ETFE (eBook)

Technology and Design

Annette LeCuyer (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2008
160 Seiten
Birkhäuser (Verlag)
978-3-7643-8624-5 (ISBN)

Infos

This book is conceived as an in-depth introduction to the characteristics of ETFE and its applications in construction. Project examples explore in detail the specific characteristics of ETFE building skins in the areas of structural behavior, light transmission, insulation, acoustics, fire engineering and environmental modification.

Annette LeCuyer is an architect and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Autoren

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Annette LeCuyer ist Architektin und Professorin an der Universität Buffalo, State University of New York.

Annette LeCuyer is an architect and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Inhalt

6 
Introduction: Pleasure, Power and Payload 10
The Pneumatic Imagination: Architectural Ideas and Applications 16
Material Matters: ETFE 32

42 
Soft Structure 46
The Performative Skin 70
Environmongery:The Variable Skin 94
Life Safety 114
The Communicative Skin 126
The Climatic Envelope 136

146 
Project Credits 150
The Authors 155
Bibliography 156
Index 157
Illustration Credits 159
Acknowledgements 160

Textauszug

Introduction Pleasure, Power and Payload (S. 10-11)

Pneumatics - ideas and technologies

Air, used as a building material, is a recent phenomenon in architecture. While the first half of the 20th century was dominated by innovative ideas, the second half witnessed the proliferation of increasingly ambitious built projects. As with many advances in architecture and engineering, this evolution is the result of a symbiotic relationship between the imagination and the application of new technologies. Because of their newness in architecture, pneumatics have tended to be identified with the avant-garde but, beyond the confines of the discipline, they have a long history. Images from Assyria show warriors crossing rivers on air-filled goatskins,` and the Greeks and Romans used inflated animal skins both to make underwater breathing devices and air mattresses to rest soldiers."

In the 13th century, the idea of a lighter-than-air balloon was suggested by Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar who mixed mysticism, alchemy and scientific methods of inquiry to imagine a "huge globe of thin metal that would rise to the heavens when it was filled with the very thin air of the upper atmosphere."3 In pursuit of pleasure, it is suggested that Leonardo da Vinci, who drew flying machines and, like many artists of the late 15th centu ry,used pig`s bladders for the practical purpose of storing pigments, was also perhaps "...the earliest artist to have understood the inherent aesthetic character of air, [when he] created a pneumatic environment by using inflated pigs` bladders in a small room."

By the latter half of the 17th centu ry,Father Francesco Lana advanced the scientific imagination by proposing a spherical balloon of thin copper sheet that would work on the basis of a vacuurn. In 1783, these lighter-than-air ideas became real when the Montgolfier brothers, French paper manufacturers and amateur scientists, sought "to enclose a cloud in a bag" and successfully launched a linen bag lined with paper that was 107 meters in diameter and filled with air heated by a fire."

Their experiment quickly transformed into a spectacle when they repeated the demonstration before the king at Versailles in the presence of an estimated 100,000 spectators, who flocked to the event "like pilgrims drawn to a hearsay miracle." Made of cotton lined with paper, the Versailles balloon introduced the concept of payload by carrying a sheep, a duck and a rooste r.Several months lat er, another Montgolfie r balloon inaugurated manned flight and was followed closely by the journey of Jacques Charles and Nicholas Robert in a hydrogen -filled valved balloon made of rubber-impregnated silk." By the end of 1783, balloon f lig ht, previously only imaginable, ....was rapid ly becomi ng a popular, romantic and ubiquitous adventure,"?

Pleasure and power were inext ricably inte rt wined int he balloon. Although th e Montgolfier balloon was decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis to fl atter th e king,an observer of t he event concluded that it turned the civil , moral and politi cal world upside down, t hat religion had become subservient to science, and th at man was master of nature. With the benefit of hindsight, the cont emporary historian Simon Schama reinforces th e profound implicat ions of the balloon at Versai lles: "In stead of being an obje ct of pr ivileged vision - t he specialty of Versailles - t he balloon was necessarily t he visual property of everyone in the crowd .

On th e ground it was st ill, to some exte nt, an aristoc rat ic spec tac le, in the air, it became democrat ic...As a spectacle, it was unpredictable, its crowds were incohe rent, sponta- neous and visce rally aroused...The sense that they [th e crowd] were witnessi ng a liberating event - an augury of a fre e-floating future - gave them a kind of temporary fellowsh ip in the open air."

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.6.2008
• Zusatzinfo: 151 b/w and 246 col. ill.
• Verlagsort: Basel/Berlin/Boston
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Bauwesen
• Schlagworte: Architecture • ETFE • Foils • Plastic
• ISBN-10: 3-7643-8624-X / 376438624X
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-8624-5 / 9783764386245