2015.11 堪萨斯城，美国建筑的发源地

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Kansas City, Powerhouse of American Architecture
Some of the country’s most interesting buildings are being created in the midwest.

By Kriston Capps

A rendering of the Petersen Automative Museum in Los Angeles (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates)
NOVEMBER 2015 ISSUE
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Even if they wind up somewhere else, the most-interesting American buildings are constructed in Kansas City.

That’s where the A. Zahner Company, a materials lab and fabrication shop known for its inventive use of metal, is based. For most of its 118 years, the firm was a sheeting and decking company with a steady business in tin roofs. That changed in 1983, when L. William Zahner—the great-grandson of the company’s founder—met the architect Frank Gehry. At the time, Gehry was just beginning to explore erecting curvilinear designs with seemingly impossible materials. Zahner subsequently worked with Gehry to fabricate the frenetic steel-and-aluminum exterior of the Experience Music Project, in Seattle, a pathbreaking achievement for metals and architecture alike.


The Experience Music Project Museum (A. Zahner Company)
Today, Zahner’s client list could be mistaken for a roll call of Gehry’s rivals, among them Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Antoine Predock, Tadao Ando, Thom Mayne, and Daniel Libeskind. The company doesn’t build much “heavy structure,” as Andrew Manto, one of Zahner’s design engineers, puts it, but instead focuses on unique surfaces, such as the copper-screen exterior of San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Zahner also takes on other restoration and engineering projects; last year, Kerry “KB” Butler, the plant’s lead welder, helped perform a core analysis of the stainless-steel-clad Gateway Arch, in St. Louis, to see how it’s holding up.


A mockup of Zahner’s renovation plans for the Petersen Automotive Museum (A. Zahner Company)
Zahner is typically working on dozens of projects at any given time, their parts in various stages of planning, manufacturing, and field-testing. Earlier this year, one of those projects was a shiny new shell for the Petersen Automotive Museum, in Los Angeles, which opened in 1994 and is scheduled to reopen in December following a $125 million renovation by the New York architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. If the original Petersen museum were a car, you might say that the renovation preserves the chassis while providing a new body—one designed to fit right over the original frame.


A rendering of the renovation plans for the Petersen Automotive Museum (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates)
One part of the Zahner plant is essentially a tech firm, where design engineers use custom software to imagine metal surfaces and facades that in many cases have no precedent. The other part is a 50,000-square-foot metals shop, where technicians use machines to cut, punch, fold, and patinate metals with precision. Work flows back and forth between the shop floor and the computer lab as engineers and craftspeople sort out riddles in aluminum, steel, titanium, zinc, and other exotic materials. Part of Zahner’s process involves erecting models of its creations outside, to see how they look (and function) in the real world. For the Petersen, this meant constructing a scale mock-up of the museum’s “ribbons” . Finally, Zahner’s creations are sent via semitruck or shipping container to their destination, where they will be put together .


The 50,000-square-foot Zahner metals shop (A. Zahner Company)

A worker constructing one of Zahner’s projects (A. Zahner Company)
The humming, thumping shop floor is littered with parts in various states of finish. Among the machines frequently in use are a turret punch, which can notch holes of virtually any size and shape into almost any material, and a high-pressure water jet that can zip through metal. Zahner’s central innovation, known as the Zahner Engineered Profiled Panel Systems (zepps), demonstrates how far digitally driven manufacturing has come. Picture two shapes: a cube and a Möbius strip. The cube is straightforward to build, but the latter requires custom components. The zepps process marries digital modeling with fabrication to make such pieces possible. Using this method, Zahner can build something as complex as the Petersen’s winding ribbons —no two panels of which are the same—as easily as if they were being assembled from a kit.


A winding ribbon for the Petersen Automotive Museum (A. Zahner Company)
Out in the yard, draft models of building facades hang on multistory support stands, alongside a sample of the material used for the Experience Music Project Museum, the firm’s first digital-modeling commission. The sample’s curvature is rougher, and its brushing a little less refined, than that of the Petersen ribbons. But it is Zahner’s Model T, and so it stays. “It’s a canonical building for us,” Manto says. “It was the point we jumped from tin roofs to something much more ambitious.”

Kriston Capps is a staff writer for CityLab covering housing, architecture, and politics. He previously worked as a senior editor for Architect magazine.



堪萨斯城，美国建筑的发源地
美国一些最有趣的建筑是在中西部创造的。

作者：克里斯顿-卡普斯

位于洛杉矶的彼得森自动博物馆的效果图（Kohn Pedersen Fox事务所）
2015年11月号

即使是在其他地方，最有趣的美国建筑也是在堪萨斯城建造的。

这就是A.Zahner公司，一个以创造性地使用金属而闻名的材料实验室和制造厂的所在地。在其118年的大部分时间里，该公司是一家板材和装饰板公司，在锡制屋顶方面有稳定的业务。这在1983年发生了变化，当时L.William Zahner--公司创始人的曾孙--遇到了建筑师弗兰克-盖里。当时，盖里刚刚开始探索用看似不可能的材料进行曲线设计。扎赫纳随后与盖里合作，为西雅图的体验音乐项目制作了狂热的钢铝外观，这对金属和建筑都是一个突破性的成就。


体验音乐项目博物馆（A. Zahner公司）
今天，扎赫纳公司的客户名单可以被误认为是盖里的竞争对手的名单，其中包括扎哈-哈迪德、赫尔佐格和德梅隆、迪勒-斯科菲迪奥+伦弗罗、安托万-普雷多克、安藤忠雄、汤姆-梅恩和丹尼尔-利伯斯金。正如扎赫纳的设计工程师之一安德鲁-曼托（Andrew Manto）所说，该公司并不建造太多的 "重型结构"，而是专注于独特的表面，例如旧金山德扬博物馆的铜屏外观。Zahner公司还承担了其他修复和工程项目；去年，该厂的首席焊工Kerry "KB" Butler帮助对圣路易斯的不锈钢包覆的盖特威拱门进行了核心分析，以了解其保持情况。


扎赫纳公司为彼得森汽车博物馆制定的改造计划的模拟图（A. 扎赫纳公司）
Zahner公司通常在任何时候都在进行几十个项目，它们的部件处于规划、制造和现场测试的不同阶段。今年早些时候，其中一个项目是为洛杉矶的彼得森汽车博物馆建造一个闪亮的新外壳，该博物馆于1994年开放，在纽约建筑公司Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates进行了1.25亿美元的翻新后，计划于12月重新开放。如果原来的彼得森博物馆是一辆汽车，你可能会说，这次改造在保留底盘的同时提供了一个新的车身--设计成可以直接安装在原来的框架上。


彼得森汽车博物馆的改造计划的效果图（Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates）。
Zahner工厂的一部分基本上是一个技术公司，设计工程师使用定制软件来想象金属表面和外墙，在许多情况下没有先例。另一部分是一个50,000平方英尺的金属车间，技术人员使用机器对金属进行精确的切割、冲压、折叠和抛光处理。工作在车间和计算机实验室之间来回流动，工程师和工匠们在铝、钢、钛、锌和其他异国材料中解开谜题。Zahner公司的部分工作涉及在室外建立其作品的模型，以查看它们在现实世界中的外观（和功能）。对于彼得森博物馆来说，这意味着要建造一个博物馆 "丝带 "的比例模型。最后，Zahner的作品通过半拖车或运输集装箱被送往目的地，在那里它们将被组装起来。


占地50,000平方英尺的扎赫纳金属车间（A. 扎赫纳公司）

一名工人正在建造扎赫纳的一个项目（A. 扎赫纳公司）
嗡嗡作响、砰砰作响的车间里，到处都是处于不同完成状态的零件。经常使用的机器包括塔式冲床，它可以在几乎任何材料上开出几乎任何大小和形状的孔，还有一种高压水枪，可以穿过金属。Zahner公司的核心创新，即Zahner工程异形板系统（zepps），展示了数字驱动的制造业已经取得了多大进展。想象一下两种形状：一个立方体和一个莫比乌斯带。立方体的建造很简单，但后者需要定制部件。zepps工艺将数字建模与制造结合起来，使这种部件成为可能。使用这种方法，Zahner可以建造像Petersen的绕线带这样复杂的东西--没有两个面板是相同的，就像从套件中组装一样容易。


彼得森汽车博物馆的绕线带（A. Zahner公司）
在院子里，建筑外墙的草稿模型挂在多层支撑架上，旁边还有一个用于体验音乐项目博物馆的材料样本，这是该公司的第一个数字建模委托。与Petersen的带子相比，样品的弧度更粗糙，刷子也没有那么精致。但它是扎赫纳的T型车，所以它保持着。"对我们来说，这是一个典型的建筑，"曼托说。"它是我们从铁皮屋顶跳到更有雄心壮志的地方。"

克里斯顿-卡普斯是CityLab的工作人员，报道住房、建筑和政治。他曾在《建筑师》杂志担任高级编辑。