UB-designed metal façade wins Architect’s Newspaper award
A perforated metal façade developed by UB architecture professor Christopher Romano and Buffalo-based Rigidized Metals Corp. has earned an Architect’s Newspaper Editors’ Choice award for Best of Products in the façade category. To get more news about
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Manipulating light and thin-gauge sheet metal as design materials, the façade system was first applied in Light/Station, an expansion project for Torn Space Theatre in Buffalo.Romano and Rigidized continue to advance the façade research for broader applications.
The AN Best Products Awards are presented across 18 categories, including building materials, acoustics, furnishings, tech and façades. The 2019 award pool included 500 entries from around the world. Winners were selected based on originality, innovation, functionality, aesthetics, performance and value. Each category includes one winner, two honorable mentions and one Editors’ Choice.
Romano’s design of the façade for Light/Station also received design awards last year in both the Commercial and Small Project categories from the Western New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects.Adaptively reusing an abandoned gas mart, Light/Station is a striking, 1,545-square-foot design studio, green room and conference facility for Buffalo-based Torn Space, a critically acclaimed, avant-garde theater company. Nestled in the shadows of historic buildings on Buffalo’s East Side, Light/Station is a signature addition to the city’s urban fabric.
The façade system is the result of a long-running partnership between the School of Architecture and Planning and Rigidized Metals, which manufactures deep-textured sheet metal panels for architectural applications.
With a thickness of only 3/64-inch, the paper-thin metal sheets feature tiny holes drilled strategically to capture or emit light, depending on the time of day. Romano and the Rigidized Metals team spent months experimenting with every aspect of the sheet metal, pushing boundaries with each iteration.
The team ran algorithms to generate the hole patterns that would be precision-cut into each piece of sheet metal, testing on smaller prototypes in order to get just the right size hole to allow light to pass through and create the desired effect.“We did everything we could to make cutting holes into metal the most magical experience ever,” says Romano, assistant professor of architecture who designed the façade through his firm Studio NORTH Architecture.
