http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/special_packages/nelson/9828089.htm?1c
". . .
Steven Holl built his reputation as an architect of light in his writings of the 1980s, then in two buildings that opened in quick succession, the intimate St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University (1997) and Kiasma, a contemporary art museum in Helsinki, Finland (1998).
McVoy, product of the University of Virginia and Columbia University, had joined Holl's firm in the early 1990s, precisely, he says, because "he more than any architect I know was able to think simultaneously in terms of material and light and the experience of a place."
Ada Louise Huxtable, an esteemed architecture critic who served on the Nelson's architect selection committee in 1999 (as did Arthur S. Brisbane, president and publisher of The Kansas City Star), had raved about Holl's Kiasma in an essay about the new age of museum architecture: Moving through this "light-filled sculpture," she writes, "we experience visual revelations and visceral sensations unlike any we have known before."
Holl had used a certain type of cast-glass plank - a U-shaped material called channel glass - on one wall at Kiasma. He had it in mind to use something like it again on the Nelson project, but in a much bigger way.
"Cast glass with its mysterious opacity traps light in its mass and projects a diffused glow," Holl once wrote. "Sandblasted glass likewise has a luminescence.cloudy sandblasted glass and honed materials establish a material depth, a pensive mood."
"Material depth" and "a pensive mood" would cost time and money.
"I think we all knew it would be challenging," says Donald J. Hall, who until recently was chairman of the Nelson's board of trustees. "Because it had never been done. It had to be created. The whole structure. The way of applying it. The way of holding it up."
Within the museum, "getting the light right" became the mantra.
The light has to be right to help illuminate the art - natural light from some of the lenses would spill down curving walls and ceilings and mix with artificial lighting in the gallery spaces below.
And the light has to be right to make visitors not only comfortable but also, most important, vulnerable to feelings of awe. To that end a lighting design subcontractor, the Renfro Design Group of New York, has spent some two years creating computer models and analyzing light levels in the new gallery spaces.
Marc Wilson, the museum's director, was fond of telling his staff that getting the light only 98 percent right would amount to failure.
Step by step the glass became an increasingly complicated component of an already complex project.
And as the designer's criteria became more specific, the number of potential glass suppliers dwindled. By 2002, when it came time to select the glass, only one firm was left standing. Lamberts Glasfabrik, a 120-year-old, family-owned firm in Wunsiedel-Holenbrunn, Germany, turned out to be the only manufacturer capable of producing the glass that the project called for.
Most glass typically shows a greenish tint. Holl and McVoy wanted a whiter glass. That requires reducing the level of iron in the basic mix of sand, sodium chloride and lime that's melted and reformed as glass. And because visitors will be able to walk up to the glass walls within the sculpture garden, the glass needed to be tempered for safety. Tempering - a process of high heat and fast cooling - compresses the surface of the glass, making it stronger and containing the way it breaks. No other manufacturer at the time had the ability to produce channel glass that was also low-iron and tempered.
Holl sought to diffuse the light hitting the planks as much as possible, which is why he liked Lamberts' solar-surface glass. Sandblasting the inner surface of the quarter-inch thick glass would further disperse and soften sunlight.
The idea was intriguing.
And troubling. . ."
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html
". . .
Steven Holl built his reputation as an architect of light in his writings of the 1980s, then in two buildings that opened in quick succession, the intimate St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University (1997) and Kiasma, a contemporary art museum in Helsinki, Finland (1998).
McVoy, product of the University of Virginia and Columbia University, had joined Holl's firm in the early 1990s, precisely, he says, because "he more than any architect I know was able to think simultaneously in terms of material and light and the experience of a place."
Ada Louise Huxtable, an esteemed architecture critic who served on the Nelson's architect selection committee in 1999 (as did Arthur S. Brisbane, president and publisher of The Kansas City Star), had raved about Holl's Kiasma in an essay about the new age of museum architecture: Moving through this "light-filled sculpture," she writes, "we experience visual revelations and visceral sensations unlike any we have known before."
Holl had used a certain type of cast-glass plank - a U-shaped material called channel glass - on one wall at Kiasma. He had it in mind to use something like it again on the Nelson project, but in a much bigger way.
"Cast glass with its mysterious opacity traps light in its mass and projects a diffused glow," Holl once wrote. "Sandblasted glass likewise has a luminescence.cloudy sandblasted glass and honed materials establish a material depth, a pensive mood."
"Material depth" and "a pensive mood" would cost time and money.
"I think we all knew it would be challenging," says Donald J. Hall, who until recently was chairman of the Nelson's board of trustees. "Because it had never been done. It had to be created. The whole structure. The way of applying it. The way of holding it up."
Within the museum, "getting the light right" became the mantra.
The light has to be right to help illuminate the art - natural light from some of the lenses would spill down curving walls and ceilings and mix with artificial lighting in the gallery spaces below.
And the light has to be right to make visitors not only comfortable but also, most important, vulnerable to feelings of awe. To that end a lighting design subcontractor, the Renfro Design Group of New York, has spent some two years creating computer models and analyzing light levels in the new gallery spaces.
Marc Wilson, the museum's director, was fond of telling his staff that getting the light only 98 percent right would amount to failure.
Step by step the glass became an increasingly complicated component of an already complex project.
And as the designer's criteria became more specific, the number of potential glass suppliers dwindled. By 2002, when it came time to select the glass, only one firm was left standing. Lamberts Glasfabrik, a 120-year-old, family-owned firm in Wunsiedel-Holenbrunn, Germany, turned out to be the only manufacturer capable of producing the glass that the project called for.
Most glass typically shows a greenish tint. Holl and McVoy wanted a whiter glass. That requires reducing the level of iron in the basic mix of sand, sodium chloride and lime that's melted and reformed as glass. And because visitors will be able to walk up to the glass walls within the sculpture garden, the glass needed to be tempered for safety. Tempering - a process of high heat and fast cooling - compresses the surface of the glass, making it stronger and containing the way it breaks. No other manufacturer at the time had the ability to produce channel glass that was also low-iron and tempered.
Holl sought to diffuse the light hitting the planks as much as possible, which is why he liked Lamberts' solar-surface glass. Sandblasting the inner surface of the quarter-inch thick glass would further disperse and soften sunlight.
The idea was intriguing.
And troubling. . ."
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html