Blog 4
– At the Storefront for Art and Architecture, there are pre casted concrete panels with fasteners to attach the panels. Between the cracks there are steel frames. They are pivoting panels. There are steel panels to keep it in place. Between the cracks there is ply wood. When it opens you see it hinged in different places. You can pivot it to a horizontal position and back, some pivot vertically and some horizontally. The corner is a mold with curvature. You see the steel reinforcement. It is not like fiber reinforced concrete panel. There are different types of concrete and this is a derivative. It is reinforced with fiber glass. It is called “Fiber reinforced concrete”. They lay the fiber glass and keeps the panels thin and strong. It needs to be reinforced with something. They layer is a steel mesh to allow to maintain the thickness.
-At the Nolitan Hotel, designed by Matthew Grzywinski and Amador Pons; the floor is precast concrete. It is pinky because it is tintet. You can see the difference because the edges are chipped away. It is very brittle and sisebtle to damage. You see uniform. There are very fine cracks. The chemistry for this concrete was well abrogated. The deck was casted on site there’s no tint there because you can see the abrogates. You an see the different types of concrete used in this hotel though the columns. The floor is finished. The deck is more natural. And the column is just a structure. There is a beautiful grade of concrete you don’t see the abrogate. Casted in place, it is casted to plywood form work. Plywood panels set up next to each other sitting next to each other. They cast that form work then pour the concrete and once it forms they’ll take the form work off then shift it up and cast again they keep reusing the same form work for all columns. The seems are joints between the panels. The round concrete column is different because it is casted into sono tubes which is an over sized reinforced cardboard roll, just like a paper tower roll. The spiral ribbing is part of the tube. It is beautiful how the concrete picks up the little details from the frame work, and can create fascinating structures.
(Concrete floor)
(Concrete column (sono tubes))
-There is a lot of wood used in the lobby as it helps absorb sound because we are in a lobby and it is at a busy intersection It is laminated veneer on substrate, veneer is thin wood cut thin and then laminated onto the wood. There is also the use of many textiles such as rugs to help absorb the sound. The lobby is filled with soft materials as well as hard materials. Wood is a soft material. The difference between them is how they perform acoustically. Like wood, rugs and curtains are all soft materials to help with the sound. Porsolin, ceramics and stone and steel are all hard materials. The ceiling has dry walls. This is very interesting because it is a soft material that doesn’t have the acoustic properties that wood would have. But it is not a reflective hard material like concrete.
^You can see the way the light bounces off the surface, how smooth it is, and how the finish affects the way light is reflected.
-The exterior of the New Museum, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa; is actually a sheet of metal punctured. Patterns of lines are then cut out and put it under tension. The minute they cut it and add tension it becomes rigid. This is a beautiful quality that the screen has. It has also been painted. It is grandparent in a way it becomes permubal to view. The inside it is painted white. There are different thicknesses and they used it inside on the book shelf. It is so interesting to be able to see the exact same material both interior and exterior of the building. Because you can see what kind of effect light has on it.
-At the Spirone West Water Gallery The exterior is made out of metal Solid sheet if you look at it you see it is opaque then when you look straight at it it (from a different angle) it becomes translucent so depends on where you are standing. This is a very interesting effect which creates illusions.
In this image you can see between the metal, and you can tell that this is a translucent material.
However in this image it looks opaque, you think that the inside is covered.
-The interior has different uses, If you look at the refinement of the dry wall, you see the shapes and curvature possible with this material. There is concrete on the floor looks a little tinted and you can see the cracks in the concrete, you can see that it is casted in place, and it looks polished. With Concrete you know that it will crack, however it is a design aesthetic. There are very minimal materials used because it is a gallery so it is kept very quite. But the detailing is fascinating on how the facade is curving. The vents are architecturally moved its very thin slots and you can imagine a bridge hovering away from the wall. The lighting is track lighting it is visible and graphic information to think about. The transformation of the floor is reflected onto the ceiling. Making spaces for the lighting track.
The width of the gallery is 20 ft. wide and 28 ft. high.
^This shows how the little vent slit makes the second floor look like it is float off the wall, it adds a very simple yet interesting effect to the plain gallery. When the design must be this simple, the designer needs to start getting very creative to be able to make proper use of the space given.
-In Aesop Nolita, the design elements have the exact same idea behind it was the other 2 stores i wrote about, however there is a slight difference in terms of materials used. The wall is made of paper tiles. Newspapers assembled and stacked. Assembled so it can be installed in space. There is still the use of Ply wood shelving system. Ply wood was in the other Aesop stores as well. There are Pinter brick walls.
Soft materials include the wood and paper which help acoustically. The wood and paper are relatives they both come from trees so they have the same aspects. Hard materials are bricks and concrete floor.
Cast iron sink. There’s the coconut rug Just like in the past store. Acoustic and sense of smell, there is a perfect balance between hard and soft materials, there’s the difference between old and new. This store they use paper tiles for the acoustic absorption, however the other store used felt.
-At 290 Mulberry St. you can see how bricks come in a few different sizes. So much variation that you can create by using a different movement. By shifting it you can create interesting patterns and texture. There are lots of brick patterns, it is stacked and shifted and some of the are actually turned 90 degrees so you see the corner rather than the side. This is a masonry material. The corner of the building you see how it projects because you can see where they are stacked flat and where they shift and start moving outwards away from the building. You see that the whole thing is pre fabricated everything was done in a controlled environment in a workshop then the panels are assembled to form it.
You can see the use of this bricks in these images, see how there is a design on the building, it looks like different shades of bricks, but in reality they are all the same thing just each brick is rotated at a different angle making you see something else.
-The exterior of the building is all made out of blue stone. It is uniform there is a variation in all stones. But you see it’s very even. We see the unionization and you see the cuts. You see the intricate detail. They all have articulation on the edges and sides. There’s an articulation and detailing. There is a cleft finish when it is not cut straight and we see the stone in its natural state. Then you can see a different part of the stone It’s very smooth with blamed finish, they contrast each other which has a very interesting effect. Roman polates had rustics took when the stones are larger units and rougher. It would have the same material but completely different reading of the way it reflects light and how it feels to the touch. Consider what you can do to it by honing Polish or finish. You see the size of the stone it is cut into units and feel the different sides they are all different finishes.
I chose to use this image to present the blue stone because this shows perfectly the different contrast between the evenly cut stone as well as the cleft cut. And you can see how messy the cleft cut is because it is not evenly cut, however it looks so beautiful when compared to the sanded down stone. They look very good next to each other.
