29 October 2002
Modular cardboard construction for Libeskind installation
Modular cardboard construction for Libeskind installation at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Arts.
Florian Foerster of Buro Happold describes the construction of large-scale cardboard structures for the Daniel Libeskind exhibition in the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Arts
The Hiroshima Art Prize was founded in 1989 and has since been awarded every three years to artists for their contribution to world peace. In 2001 the city of Hiroshima awarded the fifth Hiroshima Art Prize to Daniel Libeskind, the first architect to have been honoured in this way.
The prize was marked with a recent three-month exhibition of Daniel Libeskind's work in the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Arts. The exhibition transformed the interior of the museum into a continuous installation. The transformation was achieved through the construction of four large-scale models of recent projects by Studio Libeskind and with the walls and floors re-clad with cardboard and covered with drawings and writing by Daniel Libeskind. The models reached up to 10m high and 30m wide and were based on Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Felix Nussbaum Haus, the Imperial War Museum of the North and the extension to the Denver Art Gallery.
Buro Happold provided the structural design for the models, which have been entirely constructed using honeycomb cardboard and modular construction. The structural capacity of the cardboard was verified by load testing. Buro Happold drew on its experience in designing with cardboard on a series of recent projects in the UK and Germany.
The large-scale models are subdivided into a series of irregular smaller modules, 102 in total. The maximum cross dimensions of the modules is limited to 3.5m to allow delivery of the modules through the museum doors. The modules were prefabricated off-site by the main contractor Nomura Kougeisha employing CNC cutting techniques for the 20mm honeycomb cardboard used for the module walls.
All joints were glued and the modules contained small openings to allow access to the interior of the models during the construction. The structurally rigid and stable modules provided both the support structure and the external skin of the models. Bolted connections and cardboard stiffeners were utilised to link the modules on site.
Assembling the modules into whole models could be compared to the construction of a large three-dimensional puzzle using small volumes as the individual pieces. The design of the connection details allowed the exhibition to be disassembled and rebuilt in a different location. All the models can be fully recycled at the end of the exhibition.
The project was designed and constructed over a period of two months, including 14 days for the work within the museum.
Project Team
Architect: Studio Daniel Libeskind
Structural Engineer: Buro Happold
Contractor: Nomura Kougeisha
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Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, infrastructure and traffic engineering, geotechnical engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, access consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
