When the recent expansion of The Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, was completed, there was 40% more exhibit space thanks to a new 42,000 square foot pavilion connecting the museum’s two original buildings. The much-needed additional space made room for an expanding audience and a growing collection.
“The expansion created a more intuitive way of approaching the site, coming into the site and ultimately coming into the building kind of created a new postcard moment,” said Ryan Fisher, Alley, Poyner, Macchietto Architecture. “We always include natural light, transparency and also landscape – these things that you’re sort of looking out to.”
While bringing in lots of natural light and creating views of beautiful outdoor vistas are a key part of the success of the Joslyn design, they also can create issues such as an increase in thermal load and glare.
“Aside from just beefing up the air handling units for this project, we went through extra steps,” said Fisher. “When done well, shades can sort of layer on and add to the architecture.”
The daylight needs of the gallery presented almost a project in and of itself, in the custom solutions that we had to use in the gallery to help control daylight and set the scenes that the owner and the architect needed.
“It presented a very unique challenge on the shading side,’ said Adam McKenzie of Veil Engineered Shading. “We had to use a very custom system with both upper and lower shades deploying from one central, knuckle point in the building.”
Other significant challenges included the sheer size of some of the shades, and a number of very different design and install conditions.
“Roller shades aren’t usually front and center,” said Adam McKenzie. “It’s not something people think about all the time. But to have them, integrated in such a way to a building like this has been a really cool and challenging process.”
Throughout the process, the custom capabilities were a positive asset in tackling several sticky situations that required more than your typical shading product.
“One of the key advantages of working with Draper is that their production, their sales reps, their team is all based in the United States,” said Ben McKenzie of Veil Shading Systems. “We’re a Midwestern company, and to have Draper be a counterpart to that, they’re able to get product material to site immediately rather than waiting multiple weeks for lead times on projects.”
We’ve published a new video case study of this project, which you can see here. You can also check out some fantastic photographs of this project here.
