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.
No comments:
Post a Comment