Schedule

6:30–8:00 PM

Welcoming Remarks and Introduction

Mark Wigley
Dean, GSAPP, Columbia University

Welcoming Remarks from Oldcastle Glass

Keynote Lecture
Kazuyo Sejima
Architect, SANAA, Tokyo

9:30–11:00 AM

Structural Glass, Structure and Glass

Moderator: Richard L. Tomasetti
Engineer, Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., New York

Conventional goals for installation of glass have isolated and maintained the brittle material in conditions that assure minimal intrusion of stress and strain. Today, new means of testing and modeling loading, and of verifying the effects of the behavior of integral systems on each other have allowed more dynamic interaction of comprehensive ensembles of structure, glass, and framing systems. This panel examines the role of structural engineering in glass architecture and in particular new means of testing and projecting the behavior of systems.

Ulrich Knaak
Professor of Architecture, Technical University, Delft

Nina Rappaport
Publications Director, School of Architecture, Yale University

Jens Schneider
Professor of Engineering, University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt



11:15 AM–12:30 PM

Optics and Climate Engineering

Moderator: Joan Ockman
Director, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at GSAPP, Columbia University

The economic impact of recent environmental energy savings laws has usually been understood for overt if not linear decreases in energy consumption. Yet the emergence of a new standard of climate engineering also has produced architectures that are efficient but not decidedly driven to reducing consumption so much as allowing for a new type of architectural experience.

Glass architecture has been the recipient of many of these engineering advances and its visual qualities register against and sustain a history of early glass projects. But the visual aspects of glass have also been transferred from the experience of the user to a wider examination of material performance. The optic project is one of discrete examination and calculation of a finer gradient of affects. A finer visualization of the properties of glass as material and what these properties can allow architecturally raises the expectations for climate engineering, building design, and ultimately for energy studies in architectural design.

Michelle Addington
Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Yale University

Robert Heintges
Professor of Architecture, GSAPP, Columbia University

Wilfried Laufs
Engineer, Werner Sobek, New York

Toshihiro Oki
Architect, SANAA, Tokyo



12:30 PM–2:00 PM

Break

2:00–3:15 PM

New Materials/Conversion of Light

Moderator: Scott Marble
Professor of Architecture, GSAPP, Columbia University

During the early 1990s a shift in direction occurred in architectural design that began to place greater emphasis on the performance capabilities of building materials—indeed the performance capabilities of architecture in its widest sense. Decades of academic work that relied on theories of meaning often taken from linguistic criticism have been increasingly displaced as the dominant method in both architectural education and building design. As an overall catch phrase, “new materials” has indicated a wide range of meanings, but in general it has indicated materials that will by their very nature change what we design—and possibly for whom we design.

What are potentialities that lie within the term “new materials” for glass applications today? How are new glass materials re-writing what we do with glass and for whom we work?

Graham Dodd
Engineer, ARUP, London

Susanne Rexroth
Researcher, Institute of Building Construction, Technische Universität Dresden

Thomas Richardson
Material scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

Stefan Röschert
Architect, Diller Scofidio + Renfro



3:30–5:00 PM

Security, Safety, and Blast Loading

Moderator: Michael Bell
Professor of Architecture, GSAPP, Columbia University

Moderator: Christian Meyer
Chair and Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University

Impact loadings have been a concern of the engineering community for decades, in particular in those geographic regions that regularly experience hurricanes and tornadoes. Blast loadings were added to the set of loads on a large scale with the first attacks on U.S. embassies abroad, without really entering the public consciousness, because those attacks happened at a distance. Today, all landmark and important structures need to be re-engineered under a new set of design criteria. How do these new demands affect the glass installations as defined in earlier sessions of this conference? How does the engineering community respond to this challenge?

No realm of technical research outside of blast loading and security in glass applications seems so at odds with what we have historically expected of glass architecture. A construction possessed of a delicacy supplied by transparency— essentially fragile even as it has often been presented as anything but, in terms of social or political effect—glass architecture has routinely been understood as causing a re-evaluation of social or political hegemony. This tenuous quality has been a metaphor for the breaking of social relations within which the work situates itself.

Yet blast loading and security issues suggest that the limits we have placed on glass to sustain impact have been expanded— and indeed glass architecture’s continued presence, even acceleration in contested sites in an era of security risks would have us re-write glass as an act of securing stability rather than up-ending it. What are the new means of increasing— or sustaining—glass applications in security situations? How do we evaluate these in the context of the historical themes of glass as brittle and indeed fragile?

Albrecht Burmeister
Engineer, DELTA-X, Stuttgart

H. Scott Norville
Professor and Chair, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas Tech University

Robert Smilowitz
Engineer, Applied Sciences Division, Weidlinger Associates, New York

Closing Remarks