Earlier this month, Sky’s the Limit: The Engineering of Architecture opened at the world-renowned Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. The exhibition is an in-depth, multimedia exploration of SOM’s extensive structural engineering portfolio, presenting the firm’s uniquely integrated structural and architectural design practice and its contributions to city skylines across the globe. View this slideshow to explore the exhibition.
Sky’s the Limit: The Engineering of Architecture marks the second time SOM’s Structural Engineering practice has been featured in a standalone exhibition. Four times larger than the first iteration, it offers an expanded understanding of the firm’s structural design practice. Never-before-seen video, photography, drawings, sculpture, and interactive structural animations tell the complex, decades-long story of the evolution of SOM’s structural design philosophy.
The exhibition is anchored by 26 handmade structural models at 1:500 scale, framed by a floor-to-ceiling hand drawn grid, allowing visitors to tower over some of SOM’s most complex high-rise projects. Visitors are then invited to don a pair of 3D glasses to explore the details of several structural components, animated and projected on the museum’s walls at 1:2 scale. In the multimedia room, an immersive video installation, narrated by SOM Structural Engineering partner William F. Baker, provides further insight into the projects on display. Models, drawings, and research materials produced over several decades complete the exhibition, showing the full range of building typologies and design techniques employed by SOM’s structural engineers.
The Engineering of Architecture was shown for the first time at Architekturgalerie Munich in early 2016. It will be on view at Utzon Center until January 15th, 2017. A PDF of the exhibition booklet, which presents all 26 structural models, is available for download here.