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Its J

st a Facade Marc Simmons

As told to Brian Tabolt

I wanted to talk with you about your offices work with OMA on the Prada Beverly Hills Epicenter because it is a really good illustration of Fronts approach. The end result looks incredibly simple; but is actually quite complicated to achieve. It is an instance where the clarity of the diagram really rests on a detailand this crucial detail is actually a lack of detail, a moment where the tectonic isnt really expressed. When I first saw the facade, I thought what can there possibly be to talk about here? but it is exactly that restraint which makes the solution so successful - and there IS an incredible story behind how the team got to that point. If this project had been constructed with more conventional building techniques, it would probably look much more techy. But here, incredible technology and effort were exerted to make the engineering disappear. So I would love to hear how you and your office worked with the project team to help retain the clarity of OMAs original diagram.

Well, as you can see, the pure concept is this 14 x 42 foot sheet of aluminum. The box is conceived of as a pure prism floating in space, with a void in the middle. That opening is then dematerialized by the perimeter PDLC (Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystal) screens. Within the void are two staircases, symmetrical around the void centerline rising simultaneously from the front and the rear of the store. Its a brilliant idea. In OMAs shopping analysis a key concept is to maximize a consumers experience of and exposure to display -- this being achieved by generating universally interesting but differentiated circulation relative to the amount of surface area in the store. By introducing this reverse staircase you can modify what is front and what is back. A shopper comes in, and as they circulate around back, they are re-oriented towards the middle. You circulate the other way, and you realize the back is somehow equal. Its not like the Apple store here in New York City where you go up and you have to double back. This is a loop. As you rise, the PDLC screens yield at the middle allowing you to to choose left or right, entering into an effective figure 8
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shopping space. Once again the circulation loops are equal. The conceptual interior of this floor is the sponge material developed by OMA and lining all interior walls. The staircase up to the next level is concealed within a wall cavity, ensuring that the purity of the second floor space is uninterrupted. Once you understand that there is a possibility of success and there is a The exterior of the prism is all aluminum. The top is an aluminum floor, the soffit is an aluminum ceiling. There is an aluminum fascia capturing the PDLC screens. And of course, the facade is aluminum where it projects beyond the portal frame to the exterior, both on the Rodeo Drive faade and on the rear alley-way faade. So you can make it look like the building is two portal frames with the box suspended from it; which is partly the case. So the concept of the facade is really important to the reading of the whole building, and thats why OMA and Brand + Allen (Executive Architects) were so focused on making that piece one, and making the joint go away. Its a game of abstraction. Why this is conceptually an aluminum prism, youd have to ask Rem-- but if the joint were articulated, it would undoubtedly change the magic. If the panel on the front were divided into multiples, it would change the single-pixel abstraction into something that becomes less about raw texture and material and into something more about pattern. First, what you have to understand is that the conceptual logic has to be strong enough to convince someone to even want to do this. Because the path of least resistance will prevail in the absence of that clarity. Thats the precondition for even making this happen. And whats interesting about OMA as an office is that they have that conceptual clarity. We all recognized that the building exists at a precise scale, that the diagram is actually achievable - meaning that 42 feet might be achievable in a single panel. If the building was 60 feet wide instead of about 45 feet, you probably wouldnt propose this. Nobody knew this ahead of time, of course, but it would have become clear
The cast of characters was OMA, Brand + Allen Architects, Prada and their own design/construction team led by Marco Lenardon, and BCC Project Managers led by Chris Beetha. The Brand + Allen team was Nicole Long and Ingrid Schoenlank. The main people from OMA apart from Rem Koolhaas were Ole Scheeren, Jessica Rothschild - she had a lot to do with it - Amale Andraos, Hilary Sample and Eric Chang who executed the back end of the project. You have Plant Construction, the construction management firm who is looking after the construction for the whole building. Plant was led by Elliott Grimshaw and Jeff Gherardini who did an amazing job making everything happen. They were very committed to making it work. And then one of the better metal fabricators in the area, CS Erectors Inc, was brought on board. They initially looked at the project, before Front even got involved, and saw it at a conceptual level and they werent really interested in pursuing it.
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that you couldnt achieve that effect at that larger scale. The facade as a single pixel becomes and index for fabrication and logistical limits.

commitment to the concept, then everyone is prepared, in a sense, to fail-- a recognition by the owner of a chance of failure by the design/contracting team is key-- it is a pre-condition for taking the risk. Simply because this hasnt been done before, and you dont know that it can be done at all. You certainly dont know that it can be done within a budget, or within a time frame that meets the project requirements. But if you suspend your disbelief a for a little while and you look at the scale, look at the size, you think...well, we can truck that. Its difficult - you probably have to do it on an angle, and 14 is kind of a limit. So you know you can truck it. You can probably handle it, you can probably install it, so the first question becomes can you make it? Thats probably the most important thing for us. The other question is of course can you hoist it on Rodeo Drive over the weekend or whatever...so there are Beverly Hills issues involved.

It wasnt their job to solve it from scratch-- they werent going to be hired on a kind of design-build basis until the design team had a more evolved strategy. So we became involved around the beginning of design development. We said, OK, the contractors are saying no, but everyone is still interested in the idea so lets just try to engineer something-- a plausible strategy. The first decision was that we werent going to use the panels as any part of the weather enclosure system - only as a rain-screen. We were going to need perforated metal panel on the top, and brokendown metal panels on the soffit, which have lighting and other things in them, so the conceptual diagram of a pure prism is already compromised there. The perforated metal on the roof is to let water drain, so we have a complete insulated and water-proof drained roof system underneath. The sides and front are conceptually solid, but we have waterproofing and insulation on all sides of the exposed box first. The verticals are designed as conventional wall systems, the roof is designed as a roof system, and the soffit is designed as a vapor-impermeable surface that doesnt have to take direct rain. So all the surfaces in reality are slightly different. Of course when you start hanging five different surfaces of metal, you have to make all necessary structural penetrations through the waterproofing substrates. At the top there are a series of metal standoffs that penetrate through from the structure. The waterproofing is then built up around them and drained away. There are then a series of horizontal rails that are set up on the roof, riding above the waterproofing layer. The perforated panels are then set on top of that, and they all have a concealed locking mechanism and each one is individually hinged. So you can get up there and open them up to service the cleanouts and the drains. So when you are standing up on the third floor retail space, and you are looking through that full height glass wall, you are looking at a plane of metal plates on the floor, with a seamless recessed glass panel, which then goes out smooth and flush onto this perforated metal surface. Obliquely, it actually does look like a continuous surface, so you have to achieve that effect at the top of the prism while making a roof system that is fully accessible, maintainable, and drained.
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The vertical walls are easy in a way. The front of the Schaulager Museum in Basel by Herzog & de Meuron is a huge welded up steel plate facade with a folded geometry. That baby must have been built in a similar way. The self-weight is taken out at two points near the corners, and are actually slipped horizontally. There are a series of additional wind-load restraints tied in all the way along the panel at the top, which are really more like tension rods that you can dial in and out. You can adjust them once the panel is in. But the idea is that the panel has to hang at the top and be restrained from wind pressures by a line of lateral ties running continuously across the top and bottom with stiffeners connecting them to make sure the panel can span. But at the same time, the panel has to be able to breathe thermally. Its taking on a huge amount of heat, and expanding sideways. So that is why all the wind-load restraints have to be slipped horizontally, to allow the panel to move about a 1/4 inch in each direction over 42 feet. The next thing you ask is, what is a reasonable material thickness? You could decide to engineer the panel to be 1/8 inch thick, and put stiffener frames on it up the whazoo, so the stiffener frame would be doing all the work. But, obviously you couldnt handle or fabricate a sheet of aluminum that big while being that thin-- it would likely crumple and and pillow losing all sense of flatness. The next challenge is size-- you cant buy a sheet of aluminum this large, so you have to hot-roll it custom - no cold formed coil options here. We talked to the guys at Alcoa for a recommendation on which kind of alloy is suitable for corrosion resistance and hot-rolled applications, and it turns out there is only one. They recommended hot rolling it to about an inch thick--just to handle it. We were very fearful that the tolerances and pitting would be horrible. So we knew that we might eventually mill it down to nominally half an inch thick. So now the material has a lot of spanning capacity. Half an inch is pretty strong, which starts to set up the stiffener depth, the stiffener rhythm, etc. So when you look at the elevations, the continuous horizontal stiffeners, and the intermittent vertical stiffeners correspond to working compositely with a 1/2 inch

material thickness. So if the material was 1/4 inch, there would be a lot more stiffeners, and they would all be deeper. The final structural combination was quite efficient. The other thing is both lines of restraints are close to the top and bottom so you can access them with tools once the panel is installed. You couldnt put it in the middle because we werent going to build the waterproofing from the inside out, so accessing the mid-field of the large panel would be impossible once it was set on its support brackets. We wanted to sew the whole substrate assembly up ahead of time with regard to waterproofing and then field water test it. Once the panels are on, getting in to fix the waterproofing would be a nightmare. The interior finishes, the case work, and the clothing would all be right there on the inside. You would have to rip all that out, rip out the interior waterproofing and try to do it from the inside; and the invasiveness of getting to it from the outside is even worse-imagine taking the panel off just to fix a leak! So the idea was to get the waterproofing right the first time and then fully protect it. The next challenge was seismic movement - Los Angeles is one of the most active earthquake zones in the world. We had originally settled on having a 1/2-3/4 thick corner joint where the panels meet, because over the height of the panel, the floors would rack during an earthquake by about that dimension. Arup carried out the structural analysis for the building and these final movements were provided by them as a basis of design for the exterior cladding team. Which means that the panel on the side would stay in a rectangular configuration and would just get dragged back and forth sideways without racking. The front panel would be connected to two floors, one moving and one not, so it would actually be changing its inclination relative to the vertical. This was going to happen no matter what kind of joint we had. We were all fearful that if you didnt have a joint, the corner would just rip itself open
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during any kind of serious earthquake. We had to design to a level that under an elastic seismic event, the panels had to be fully serviceable; they have to return to their original condition without requiring any further work. In an inelastic seismic event, which is really catastrophic, they are not allowed to come off the building but it would be fine for them to be damaged. Safety first! There is always the risk that one panel would rip another off its bearings, all the wind-load restraints would pop out from the force created by the racking and the panel might actually rip off. However, it became clear after a few quick 1:1 mock-ups that 1/2 - 3/4 inch joint would totally destroy the conceptual effort going into building the front panel. If you are going to take the trouble to fabricate a monolithic front panel, youve got to find a way to eliminate the joint. So the way to do that is to take all three panels and lock them up seismically. That means locking each corner up like a piano hinge. So when it moves thermally, one panel actually twists. Now the first connection for the panel has to be located slightly away from the corner so there is room for the metal to bend without producing a permanent coldformed deformation in the material. After that you have to release the bottom so that it is no longer connected to the primary steel work. So now where is the windload from the bottom of the panel going? Well, you have these two side-panels that can work as a kind of shear wall. The only way to do this was to build a horizontal truss above the soffit panels, much like the roof but much lighter. The truss would then lock up all three half inch thick panels (front, side, side), with all panels supported by deadload hangers from the soffit above. The whole thing then sits under its own gravity, but under an earthquake, the box just swings from the top, moving back and forth independent of the floors since it is no longer tied at the bottom to the primary structure.

worried about the tolerances of this huge sheet of aluminum coming out of the factory, UAE was able to grind the panels down from 7/8 to 1/2 inch. They also had a shear big enough to cut the 42 feet dimension all in one go. At the end of the day, they were able to get the diagonal tolerance to 1/16 inch over the entire sheet. The diagonal. Pretty amazing. The panels were too big to be anodized (they wouldnt fit in any bath), so the final finish is hand-applied, done by Italian artisans imported by Prada and put to work in Long Beach. The facade contracting business is kind of like the car industry: the good companies know thousands of suppliers. They can outsource a component or process that makes the project possible. Sometimes the consultant does this work instead-- identifying specialist fabricators and nominating them to the facade contractors. The manufacturers often service other industries because they have developed such a specialty. A lot of the companies we deal with to do facade work do industrial, marine, automotive, and aircraft components. These industries have very high-tolerance demands that buildings only rarely require, let alone afford. The Beverly Hills Store was one of these rare projects, and was executed with extreme precision-- I could tell similar stories about the roof which is 100 percent skylight while serving as a horizontal Vierendeel frame for the building, or the fiberglass cone and elliptical glass floor display windows, or the Liquid Crystal projection screens, or the 40 foot wide aluminum front door that is fully retractable into the ground, and certainly an entire book could be written about the development of OMAs sponge material. An exquisite undertaking.

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Marc Simmons is a partner in Front Inc., a facade consultancy office based in New York City.

A company called United Aircraft Engineering in St. Louis had an 80 by 240 foot milling bed that they normally use to mill aircraft wings. We were really

To date they have consulted on projects with SANAA, OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, and Renzo Piano among others. Marc Simmons was interviewed at Fronts office on March 6, 2007.