Honorable Mention: Functional Façade, Made with a Robot for Cornell Tech’s Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center

“This project shows how something so simple can be done in order to achieve maximal design finishes.” —Juror Florencia Pita

Rainscreens have long helped to protect buildings from water infiltration and, in colder climates, heat loss. But on structures with large wall expanses, they can look monotonous. To break up the façade of the Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, on New York’s Roosevelt Island, the project team turned the building’s rainscreen into a functional work of art.

The need for the rainscreen, says Morphosis principal Ung-Joo Scott Lee, AIA, came from Cornell University’s request that the project be energy neutral. “The client said, ‘What if instead of giving you a dollar budget, we gave you an energy budget?’ ” Lee recalls.

Morphosis reached out to metal fabricator A. Zahner Co., in Kansas City, Mo., for help in conceiving a rainscreen that would fulfill its conventional functions but also make an aesthetic statement. The team hit on the idea of using 4,000 2-foot by 10-foot metal panels, each punctuated by laser-cut, 2-inch-diameter circular tabs. Each tab would be rotated from the vertical plane by a precise degree in order to reflect a specific amount of light such that, when viewed from afar, the 337,500 tabs and perforations would morph into images: on the building’s west elevation is the Manhattan skyline, just across the East River; on the east, are the gorges around Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University’s hometown. The images are somewhat abstract—more “inspired by” than anything literal—because the designs have to balance aesthetic, energy conservation, and light distribution requirements.

Accurately turning each of those hundreds of thousands of tabs to its particular angle, however, would take workers about a month—not accounting for potential errors in finesse. As an alternate, Zahner proposed reprogramming a spare welding robot to push and rotate each tab as specified. The completion time? A few days.

And while this was a site-specific, one-off solution, Zahner engineer James Coleman says it demonstrated how well fabricators can work with architects to realize ideas that once would have stayed on the drawing board. “The message,” he says, “is to come with the wildest ideas and we’ll shape our manufacturing process around that.”

Project Credits
Project: Functional Façade, Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center
Client: Cornell University
Design Firm: Morphosis, Culver City, Calif. . Thom Mayne, FAIA (design director); Ung-Joo Scott Lee, AIA (project principal); Luke Yoo (project architect); Nicolas Fayad, Edmund Ming Yip Kwong, Jerry Figurski, Jean Oei (project designers); Chloe Brunner, Debbie Chen, Chris Eskew, Stuart Franks, Farah Harake, Clayton Henry, Ted Kane, Hunter Knight, Ryan Leifield, Simon McGown, Brian Richter, Go-Woon Seo (project team); Cory Brugger, Assoc. AIA, Kerenza Harris, Stanley Su (advanced technology); Fiorella Barreto, Christopher Battaglia, Marco Beccuci, Paul Cambon, Vivian Chen, Tom Day, Justin Foo, Yong Fei Gu, Yoon Her, Sean Kim, Jognwan Kwon, Matt Lake, Sangyun Lee, Haidi Liu, Assoc. AIA, Eric Meyer, Nicole Meyer, Jason Minor, Michelle Park, Vincent Parlatore, Conway Pedron, Danny Salamoun, Ben Salance, Suzanne Tanascaux, Matthew Tarpley, Ben Toam (project assistants); Stuart Franks, Jasmine Park, Nathan Skrepcinski, Sam Tannenbaum (visualization)
Façade Construction: A. Zahner Co.
Façade Consultant: Arup
Façade Coating: PPG
Structural Engineer: Arup
M/E/P Engineer: Arup
Fire Protection Consultant: Arup
Sustainability Consultant: Arup
Cost Estimator: Dharam Consulting
Geotechnical Engineer: Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers
Lighting Design: Arup
Acoustics: Arup
Audiovisual/IT/Security/Smart Building: Arup
Code Consultant: Code Consultants, Inc.
Specifications: Construction Specifications Institute
Waterproofing Consultant: Henshell & Buccellato
Food Services Consultant: Jacobs Doland Beer
Graphics and Signage: Pentagram
Visualization: Kilograph
Collaborating Artists: Matthew Day Jackson, Michael Riedel, Matthew Ritchie, Alison Elizabeth Taylor
General Contractor: Barr & Barr
Preconstruction Construction Manager: AECOM Tishman
Owner’s Representative: Forest City Realty Trust

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