With animation software used by Hollywood filmmakers, Chicago architect Doug Garofalo designed a home addition that bends and curves to mimic the electric racetracks his client collects.
Like designers in the auto industry, which added amenities, increased performance and improved design while keeping costs affordable, architects are creating buildings that are more physically, aesthetically–and financially–responsive to human needs.
But some architects are pushing beyond the realm of conventional architectural software and looking to other industries to realize their design visions.
Garofalo uses Maya, a software program to create animation, to build futuristic museum installations, wavelike retail spaces and buildings with extreme curvilinear forms.
California’s Frank Gehry, architect of Chicago’s Millennium Park band shell, is famous for taking an aerospace industry design program and using it to help create the curvilinear forms of such notable projects as the Guggenhiem Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle.
Chicago will witness a world-class result of computer-aided design with the creation of the Millennium Park band shell designed by Gehry’s Santa Monica, Calif., office. The band shell’s curving stainless steel panels and supporting steel structure will be fabricated based on electronic drawings that come directly from the architect and his associated structural engineer, Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Through small projects like retail interiors and furniture-making, architects are familiar with the use of computer-aided design files to control fabrication and manufacturing. But they are increasingly taking greater control of the building process with electronic drawings that control construction.
For a home addition Garofalo is working on in Wisconsin, floor-to-ceiling curved beams are built from precisely cut and laminated structural plywood. The beams will attach to the house on many sides, sculpting it into a form in tune with the surrounding rolling landscape the client admires.
“At 1,000 square feet, [the house] is a relatively small project, so the question was how to create the effect within a reasonable budget,” said Garofalo, acting director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture.
“Most general contractors would raise their eye if they saw a design like this. Also, they usually don’t have the computer-controlled equipment that would make a project like this affordable,” he said. “So we found a cabinetry fabricator who was excited to take on the project.”
Garofalo supplied J.C. Pendergast Inc. of Racine, Wis., with electronic drawings of the curved trusses.
“We converted the shapes into entities that our software could understand and then used a nesting program that took the more than 600 individual entities and nested them on 5-by-8-foot plywood stock,” said John Stankey, vice president of Pendergast.
The cut pieces were marked and connected by pressure lamination to create the 31 trusses needed for the addition.
“These processes are still relatively rare and can be a bit more expensive initially,” Garofalo said. “But construction is a very complicated industry, and any way you can manage a project effectively, eliminate places where things can go wrong, and have less-adversarial relationships, you get a better product.”
Software programs are at the heart of these advancements.
Linda Searl, president of Chicago’s Searl and Associates, wants Presentation Studios International, a Chicago company that makes architectural models, to create exterior ornamental gratings for a residential high-rise she is designing at 55 E. Erie St. PSI uses computer-aided design files to control a milling machine to cut building models out of plastic. But its precision cutter also can shape metal, and PSI is evaluating how to help build pieces of the actual building.
Gehry is the leader in the movement toward maximizing computer-aided design and manufacturing in architecture. In the 1990s, his firm developed architectural applications for an advanced design program named CATIA, developed by the French aerospace industry. CATIA was used by Gehry’s team to design and fabricate the complex shapes of his famous buildings.
Like these projects, Chicago’s band shell was originally designed as a small-scale paper model. The paper model was placed on the bed of a 6-foot-tall FaroArm digitizer, which was created by the medical industry to map the spine. The digitized reading of the model was converted into computer drawings that could be analyzed and manipulated to determine the best sizing of panels and placement of structural members.
While not inexpensive at an estimated $50 million, the band shell would be unaffordable without the use of computer-modeling technology, said John Zils, associate partner in the structural engineering group at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
“The shapes are so complicated that it would be overly time-consuming to generate this on paper,” Zils said.
Sharing the digital 3-D model of the band shell among the building team members eliminates the need to re-create engineering or shop drawings, which reduces the chance for errors and increases the opportunity to perfect designs.
Panel fabricator A. Zahner Co. of Kansas City, Mo., which will manufacture the structural panels for the band shell, has worked with Gehry on many projects. Roger Reed, architectural coordinator for Zahner, said the CATIA program makes creating the panels much easier.
“We don’t have to design every single panel. We can design master panels for certain conditions, and the program will resize them and locate them to accommodate the position of the structural members of the building,” he said.
Reed said more architects are exploring this new approach.
“Previously architects were more concerned with the end result,” he said. “Now they are more interested than ever on how it is being put together. They are more interested in pushing design further.”
Computer-aided manufacturing also allows architects to consider new roles in the construction process. “In the Renaissance, the architect was considered a master builder,” said Garofalo. “Now there is less physical contact with those who make the building. But, with the development of computer-guided tools and software, we are able to work with the fabricators and manufacturers in a way we haven’t in a long time.”
Garofalo said that with this type of construction, architects can increase their role in the building process by taking on additional management responsibilities and have an expanded participation in the field.
He is even planning to obtain a computer-controlled milling machine for his own business. While initially intending to use the machine for furniture and interior fixtures, he is not averse to other possibilities.
“We know how to work the equipment, so why shouldn’t we build the trusses?”
