Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
approach resonated with Hertz, who worked on several Gehry projects in
1982 and 1983. Hertz also worked with a few fine artists, including Charles
Arnoldi and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Hertz completed his studies with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in
1983, obtained certification, and promptly started his own practice, which
was incorporated in 1984. He named his firm Syndesis, a word meaning to
link or connect. He was thinking not only about the physical connections
of buildings but also about the various disciplines he wanted to pursue—
architecture, furniture, and the development of materials and products. In
his practice, they were all connected, and all based on the idea of sustain-
ability. “Sustainability,” Hertz explains, “means providing for the needs of
the present without detracting from our ability to fulfill the needs of the
future.”
For the first 3 years, Hertz shared a small storefront studio space with his
father, who, although still practicing medicine, was also engaged in sculp-
tural projects. Hertz began working on commissioned pieces and public
sculptures, occasionally collaborating with his father. He also continued his
experimentation with concrete furniture:
There was a really good forum and a good economy for me to do commissioned
furniture. So the furniture became little exercises, just like architecture. They had
structural issues, clients, and budgets, they were little design problems, and they
offered me the immediacy that architecture didn't afford me at that point.
While he relished the creative possibilities of concrete, he also felt its lim-
itations. He was using commercial reinforced concrete. “As my furniture
projects grew,” he recalls,“and I started to do countertops and other things,
I ultimately felt limited with the material, just wrestling with its sheer
weight and fragility and the difficulty in tooling it, especially on site. So I
began to think, if only I could make some of these pieces off site, in a con-
trolled environment, and make them light enough that I could carry them,
that should be the goal.That goal then led to, well, what can I do to lighten
up the material?”
Concrete is a mixture of cement, water, and aggregates (which can be
anything from gravel and sand to the kinds of recycled consumer products
that Hertz uses today). The earliest evidence of concrete used in architec-
ture dates back nearly 2,000 years, to Roman ruins such as the villa of
Emperor Hadrian, built in the second century A.D. Roman concrete was
