Material World
When it comes to residential design materials, architects have long asked, “What if ?” Rudolph Schindler built his Kings Road house with walls of tilt-up concrete slabs. Frank Lloyd Wright created entire projects in Pasadena and Hollywood by stacking precast concrete blocks. Frank Gehry wrapped his own home in Santa Monica in chain-link fencing. Over the years, a host of unconventional materials have become part of the residential design vocabulary. But as steel beams, sectional doors and corrugated metal siding, to name just a few examples, pass from novelty to norm, resourceful architects continue to embrace ever-more-unusual materials in the eternal quest to solve problems of style and function.
The impulse for such experimentation varies. Some architects fly in the face of the familiar for aesthetic effect; some dare to be different to save money. Others may be motivated by a sensitivity to environmental concerns. And still others are driven by all of the above.
David Hertz, head of the architectural firm Syndesis in Santa Monica, recently designed a 3,000-square-foot garage for an Anaheim Hills automobile enthusiast who needed a large enclosed structure where he could work on and store his car collection. The challenge for Hertz was threefold--to make the garage attractive, to build it economically and to minimize heating and cooling costs, since it would only occasionally be occupied by people.
Fortunately, Hertz was no stranger to such considerations. He had designed his own contemporary-style house without central air conditioning and heat, relying instead on radiant-heated concrete floors in winter and natural ventilation in summer. He also invented Syndecrete, a versatile lightweight concrete made of crushed electronic parts, glass and other recycled objects, in 1984.
What’s more, with in-laws in the refrigeration business, Hertz had always been intrigued by the notion of using refrigeration panels in one of his projects. So after researching meat lockers and icehouses and talking with a local contractor who specializes in such projects, he decided to build the garage out of refrigeration panels.
“It’ll be an incredibly efficient building with structural integrity,” Hertz says. The rigid 4-by-15-foot panels consist of 6 inches of foam between two sheets of metal. They are fire-and weather-resistant and lock together easily with clips and levers for quick assembly.
Because the insulated panels are expected to mitigate extremes in climate, Hertz eliminated air conditioning and heating--and exorbitant energy bills. “The interior temperature will be consistently different from the exterior temperature,” he says. “When it’s 100 degrees outside, it’ll be a comfortable 65 to 70 degrees inside.”
Following groundbreaking later this year, Hertz anticipates that construction of the gleaming silver garage will be a simple process. He’ll pour a slab foundation, erect a steel frame and then install the panels like so many Lego pieces. “Once we get started, it could go up in about a week,” he says. “It’s like a Costco or one of those kit buildings that can be dropped in Antarctica and assembled in the wilderness.” .
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Where Hertz was able to appropriate a tried-and-true building material, Malibu-based architectural designer Bruce Bolander faced a different task in 1996. For the house of a local writer-director, he designed a two-story atrium tower over the front door. The question was how to introduce light and color to the interior without exceeding the client’s budget.
A huge expanse of costly glass was out of the question. Likewise any pricey architectural material, such as Kalwall, a translucent fiberglass and aluminum panel specially formulated for windows and skylights. As Bolander recalls: “We said, ‘OK, we want this effect.’ Then we asked, ‘How can we do it cheaply and uniquely?”’ His solution was virgin fiberglass-reinforced plastic, a common component in the production of computer circuit boards. “I started using it when I was building furniture,” Bolander says. “I would frequent junkyards and electronic surplus stores. Every once in a while, I’d see a piece lying around and incorporate it into furniture doors or surfaces.”
New fiberglass panels range in color from green to yellow to brown and are available in 3-by-4-foot sheets up to a half-inch thick. He was drawn to them for the same reasons he included them in his furniture: They diffuse light well, have an appealing translucence, are strong for their weight and don’t conduct electricity.
The project in Malibu marked the first time Bolander attempted an architectural application of the panels, one that would expose them to direct sun. “When we have a material that’s never been used a certain way before, we make sure the clients all agree they’re going to take some risks,” he says. “Everyone had to understand that it might last one year--and we would have to redo it--or 30 years.”
In the end, Bolander clad the atrium tower in one-eighth-inch-thick yellow fiberglass-reinforced plastic, flooding the space inside with a dramatic golden glow. For visual continuity, he then repeated the material in other places where its ethereal qualities could be appreciated--on the balustrade of the interior staircase and on the privacy fence around the swimming pool.
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Unlike the Bolander commission, money was no object in 1998 when architect Enrico Bressan of Artecnica in Culver City designed a 7,000-square-foot house in Pacific Palisades. His client asked for one-of-a-kind decorative features but left it up to Bressan to determine what they would be.
Inspired by a friend who had used broken glass as an ornamental element, Bressan encased crushed glass inside custom double-pane window units to produce transparent mosaic-like fields of color. “It’s a version of stained-glass windows but allows you to recycle something,” he says. Though Bressan poured and sealed the recycled crushed glass inside steel-framed windows, the same crystalline effect could be achieved with wood-framed windows. But he cautions that the addition of the glass pebbles “does change the energy-efficiency of the windows since they conduct heat and cold.”
Available by the pallet from industrial facilities that melt glass for bottling companies, the tumbled glass is safe to handle, comes in a variety of colors and ranges in size from one-fourth to three-fourths of an inch in diameter. It can also be purchased in 5-pound bags at some nurseries.
“The colors I chose were derived from the setting,” Bressan says. “Aqua glass represented the sea, blue symbolized the sky, and pink was for the flowers growing in the garden.” But he didn’t stop with the windows. He used the recycled crushed glass as a landscaping material inside an enclosed atrium between the living and dining rooms. Mounds of green and pink glass are lit from below with halogen fixtures to create an otherworldly looking cactus garden.
And he turned the glass into a fanciful roofing material. Instead of white gravel, he scattered light blue glass over an adhesive on the roof, and now the surface glitters in the sunlight.
Depending on the quantities required, Bressan notes that recycled crushed glass costs slightly more than regular gravel. It’s also more expensive than a typical stained-glass window due to labor-intensive installation. But he believes that sometimes design for design’s sake is worth it. “I like designing for utilitarian purposes,” he says, “but it’s also good to leave some room for the soul.”
Bressan insists that working with unconventional materials is simply part of the continuum. “It’s always been the goal of architects and designers to innovate and propose new ideas, especially in custom work, where you want to find alternatives to mass construction. It’s all part of our job to find better ways to design.’
