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Today's archidose #268
Richard Desmond Children's Eye Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital in Islington, London, England by Penoyre & Prasad LLP, 2007. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose
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Literary Dose #36
[Geodesic dome over Midtown Manhattan | image source]
"I find Bucky [Fuller] more and more inspirational, especially for the freedom of his research. Two projects done with Shoji Sadao in 1960 make the point. The first of these is the much-ridiculed dome over Midtown Manhattan, criticized either as “impractical” (how to buff the glass, how to get the traffic through) or as simply a megalomaniacal expression of an environment overly controlled [as I did]. Such criticisms miss the project’s simple point: The membrane has a surface area approximately 1/64 that of the aggregated exteriors of all the buildings within it, and Bucky argued that the larger the dome, the greater the energy conserved. The Manhattan dome is simply rhetorical, a device to describe the environmental inefficiencies of standard practice."
- Michael Sorkin, from "Bucky lives! Why Fuller matters more today than ever before" in Architectural Record, November 2008, p.
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Monday, Monday
My weekly page update:
China Academy of Art Xiangshan Campus in Hangzhou, China by Amateur Architecture Studio.
This week's book review is Positions: Portrait of a New Generation of Chinese Architects, edited by Frédéric Edelmann & Françoise Ged, and Olympic Architecture: Beijing 2008, by the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design.
Some unrelated links for your enjoyment: neuehaus
News for designers with both e-mail and rss subscriptions. (added to sidebar under blogs::aggregate)
on site
"architecture, art, engineering, performance, landscape, culture, infrastructure, photography: we mix it up and show smart work from Canada, the US and Latin America not on the web, not in any other magazine." (added to sidebar under architectural links::publications)
Patan Museum Report
Thorough documentation of a building in Nepal, something I came across when researching brick for a couple recent posts.
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AE#10: Porous Masonry Walls
While masonry is often perceived as impenetrable, a suitable material for keeping out wind and rain, it is actually by nature porous, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the specific material and its treatment. Cavity walls, for example, are designed to shed any water that may weep its way through the outer brick and mortar facade. Brick is seen as a veneer that keeps out most air and water, but it is not the sole means of doing such.
Some architects exploit this inherent porosity of masonry -- be it brick, stone or concrete -- by designing walls that allow light, air and water to penetrate. The most famous examples are surely Frank Lloyd Wright's four Textile Block Houses in sunny California. Wright used horizontal and vertical steel reinforcing bars and concrete grout (instead of standard mortar) to create three-dimensional compositions of flat and textured custom blocks, the latter either open or with glass inserts. The 1923 Freeman House shows the wonderful effects of Wright's experimentation, namely making the "gutter-rat" (the architect's term for standard concrete blocks) appear lighter than it really was, ironically aided by the invisible strength and weight of steel.
[Frank Lloyd Wright's Freeman House photographed by Julius Schulman | image source]
A recent example that achieves a similar lightness is Peter Zumthor's Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, Germany, which opened in 2007. A band in the "brick coat" of the new building -- located directly over ruins of a gothic church -- illuminates this in-between space, what the architect calls a "memory landscape." The "filter walls" create beautiful lighting effects inside the space that is not burdened by requirements for conditioned air.
[Peter Zumthor's Kolumba | image source]
Another project without concerns for keeping out the elements is the Nazarí Wall Intervention in Granada, Spain. Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas's intervention fills a gap in the Nazarí Wall, caused by a 19th-century earthquake. The wall allows passage between its two layers, in which light dapples through the random openings in the stacking of granite blocks.
[Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas's Nazarí Wall Intervention | image source]
Kengo Kuma's earlier Stone Museum from 2000 in Nasu, Japan creates a series of pavilions created from stacked stones, quarried from the same stone as the existing buildings on the site. Unlike the wall in Granada, here the openings are composed in regular patterns. Glass infill in portions gives a colored glow to the narrow slots during the day and at night.
[Kengo Kuma's Stone Museum | image source]
Last is the award-winning design for the offices for Dehli, India's South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC) by Anagram Architects. While this is the only image I've encountered for the project, it tells volumes. Openings in the brick wall are achieved not be leaving gaps in the wall (like the three projects before) but by the rotation of the bricks in plan. As the brick moves past a certain angle, the gap between it and its neighbor becomes too large for mortar, and it therefore becomes an opening; the bricks above and below span the opposite direction to make the maneuver structurally sound. Regular rectangular-sized openings are created by the architects' handling of the brick, but the variable coursing of the brick up the wall means the texture of the wall appears undulating, as if the wall is billowing as it rises. It's a beautiful example of what can occur when the architect allows the brick to lead the way, letting the simple form of the modular unit be a guide for more complex patterns, textures and openings.
[Anagram Architects' South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre | image source]
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Today's archidose #268
The Sequence in Brussels, Belgium by Arne Quinze, 2008. Check out michaeluyttersp's set for a few more images of the installation. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or:: Tag your photos archidose
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Today's archidose #267
The interior spread from an exhibition pamphlet for the Architectural League's 13:100 | Thirteen New York Architects Design for Ordos (Mongolia) exhibition now on display. Check the original size to read the key to the 13 projects by New York-based architects. See my previous post on ORDOS 100 for more information on the project.
To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose
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Firm Faces #9
Portugese firm Kaputt!'s web page is basically a splash page, but it's quite an interesting one. A slideshow of hands on a scanbed next to model photos gives us the firm's contact information and "cast of characters." The images associate the hand of the architect with the architectural creation, an immediate relationship that seems often splintered these days. The names take this relationship one step further, by marking the skin with that which can only be handwritten, not typed and printed on a computer.
And in case you're wondering about the faces that go with those hands:
Check out the belly of an architect for one of Kaputt's projects.
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Today's archidose #266
Saxion Hogeschool Enschede in Enschede, The Netherlands by IAA Architecten, 2001. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose
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Monday, Monday
My weekly page update:
Alila Cha-Am in Petchaburi, Thailand by Duangrit Bunnang Architect Limited.
This week's book review is Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties, by Alastair Gordon.
Some unrelated links for your enjoyment: Checking the Pulse of the Architecture Industry
A survey at Archinect that asks, "What will the future hold for an industry that relies on a relatively stable economy, and how will our industry support so many new eager professionals?"
YSkira
The Skira yearbook of world architecture. Check out the call for ideas for those interested in getting published. (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)
Imagine Coney
"Coney Island needs to be revitalized and reimagined." Send in your best ideas for a January exhibition.
City Desk
"Fictional urbanism. Semi-regular items about a city." (added to sidebar under blogs::urban)
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AE#9: Undulating Brick Walls
A brick is a modular masonry unit, something that wouldn't appear to "want to be" composed into undulating surfaces. Of course this doesn't stop architects from trying, from using limitations as inspiration and opportunities for doing something new. The idea of creating curves from orthogonal materials is not new. Modern examples of undulating brick walls include such mid-century designs as Eero Saarinen's 1955 MIT Chapel, where fairly regular ins-and-outs create an embracing space for worship.
[MIT Chapel by Eero Saarinen | image source]
Similar forms were created by Uruguay's Eladio Dieste, an engineer who exploited a technique of reinforcing brick walls, an innovation that could be considered his own. The Church of Christ the Worker is a stunning examples of how Dieste engineering prowess led to sensually appealing forms, undulating in plan but also leaning in section, following the roof also undulating overhead. The image below shows how he revealed the thickness of these walls, showing how the bricks supported themselves in relatively thin sections, unlike the thick load-bearing masonry walls of the Monadnock Building and the like.
[Church of Christ the Worker by Eladio Dieste | image source]
Thanks to engineers like Dieste, and advances in computer drafting and manufacturing, architects are trying similar forms, but less regular and repetitious. An unbuilt 1999 project in Green Bay, Wisconsin by Office dA -- a firm that thrives on the unconventional composition of materials -- is a good example of this trend. Gaps in a rectangular shell give the impression of carvings in a brick mass. Up close the "truth" is revealed, that the wall is but a wrapper that is manipulated for effect.
[Witte Arts Building by Office dA | image source]
Erick van Egeraat's design for an art gallery in Cork, Ireland is a masonry execution of "blob" architecture, achieved via a thin-joint mortar system, in which bricks are glued together on a backing, more akin to precast systems than the conventional on-site stacking of bricks. Egeraat uses this technique as a sort of flourish in the Crawford Art Gallery's facade, a one-off design not dependent on structure like the earlier examples above. The subsequent implementation of undulating brick walls is more in keeping with Dieste's techniques than Egeraat's.
[Cork Gallery of Art by Erick van Egeraat | image source]
ROTO Architecture's design for a building at Prairie View A&M University in Texas recalls Dieste's expression of the wall's thickness, as well as SITE's series of 1970's Best Product showrooms which treated the brick facade like a thin veneer shed by the big box behind it. Prairie View's brick facade peels away to allow access to, and light to enter, the interior. This playful maneuver activates a long elevation otherwise punctuated by small, apparently random windows.
[Architecture and Art Building by ROTO Architects | image source]
Last is 290 Mulberry, a condo building now under construction in New York City. Designed by SHoP Architects, the facades are covered in a patterned brick that appears at once undulating and folded. The vertical joints in the rendering below make me believe that the construction is more akin to the precast Crawford Art Gallery than the other examples here. In design it recalls the mid-century designs of Saarinen and Dieste, where repetition is key; it is evident here, but in a more complex and decorative form. It creates a pattern, a texture that unfortunately recalls architecture's past, not its future.
[290 Mulberry by SHoP Architects | image source]
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