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Common Sky
Common Sky
Buffalo, NY, United States
Finalist, 2024 A+Awards, Concepts - Architecture +Art
Project Featured on Sep 20, 2024
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Common Sky
Buffalo, NY, United States
Finalist, 2024 A+Awards, Concepts - Architecture +Art
Project Featured on Sep 20, 2024
Firm
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2023
Studio Other Spaces (SOS) – led by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann – designed Common Sky, a canopy of glass and mirrors that envelops the courtyard of the Seymour H. Knox Building. Both a sculpture and an architectural structure, Common Sky provides a space that is free and open to the public, and that reflects the museum’s vision of a twenty-first-century art institution of inclusion.
Common Sky is a celebration of the sky as common. The glass roof acts as a lens, inviting people to connect with their immediate environment and bringing into focus the ephemeral qualities of the atmosphere: the changing seasons, the dappled light, and the cloud formations. The alternating mirror and transparent glass panels emphasize physical movement as a means to shape space, making visitors visible within the work and prompting them to co-create fragmented inward and outward perspectives. The various angles of the mirrors cast complex, kaleidoscopic reflections that frame unexpected views as people move around the courtyard below.
The geometry of the canopy forms a trajectory across the courtyard, from a triangular pattern at the roof’s edges to a hexagonal pattern towards the middle. In cross-section, the roof structure has two levels, which are covered by alternating mirror surfaces. These reflect sunlight and minimise heat gain, which is necessary for environmental reasons. The distribution of hexagons and triangles thus also serves to balance the opening and closing of the roof. Even though almost half of the surface is closed, the space feels open and airy. The structure curves and reaches down to the ground at a single off-centre point of support, maintaining an asymmetry of space. This funnel-like column marks the spot where a lone hawthorn tree, planted in the 1960s, once stood, evoking a memorial to what came before. The presence of this feature means that the roof structure need not impose a new support system on the building. It also adds movement and, like a hollow tree trunk, draws the outside elements in – whether rain, snow, leaves, or light.
Studio Other Spaces designed Common Sky to create a connection between the historic museum and the adjacent Delaware Park. Inspired by the intense weather patterns of the city of Buffalo and the lush park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it strives to form space with non-classical architectural elements that are already inherent to the site, while also honouring the original architecture. The strict modernism of the Seymour H. Knox Building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1962, is complemented by Common Sky’s organic shape, which rhymes with the forms found in the surrounding landscape, such as the trees, winding paths, clouds, and shafts of sunlight.
Common Sky is a celebration of the sky as common. The glass roof acts as a lens, inviting people to connect with their immediate environment and bringing into focus the ephemeral qualities of the atmosphere: the changing seasons, the dappled light, and the cloud formations. The alternating mirror and transparent glass panels emphasize physical movement as a means to shape space, making visitors visible within the work and prompting them to co-create fragmented inward and outward perspectives. The various angles of the mirrors cast complex, kaleidoscopic reflections that frame unexpected views as people move around the courtyard below.
The geometry of the canopy forms a trajectory across the courtyard, from a triangular pattern at the roof’s edges to a hexagonal pattern towards the middle. In cross-section, the roof structure has two levels, which are covered by alternating mirror surfaces. These reflect sunlight and minimise heat gain, which is necessary for environmental reasons. The distribution of hexagons and triangles thus also serves to balance the opening and closing of the roof. Even though almost half of the surface is closed, the space feels open and airy. The structure curves and reaches down to the ground at a single off-centre point of support, maintaining an asymmetry of space. This funnel-like column marks the spot where a lone hawthorn tree, planted in the 1960s, once stood, evoking a memorial to what came before. The presence of this feature means that the roof structure need not impose a new support system on the building. It also adds movement and, like a hollow tree trunk, draws the outside elements in – whether rain, snow, leaves, or light.
Studio Other Spaces designed Common Sky to create a connection between the historic museum and the adjacent Delaware Park. Inspired by the intense weather patterns of the city of Buffalo and the lush park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it strives to form space with non-classical architectural elements that are already inherent to the site, while also honouring the original architecture. The strict modernism of the Seymour H. Knox Building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1962, is complemented by Common Sky’s organic shape, which rhymes with the forms found in the surrounding landscape, such as the trees, winding paths, clouds, and shafts of sunlight.
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