existing ecosystem of buldings. City roofs as is provide some opportunity for solar harvesting, but the area is limited, and the vertical curtain walls are generally inneffective hosts for solar panels, since only the northern facades will have solar access and other buildings may cast shade for too much of the day. Additionally panels may block some or all of the view from the building.

When we deploy solar panels we generally have two strategies: stacking or arraying. A stacked array was tested, angled at the optimal 38 degrees for Melbourne’s sun angle.

However, a second approach tested the array being draped from the top of the building, achieving a cone of 38 degrees anlges solar array with more acute 45 degree angles at West and East to respond to those sun angles.

The lightweight array approach affords the opportunity to tailor the shape of the intervention, like a tailored suit; cutting away areas that see too much shade, precisely angling areas to respond to local conditions.

Shadowing was tested over the course of a day in summer, and a combination of the stacking and spreading approach was tested, to optimize solar exposure, while keeing views from neighbouring buildings and from BHP House, and allowing the array to cling to the facade where protection from harsh sunlight is needed. the different layers of transparencies in the knitted fabric allow natural light penetration and often modulate views rather than blocking them. The array was refined and altered as feasible cable routes and spans from building to building were tested. The form achieves at least 1400 kwh/m2 on 80% of the array.

18. Solarvoltaic yarns with the idea of knitted modules to both provide shade and harvest solar energy. This technology exists now, the precedent on the right is dutch designer Pauline van Dongen’s backpack made with solar yarn.

Hours of solar radiation kwH/m2

18

12

7

2

Hours of solar radiation kwH/m2

18

12

7

2

19. Testing arrays for hours of solar radiation throughout the year showed that the most effective harvesting strategy explpited the gap between existing buildings. The extended build site is viewed as an ecology to team up with, where affordances and benefits are negotiated.

20. The proposal is a lightweight façade-and-array hybrid, that can make use of the southside lee of the building, that can shade BHP house and the surrounding buildings from harsh Western and Eastern sun, reduce glare, dapple light, and where it meets street level, gently deliniate social spaces and provide soft street furniture.

Net cable mesh structures were explored, eventuating as a hybrid of cable net carrying a individul knitted modules.

NORTH ELEVATION

SOUTH ELEVATION

EAST ELEVATION

WEST ELEVATION

21. The project continously looped through scales of the micro [the stitch technique, form and fibre] the meso [the level of individual module] and the macro [the intra building mesh]. At the level of the module, the project invstigates deesigns that require minimal structure, can achieve variable surface angle and curvature through simple alterations, and creates apertures for views out of the building and to glimpse the original form under its new skin. the proposed module design consists of knitted membrane, flexible diagonal brace element and rigid horizontal spar or yardarm which is anchored to the floor slab, where the spar holds the knit and the flexible cross-members in opposition. The attachment frequency and interval is therefore based on the existing glazing grid and the column and slabs under it.

However the lightweight stucture disengages with the facade at times supported by conection points, masts and cables.

The module design allows the fabric to be pre-tensioned, twisted at top and bottom, with and addition acute counterdirectional curve at the mid point.

22. The basic module can be pushed and pulled, manipulated and transformed as it responds to different conditions around the site.

The array has no overarching form without its host. Like lichen agentially it’s somewhere near the bottom, so it positions itself strategically.

Resources like positioning, shading and structure are shared.

MODULE CRITERIA

ENGAGES WITH THE GRID OF THE EXISTING GLAZING

ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE TO RESPOND TO LOCAL CONDITIONS

ABILITY TO CHANGE APERTURE SIZE

ABILITY TO CHANGE SURFACE AREA AND ANGLE

PROVIDES SEVERAL DIFFERENT DEGREES OF TRANSPARENCY

CAN BE FABRICATED CONTINUOUSLY

THE SHAPE OF THE DESIGN PRE-TENSIONS THE KNIT

ONLY ACHIEVABLE WITH KNIT, NOT WITH A WOVEN MEMBRANE

ABILITY TO INCORPORATE TWO+ MATERIALS IN KNIT

Street Furniture

Hours of solar radiation kwH/m2

18

12

7

2

1. Vertical strips of fabric dapple hard East and West light

Summer Solstice solar noon 75* Equinox solar noon 52* Winter Solstice solar noon 29*

2. Horizontal bulge of fabric at floor slabs dapple northern light in Summer and not Winter

3.Apertures between vertical fabric strips allow building inhabitants views; translucent knitted fabric dapples light

TYPICAL FLOOR EXISTING SHADOWS AT NORTH-FACING WINDOWS SOLAR NOON, SUMMER SOLSTICE

TYPICAL FLOOR SHADOWS AT NORTH-FACING WINDOWS SOLAR NOON, SUMMER SOLSTICE

TYPICAL FLOOR SHADOWS AT NORTH-FACING WINDOWS SOLAR NOON, WINTER SOLSTICE

ROOF PLAN

SECTION A - A

10

40

SECTION B - B

10

40

NORTH FACADE, BHP HOUSE

CGU building corner South Elevation

CGU building corner West Elevation 1

3

5

1

3

5

VIEWS TO AND FROM WILLIAM STREET, SOUTH OF BHP HOUSE

BHP HOUSE CARPARK LANEWAY

VIEW WEST, BOURKE STREET MALL

AERIAL CITY VIEW, LOOKING NORTH