KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce a new book, Cellophane House™

Released in January 2011 as a digital book, it is now offered in paperback, available for purchase on Amazon.com and at select bookstores worldwide including:

AIA Bookstore, Philadelphia
Builders Bookstore, Berkeley
Hennessey + Ingalls, Los Angeles
Joseph Fox Bookstore, Philadelphia
Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
National Building Museum Shop, Washington DC
Peter Miller Books, Seattle
Quimby's, Chicago
RIBA Bookshop, London
Wexner Center Store, Ohio State University, Columbus OH
William Stout, San Francisco

With 110 illustrations and detailed commentary, the book chronicles the design and execution of a five-story, off-site fabricated home assembled on-site in just sixteen days as part of The Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Through a series of questions, the book explores several of KieranTimberlake’s ongoing research agendas including speed of on-site assembly, design for disassembly, a holistic approach to the life cycle of materials, and the development of a lightweight, high-performance, energy gathering building envelope.

PAPERBACK | 156 pages | 5.875” x 8.25” | 110 color illustrations | ISBN: 978-0-9831301-3-0 | $20 US | May 2011

Also available electronically on Amazon, iBooks and Google Books. Compatible with iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle, Android, Mac and PC  | $9.99 US | Jan 2011

KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce the release of a new eBook, Cellophane House™,available for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle, Nook, Android, Mac and PC.

Cellophane House™ takes a radically different approach to off-site fabrication, reinventing the way buildings are assembled, what they are made of, and the experience of living in them. It demonstrates an end-of-life strategy that, enabled by an innovative structural frame and variety of connectors, makes disassembly and waste-diversion inherent in the building’s construction.

The book contains a detailed discussion of the house and 105 color photographs and illustrations. The iBooks version contains a time-lapse video of the assembly process.

Available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks.

Brockman Hall is composed of two bars nestled between existing buildings

In the spring of 2008, we began design for Brockman Hall for Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This 110,000 SF facility will house research, teaching, and office space for the Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Nestled between existing buildings in the dense Science Quad, the building envelope respects the scale of the historic masonry vocabulary of the campus while extending it into a 21st century model for architecture and research at Rice. In this manner, lightness and transparency become the foil to weight and opacity. Further, as is common among other buildings on campus, subtle references to the building's program will be made with iconography incorporated into elements of the building skin.

The building's eight facades are designed as a series of layers that allow day light to filter through, while solar gain and glare are kept out and privacy for researchers is maintained. Each façade is uniquely tuned to its solar conditions and adjacency to other buildings, taking strong cues from the predominant proportions on campus while employing innovative materials appropriate to the site and building program. The most public façade on the north is a glass curtain wall with a continuous silk-screened Penrose pattern that helps the building recede into its surroundings. On the opposite side of the building, the south façade is a composition of colored aluminum composite cladding behind a sun screen of thin horizontal terracotta elements. The inner facades are entirely glass, and the east and west facades are fritted glass with thin aluminum sunshades.

The north bar has a landscaped loggia and a fritted glass curtain wall

The south bar has a terracotta sun screen and glass brick walls on the ground level

The University has placed the project on a "hypertrack" schedule, overlapping design and construction with the goal of completing the building in just 30 months. Given the unique building envelope and rapid schedule, the team endeavored to explore elements of the proposed building skin at full scale as early as possible in the design process. This methodology invariably became an essential tool for gathering decision-ready information to present to the project's Steering Committee for discussion and approval.

7'x8' mockup of the south façade constructed to evaluate scale, spacing, technical qualities, and color

We constructed several prototypes in our office, using both actual materials and facsimiles. The sun screen for the south façade was constructed to test the appearance of various materials behind the terra cotta elements, including iridescent-coated metal panels, painted metal panels, and cement board. The terracotta tubes in this mockup were simulated using painted high-density foam. A full scale mockup with real materials was later constructed at Admiral Glass in Houston.

Full scale 15' x 15' mockup at Admiral Glass in Houston

Hybrid glass and brick masonry wall prototypes of the ground level building skin

Hybrid glass and brick masonry walls clad the first story as a counterpoint to the solid walls of the adjacent buildings, their scale and proportion referring to the traditional masonry elements used throughout Rice's campus. We created a mockup of the wall in our shop to explore patterning, scale, and finishes. A larger mockup of the current design is under construction at the project site. Off-site fabrication of the glass masonry walls is under consideration.

Full-scale mockup of a portion of glazing for the north facade

The glass and Penrose frit pattern for the north façade were simulated with a laser-etched acrylic sheet to test scale and registration of the pattern.

2' x 2' mockup of glazing samples

Using 12" x 12" IGU samples provided by glazing vendors, the design team constructed boxes used to evaluate proposed curtain wall details, as well as the deployment of different types of glass, spandrel variations, and translucency. The boxes were staged outdoors and photographed in different orientations and conditions in order to provide a basis for discussion in subsequent design reviews.

Interior wood screen mockup

A long vertical wood screen has been proposed to provide shading in the main lecture space at Brockman Hall. Full-scale iterations of wood slats with varied spacing and depth were constructed in our shop and staged in front of other proposed materials for evaluation.

The collaborative design process between KieranTimberlake, Rice University, our contractors and manufacturers has been assisted and enabled by our iterative process of prototyping integrated elements of the building. In a project that employs innovative building strategies and has an aggressive design and construction schedule, it is critical to fully understand the full-scale impact of those strategies as early as possible.

Yale School of Art Gallery and Sidwell Friends Middle School
photos © Peter Aaron/Esto (left) and © Halkin Photography LLC (right)

It was announced last month that the Yale University School of Art Gallery and Sidwell Friends Middle School have received 2008 Western Red Cedar Architectural Design Awards, presented by The Western Red Cedar Lumber Association and The Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau.

Three of our recent projects make use of western red cedar as a cladding material; Sidwell Friends Middle School, Loblolly House, and the Yale School of Art Gallery. Its varied applications are appropriate to the unique site and program circumstances for each project. Because of the variety of weathering conditions based on geography, site location, orientation of building elevations, and variable responses between wood specimens even within the same species, it is often difficult to predict the long term visual appearance of cedar cladding. But based on our research, we were able to determine that careful detailing can insure the maximum longevity and predictable appearance of the cladding. A study of the natural characteristics of the material, available water-repellents and preservatives, and detailing strategies led us to leave the cedar untreated in each instance. We were also able to advance the sustainable agendas for Yale and Sidwell by sourcing very high-grade reclaimed cedar from salvaged fermentation barrels.

Sidwell Friends Middle School, photo © Halkin Photography LLC

At Sidwell Friends Middle School, reclaimed western red cedar unifies new and existing structures. Strips are arrayed vertically and angled to permit daylight deep into the building while protecting against solar gain. At the same time they visually reference the forest. The multi-layer building envelope, including the outer layer of cedar cladding and under layers of high performance operable windows, sunscreens, and rain screens, were fabricated off-site and attached to the structure in large sections, greatly reducing the amount of on-site labor required to enclose the building.

Yale School of Art Gallery, photo © Peter Aaron/Esto

Located at the end of a row of two-story 19th century houses, the Yale School of Art Gallery is a taut wood box with side walls that subtly bow out, scaled to fit the New Haven streetscape. The exterior wall is a ventilated wood rain screen made of horizontal strips of reclaimed western red cedar. The cedar strips are beveled on the top and bottom edges to force water to drain to the outside, spaced 1/8" apart for air circulation, allowing the cladding to expand when wet and dry evenly on both sides. This layered wall construction creates a lattice-like scrim at the entry and a pattern of parted planes at the corners of the building. The gallery entrance is set within a recessed glass enclosure along the north end of the building, where an open screen of spaced cedar slats is suspended veil-like from the roof. The cladding pulls back at the corners to reveal narrow slit windows, and bands of horizontal metal wrap the walls at intervals, appearing to hold the wall planes together.

Loblolly House, photo © Peter Aaron/Esto

Loblolly House is a dwelling both among and above the trees. The pattern of the cladding is literally abstracted from a photograph of the forest, with the solids and voids rendered in the staggered vertical siding, sometimes positioned over solid wall and sometimes lapping over glazing to evoke the solids and voids of the forest. Fabricated off-site in segments for swift attachment to the house, the cladding functions as a rain screen, designed to shed most water but remain open to the movement of air. Now in its third season, the cedar is beginning to weather to a beautiful silver-gray.