On October 17, 2008, AIA Philadelphia held its annual Awards for Design Excellence celebration. We were honored to accept four awards that evening, including a Gold Medal for Cellophane House™, our second gold medal in a row from AIA Philadelphia.
The Gold Medal recognizes only one built project of the most exemplary design quality, and is rarely given annually. Our heartfelt thanks go to the clients, design teams and consultants who made this honor possible.
Fabricated in just-in-time sequences, each panel consists of two Bosch frames, with a combination of plain PET, PET with photovoltaics, and IR blocking material from 3M applied to both sides of the frame.
Can we create a material that combines the ideal functions of a building envelope into a single product? We began exploring this question with SmartWrap™, a building envelope that has the potential to generate energy, control climate, and provide lighting and information display on a single printed substrate.
Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House™ is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap™, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Actor Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation selected KieranTimberlake among thirteen architecture firms to design safe, affordable, and environmentally sensitive housing to rebuild New Orleans' Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. Construction at Tennessee Street, the site of our first house, began on July 1, 2008; homeowners are scheduled to move in during September. John Williams Architects of New Orleans is the Executive Architect responsible for construction documents and administration.
On September 15, NPR's Morning Edition featured a segment detailing The Museum of Modern Art exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. A conversation with Assistant Curator Peter Christensen covers the rich history of prefabrication and the five full-scale prefab homes, including our Cellophane House™, currently on view at the Museum.
Members of the college community use the meditation room within the Multifaith Center at Wellesley College.
Our renovations at Wellesley College's Houghton Chapel and Multifaith Center were completed in the spring of 2008. In this article from Wellesley magazine, alumna Jana Reiss discusses students' dreams for the space, and the hum of activity happening there now.
How well does a plastic building envelope function in the summer heat of New York City? We attached sensors to the house to collect data on the thermal performance of our SmartWrap™ building skin.
We are thrilled that the Sculpture Building and School of Art Gallery at Yale University have been named among the Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Sustainable Projects. View the ten measures and supporting metrics used to evaluate the entries here, and a comprehensive list of the building's sustainable features here.
Last Friday, the whole KieranTimberlake team piled into two charter buses from our office in Philadelphia and trekked up the New Jersey Turnpike to visit the Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. This movie was taken with a handheld camera and shows the interior spaces from the top down. Indeed, the experience of walking through the house is quite different from seeing it on a computer screen.
Completed in 2006, the Yale University Sculpture Building is a 51,000 square-foot studio space for the undergraduate and graduate sculpture programs of the School of Art. The building called for an exceptional quality of light, low energy usage, and operable windows. A climate analysis performed on the site indicated a strong seasonal variation, with significant heating loads during the winter and cooling loads in the summer. This presented the opportunity to advance solar wall technology in partnership with a curtainwall manufacturer.
