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Eco-Innovation through Collaboration
The DesignWorks event peaks with a backstory look at three astonishing and sustainable installations led by Ruben Suare, Vice President of the Architectural Division of 3form. No one is better equipped to communicate the drama of designing and engineering with today’s plastics. Ruben’s company manufactures design-driven materials from a translucent resin that has been transformed worldwide into walls, panels, furniture and architectural solutions that are also environmentally kind. A trained architect and winner of numerous design awards, Ruben takes the audience behind the scenes of innovative, high-profile projects in which plastics provided a sustainable solution. Collaboration was key to driving the designer’s vision to an eco-friendly outcome in each project.
Ruben worked closely with BMS to develop material for a 60’ x 30’ facade on Sunset Boulevard that called for translucent metallic panels forming a continuous, twisting ribbon surface. Ruben documents the design and sustainability challenges in developing material that would optimize color, light transmission and diffusion properties and withstand the elements inherent in an exterior installation. Through a series of remarkable photographs, the resulting custom-tinted Makrolon¨ polycarbonate is formed and fabricated before our eyes to achieve the authentic appearance of translucent metal. A prototype of the solution is on exhibit in the Design Gallery at the DesignWorks event.
Repeating geometries constituted the material challenge in creating the oval double iWall at the Fidelity Finance Center. Requirements for the media heavy project included digitally-printed, backlit compound curved panels that reveal no hardware. Ruben illustrates the Vivak® thermoplastic solution, a recyclable material choice that allowed panels to be formed to complex geometries, digital images to be embedded and hardware to be back tapped for unseen support. The Fidelity installation is fascinating from material selection through finished product as seen from outside and from within its concentric walls. A prototype of the backtapped panel is on exhibit in the Design Gallery at the DesignWorks event.
Finally, Ruben previews the renovation of the Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center, an installation that represents material innovation on a grand scale. The design intent and acoustic requirements of the concert hall’s interior wall system called for thick translucent wood sequenced in graceful undulations throughout. Research and development collaboration resulted in an entirely new material application in which real wood panels are embedded in highly formable Vivak® thermoplastic sheet to achieve a translucent wood aesthetic. Ruben demonstrates the intimacy that can be achieved through illuminating the material with a presentation that casts a succession of lighting effects on a prototype encased in thermoplastic sheet.
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