Part 3 in The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard Series: Visual Mock-Up of a Façade, switches gears to another type of mock-up being coordinated around the same time – The Performance Mock-Up
The Performance mock-up is how we tested a portion of the unitized curtain wall against air, water, wind, and seismic forces!
If that doesn’t sound cool, just look at this airplane propeller that is used to create the wind forces for these tests:
A sprinkler rack is placed close to the face of the curtain wall to simulate rain:
Both rain and wind are simulated for the dynamic air and water test:
The chamber behind is sealed and monitored throughout various tests. In the uniform structural design load test it is positively and then negatively pressured and strain gauges record the deflection throughout the chamber.
A hydraulic cylinder crank was used on the supporting structural frame to twist it out of shape. That was how the seismic (interstory differential) horizontal and vertical movements were simulated.
The success of the Performance Mock-up was a huge step towards fabrication (and later installation) of the unitized curtain wall panels!
Related Posts in this Series
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.