Project Details
- Project Name
- The Chrysalis
- Architect
- Living Design Lab
- Client/Owner
- Inner Arbor Trust
- Project Types
- Cultural
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 5,977 sq. feet
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $6,600,000
A band shell defies formal convention, while serving as an unexpectedly sturdy and versatile performance venue.
Architectural follies can be whimsical, bold, or inventive, but rarely are they as hardworking as the Chrysalis, a new electric-green pavilion in the suburban community of Columbia, Md. Designed by Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany and the Baltimore-based Living Design Lab, the iconic roof of the amphitheater torques and billows like a sail that the wind might carry off. But contrary to its lightweight appearance, the structure is robust enough to shoulder modern concert rigging—up to 58,000 pounds of it. With catenary arches forming primary and secondary prosceniums, it has the flexibility to host performances of different types and sizes, from small community groups to major musical acts and orchestras.
The Chrysalis began to emerge in 2014, when the Inner Arbor Trust, a nonprofit, was established to plan the future of Symphony Woods, a public park in downtown Columbia. (Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Columbia was founded as a utopian New Town by developer James Rouse, also known for revitalizing Faneuil Hall in Boston.) The Columbia Association, which owns Symphony Woods, granted the Trust a perpetual easement to develop an arts-and-culture park. For its first phase, the Trust’s then-president, Michael McCall, wanted a design that people would embrace as an exciting symbol of Columbia’s future. It also had to harmonize with its woodland setting while asserting its own presence. “It needed to be of nature, but obviously not nature,” McCall says.
Enter Marc Fornes, whose career McCall had been following with interest. As principal of New York-based studio Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany, Fornes specializes in parametrically designed, organic structures that defy orthogonal geometry (and gravity). To generate the form of the Chrysalis, Fornes—using Rhino and custom protocols written in Python—drew a flat digital mesh, programmed its segments as spring systems, then inflated it, adding pleats for more structural depth. “The final form of the building [was not] CAD-drafted, but entirely generated through code,” Fornes says.
The Chrysalis is the “big sibling” to an earlier Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany project, a pavilion called Pleated Inflation in Argeles-Sur-Mer, France, completed in 2015. Like the Chrysalis, it has a series of pleated arches that touch down gently on slender legs. But its self-supporting aluminum shingle structure would not work for the Chrysalis, given the latter’s size and functional requirements. Fornes worked with Living Design Lab principals Davin Hong, AIA, and Kevin Day, AIA, as well as collaborators at Arup and Zahner to devise a structural system that would be an integral part of the architecture, on the very visible underside of the shell.
“It was intended that all that structure would be fully exposed,” Hong says. “In my mind, that’s the cool story about this building: It required an unprecedented level of collaboration and coordination between all the different disciplines, with everyone having an equal role in making it realized.”
The solution, arrived at by team members passing around the complex 3D model, was a skeleton of steel tubes married to Zahner’s ZEPPS prefabricated panel system. “We had these biweekly meetings, when we’d get on a web portal and fly through the model,” Day says. “We were mediating between the plinth, the legs of the shell that came down, and the picket-guardrail system. … There were a lot of times where we were tweaking the shell geometry to make all of that come together.”
Arup helped ensure the Chrysalis would be a multifunctional venue, determining an invisible theatrical box large enough for eight or 10 different types of performances. It also considered lighting, acoustics, thermal comfort, and fire safety. “Nothing was prescribed when we started,” says Arup’s Matt Larson. “We were trying to solve a problem with inputs from the past, but not necessarily [a problem] that’s been solved before.”
In addition to the main and secondary arches at the front (or Stages Alpha and Beta), the arches around the sides and at the back all have their own programmatic functions, written into the code. (“One arch, one program,” Fornes says.) Arches open onto an accessible boardwalk with a railing of slanted wooden pickets; a grand staircase; a loading dock; and backstage balconies. Next to Stage Beta, the stage floor steps down and pools into informal terraced seating.
Covered in 4,000 aluminum shingles in four shades of green, which form a barely perceptible gradient, the Chrysalis simultaneously pops out from and defers to Symphony Woods as its creators had hoped. Fornes describes this as a balance between “signal” and “camouflage.” “We did not try to pick up the green from the surroundings,” he says. “We pushed the green toward artificiality. There’s that play between being part of your surroundings and at the same time being a signal, because you want to attract all sorts of people just walking by.”
For those who explore it from the inside as an urban-scale sculpture, the brawny steel exoskeleton, warm ipe wood, and framed views through the arches combine to create a powerful impression. “People do not react to it as a building,” McCall says. “It feels like it’s animate. Everyone knows intellectually it’s not, but they react to it in a more emotional way.”
Project Credits
Project: The Chrysalis, Columbia, Md.
Client: Inner Arbor Trust
Designer: Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany, New York
Architect of Record: Living Design Lab, Baltimore . Kevin Day, AIA, Davin Hong, AIA (principals)
Structural/M/E/P Engineer: Arup
Lighting Design: Arup
Civil Engineer: Gutschick, Little and Weber
Geotechnical Engineer: Robert B. Balter
Construction Manager: Whiting-Turner Contracting
Landscape Architect: Mahan Rykiel Associates
Computational Design Consultant: David Eaton
Specialty Fabrication: Zahner
Size: 5,977 square feet
Cost: $6.6 million