Wednesday 1 December 2010
025 Tres Grande Bibliotheque - Regular Irregular Freedoms Part 02
Book: The construction of Merveilles.
The Tres Grande Bibliotheque de France (TGB, 1989), the ideology of its two fundamental parts:
.01 The stacks (layering of floors)
.02 the reading rooms (voids cut into the layering)
Low volumes are generated for the conference center, exhibitions, reception, storage and technical spaces which are conceived as autonomous parts of the program. These volumes are contained in a long, tall, colossal prism of a library, with a quadrangular plan (75x87m).
Structure:
In the lower levels, towards the Seine, a heonidovian structural trellis is inserted that permits elimination of any other vertical support. The upper load bearing structure is composed of five long walls that subdivide the plan into parallel bands. The walls are made of reinforced concrete, 2m thick, calculated to prevent fires and equipped wit inter spaces for conducts and technical equipment.
"giant deep beams define a self sufficient structural system"
Nine elevator groups, enclosed in 'glass cages', are inserted in the pattern of the walls. The walls and floor slabs are cut to interlock the reading rooms. These spaces are not crossed by structural elements and are larger than the spaces in-between the floor stacks.
The stratification of obtaining large spaces in floor stacks dates back, in the cae of OMA's work, to the bodies inserted in the Sphinx, the statue of liberty inside the Chrysler Building in Dream of Liberty, the spherical council set into the City Hall of the Hague.
The reading rooms are enclosed in shells and mimic forms of pebbles.. randomly arranged on the lower levels, (auditorium and projection booths), of a "cross" between different volumes (current event library), of a "spiral" (study library on three large ramps), of a "shell" (catalogue room) and of a "loop" based on the Moebius strip, (research library).
The extremities of the rooms are cut by the glass enclosures, which thus become one of the vertical section of the prism.
Facade:
With the exception of the facade of the offices.. perforated by windows, the others are decorated with cloud morfits, translating the idea of series of cavities created inside a "nebulous mass" into imagery. If we imagined it with pebbles.. "this nebulous mass" might also been seen as the spatial sublimation of the blue monochromes painted by Klein, starting with the one entitles RE19 in 1958, where he applied sponges of different sizes on the canvas, randomly arranged and soaked with the same colour, almost as if they were clouds.
The objective of the design process was to discover the degree of freedom permitted by such grand structural system.
"we simply assume that the weight of the TCB will be supported by columns in a regular grid. The disadvantage is that void spaces would be skewered. Also in the lower levels, the columns would get horribly fat. The entrance level would be stunning, however not very efficient. Nobody would know where to go, and it would be impossible to excavate larger spaces below for the auditorium".
OMA considered the possibility of eliminating the pillars, transforming the enclosure of the rooms into structural "carapaces" to support the slabs. Nevertheless, the position of the rooms was limited by the distribution of the load. The path indicated in this latter solution is more difficult and complex for the calculation of the structures and the economics of their construction.
According to the OMA narrative, this is the point in the project in which Vierendeel Beams was introduced, with the height of one floor (as in the ZKM). The Vierendeel Beams are used in different configuration, resting upright, creating an alternation between floors that correspond to the height of the beams and floors sandwiched between two beams. The beam makes it hard to insert the rooms in the structure.
The various solutions examined thus far in the project were all discharged due to the persistence of the original idea, contained in the sketch for the ZKM, of large rooms with irregular configurations set into the regular volume of the building.
To obtain this specific relationship within the library, a solution was developed by rejoining the beam to achieve a single continuos vertical structure that could be freely cut to permit insertions of the rooms.
The starting point of this solution was the Vierendeel beam, the structural model most similar to this beam wall is the reinforced concrete wall freely cut to adapt the layout requirements, a wide spread construction solution by now.
"now the plan - OMA continues - is divided into parallel zones 12.5 meters each, separating by walls of concrete. The walls are 100m high and act as a deep beam of theoretically infinite strength. Where the voids occur, they simply punch out holes in the beams. In the Great Hall of Ascension, the beams are supported on two opposite sides to create a column-free square of 70x70m. So the walls are made hollow and are subdivided into vertical shafts. To service the 12.5 meter in-between, they merely have to be punctured. The void spaces each have their own plant rooms: five technological placentas"
o
A series of plans and sections proposed by OMA features venturian poche fields to bring out the idea of the reading rooms hollowed out inside a sort of boulder.
One of the two models represents only the rooms, the service spaces and the elevators in solid form. The other shows the complex of the stack in the form of a mass perforated by the cavities of the room.
"The library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory, books, optic disks, microfiches, computers..etc. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absence of building, void carried out from information solid"
The Tres Grande Bibliotheque de France (TGB, 1989), the ideology of its two fundamental parts:
.01 The stacks (layering of floors)
.02 the reading rooms (voids cut into the layering)
Low volumes are generated for the conference center, exhibitions, reception, storage and technical spaces which are conceived as autonomous parts of the program. These volumes are contained in a long, tall, colossal prism of a library, with a quadrangular plan (75x87m).
Structure:
In the lower levels, towards the Seine, a heonidovian structural trellis is inserted that permits elimination of any other vertical support. The upper load bearing structure is composed of five long walls that subdivide the plan into parallel bands. The walls are made of reinforced concrete, 2m thick, calculated to prevent fires and equipped wit inter spaces for conducts and technical equipment.
"giant deep beams define a self sufficient structural system"
Nine elevator groups, enclosed in 'glass cages', are inserted in the pattern of the walls. The walls and floor slabs are cut to interlock the reading rooms. These spaces are not crossed by structural elements and are larger than the spaces in-between the floor stacks.
The stratification of obtaining large spaces in floor stacks dates back, in the cae of OMA's work, to the bodies inserted in the Sphinx, the statue of liberty inside the Chrysler Building in Dream of Liberty, the spherical council set into the City Hall of the Hague.
The reading rooms are enclosed in shells and mimic forms of pebbles.. randomly arranged on the lower levels, (auditorium and projection booths), of a "cross" between different volumes (current event library), of a "spiral" (study library on three large ramps), of a "shell" (catalogue room) and of a "loop" based on the Moebius strip, (research library).
The extremities of the rooms are cut by the glass enclosures, which thus become one of the vertical section of the prism.
Facade:
With the exception of the facade of the offices.. perforated by windows, the others are decorated with cloud morfits, translating the idea of series of cavities created inside a "nebulous mass" into imagery. If we imagined it with pebbles.. "this nebulous mass" might also been seen as the spatial sublimation of the blue monochromes painted by Klein, starting with the one entitles RE19 in 1958, where he applied sponges of different sizes on the canvas, randomly arranged and soaked with the same colour, almost as if they were clouds.
The objective of the design process was to discover the degree of freedom permitted by such grand structural system.
"we simply assume that the weight of the TCB will be supported by columns in a regular grid. The disadvantage is that void spaces would be skewered. Also in the lower levels, the columns would get horribly fat. The entrance level would be stunning, however not very efficient. Nobody would know where to go, and it would be impossible to excavate larger spaces below for the auditorium".
OMA considered the possibility of eliminating the pillars, transforming the enclosure of the rooms into structural "carapaces" to support the slabs. Nevertheless, the position of the rooms was limited by the distribution of the load. The path indicated in this latter solution is more difficult and complex for the calculation of the structures and the economics of their construction.
According to the OMA narrative, this is the point in the project in which Vierendeel Beams was introduced, with the height of one floor (as in the ZKM). The Vierendeel Beams are used in different configuration, resting upright, creating an alternation between floors that correspond to the height of the beams and floors sandwiched between two beams. The beam makes it hard to insert the rooms in the structure.
The various solutions examined thus far in the project were all discharged due to the persistence of the original idea, contained in the sketch for the ZKM, of large rooms with irregular configurations set into the regular volume of the building.
To obtain this specific relationship within the library, a solution was developed by rejoining the beam to achieve a single continuos vertical structure that could be freely cut to permit insertions of the rooms.
The starting point of this solution was the Vierendeel beam, the structural model most similar to this beam wall is the reinforced concrete wall freely cut to adapt the layout requirements, a wide spread construction solution by now.
"now the plan - OMA continues - is divided into parallel zones 12.5 meters each, separating by walls of concrete. The walls are 100m high and act as a deep beam of theoretically infinite strength. Where the voids occur, they simply punch out holes in the beams. In the Great Hall of Ascension, the beams are supported on two opposite sides to create a column-free square of 70x70m. So the walls are made hollow and are subdivided into vertical shafts. To service the 12.5 meter in-between, they merely have to be punctured. The void spaces each have their own plant rooms: five technological placentas"
o
A series of plans and sections proposed by OMA features venturian poche fields to bring out the idea of the reading rooms hollowed out inside a sort of boulder.
One of the two models represents only the rooms, the service spaces and the elevators in solid form. The other shows the complex of the stack in the form of a mass perforated by the cavities of the room.
"The library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory, books, optic disks, microfiches, computers..etc. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absence of building, void carried out from information solid"
Monday 29 November 2010
023 Tres Grande Bibliotheque - Regular/Irregular Freedoms
S,M,L,LX Book
"the ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggressively ... architecture lost function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodates the persistent desire for collectivity"
Proposal for the Expo 1989.
Seine is seen by Koolhaas as boring...Only visible excitement: irregular palisade of "bad" sixties and seventies towers (social housing) that surrounds/encloses the site.
A colossal rectangle (250x300 m) completely isolated between river and railway. Only one restriction: a limit height of 35m give or take. There's a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine to connect with the park.
The program is a megalomaniac's dream. Five total different libraries for the entire postwar production of words and images. The program is 250,000m2 (13 x ZKM, 10 x Zeebrugge); 75% of it is storage.
"A long with conference centers, restaurants, offices, e.t.c.... it would accommodate five separate and autonomous institutions in which the complete production of words and images since 1945.. would be contained.. A cinematheque, a library for recent acquisitions, a reference library, a library of catalogues and a scientific research library"
The scheme is based on Technological scenarios developed with inventors, system analysts, writers, electronic companies.
In the podium, we put circulation.
On the podium, we drop five different forms... libraries. Some round, some square, some on sticks, some sinking.
The very big library is interpreted as a solid block of information or repository of all forms of memory - books, laser disks, microfiche, computers, databases.
The major public space are defined as absences of buildings, voids carved out of the information solid.
Since they are voids, individual libraries can be shaped strictly according to their own logic, independent of each other.
1 slab of Storage, 1 slab of Admin,Office, 1 slab of Circulation/elevators... laminate them together to form a single large block.
The horizontal slices through this block, mimics the program of the reading rooms. Therefore, it is said that the plan = the section.
o
"imagine, a building consisting of regular and irregular spaces, where the most important parts of the building consists of an absence of building"
The regular here is the storage; the irregular, reading rooms, not designed, simply carved out.
The TGB is a cube.
It's a solid block of information with reading rooms, voids, excavated where efficient.
Dark in the centre... daylight in the perimeter.
Cube pierced by nine shafts of vertical movement. As long as a void surrounds one of the elevator square, it is accessible.
Forms have to be left out, not constructed.
A cube. All the "deduction" have been performed, the building as a residue of process of elimination.
The portraits of the libraries, the way they will never be seen as shapes, as objects.
Somehow, presence of the cube, seems only way to respond to the surrounding "neatness" of the new architectural landscape.
But can such a container still have a relationship with the city? Should it? Is it Important?
Make a reverse model: What is solid has melted, what is void floods as object in nothingness.
The first test for facade... simulating the impossible.
A plane, sometimes transparent, sometimes translucent, sometimes opaque; mysterious, revealing.
material - cloud sky at night, like an eclipse.
The Void Spaces:
.Pebbles: "sound and moving image library":
Lev -4: Auditoriums, viewing booths and cubicles for film, video, television and music.
Lev -3: Cinemas, conference rooms, booths.
Lev -2: Booths, cinemas, offices: entrance lobbies.
Lev -1: "Treasure Exhibition"
.Great Hall of Ascension:
Lev 00: A horizontal cut separating the lower four floors from the cube that hovers nine meters above.
The hall can receive 10,000 people, it's floor and ceiling are made of glass.
It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination.
On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announces different libraries.
.Offices:
Lev 01: The north face of the building is an office zone for ad ministrative, libraries and complementary services, connected, where necessary, to the stacks or the major rooms.
Lev 02: Storage.
.Intersection:
.Recent Acquisition Library:
Lev 03: " two voids that cross - a horizontal reading zoom and an auditorium that slopes towards the river"
Lev 04: Audio, booths, plant, storage.
Lev 05: Audiovisual, Auditorium.
Lev 06: Video, booth storage.
Lev 07: Video, storage.
Lev 08: Storage.
.Spiral:
.Reference library;
Lev 09; " a continuos spiral that connects five floors of partly open storage and study booths.
Lev 10: Reading rooms, open storage, carrels, robotized storage, plant.
Lev 11: Reading rooms, storage.
Lev 12: Reading rooms, plant, storage.
Lev 13: Lounge, conference room, storage.
Lev 14: Storage.
.Shell:
.Catalogue Room:
Lev 15: "appearing on the exterior as an eye; it provides a panoramic views of Paris"
Lev 16: Catalogue room, storage.
.Loop:
.Research Library:
Lev 17: "a scientific interior where floors becomes walls become ceiling becomes walls - a Mobius strip that performs a loop - the - loop across the depth of the building."
Lev 18: Conference room, storage.
Lev 19: Reading room, storage.
Lev 20: cafe, lounge, storage.
Roof: Restaurant, gymnasium, garden, swimming pool.
Friday 26 November 2010
022 Kunst und Medientechnologie - A Building of Stacked Freedom Part 02
Book: The construction of Merveilles
Precisely 1989-90 a turning point appears in the work of OMA. Towards a new synthesis of the principals outlined in Delirious New York, the metaphors and structural conceptions.
This is seen in the competitions projects for the zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie at Karlruhe, the Tres Grande Bibliotheque de France in Paris and the Maritine Terminal at Zeebrugge.
In these projects, Koolhaas tried to safeguard, even in buildings whre the large structural size imposes constraints in the stratification of the floors, the freedoms, the collision of values, layers, the urban voids.
The most significant element, comes from the Vierendeel Beam.
The ZKM is placed carefully on an area adjacent to the railroad, behind the station, symbolically facing towards the outskirts of the city. This makes it another expression of the contextualism of OMA, structured by a system of three perspective axes:
1.an axis connection to the city
2.an axis of circulation within the building,
3.a vertical axis, which delivers the pleasure of seeing the baroque city.
The ZKM is composed of a long volume with a rectangular plan, containing technical space, store rooms, research departments, and a multipurpose hall, arranged accordingly to Koolhaas' strip schemes, and a large, deep prism with a square plan grafted onto one end of the strip, containing a theater, an auditorium, a museum and a restaurant with panoramic terrace.
o
A working sketch for the prism shows a stratification of the floors in which ire-general cavities have been cut out, reflecting the issue of the pursuit of new hierarchies between regular structure schemes and freely configured spaces.
The plan is subdivided into a vast central zone for the main spaces - "rooms" or "inner buildings" - and perimeter bands for physical plant, conducts, technical and service spaces, as well as vertical access elements - "Technical Rooms" of varying depth, derived from Koolhaas, "hollow wall".
The rooms are obtained by layering Vierendeel beams of the height of our floor, so that the lower bands are free of pilasters, with the objective of alternation of beam floors and floors that are completely free of structure.
To host the physical plant rooms and vertical access element, the technical rooms vary in thickness in the four sides, though it remains constant on the different levels, in some cores requiring the insertion of function that might have called for appropriate depths, i.e. the stage of the theater is narrow and extends for the entire height of the building.
The service strips are obtained with cantilevered floors slops on trusses, in the narrowest band, on the eastern facade, which contains staircases, ramps and rest rooms, with structures arranged along the perimeter, or with the addition of a beam inclined to be perpendicular to the ramps.
In this case, the cavity with the vertical connections, created between the enclosures and the "rooms", is similar to that of the North Lobby of the Un Assembly Building.
The band of the greatest depth contained the most important service spaces and is the only one with a non-transparent, windowless outer enclosure.
"Each architecture now embodies two conditions: one part permanent, the other temporary" . Koolhaas wrote.
The sketch for ZKM becomes a source of inspiration for the design of the Tres Grande Biblioteque de France (TGB).
The ideology, ideogram of its two fundamental parts: The Stacks (layering of floors) and the reading rooms (voids cut into the layering)
Book: Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with students.
The museum is to serve as a laboratory, a university and a theater of media.
Main thoughts of Karlruhe was that it's an idyllic baroque city, however its filled wth highways, railways and autobahns. It's site is exactly at the interface of the old city and the new city.
Three axes informed the project: an axis of connection to the city; one of circulation within the building and a vertical axis which delivers the pleasure of seeing the baroque city.
Structure plays an important role.
A system of enormous trusses that could span from wall to wall. These trusses would be so deep that they could include the whole floor.
A floor to be completely determined by structure and for the next to remain completely free.
The trusses could be changed and manipulated for artists affect, to bring about a kind of emotion or empathy, in terms of the structure of he building.
In section, one can seen how the increasingly theatricality of the museum is consummated, to the point that what you have is a single stack of events.
The first is the theater, followed by two floors of laboratories, one floor of a lecture hall, and then two museum floors.
This would happen in one central tower, which is surrounded by four different zones:
1.Public Circulation
2.Office
3.Technology, like a stage tower, extends the full height of the building
4.Series of balconies.
These four zones would simply wrap around the central zone of the building.
The theater is a space where the whole spectrum between classical theater and completely simulated theater will be presented, so it is a space where every single plane can be seen as a surface for projection.
Above this one the labs, which are sometimes completely determinate by structure and at other times completely free.
As in the case of library, this would create enormous variety of spaces.
The following floor is slopped in it's entirety, so there is a natural tendency towards the amphitheater.
The top floors have a classical organization, so the building starts with a vary experimental organization below and becomes almost Scinkelesque at the top.
Another interesting thing about the museum of media is that what is inside can be seen almost as an evasion of public life.
On exterior, one elevation has transparent metallic surface that can serve as a projection screen and can completely transform the building's character.
Some of the activities can be projected on the outside.
On the north side, a system of public circulation that can be projected on the facade, with people climbing to different levels of the museum.
The next side would be the office zone and finally the technical zone.
"There is incredible presume for the media to always change, in term of both its content and it's form. What is difficult about doing a museum for media is that curse of continuously accelerating events, combined with the problems of creating real space as well as space that is virtual, ephemeral or destructible."
Precisely 1989-90 a turning point appears in the work of OMA. Towards a new synthesis of the principals outlined in Delirious New York, the metaphors and structural conceptions.
This is seen in the competitions projects for the zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie at Karlruhe, the Tres Grande Bibliotheque de France in Paris and the Maritine Terminal at Zeebrugge.
In these projects, Koolhaas tried to safeguard, even in buildings whre the large structural size imposes constraints in the stratification of the floors, the freedoms, the collision of values, layers, the urban voids.
The most significant element, comes from the Vierendeel Beam.
The ZKM is placed carefully on an area adjacent to the railroad, behind the station, symbolically facing towards the outskirts of the city. This makes it another expression of the contextualism of OMA, structured by a system of three perspective axes:
1.an axis connection to the city
2.an axis of circulation within the building,
3.a vertical axis, which delivers the pleasure of seeing the baroque city.
The ZKM is composed of a long volume with a rectangular plan, containing technical space, store rooms, research departments, and a multipurpose hall, arranged accordingly to Koolhaas' strip schemes, and a large, deep prism with a square plan grafted onto one end of the strip, containing a theater, an auditorium, a museum and a restaurant with panoramic terrace.
o
A working sketch for the prism shows a stratification of the floors in which ire-general cavities have been cut out, reflecting the issue of the pursuit of new hierarchies between regular structure schemes and freely configured spaces.
The plan is subdivided into a vast central zone for the main spaces - "rooms" or "inner buildings" - and perimeter bands for physical plant, conducts, technical and service spaces, as well as vertical access elements - "Technical Rooms" of varying depth, derived from Koolhaas, "hollow wall".
The rooms are obtained by layering Vierendeel beams of the height of our floor, so that the lower bands are free of pilasters, with the objective of alternation of beam floors and floors that are completely free of structure.
To host the physical plant rooms and vertical access element, the technical rooms vary in thickness in the four sides, though it remains constant on the different levels, in some cores requiring the insertion of function that might have called for appropriate depths, i.e. the stage of the theater is narrow and extends for the entire height of the building.
The service strips are obtained with cantilevered floors slops on trusses, in the narrowest band, on the eastern facade, which contains staircases, ramps and rest rooms, with structures arranged along the perimeter, or with the addition of a beam inclined to be perpendicular to the ramps.
In this case, the cavity with the vertical connections, created between the enclosures and the "rooms", is similar to that of the North Lobby of the Un Assembly Building.
The band of the greatest depth contained the most important service spaces and is the only one with a non-transparent, windowless outer enclosure.
"Each architecture now embodies two conditions: one part permanent, the other temporary" . Koolhaas wrote.
The sketch for ZKM becomes a source of inspiration for the design of the Tres Grande Biblioteque de France (TGB).
The ideology, ideogram of its two fundamental parts: The Stacks (layering of floors) and the reading rooms (voids cut into the layering)
Book: Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with students.
The museum is to serve as a laboratory, a university and a theater of media.
Main thoughts of Karlruhe was that it's an idyllic baroque city, however its filled wth highways, railways and autobahns. It's site is exactly at the interface of the old city and the new city.
Three axes informed the project: an axis of connection to the city; one of circulation within the building and a vertical axis which delivers the pleasure of seeing the baroque city.
Structure plays an important role.
A system of enormous trusses that could span from wall to wall. These trusses would be so deep that they could include the whole floor.
A floor to be completely determined by structure and for the next to remain completely free.
The trusses could be changed and manipulated for artists affect, to bring about a kind of emotion or empathy, in terms of the structure of he building.
In section, one can seen how the increasingly theatricality of the museum is consummated, to the point that what you have is a single stack of events.
The first is the theater, followed by two floors of laboratories, one floor of a lecture hall, and then two museum floors.
This would happen in one central tower, which is surrounded by four different zones:
1.Public Circulation
2.Office
3.Technology, like a stage tower, extends the full height of the building
4.Series of balconies.
These four zones would simply wrap around the central zone of the building.
The theater is a space where the whole spectrum between classical theater and completely simulated theater will be presented, so it is a space where every single plane can be seen as a surface for projection.
Above this one the labs, which are sometimes completely determinate by structure and at other times completely free.
As in the case of library, this would create enormous variety of spaces.
The following floor is slopped in it's entirety, so there is a natural tendency towards the amphitheater.
The top floors have a classical organization, so the building starts with a vary experimental organization below and becomes almost Scinkelesque at the top.
Another interesting thing about the museum of media is that what is inside can be seen almost as an evasion of public life.
On exterior, one elevation has transparent metallic surface that can serve as a projection screen and can completely transform the building's character.
Some of the activities can be projected on the outside.
On the north side, a system of public circulation that can be projected on the facade, with people climbing to different levels of the museum.
The next side would be the office zone and finally the technical zone.
"There is incredible presume for the media to always change, in term of both its content and it's form. What is difficult about doing a museum for media is that curse of continuously accelerating events, combined with the problems of creating real space as well as space that is virtual, ephemeral or destructible."
Tuesday 23 November 2010
021 Kunst und Medientechnologie - A Building of Stacked Freedom
S, M, L, XL Book:
Karlruhe is Europe's geographical center. It poses as a "typical west german city at the end of the 20th century". It's citizens serenely inhabit the baroque idyll of their reconstructed townscape. It matters little that their town has been through modernized.
The city is seemed to be developed by its own periphery. However, conceptually it's 'heat' will always remain the center.
It's train station is being extended to receive the IDZ Germany's equivalent of the French TGV.
Take a Futuristic institution - ZKM, Zentruim fur Kurst und Medientechnologie, also known as Electronic Banhaus - and place it in this context.
Projected on the perimeter of the baroque town, on a narrow strip of land on the wrong side of station and tracks, it focus on and of ramps of the Autobahn.
It's program consists of a museum of media art, a museum of contemporary art, research and production facilities from music, video and virtual reality, theater of media, lecture halls, media library.
It represents a laboratory open to the public, the elusive connection between kunst and technology.
A darwinian arena where classical and electronic media can compete with and influence each other.
The entire program is incorporated in a single container, 43m x 43m x 58m.
The container is pushed bluntly against the railway embankment, then coupled with the station circulation to form a new, two faced entry:
1.To the city; BAHNHOFMUSEUM
2.To the periphery, MUSEUMBAHNHOF
Within this container, it seen that all the program are superimposed in a single stack.
1. Studios - Music and Film
2. Laboratories - Video and Computers
3. Media Theater
4. Media Museum
5. Library
6. Lecture Halls
7. Museum of contemporary Art
8. Restaurant
9. Open Air Terrace
This sequence corresponds to a transition from production/research/display, from artifact to "natural", from private to public.
The lower part of the structure is a machine however, towards the top, it becomes more of a building.
East and West side of the core are defined by huge walls of black concrete. Between the wall space, seven Vierendeel beams, each six meter deep, creating an alteration between floors completely free of structure - to exploit this literal incarnation of the free plan one of the rooms is round and floors of inhabited structure that are "marked" by different Vierendeels, which oscillate between structural support and architectural definer, utility and aesthetic.
The deep core is surrounded by four thinner zones:
1. A public void space faces the historical city to the North; i.e. the atrium as a facade. A system of elevators, escalators, ramps, balconies climb upwards in a continuos movement from event to event. Two - thirds of the way up, this route enters the core itself to merge with the slope of the lecture hall. Its facade combines blue, red transparent and etched glass in a mask that sometimes contradicts the movement behind it.
Facing the lecture hall - it opens to the atrium - the steel millions turn to non-reflective glass to form a transparent 'eye'.
2. In the East zone, behind a screen of expanded metal, allow open-air escape from the interior. The metal wall is used as an electronic billboard. The activities leak out and are projected in real time alternating with commercial messages, railway network bulletins...e.t.c.
The screen faces a ramp that leads directly to the ZKM entrance, on the level of the trains and below it, to a new station hall. A passage runs beneath the tracks to connect North and South entries, a mixing chamber of the two publics.
In this hybrid of utilitarian and cultural program, a linear antechamber with a medieval german motif (fireplace, log beams on the ceiling) at the level of the trains represents a platform for culture. A seemingly endless elevator transports the visitors from here through a hole in the wall to the realm of the media. The theater is connected to this lobby by a 30 meter wide door that can move up and down.
3. On the South is the "robot" - An adaptation of the fly-tower of a conventional theater. A void space that runs the entire height of the building to allow stage sets, electronic devices, projectors, arts, container capsules to move up and down... or to be locked in place to create a new condition on particular floors.
Corrugated Polyester Skin is used for this facade.
4. The West zone, clad in giant glazed bricks, contains offices and individual plant rooms for each major program, to provide the most specific, direct precise servicing.
Wednesday 17 November 2010
020 Buildings as Social Objects Part 02 - Structures
Does society 'really exist' that is, is it some kind of thing?
What we see of society in space-time is individuals interacting, encountering and perhaps also seeking refuge from all these.
Is society then the sense of the interactions that we see in space-time?
It cannot be so. Society must persist through time. Society is, at the very least, something that outlasts individuals. The reduction in individualism is in fact the one thing we logically cannot do.
If we are not talking about interactions in space-time when we say 'society' then what are we talking about?
What persists under human interactions that we observe in space-time?
What persists is not interactions, but certain configurational patterns underlying the interaction. Individual interactions are endless replaced. But certain underlying patterns persist. These are patterns that we name as 'society' The patterns can be the result of any number of different pattern formers: Form of production, social institution..., but it is these that we name as society. This allows us to include space form to society among the patterns.
Space is one thing that can generate and restrict encounter and interaction probabilities. This is how space becomes involved in society.
Society then is not the space-time manifestations of society as the interaction fields. The entity which we name society is not a thing but a abstraction.
Does this entitle that society could be seen as an imaginary concept?
Firstly, it is real. Secondly, its real when its realized in space-time. The world of interaction in which we live, is not itself society but it is by which society realized itself in space-time and thus projects itself through part to future.
The realization in space-time is the means by which society as a system of configurational persistence achieves this persistence and transmits itself across time.
Society is in this sense an abstraction. It is the genotypes of social arrangements that are reproduced through time and which are therefore recognizable in the relational complexes which are realized in a specific form at one point in time. Society is in the sense a dematerialized thing and this is why we find it hard even to acknowledge its existence as a real thing.
Although society is seen as this dematerialized genotypical thing, the means by which it is projected through time is anything but dematerialized. On contrary, the material form of society at any moment of time is not that society, it is the means by which that society is transmitted into the future. The means of society as an abstraction is realized in space-time and then reproduced.
Society is not in itself its material form, but even so only exists through its material form.
This double-take is why all social practices take the form of abstract structures. Dominating the reality can be done by structuring what can happen in it.
Buildings happen within this double take. Like the social events which they contain, they themselves are space-time realizations of abstractions. Buildings are seem less than social events, in that they are not made up of thinking human beings, but they are long lasting, almost permanent, transformations of the world in the image of society that which governs it's form.
Buildings are not maps of human interaction. They are maps of social genotypes of human interactions. This is what makes them so powerful.
Buildings only contingently house the phenotypes of human interactions. The mystery of the social nature of building now becomes clear.
It's essential nature is to give form to an abstraction and through this to give that abstraction the realization which enables it to be projected through time.
Buildings reflect on the generic abstractions which constitute society itself. It is these abstractions that need to be transmitted through time.
Buildings make this powerful by hosting these genotypes into the very materiality of our existence.
Buildings are thus the most powerful means that a society has to constitute itself in space-time and through this to project itself into the future.
In this sense, societies are throughly dependent on space.
The art of building is, inevitably a social act.
As such it entails risks, risks that the forms will not be these that permits the society to reproduce its essential form.
In modern societies, these risks are carried out between architecture and the social agencies through which architecture is legitimated and controlled.
Architecture persists both because society changes and must change its built form in order to perpetuate itself in a different way to it predecessors. These must always experiment with the future.
The real risk is in the persistence of error through time, so that form inconsistent with the perpetuation of a good society became dominant. It is exactly from such high risks that we, in the late twenty century, seen recently to have made our escape.
020 Buildings as Social Objects Part 01
What is the role of buildings in society?
The simple proposition that human beings inhabit two types of co-existent worlds:
1. A continuos material world of objects and space which we occupy and move about in physically.
2. A discontinuous world of expressive forms, signs and symbols which we occupy cognitively.
The act of building, through the creation of configuration in space and form, converts these into a single world. Building is the meeting point of the two worlds, where real space is converted into logical space.
Buildings convert the material world which we inhabit into a non-discursive world of culture, indeed into culture's densest locus. Through, this conversation, the material world becomes for us information and idea, rather than a thing. Because culture functions non-discursively, and makes the artificial appear natural, the built world we have made into information and idea comes to appear material to us.
Through this assimilation of the material world in the cultural world, buildings becomes a puzzle for us. We become so used to its automatic culturality that we are taken by surprise when we remember its physical nature.
We begin to make distinctions between house and home and between building and dwelling, protesting that building is 'mere material' while something else, some immaterial human stuff, is the essence of what appears at first to be a physical object.
How can the material world be involved in our social and cultural lifes?
The same difficulty occurs when trying to separate social institutions from the building they occupy. Its defined tat social institutions is an arrangement of people. Therefore, we can say that a church is 'mere bricks and mortar' nothing without the priest and congregation.
The fact is that a church building without its social set up is no longer 'really a church'. The fact that the social set up 'gives a meaning' to the building is more than an association of ideas.
Once a social set up with its building exists, then the building is much more than a stage set or background. The case of the church is particularly clear, since the entire form of the building is dedicated to the support of a spatialised ritual of some kind, and the provision of an audience for that ritual.
By providing a spatial form adapted to a particular ritual, the building becomes part of the means by which that ritual is acted by its community. The building becomes a powerful part of the means by which that ritual is perpetuated, and transmitted into the future.
How can the abstraction we call 'society' take a physical form, as it seems it must do it it is to be real in the manually accepted senses of the world? If society does exist, then in what sense does it exist?
There is a problem in assigning society a material existence in the same sense that we assign an individual a material existence. If we do not assign society some kind of material existence, it seems unlikely that we can formulate answers to questions as to why and how spatialization through the house as home and the church building as an aspect of the church institution should be so consistent ways?
If society is immaterial, then surely it would not require this consistency of materialization.
The idea of society is not exhausted by the possibilities of existence in the same sense that individuals, or material objects, exist, that is as continuos finite entities occupying a well-defined region of time-space.
To conceptualize society as a thing has its origins in the most fundamental of our materialistic prejudices:
The Idea of A Thing.
Beginning a famous problem in philosophy, by Heraclitus and discussed by at length by Quine, about the definition of rivers.
How can we say that a river is a thing when its constitutive elements - water molecules - keep changing, and will be found now here, now elsewhere in the river, then is a nearby sea, then as falling rain?
The elimination and replacement of parts is also true of human beings. We should see ourselves, not as things, perhaps, but as processes. The common sense definition of individuals as things, and even of things in general, seems after all to be illusory.
Is all 'flux and change', and are all assertions of the 'thingness' of the world just temporary fixations?
By considering three entities which seem to have different degrees of thingness:
1. one meter cubed empty box lying on the ground below a tree, on a warm summer evening with a light wind.
2. a swarm of gnats, three meters above the box.
3. a cubed meter of gnats-free air 3 meters to the east of the swarm.
The box is clearly a thing, the cubic meter of air is not. The swarm we instinctively mean as a thing, even though it seems dubiously to satisfy common sense criteria.
Can we arrive at a general definition which clarifies what is and is not a thing?
What does a swarm have that the cubic meter of air does not?
The swarm appears random but its not. Its a partially random system subject to at least one restriction. Individual gnats move randomly only until they see a field of vision empty of gnats, when they turn and fly back in the direction of gnats.
This rule is enough to convert a set of individuals into a swarm. Every now and then a gnat will be lost and gained, but this won't effect the existence of the swarm because the swarm does not depend on any individual.
However, do we have a conception of a swarm, and are inclined to call it a thing...why?
How can we conceptualize this sense of thingness?
First, the sense of thingness appears because we note through time relational persistence among gnats which manifest themselves in space and persists through time. Because these relations are multiple and simultaneous, we may call them configurational persistencies.
Secondly, these configurational persistencies have the quite objective effect that the thing we think we see, the swarm, offers some resistance to determination by forces of the external to itself, i.e. the light wind.
In this sense, the swarm differs from the cubic meter of air. The light wind blows away the air molecules and replaces them with others, but leaves the swarm of gnats.
The configurational persistencies of the swarm offers a certain resistance to externalities that manifest itself as a temporary stability in space-time, and this seems enough to call it a thing.
the cubic meter of air is clearly not a thing, but the box on the ground clearly is. It's configurational persistence are of a more durable and fixed kind than those of the swarm. As with the swarm, they do not offer endless resistance to externalities.
Taking the definition of things further a field, it seems to work for rivers, which we can see as configurational persistencies among banks, water molecules and land gradients, rather than simply as water molecules.
Clearly it works for less difficult cases such as human beings. If it has configurational persistencies, then we can call it a thing.
An interesting aspect of this definition of what we see and say is a thing is that what we are defining is a process, or a particular stage of process. We have made our problems in defining things, that what we see appears to be process rather than fixations When we see a universe, a human being, a box or a swarm, what we see is a constructive process unfolding in space-time under morphological necessity.
Tuesday 16 November 2010
019 Spatial Syntax Part 08- Probabilistic Inequality Genotype
This article relates to some extent with the Nolli project. References and connections could be made with spatial syntax and the distribution of public and private within the Edinburgh New Town and Marchmont.
The is a good example of how this spatial structural tool can cast various differences and to post rationalize its layout in a more diagrammatic legible form.
These figures demonstrate the open structure of Lab x and Lab y.
This is a useful way of representing the difference in spatial layout of the two labs. In each figure, all the free space - that is, the space in which people can work and move freely - is colored in black.
This clearly elaborates not only on the basic cellular form of each building, but the fundamental configurational differences between the spatial layouts of Lab x - y.
In the latter case, the differences have risen from a protracted process of spatial mutation and adaptation.
The most important configuration difference between Lab x and Lab y is that while both have created internal permeability between group of cells, links are deep in Lab x and shallow in Lab y.
Here the differences are shown clearly in these 'axial' maps of each lab. There is also a fundamental difference in the space use patterns of Lab x - y. The most obvious difference is that Lab y has space use and movement rates in the main corridor about 5 times as high as these in Lab x.
We can make the pattern differences clear by dividing activities into four kinds:
1. Contemplative activities - such as sitting, writing.
2.Practical activities - working at a bench, which usually involves a certain degree of local movement.
3. Interactive activities - conversation or taking part in discussions.
4. Non-local movement - Movement that is basically linear and on a longer scale rather than describing a local convex figure, as would usually be the case for movement involved in working at a lab bench.
Both buildings are corridor-based, most non-local movement will be in the shallowest space, the corridor itself.
Lab x:
.Contemplative activity concentrates deep in the lab.
.Practical activities are usually spread over the full depth of the lab.
.Interactive activities concentrate in the region of the axial lines linking the lab bays together.
These links occur deep in the lab, which means interaction tends to occur in the same areas as contemplating activities, close to local movement but maximally for from non-local movement.
Lab y:
.Contemplating activities occur deep in the lab by the windows
.Practical activities tent to concentrate towards the center and shallow areas.
.Interactive actvities concentrate strongly in the shallow areas close to the corridor.
This means that the interaction occurs both close to local movement within the lab, and close to non-local movement in the corridors.
As analyzed, Lab y contemplative activities are deeper than practical activities while interaction is shallow and close to non-local movement.
Using the symbol '<' to mean 'shallow than':
Lab y: Movement < Interaction < Practical < Contemplative
Lab x: Movement < Practical < Interaction = Contemplative
These formulae summarizes the spatial dynamics of each organization resemble the 'inequalities genotypes'.
We might call these formulae expressing differential spatial dynamics 'probabilistic inequality genotypes' and note that are short models that they affect the dynamics of the organization differently.
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