core.form-ula

Light Organizations
Ceiling Systems and Office Ecologies

ARCH 400.13: VELUX Sponsored Studio, Fall 2008, M Th 2–6, HHC 330-C
Professor: Michael Kubo
Teaching Assistant: Erin Bartling
Digital Expert: Kyle Steinfeld

Introduction
The studio will explore the relation between two types of horizontal organization: the floor plan and the ceiling pattern.The corporate office landscape will provide a fertile testing ground for this investigation. Ceiling and plan organizations have been deeply intertwined in the performance (social, economic, and environmental) of horizontal office spaces, typically aligning to coordinate the distributions of lighting, ventilation, structure, furniture and equipment, circulation, services and conditioning—the total organization of the work environment and its efficiencies.

Horizontal Systems: From Ceiling to Plan
Historically, the organization of corporate spaces has relied on the techniques of the section—especially the technologies of the artificial ceiling—to allow the extensive horizontal freedom of the plan. The emergence of the open plan—the dominant typology of corporate space from the postwar to the present day—was dependent on the evolution of building services and artificial conditioning technologies, and their compression into the two dominant horizontal surfaces of the building: the suspended ceiling and the raised floor. The evacuation of these functions— lighting and ventilation to the ceiling above, electronics and data to the floor below—allowed the office to be divided into uniform modules of pure, extensive horizontal space. These have either been stacked vertically to form towers (attached to the vertical shaft of another artificial technology, the elevator core), or aggregated horizontally to form suburban office-scapes, occasionally punctured by courtyards to introduce natural light and preserve a visual connection to the outdoors within the center of these otherwise extensive types. The even distribution of services and environmental qualities to all parts of the office, equally and without hierarchy, emphasized the supposed uniformity and equality of all workers (but also their conformity) in the social ecology of the office.

Today, new “work modes” and transformations in the definition of contemporary workspace require us to rethink the neutral and homogeneous distribution of elements in corporate spaces. In contemporary workspaces, new, flexible models of “alternative officing” designed to unlock new creativities and productivities—benching, hoteling, flex zones, chillout spaces, mobile lounges—place a new emphasis on differentiation and the definition of varied, locally speciic characters that can modulate our experience of work: a complex variation of environments that constitutes a social ecology rather than a homogeneous space of labor. In this transition to more varied spaces, the traditional definition of the uniform ceiling, providing the same qualities everywhere, has become inadequate to produce these differentiations.

Moreover, the technologies of the artificial ceiling have become inadequate to the new environmental needs of office buildings. Sustainability issues that preclude the dependence on artificial lighting and ventilation, together with the redefinition of office ecologies away from uniformity towards forms of hierarchy and differentiation, question the suspended ceiling, based on artificial conditioning, as an architectural instrument. Given the historical dependence of office types on the technologies of the ceiling, these issues suggest the need for a fundamental transformation of the environmental, spatial, and performative efficiencies of these types.

Skylighting Systems: From Modularity to Complex Repetition

Introducing skylighting into the office will be our agent to transform existing open-plan office typologies towards new possibilities for differentiations that can evolve the type. If offices have been fundamentally based on the ceiling section premised on artificial lighting and ventilation in even, homogeneous distributions, the introduction of skylighting can introduce completely new spatial qualities and differentiations, environmental performances, and social organizations to the office type. Taken individually, the shifts from artificial to natural lighting, from mechanically controlled to natural ventilation, and from uniform distributions to more varied organizations, can each be a means to rethink the performance of these spaces. Skylighting systems have the potential to accomplish all three at once, and thus have a powerful capacity to transform our understanding of the office.

These systems also have a unique capacity to differentiate to produce complex material-organizations. In departing from the typical conception of the repetitive ceiling, our investigation will depart from traditional modular organizations (uniform and repetitive) in favor of systems of complex repetition. Modernist architectural space sought to establish consistency between parts and wholes through modular logics made possible by the processes of industrialization; these methods relied on regulating systems and planning grids to organize space, particularly in plan organizations. While modules are stable or homogeneous systems of elements that can only be replicated or aggregated, complex repetition is an example of part-to-whole patterning that can vary to meet local needs. While early attempts at complex patterning systems were periodic (based on filling space with more varied yet still fixed parts), new tools allow us to explore aperiodic and non-recursive part-to-whole relationships, based on flexible but specifiable geometries. The studio will explore the possibility to organize flexible part-to-whole relationships that can grow and differentiate to produce complex material-organizations.

The studio research will take into consideration the history of corporate organizations, office types and their social formations, as well as the development and performance of open plan, the complex technologies of the ceiling that have permitted its evolution, and the radical redefinition of these types once these technologies are put into question. Each studio project will be as much a proposal for the ecology of the office space below as it will be a complex, synthetic design of the ceiling above.

VELUX

In redefining these types, we will have the unique opportunity to explore systems designed by VELUX, a leading manufacturer of skylighting for commercial and domestic uses. As the second year in an ongoing collaborative research between VELUX and Pratt, initiated last year with the SKY/lite studio (taught by Richard Sarrach) and the Manufactured Surfaces studio (taught by Lonn Combs and Mark Parsons), we will be able to draw on the accumulated knowledge of this research to pursue new office ecologies using the potentials of these systems.

Founded in 1941 in Denmark, VELUX pioneered the introduction of the operable “roof window” into domestic environments, initially in sloped roofs and attic conditions which became more prevalent in housing after World War II. The company has moved increasingly into commercial environments since it began operating in the North American market in 1975, developing systems specifically designed for the flat, extensive ceiling conditions typical of these types. The wide array of systems offered by VELUX—including fixed and operable skylights, roof monitors,“sun tunnel” systems, and solar water heating systems—will allow us to explore new combinations of lighting, ventilation, and heating performance in commercial spaces.

Case Study: CIGNA Headquarters

Our site to explore the potentials of the skylit ceiling will be an icon of the modernist open plan. The headquarters of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (today CIGNA) in Bloomfield, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford (then a capitol for the country’s largest insurance companies) was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM, responsible for many of the iconic examples of postwar office design in both the city and the suburbs (including the headquarters for Lever House, Pepsi-Cola, Union Carbide, and Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, among others). Its construction represents the movement of corporate headquarters from cities to the suburbs in the postwar period, choosing to build idyllic office “campuses” that would cater to suburban employees and the perceived benefits of the non-urban landscape.

Widely imitated since its construction, CIGNA’s headquarters has often been described as a “prototype” for the suburban office building, a pinnacle of the total coordination of modules and functions towards a homogeneous and extensive office space. Frequently mentioned in this regard is the complex performance of CIGNA’s ceiling section, the first synthetic example of an exposed ceiling integrating lighting, ventilation, and acoustic functions.

Paradoxically, the intended flexibilities of CIGNA’s design have proved inadequate to changes in the organization and functions of the company it houses. Due to changes in the company’s structure and space needs in the decades following its construction, deficiencies in the environmental performance and organization of the CIGNA headquarters nearly leading to the building’s demolition in 2001. Saved only after a sustained protest from the architectural community, CIGNA decided to preserve the building as of 2006, but by subjecting it to a retrofit that has fundamentally altered the design and character of its interiors. This includes the transformation of the building’s coordinated, modular ceiling, the defining element of its original construction, yet a subject of criticism in later years for its inadequate environmental performance.

We will use skylighting to revisit these transformations to the architecture of CIGNA. You will be given the option to design a new office prototype in place of the current building, or to use the existing building as a departure point for your own investigations, retaining some parts of it and replacing others. Your investigations will develop new definitions of the ceiling against an exemplar of postwar ideals of the homogeneous office, to produce new prototypes for 21st-century workspace.

Studio Format

The studio will be an in-house competition sponsored by VELUX, with prize money awarded at the end of the semester to the first- and second-prize winning entries. Students will work in teams of two after the first assignment to develop your final projects. The final review will be structured as a competition jury, with team presentations to be followed by a judging by VELUX representatives and other jurors and an announcement of the winners. Prize money will be $2000 for the first-place team, and $1000 for the second-place team, with the remainder of the studio funding to be distributed equally among all teams for model production during the semester (in the range of $300 per team). Timothy O’Neill, the Northeastern Representative for VELUX, will join us periodically throughout the semester for reviews and to present the company’s products to the studio early in the semester.

Methods

Methods of working will include, but not be limited to, parametric modeling techniques. While there are no formal prerequisites for the course, facility with and a sincere interest in digital techniques will be crucial to the studio research. 3D modeling software such as Rhino, 3D printing, and other CAD/CAM fabrication techniques will be important tools in pursuing your investigations. The studio will have access to a Digital Expert who may be able to provide tutorials or advice on these tools and techniques as necessary to your production.

Required Readings:

Sanford Kwinter, “The Complex and the Singular,” in Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in
Modernist Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

Benoit Mandelbrot, “Scalebound or Scaling Shapes: A Useful Distinction in the Visual Arts and in the Natural
Sciences,” Leonardo, v. 14, 44-47 (Pergamon Press, 1981).

Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros, “The Evolution of Space Planning in the Workplace,” in Tower and Office
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 177–216.

Kazys Varnelis, “The Stimulus Progression: Muzak,” in Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural
Philosophies (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 100–131.

Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, “From New York to Silicon Valley,” Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries
(Barcelona: Actar, 2007), 18–44.

Suggested Additional Readings

On office typologies and corporate space:
Donald Albrecht and Chrysanthe B. Broikos, eds., On The Job: Design and the American Office (National Building
Museum, 2000)

Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003).

Michael Kubo, Constructing the Cold War Environment: The Architecture of the RAND Corporation, 1950–2005
(M.Arch. thesis, Harvard GSD, 2006)

Kazys Varnelis, “Programming After Program: Archizoom’s No-Stop City,” Praxis 8
Scott G. Knowles and Stuart Leslie, “’Industrial Versailles’: Eero Saarinen’s Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and
AT&T,” Isis, vol. 92 no. 1 (March 2001), 1–33.

John Harwood, “The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior,” Grey Room 12
Jade Chang, “Behind The Glass Curtain,” Metropolis, July 2006

On modernist modular systems:

Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and
Mechanics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954).
Konrad Wachsmann, “Modular coordination,” in The Turning Point of Building: Structure and Design (New York:
Reinhold, 1961).

Lawrence B. Anderson, “Module: Measure, Structure, Growth and Function,” in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Module,
Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (New York: George Braziller, 1966).
C. H. Waddington, “The Modular Principle and Biological Form”, in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Module, Proportion,
Symmetry, Rhythm (New York: George Braziller, 1966).

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