Mexican Marvel

by Mark Robins | June 3, 2019 12:00 am

FEMAP Nursing School is centered in a Juarez area desolated and impoverished by crime and lack of public investment. The 48,500-square-foot, five-story building houses nine classrooms, seven laboratories, computer lab, library, a 250-seat auditorium, cafeteria, teachers’ lounge, a multiuse hall, administrative offices and an elevated plaza/roof garden. It’s the second of a series of projects on the FEMAP-planned campus. Designed to be a positive catalyst for its surrounding environment, this nonprofit entity aims to transform thousands of students’ lives, their families and the community. Juarez-based GRUPO ARKHOS[1] served as its architect, general contractor and metal installer. The firm gave the project a contemporary, innovative look with urban-scaled textures and geometry.

A KALEIDOSCOPIC EFFECT

The school’s most prominent building component is its faceted façade. The façade creates a kaleidoscopic effect, as light and shadows constantly change during the day and night as light strikes its sharp, urban-sized texture and volumes. A green wall and rooftop garden transform into a living mural blended onto the project. “Every time you walk by the school, you perceive it differently; the project is ever changing,” says Ruben Escobar-Urrutia, LEED AP, BD+C, principal architect, GRUPO ARKHOS.

Low maintenance, excellent color and gloss retention, and durability were characteristics needed for the building’s façade. Because of this, Escobar-Urrutia says Reynobond aluminum composite material (ACM) by Arconic Architectural Products LLC, Eastman, Ga., was the natural choice. “We used 55,000 square feet of Reynobond Colorweld 500 in Konig Blue, Copper Penny, Silversmith and Pewter. Paint finishes feature 70 percent Kynar 500/Hylar 5000 polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) resins. The panel used was 4-mm thick. We wanted a tasellated geometry. The ACM allowed us to fabricate a 3-D texture with crisp edges and bright surfaces; the walls from the building were covered as a rainscreen creating a ventilated façade.”

The school was modulated with the dimension of the 3-D panels, so the 3-D screen could be fabricated using one standard sized ACM sheet, cut in four pieces, to create the pyramids when folded. “Being in control of the process from conception through construction documents, and later during the construction process as the general contractor and ACM installer, gave us the advantage to make decisions regarding design and dimensioning of the aluminum panels, so there was little or no leftover or waste,” Escobar-Urrutia says. “The ACM pieces were fabricated with a recessed joint and an overlap among them, so the bolts are concealed from the inside out; neither bolts nor silicone seals are visible.”

The pyramids are fastened to the structure 6 inches from the wall. This cavity plus the air volume at the back of the pyramid create an extra layer of insulation. The sun never hits the inner wall, which is waterproofed and insulated. On the bottom of the 3-D texture there is a metal grille, which allows fresh air to enter, and on the top of the wall, concealed by the vegetation of the roof garden, there are operable grilles that ventilate the inner cavity of the wall during the summer. This allows natural ventilation by convection of the hot air that is generated on the inner face of the ACM pyramids.

SCREEN SHAPE

For the 3-D metal screen, GRUPO ARKOS explored materials with different textures, experimented with origami shapes and patterns, and came out with a particular shape: a rectangular-shaped pyramid, which does not have its apex on the center, but is shifted toward one side. The base is a trapezoid. This pyramid, when it is aligned alternately horizontally (one to the right and one to the left) creates the complex 3-D texture with different sized triangles.

To build the 3-D texture, the cut-and-router drill trace of the pyramids on the ACM sheets had to fit on one quarter of a standard size ACM sheet from Reynobond. “We designed the cutting pattern, and later scaled it so that it fit on a quarter of the ACM sheet, so there was zero waste, because the small triangle cutout needed to create the pyramid when joining the four sides of it was used on the back of the pyramid,” Escobar-Urrutia says. “[Once] we had a pyramid-shaped, 3-D texture, all we needed next was a structure to fasten the individual pieces. That’s where being the architect and builder comes in handy. The distance between columns on the library was spaced to 7 feet, 9 1/2 inches apart, instead of a more logical 8 feet on axis. This small difference, 2 1/2 inches, allowed us to fabricate four whole pyramids out of a standard size ACM sheet instead of two, cutting considerably the cost, and the amount of material needed to create the 3-D texture. The double-pane, low-E glazing under the auditorium volume, covered with the 3-D pyramids, was fabricated to size anyway, and the [Pearl River, N.Y.-based] Hunter Douglas Architectural sunshade louvers were ordered to a specific length. So there were no disadvantages of not following a more traditional structural spacing.”

On the façade, a DMX controller programs the different color-changing schemes used throughout the year. Color changes slowly but constantly during regular days, and as a special theme on certain months, like pink during breast cancer awareness month, red and green during the holidays, and green, white and red on Independence Day.

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/mexican-marvel/

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