Where Glass Meets Machine: Sarah Oppenheimer’s N-05001 at MIT

Sarah Oppenheimer’s N-05001 at MIT

Abstract

The artist Sarah Oppenheimer has designed a dynamic glass sculpture titled “N-05001” to inhabit the newly renovated Metropolitan Warehouse at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This immense warehouse facility, the Met, was originally constructed in stages between 1894 and 1916, and has been repurposed into the new home for MIT’s School of Architecture, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro as the design Architect. The renovation includes four new atriums running from ground to roof levels that cut directly through the core of the existing building, exposing century-old structural layers and enabling natural light to flow into the surrounding academic spaces. “N-05001” will roam about one of the most populated atriums at a nearly imperceptible pace, challenging occupants’ perception of static architectural space. The sculpture consists of a 0,5 m diameter glass cylinder, 3,8 m tall, which travels up and down the end of a 6,0 m long cantilevered horizontal glass beam suspended from a trolley traversing the flange of a structural steel girder. A stainless steel counterweight on the opposite end of the glass beam balances the asymmetric configuration. This paper will focus on the initial problem of engineering a moving large-scale glass cylinder, and the increasingly complex stages of analysis, design, and coordination culminating in the creation of a glass machine whose intentionally exposed operation is transparent yet undetectable.