Second Skin, Facade-as-Site 

This article and project are about approach. Approach in a non-traditional sense, in that it’s not on axis or frontal, but is emotional and personal. Emotional and personal are two topics related and yet both are considered taboo in contemporary architecture. These two topics act as a catalyst to fuel a design pedagogy which recognizes architecture as a framework around which things happen and life occurs. In other words what something looks like is irrelevant, what it does is what matters. Architects have a tendency to reverse matter for looks. The following approach directly addresses facade as an opportunity to assemble a second skin of matter.

FIGURE_01 :

A site one hundred and three years old cast silhouettes towards a facade in the present day.

The history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 is our starting point, and one hundred and three years later an ancient element of architecture is renewed for the purpose of a competition to design a memorial. The element of architecture renewed under these particular circumstances is the one known as facade. Facade is historically defined as the face or front of a building, but in this case it needs to represent one hundred and forty-six portraits of the victims. Setting aside the tragic event of 1911 momentarily, the facade as per this volume is of focus for two primary reasons. One reason is given per the competition brief, the other reason is supplied via the approach towards another ancient element of architecture known as site. The competition brief stated that a “second skin” was required on the facade of the Asch Building. (The Asch Building was the location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. The same structure was renamed the Brown Building by its owner New York University.) The required “second skin” could only be a maximum of fourteen inches in depth off the existing facade and could not block any entrances, windows, mechanical intakes, etc. This first reason is functional and pragmatic, two influences which continue to dominate the practice of architecture. The second reason reconsiders the problem of designing a memorial by approaching it as a conventional site. This site is vertical instead of the customary horizontal, thereby redefining the spatial relationship upon which to construct the figurative grounds for remembrance. 

Context :

The context of this project begins not with the event of March 25, 1911, but with the production of a product. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory produced the fashionable female garment for which it was named. The fabric garment was a hybrid somewhere between a shirt and a dress, and it radically altered the proportional appearance of the female silhouette. The connection between the location and its product set our conceptual framework. Conceptually, the shirtwaist needs a body to act as structure, or in our case to act as site. The body is the site, just as the facade of the Asch Building is the site to support the fabric of the memorial. The second skin we imagined fashioned a fabric facade for two bodies simultaneously. The two bodies involved were not only at different scales, but needed to be both collective and singular in nature. The second skin was made to resemble fabric both for the facade of the Asch Building and for each individual who perished in the fire. To be clear, as stated before, the facade-as-site is directly analogous to the body-as-site, both from which the second skin is hung. In both conditions the memorial or clothing takes a semi-permanent position on the site.  

FIGURE_02 :

Contoured vertical landscape prototype unit.

Any modern curtain wall system is hung in a method similar to the building’s structural skeleton. Modern curtain wall systems deal almost exclusively at one scale: the holistic scale of buildings. Dealing holistically with building facades even in today's parametric modeling era still has increased tendencies toward purely repetitious homogeneity. The architectural profession once again is out dated in a time period of customer/client demands for mass customization. This comparison creates a potential example where facades and bodies are condensed into one vertical site, a vertical site in its context desiring non-standardization as a means to represent two scales, two bodies, and two meanings. The multiple scales and bodies have already been described, but the two meanings are just as significant. The two meanings establish a new and fruitful context upon which the project hangs, not only literally on the facades of the Asch Building, but in eternity. One must be reminded that this is a memorial dealing with the two fairly large meanings of life and death. Life and death are the eternal context, and in this situation a context repositioned ninety degrees, leaving behind any connection to the physical ground. Tombstones traditionally mark the ground of burial and act as vertical facades in context. The roles of tombstones and physical ground have been superimposed to create our vertical site. 

Our vertical site is indeed a memorial, but this superimposing has generated a context ripe for new facade typologies. These new facade typologies do not simply reflect or mirror context, but instead interlace vertical sites with tales of ordinary people. The vertical site of the Asch Building’s facades are a tale of ordinary people shaping extraordinary change in workplaces worldwide. Two facades develop a context, establish a typology and introduce a new second skin to tell this tale. A tale who’s story is written on one hundred forty-six separate garments, all of which assemble the context for the Triangle Fire Memorial.

Competition :

Just as the section on Context focused upon product as catalyst for our conceptual framework, this section expands into the area of process. That is, process in terms of an ability of reading the vertical site as a landscape. Once again, dual components of a collective group and singular individual seed the facade’s landscape. In order to read the seeded landscape, a closer internal organization was required. A sub-grouping became apparent below the obvious female and male victim’s level, one which revealed a landscape highly structured by its hidden contours. Contours which, based upon age of victims, layered the facade as a site of micro elements and macro personal utterances. The one hundred and forty-six victims ranged in age from fourteen to thirty-nine, of which one hundred twenty-three were female and twenty-three were male. Most importantly per our process was the development of the facade-as-site into a specific contoured topography reflecting the number of victims within each age group. Twenty-three age groups were discovered, but an additional contour of information surfaced. The twenty-three age groups were really only eleven age groups based around the common denominator of number of victims inside of each age group. (There are two victims each for fourteen, twenty-six and thirty-one year old age groups, all of which are female. In the largest age group of victims, twenty-three bells represent the eighteen year olds, of which twenty-two are female and one is male.) This process resulted in eleven female and nine male contours because two age groups of victims did not include any males. 

FIGURE_03 :

Chart of age group & victims organization for twenty-three bell types.

The facade as site was conceived as a theory, the addition of an investigative process supplied contours which could be applied in practice towards a new vertical landscape. A vertical landscape is transformed into a physical facade, one filled with voices silenced in 1911, waiting one hundred and three years to speak again. 

FIGURE_04 :                        

FIGURE_05 :

Elevations diagram for placement of bell types.            Washington & Greene St. elevations with one hundred forty-six bells.

The age based contours literally produced audible tones to be heard by the current citizens of New York City. In the linguistic concept of tone the pitch contour of a sound is a function that tracks the perceived pitch of a sound over time. The change in a pitch contour unit over time affects the semantic meaning of the sound. The factor of time as related to years of age is the exact variable use to produce the twenty-three different contour based micro landscape, embedded with sound. These micro landscapes represent all the victims of the fire acting as a set of instruments yearning to be played. The term contour means “to go around”, as in to turn a lathe. The age-based contours were turned around three hundred and sixty degrees into layered, hill-like forms. As hill-like forms revolved on a digital lathe, it became clear that these micro landscapes were something far more universal. Universal in the sense that our description and process were our intuitions materialized. The detailed contoured surfaces of theses micro landscapes had metamorphosed into something completely unexpected. The unexpected result of our process was a set of twenty-three bell types. Yes bells, as in hollow cast instruments. 

FIGURE_06 :                        

FIGURE_07 :

Detail view of bells casting silhouettes in remembrance of Triangle Fire victims.    Greene Street facade detail 1.

We had accomplished the facade-as-site by means of constructing a topography of hidden sounds. To ring a bell is to awaken a memory. The memory awoken via the Triangle Fire Memorial incorporates twenty-three bell types assembling a single non-visual vertical landscape. The bells are physical components linked together to articulate the facade-as-site. The bells are arranged vertically in alphabetical order on the third to tenth floors of the Greene and Washington Street facades.

FIGURE_08 :

Greene Street facade detail 2, with Washington Street elevation in background.

The bells also have a latent dynamic quality that brings scale of the facade to the human level once a year. As a rule of the competition, whatever facade memorial elements envisioned, those elements would annually need to be removed for cleaning the Asch Building’s existing surfaces. Folding this competition rule into the process allowed for an annual moment of remembrance. On March 25th of each year the one hundred and forty-six bells will be removed from the facades of the Asch Building and inverted in both Greene and Washington Streets. On that date annually at 4:25pm, all one hundred and forty-six bells will be struck simultaneously to commemorate the anniversary of the fire. The bells will remain inverted at street level until the morning of March 26th.

What was a non-visual vertical landscape is actively converted into a physical, visual and sound based landscape for the citizens of New York City to inhabitant. The citizens are inhabiting much more than the Triangle Fire Memorial, they are occupying a new city. A city born in the past but made for the essence of the present.

Bellwether City is the location the citizens are occupying, but this city is empirical. The empirical nature of sound builds a memorial, builds a city, and uncovers a vertical landscape repurposed as a site. During the funeral for the one hundred and forty-six victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, a crowd of approximately four hundred thousand citizens lined the streets in and around Washington Square Park. The annual positioning of the one hundred and forty-six bells of the memorial in the streets continues a process of free and open public social responsibility. The interaction of which furnishes a landscape at once permanent, yet ever changing and adapting our collective consciousness as citizens of the city. 

FIGURE_09 : Bells inverted in Washington Street view 1.           

 FIGURE_10 :Bells inverted in Washington Street view 2, with Washington Square Arch in background.

The relationship between architecture and sound is trivialized by architects. Sound is a material, just as light or wood. In architecture, sound is a critical material if integrated into both analog and digital processes for the construction of spatial projects. Without the material of sound our Triangle Fire Memorial would have remained sealed inside the theory of facade-as-site. The inclusion of sound thickened the theoretical vertical site, providing ground upon which to build, inhabit, and hear a memorial with voices more than a hundred years in the making. The voice of this project does reflect our process, but more importantly it speaks the universal language of music. It is music heard but once a year, creating an intimate relationship between the victims and any singular or collective listener. Bellwether City is suspended on facades, in streets, in time, her sound dwells in the air, and in all who hear the Triangle Fire Memorial.

FIGURE_11 :

Analytique drawing with closeup view of Washington Street facade.

Post Competition :

The last section of the article is by no means a conclusion. This section hopes to open a broader discussion on recent developments in the discipline of architecture. Developments specific to facades as sites, and ongoing topics of today’s practice of architecture.

Thinking beyond the Triangle Fire Memorial competition and it physical location is a technique for remapping New York City. In many ways New York City has become a city of memorials, just as Washington D.C. is a pre-existing model of one. With this said New York City portraits itself as a progressive, front-running metropolis of influence. Some of New York City’s newest memorials do not only fall short of those projected standards, but also lack any imaginative vision towards facades-as-sites. Lower Manhattan has three recent memorials dedicated to very different events, but in many ways directly linked to traditional interpretations of what is a site. The three memorials are the 9/11 memorial, the Irish Hunger memorial and the Garden of Stone at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. 

Technically the 9/11 memorial has no facades. The cascading water walls fill two unfillable voids left by the events from 2001. These voids represent absence, but with an ironic twist. Considering the twin towers were over one hundred stories each, its enormous facade areas should have provided fertile ground for new ideas of vertical sites. The iconic remnants of the twin tower’s facades will rest below grade in the 9/11 museum as reduced sculptural artifacts, rather than acting as topographies to be harvested for new facades-as-sites. 

The Irish Hunger memorial falls into a similar role, but with a different attitude towards site. This memorial uses facades as metaphorical support for literal elevated ground. The elevated ground becomes a hovering vegetated site above the shore of the Hudson River. The facades of this memorial are mere name-filled corridors to pass through on the way to a hierarchical vantage point reserved as a poor demonstration of life defeating the angel of death. Could have not this memorial’s facades been the site for public dwelling? Instead its facade are simple walls upon which a gate is hung in order to close the site and privatize it after sunset each night.

The last of the recent lower Manhattan memorials is the Garden of Stone at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Some may describe this as a non-architectural project, but it is very spatial all the same. Many large stone boulders scatter the garden’s surface. This is the second of the three memorials discussed which again technically doesn’t have a facade. Unfortunately, this facade-free site renders the victims as faceless elements similar to the event it commemorates. Stone is as traditional a building material. In practical means stone is physically heavy and represents the weight of the load it can support. As a theory for facade-as-site, a reversal of gravity-based loads would symbolize freedom. Freeing the earth of its loads but not the facade-as-site could be viewed as a burden lightened both in the garden and in the souls of the ancestors of the victims. The Garden of Stone could have been a signal to relieve the weight of a tragedy, rather than reinforcing a face of terror.

Shifting specifically to 2013’s year in architecture, it can be seen as a year of the demolition of facades, instead of the building of facades. In the past year two other major American cities made design headlines for the demolition of significant historic architecture. In Chicago, the Prentice Woman’s Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg was sentenced to be demolished because its facades were not as understood to be as ornate or beautiful as other landmarked buildings. Chicago’s long-lived architectural birthright will be ashamed of this decision for decades to come. The City of Houston also falls into the category of voting for demolition rather than reuse. The building voted upon is the Astrodome, once called the eighth wonder of the world. The Astrodome is the largest interior room on the planet, one with facades opportune to act as sites of rejuvenation. This building’s facade falls under similar judgement in that its exterior precast panels are just too unsightly to save the structure. All three of the aforementioned New York City memorials have the potential to demonstrate facade as site characteristics. To discover such characteristics, a sympathetic point of view can reveal vision which exposes unconventional approaches. 

Finally, we return back to New York City and the ongoing debate about the decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM). Once again, it is the facade that is the site of controversy. This case is different from Chicago and Houston in that it is both professional and personal. Professional because architects are split somewhat evenly over whether to save the building, save its facade, or to demolish it. The AFAM is only slightly over a decade old, which means landmarking it is out of question. This is a personal debate too because the principals of the firm who designed the AFAM and the principals of the firm hired to evaluate the fate of the building are family friends. The evaluating firm used the term “Facadism” to defend their demolition decision. Facadism is a term only architects could have invented to discredit the work of a fellow architect. Facadism is regarded as a compromise between the historic preservation and demolition of a building. In the law a compromise is seen as a mutual promise in which both parties involved are equally dissatisfied. In architecture a compromise is strictly seen from one perspective. This perspective is that the architect failed to get their way. Facade-as-site in this case has been misappropriated for the stylistic espionage known as redevelopment. New York City is the birthplace of the historic preservation movement in America because of the case involving the Grand Central Terminal. The idea of preservation in America is as backwards as using Facadism to shield pure laziness. Preservation in America really means restoration. Restoration is a means to bring a building back to a perceived pristine condition. Preservation in many other countries is a method for reuse of existing historically valued buildings and historic fabric. Preservation in America is an all or nothing proposition. 

FIGURE_12 :

Facade-as-Site inside the context of New York City.

This type of position sealed the fate of the Prentice Woman’s Hospital, the Astrodome, and now the AFAM. It is only a matter of moments before architecture students start to use Facadism as a defense at their final reviews. Facade-as-site is a theory with both practical and poetic implications. Facadism is as shallow as any standard curtain wall system. The AFAM is a facade-as-site for a few very simple reasons. The AFAM’s facade could be and should be included in the current MoMa expansion plans. Using it as a facade-as-site example would contribute to a nationwide discourse in reconsidering our country’s preservation strategies. The second reason is more straightforward and meaningful. 

This reason also brings this article full circle back to the Triangle Fire Memorial. In a recent New York Times article entitled “The Museum With a Bulldozer’s Heart”, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman made a helpful suggestion. The article mentioned that the architects of the AFAM affixed a panel to the building’s facade inscribed with the names of all the workers who helped build the structure. Kimmelman went on to say that MoMA should save that panel after the building is demolished. A museum’s facade with a panel inscribed with names, could this also have been designed to act as a memorial to workers expressing their crafts? Architect’s who embrace facade-as-site truly comprehend the empirical nature of all architecture. Horizontal or vertical sites can be transformed, adapted, or preserved to act as living, evolving organisms.

A facade of bells and a facade with a panel of names represent the sound citizens make in a city inside a city. Facade-as-site is a destination inside the obvious elements of architecture. A destination architects only approach with the assistance of ordinary people.

Fumanelli & Surjan make up the design team known as C_UP.