How well does a plastic building envelope function in the summer heat of New York City? We attached sensors to the house to collect data on the thermal performance of our Next Gen Smartwrap(TM). With the 53rd street buildings hovering over the exhibition site, the house is in shade for most of the day, so we settled on monitoring the west elevation - the only location with direct solar exposure - which currently gets about four hours of sunlight. We wired the west elevation with sensors on each of the four layers of the PET envelope. These read the envelope's surface temperatures. Data is routed to loggers tucked discreetly inside the chase wall and all wires are nestled into the grooves of the house's aluminum frame. Data is logged every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, from July to October. To add context to the building envelope data, we are monitoring the relative humidity on the third floor as well as solar radiation, ambient temperatures and relative humidity on the roof. We are also analyzing the airspeed within the cavity space of the building envelope with a digital anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed in low velocity situations, to determine if the thermal "stack" performs as designed.
The data generated will not only inform our research group after the MoMA exhibit is over, but will also provide a more complete understanding of the insulative capacities this building envelope, the efficacy of the thermal stack, and the dynamics between outdoor temperatures and the interior environment of the house.
Last Friday, the entire KieranTimberlake team piled into two charter buses and trekked up the New Jersey Turnpike to see the Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. This movie was taken with a handheld camera and shows the interior spaces from the top down. Indeed, the experience of walking through the house is quite different from seeing it on a computer screen.
Cellophane House is a five-story, offsite fabricated dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, on view July 20 through October 20, 2008. The project is a full scale prototype that confronts several agendas head on: the economy of offsite fabrication, design for disassembly, recycled and recyclable materials, parametric modeling, and the evolution of SmartWrap™, a high-performance building skin.
James Timberlake, Stephen Kieran and Arizona State University professor Max Underwood were co-chairs of the 2008 ACSA/AIA Teachers Seminar entitled Deep Matters: a path to meaningful and provocative architectural research at Cranbrook Academy, June 19-22. Architecture educators and practitioners from throughout the United States and Canada convened to discuss one of the most pressing issues currently facing architecture education: Architectural Research.
Completed in 2006, the Yale University Sculpture Building is a 51,000 square foot studio space for the undergraduate and graduate Sculpture programs of the School of Art. The program for the building called for an exceptional quality of light, low energy usage and operable windows. A climate analysis performed on the site indicated a strong seasonal variation, with significant heating loads during the winter and cooling loads in the summer. This presented the opportunity to advance solar wall technology.
Markku Allison interviewed James Timberlake at 2008 AIA Convention in Boston. Hear his thoughts on receiving the 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award, and how research and innovation are embedded in the practice.
