Radiant barrier is a heavy-duty aluminum foil that reflects 97% of the infra-red spectrum. It’s available on the underside of plywood roof sheathing for new construction, or in rolls for retrofits.

A fiber-reinforced radiant barrier, 48" wide roll.

Barrier stapled in rafter bay about 3/4" below sheathing.

Rolls can be stapled between existing rafters, an inch or so down from the underside of the sheathing. No taping is needed (unless you’re trying to make an air or vapor barrier as well).  This 4′ x 250′ roll is the perforated “Ultima” type from radiantguard.com – about $150 including shipping.

I stapled up the first couple pieces in the morning of a very sunny, 78° day, on this east-facing 12:12 roof. The infra-red thermometer shows a 30° difference in temperature by 10:30am.

East-facing 45° roof at 10:30am. Outside temperature was 78°.

Heat will also enter your attic by convecting off the underside of the sheathing, as well as by radiation, so a layer of insulation with air barrier below would complete this cathedral-ceiling job. But the radiant barrier alone would take a load off an uninhabited attic with ceiling insulation below.

In this application I’ve got a ridge vent. Intake vents lower would help. Either way, the increase in roof surface temperature with the installation of radiant barrier is only 3° – so little that composite shingle manufacturers have said installing the barrier would not void their warranties.

In my office though, I experimented with a pair of Ikea mirrors for more interesting light play. They’re mounted face up about 9″ down from top of glass, comfortably above eye level. The underside is painted white, to serve as a mini “ceiling” to the light reflected up from the venetian blinds below.

Mirrored light shelves reflecting sunlight onto ceiling

My office ceiling is the underside of a 12-in-12 pitched roof; the exposed surface is a dark grey polyiso insulation with merely a thin coat of white primer. Even so, the reflected sunlight on a clear day (center image, below) is roughly 2.5 times brighter than a pair of T-8 fluorescent tubes (right). Compare this to the ambient light of the ceiling — from light shelves reflecting the surrounding sky (left). Note that readings (in footcandles) are taken 12″ from the ceiling to isolate the light source for the meter.

Light readings for ambient, reflected sunlight, and dual T-8 fluorescents

In another project I inverted the concept, reflecting low winter sun down through skylights. Here the reflectors act to shade the skylights during the summer months. Specifics of this project are spelled out here.

South-facing, inverted reflectors over skylights to catch winter sun

For retrofitting windows, an interesting product called LightLouver based on the same principle as the light shelf has been developed as a vertical window treatment. I haven’t seen this in person, though, and don’t know how it compares to a standard polished chrome venetian blind.

At the SFMoMA for example, the composition intimates sanctity, rootedness, exclusion from the outside, attention toward sun and sky, and so forth. This is done with a skylit cylinder set atop a nearly windowless, square masonry base, sheltering a broad opening of an entry. The masses hunch in a vaguely animorphic way, gazing over the recumbant postures of the Center for the Arts buildings across the street.

In his original proposal however, Botta’s ensemble was to be crowned with a ring of ficus trees planted atop the cylinder. This feature, almost unseen in the history of architecture, did figure prominently in the mausoleum of the ancient Roman emperor Augustus. Though only ruins of the mausoleum remain today, scholarly reconstructions all show an earthen mound over a windowless masonry cylinder and square base, planted with a great ring of oak or laurel trees.

Rings of trees on the SFMoMA and Mausoleum of Augustus, elevations.

Trees as seen on the SFMoMA and a reconstruction of the Mausoleum of Augustus.

Was the allusion to a mausoleum intentional?  Was Botta making a subtle poke at the state of the art collection?  And why is it that art should be so easily housed within such a tomb-like structure?

I’m comfortable arguing against the poke. Botta studied under Carlo Scarpa, and went on to work for le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.  Common to all three was a predeliction for the primordial origins of form. The shapes a building assumes come from something deep rooted.  There is something archetypal in the masses of many of these architects’ buildings – something so common to our collective conscious that we may intuit what a building is about even before we know what’s inside. And the deep roots that sprouted the basic form of the mausoleum may easily have brought forth the basic form of this museum.

Given how distanced from everyday life art seems when experienced in the sanctum of a museum, it shouldn’t be surprising that the forms of museums occasionally bear some relation to those of mausolea.  The raised earthen mound of Augustus’ mausoleum lifts up the image of burial as if foisting upon us how removed from us it is.  The museum similarly enshrouds its contents on a pedestal. Historically museums have made no pretense about this, and examples in San Francisco are not new.

The Egyptian revival de Young of 1894.

The original de Young Museum, of the 1894 Mid-Winter’s Fair in Golden Gate Park, was designed in the tomb-like Egyptian revival style. Two of the original sphinx remain, and have been reinstalled outside the new building. It was not an uncommon style for museums, with its intimations of preservation and eternity.

After the original building was damaged in the 1906 quake, a reconstructed edifice continued the same theme. Though not overtly Egyptian revival, the central tower with its nearly-pyramidal roof form bore a notable resemblance to the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the so-called ancient wonders.

The post-quake de Young, and the original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

The latest de Young building eschews the burial analogy. The architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, did consider sodding the roof early on. But despite the current trend toward green roofs, they wound up dropping the idea, feeling it inappropriate to showcase arts under an earthen roof. (The irony here is that the de Young houses some of the most moribund art in the city – the Oceanic and African relics long removed from the vitality of their accompanying rituals.)

But what is it about art and death that moves us to inter them so?

“The animus of the museum is to value the plucked fruit more than the tree that bore it.” – Lewis Mumford

Art dies, in a way, when hung in a museum.  Its relation to the outside world is muffled. Its meaning within, and allusions to its original melieu are severed.  Influence is assimilated, and the impact of the art fades.  This is why one wears black to openings.

There are of course works of art that don’t require context (paradoxically, one has to know this to best appreciate them), or that rely on the blank white walls of the museum for effect. But museums can drain vitality from art in other ways. The mere presence of a work in a prominent museum can legitimize it in the public mind. When an artist’s work is represented in a museum’s collection and sanctified in catalogs, it runs the risk of being canonized – studied dutifully by the next generation of art students. Each new wave of the avant-garde loses its impact this way.

But in “death”, art may gain something. On hearing of a collegue’s passing, our thoughts may turn toward their legacy, how they impacted us or our community. Their vitality is taken from us, and not until its absence do we appreciate it most keenly.

This is the impetus behind mausoleum design. There is something worth preserving here; there is something worth remembering. This is not architecture of the living; this is the architecture of remembrance. And this is the innuendo in Botta’s design.

]]> http://www.actual-size.com/blog/2009/06/art-death-and-the-museum/feed/ 2 http://www.actual-size.com/blog/2009/05/takematsu-tidbit-from-93/ http://www.actual-size.com/blog/2009/05/takematsu-tidbit-from-93/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 01:57:44 +0000 Geof http://www.actual-size.com/blog/?p=10

Here’s a piece I wrote for the June 1993 Architectural Review. Shin Takamatsu had just designed his own exhibition in the top floor rotunda of the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at the War Memorial Building on Van Ness…

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Photos from the article as published

To anyone already familiar with his work, the most surprising quality of Shin Takamatsu’s retrospective is its uncharacteristic grace. Mounted in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fourth floor atrium, and designed by Takamatsu himself, the space feels like the antithesis of the signature high-tech dazzle for which his buildings have come to be known.

Natural light filters down over white-draped pavilions, transparent walkways cross each other over a stone garden, the shoji-like skylight reflects in the glass underfoot. A tubular steel and glass torii arches one walkway as if to mark some modern Shinto shrine. But no, the visitor enters the space to a prattle of upbeat electronic soundtracks, dispelling any notion that he has perhaps found his way into the wrong exhibit.

The fantastic and highly personal style for which Takamatsu gained his notoriety abounds nevertheless in the work on display. Here the proclivity is to expend enormous effort detailing industrial-like accouterments, which, given a moment’s scrutiny, reveal themselves to be mere architectural tinsel. Ensembles of the stuff run gratingly against all conventions distinguishing architecture from sculpture .

But as the size of his commissions increase, the favor toward mechanical pretension has given way to abstraction and Takamatsu has adopted the curious practice of assigning function to his sculptural ephemera. New work seen for the first time here displays a predilection for large scale compositional play. In the Kunibiki Messe convention center, a glass slab frames a seven-story terrarium of platonic solids, each element housing a different activity.

Three other buildings were selected to highlight the exhibition; each was assigned to a pavilion with thumbnails, drawings, models, and most notably, a high-resolution computer display, continuously running a 3-D representation of the building. The introduction of such graphics affords a comprehensiveness the traditional renderings fail to achieve.

Few of the works, unfortunately, provide much spatial play for the new medium to exploit. The computer animated display of such a static volume as the Kirin Plaza Osaka, for example, tells us nothing we can’t glean from the models. The building first appears on the monitor as a reflection in the canal it fronts. Panning back, we see the building in what could be an expansive asphalt desert, not the neon-packed district of Osaka where it actually stands. (Perhaps paving the city like this was deemed more appropriate, given Kirin’s symmetry all but ignores its site.) We are taken from the canal around the exterior of the building: up the walls, across the facade, in daylight and at night, from this angle and that, but never from the inside, and always to the pop beat of electronic background music. The whole sequence smacks of a promotional — nothing is flaunted but the building’s chrome-fitted facade. There is irony in viewing this architecture through technology the building can only feign.

Of greater novelty is a twelve-minute, high-definition 3-D projection video. Museum visitors don stereo headphones and image-polarizing 3-D glasses for dramatic footage of existing Takamatsu behemoths. Cameras pan through and around the structures in Orson Welles-like sweeps; boom-operated camera work takes the audience on crane rides far from anywhere a visitor to the actual buildings might find himself. And, once again, each building muscles about the screen to its own theme song.

If the video footage is gratuitous, the implications of the computer sequences are significant. Space has always been the stumbling block of architectural representation. Perspective, the isometric, and even models have their inherent limitations. But the dynamic quality of computer animation has the potential to renew attention to spatial design, both in conception as well as representation. One hopes to see the medium employed in future exhibits, preferably for a less static body of work .