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Competition Submission: Legacies Are Built Winner
Inspired by both the piano and the decibel, the New Orleans School of Music boasts Silverstorm and Bone White insulated Kingspan panels which gracefully dance upon its facade. Large rectangular windows serve to bring performance art into public view, and lightwells on the vegetated roof illuminate the inner core from above while providing evening light from below at night. The abrupt angles of the facade signal public entryways and encode the founding date into the building skin like DNA.
The School of Music is a collaboration among private donors, city officials, and the Kingspan company. Both socially responsible and environmentally sustainable, the new school offers local inner-city youth a positive setting to observe, practice, and showcase their talents in music within a city ravaged by Katrina. The site was selected to highlight the city’s jazz heritage. The building rests across the street from Louis Armstrong Park, and the black-and-white color scheme represents the piano, a key instrument in jazz.
Urbanistically, the building attaches itself to its context by the patterns of the panels repeating along the ground plane into its surroundings (see renderings). In continuing the theme, the panels tilt at both 19.01 degrees (1901 being the birth date of Louis Armstrong) and 20.15 degrees (marking the institution’s build date of 2015).
For Kingspan, this much-needed institution represents an opportunity to showcase the resilience and timelessness of its product lines and give back to broken, low-income communities. Insulated panels of varying lengths and depths form a topographic building envelope that reflects the dynamism of piano keys while also reducing heat gain. These panels are included at different thicknesses both to create interesting shadows and to follow the same language of the piano keys. Kingspan also manufactures flush glazing which is used throughout the project (see rendering).
The green roof offers a quiet space for students to practice outdoors and can serve as an outdoor venue for recitals. This open space serves for recreation, helps to lower heat gain on the roof, and provides for water catchment. Water runoff from the roof is collected on site and feeds the vegetation below.
The glazing below alternates (in the same vocabulary) between transparent and fritted glass. This pattern (as you can seenow) repeats throughout to create a sense of cohesion in the project.
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