Article 2: The Getty

According to Wikipedia :
The Getty Center, designed by architect Richard Meier, is the $300 million flagship museum of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the largest arts endowment in history (at over $3 billion).[1] It has a seven-story deep underground parking garage with over 1,200 parking spaces. It is located on a hill in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California overlooking Interstate 405 and is open to the public for free (although there is a charge for parking). The Getty Center is high enough that on a clear day, it is possible to see the snow at Big Bear as well as the Pacific Ocean and the entire Los Angeles basin. Much of the buildings and grounds are made of travertine. Other parts are made of white or beige enamel plates. The design is based upon a 30 inch grid with all wall and floor elements composed of 30 inch squares or some multiple of it. (The smallest elements are 7.5 inch floor tiles.)

USGS satellite image of the Getty Center.
The galleries are housed in four separate two story towers which sit on a main three-story building which is closed to the public. Central to the design is a main entry hall, with a circular design which mediates the 22 degree angle between the grid of the gallery buildings and the grid of the administrative buildings to the North.
The north axis is anchored by a circular grass area which serves as a heliport in case of emergencies, and the south axis is anchored by a cactus garden.
A grand central staircase in the entry hall lures visitors to the second floor galleries which display paintings using natural light from computer-controlled skylights. The second floors of the four gallery towers are connected by glass enclosed bridges offering views of the hillsides and of the central plaza. Numerous outdoor terraces and balconies allow visitors to stop and appreciate the views.
The first floor galleries house light-sensitive art, such as furniture or photographs. The sequence of these gallaries are interrupted by various lobbies which invite visitors to return to the central plaza.
Throughout the design, numerous fountains provide white noise as a background.
The initial design has remained in tact, except that benches and fences have been installed around the plaza fountains to discourage visitors from wading in the pools and fences close off the entry ramp to discourage skate boarders. An automated, three-car tram takes passengers to and from the museum.

Central Garden

The central garden in November.
The 134,000-square-foot Central Garden at the Getty Center is the work of artist Robert Irwin. The design of the Central Garden re-establishes the natural ravine between the Museum and the Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities with a tree-lined walkway. The walkway traverses a stream planted on each side with a variety of grasses and gradually descends to a plaza where bougainvillea arbors provide scale. The stream continues through the plaza and ends in a cascade of water over a stone waterfall into a pool in which a maze of azaleas floats. Around the pool is a series of specialty gardens, each with a variety of plant material.
The process of creating the Central Garden began for Irwin in 1992, when he started working with Harold M. Williams and Stephen D. Rountree of the J. Paul Getty Trust in consultation with Richard Meier. Irwin also worked closely with Richard Naranjo, the Getty’s manager of grounds and gardens, and the landscape architecture firm of Spurlock Poirier, in finalizing all facets of the garden.

Current Exhbitions:
The Getty Centre in LA: Icons from Sinai
The Getty Villa in Malibu: Stories in Stone: Conserving Mosaics of Roman Africa, Masterpieces from the National Museums of Tunisia
Also on View: http://www.getty.edu/visit/exhibitions/

Article 1: Thom Mayne's DRHS- Betsky, Aaron

DIAMOND RANCH HIGH SCHOOL
PA 1997 AWARD
DIAMOND BAR, CALIFORNIA MORPHOSIS WITH THOMAS BLUROCK ARCHITECTS
Architecture; Nov2000, Vol. 89 Issue 11, p132, 14p, 7c, Betsky, Aaron.

A folded surface undulates across the site in a geometric abstraction of existing contour lines--this creased plane became the building's roofs.

The Diamond Ranch High School unfolds out of the landscape in waves of fractured form to become a civic structure of astonishing beauty. Confronted with the pragmatic challenges of moving more than a million cubic feet of dirt around a steep site in suburban Los Angeles, a budget of $145 a square foot, and a society in which secondary education often takes place in prisonlike bunkers, architect Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis has excavated a significant civic structure with the capacity to edify, educate, and delight.

Diamond Ranch is a stretch of hills that Californians euphemistically call "golden" (i.e., nearly barren, except for a few lonely oak trees). While the rest of the area is fast succumbing to sprawl, the Diamond Ranch High School's especially precipitous, 72-acre site was considered unbuildable because its unstable soils were likely to slide into the road-cut of a highway. The Pomona School District capitalized on the site's supposed uselessness, acquiring the land for a dollar from a nearby municipality's redevelopment agency and then obtaining $5 million from the state to stabilize the hillside. In negotiations with the state and environmental pressure groups such as the Sierra Club, the school district agreed that no soil would be removed from or added to the site.

"It all worked out, because in a high school you have to start with the playing fields anyway," comments Mayne, referring to the vast amounts of space most high schools devote to sports. Working with Thom Blurock of Blurock Partnership (a California-based firm with a specialty in schools) and Olveri Engineering, Mayne won a limited design-build competition that the school district staged in 1994. He proposed to tame the 380-foot drop across the site with three terraces: an upper playing field, the school, and a lower playing field. Further grading provided access and parking for 770 cars to the south of the main building site.

Mayne did not treat the site work as separate from the design of structures, but rather saw the whole task as a refolding of the land into a building. "I am interested not in making isolated objects, but in how plates can become forms," he explains. Working closely with project architect John Enwright, Mayne developed the concept of a folded surface that undulates across the site in a geometric abstraction of existing contour lines--this creased plane became the school's roof. Because of the way Mayne and Enwright manipulated them, the forms make visible the site's inherent topography, while at the same time appearing to be monumental and abstracted versions of the waves of pitched roofs covering the suburban homes below.

A particular program governed the making of spaces within this derived landscape. Superintendent of the Pomona school district Patrick Leier was concerned from the beginning with "how we keep students connected in such a large school; how we keep things smaller; how we blend with the site." He and his team proposed breaking the 2,000-student school down into small clusters with no more than 300 students in each, and asked Mayne to think of the facility more as a campus in the collegiate sense.

Mayne responded by cutting through his plates to create three separate wings for the ninth and tenth grades. These thin bar-buildings cantilever out over the slope and open up to playing fields on the north. On the south side of the building, he organized classrooms for the remaining two grades around small, internal courtyards. Teachers also have offices associated with each cluster. While the southern classroom buildings exhibit all the assertive exuberance of modernist construction, the back wing creates intimate and introspective spaces that mine the hill for small oases of academic gathering.

An internal street winds its way between the row of classroom wings on the north and through the class clusters on the south. The street twists between the roof's folds and the functional spaces, tying the volumes and the roof plane together into a coherent assembly. It is a canyon, but also a village street with activities. Periodically, the roof plunges down to meet buildings placed at slightly different angles, in a choreography of vertical measure and horizontal flow. Because of the separation between the wings to the north, the views always make students and faculty aware of the world outside, while the density of forms to the south roots the communal gathering space in the site.

The school's organization is thus rather conventional. The northern and southern classroom wings open on a central spine between the eastern and western wings. At the east end of this central corridor are the main entrance and gathering spaces: a library and administration building, a gymnasium, a cafeteria, and a multifunction room. Here the steel trusses holding up the roof are visible both inside and out, and the stucco-clad walls and glass planes rise up to announce the school's identity. These large spaces are what the public sees first and what students can use to orient themselves as they return periodically to them for communal activities. They introduce the school and give it an identity like a pedimented and columned entry in your standard Central High. The facilities can also be used by the community.

Mayne has in many ways done no more than find the central idea of a conventionally organized school-with its long, double-loaded corridor with classrooms on either side and a controlling facade of administrative space-buried within the logic of the school's program. Rather than cladding this shape, he has treated the corridor like a cut in the ground, excavated one arm of classrooms and cantilevered the other, and then unfolded the formal front using his system of site analysis.

"At this stage in my career I am more involved in how you set up a strict system, and then open it up," Mayne claims. "I am concerned with how you create both difference and coherence out of the manipulation of a set of conditions, rather than adding them on to a simple shape."

To Mayne, this is not just an abstract working method. With two sons in high school, he understands such institutions as places where students learn about a tense cultural and political system that somehow remains coherent, and he wants his buildings to be part of that education: "By cutting into the lines we set up, which were based on the landscape, we initiated accidents and exploited them," he explains. "The result is heterogeneity and even conflict within something that still hangs together."

Superintendent Leier, who has gone on to expand on the "college campus" model in several other schools in Pomona, one of which was previously a shopping mall, agrees that the school should be "a place where students learn just from looking around themselves. It is really a model community," he says. What at first appears to be a confluence of tortured planes rising up out of a barren and banal landscape finally resolves itself into a model for civic architecture. Thanks to Mayne's structural expression, response to site and program, and a few willful gestures, the school offers intricacy, complexity, and a sense of discovery appropriate to the act of learning.
DIAMOND RANCH HIGH SCHOOL, DIAMOND BAR, CALIFORNIA

CLIENT: Pomona Unified School District, Diamond Bar, California-Patrick Leier (superintendent) ARCHITECT: Morphosis, Santa Monica, California-Thom Mayne (principal); John Enright (project architect); Cameron Crockett, David Grant, Fabian Kremkus, Janice Shimizu, Patrick J. Tighe (project team); Sarah Allan, Kaspar Baumeister, Jay Behr, John Bencher, Mark Briggs, Frank Brodbeck, Takashi Ehira, Magdalena Glen, Ivar Gudmunson, George Hernandez, Martin Krammer, Ming Lee, Francisco Mouzo, Christopher Payne, Kinga Racon, Robyn Sambo, Andreas Schaller, Bennet Shen, Mark Sich, Craig Shimahara, Tadao Shimizu, Steve Slaughter, Brandon Welling, Eui-Sung Yi (project assistants)

ASSOCIATE ARCHITECT: Thomas Blurock Architects--Thom Blurock (principal); Tom Moore (project architect); Mark Briggs, Kevin Fleming, Nadar Glassemlou, Chris Samuelian, Kristina Steeves, Jose Valentin, Wendell Vaughn, Lis Zuloaga (project team); Gregory Aston, Colleen Bathgate, Mike Blozek, Vince Coffeen, Karen MacIntyre, Kathy Sun, Brady Titus, Robert Trucios LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: Allen Don Fong ENGINEERS: Ove Arup & Partners (structural); Andreasen Engineering (civil) GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Bernards Brothers COST: Withheld at client's request

(unfortunately these pictures did not come with the article so I have attached some other photos of the same subjects)

PHOTO (COLOR): Evoking the piazza of a Tuscan hill town, the courtyard at the heart of Diamond Ranch High School overlooks the suburbs of Los Angeles.

PHOTO (COLOR): ARRIVAL The school's principal entrance sits at the corner of a two-sided forecourt (above). Students proceed from the parking lot, past a gymnasium, cafeteria and multifunction room (left, at left) to a staircase alongside a library and administration block (at right).

PHOTO (COLOR): THRESHOLD A small courtyard (facing page, bottom) at the head of the entrance stair terminates a central, external corridor (or "street") that winds through the school. Ramps connect two levels of cantilevered classroom wings on the north side of the corridor as seen looking toward the landscape (facing page, to right) and backward toward the school (facing page, top left).

PHOTO (COLOR): MOVEMENT Mayne formed the school's central corridor with tilted, corrugated-steel walls to create an abstraction of a natural ravine or of the false storefronts of an American main street (facing page, top left). Breaks in the walls provide views of the surrounding landscape and suggest gathering places for student's (facing page, top right and bottom).

PHOTO (COLOR): PERMEABILITY A monumental angled roof and glazed farade denote the school's principal gathering space, the multipurpose gymnasium (left). A large opening in the wall of the band room (top) allows it to double as an impromptu stage. Daylight from tree-planted courtyards (above) illuminates 11th- and 12th- grade classrooms.

PHOTO (COLOR): EVENT Exposed steel structure and artfully controlled lighting provide simple animation in the principal gathering spaces--the gymnasium (facing page, top) and library (facing page, bottom left)--as well as in classrooms (facing pages, bottom right).

PHOTO (COLOR): SITE WORK Three classroom wings cantilever over the playing fields (facing page, at right). Staircases (top) cut into the hillside and connect the school to the playing fields A ramp (above winds down from the library and administration block.

you can see plans at: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/morphosis/diamond/index.htm

final product photos

post-academic symposium crit

Just as the light started to beam down onto the screen/rail for the afternoon, my crit took lieu. What a nice coincidence.

The discussion ideas that were particularly interesting focused on:

-What if the joining detail happened in the centre of the tires rather than on their rims? If so, could more of the recycled bike be used by using the essential triangular frame of it?

-The recurring question of when does this cease to be a railing? It is in fact in so many ways a screen. (and as a screen, it could be suspended)

-Could the joint which sometimes refused to really hold the tires flatly in two rows be embraced and its want to push in and out embellished?

-In alignment with Nancy Rubins, does she ever consult with structural engineers of structural analysts or does she learn by process.

symposium product continued

When my support footings-- the precarious little legs I wanted to support the whole structure gave out I had to cut them off and build more durable legs. I ended up taking solid cylinder steel and threading it 2 inches deep myself to thread in the 1/2 inch threaded rod (just under the 3/5 inch hollow tubing at the foot of each footing)

I assembled and disassembled the railing probably close to 4 or 5 times and was never able to put it back together in the same way twice-- even when I lay the individual detail pieces on paper towel right next to their joint when I painted them. This is both advantageous and disadvantageous-- it speaks about the capacity of metal objects to be easily constructed with the "kit of parts" mentality. The difficulties in reassembling it every time really made me sympathize with Nancy Rubins in that building an object that hovers is really tricky in the matter of seeing where the centre of gravity will be. This could be mathematically calculated with great efforts with varying rim sizes and diameters but I am certain she also uses trial and effort technique in building her sculptures like I did (hence why three of more of her earlier built works have reportedly fallen down) I even managed at one point to have 9 wheels all hovering on the ONE footing with no other contact with ground. The only reason I disassembled and added more ground support is that I am a realistic and know that it would not withstand three days worth of symposium curious touching.

Also illustrated is the testing of painting all the rims black. I liked the sillouette that it created but opted to polish all the rims instead and paint the detail in a chocolate matte brown paint to draw attention back to it. It is actually quite beautiful to reveal the mix of aluminum and steel frames and how the rust of where the washers hold the sprockets on the rim gather rust that is not easily sanded down. The play of light during sunset in the school is remarkable now that they are all shined up too.

I also lay the railing down yesterday-- pictures to be in the next update.

symposium

Of course fellow Luce Studio colleagues will be fully aware of my work thus far but I wished to update anybody outside of the Studio of the progression of my work since my last entry.

For starters-- these three panels make up the final panel which explains a short history of how the project was inspired through- Nancy Rubins, Ferrous Metals and the element of "railing".

Hmmm...

I am not sure this if this how I envision the railing or not. I like how it feels to the hand and the extra girth to the hand. I also think I will be able to make a smoothe connection piece to tie the rims into one continuous railing-- but it visually reads as a bike tire. Whether I like this contradiction or not is what I am considering now--- any thoughts?

work in progress

Sometimes we try things that should work better in principal (or look better in principal) and realize that what we had figured out intuitively worked best. This has been my case over the last two days where I tried a great number of approaches to adapt the "lateral detail" I made last Friday in the shop.

Last week I took two steel angles which fit two tire rims and plug welded them together. I didn't worry about polishing them but was satisfied in how they worked. This weekend/ two days in the shop, I considered a number of recommendations to make the detail better-- including how one angle could meet a flat bar in order to reduce the whole detail to the same thickness of metal AND taking away the plug weld as well as an intricate folding of flat metal in L-form into the final piece.

My final verdict is that what I had initially is best-- just taken to a metal grinder. If I only had to make one and then a factory made all the rest I could continue on-- but I have to make many of them and return my focus back to the railing. So... I am determining that after 3 jigs, much consultation with Mark (metal shop consultant) and trips to Home Depot to get specialty rounded angle that the initial detail I had was best.

As such, I am returning to what I had and adjoining all the rims tonight and into tomorrow morning. I want to degrease the tires and then paint them black since I find the sculptural effect most powerful as a silouette (versus when my camera used the flash to capture the image) and I sanded down one of the red bike fork legs today which should draw attention back up.

In terms of railing- I acquired 1.5 diamter clear threaded tubing yesterday-- but I am beginning to see some promise if I can use foamy pipe insulation which also comes with V-pieces and would work well massaged over joints where rims meet. Any ideas?

Jen's RX

Kelly,



Just amazing.

The spokes are so delicate and imply movement even though they are stationary.

As for the handrail material, I think it should be something that is unexpected and yet very ‘touchable’.

Could you form a gel that has movement and play or ….is it a fabric; like felt.

I see the rail as the sensual moment when the curiosity of approaching the piece is satiated by surprise.



The connectors should be either very refined or coloured or maybe patina.

Clearly ‘worked’ as opposed to the roughness of the spokes.



I will check on you tomorrow.



Jen

Presenting the prototype detail...

Presented in these images is the essential detail that will bridge the tire rims laterally to one another. It is shown here in its crudest form (a race to finish enough of them before shop closed today) but it demonstrates the principal I am thinking about. The entire railing structure will be made of this and another simpler-still detail that bridges tires together with depth-- more than likely, a steel tube that like a Christmas tree holder, pegs into one bolt through to keep it taught-- if not an entire pin running through all the wheels at once.

It is these two details that I am considering this weekend and how I can massage them into something more elegant. The first given is to sandblast them to show their metallic quality and wax them... but I like Sheryl's recommendation to try and fold a piece of flat metal in L form into the shape (at least I will try it on Monday). The better their craft and design, the more it will contrast against the well-worn bike rims.

The other thing to consider all this weekend design wise is the railing. In the photo here I am holding tire tubing. It would be contradictory again to make the part of the bike that meets the road and is the dirtiest part into a railing of a sensual nature to the hand that weaves in and around various bike rims. Other materials might lend themselves well too though...

This weekend for me is now all about the detailing of these two connection details (the lateral and the depth-giving one) and what the railing will be (how it will attach to the rims). On Monday, it will be pure work for five shop days and a matter of assembling the whole thing on the weekend.

What I am content in is that it should work-- I will know by the end of this weekend.

Any ideas? How should this railing end at intersecting rims, softly or abruptly? Arguably it could be either. Could it be tire? Or leather? Or something else? Could it be sewn onto the rim? Hmmm....

Explorations with Bike Wheels

So...we have bike wheels. Plenty of them. Sooooo many of them I couldn't possibly have lugged them on the bus like I was going to try and do... (thankfully I have a wonderfully supportive and enthusiastic boyfriend... with time to help me, a car... and that ever so useful thing called a license.) This semester is starting to have a theme of "if only you had a drivers license" what with the car available to me in San Diego and now in the acquisition of many metals)

Since the acquisition Wednesday, I cut through a few of them to see how I might be able to have one tire rim lead into another one, like an ever looping roller coaster. Cutting these rims is quite difficult in itself, not to mention opening the cut rim up, and not actually all too valuable for my purposes but I thought I would make certain.

I started thinking last night about how to put the whole upper rim structure together to determine its centre of gravity. I hung it up as one option-- and even considered Rubins technique of laying it on the ground and then weaving through the whole structure of wheels and then pulling them taught once a long weave is complete. In truth, I disliked this possibility because I wish to keep all the tires facing the same direction, and tying it taught would result in a hodgepodge of angles. I think the magic of the recycled rim is enough for the Rubins effect-- and now I can be more architectural in how I put this "sculpture" together in an architecturally meaningful way. I am still thrilled with my last sketch-- especially if the rims on the ends can just kind of fade off as they start to.