Wright’s Palmer House Put on the Market

The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Palmer House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, acclaimed by historians as one of the architect’s best residential projects, has been put up for sale by the family of the original owners. The asking price is $1.5 million.

Built between 1951 and 1952, the Usonian-style home measures 2,000 square feet and sits on 1.5 acres of wooded hillside near the University of Michigan campus. Still in pristine condition, it contains three bedrooms and two baths, as well as many pieces of Wright’s free-standing furniture and a collection of original documents relating to the project. The grounds also include a small teahouse designed in a sympathetic style by John Howe, a Wright protégé. The structure was built several years after Wright’s death in 1959.

Wright designed the house for William Palmer, a professor, and his wife, Mary, a musician. In 1950, the couple asked the architect to create a dwelling for a double lot they had purchased on Ann Arbor’s east side. Historian Grant Hildebrand, author of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Palmer House, published in 2007, wrote that the architect, then in his eighties, gave the Palmers a design that ranks among the best residential work of his career.

The Palmer family lived there for five decades. William Palmer died several years ago, and his wife and their children recently decided the time is right to sell.

Viewed from above, the house evokes an arrowhead. Its shape is based on an equilateral triangle, which creates sculptural spaces and relationships, inside and out. The house contains many of Wright’s trademark interior elements, including cypress paneling, a large central fireplace, and flooring made of reddish concrete with a leather-like finish. Outside, the gently sloping roof features cedar shingles and patinated copper flashing. The building’s façade is a defining characteristic: brick walls are accented by bands of ceramic blocks with a repeating cutout that resembles a bird in flight.

Edward Francis, FAIA, a Detroit architect and long-time student of Wright’s work, says the house is in mint condition, which he attributes to the architect’s meticulous craftsmanship and the building’s “well-conceived and technically solid design.” Furthermore, he adds, the house was “passionately maintained by dedicated owners.”

For more information, visit www.palmerhouseannarbor.com.

By John Gallagher (Architectural Record)

An Architectural Gem in Germany is Reborn

For architects Winfried Brenne and Franz Jaschke, restoring the 80-year-old ADGB Trade Union School, in Germany, was a case of subtraction. “The building was not in worse condition than others we had worked with,” Brenne says, “but it was more hidden under changes made over time.”

For three decades, their Berlin-based firm, Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten, has been restoring and adapting Modernist structures. Their first job, in 1978, entailed renovating social-housing complexes designed by Bruno Taut. They have since worked on buildings by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Erich Mendelsohn, among other influential architects.

In 1999, the firm won an invited competition to renovate the ADGB, a yellow-brick complex designed by Hannes Meyer—who, from 1928 to 1930, served a controversial stint as the director of Bauhaus—and his colleague Hans Wittwer. For their work in sensitively resurrecting the structures for contemporary use, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) recently awarded Brenne and Jaschke its first-ever Modernism Prize, a new prong in its two-year-old Modernism at Risk campaign, cosponsored by Knoll. In a statement, WMF president Bonnie Burnham called the project a “superb restoration” that she hopes “will inspire the preservation and restoration of other great Modern buildings.”

Located in Bernau, Germany, ADGB was designed for the Federal School of the German Workers’ Unions and completed in 1930. “We discovered a new combination of materials and colors,” Jaschke says of the functionalist design. Built on a 12-acre site, the school comprises a network of buildings containing administrative, dormitory, classroom, meeting, and gymnasium spaces, as well as a dining hall with a glass-block ceiling. The complex’s two flanks are connected by five dormitory volumes that step back from one another; this series is edged by an external corridor fabricated of glass and red-painted steel.

The campus operated for only three years as a trade school before the Nazi party claimed it for SS training. After World War II, the East German Trade Union Federation—a union group—took it over for educating its members, and made significant alterations and additions: a wooden parapet substituted glass in the external corridor, for instance, and a suspended ceiling concealed the cafeteria’s glass blocks. These modifications made the original design unrecognizable. “We know of colleagues that went there,” Jaschke says, “and said they didn’t find it, because it was so hidden under changes they hadn’t even imagined.”

The campus was off-limits to the public, and historians didn’t even know it existed until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. A decade later, in 1999, Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten won an invited, Europe-wide competition to restore the complex, which over the years had been vacated and neglected. The Province of Brandenburg and the Handwerkskammer Berlin (Chamber of Crafts) agreed to reopen it, once again as a trade school. The crafts organization paid one-quarter of the €28 million project cost, while the remainder was funded publicly.

The design team focused on restoring the most important features in the original design. For instance, a stairway lined with trapezoidal windows, which had been walled off in concrete, was returned to its original exuberant condition. The architects also demolished a masonry addition, replacing it with a semicircular winter garden that had been there in 1930. They made code updates, and left their own creative mark in places like the lobby, where the yellow-brick walls were too damaged to restore. There, they overlaid the old surface with integral-color cement panels whose green, yellow, blue, and red stripes reference the palette of the dormitories.

ADGB reopened in January and is now filled to its 109-student capacity. WMF executive vice president Henry Ng says the greatest threat facing Modernist buildings is a “lack of public will,” and this project shows how valuable these structures can be. “There are buildings that people think may be obsolete,” he says, “but with a commitment on the part of the owner, they can be returned to leading viable, sustainable lives. We’re hoping this encourages people to make that happen.”

By David Sokol (Architectural Record)

Blackfriars Station, London, United Kingdom

London’s Blackfriars Station redesign will bridge the North and South banks of the Thames.

Work has now started on the £350m redevelopment that will make London’s Blackfriars the first station to span the river Thames.

Two architects are involved in the project, (Jacobs designing the building and Tony Gee & Partners designing the bridge), which forms part of the £5.5bn Thameslink Programme to ease rail congestion and to cope with a predicted growth in commuters.

Although Blackfriars station used to contain an entrance on the South Bank in the 19th century, the present entrance is on the north side of the river. The redevelopment will extend the current platforms across the Thames, with entrances on both sides of the river.

The new South Bank entrance will provide direct access to major attractions such as Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe theatre.

The existing entrance on the north side will be replaced with a curvaceous glass building containing a shared ticket hall for National Rail and London Underground services and a mezzanine level.

Richard Parry, London Underground’s director of strategy and service development, said: “Once the works are complete, customers will get a new upgraded station with step free access, increased capacity and better interchange facilities between the Tube and National Rail services.”

A spokesman for Network Rail told WAN: “As well as spanning the entire length of the Thames, the scheme will accommodate a set of disused piers from an old railway bridge that was built in 1864. It’s a very interesting build.”

Blackfriars’ overground section will remain operational but the Tube station will be closed from March 2 2009 until work completes in late 2011.

The Thameslink Programme also includes a revamp of Kings Cross St Pancras, London Bridge and Farringdon station.

Jacobs | www.jacobsbabtie.com

Oliver Ephgrave, Reporter (WAN)

Moisture Control

From rain-screen technology and whole house dehumidification to enhanced sheathing and roof underlayment, this month’s selection homes in on excessive moisture and humidity—whether it’s pounding the exterior of a structure or coming from within the building itself. — Linda C. Lentz

Outer laminate

Used in Europe for over 20 years as a surface for ventilated-rain-screen facades, Building Grade exterior laminate is mechanically strong, impact- and scratch-resistant, corrosion- and mold-resistant, vandalproof, and high-velocity-hurricane-zone compliant. Made of 40 percent postindustrial waste and 70 percent rapidly renewable resources, it comes in three thicknesses and 50 patterns, including oxidations, wood grains, and solids, as well as optional custom digital printing and graphics. Arpa USA, Jacksonville, Fla. www.arpausa.com

Ventilated-rain-screen facade systems keep moisture issues under breathable wraps

When 2 Columbus Circle, renovated by Allied Works Architecture’s Brad Cloepfil for the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, opens next month, one thing will be irrefutable. Its luminous terra-cotta-tile skin is engineered to protect the core from any weather the city may suffer.

One component of a complex, ventilated-rain-screen facade called Terrart by the German manufacturer NBK, a division of Hunter Douglas, the glazed clay ceramic skin is shiplapped and suspended over (not adhered to) the substructure, which is protected by a moisture barrier via a clip system. This allows air to flow through, preventing moisture buildup. Moreover, the overlapping configuration, along with gaskets behind the vertical joints and balanced air pressure, avert water from entering the cavity. “It’s a very forgiving system,” says NBK North America Director of Sales Bud Streff. “You’re never trapping moisture. Plus, there are no sealant joints. So maintenance is low.”

As for the terra-cotta itself, Streff claims it has excellent color retention. It is very hard, with a water absorption of 4 percent or less, and virtually graffiti-resistant. NBK North America, Marblehead, Mass. www.nbkusa.com

While NBK’s Terrart has been available in this country for seven years, the firm’s parent company, Hunter Douglas, has only recently launched its reputable QuadroClad Façades brand west of the Atlantic.

According to Boyd Goodson, manager of Hunter Douglas Contract Façades division, “Hunter Douglas has been selling rain-screen systems all over the world, except the United States and Canada. It’s been the European way of building for a long time, and we feel it’s the healthier building cavity to have.”

Similar to Terrart, QuadroClad consists of two main components, the panels and substructure, which differ in size and surface material. The large QuadroClad panels come in metal—a combination of lightweight aluminum skins fused to an expanded honeycomb aluminum core; glass, with such options as tinting and fritting; and an exterior-grade resin, specially developed by 3Form and Bayer Material Science. All install on the same substructure, allowing them to be integrated for maximum design flexibility. Hunter Douglas Contract Façades, Salt Lake City, Utah.
www.hunterdouglascontract.com/facades

Hunter Douglas Contract’s QuadroClad Façades are available in a variety of colors and finishes, as well as standard panel sizes as large as 60″ x 120″, plus custom. Materials include glass (1), metal (2), and resin (3). NBK Terrart systems (4) come in myriad sizes, shapes, and hues.

Long-term insurance

Named for its ability to endure extended exposure to the elements, Gold Bond e2XP Extended Exposure Sheathing has a coated fiberglass facer or mat and an enhanced mold- and moisture-resistant core. Designed to attach to the outside of sidewall and soffit framings as a water-resistant underlayment, it can be used in both wood- and metal-stud construction, or as a substrate for a number of air- and water-resistant barriers. National Gypsum Company, Charlotte, N.C. www.purplechoice.com

Up on the roof

Developed to prevent damaging moisture conditions, Delta-Roof underlayments include Delta-Maxx Titan (left), a vapor-permeable and watertight material enhanced with a spongelike bottom layer that absorbs a surfeit of condensation or water to safeguard wood roof rafters and sheathing. Delta-Vents (left) is a multilayered underlayment for insulated pitched roofs that is not only impermeable to wind and rain but permeable to water vapor from inside the house, thus managing its evaporation. Cosella-Dörken Products, Beamsville, Ontario. www.cosella-dorken.com

The Council House 2 (CH2) building

The collaboration between two Australian firms on Melbourne’s new Council House 2 shows off the design possibilities for building-integrated HVAC.

The city of Melbourne intended CH2–the Council House 2 building, which opened in August 2006–to exemplify the best of high-performance, sustainable design as a model to other Australian cities. The 10-story, 135,000-square-foot city office building, which occupies a dense block adjacent to an existing city building in the heart of Melbourne, incorporates a number of radical strategies, like sewer mining for nonpotable water and the use of phase-changing materials in lieu of conventional chillers for cooling water. But it’s the integration of these performance strategies–particularly in the building’s mechanical systems–with the architecture that makes CH2 stand out as a case study, even for less ambitious projects and designers.

Melbourne has long been considered a hotbed of architectural experimentation, a distinction that is waning, much like the diminished visual shock of the landmark Federation Square designed by Lab Architecture Studios that opened in 2002 [record, June 2003, page 109]. This penchant for wackiness is lately being replaced by a more overt expression of sustainable design, such as in Grimshaw Architects’ naturally ventilated Southern Cross rail station [record, May 2007, page 243] and, just as visibly, in CH2, designed as a collaboration between DesignInc’s Melbourne office and Sydney-based engineers Lincolne Scott. It’s as if the designers of the Southern Cross and CH2 projects sought to fuse the city’s past obsession with form-making to a more recent concern: climate change.

The Nature of Architecture

It’s probably safe to say that the average architect doesn’t think much about atmospheric pressure cells, let alone competing cells moving counterclockwise that can completely alter a city’s weather in the course of half an hour. Melbourne architects complain that, due to such atmospheric conditions, the city experiences all four seasons in one day. DesignInc’s Mick Pearce saw opportunities in these circumstances for the design of CH2. Pearce has long adhered to a philosophy of biomimicry, whereby artificial systems–like those in a building–are designed to “mimic” the processes of nature. The biologist Janine Benyus, who Pearce knows well, documented such things in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997). Pearce implemented the approach with his design for the 1996 Eastgate building in his native Harare, Zimbabwe–a building long-considered a landmark in sustainable design. That naturally ventilated office building relied on basement rock piles as thermal storage for free cooling in a building designed to mimic an African termite mound. “We’re beginning to see a whole new science of biological design,” says Pearce. “It’s much closer to the thinking that goes into a zoo than an office environment.” He connected with the CH2 project through his friend, Rob Adams, who, as Melbourne’s director of city design and urban environment, is largely credited with championing the high-performance design goals of the building. And thanks to Adams’s advocacy, CH2 is the Green Building Council of Australia’s first Six Star office building, which is roughly equivalent to LEED Platinum.

As the sun drifts west, the timber panels slowly close. The phase-change-material tanks in the basement are part of the comprehensive HVAC strategy for the CH2 building. The diagram developed by DesignInc  illustrates how fresh air supplied from the roof circulates from the south side and down through the building before it exhausts through ducts integrated into the north side of the structure. A roof deck provides an up-close view of wind turbines. - Photos © Russell Fortmeyer

With CH2, Pearce and his colleagues at DesignInc sought to implement similar strategies employed at Eastgate, but within the requirements of Australia’s version of a Class A office building. “Our climate analysis showed using thermal mass would work well, but Melbourne’s pressure cells cause an interval of about three days between hot and cold periods,” Pearce says, explaining that rock piles would have needed to be extremely large in order to store heat or cool long enough. “This three-day period is what we exploited with the design. The challenge was to go for serious thermal mass, as well as good thermal storage.” From the street, the three most public facades on CH2 actively convey this environmental message: hydraulically controlled recycled timber shutters on the west side automatically open and close depending on the sun’s position; balconies with planter boxes on the north shield windows; and the south is defined by fresh-air shafts integrated from the roof down, set behind five so-called “shower towers” that act as exposed cooling towers for the mechanical system.

DesignInc had devised a preliminary scheme that called for tearing down an existing building adjacent to CH2’s site, but they scrapped the idea based on the recommendation of the engineers at Lincolne Scott, who were brought in to help rethink the project. Over a three-week charrette in 2003, which included city representatives, architects, and engineers, among other interested parties, the team developed a schematic design incorporating many of the strategies eventually realized in CH2. Ché Wall, managing director of Lincolne Scott and its Advanced Environmental Concepts group, says that “after the charrette, we had 85 percent of the engineering design done.” But he adds that the more riskier items were isolated in the design so they could be replaced by conventional strategies in case they failed to perform as expected.

The original plan for CH2 called for a naturally ventilated building, but Wall says once it became clear that the building would need to meet the highest standards for occupant comfort when compared to commercial offices in the local market, they decided against natural ventilation because of noise and air-quality concerns in the busy central business district location. Instead, to maintain 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the building, the designers embraced a combination of passive and active HVAC systems. This meant the floor plate–with a width of nearly 69 feet–was not as narrow as originally proposed (a narrow floor plate assists in cross-ventilation), but it also meant the designers needed to take a more holistic view of how the HVAC systems would be integrated into the structure and architecture.

The Sum of All Parts

The success of that integration is felt every day. Consider an operational profile of the building on a warm day–Melbourne’s temperatures average 80 degrees F in January–as experienced by an occupant sitting at her desk in the open office plan of the sixth floor. The building’s concrete structure, poured with 30 percent fly ash, and its wavy, 7-inch-thick precast-concrete ceiling panels both cool down when windows automatically open from 1 to 6 a.m. to allow in night air. This lowers the office’s temperature 4 to 5 degrees and is directly responsible for a 14 percent energy savings for cooling. The ceiling is wavy for two reasons: first, to increase the surface area of thermal mass, and second, to create cavities used for exhaust air. Wall says they researched laser etching the concrete ceilings to double the surface area, but it proved too expensive (although, analysis showed it would have significantly improved the thermal properties). However, the ceilings are sandblasted, which does increase surface area.

Once the occupants arrive in the morning, air-handling units on the roof kick on and supply filtered, 100 percent outdoor air to cast-concrete ducts running down the building’s south elevation. These ducts tie into the 6-inch, pressurized cavity of the raised floor on each level. “That’s quite tight compared to most access floors,” Wall says, a decision he says was made in order to preserve market-rate floor-to-floor heights of nearly 10 feet. The air, which is treated for humidity depending on the wet-bulb temperature of the outdoor air, enters the space via floor-mounted, user-controlled “twist” diffusers at each workstation. This cool air heats up and rises through the space and, induced by the stack effect, is pulled into slots along the ceiling panels and into cavities where it exhausts into shafts designed into the north elevation. These shafts exhaust through rooftop-mounted wind turbines. Matthew Jessup, a principal at Lincolne Scott, says computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling–and, now, postoccupancy studies–illustrate that this combination of night flushing, thermal mass, and mechanically supplied fresh air has been more than enough to keep occupants cool the entire morning and, on milder days, well into the afternoon.

During warm afternoons, however, the building shifts from a passive mode (where outside air is simply moved around) to an active mode that depends on mechanical cooling. The most novel aspect of CH2, in this respect, is the use of radiant panels attached to the underside of the precast-concrete ceiling units. Mechanical engineers like to call this a “chilled beam” or, in some cases, a “chilled ceiling.” Long a solution embraced in Europe, chilled beams have yet to significantly catch on in the U.S. or Australia. For a conventional installation, the beams, which are basically metal tubes, are filled with chilled water supplied by a central chiller. “Using water as a medium for cooling is much more efficient than moving cold air around the building,” says Wall.

At CH2, the beams are supplied with chilled water from two sources: an innovative phase-change-material-based storage tank in the basement and a more conventional rooftop central plant consisting of a gas-fired cogeneration plant. Phase-change materials (PCMs) are natural compounds, generally salt-based liquids, that collect and then release energy. This typically occurs from a liquid to solid state and vice versa. PCMs are basically a more efficient version of ice storage, where engineers have taken advantage of cheap energy at night to make ice, which can then be melted during the day to provide chilled water to a building. And it’s much more efficient when compared to Pearce’s original concept of using rocks for thermal storage.

The chief benefit of PCMs is that they have a significantly higher freezing temperature (around 60 degrees F) than other substances, which means water returning in the loop system via evaporative cooling towers needs to be cooled less than usual. Although HVAC systems using PCMs have been installed in the U.S., they are relatively uncommon anywhere. At CH2, the 30,000 PCMs–they look like baseballs–divided among the basement’s three tanks can be used 80 percent of the year. Otherwise, the chilled beams rely on the rooftop chiller and cooling towers during peak loading conditions in summertime, which is typically the last 2 hours of the work day. The architects supplemented the cooling towers with so-called “shower towers,” which act like public art anchored to the south elevation. The towers are 40-foot-high, 5-foot-diameter vertical shafts of ETFE material with a shower head installed at the top and a glass catchment basin at the bottom. The towers provide chilled water to the mechanical system (cooling it nearly 10 degrees F), while also cooling the air for ground-floor retail spaces. Wall says the towers cool water much more efficiently than the CFD analysis originally indicated. At night they glow like five tubes along the column lines, while water cascades across the glass basins. Pearce likes the way the towers add to the building’s dynamism–the moving wood panels on the west side, the spinning rooftop turbines, and the sway of the plants on the north side–all sustainable signposts meant to engage the city’s residents.

The description of CH2’s mechanical system can make it sound easy to accomplish, but many nuanced considerations and details are required to make it work. For one, Wall says they had to install chilled beams at windows to cut the heat load from sunlight but were able to incorporate the beams into light shelves that could be used to control daylighting. A common concern regarding chilled beams and ceilings is condensation, a topic that raises Wall’s ire. “As an engineer, I find this topic hugely annoying because we only have to maintain indoor humidity between 40 and 60 percent,” he says. “In a museum, you need 45 to 50 percent humidity, so anyone saying you can’t do a chilled beam in this city is saying you can’t design a museum.” Since CH2 isn’t naturally ventilated, the facade was designed to be relatively airtight, helping to prevent condensation problems (the HVAC system also offsets high humidity when the windows open for night purging). All of this is monitored with the building management system through 2,500 probes and control points located throughout the structure. So far, the mechanical system hasn’t had major problems.

By far, the most challenging aspect of the building’s systems has been the unusual sewer-mining plant in the basement. This system draws nearly 12,000 gallons of raw sewage per day from the city’s drains, filters out the physical waste, and then treats the water through a series of high-tech components. Coupled with a rainwater collection system, the mining plant supplies all of CH2’s nonpotable water requirements, including the HVAC system. Eventually, it’s hoped that the plant will feed nonpotable water back to the city for fountains and irrigation, as the system is designed to handle 26,000 gallons per day. “This system uses one-third the energy of a desalinization plant,” Pearce says, in sly reference to political plans afoot for such a plant in the Melbourne area, a region long-plagued by drought.

From Energy to Occupancy

The designers and the client for CH2 all stress that while energy and water savings are worthy goals, the comfort of the occupants is the ultimate reason for the environmental strategies deployed in the building. Pearce says a hallmark of the Australian attitude toward sustainable design in offices is equity–thus, an occupant on the top floor would have a similar environmental quality as one on a lower floor. At CH2, windows narrow toward the upper floors and widen toward the lower, so intense daylight at the higher offices will appear similar to lower floors. To ensure equity, DesignInc and the city are working with the London-based postoccupancy expert Adrian Leaman, with the Usable Buildings Trust, on statistically gauging occupant satisfaction with the work environment in the next several years.

John Williams, a director in DesignInc’s Melbourne office, says the city has invested so much into CH2 in hopes that it could influence the development of subsequent buildings, including housing, that involves city government. The city projected a 4.9 percent increase in effectiveness for the staff of 540 employed in the building, which translates into nearly $1 million in annual savings. Seeing those goals through was always Pearce’s aim. He says he “likes to come to a place, build a building, and stay there afterward to make sure it works.” He adds, “That’s the only way you can find out about your own profession.”

By Russell Fortmeyer (Architectural Record)

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