The detail being studied is taken from the overhang at the entrance of The New Art Museum by SANAA architects (Figure 1). The concept behind the building was to create shifting boxes which fit in and reflect the New York cityscape where it is located. From a distance, the building is seen to be clean and monochrome, and fits in well with the cityscape, but upon closer inspection, it is made up of a more industrial continuous mesh facade. This can be seen as a metaphor for the New York cityscape in general.

The building’s facade is made up of an anodized expanded aluminium mesh bolted directly to aluminum panelled walls (Figure 4). Aluminum was chosen due to its light weight and cost efficiency. This aluminum mesh skin wraps the entire building, softening its edges and hiding the windows throughout the day. This was meant to allow the building to melt into its surroundings and increase its sense of transparency and lightness. The mesh panels themselves are made to a standard size to reduce costs, each 4’ long with 6 diamond shapes of width. The separate panels are overlapped at the centre of the diamond shape to hide the joints and allow for the appearance of a continuous wall. The clips which attach the aluminum mesh to the interior aluminum panels are steel, which may cause problems in the future due to being a different metal. However, they are strong supports, and are made at an angle in relation to the angled diamond shapes of the mesh panels, which allows them to remain hidden out of view, also contributing to the continuous look of the facade.

The expanded aluminium mesh on the facade is a material usually used for fencing, but SANAA was able to demonstrate a new way to use this material as a continuous skin for a building. Their research into this detail is not yet perfect, as the joints at the corner of the building are not continuous, and they are criticized for the interior look of the mesh through the windows. However, this use of aluminum mesh may be, and has been, re-fabricated and customized into other similar building facades. It is a good precedent to see how a non-traditional material can be used for aesthetic and building purposes as a skin on a facade. 



In order to demonstrate transparency to the outside world, the main entrance of the New Art Museum has a large glass wall, and continues the exterior concrete sidewalk into the interior (Figure 1). This entrance includes a small overhang of the building above. Unlike other overhangs present in the building, which simply use white panels to close off the overhang’s bottom, this one is more visible to passerby, and is more detailed to accommodate this. The bottom of the overhang is covered by a small metal mesh which turns up to seamlessly hide behind where the aluminum mesh panels of the wall’s facade hang down (Figure 3). The use of a mesh below the overhang allows for the continuous feeling of the building’s facade to remain unbroken to people walking under.

This overhang mesh detail also imitates the building’s interior skylights, which are one of the main natural light sources inside of the building, created in the spaces between the shifting box shapes. By putting lights behind the overhang’s mesh where the structure is, the overhang shines down light at night, just like the actual skylights which shine in the interior (Figure 2). This also enforces the concept of transparency and connection between interior and exterior.

Chanel Wase

Project 2B - Tectonic and Material Design, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Metal Mesh Facade

The assignment objective is to develop in the students the primary ingredients of design, innovation and entrepreneurship required for the architectural and construction industries. The professional scope of the Architect is changing dramatically in the 21st century. In the future, Architect’s ideas will permeate the fabrication process in its entirety. A new relationship is being established between the Architect’s traditional responses towards advanced construction in terms of tectonics and materiality.

The facade detail of the New Art Museum by SANAA architects has been greatly studied for the completion of this assignment. The concept behind the building was to create shifting boxes which fit in and reflect the New York cityscape where it is located. From a distance, the building is seen to be clean and monochrome, and fits in well with the cityscape, but upon closer inspection, it is made up of a more industrial continuous mesh facade. This can be seen as a metaphor of the New York cityscape in general.

The expanded aluminium mesh on the facade skin wraps the entire building, softening its edges and hiding the windows throughout the day. This was meant to allow the building to melt into its surroundings and increase its sense of transparency and lightness, as well as give it a sense of blurred lines and edges. The use of aluminum panels behind the mesh also give a shallow depth and clean look to the facade.

Upon studying this detail, one of the main critiques which can be found is the fact that the facade is not actually as continuous as it is meant to appear. For example, at the corners of the building, the mesh skin does not join together, and at the bottom of the overhangs, a completely different mesh is used. Perhaps due to the budget, or because “the quality of craftsmanship in New York is known to be substandard” the building is not as detailed as it could have been in some specific areas (Ouroussoff 2007). The interior look of the mesh through the windows is also criticized, as it does not act as a true shading device, and has a very cold look to it. “Seen from outside, the strip windows there emit a blurred glow through the mesh. But from within, the metal creates a dispiritingly correctional effect: inmates look through the grate at a skyline partitioned into little diamonds” (Davidson 2001).

The most critical detail of this building is, of course, the mesh skin. However, it can also be considered as one of the main issues with the facade of the building. When looking into this detail, it can be considered that perhaps a certain change in materiality and nature may fix many of the issues noted above, while still remaining true to the nature of the building and its design concept.

The new proposed detail offers a look at the use of a metal fabric, as opposed to the expanded aluminium mesh. Metal fabric involves small strips or wires of metal which are weaved into a kind of fabric mesh. There is a wide diversity of mesh weave types, and a very wide range of colour options, allowing for expansive design possibilities and mass-customization.

For this new detail, the fabric could be made of an aluminum metal mesh fabric, with connections of the same metal, in order to relate to the aluminum side panels beneath. The mesh is quite small, so it acts as a much better light filter than the New Art Museum’s current large expanded aluminium mesh, while still allowing in a good amount of filtered incident light. The metal fabric also gives the exterior of the building a very monolithic feel, just like the current expanded mesh, but it is very transparent when viewed straight on from inside the building’s windows. This eradicates the “dispiritingly correctional effect” of the use of expanded aluminum panels over the windows, and instead allows for a very good view straight through the glass, while still hiding the interior when looking from the exterior.