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MIT Simmons HallIntroductionAchieving architect Steven Holl's design for the wood ceilings at MIT Simmons Hall was a difficult and complex effort. It evoked a new level of Engineered-To-Order manufacturing performance from WoodCeilings as well as the installation capabilities of Environmental Interiors, Inc.
Design PhaseOne of the leading scientific campuses in the nation, MIT, in a drive to host world-class architecture, has over $1Billion dollars in capital funds currently under construction. Steven Holl, one of the leading organic-form architects in the nation, was commissioned to design an undergraduate dormitory that would help realize this ambition. The unusual building does make an architectural statement. In Holl's own vocabulary, that statement is "screen, net, aperture, passageway, sieve, unrestricted, honeycomb, riddle, sponge, opening, hole, cribriformity, pervious." (We could not find the exact definition of cribriformity). Highlighted on the May 2003 Cover article of Architectural Record, Holl's design focused on, as he called it, an "experiment in permeability". |
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True to his design intent, this "porous building morphology" was brought to bear everywhere, including the ceiling elements. WoodCeilings was contacted because Mr. Holl chose wood to develop the public space ceilings and needed the services of one of the leading Engineered-To-Order wood ceiling manufacturers in the nation. "Wood was chosen because it maintained the natural material to fit the organic "sponge" metaphor intended for the building," says associate architect Ziad Jamaleddine. |
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Engineering PhaseWorking with the architect and the installation subcontractor, Environmental Interiors, the project requirements boiled down to the following elements:
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Torsion Spring Suspension: Downward access was proposed because accessibility to cable trays and fixtures was needed without giving up valuable ceiling height. Conventional torsion springs rely on slotted T-Bar grid. It works great with lightweight metal panels, which need 4 corner springs only. But the WoodCeilings' 2' x 8' wood panels that the S.H.A. design team envisioned were much heavier, requiring 10 springs per standard panel. Getting the springs into and out of the slotted T-Bar became an awkward challenge for both installation and maintenance, particularly the middle springs. Much blood was spilled (literally) during testing. WoodCeilings' solution was to design and engineer an entirely new type of T-Bar, dubbed the Butterfly Notch T-Bar grid (now patent pending). The notches allowed the springs to release laterally instead of forced obstinately down through the T-Bar slots. As WoodCeilings' project engineer Dan Boustead recalls, "We knew that the MIT maintenance department wanted to drastically reduce the panel size to make them more manageable. The Butterfly Grid solution saved the design intent and satisfied the maintenance team." |
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Create a 60-30 perforation pattern: The architect's chosen perforation pattern contained over 4600 holes per 2x8 panel. In the end, the project required over 10,000,000 drilled holes. To accomplish this monumental task, a special pair of drilling heads were individually engineered and fabricated in Germany for WoodCeilings' CNC Router. In addition, to maintain structural integrity in the panel, stiffener bars were needed. The problem encountered was that the huge number of holes in the panel made screwing down a stiffener bar impossible. There simply was not enough core left to locate a screw without blowing out a perforation. The solution? Use a mechanical fastener to anchor the stiffener bars to the inside of the perforations. Achieving sound absorption seemed straightforward. Typically an acoustic non-woven scrim is placed behind perforations on the backside of the panels, which provides an inexpensive but satisfactory Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC). But this did not pass strict smoke dampening restrictions for the college dorm. Finally, after months of effort, a solution was reached using a black acoustic tile, which provided some acoustic absorption while meeting life safety restrictions. |
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Maintain a 1" non-perforated border: Words fail to describe the building's huge air return atriums, which pierce through dorm floors right up through the building. These are multi-dimensional, multi-story Freeform stud and plaster shaped atriums. They resemble, for lack of a better word, climbing walls. Not only do they go up through the building, these circular shaped walls burst into the dorm corridors at various locations. The design intent called for maintaining the 1" non-perforated borders. WoodCeilings knew theoretically that the CNC boring machines could be programmed to make custom perforated patterns. The question was how to import the actual drywall As-Built information into the AutoCAD computer data that drive the CNC machine programming.
Carefully scribing hand templates is the traditional solution. So WoodCeilings' Engineering department went to work to test the possibility of scanning paper outlines traced from wood templates. These scanned images in turn were converted into computer graphics. It worked. But it became painfully obvious that the cost of making all these templates (271 conditions), including precisely indexing them to the building grid within a short field dimension window, prohibited this solution. |
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It was back to the drawing board. Again WoodCeilings Engineering department went to work on an old fashioned solution using a device called a Contour Gauge. Using aluminum rods like multiple feeler gauges, it created a profile of the Freeform wall from which a paper template could be drawn. This Field Transfer Device worked in 30% of the wall conditions. But unfortunately it was discovered through more mock-up testing that when the wall curves became too acute, the rods could not reach far enough to create a profile of the wall. Eventually the architect agreed that the reveal at the perimeter should be enlarged to ¾". This allowed the project team to go back to the original concept of using a survey laser theodolite to acquire the wall profile electronically. The process was dubbed a 3-D Survey Control Method. It entailed: |
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Fabrication Phase
Production also faced its own fabrication hurdles. Besides the custom nature of the Freeform panels, creating and maintaining a real time panel database for the project became critical. Combining the power of Excel spreadsheet and AutoCAD drawings, it became possible to map each panel on the Shop Drawings and in a Database. This converted to a physical bar code label that was used to track all 2417 panels in the project. This panel database became the key to the project, as the entire building construction fell behind schedule. The owner asked the project team if they could focus production and installation on the critical MEP Panels throughout the building in order to obtain a COO in time for the incoming students. For a 3-month period a daily critical path analysis was required to expedite these key panels as field dimensions became available. This database also played a significant role in managing Change Control for the entire Project Team. Though not specified for the project, the database proved so powerful, the owner requested a copy for future maintenance use. Another complex aspect of the project surrounded the specified 1/8" reveal between panels. To accommodate this tiny reveal, fabrication tolerances were required to be ± 1/64" (0.016"). This tolerance is virtually unheard of in the architectural millwork industry. The solution? CNC machinery, of course. But good old-fashioned jig building was also required. WoodCeilings designed and fabricated special parallelogram benches, dubbed Centering Jigs, to split dimensional variations to more accurately assemble the torsion springs on the panels.
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Installation Phase
Design, engineering, fabrication . . . now it was Environmental Interiors installation team's turn to face its own hurdles. Because the location of the Butterfly Notched T-Bar set the location of the panel precisely, installing and locating the T-Bar grid to a very tight tolerance was critical. This was not a simple task, as Bill Crawford EII's Project Executive recalls, "The layout of the grid from the centerline of each corridor, some of which were 300 feet long, was critical because the perimeter reveal had to be maintained along all walls. This also determined the wood ceiling panel sizes for each area since field trimming of the panels was not an option." Logistics was another test for Environmental Interiors. Locating the many one-off panels became an administration challenge, made especially difficult because the building's "porosity" created towers on the upper stories, which rendered full access across an entire floor impossible. In addition, because the building was a dormitory, service elevators were not part of the design. And of course, the panels were just large enough NOT to fit the elevators. Scheduling the use of external elevators and huge knuckle trucks to insert the crates through windows even on the 10th floor became essential. |
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| Ceiling at Lobby - Click to Zoom |
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| Freeform Ceiling - Click to Zoom |
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