Displayed in the back of the soaring concrete-floored gallery two floors below street level, the liquid wall has the clean, white, sculptural appeal of something from a movie that takes place in the future; it’s made of an elegant poured-concrete grid and glass panels, each of which frames what looks like a semi-transparent garden hose that snakes up and down several times as you watch the display. This cladding has never actually been used on a building, but according to the curator, everything chosen for the contest could feasibly be used as one. The liquid wall is made possible by Ductal, a fortified concrete strong enough to bear weight in thin, sculptural forms.In the prototype, water runs through the hoses, making a passive solar collector that can heat the building. The winning design is the central attraction of the "innovate" part of the exhibit. The "integrate" part of the show is meant, according to A.I.A. New York’s president, Anthony P. Schirripa, to teach the public about modern construction, which requires much more collaboration between architects, engineers and builders, and more technologically advanced modeling than it once did.
A few New York City projects qualified: Yankee Stadium for its Building Information Modeling, the Barclay Center for using 4-D Visualization, Beekman Tower for its B.I.M. Consulting, HOK's New York office for Integrated Project Delivery, the World Trade Center for 4-D Scheduling. (The fourth "D” being time.) All were honored for one of three things: construction management, construction logistics, or construction technology.
In other words, not the actual building, so much as the way of visualizing it, and not the architecture, so much as the construction method.
“There are a lot of projects in here that are New York-based,” said Sara Hart, the curator of Innovate/Integrate. “But that—the liquid wall—is a use of Ductal that you see almost exclusively in Europe; same thing with the Corian-clad building upstairs.” (Corian is a non-porous surface material that can be heated and molded; it's popular for kitchen and bathroom countertops.)
“Corian’s been trying to get people to use it as an exterior,” Hart said. “It’s a beautiful material and I think eventually ... but you need a client.” She paused. “I think it will happen. I don’t know if it will happen in New York first.”
THIS KIND OF DOUBT ABOUT NEW YORK'S willingness to create space for really new ideas in architecture and building design and construction is not a new thing. Among architects it's axiomatic. Despite a long history of innovative building, New York, for a number of reasons, hasn’t produced much in the way of interesting architecture in the last 50 years. And in the course of a conversation, Hart became more explicit.
“We just don’t like to try new things,” Hart said. “And so the construction industry is very conservative, and so are clients.”
She blames the city's “opposition to everything” for some of this, but especially that of unions operating in the engineering and construction sectors. If a project demands a complex facade, it will likely be built overseas, as it was the case of the 2002 facade of the Burberry building. The components were completed in Germany, by Germans, shipped here, and assembled on-site.
And when the company tried to bring German craftsmen to do the installation, the unions wouldn’t allow it. “So to get the quality they wanted, they had to handpick some New York construction people and train them, the German way,” Hart said. “There are some non-union jobs that happen in New York, but it’s—clients don’t want the hassle; they don’t want the bad publicity. In other states it’s different. New York is different than the rest of the country.”