stainless steel

concept and reality

WORK 130711

Retrospect

Great photo of our exhibit by JD.  Check out Jean & JD's article here

Love this quote

“While Dallas rushes headlong into the future, the Bush center seems stuck in a past of its own invention" - Mark Lamster, on the George Bush Presidential Library.  This could be said of public architecture in many a Dallas suburb, in fact, it could be said of most single family residential construction.  I guess the urge to associate with tradition and history reflects a desire for legitimacy.  I don't find it that unusual that a president that studied history and got to shape historical events, though perhaps not as he desired,  should now labor to write a version of history which suits his needs.

Innovation Awards

Innovation, collaboration, and design excellence are highly valued at Gensler. This attitude is part of the culture and one way this is promoted is by holding an internal awards program for innovation.  Our studio just got done submitting three entries and here is one that deals with some of my projects.  A lot of great people worked on this, but central to the piece was Justin Bashaw's Grasshopper script for fenestration design.

City Hall Beach Day – 1984

This is brilliant and not photoshop: in 1984 the plaza in front of Dallas' city hall was turned into a beach!thanks to Mark Harder for the tip.

See more photos at  Friends of Living Plaza

Innovation Breakfast with Coy Talley

At the conclusion of most projects, designers have the opportunity to reflect on the “what might have been” in the form of ideas or design elements that did not survive the project process.  Sometimes, rather than dying completely, ideas evolve and mutate to the point of being unrecognizable in their original form. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on the final outcome. 

 We recently invited Coy Talley, of Talley Associates, to Episode 10 of Gensler Dallas’ innovation breakfast series.  As the Landscape Architect for the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Coy was able to share how one such “what might have been” example ultimately informed the final design.

 The Museum’s design team let a few important and overarching Ideas inform them at all times, but the process to get to a final design was open-ended, and they were pragmatic about the final product.  A perfect example of this is the collaboration between Coy Talley and Morphosis’ Thom Mayne, which led to an innovative cladding for the building. The initial concep for the exterior envisioned a glass or metal clad box, but Coy and Thom Mayne liked the idea of a building covered by vegetation, because that  would illustrate natural processes at work.   This desire led to devising an exterior cladding system that incorporated moss ledges.  The moss ledges survived budget concerns, but could not overcome worries about a weather tight envelope and the associated liability. However, the discarded moss ledges managed to make an important contribution to the final design:  they evolved to become the horizontal striations in the precast cladding of the building, which is now one of the building’s most celebrated features. 

 There were other failed attempts to get moss on the building, but Coy is determined, and  we have no doubt that some how, some way, there will be moss on that building;  the opportunity might come soon, because the museum has been so successful that there’s already talk about an expansion.