by: Lisa Delgado
Event: Emerging Voices Lecture Series
Location: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 03.19.08
Speakers: Anne Rieselbach — Program Director, The Architectural League of New York (Introduction); Nat Oppenheimer — Director, The Architectural League of New York (Master of Ceremonies); Brian Johnsen, AIA, Sebastian Schmaling — Principals, Johnsen Schmaling Architects; Granger Moorhead, Robert Moorhead — Partners, Moorhead & Moorhead
Organizer: The Architectural League of New York
Johnsen Schmaling Architects’ Parts House Pavilion incorporates moveable panels (left). Moorhead & Moorhead’s Mobile Chaplet is a woven traveling place of worship.
Johnsen Schmaling Architects (left); Moorhead & Moorhead (right)
Moorhead & Moorhead is a multidisciplinary NY-based studio led by Granger Moorhead, an architectural designer, and brother Robert Moorhead, an industrial designer. They admire materials and craftsmanship, and described how testing the potential of weaving and folding gave birth to some wild-looking yet highly practical designs. One weaving experiment led to the carbon-fiber Filament Wound Bench, resembling a donut wrapped in a fishnet stocking. Created using a manufacturing process commonly used for large-but-light items such as aircraft fuselage, the 54-inch-diameter bench weighs a mere 17 pounds.
A week-long weaving binge with their architect father yielded the Mobile Chaplet: a traveling chapel with a curvy mesh canopy made of two layers of thermoplastic-composite rods woven together. The canopy doubles as a backrest for a built-in bench, and its porous form offers a veil of privacy that still allows views of the surrounding landscape, Granger explained.
For Johnsen Schmaling Architects, Brian Johnsen, AIA, and Sebastian Schmaling believe, “the size and budgets of the projects are so limited, we have to make sure that the structures themselves are simple, so we have a little bit of wiggle room to explore the issues that we’re interested in: skin, materiality, tectonics, and context.” Most of those issues came into play in one early, defining project, the Parts House Pavilion, completed a year after the Milwaukee-based firm formed in 2002. The pavilion features movable colored Acrylite panels that can be rearranged into various Mondrianesque configurations, forming shifting frames for the surrounding cityscape and architecture. (The cheery colors in contrast to the gray city might be termed a “Milwaukee mood enhancer,” Johnsen quipped.) The windows draw public attention, too, and the client’s penchant for rearranging them earned him a neighborhood nickname as “the South Side Picasso,” Schmaling said.
The award-winning Camouflage House in Green Lake, Wisconsin, shows a similar interest in framing and context. The building façade echoes surrounding trees with layers of thin, vertical strips of untreated cedar, Prodema panels in foliage colors, and clear glass. In a renovation of a former brewery, walls made of beer bottles provide a nod to the building’s historical ties to another of Milwaukee’s famous mood enhancers.
Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.