Perhaps the most famous cantilever in America is one of the shortest: Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 design for the exterior concrete terraces at Fallingwater, the longest of which extends a mere 15 feet to hover over the rush of Pennsylvania’s Bear Run stream. Much has been made of the ongoing structural repairs the cantilevers have needed since they were built, but there has never been a question about preserving them.
Where the Michigan project is more of a conventional structural cantilever, the new K Clinic in the Japanese city of Nara, just outside of Osaka, takes a minimalist approach to integrate the architecture fully into the structure. The Tokyo architect and engineer Akira Yoneda, whose firm, Architecton, was chosen for record’s 2004 Vanguard, had less program space to incorporate for his client, a dermatologist who had briefly studied architecture while in college. The doctor asked Yoneda to design a building that would make a statement along the city’s main street. The clinic is located in a ground-level structure, while the
Chuck Hoberman has a vision of Buckminster Fuller. As the New York–based artist, mechanical engineer, and product designer expands his projects to large-scale architecture, he is integrating his mechanized elements to develop a new strain of sustainable and flexible structures that conceptually relate to what the late Fuller had imagined, but never realized, decades before. Often starting with the simplest of ideas, such as the mechanism of a scissors, Hoberman amplifies operability and motion by connecting a series of hinged units to playfully form what he calls the Hoberman Sphere. In 2002, he increased the scale of the sphere
Earlier this fall, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) released performance data for the green roof planted on its Washington, D.C., headquarters. The findings demonstrate a number of environmental benefits, including a significant reduction in storm-water runoff, retaining 27,500 gallons of water, or nearly 75 percent of precipitation, during a 10-month monitoring period. Photography: Courtesy ASLA The installation includes planted “waves” that hide rooftop mechanical units. The results suggest that widespread implementation of green roofs and other sustainable site development practices could be a viable storm-water-management option, particularly in cities with older, and overburdened, combined sanitary and wastewater transportation
If there were a prize for the project most often mentioned during the conference “Engineered Transparency: Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering,” it would go to the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, designed by SANAA [RECORD, January 2007, page 79]. The first to present the building was the Tokyo-based firm’s principal, Kazuyo Sejima, in her keynote address on September 26 for the two-day event at Columbia University, in New York City. Photography: ' Christian Richters The apparent simplicity of Toledo’s Glass Pavilion belies its complexity. Several of the subsequent 30 speakers, including architects, consultants, and
Sustainable Design: Ecology, Architecture, and Planning, by Daniel E. Williams, FAIA. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 304 pages, $75. High-Performance Building, by Vidar Lerum. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 304 pages, $70. The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, by Ann Thorpe. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2007, 225 pages, $29.95. We seem to have two camps emerging in the nascent field of sustainable design: an informed one that remains sensitive to the high aims of architecture, ecology, and site, and then one we might call “design services 2.0,” a kind of appliqué of green technologies onto
We presume that the link between intention in design and the materials we choose is deterministic: The right collection of materials will yield the desired effects both aesthetically and performatively.
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