Tag: architect blog

Architecture and Windows: Duchamp, Cage and Contemporary Architectural Production: Exploring the Window; Architecture, Scientific Determinism + Artistic Production

August 6th, 2010

hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) are great fans of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and bring their enthusiasm for these two giants of the artistic avant-garde forward in time through hMa's on-going collaborations and conversations with contemporary avant-garde artists including Michael Schumacher, Bruce Pearson, Monica de la Torre, Roxy Paine, Joe Amrhein, and Susan Swenson, and including several other artists who we work with, mostly from the New York area.

Reunion by John Cage, featuring John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Teeny Duchamp playing chess. Post: Victoria Meyers architect

What hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) love about Cage, Duchamp, and our contemporary friends in the arts, is how the most intelligent works in the fine arts foster on-going discussions about science, technology, and culture. Great artists look at culture as a whole, and create visual and sound interpretations of the technological changes of that period in time. This discussion places viewers and listeners into that conversation, through an incisive and intellectually challenging presentation of ideas.

hMa's architecture incorporates contemporary discussions into buildings and space design. hMa does this by bringing on-going discussion with artists who are making some of the most challenging contemporary art into the firm's design process. hMa invites artists whose work poses challenges beyond the ordinary to incorporate their works onto and into hMa's buildings.

three early versions of the 'WATER' score frit pattern by NY composer Michael Schumacher in collaboration with hanrahan Meyers architects. For information contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com. Post: Victoria Meyers architect

As part of hMa's ongoing discussion with the arts, they are developing an interactive glass wall for their Digital Water i-Pavilion (DWi-P): Battery Park City Community Center in collaboration with Michael Schumacher. The facade will be activated so that Visitors passing by the building will be able to wave cell phones at the building's facade and receive sound samples of Michael's 'WATER' score, depicted on the facade as a bar-coded frit pattern.

The DWi-P collaboration takes the idea of the 'normal' glass window which has been 'altered' by being selected for interpretation by the artist (and – in this case - by the architects) and uses that otherwise mundane and everyday piece of the built fabric to generate an architectural armature that works as a building - but also as in interactive work of art.

scale mock-up of the frit pattern seen on-site of the Digital Water Pavilion: Battery Park City Community Center, with WATER composition shown as a bar code. For information contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com. Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Above, we are showing a full scale mock up of the glass - fragments of a future 550-foot long glass wall – in our office for on-site installation - at the building site at DWi-P. hMa will keep Visitors to the blog updated on progress with the WATER score / glass installation. DWi-P is scheduled to receive a Platinum LEED rating.

More to come….

for more information about the hMa / Schumacher collaboration, visit our website: www.hanrahanMeyers.com. Contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com
Furniture Design Minimalist furniture design: Design Furniture: Furniture + Nature; natural furniture design

June 24th, 2010

Victoria Meyers architect, hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) partner, designs custom furnishings to fit clients' needs. Many projects result in spaces where off-the-shelf furniture doesn't fit. For White Space / Ash 4Ways, for example, this included most of the apartment furniture.

White Space / Ash 4Ways dining room table : hanrahan Meyers architects with Miya Shoji. Contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com; Post: Victoria Meyers architect

For the living room hMa designed a coffee table that opens to become a bed. For the dining area, hMa worked with hMa collaborator Miya Shoji to design a custom dining room table that fit within the confines of a limited dining space. For the Bedroom, hMa designed a bed that incorporates storage and also elegantly controls the flow into and out of the room. The solution faces the bed toward the apartment's Central Park view. Closets lining the bedroom open to reveal an enclosed work desk. Tight New York spaces work when furnishings are customized to fit the space.

Master Bedroom custom bed : hanrahan Meyers architects with Miya Shoji. Contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com; post: Victoria Meyers architect

In addition to designing elegant and beautiful solutions to everyday living, hMa designs award-winning, one-of-a-kind specialty furnishings. This includes WaterFall Table, hMa's winning design entry to the 'Wonder Women' furniture competition.

WaterFall Table by Victoria Meyers, available through Dune Furniture. Contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com, Post: Victoria Meyers architect

WaterFall Table was designed as a simple slab of (sustainably harvested) ash, supported on two planar leg supports, so that you read the horizontal line of the table-top as a strong line, floating in space. At the two edges, steel beads make a translucent WaterFall. The table was designed to transport interior spaces into Nature.

Music Box: Designed for New York Composer Michael Schumacher; hanrahan Meyers architects. Post: Victoria Meyers architect

The Music Box, commissioned by New York Composer Michael Schumacher, was designed as a container for an ambient sound art installation. Schumacher's ambient sound pieces use everyday sounds to make compositions. Schumacher requested an object that would perform as the sound-art equivalent of Duchamp's urinal. To create a box that took the everyday, and force it into a new geometry, hMa designed an anamorphic cube. An Anamorph is a figure that appears randomly distorted, that pops into its normal shape when viewed from the correct angle. The Music Box is a distorted cube.

To read more about hMa's furniture designs, visit our website, www.hanrahanMeyers.com.
Manhattan Waterfront Design: Waterfront Architecture + Music: SaMPlinG: hMa / Michael Schumacher / DJ Olive

April 28th, 2010

Since hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) founded their architectural practice, the firm has collaborated with artists in other fields. The artist who hMa has the most long-running collaborative experience with is Michael Schumacher. hMa is showing 'Open Fabric', the firm's original design proposal for the redevelopment of Manhattan's West Side.

Michael Schumacher / hMa: Architects Design Music: Performance at the Kitchen, 2004. For information, contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com

The hMa / Schumacher collaboration started with Victoria Meyers' proposal to San Francisco MoMA for a show titled: 'Sampling'. The show was to focus on the idea of using 'samples' to make architecture, art, and music. This preceded the Meyers – Schumacher collaboration, and included DJ Olive, painter Bruce Pearson, and sculptor Roxy Paine.    After the 'sampling' collaboration, Michael Schumacher came on board as a permanent hMa collaborator.

DJ Olive, 2010

For the Samples show, hMa proposed showing their master plan proposal for the development of Manhattan's West Side waterfront. hMa had produced a design titled: 'Open Fabric'. Open Fabric proposed a series of formally complex buildings to mediate the edge of Manhattan with the water. hMa's proposal included several areas with waterfront parks, and different developments to create a positive urban experience in approaching the water's edge.

diagram for 'Open Fabric' plan by hanrahanMeyers architects. For information contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com.

In 2000 hanrahan Meyers were recognized as new New York design talent, winning the Young Architects award from the Architectural League of NYC.  For the public lecture accepting their award, hMa presented their masterplan design for the West Side of Lower Manhattan, starting at Canal Street, continuing north to 34th Street.

site plan, ' Open Fabric' masterplan for NYC West Side development by hanrahanMeyers architects. For information contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com.

After hMa's successful presentation of the Canal Street Masterplan, hMa were hired as the official masterplan architects for Battery Park City's North Neighborhood.  Working with Battery Park City Authority, hMa was able to explore ideas around large-scale Masterplanning design incorporating cutting-edge sustainable practices.

Battery Park City: North Neighborhood at night. hanrahan Meyers architects, Master Plan architects since 1997

For more information about hMa's Masterplans and Landscapes, visit the firm's website: www.hanrahanMeyers.com. For more information about 'Open Fabric' contact: info@hanrahanMeyers.com.
Natural Wave Structures and ArchitecturehMa Research: WaveLine; Latimer Gardens Community Center; Sound Theory and Architecture

April 5th, 2010

Acoustical decay curve for music : hanrahan Meyers architects research into Wave Forms

WaveLine is a steel and masonry pavilion of subtle but powerful vision, with modest dimensions. The building is located in Queens, New York and uses the contrast of its contemporary materials and graceful form to define a new place for performance and sport within an existing public housing complex.

The main façade of WaveLine is the building’s bent roof plane constructed using standing-seam galvanized steel and aluminum. The interior is a simple, white, one-room volume for performance and sport. The pavilion ceiling is a faceted surface expressive of the overall form of the building’s exterior.

main elevation: WaveLine by hanrahan Meyers architects

WaveLine is a term from ship-building and physics referring to the shape most likely to glide through water without resistance. The formal properties of the project were influenced by researches into non-resistant structures. hMa also consulted with acoustic designer Yasuhisa Toyota whose sound calculations of reverberation times for chamber music performed in the space also influenced the roof shape.

The pavilion is 5,000 square feet, and the adjacent community center is 20,000 square feet. WaveLine finished construction in June 2007.

3D rendering of WaveLine
Green DesignBattery Park City North Neighborhood; Masterplan Guidelines; Urban Design; Green Streets

April 5th, 2010

North End Avenue: Battery Park City North Neighborhood; photos: Paul Warchol

hanrahan Meyers architects (hMa) support major advances that are happening in green and sustainable technologies and practices. These changes have radically altered how people see their relationship to the environment.

Cities everywhere are becoming greener, cleaner and healthier places to live. A major aspect of this change for the better is the 'green streets' movement. Green Streets is a new Landscape Design Initiative to use planted areas to control and clean rain water run-off. It is a more natural approach to controlling storm water run-off that results in islands of Nature within cities.

Battery Park City Esplanade

Green Streets work by diverting street rainwater run-off from the city's storm/sewer pipe system and manages it on-site using a landscape approach. Once water is within the landscape area, it is retained to a certain depth, often up to 12" deep, by a series of check-dams. Water cascades from one cell to another, until plants and soil absorb the runoff or until the curb extensions reach their storage capacity. The landscape system infiltrates water at a rate of roughly 3 inches per hour. If rain is too intense, water will exit the system, through another curb cut at the end of the curb extension, and flow into the existing street inlets.

These systems have the ability to manage most rain water run off and, through the natural filtration abilities of plants, purifies water that would otherwise go into a storm or, even worse, sewage system.

The City of New York currently diverts all of its rainwater run off into the City's sewage system. hMa applauds Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts to 'green' the City by creating hundreds of new pocket parks and greenscapes throughout the five Boroughs. We would like to encourage the City to think about implementing a 'Green Streets' system for the City of New York, perhaps choosing a limited area as a 'demonstration project'.

A jog in the park : Battery Park City North Neighborhood

hMa sees Green Streets as the most important urban innovation since the City Beautiful Movement in the 1890's / 1900's. It is about time that Americans make their cities more natural and, by being more natural, more humane.

hMa have been the Master Plan Architects for Battery Park City's North Neighborhood since 1997. In that capacity, they have written design guidelines for over 4 million square feet of Green construction. Under hMa's watch, Battery Park's North Neighborhood developed the first high-rise LEED certified residential tower – the Solaire – in 2003. hMa also were responsible to overview the development of all Parks in the North Neighborhood, where Green Streets principals of water management are currently being actively applied.

To read more about hMa's Master Plan designs, visit our website, www.hanrahanMeyers.com.
Green Design: Barack Obama, Al Gore and the changing fac(ade) of architecture

March 13th, 2010

Chattanooga Nature Interpretive Center, hanrahan Meyers architects LLP

In the not-too-distant past green design was frowned upon by the upper echelon of architectural design as the provenance of unsophisticated and unhip 'designers in Birkenstocks'. Today, architects who fail to embrace Green design are missing the boat, as more and more clients demand and expect a full working knowledge of sustainable practices from their architects.

Since the founding of their firm, New York architects hanrahan Meyers - whose firm logo, 'hMa' embraces the values behind green design (hMa stands for the principals names, and also 'h = horizon line and Ma = space') - have placed a high priority on incorporating green design in the firm's projects. hMa is a logo that speaks about the principal's belief that a protective and sustainable attitude toward Nature is a first principal in the firm's body of work.

Chattanooga Nature Interpretive Center is hMa's first project that placed hanrahan Meyers in the national spotlight. Chattanooga Nature Interpretive Center was a ground-breaking building designed twenty years ago, which proposed that solar panels and wind turbines be not only incorporated into a public building, but that these elements become the major aspect of the buidling's overall aesthetic.

Entering the Interpretive Center, visitors walked under a large solar panel that acted as the Entrance roof panel. That large solar array gave visitors to the Center a direct connection to the building's interconnectedness to the Nature around it.

Battery Park City Community Center: going for Platinum LEED certification: hanrahan Meyers architects LLP

In the case of Green Design, the path to acceptance turned into a major fashion trend after the endorsement of forward-thinking politicians Al Gore and Barack Obama embraced Green Design as the wave of the future for construction in the United States. Today, federal policies not only embrace and encourage Green construction practices, they demand them. All GSA projects are built to a minimum LEED Silver standard of design. The Green practices of the GSA are an important step forward, with the Federal Government leading the way into the future of construction practices in the United States. hMa partner Victoria Meyers is a Peer with the General Services Administration.

hMa is proud to be a part of a movement toward the creation of a more rational and Green way of building in the United States, and the world at large. Starting this year, hMa is offering clients access to a new 'Green Design-Build' service, for clients who wish to incorporate a cutting-edge Green approach to their projects, using a holistic approach, where the entire design and build team is on board, supporting and embracing the principals of Green Design. Watch hMa's website for a formal announcement later this year. At this time, hMa is ready to support 'Green Design-Build' projects in the New York area with specialized Construction Partners, with experience in bringing Green projects together, on time and on budget.
Award-winning Education Buildings:Pratt Pavilion; WaveLine; Buddhists Educational Retreat

March 2nd, 2010

Juliana Curran Terian Pratt Pavilion: View of Pavilion floating above entry court: hanrahan Meyers architects: 2007 NY Designs Award, Architectural League

New York architects hanrahan Meyers (hMa) have a track record for designing award winning educational buildings. hMa's Pratt Pavilion, completed in 2007, was recognized for its cutting edge design with a 'New York Designs' award from the Architectural League of New York. The building is featured in the 2009 Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture. The Juliana Curran Terian Pratt Pavilion is a new 10,000 square foot building on the Pratt Institute Campus in Brooklyn. The Pavilion ties two previously separate buildings into one entity: the Pratt Design Center, creating the first Design Center in the United States uniting all Design disciplines (fashion, interior design, graphic design and industrial design) under one roof.

WaveLine Pavilion: Rear elevation view: roof becomes the wall; hanrahan Meyers architects: 2007 AIA NYChapter Design Award

WaveLine, completed in 2007, was recognized with an AIA NYChapter Design Award for its excellence in design. WaveLine was built within an existing NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) compound in Queens, New York, as a multi-use building. Like Pratt Pavilion, WaveLine is connected to a larger Community Center, and was designed to function part-time as a classroom.

Won Buddhist Training Center, Claverack, NY: hanrahan Meyers architects

The Won Buddhist Retreat, currently in construction in Claverack, New York, is designed as a campus for Buddhist education. The Retreat consists of five buildings; three residential halls (each with one room dedicated as a classroom); an Administrative building (with classrooms and a library); and a main Buddhist Meditation Hall.

All three projects have been recognized through publications and awards programs for their foresight in design.

To read more about hanrahan Meyers architects visit our website: www.hanrahanMeyers.com.

Related articles

Max Neuhaus: Elevators, Time-PIeces, and Sound art / Victoria Meyers architect and Sound Urbanism/ Sound Ecology

Rossville Library Design hanrahan Meyers architects hMa

Walking, Moving, Thinking: through an invisible building: hMa's DWi-P at Battery Park City
Green Roof DesignGreen Home Design; American Houses; Green Roofs for Healthy Cities; See-thru House: hanrahan Meyers architects

February 9th, 2010

hanrahan Meyers architects' See-Thru House design for Urban Reserve features a Green Roof click here to see more of See-Thru House at www.hanrahanmeyers.com: Victoria Meyers architect and Thomas Hanrahan architect: Contemporary Residential architecture

New York architects hanrahan Meyers (hMa) recently became a member and sponsor of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. Green Roofs for Healthy Cities was founded in 1999 as a direct result of a research project on the benefits of green roofs and barriers to industry development entitled "Greenbacks from Green Roofs" prepared by Steven Peck, Monica Kuhn, Dr. Brad Bass and Chris Callaghan. Green Roofs for Healthy Cities – North America Inc. is now a rapidly growing not-for-profit industry association working to promote the industry throughout North America. Click here to read more about Green Roofs.

hMa's See-Thru House is a 3000 square foot green residence designed for the Urban Reserve development in Dallas, Texas. Urban Reserve is a new development with tight design standards, and a roster of selected architects hired by the Developer. hanarahanMeyers are one of two New York firms chosen as architects for the development.