Filter | CLB

Save
Filter | CLB

Information

  • Project Name: Filter
  • Practice: CLB
  • Completion year: 2022
  • Project Location: New York
  • Country: USA
  • Structural Consultants: KL&A, Inc.
  • Photo Credits: Kevin Scott, Andres Orozco, Leonid Furmansky
  • Others: EMIT (Exhibit Patron, Steel Supplier and Fabricator), Spearhead (Wood Supplier and Wood Fabricator), Dowbuilt (Builder), HELIUS (Lighting Designer), B-K Lighting (Light Fixture Provider), Raemelton Farm (Tree Provider), Apollo Electric (Lighting Contractor)
More Info Less Info

Excerpt:Filter is a pavilion designed by the architectural firm CLB Architects. The pavilion’s chapel-like design facilitates a new understanding of the place, allowing each occupant to explore their relationship with the natural world. The structure’s concept began as a simple diagram – a folded sheet of paper, carefully sliced and able to stand on its own. FILTER engages the visitor with its flowing folds of weathered steel and timber. At the pavilion’s centre, a lone tree embodies the ecological cycles and serves as a counterpoint to Manhattan’s urbanity.

Project Description

[Text as submitted by Architect] New York, NY –– Created for Design Pavilion and the NYCxDesign Festival, FILTER carves out space for quiet recentering within the frenetic energy of Times Square. Designed as both a monumental object and an ephemeral experience, the pavilion establishes a new node in the heart of New York City’s urban fabric – reorienting that experience toward the natural rather than the manufactured. Evoking the rugged Wyoming landscape from which it originates, FILTER engages the visitor with its flowing folds of weathered steel and timber. At the pavilion’s centre, a lone tree embodies the ecological cycles and serves as a counterpoint to Manhattan’s urbanity. 

Filter | CLB
© Andres Orozco

Designed by CLB Architects, the pavilion’s chapel-like design facilitates a new understanding of the place, allowing each occupant to explore their relationship with the natural world. The structure’s concept began as a simple diagram – a folded sheet of paper, carefully sliced and able to stand on its own. Eric Logan, Partner at CLB, translated this exercise into full-scale existence through a design composed of a series of standard-sized, half-inch hot-rolled steel plates, or “chaps,” arranged to form a 24-foot diameter 20-foot-tall ellipsoid. 

Filter | CLB
© Leonid Furmansky

FILTER, located between West 46th and 47th Streets at Times Square, appears to be a foreign object. Fluid shards of naturally-weathered steel invite close inspection, and a gentle ramp leads around the perimeter, offering views of the space held within. The noise, bustling crowds, and glaring lights of the city are filtered out, and the newly-centred visitor is left in solitude, inhabiting the urban “pause.” As Logan explains, the structure presents “an offering. It [FILTER] changes the environment and creates its own.” A bench of reclaimed fir offcuts is folded into the interior, encircling a live, 20-foot-tall tree. The tree’s dense canopy only partially obscures the sky beyond, inviting occupants to look upward and lose themselves in contemplation. 

Filter | CLB
© Leonid Furmansky

Each element of the structure was designed with attention to its sustainability, portability, and longevity beyond the duration of the NYCxDesign installation. In Sheridan, Wyoming, EMIT is responsible for the steel prefabrication and is the exhibit patron. Weathered steel to develop a protective rust patina evocative of the Rocky Mountain West. The lightly-charred and textured timber elements were crafted from salvaged Glulam beams by Spearhead, a sustainable wood technologist based in British Columbia.

Filter | CLB
© CLB

These systematized and structurally self-supporting components were first sent to Greeley, Colorado, for test assembly and then disassembled and shipped to New York City to be erected by New York-based contractors Dowbuilt. Utah-based Helius oversaw lighting design, incorporating fixtures by B-K Lighting and coordinating with New York-based contractors Apollo Electric. An organic Exclamation Plane tree, donated by Raemelton Farm in Adamstown, Maryland, completes the design. 

Filter | CLB
© CLB

Following the closure of the NYCxDesign festival, the tree will be donated to the New York City non-profit The Battery Conservancy, and the pavilion will be carefully disassembled and transported back to Wyoming to continue its life as a public sculpture at EMIT’s headquarters and enjoyed for generations to come. When it completes its cycle and reaches its final resting point in Sheridan, FILTER’s patina will reflect both dry western air and East Coast salinity accumulations. Forging connections across geography and intimately centred on occupant experience, FILTER makes a place of its own.

Filter | CLB
© Leonid Furmansky

Leave a Reply