Alcoa Corporate Building/smart workplace

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ALCOA CORPORATE CENTER, Pittsburgh USA 1994 - 1998.

the "checker skin-wrap"

Wrapping this "mundane" serpentine volume (elementally sculpted by a simple double bending of the bar) is the aluminum checker-skin, with a pattern on the scale of city-objects rather than individual building-inhabitant. This large-pattern /urban-scale wrapping-strategy provides an interior conducive to (large) open office rather than (small) enclosed single office cells.
In addition to providing interior anchor points on an otherwise a very long wall in a very large space, this wall pattern is also arranged to neutralize any residual conventional hierarchy of floor plate "real-estate."

modules

The above skin-wall is made up of (small) modules of glass panels at several pattern-scales at once. In each module skin-"plates" are assembled -- i.e. layered -- to build up to a taut filter that is enviromentally resilient, sensitive, and dynamic -- responsive to its surrounding and its interior.
Hence the checker-skin changes its appearance along with the movements of the sun above, the water below, and the people inside, as it filters light and temperature from outside to the inside. With the shifting shadows inside the curtainwall's shadowboxes, the changing angles of the clerestory louvers (thin-line mini light-shelves), and the fleeting mirages of the total see-through/partial reflection on the vision windows, this surface (and indeed volumetric) "weather-o-meter" registers and displays time, seasons, work processes inside the building, as well as its own processes in weathering the building.
(Additional and night-time artificial lighting for this "S"-volume is conceived, accordingly, to further supplement this serpentine "light-bulb" notion.)

Hovering above, behind the parallel layering of low-linear-sandstone walls is . . . (back to -- the "serpentine block" . . . )

©1996, 1997 Agus Rusli / Rusli Associates

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