Norwich, East Anglia, England Norman Foster & Partners
The Sainsbury Centre probably represents the first prominent use of insulated cladding panels for a public institution. Its efficient shape and the adoption of industrial – quality building materials, not unlike those of the Boeing 737, have earned it the description of resembling something between a dirigible airship and a dirigible hangar. Wrapped into the building’s structural frame are the mechanical, utility, and service spaces along with a highly tuned daylighting system. Inside, the single-volume space brings together an art collection, a school of fine art, and an assortment of public spaces.
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TABLE 10.4 Fact Sheet
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Rectangular plan of 114.83-ft x 431.1 – ft (35-m x 131.4-m) for a 49,503-ft2 footprint. Subtracting the occupied 6.9-ft (2.1-m) perimeter structural zone leaves an interior clear room of 401.6ft x 95.1-ft (122.4-m x 29.0-m) equaling 38,192.2-ft2 (3,549.6m2). About 70% of the footprint is in the continuous central space. Total height is 32.8-ft (10.3-m) with a clear inside height of 24.0-ft (7.3-m).
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Continuous 9.8-ft (3.0-m) deep concrete strip footings with integral floor slab. |
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37 prismatic truss assemblies on 11,8-ft (3.6-m) centers made of welded steel tubes form supports measuring 5.9-ft (1.8-m) across the plan and 8.2-ft (2.5-m) deep. Wall trusses similar to the vertical members are bolted to the truss columns forming a portal frame. |
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Interchangeable insulated panels in curved and flat superplastic aluminum 0.06-in (1.5-mm) facing. Rigid foam insulation is 3.9-in (100-mm) thick. Overall heat transfer coefficient is 0.08 Btu/ft2 °F (0.47 W/m2 °С). Identical roof and wall cladding panels are 7.9-ft x 3.9-ft (2.4-m x 1.2-m). All panels fit in a continuous neoprene gasket grid incorporating an integral rain gutter in the profile. The gasket lattice was molded together on site from large prefabricated sections and has a total weight of over 14.8-tons (13.2-tonnes or 12,000-kg). |
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Forced air from 40 fan/coil units housed in truss wall thickness. Heat from campus central plant. No cooling is provided. High side-wall diffusers with long throw design. Usually mounted in sets of four per fan/coil unit. Fans discharge directly into space. Mechanical systems are housed in wall thickness. |
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Perforated aluminum shutter systems are fixed to inside of structural frame and backed with acoustically absorbing blanket. A deeper aluminum shutter system is used on the ceiling than on the walls and openings are left for High bay metal halide downlight fixtures. |
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Figure 10.12 Plan and section. |
Program
Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury described their interest in art as the “passionate acquisition” of works that appealed to them intuitively and sensually. They thought that the Centre for Visual Arts was the best way to convey their own appreciation and to promote the academic understanding of others. Norman Foster was commissioned to create a place where art could be experienced sensually in the course of daily life. Sainsbury was chosen because it was a new school whose scope and format could accommodate new ways of thinking about art education.
The Sainsbury’s art collection at that time consisted of about 500 works of drawing, painting, and sculpture from the late-nineteeth and twentieth-century periods of European art and a second group of antiques from Africa, Oceania, the Orient. and the pre-Columbian period. Most
of the objects are quite small, anthropomorphic, and constitute a selection based more on individual taste than rarity or cohesive inclusion.
The University of East Anglia’s (UEA) School of European Art Studies was founded in 1964 with a focus on European art and architecture. Acquisition of the Sainsbury collection greatly expanded the program’s scope and ambition. It was later renamed as the School of World Art and Museology.
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TABLE 10.5 Climate Data for Norwich, UK (compiled from several sources for nearby stations)
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The client’s initial brief was quite short. The Sainsburys wished for the art to be experienced in a casual fashion by everyone in the East Anglia program. The art collection would be shared between academic studies and public display in a “living room” environment. There would be a restaurant, a display area, and a library. In consultation with UEA, the program was extended to include a school of fine art, a faculty club, and a public restaurant. A site was selected for the project where a grassy field could be incorporated into the public aspect of the center along a 40-acre lake, or broad, that would be included in the project.
The University of East Anglia is located on the western edge of Norwich (population 300,000) in the east coast county of Norfolk, United Kingdom. The Yare River runs west of the campus, closest to the Sainsbury Centre site, flowing through the broadland lakes of East Anglia to the coast at Yarmouth.
The master plan for UEA was created by Sir Denys Lasdun in 1962 and developed through 1968. Lasdun is a Modernist in the mode of Le Corbusier’s Brutalism. The
Figure 10.13 Climate analysis graphics.
platformed concrete architecture of the campus reflects Lasdun’s views of buildings as strata of interlocking levels. He refers to the campus in this regard as a single entity: “University Town.” His row of “ziggurat” student residences, elevated walkways, and terraces lead directly into the Sainsbury Centre.
The Eastern Counties climate region of England includes Norwich and Ipswich on the coast and stretches inland to Cambridge, Northampton, and Milton Keynes. This area is separated to some degree from the moderating Gulf Stream maritime influences on the eastern half of the British Isles. Its winter climate in particular is subject to influence by cold air masses from the continent. Warmer air across the English Channel frequently provides enough energy and moisture to produce winter rain and snow in the British Eastern Counties.
Overall, Norwich is drier than most of England because of its west coast separation from the moisture – bearing Gulf Stream. Annually, there are 22 in. (550 mm) of precipitation in Norwich versus 24 in. (600 mm) in London, 32 in. (800 mm) in Brighton, and 40 in. (1000 mm) in easterly Cardiff and Plymouth. Parts of the west coast Cambrian Mountains, in comparison, receive more than 78 in. (2000 mm) per year.
Temperatures in Norwich seldom exceed 75°F, normally for fewer than 174 hours per year. Readings over 85°F are very rare, and the extreme high on record is 91°F. Using the summer design conditions at Hemsby (20 miles
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Dry-Bulb Temperature, °F Figure 10.14 Bin data distribution for Norwich. Concentric areas of graph indicate the number of hours per year that weather conditions normally occur in this climate. Similar to elevation readings on topographic maps, highest frequency occurrences of weather are at the center peaks of the graph. (Data sources: Engineering Weather Data, typical meteorological year (TMY) data from the National Climatic Data Center, and the ASHRAE Weather Data Viewer from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.) |
east of Norwich at 52.7N 1.7E, 46 ft) as a guide, the 69°F dry-bulb / 62°F wet-bulb condition is exceeded only 2 percent of the time, and 71 / 63 is exceeded only 1 percent of the time. The corresponding relative humidity for those conditions is a rather dry 60 to 63 percent. Weather is comfortable 7 percent of the time, cool 62 percent and below 45°F about 28 percent of the time. There are 5319 annual degree-days heating and fewer than 50 degree-days cooling.
Intention
Overlapping Norman Foster’s 1970-1975 work for the Willis Faber Dumas Insurance Headquarters (see case study #7), the office began a series of projects that opened the potential for translating industrial building systems into wider applications. The flexible IBM offices in Cosham (1971) and the Factory Systems Studies (1972) publication initiated this sequence. Projects for Olsen Ltd., VW/Audi (1972), the Retail/Leisure Research Studies (1973), and the Modern Art Glass facility in Thamesmead (1973) all foreshadow Sainsbury in different ways. Both IBM and the Retail/Leisure Studies portend the “clustering of uses usually found in different buildings” concept that is employed at Sainsbury.
Beginning in 1971, Foster established a working relationship with Richard Buckminster Fuller. This relationship lasted until Fuller’s death in 1983, only ten days after he personally delivered the address at Norman Foster’s award of the RIBA Gold Medal. Among their collaborations was the unbuilt 1978 design of a domed theme pavilion for Knoxville, Tennessee’s 1982 International Energy Expo, which was a refinement of Fuller’s dome at Montreal Expo 67 (see Chapter 8).
Foster admired Bucky Fuller’s ideals of ephemeraliza – tion. They fit well with his own social and ethical motives for architecture. When Fuller saw the Sainsbury Centre, for example, he asked Norman Foster for an evaluation based on the building’s total weight of construction.
As Foster developed the brief, he soon arrived at a solution that put the gallery, art school, seniors’ common, and restaurant functions all under one roof. This was more efficient than creating a cluster of smaller buildings and satisfied the Sainsburys’ desire for the collection to be available for casual viewing. By grouping everything together, the design would allow more opportunity for leisurely interaction. Foster also decided that a mechanically cooled building would suggest an institutional character that was unfriendly to a casual setting, so the building would rely on natural cooling strategies.
Critical Technical Issues
The display and lighting of art are the prime aspects of an art gallery. But these goals presuppose the security and protection of the collection. With art valued at more than £5 million, or about US$ 10 million in 1977, this is a serious concern. Making the collection available to the general public means securing it from theft and vandalism, from aging caused by humidity or ultraviolet degradation, and from accidental damage due to vagaries such as roof leaks.
The actual display and viewing enjoyment of art in the gallery required the design of lighting, display, storage, delivery, packaging, security systems, and inconspicuous visual monitoring of visitors. Provisions for gallery visi
tors, like the cafe, the information desk, and so forth, are a secondary overlay to the requirements of the art.
Lasdun’s master plan for the campus and its execution in raw massive concrete forms were formalistically adverse to Foster’s philosophy of lightweight ephemeralization. Options to site the Sainsbury closer to the campus entryway or in various other locations were all rejected because of interference with planned growth or similar objections. The situation chosen seemed the most appropriate to Foster and was reasoned out with Lasdun.
Putting all the program spaces under one roof introduces problems of separation between the functions: security, acoustics, privacy, scheduling, and so forth. This makes circulation and separation within a single volume multiuse space quite difficult. It also raises issues about flexible space versus differentiated space. Foster’s choice of a large open plan, adaptable to any number of purposes, had to prove satisfactorily better than a compartmented series of differentiated spaces optimized for specific uses.
A low-energy solution that would forsake mechanical cooling would also be a challenge, even in Norwich’s cool climate. High humidity and high temperature levels accelerate the material degradation of art objects and also play a role in photodegradation via ultraviolet light. Lighting for museum viewing and art study, on the other hand, must provide task-level illumination on the order of 50 footcandles (540 lux) with excellent color rendering. Natural cooling with outdoor air ventilation would have to be able to offset not only the envelope heat gains from temperature and solar impacts, but also the internal heat gain from people, lights, and equipment.
Appropriate Systems
Members of the design team explored functional precedents on extensive visits, accompanied by the Sainsburys, to several museums:
• The Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, by J0rgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, 1956-1958—A modern Danish art collection based in a villa on the coast and expanded with several pavilions and connecting glass corridors. The facility was expanded in 1966 and again in 1971. It houses modern art by international artists such as Arp, Francis Bacon, Calder, Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Sam Francis, Giacometti, Kiefer, Henry
Moore, Picasso, Rauschenberg, and Warhol. This museum was appreciated for its response to its natural surroundings. Created by private art collector, Knud W. Jensen, it is in a beautiful setting overlooking the Sound, a few kilometers south of Elsinore and Kronborg, Denmark.
• Alvar Aalto’s Nordjyllands Museum, Aalborg, 1958, 1968-1972 — Designed by Elissa and Alvar Aalto with Jean-Jacques Baruel, built between 1968 and 1972. This is a 19,685 ft2 (6000 m2) toplit museum on a site similar to Sainsbury’s, adjoining a large wooded area and set on a ziggurat-terraced landscape. It has a mobile partition wall system for flexibility.
• Berlin New National Gallery, Mies van der Rohe, 1962-1968—Mies’s glass box pavilion, 166 ft (50.6 m) square in plan with a 213 ft (65.0 m) dimension overhanging roof. The 27,000 ft2 (2507 m2) upper level is one great room walled in glass and spanned by the world’s first rigid plate roof constructed over 6 ft deep web girders at 12 ft on center. Large-scale sculptures occupy the outside terraces. The lower-level gallery has one glass wall looking out to a sculpture court.
These precedents established several influences on the design:
• Daylighting strategy with tunable toplighting
• Flexibility for growth and adaptive use
• Useable storage space
• Security with a minimum number of docents
• Service of infrastructure and lighting without disruption to exhibits
• Sociable atmosphere
• Coordination of furniture and display elements with building design
The building is sited at the southeast end of the campus. For a public space, it is in a remote corner location, far from parking or other public amenities of the university. It makes for a very long procession from the bus stop to the Sainsbury Centre. The saving grace is the luscious open field and neighboring trees and, of course, the new lake. Its placement gives the impression that the site was reserved for this building long ago. Sitting to one side, the Sainsbury respects an open vista in the center of the campus that captures the new broad. Nestled against the tree line, the building mass terminates the long axis of the science classrooms on one side and claims its private garden
on the other. Entering the building from the campus terraces above, a level bridge conducts visitors above the street and into the midlevel at a 45 degree angle to the plan. A spiral stair winds down to the reception area. The bridge is narrow and low-key; the entryway and reception area are scaled to be friendly, and the cafe is right there to provide a domestic greeting. Walk-up entry at street level is through a door below the bridge. The art school has its own doors farther up the same campus side elevation.
With so much roof glazing, the building’s solar exposure is horizontal and wall orientation is less important. Foster pushed the footprint back against the open end of the campus, preserving and capturing all available green space to the southeast. This also affords the best view from the special exhibits area toward the broad, rather than back at the residences had the long axis of the Sainsbury faced south. If there is an environmental angle to the orientation, it must be aerodynamic. The prevailing summer breezes in Norwich hail from the west to southwest and stream directly onto the long axis of the building.
Service access to the basement storage and workshop comes from the other side of the campus. A drive veers off toward the building and burrows down unseen below the sculpture terrace outside the restaurant. All loading and unloading of artwork happens securely and unnoticed in the basement.
There are 37 sets of triangular steel tube trusses spanning the 113 ft (34.4 m) width of the building. They provide a clear inside height of 24.6 ft (7.5 m) and rest on lattice columns. Both truss and column have their flat base supporting the envelope and their pointed ends facing the interior. Both members measure 8.2 ft (2.5 m) deep by 5.9 ft (1.8 m) across. Substantial camber is introduced to the roof span by use of lower chord members that are shorter than the upper cords. A two-pin connection of the trusses is made with bolted connections where the outside vertical tubes meet the top two horizontal tubes. At the end walls all three points of the trusses are bolted together to protect the full-height glass from lateral motion.
Prefabricated columns were delivered to the site in one piece, and the trusses arrived in two sections. Trusses are pin-connected at their top two points to the columns except at the end condition. Glass walls at both ends of the building require those two bays to have pin connections at all three truss-to-column points. This provides the stiffness of a rigid frame that is needed to prevent distortion of the glazing mullions.
The concrete foundation consists of a 9.8 ft (3 m) deep continuous perimeter beam. There is also a narrow but full-length basement connected by an underground service drive to the street north of the building.
The void of the tubular structural system frames a doublelayer envelope for the long walls and roof of the building. The exterior side is clad with an interchangeable system of panels 6.9 ft wide X 3.9 ft high (2.4 m X 1.2 m). Solid aluminum, fiberglass-glazed, and aluminum louvered options are mounted in a continuous neoprene gasket and secured with six bolts each. Although all of the panels are interchangeable, the general scheme is laid out with four long rows of mostly continuous skylights down the long axis of the roof. The curved eaves are transparent where they match the skylight pattern. Transparent fiberglass panels are also used on sections of the south wall to display the mechanical units and announce the ground-level doorways.
Interior claddings consist of perforated aluminum louvers. The ceiling panels are automatically adjusted to regulate daylight. The wall panels are backed with a fibrous acoustical blanket for noise and reverberation control. Both walls and ceilings are painted white.
Between the exterior and interior layers, within the structural thickness of the frame, is a continuous service zone. The wall contains offices, toilets, and storage at the ground and mezzanine levels, with mechanical systems and more storage interspersed above. The 9.8 ft (3 m) thick ceiling zone is webbed with a walkway used for adjusting illumination.
Daylight is diffused by photosensor-controlled louvers under the horizontal skylights, through the structural frame, and, finally, through the adjustable ceiling louvers. The two sets of louvers are set at right angles to each other, with the skylight controls running across the plan and the ceiling louvers reinforcing the line of the long room. This crisscrossing lattice creates a fine mesh and thus prevents direct glare much more effectively than parallel louvers would have. Ambient supplemental light is supplied by high-voltage track light fixtures, and display lighting by low-voltage fittings. The lower ceiling louvers are spaced in long rows, and artificial sources are mounted in the open gaps between them. All of the display lighting is provided from this level. Although it is less energy-efficient to light the art from 15 ft above than at the display, this ceiling-mounted strategy keeps much of the heat of light up high in the space where it can be exhausted before affecting room temperatures.
Glass walls measuring 98.4 ft X 24.6 ft (30 m X 7.5 m) fill both ends of the long building. The glazing rests in steel channels anchored to the floor slab. The glass lites measure a full 8.0 ft X 24.6 ft (7.5 m X 2.4 m) and are joined by structural silicone sealant. Full-height reinforcing glass fins, like those at the Willis Faber Dumas Headquarters (see case study #7), are set perpendicular to each joint on the interior for wind bracing.
Insulation in the aluminum-clad envelope panels is rated at R-12 or u = 0.08 Btu/ft2 °F (0.47 W/m2 °C). The panels are also light reflective to keep sunlit surface temperatures, and therefore heat gain, more managable.
Roof drains, downspouts, and leader lines have all been eliminated by the neoprene gasket system behind the envelope panels. Its profile incorporates a small gutter, and the entire assembly makes a distributed drainage system. At the base of the building is a continuous rain gutter to carry away the water shed from the building skin.
The technically inventive contribution of the Sainsbury Centre comes in the form of a reinvented wall as a layering interpretation of both served and servant spaces and interior to exterior environments. Instead of using a thin-leaf wall with finished surfaces on either side and pipes and wires in the middle, Foster fills the 6.9 ft (2.1 m) thick
structural frame with occupied and mechanical servant spaces. Fan/coil units, darkrooms, offices, storage, toilets — everything not contributing to the public use of the daylit gallery is swept away to the interstitial wall. This emancipates the grand central space for open circulation, daylighting, and shared volume. The entire structural frame is engaged in this scheme. Ground-level spaces serve private occupancy needs and storage. Two intermediate wall levels are primarily mechanical. The ceiling-roof space is the moderator of light, both natural and artificial.
With the envelope strategy geared to minimizing cooling loads, HVAC systems are limited to heating and ventilation. Heat is distributed to the building from a campus central plant in the form of high-temperature water. Ventilation is supplied directly through grilled panels of the envelope, and air is discharged into occupied spaces via long-throw sidewall diffusers. In all, there are 40 fan/coil units housed in the upper three levels of the south wall. Ducts do not penetrate beyond the service wall. Additional exhaust ventilation is provided for kitchens, toilets, darkrooms, and basement areas.
From end to end, the central interior space is divided into seven areas surrounded by the thick service core wall. Each of these can be described as bays of the structural grid, of 11.8 ft (3.6 m), between truss centers. At the southeast gable is a four-bay special exhibits area, followed by a four – bay entryway and service desk adjoining the cafe. Next is the eleven-bay collections gallery, followed by a four-bay mezzanine with reserved study space fronting the gallery and art school offices facing the opposite direction on the lower level, and more exhibit/study space above. Beyond are the four-bay art school and another four-bay mezzanine with more offices facing into the art school area, a kitchen facing away, and the faculty club above. Finally, there is the restaurant dining area on the northwest end. A one-bay-deep covered terrace is recessed under each end of the long roof. Roughly one-third of the floor space (15 of 45 total bay widths) is dedicated to exhibits.
Every public area except the restaurant and the mezzanines are skylit by four double rows of translucent roof panels and a continuous translucent eave of one curved and one flat wall panel. There are 32 panels across the roof, so it is effectively 25 percent glazed above these areas. Counting the wall and eave panels, the enclosure is 46 panels across sill to roof to sill and 12 panels are glazed in the daylight critical rooms. In addition, where the south elevation is fitted with doorways at the art school and main entry, the wall is covered in translucent panels up to the curved eave. All of these panels are subject to being rearranged, but this is the original scheme.
Mechanical spaces are meshed within the structural frame, liberating the open plan.
Mezzanines divide the space functionally without imposing on openness.
Natural surroundings provide a public setting for outdoor sculpture.
Mechanical systems are exposed on the south elevation.
The structural frame is exposed at both sculpture terraces.
The envelope, roof structure, and interior louvers work together to daylight the space.
Interchangeable envelope panels enhance the flexibility of use.
Ceiling-level catwalks negate the need for scaffolding and ladders in the gallery.
Interstitial wall spaces and removable exterior wall panels eliminate the need to work on mechanical or electrical equipment from the interior.
Sidewall discharge of heating and ventilation air across both sides of the open space eliminates the need for ducts.
High ceilings combine good daylighting with the ability to display large works of art. They also promote stratification of warm air to be exhausted and replaced with outdoor air.
A neoprene gasket lattice behind the panel system incorporates small rain gutters.
When Fuller asked Foster to produce calculations on the total weight of the Sainsbury wing, the results proved that the basement accounted for 80 percent of its weight and 30 percent or so of its budget. More significant, the building reportedly weighs less per square foot than a Boeing 737. For High Tech buildings, weight, cost, and benefit ratios are interesting metrics. Lightweight, inexpensive, and interchangeable materials, in this case, are providing much of the benefit with a lower share of resources. More with less.