Lars Müller Publishers 2010/2011 Architecture Design Photography ...

guy nordenson
PATTErnS AnD STruCTurE
Selected writings
Design: Integral Lars Müller
16.5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in, 464 pages
218 illustrations, softcover
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-219-4, English
EUR 40.– GBP 40.– USD / CAD 60.–
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This rich collection of writings and criticisms by
structural engineer and Princeton University
professor Guy Nordenson, brings together previously
published essays on structural engineering,
architecture, design, and seismic research from
1972 to 2008. Decade by decade, Nordenson’s
essays provide the unique viewpoint of the
struc tural engineer and design collaborator, adding
context that relates not only to the history of
architecture and engineering, but locates these
fields in a larger network of cultural relevance.
Nordenson’s writings investigate a wide range of
genres: from technical reports on seismicity,
methods and technologies in structural engineering,
architectural criticisms, the importance of
collaboration in design, to the metaphor of tall
buildings, design democracy at Ground Zero, and
engineering history and theory.
“ It is rare to see engineers engaging in a sustained
effort to write about their work and its significance.
Those with a distinctive style are even less common.
nordenson possesses the capacity to convey
more than a technical expertise: a vision of what
matters today and how engineering can engage it. ”
Antoine Picon
With Great Joy and Expectations
In his 1968 autobiography Isamu Noguchi quoted Marcel Duchamp’s advice to him:
“ Don’t do anything that pleases you — only do that which you dislike and cannot
help but do. This is the way to find yourself. But it is also true that we cannot ever
be more than we are.” This turns against the grain of desire, but does not deny
desire or passion. It stills and sublimates it.
Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi met at Romany Marie’s tavern, for which
we are told Bucky designed the décor. Fuller would often stand on a table
and declaim his Homeric account of four-dimensional science and art, of triangles
and tetrahedra and the “ new consciously disciplined relationship of man to
his physical universe.” He enchanted an audience that included Noguchi, Mark
Tobey, Willem de Kooning, The Museum of Modern Art’s Dorothy Miller, the paleontologist
Walter Granger, and even Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, the Arctic explorer, with
epics that were part mathematics, part physics and chemistry, and part neo-Buddhist
mysticism avant-la-lettre, “ what the scientist-artist speaks of as intuition is the
intellect-initiated and synergetically precessional event evolution into conscious
objective anticipatory evolutionary conceptual formulation, realized in thought
described words, mathematical relationship rotation, graphical schematics, threedimensional
static and four-dimensional kinetic modelling.”
In 197 6 I worked as an intern in Noguchi’s Long Island City studio for Fuller and
Shoji Sadao, making tensegrity models with Rob Grip, one of Bucky’s assistants, for
that fall’s inaugural exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, titled Man Transforms.
Fuller stopped by one day and took me aside for tête-à-tête in his and Sadao’s
drafting office. He sat perched on a table; I took a chair, he turned off his hearing aid
and started off. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what he spoke of, but I do remember
I said nothing, figuring he could not or did not want to hear. Twenty-five years later
I learned from his daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder that he would turn off his hearing aid
at the start of a conversation so that he would not be distracted by ambient noises
and could concentrate, reading lips. I had completely misunderstood.
2. Boiler wall stiffness is neglected and the boiler element masses are
apportioned to each platform or key level on a tributary basis.
3. Typical load paths for boiler inertial loads are:
– element
– boiler wall ( consisting of vertical tubes )
– horizontal buckstay
– bumper
– main structure — columns or horizontal key level truss
– vertical bracing
Considerable attention is given to the design of the boiler wall to bumper
portion of the path, including any stress concentrations in the boiler wall.
4. Vertical bracing is designed by conventional means. A critical factor
is usually the client-specified limit on uplift forces at the column bases.
Current practice has been to mitigate this by locating the bracing between
columns supporting the “ top steel ” plate girders, mobilizing their
large reactions. The necessity for numerous ducts and other penetrations
across these “ inner ” bents, however, sometimes results in awkward configurations.
A review of this practice has identified several drawbacks which this
study has sought to correct:
– The boiler stiffness is in fact large and will influence the dynamic response
of the overall system. This has been recognized in the 1988 Uniform
Building Code (1988 UBC ) provisions for nonbuilding structures, wherein
it is mandated that elements weighing over 25 percent of the total system
weight must be properly represented in the analytical model.
– The horizontal diaphragm structure of two trusses alongside the boiler
cannot be considered rigid overall.
– The interference of ducts and other penetration with the bracing at the
“ inner ” bents is costly and preferably to be avoided.
Literature Review
An exhaustive review of existing literature on both the analysis and actual
earthquake response of SBSs has been done. Selected references are
provided herein. The literature obtained covers a range of topics including
the behavior of boilers in real earthquakes, vibration testing of fullsize
and scale model structures, and dynamic modelling of the boiler and
support structure.
Damage observed in real earthquakes includes buckling of crossbracing,
permanent deformations of the bumpers, damage caused by piping
Tall Building as Metaphor
“ The ‘ tall buildings, ’ which have . . . usurped a glory that affects you as rather
surprised, . . . the multitudinous sky-scrapers standing up to the view, from the
water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted, and stuck in as
in the dark, anywhere and anyhow, have at least the felicity . . . of taking the sun
and the shade in the manner of towers of marble. They are not all of marble,
I believe, by any means, even if some may be, but they are impudently new and
still more impudently ‘ novel ’ — this in common with so many other terrible things
in America — and they are triumphant payers of dividends; all of which, with flash
of innumerable windows and flicker of subordinate gilt attributions, is like the
flare, . . . of the lamps of some general permanent ‘ celebration.’ ”
After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 , 2001,
it was natural to wonder why the World Trade Center Towers and not the Statue
of Liberty had been the target in New York, why Al Qaeda had chosen a symbol
of commerce over a symbol of freedom. Whatever the answer, there is little doubt
that if it had been attacked, the statue would have been rebuilt ( as was the
Pentagon ) and not replaced ( as the World Trade Center will be ). What is not as
clear is how it would have been rebuilt, and what that would have meant.
Tall buildings, if only by being tall, look to stand out in a crowd. In time they may
become the crowd, but it is always their intention to speak up, to declare, indeed,
even to persuade us of their novelty, their sumptuousness, their responsibility
to social needs and ideals, their outright beauty, and their abstraction. The World
Trade Center Towers were built to revitalize downtown Manhattan and promote
globalization. Like Rockefeller Center, they expressed a unique moment of civic
will. And they became exponents of global commerce in the marketplace of
New York City. After their destruction, the same expression of civic will did not
reemerge; what did emerge was more of our own time.
hAMSun – hOLL – hAMArøy
Literature, Architecture, Landscape
Edited by Erik fenstad Langdalen, Aaslaug Vaa,
nina frang høyum, and Lars Müller
With photographs by Iwan Baan
Design: Integral Lars Müller
16.5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in, 240 pages
186 illustrations, hardcover
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-214-9, English
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-215-6, Norwegian
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-213-2, German
EUR 40.– GBP 40.– USD / CAD 60.–
Steven Holl has set up a documentation
centre for the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun
(1859 –1952) on Hamarøy, in northern Norway.
This unconventional building reflects the author’s
no less unusual personality.
The centre in the barren landscape of Hamarøy,
where Hamsun lived and worked, the silence and
solitude, challenge visitors to involve themselves
with him and his work.
The book records the connection between
Hamsun, the architecture and the landscape.
Photographer Iwan Baan relates the landscape
and the building to each other. Historical
documents illustrate Hamsun’s contradictory
life and influential work, et al. the novel Hunger
(1890), with which Hamsun achieved his fame.
In 1920 the poet was awarded with the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
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