Looking Back / Looking Forward

2000 - 2010: 10 Years of Collalborations:

WHO'S WHO

2x4 Acconci Studio Adjaye Associates Allied Works ArupLighting BBB Barkow Leibinger Petra Blaise Boucher Landscape Buro Happold CSA LERA Michel Desvignes Takashi Murakami Diller + Scofidio Exploration Architectures FMSP Front Hood Design Innovision Jean Nouvel Max Fordham MGMT Design Mosbach Paysagiste Paratus Group I.M.Pei Repérages Dominique Perrault Renzo Piano RFR Richard Smith SANAA SAPS Studio Rodel Tillotson Design Associates Tod Williams + Billie Tsien Tombazis Transplan Transolar Vanguard William McDonough

WHAT’S WHAT

When not doing our own design projects - many of which may be familiar to you, from the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum (SAAM) - we prepare a steady stream of shorlist RFP’s, of which a sampling is found on this poster.

These demonstrate our efforts to forge new collaborations with other architects or engineers we have not worked with before. By initiating each of these RFP’s and creating the team specifically for a given site or museum type, we remain faithful to the reason why we started our studio in the first place: making architecture in collaborative teams that can bridge two design firms and various partners on a single project.

Now in our tenth year, the museum list below, from new construction to expansions, feasibility to exhibit installations, is the result of many of the or our RFP proposals, a list that remains inevitably incomplete and open to new collaborations.

MUSEUM LIST

Asian Society & Museum
New York, NY

Centre Pompidou Paris, France

Dar Al Bacha, Patti Cadby Birch Morocco Palace of Arts Marrakech, Morocco

Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY

Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World New York, NY

Institute of Contemporary Art
Boston, Massachusetts

Japan Society & Museum
New York, NY

Kuwait National Museum
Kuwait City, Kuwait

Miho Museum of Art
Shiga, Japan

Morgan Library & Museum
New York, NY

Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée Marseille, France

Musée Dobrée
Nantes, France

Musée du Louvre-Lens
Lens, France

Musée Européen de la Photographie Paris, France

Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec, Canada

Museum of Arts & Design
New York, NY

Museum of Modern Art (mudam)
Kirchberg, Luxembourg

National Museum of the
American Indian New York, NY

New York Public Library
New York, NY

Peabody Essex Museum
Salem, Massachusetts

Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles
Bangkok, Thailand

Rubin Museum of Art
New York, NY

Saint Louis Art Museum
Saint Louis, Missouri

San Antonio Museum of Art
San Antonio, Texas

Sheikh Zayed National Museum
Abu Dhabi, UAE

Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) Washington, DC

The Jewish Museum
New York, NY

Toledo Museum of Art, Glass Pavilion, Toledo, OH

World Trade Center Memorial Museum New York, NY

Yale Art Gallery
New Haven, CT.

ARTISTS COLLABORATIONS

Vito Acconci

Anthony McCall

Daido Moriyama

Takashi Murakami

Yoko Ono

Dennis Oppenheim

Mike & Doug Starn.

For more on the Louvre-Lens ground-breaking, go to:• www.dezeen.com/2010/01/08/louvre-lens-by-sanaa• www.bustler.net/index.php/article/musee_louvre-lens_breaks_ground

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)