Working with and pushing the design boundaries of metal architecture
Architect Jason A. Silva, AIA, owns a 3,000-squarefoot warehouse full of nothing but cardboard. That’s because he started a group called SacDigiFab based around sharing digital fabrication concepts and rapid prototyping with corrugated cardboard full-size mockups. Working with architecture students and other designers on designs directly transferable to metal forming, he’s completed multiple installations including two architecture pavilions over the past two years.
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SacDigiFab retires the archaic practice of selecting standard components from catalogs and replaces it with today’s robotic fabrication methods. With it, full-sized structures can be created directly from 3-D computer models. Combining technology and creativity, architects and designers can generate amazing functional spaces that were previously unimaginable. And Silva-a self-professed champion of this parametric design and digital fabrication-is convinced that metal is the perfect material for this “flat stock conversion.”
“The ability of software to unfold something and have it cut out of metal makes it a perfect material,” he says. “It turns your designs into anything you can dream up.”
Always an architect
Silva always knew he wanted to be an architect. He started designing buildings and furniture in elementary school. After building a redwood deck with his father in junior high school, he started designing and building projects that became larger and larger over the years. Before finishing high school, he had completed a dozen deck and trellis projects. In the first few years of college, he spent summers designing and building garages and a small cabin. He studied at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Calif., where he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree and spent a year of that time at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Consortium in Alexandria, Va., an extension of Virginia Tech.
“Early in college, I was asked to design and assist in the construction of shade structures for the historic Old Sacramento riverfront boardwalk,” Silva says. “With this commission, I designed custom steel-timber frame connections that had an innovative design of the post base that preserved the boardwalk structure.”
Partner and principal
Silva is now a partner and design principal at Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects, a Sacramento, Calif., design studio specializing in environmentally sensitive, transformational projects through innovation and creative problem solving. Focusing on higher education and arts-related clients, he’s dedicated to the integration of new technologies, and has overseen the design and construction of projects throughout northern California. It was here where he first experienced metal’s mettle. “While I tinkered with brake metal in college, it wasn’t until I joined Dreyfuss
& Blackford that I learned the art of façade system design,” Silva says. “Over the years, working with some of the best builders and fabricators, I would always challenge the status-quo. I would often ask, ‘How can we make this better?'”
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Metal is Silva’s favorite material and he’s always looking for ways to leverage its best properties. His desk is cluttered with origami forms that he is waiting to incorporate into projects. “I’ve worked with aluminum composite materials, aluminum plate, zinc and custom extruded aluminum,” he says. “I think metal is a material we have just scratched the surface of its potential. It is economical and because it can be recycled, it can be environmental. The wave of digital fabrication technology is opening doors to design solutions that we could only dream about in the past. We’re reaching a point where if you can fold it with paper, a robot can fold it in metal. But, while progress comes from the crazy ideas, it takes knowledge and understanding of the material and processes to make something real and make it viable.”
Projects
One of Silva’s favorite metal-related projects is the Academic Information Resource Center at Sacramento State. It has a façade that uses a rout-andreturn panel captured in a perimeter aluminum extrusion. “The system gutters the horizontally oriented panels down each of the discontinuous verticals,” he says. “The pressure-equalized cavity wall system was built with no sheathing. The vapor barrier was installed by the subcontractor directly over the metal studs. It’s important to have the façade entirely under one subcontractor.” This project won the Best Practices Award in HVAC Design for its underfloor air distribution system. The award was given by the Green Building Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which studies buildings on University of California and California State University system campuses.
Silva’s work on the University of California, Davis Medical Center parking structure in Sacramento, Calif., won a 2013 Metal Architecture Design Awards Judges Award and was a finalist in the international Architizer A+ Awards category for Parking Structures. Judges parked their praise on it saying, “It takes a mundane program and turns it into something interesting” and “a pretty amazing façade concept.”
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“Our goal as a design element was to create a simple, unified form that obscures the parking structure while focusing on something you can’t define,” says Silva. “Metal was important because it allowed us to affect this large projected curved surface away from the parking structure. The structure moves as you move past it; as light bounces off of it. The beauty behind it is the sun bounces off it and it twinkles all over the place. It’s an active thing.”
Layout for the parking garage’s nearly 4,000 louvers leveraged parametric modeling to produce layouts of all the different mounting angles for a CNC laser. Traditionally this would have been done by hand, but with the computer, the design and fabrication process is directly connected. “If we have to do a change in the layout, we just edit it in the computer,” Silva says. “It’s infinitely more flexible, but also infinitely more precise. We’re able to get the precision you get with the assembly of machinery, like working on an automobile. It’s not like the arduous process of mockups trying to fit parts together like the way they built cars in the past. Once fabricated, the parts go together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
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Arch Connect
What is the best advice you ever received as an architect?
Don’t compromise.
What’s on your iPod while you work?
Podcasts: 99% Invisible, Radiolab Music: Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Future Islands, Patrick Watson, Department of Eagles
What do you do on weekends?
I have a seven-year-old son and he has the same interests as me. We actually spend a lot of time building and fabricating things.
What is your favorite book?
My short attention span makes reading unenjoyable. I read a lot, but I don’t read books.
Where is your favorite place to vacation?
Carmel, Calif.
What historical figure would you most like to have dinner with and why?
Salvador Dali. I thrive on non-sequitur and koan.
To future architects, what advice would you give?
Maintain authorship of your work and do not relinquish responsibility to reduce risk.