Words Sara Hart

The dining pod fabricated out of Corian was designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill for Dining by Design, the annual DIFFA benefit.

Smooth, luminous, durable and capable of being fashioned into almost any shape, Dupont’s Corian is an extraordinary product. Concocted out of acrylic polymer, aluminum trihydrate filler, and pigment, it is one of a number of nonporous, homogeneous materials known as solid surfaces. Yet in the 40-some years since it was introduced, architects have typically consigned it to the most prosaic of applications, notably countertops and wet walls. DuPont has had to work hard over the years to market the material’s allure and versatility by soliciting designs from cutting-edge architects and designers. Their efforts are finally paying off to judge from some of the stunning interiors recently created using the material by the Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young and Kartrin Olina and Herzog & de Meuron. However, it could also be argued that what has really changed is not so much the attitude of practitioners as the practice of architecture itself.

“Information management tools” are once again enabling the architect to become “the master builder by integrating the skills and intelligences at the core of architecture,” write Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in their manifesto Refabricating Architecture (McGraw Hill, 2003). These intelligences—multidirectional thermoforming, CNC machining and rapid-speed routing—have expanded architecture’s possibilities exponentially while creating another level of knowledge with which most practitioners are only now becoming familiar. Their tutors are often the highly skilled contractors behind these high-tech manufacturing processes. And their profession is changing too as they assume the roles of architectural collaborator and innovator.

It was Grant Garcia, managing director of the Massachusetts-based Sterling Surfaces, who in 2005 helped Claes-Henric Appelquist, an associate senior designer at the New York office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), realize his concept entry for “Dining By Design,” the annual fund-raiser for DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS). For the benefit, design firms were invited to create a unique dining venue capable of accommodating ten guests. Appelquist conceived a seamless, durable, modular dining pod. And out of what better material to fabricate it than Corian? He queried DuPont about sponsoring the pod, and the company selected Garcia to produce it.

The fabrication process began with Appelquist using Maya software to submit a 3-D model of the pod to Sterling Surfaces. He knew his design would go through several tweakings before being produced, but Garcia immediately saw the need for a reformulation, because the production time was short and the budget limited. “With only three weeks to deliver the product, we had to simplify the design by reducing the number of curvatures and thereby reducing the amount of formwork,” Garcia explains. He asked Appelquist to generate a series of CAD wire-frame drawings to resolve conflicts inherent in the design and then figured out the most efficient way to structure the form. Half of the time originally allotted to production was spent on this reformulation, but with Garcia’s expertise the pod arrived in time for the dinner.

Although the pod looks as if were carved from a solid block of Corian, it was in fact made by heating flat sheets of the material until they were pliable, and then bending them over a plywood structure. The new forms were then clamped into place until they cooled down and hardened.

Like Garcia, Christopher Whitelaw, a partner at Evans & Paul, another Corian-certified fabricator, located in the New York City borough of Queens, is part designer, part process engineer. His mastery of computer-modeling software enables him to rationalize the most complex designs. “It’s not enough to make a form. You’re also responsible for its performance,” he says. Performance was critical when the company was commissioned to fabricate an undulating 60-foot-long, 22-foot-high, glacier-white Corian wall for the lobby of 40 Bond Street, a luxury condo building in New York City’s NoHo, developed by Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen and designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. (For images, see “Analysis: 40 Bond Street”).

The Hong Kong-based designers Michael Young and Katrin Olina created Skin, a fanciful aesthetics clinic on the ground floor of a 12th-century Florentine tower. Olina conceived the geometric floral pattern cutout on the backlit Corian panels. The design was achieved through CNC routing. The sofa is a new design by Young, manufactured by the Japanese firm, MK Maeda.

The building’s leitmotif is a graffiti-like design that appears throughout the exterior and interior of the building in different materials and formats, including a Gaudi-like cast-aluminum gate. In the lobby, the architects wanted the delicate bas-relief pattern to be etched into the Corian wall’s surface. Using 3-D modeling software packages, including SolidWorks, Whitelaw worked with them to revise their design to conform to the material’s tolerances. “When the design was finalized, we used Mastercam, a CAD/CAM manufacturing software to develop machining strategies. The program translates the design geometry into machine code, which the CNC reads and then cuts into the material,” says Whitelaw. The etching process pushed the machine’s limits, because the design tolerances turned out to be smaller than Corian’s tolerances, requiring recalibration of the cutting mechanism for each panel to ensure identical depths and perfect registration. Although 95 percent of the process was done by machine, it was the last five percent completed by skilled artisans hand-sanding and -polishing the panels that gives the walls their seamless, sensuous continuity.

The same technique was used to etch the design into the tub and shower floors of the Corian-covered master bathrooms. As the 28 bathrooms are not identical, Whitelaw had to engineer 17 different configurations and dozens of components. These were assembled in the shop to verify fit, then broken down for shipment. At 40 Bond, developer and architect invented a new paradigm for luxury, one defined by an imaginatively conceived and deftly executed design.

Without recent advances in fabrication technology, these architectural applications of Corian would not have been possible. But what’s so intriguing about them is that the byproduct of this technology is genuine collaboration. Fabricators, with their specialized knowledge, are becoming designers. Innovative architects are embracing the possibilities of manufacturing and learning the science of materials. To paraphrase Kieran and Timberlake, the boundaries between thinkers and makers are finally dissolving.

The brick walls and iron grille are original to the building, while the flooring is a Dupont SGX Laminate with a floral design by Olina.

Photos Sterling Surfaces; except bottom two, Carlo Lavatori