QUICKSILVER
JUT Art Museum, 2019
Taipei, Taiwan
Designed as a site-specific installation for the JUT Art Museum in Taipei, Quicksilver continues Oyler Wu Collaborative’s ongoing design exploration of the architectural stair. The stair is embedded with so many of the characteristics essential to architectural vitality - movement, structure, form, connectivity, and a sense of spatial transition. And like architecture in general, the stair offers an incredibly wide range of expressive outcomes - from lightweight to heavy, from compact to monumental, from ephemeral to permanent. The architectural stair sits at the intersection of spatial poetics and technical achievement and offers fertile ground for architectural experimentation.
Free from any circulatory requirements, Quicksilver takes on the stair as a non-functional element as it hangs in a 10-meter atrium space that opens to a gallery above. With the base of the stair at approximately 4 meters off the ground, the stair is only spatially suggestive of its more common function. The intention is to first create a dynamic sense of movement into the space that travels mercurially through the existing void between the 1st and 3rd floor of the museum. Consisting almost entirely of 1” polished steel tubes, the chandelier-like element is intended to create a sense of spatial occupation in an otherwise empty and un-occupiable void.
Additionally, the stair explores a loose-fit relationship between the linear elements that form its overall structure, and a series of panels that work in dialogue with them - creating moments of solidity through panelization, without detracting from the continuous movement of the linear elements through the space.
Designed and fabricated entirely by the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative, the project was also an opportunity to further explore a number of technical challenges. This included multiple bending methods that achieve a range of bend radii on the tubes - at times simply a fillet radius and at other times large sweeping bends. It also required customized tooling that allowed for multiple radii or the metal surfaces- from a tight 90’ bend in the surface, to smooth bends that track the subtlety of the linear elements.
Project Credits:
Principal Architects:
Dwayne Oyler
Jenny Wu
Project Leaders:
Owen Duross
Andy Magner
Hans Koesters
Design and Fabrication Team:
Dwayne Oyler
Jenny Wu
Owen Duross
Hans Koesters
Andy Magner
Marianna Girgenti
Tucker van Leuwen-Hall
Yi Dazhong
Yuan Wang
Dongwoo Suk
Irvin Shaifa
Isabelle Joannides
Abel Maqueira
Phoebe Ou-Yang
Wilson Chan
Engineering:
Nous Engineering, Matthew Melnyk
Photography:
Lu Guoway