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Longtime preservationist and humanities advocate Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel has assembled a formidable roster of critics and practitioners in her newest quantity, revealed on the sixtieth anniversary of the New York Metropolis Landmarks Regulation that strengthened the fee charged with defending vital buildings within the 5 boroughs. Within the e-book, contributors muse on the legacy and way forward for historic preservation within the ever-changing metropolis. Following is an excerpt from “Engineering Landmarks,” an essay written by Man Nordenson (in dialog right here with John Ochsendorf) and Nat Oppenheimer, which explores the traces of historical past left behind by totally different development methods.
Past Structure: The New New York, edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.
New York Evaluation Books, 224 pages, $38.
Reflecting on “inventive destruction” and town, the New Yorker Marshall Berman wrote, “Even probably the most lovely and spectacular bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for quick depreciation and deliberate to be out of date, nearer of their social capabilities to tents and encampments than to ‘Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals.’” Landmark legal guidelines prohibit the extent of this churn by sustaining objects and districts of continuity. Within the language of ecology, inventive destruction can be framed as a part of the cycles that C.S. “Buzz” Holling related to ecological (versus engineering) resilience and the corresponding adaptive cycle of development, improvement, collapse, and renewal. The associated ideas of social-ecological adaptive cycles describe cyclical patterns of nature and societies that repeat but additionally evolve in “nested” cycles. Pure methods, from boreal forests to the Serengeti, rework via cycles of development, destruction, and regeneration that may prolong over many years. To arrest these cycles—say, with hearth prevention in forests—can danger extinctions. Equally, to fixate on notions of regular state and equilibrium—the thought in engineering resilience of “bouncing again”—misses the nonlinear dynamics of actual city methods.
It’s helpful on this sense to review the periodic transformations and growth of museums and performing arts facilities in New York. Each of the current authors have served as structural engineers for these tasks, together with these of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Metropolitan Opera. MoMA, for instance, has added buildings over time since its begin in 1939, within the constructing designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. Main expansions have occurred—in 1980–84 with César Pelli, in 2001–04 with Yoshio Taniguchi, and, most not too long ago, in 2016–19 with Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). Buildings and a backyard had been added by Philip Johnson between 1950 and 1964. With every cycle, the alternatives to retain or exchange mirrored the prevailing style. Taniguchi aptly captured that dialectic by framing the Johnson backyard, painstakingly recreated, in his all-around crisp Modernism, whereas restoring the historic sequence of facades alongside the aspect of the 53rd Avenue entrance. DS+R’s addition to the west, together with the tragic destruction of the American Folks Artwork Museum (designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien), prolonged this sequence to incorporate the Jean Nouvel tower on the west finish. Alongside the road, one can comply with the historical past from Goodwin-Stone to Nouvel through Johnson, Pelli, Taniguchi, and DS+R.
From the engineers’ viewpoint, this historical past can be embodied within the multiplicity of constructions, enclosures, and methods that emerged from an equally eclectic sequence of actors. Whereas principally invisible, there’s a compelling story of New York development, fairly like that of the industrial development of tall buildings famous above, which has been included via these cycles. Each the Pelli and Nouvel towers are in-built typical residential flat-plate development, although the Nouvel tower’s jagged profile shows a jazzy model of Chicago-style diagonal bracing. The remaining museum sections are a combination of concrete and metal framing. The Taniguchi growth contains some principally invisible nuances, each within the construction’s tatami-inspired geometry and the intense minimalism in some locations, together with the carving of areas via the Pelli tower to accommodate the reconfigured circulation. What’s placing, and really New York, is the sensation contained in the totally expanded museum of smoothed, frictionless house as one progresses via the invisible historical past of constructions.
In distinction, the a number of expansions of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork are extra clearly manifest as one strikes round its labyrinthine inside. One of many museum’s charms is the problem of discovering one’s means, proving a problem to many younger explorers. This palimpsest of architectures presents a really totally different expertise from the MoMA’s “make it new” smoothness. But right here, too, the embedded historical past of development is little understood or documented. Morrison Heckscher’s glorious historical past of the sequence of buildings, from the these of Calvert Vaux to these of Kevin Roche, reveals how every technology of growth wraps round and each buries and hundreds the final. Relying on the architect, the corresponding constructions could have some historic significance or not. The data are restricted. In a single occasion, within the Nineteen Sixties, the lack of information and documentation of the Guastavino vaults put in at Charles McKim’s path within the courtyard and gallery areas of the northern Wing H (1904–13) resulted of their demolition. They had been changed by a metal and concrete flooring for the expanded Egyptian reveals. As has usually occurred in New York, a mixture of misplaced craft information and misplaced or nonexisting documentation has led to the demolition of those hidden cultural treasures. On the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork particularly, given its age and place on the fringe of Central Park, a wealthy materials tradition and historical past is subsumed within the partitions and flooring. These—together with the underground and back-of-house hidden mysteries, from water tunnels to vaulted foundations—may warrant a comply with as much as Heckscher’s historical past.
The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and accomplished in 1959, represents an apparent landmark in some ways, together with, in our opinion, structurally. Aside from the extra typical northeast portion of the constructing (the place the steps and elevators are positioned), the vast majority of the construction consists of 9 cast-in-place concrete radial “internet partitions” (seen throughout the galleries), the repeatedly rising ramp slab (cast-in-place concrete as nicely), and the enduring facade spiral, which was constructed in concrete utilizing the gunite methodology (fluid concrete that was sprayed onto mesh reinforcement, a way extra usually used to construct swimming pool shells or sculpture).
The exact efficiency of the Guggenheim’s facade—each the parts hung from the net partitions and concurrently bracing the net partitions—has not all the time been evident. Whereas there’s a clear structural-load path all through and, by statement, the construction is inflexible and laterally succesful, in 2005–08, a structural staff, led by Robert Silman, was requested to find out the reason for persistent cracks within the facade concrete which have vexed the museum from the outset. The evaluation and repair finally present a potent instance of utilizing fashionable evaluation instruments to evaluate, after which restore, historic constructions. The important characteristic of this method is harmonizing fashionable digital design packages with archaic constructions to make sure that one doesn’t incorrectly ascribe fashionable properties and behavioral assumptions to brittle parts from an earlier time.
On the time of Silman’s evaluation, large-scale digital scanning was comparatively early in its use in buildings however had lastly develop into out there past tutorial domains. Given the significance and scope of the constructing, the staff leveraged this new expertise, scanning the complete constructing into an unimaginable digital cloud of information, which was then transformed right into a three-dimensional geometric picture. They uploaded that picture into structural modeling software program and analyzed it as a strong concrete construction. This course of took months to finish (months alone merely to wash up the information and “mesh” the weather within the mannequin); it might take significantly much less time in the present day, because the expertise has superior quickly within the 20-plus years since this evaluation came about.
Over the lengthy interval of modeling, the constructing was concurrently monitored beneath all exterior situations on a day-by-day foundation, with the final word intent of calibrating in situ actions with the pc mannequin. Lastly, concurrently with each of those efforts, the staff opened bodily probes on the facade that unlocked the important thing to the final word design resolution: discontinuities within the reinforcing on the round facade. These discontinuities wouldn’t have been seen to any kind of scanning (even in the present day), as a result of the break within the reinforcing was obscured behind different metal parts.
By combining every of those steps, the staff discovered the reason for the cracking after which, most significantly, designed a repair that could possibly be verified with confidence, primarily based on the calibration of the digital mannequin with precise habits within the subject. Any one among these approaches could have yielded a supposition or advice. Collectively, mannequin, monitoring, and testing ensured that the repair (on this case, laminating the complete nonhistoric inside face of the facade with carbon fiber so as to add tensile power) aligned with the unique intent of the construction. Quietly, and hidden behind the finishes, this trifecta returned the construction to its authentic intent. The churn on this case was extra one of many technological kind inside a singular kind.
