Water and Daylight 2

                                                                                          The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, December 2012

Water and Daylight 1

                                                               The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, December 2012

Zaha Hadid's Broad Museum

The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum East Lansing

It has been suggested that Zaha Hadid’s Broad Museum in East Lansing looks like the business face of those multiple-bladed men’s razors.* The lower left image, of a Gillette razor, depicts the device as (a) emitting some kind of spooky shaving rays or (b) maybe blocking incoming radiation.  I’ll assume that the Hadid office had something like the latter in mind, with its deep, stainless steel fins arrayed across the museum’s large, glazed openings (lower right image), oriented such that they will most certainly receive direct sun.

The top photo, of a portion of the museum exterior, is not exactly the way the museum looks, but the reason it turned out this way, a happy accident in terms of taking graphically interesting photos, is the point I want to consider.  The photo was taken on a bright, sunny, clear-blue-sky day in mid-April, just after noon.  The camera was set to automatically determine the aperture opening and the length of time its shutter is open.  Following its automatic program, the camera correctly read the intense glare of reflected sunlight and determined that, with so much energy fleeing the stainless steel surfaces, it set itself so as to drastically sift out extra light.  Otherwise, faced with an unmediated blast of solar radiation, the camera would have produced nothing more than a white image.  The photograph is evidence that there was still so much sunlight jumping off the building’s skin, even after the camera shut itself down, that the essential texture of the building was still discernable.  However, the camera had to shut itself down so much that the midday sky went dark: it reads as if it were nighttime.  Viewing the building, our eyes work similarly to defend the retina against a flood of glare.

The message of the facade can be read, most sympathetically, as representative of the need to shield artwork from daylight.  The delivery of that message is a little extreme: the glare coming off the stainless steel is substantial (like the rays emitted from those razor blades).  Another way to consider a working elevation for a building, a museum or otherwise, is as a design that not only shields the interior from a surfeit of illumination, but works to shade itself and, at the same time, treat the viewing eye gently.

Inside, the small museum has six long-ish galleries that stretch away from a sky and north-side illuminated central stair.  It’s a simple plan idea and entirely appropriate to a museum this size.  It is at this center where daylight is permitted to enter most effectively and so that a little daylight sneaks harmlessly into the galleries and helps us to orient ourselves.  Light also enters the western galleries, from the west and southwest, limiting the work that can be shown to that which is durable enough to resist the deteriorating rays of the sun.   Deep fins and tinted glass will filter the light somewhat, but the uses of these galleries must still be constrained.   The light is welcome visually; the curators will no doubt take care to work with it.  The upstairs eastern gallery only receives a bit of daylight from the central stair at one end, making it safe for more fragile artworks.  The café at the east end, near the east entrance, is substantially daylighted and with considerably less protection for the interior spaces. The space is visually interesting, open, patterned with light and shadow, but may sometimes turn out to be uncomfortable.  Lots of air conditioning may be needed.

The question is, does the aggressively variegated, reflective envelope and the configuring of the building so that it appears to be aiming itself at something, contribute significantly to the interior daylight quality and performance of its galleries?  Probably not.  You could get these good interior spaces without all that aggravation. Nevertheless, it’s a nice, small museum.

Citations

Broad Museum photos: c. 2013 Martin Schwartz

Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power Razor image: http://www.gillette.com/en/us/products/razors/proglide.aspx

* Thanks to Chris Sullivan.

Can Lis: Form and Performance

One of Utzon’s most important works is a house he designed for himself and his family near Petro Porto on the Spanish island of Majorca, off the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona.  The house is one of those extremely rare, successful essays in the conscious production of a vernacular building by a professional, and appropriately a significant example of Utzon’s understanding of sun and daylight.  Not so long ago, the production of (vernacular) buildings, the control of daylight, and thermal control were one and the same.  There were no mechanical or electrical means for providing visual or thermal comfort.  At this house, which Utzon called Can Lis, he developed a most interesting approach to daylighting, one which, in a vernacular manner, guided his design decisions throughout the project.

Utzon’s daylighting strategy at Can Lis recognizes three ideas. The first is that a little sunlight goes a long way.  For the most part, direct sun is visually uncomfortable and inefficient and the same is true thermally; it is typically a mistake to bring quantities of uncontrolled direct sun into a space.  Direct sun is fine if you are lazing on the seashore or enjoying a leisurely stroll.  But too much sun, even a little sun from the wrong direction, easily introduces glare and overheating to a building interior.  Utzon’s second idea was that views of sun-washed and daylight-washed surfaces and landscapes can bring the satisfaction of sunlight and a sense of the passage of the day into a space while minimizing the visual and thermal problems.  Seeing the unmistakable evidence of sun on a nearby surface or in the distance is a very effective substitute for being exposed to direct sun.  The third and crucial idea was Utzon’s recognition that in Spain the sun follows a relatively high arc through the southern sky (at least in comparison to his native Denmark) and therefore configuring and locating the house’s openings toward the horizon would minimize the attack of direct sun and maximize the intake of more desirable, diffused skylight.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels