Many museum buildings have incorporated systems that allow daylight to illuminate their galleries, but none as robustly as MAXXI, where almost every roof surface is glazed. To support such a roof above the museum’s winding galleries, whose bays average 40 feet wide, reinforced-concrete walls on either side sandwich a series of trusses. While these trusses run parallel to the gallery walls, transversal steel beams connect the walls. Originally conceived as a precast-concrete element, each of these longitudinal sections, typically six per bay, is composed of a steel truss encased in 1⁄2-inch-thick fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels. The nearly 8-foot-deep assembly, which rises
Image courtesy Foreign Office Architects Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, rendering. Click here to view images. Talk to most architects in Ohio and they’ll tell you it’s a pretty conservative place. But while design innovation may be a hard sell for local architects, the state has had an astonishing track record in the last decade for giving cutting-edge foreign architects their first shot at building on American soil, arguably more so than more “forward-thinking” locales on either coast. When the Toledo Museum of Art picked this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, SANAA, to design an ethereal Glass Pavilion in 2000, it
Images courtesy Hans Hollein Click here to view images. Hans Hollein tried something new by doing something old. For nearly half a century, the prolific architect has been building around the world, though he is probably best known for the groundbreaking, and sometimes controversial, projects he completed in his native Vienna decades ago. For a recent competition entry for an office building in Shenzhen, China, the Pritzker Prize winner searched his archive of drawings, focusing on a series of sketches he did in his twenties while traveling through the United States on a Harkness Fellowship. A year spent in Chicago
Project Specs North Carolina Museum of Art Raleigh, North Carolina Thomas Phifer and Partners << Return to article the People Design Architect Thomas Phifer and Partners 180 Varick St. Suite 1110 New York, NY Ph. 212 337 0334 Fax 212 337 0603 Partner in Charge: Thomas Phifer AIA Project Partner: Gregory Reaves AIA, LEED AP Project Architect: Gabriel Smith AIA, LEED AP Project Team: Adam Ruffin, Katie Bennett, Christoph Timm, Jon Benner, Kerim Demirkan, Len Lopate, Eric Richey, Joseph Sevene, Danny Taft Local Architect: Pierce Brinkley Cease + Lee, Raleigh, NC Partner in Charge: Clymer Cease, AIA Project Partner: Jeffrey