Drawing is Thinking: Concept Sketches by I.M.Pei

I.M.Pei

These sketches are an unfurling of sequentially produced thoughts on paper for the Musée d’Art Moderne in Luxembourg (MUDAM), beginning in 1991 through 2000.

Over the course of a decade I worked closely with Pei on several designed museum projects and kept an active archive of each sketch he made from the first day of design meetings through site visits on the construction site. The MUDAM project was the longest spanning project in Pei’s practice – outdoing the JFK Library project which took 14 years to complete – on account of the inchoate government ministries involved.

I.M. Pei's almost ethical imperative to never show an incomplete project - an unrealized design or a work in progress, as he felt architecture must be judged as a physical experience - has largely kept all of his unbuilt designs, not to mention conceptual
sketches, unpublished.

These sketches, then, offer a rare opportunity to see his mind at work. They are a record less of the source of the completed design - the struggle with the arrow-head shape of the historical fortress on which the museum was built - but of the action of the architect's hand, exploring and resisting the imposed geometry of the site and his own design principles.

It offers a fresh look at the trials and errors, small puzzlings and geometric victories of the architect’s musings, which would later become the backbone of the completed building, opened to the public 16 years later, in 2007. Visit an earlier blog entry on the MUDAM project on this site, and visit the full collection of drawing on arcspace at http://www.arcspace.com/architects/freed/pei_sketches/pei_sketches.html.

To rebuke those that see an architect's "napkin sketches" as mere curiosities, look again.
Here we can see an experienced mind flirting with the lines and geometries that have marked much of his built work, done with the same wonderment and pleasure as that of a child: the personal markings of an inquiring mind.

Completion of the Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM) Luxembourg

Views of the completed MUDAM naturally daylight galleries Luxembourg, August 2007

Recently completed and opened to the public this past summer, 2007, the two galleries are noteworthy for the calm diffused, clerestories windows, created by the single-spanning concrete shells. The curved form, cast in concrete on site with a complex form work made by boat-workers from Marseille, France, were the longest pre-fab cast shell structures built in Europe in over 50 years - varying from 22 to 28 meters - with no control joints. They act in the classic, time-tested way, as light-baffles aligned due North.

This form, long preferred for car factories in Northern Europe, had not been executed until we developed the design, and its execution, for the MUDAM (the engineering was by Schroeder et Associes, assisted by RFR of Paris, and audited by LERA of New York; the lighting design profiling was studied in the Artificial Sky laboratory of ArupLighting, London, with Andy Sedgwick; the design geometry of the concrete shells and the gallery itself, were designed by Tim Culbert, then an associate-partner of Pei's).

Of particular interest in the shell construction, is the lack of structural ties in the plane of the glass, thus each shell is entirely independent of the next. The axial moment of the shells under self-loading, braced only at the perimeter walls, were originally thought as not possible to execute, requiring the glazed plane to act in concert with the structure deflections of the concrete. Our design work, both on the concrete profiling and the glazing, was aimed at minimizing any additional structural elements in the glazing plane - both to reinforce the structure integrity of the cast shell, as well as to preserve the maximum of North facing views to the sky. The orientation and form of the shells, act as baffles for the direct and indirect sunlight.

After more than two years of study, in structural design, natural daylighting simulation and in test casting of the concrete shells on site , we were able to successfully execute our design without any control joints. Pei, who had little to do with this aspect of the project design, was assuredly pleased, as the concrete form work and concrete finish, emulated the fine architectural concrete he has been noted for, at the Louvre and the National Gallery (As in the Louvre Pyramid ceiling, the concrete form work was comprised of recycled Douglas Fir boards, 77 millimeters wide, wire brushed, with a mix comprised of marble dust to increase the surface reflectivity of the concrete).

Notes: The Musée d’Art Modern Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg was designed by I.M. Pei, from 1990 – 2007, the longest design-execution project in the architect’s career (up-staging the Kennedy Center which took 16 years to complete). Tim Culbert was the lead design architect overseeing the project from design through complete shell construction and close-out.

All images courtesy of photographer Thomas Mayer (Thomas Mayer Archive, copyright)

Belated Recognition: Building the MUDAM, Luxembourg

Photographs: Concrete shell roofs being lifted in place, Luxembourg, November 1999

The author/architect Tim Culbert standing under a cast shell he designed for the MUDAM galleries, 1995-2000.

The museum, featuring recent European contemporary art, opened to the public in July 2007.

When we started our practice in 2000, we had just overseen the completion of Peter Rice's posthumous fink-cable structure for the glazed sculpture courtyards for the Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg. The entire building structure was completed, and glazed in, while the cladding and final fit-outs of the public and gallery spaces were yet to be started. Having overseen the Pei designed building from the start - first as a draftsperson for the original design in 1990, eventually as the project architect on the construction site 10 years later - we had never imagined it would take another 7 years to open to the public.

Well here it is, in all of its slightly dated grandeur - a bizarre mismatch of a very classic Pei building in its relentless focus on geometry, to house no classic art, not even modernist art of the classic period - the Ecole de Paris as originally conceived - but an idiosyncratic "non-collection" of contemporary art, hobbled together by the combative director/curator Marie-Claude Beaud. The mismatch - Client-Architect as well as Building-Art, was one of the many reasons for the hugely extended design-construction-fit-out period, and encompasses the poor choice of sitting the building on an historical military fort protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Despite the above, with the building overshadowing both the site and the raison d'être of the museum itself, the MUDAM as it was later conceived and baptized (Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean), there are a few noteworthy spaces we were responsible for in design and execution, notably the stunning top floor, naturally day-light galleries.

The engineering and execution of the concret sheds are of interest (see posting below). Of more importance to us, the designers of the MUDAM gallery and in our on-going museum work in our studio at IMREY CULBERT, is the resulting natural lighting it achieves.

Effortlessly spanning the gallery length, the shells give a real physical presence to the spaces, both in terms of scale but also in the much harder to define notion of light quality: an ethereal indirect lighting, in diffused tones, on all six faces of the galleries. The galleries, an eschewed rectangle with two chamfered ends (thus six sides), have art display walls, over 6 meters tall, that face due South, due North, with contrast differences that are barely noticeable. The target performance we aimed for on natural and artificial lighting, where we work strenuously to avoid light-level contrast between adjoining surfaces - a real eye-sore in many early classic day-lit galleries - were exceeded here: all six gallery walls have close to identical light levels at all times of the day, all done with a passive, single form, roof profile, and unshaded clerestory windows.

Ten years after we designed this roof, with Andy Sedgwick of Arup to fine tune the daylighting profile for the MUDAM, it has become standard practice to use solar sun-tracking, to define museum roof skylights or laylights. Some museums end up using more complex active systems, as in the Baeyler Museum in Basel in a depth of 4 meters, or equally complex but passive custom shell-screens installed at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in a depth of only 40 millimeters (both by Renzo Piano) to do the same job. Namely: to allow for natural daylighting in the museum gallery, for the quality of color rendering that natural light provides, and to allow visitors a view of the sky - thus the time of day and varying sky cover conditions - while not allowing a single ray of direct sun to hit an art work, or the gallery floor. This may sound easy, but it has taken the last century in museum construction, ever since the first natural skylights were opened in the Grand Galerie of the Louvre in the 1810’s (first conceived by Hubert Robert in 1796, but executed much later) to get it right.

Working again with ArupLighting, Imrey Culbert defined the natural daylighting for the future Louvre-Lens satellite museum that was key to the winning design. Currently in our joint-venture with Sanaa, we are developing a new approach to solar mitigation in what will be the largest glazed museum roof in Europe when completed in 2011. Stay Posted.