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The Fort Worth Camera building, a new photography studio and retail space, is surrounded by notable concrete neighbors, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by Tadao Ando and the Kimball Art Museum by Louis Kahn. Ibanez Shaw Architecture responded with its own concrete novelty inspired by the building’s program.

The primary facade is a site-cast concrete panel system which used tilt-up construction with steel anchors cast into the wall. The concrete wraps the perimeter of the building and transitions into an aperture screen on its most prominent street frontage. Ibanez Shaw decided upon concrete as the best material because security was a major concern for the client. The concrete provided protection at the street level and all the glazing on the building was either elevated above ground or made too small for a human to fit through.

The seven standard aperture settings of a camera lens inspired the design of the concrete feature wall. The shape and proportions of the apertures were directly translated from these lenses and then modified to make them into standard-size openings. The formwork for the wall was made by gluing wood blocks together, which were then vacuum formed into fiberglass. The array of 25 fiberglass shapes were filled with grout and then cast around to create the screen wall.