The view from the road -Amesterdam

Amesterdam,the biggest city in the north and also the captial city of of Dutch, serves as the northern door of Europe and international tourise center.The name of the city can be traced back to 12 century when residents here established Dam on the Amstel River ,they named here Amesteldam.With the time goes by,"Amesterdam" accepted because its convicence .

The city is known as a secual city,the symbol of open and free; "the north Vience ", means a city full of inspiration.It is also famous as a bicycle kindom,where the number of citizens travle by bike far more exceed the residents go by vehicle.The safty issue that government pays to the citzens and the convenienve they provides for public all impressive me from a city planning points of view.

As a result,as a architecture graduate student , I take advantage of the chance of traveling in Amesterdam to cyclying in Amesterdam inspired by the study " The View From the Road".a book published in 1964 for the center of Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Universityby Donald Appleyard, supported Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer.The book is written for enginners who decide the furture highways;arguing that they should consideration the vision and perception of the landscapes from the road to image the furture highways. The visual sequences of Routes are describes by defferent succession if sketches or photographs to stimulate the motion of view points of the driver.The car and the street can be considered as windows on the sociey and as a starting point to understand the city.

Water flows in this city,like the blood of human body,connect the city ,people and spirit.
The connection elements can de divided as physical parts which included river bridges,public spaces,ferry ,phychological elements such as visual connections.Those elements can be identified in every part of the city during the cycling trip in Amesterdam.For example ,the design of most residential buildings near the river all condiser the necessity of ensuring enough visual connection for the buildings behind ,which accord with the sustainable theme of the city planning. Morover,the laested amesterdam Film Museum "EyE" designed by Viennese architectural firm Delugan Meissl Ass.The museum located between historic centre and modern development area,facing the south amesterdam river.The design provides a big staircase landscape inside the building offering the direct visual connection with the historical city across the river as a way to extend the space and the movement of the amesterdam spirit.

Vitra Fire Station

In 1993, the Vitra Campus Fire Station by Zaha Hadid was finally completed. After a fire in 1981 on the campus, Vitra wanted to avoid any future fires from occurring on the campus. Hadid wanted to find the relationship between space and form, and thus did many studies and paintings of the fire house throughout the design project.

She wanted to use the building to join the agricultural landscape and surroundings to the artificiality of the Vitra Campus.

In my cuttings, I wanted to show how the building protruded from the landscape as if it was a continuous part of it. I think using a cutter in a 2D manner really helps in communicating this concept. I analyzed the lines of the building and figured out how to flatten them. The hardest part was figuring out how to get the streamline and dynamism of the building into a paper model.

http://www.archdaily.com/112681/ad-classics-vitra-fire-station-zaha-hadid/

AT&T Building by Philip Johnson

The AT & T building designed by Philip Johnson in 1984 is located in New York City. At 197 meters tall, the building is 37 stories high and it now serves as the headquarters for Sony Corporation of America. This postmodern building has a sends a strong message as a corporate building and serves as a landmark. One of the most recognizable elements of the building is the ornamental top. It is also controversial because it resembles the style of the open pediments used in Thomas Chippendale’s furniture. Johnson used these post-modern “Chippendale” forms to give the building a more monumental look. 

The building is a vertical massing that uses a tube frame in its framework with tied trusses at the top and bottom of the tubular columns. The material used on the outside of the building is a grayish-pink granite. Besides its ornamental top another main feature of the building is its entrance. The arched entranceway is about seven stories in height. This remarkable entrance combined with ornamental features challenged the functionalism and purely efficient design of the modernist style architecture. 

In my model I wanted to recreate the massing of the building and the ornamental top because it is such a recognizable feature of the building. 

Prada Tokyo, an ever-changing facade

Prada

Herzog and deMuron, Tokyo

2003

Herzog and deMuron's design for the Prada store in Tokyo is fascinating because the facade appears to always change.  The outer structure of the building is made up of a geometric design consisting of concave, convex, and flat diamond shapes.  All glass, the building is complete transparent and markets the Prada merchandise easily.

As mentioned in my title "ever-changing facade" the building looks different during the nighttime and day.  During the day part of the class is highly transparent while other parts are reflective.  People outside can see themselves or the reflection of the city.  At night, the window panes can also function as a screen.  Lights and video can be projected to the surfaces to create shows or as advertisement.

What fascinated me most about the diamond facade is the use of the shapes as more than windows.  The shape supports the roofs of the structure.  In addition the space created by these windows have been used as changing rooms, cash registers, and even full-length mirrors.  I appreciate how the architects were able to carry the facade inside the space rather than making it a simple texture.

The shape of the door is an enlargement of the same geometry.  A combination of 4 diamonds, it is a captivating way to enter the store while still having the same language as the rest of the structure.  If the building had a rectangular door the strength of the texture would have been weakened.

flattened texture of building

voids left behind that would be the window panes

structure that is filled with mirrors, glass, and other elements

texture when curved around a surface

windows are both raised and lowered while some remain completely flat

Isolation and Curiosity- The Prada Installation

The Prada building of Marfa, Texas is a form of fictional architecture; a no man's land. Designed by Michael Elmgreen, it sits in the middle of nowhere off of a lonely highway. The work was built in 2005 and labeled "pop architectural land art project." The building is considered  a permanent installation that will never go under repairs. Therefore, ideally the project will eventually degrade back to the ground it came from. However, three days after the project was finalized, the exterior was vandalized and the inside rampaged and looted. So, the building went under repairs after only a few days.
The building is designed after a real Prada store, equipped with minimalistic window displays and the actual Prada logo. The facade is made up of a nonfunctional door and hand-picked display of the Fall 2005 collectionby Miuccia Prada herself. The sculpture is a perplexing display due to its (non)functioning purpose and obscure location. However, due to these peculiar aspects, it is no doubt a landmark and a project to be recognized.

This cutting embodies the solidarity of the sculpture in its context. No one could miss the building as they cruise down Route 90, because there are no distractions around it. I also wanted to explore how the building would degrade over the years in the same cutting. So while taking it apart, I documented the process of pulling the model back into the site and the breaking of connections.

Lacaton & Vassal: The Greenhouse Dwelling

The incredible thing about Lacaton & Vassal is the ingenuity with which they approach their projects. They reuse, refurbish and find inexpensive materials that are suited for their specific design. Started in Paris in 1987, Anna Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have designed educational, commercial, cultural, and residential buildings. In this post, however, I will be focusing on their ability to create incredible, inexpensive buildings that not only work, but are also taking a step forward in mass housing.

 

The Social Housing project in Mulhouse, France ingeniously utilizes industrial products and materials to maximize the space that can be built. A greenhouse-like construction allows light to enter the upper story with two-thirds of the space using thermal heating. The raw material usage maximizes the space for the residents while letting them retain their privacy.

In my cut out, I looked at the ventilation and raw material usage. The heavier concrete lower level is superimposed by the light greenhouse structure above. It is a very successful housing project compared to the rest of the architects that were part of this social housing project. With simple materials you can still build a simple, "home, sweet, home."

Unique Approach to Restrictions

The Wozoco apartments, housing project in Amsterdam for residents over 55 years of age, represents an interesting approach in following the conditions and restriction of the site. The apartment complex was originally restricted to 87 units, each promising good natural lighting. MVRDV, the architectural firm of the project, set out to create a large common area within the site that the residence would use for leisure. However, this ideal left little space for the actually building. On top of this obstacle, the additional 13 units requested by the client expanded the building even further, adding additional restraints to the building/green space ratio.
To solve these issues, MVRDV extruded 13 units from the side of the building, creating a very unique structure in the realm of contemporary architecture. Cantilevered beams support the load of the suspended entities and the wall thickness were increased by 8cm. Though the apartment complex was suppose to be built to reduce construction noise of the surrounding area, much of the budget was spent in structuring the projecting apartments. The materiality of the protrusions were thus built of wood and the main facade of the building is mainly glass.
This cutting is meant to show the relationship of two separate elevations of the building. The main facade, if drawn in plan, appears normal. The protruding units are not evident as they are in another view of the structure. From the side, the suspended apartments are dominating and peculiar.

Bringing Color to the Lifeless

Maurice Nio is an architect that strives to connect the site to the people, the function to the space, and the architecture to the culture. His unusual but captivating work introduces quality to an unremarkable site, truly characterizing a city.  Nio has the exceptional ability of truly transforming spaces from insignificant to noteworthy.

            Touch of Evil is a recent project of 2004 by Nio Architects that brings vibrancy to an otherwise lifeless setting. The architect accomplished this by introducing bold color to an obtrusive railway, illuminating the area with color and energy. His goal was to redefine a simple area of transit by converting a “technical space” into a landmark for the city. He wants to attract attention and inspire imagination in the people passing through.

            To represent the intention and emotions behind this project, I have constructed a model that illustrates the effect one piece of architecture can have in a dismal space. Touch of Evil is designed with the intent to shock the public. The boldness of the piece is clearly out of place in this setting, achieving exactly the effect Nio aimed for. Likewise, I have attempted to capture this same effect by contrasting colors, scale, and structure. Nio’s designs are honest in their purpose and function, making his architecture effective in transforming cities visually, as well as emotionally.

Danteum- A Geometric Masterpiece

Terragni's Danteum is a unique project combining the concepts of Dante's Divine Comedy with the ideologies of fascist Italy of the 1930s. The project, though never built, was to be a powerful statement and a symbol of patriotism for the people of Italy. However, it had the potential to supersede political symbolism as it was intended. Terragni idolized Dante as both ancient and medieval. His legacy embodied the hope for Italy's unification and the Roman Empire's resurrection.
Terragni faced a difficult task when commissioned for the project. And so, to encompass the cantos of the Comedy in a physical form, the architect depended on the golden ration triangle for solidity. This form, along with the intergration of two overlapping squares, works to create a structure that embodies the "value of 'absolute' geometric beauty" (Schumacher, Terrangi's Danteum). Terragni believed that the golden-section rectangle was a tie to the ancients. It occured in plan-forms of the ancient Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, and, of course, the Romans.
To avoid rhetoricism, Terragni applied a series of squares descending in a spiral fashion, and theoretically infinite in number. The spiral that runs through the center of these squares represents the ascent from the inferno to purgatory. I find it interesting that Terragni uses rectilinear shapes to obtain a fluid movement in the building's circulation. This cutting is demonstrating the contrast between rigid and organic, while also illustrating the way in which these two entities can combine to form one. I have attempted to abstractly recreate the series of columns he uses in the room of the Inferno in this model. He reconstructs the golden rectangle by setting up 7 columns following the flow of the diagram. In my cutting, I reinterpreted this progression by also decreasing the length of each column, symbolizing the descent from the mortal world to the inferno.

Lelystad Art Project: A Tribute

In 1985, the chief government architect of the Netherlands gave sculptor Lucien Arend a commission to build a sculpture as a tribute to the late Russian artist El Lissitzky. The piece was placed in the Test Circuit and Test Center of the National Road and Transport department in Lelystad. However, in the early nineties it was demolished because the center needed space to expand. Arend was supposed to contribute another piece, but that has yet to occur.

As I was thinking about the concept of this piece, I went back to the original purpose of the sculpture. Lucien Arend was designing a tribute for an avant-garde artist. This means that Arend's concept had to clearly express the avant-garde ideas of Lissitzky.

I decided to do a little research on Lissitzky and found out that he was a suprematist artist. This means that he focused his work on the purity of geometric shapes. Interesting. Eventually, however, he continued to expand on suprematism and develop his own interpretation which he called Proun. This style continued with the foundation of suprematism but further used geometric shapes as 3D objects instead of 2D. Here is an example:

Of course Arend would have also done his research as a sculptor and would have seen the opportunity to depict Lissitzky's Proun in his own sculpture. Ared studied geometric shapes in 3D to find the concept for his sculpture.

We can see that in the final piece Arend retained the geometrical essence of Lissitzky's work. The red rectangle even provides the emphasis needed to contrast both shapes.

As you can see I tried to replicate his work through paper. I tried to study the curves and how I could cut it out of paper. As you can see, curves on paper are near impossible.

Rolling Structure - OMA's Prada Transformer

Rolling Structure - OMA's Prada Transformer

by Victoria Shingleton

OMA's Prada Transformer, located in Seoul, Korea caught my eye because it reminded me of a toy.  The versatility of the structure designed by Rem Koolhaas with Kunle Adeyemi and Alexander Reichert is similar to that of a dice which you roll in a game (especially the pentagonal alphabet dice) or a Rubix cube, having each side different.  The structure, constructed with the four-sided frame of a triangular prism, just seemed as if it was calling out for me to roll it and change the space.

The Prada Transformer is a tetrahedron with four distinct shapes making up the solid walls.  A rectangular, hexagon, cruciform, and circle are all arranged within a large triangle divided into four smaller triangles, so that when you fold the sides up, a different shape is visible on each side.

The structure was designed so that it could be rotated and provide a unique atmosphere for a variety of different events.  OMA specified a rotation for fashion, art, cinema, and special events.  By simply rotating the structure, it gives a new characteristic for the different needs of Prada.  Adding to its versatility, the walls are constructed of a steel frame and the facade can be easily changed.  The walls become the floor and the floors become the wall as the 20-meter structure is flipped by three cranes after each event to accommodate the next.

In order to get a better understanding of this kinetic structure, I cut out my own.  It is the transformation of the structure and the movement that make this pavilion so unique.  And not only does it save space due to its versatility, but it also saves money on building materials and construction.  I think that this is a wonderfully innovative project and think that it will positively influence more versatile works of architecture in the future.

Fashion

Art

Cinema

Special Event

Terminal Hoenheim Nord - Zaha Hadid

Hoenheim-Nord Terminal

To help fight against the congestion and pollution in the city, Strasbourg developed a new tram-line service that encourages people to leave their cars outside the city and take a tram to the more inner parts of the city. Hadid designed the tram-station and a car park for 700 cars. Her main idea was to create an attractive space with energy that is clearly defined in terms of function and circulation. Hadid did this by using 3D graphics of light and openings.

 

Overlapping fields and lines that come together to form a whole is the concept used in the planning of the car park. The ‘fields’ are the patterns of movement from the cars, trams, and pedestrians traveling through the space. 

The station has a basic program of waiting space, bicycle storage, toilets, and shops. There is a sense of three dimensional vectors that is improved with elements such as a play of lines that continue as light lines on the floor, or furniture pieces, or strip-lights in the ceiling. In plan, these ‘lines’ create a synchronous whole. From this concept, I made a model that shows the basic plan of the station. The lines from the station blend with the parking area and makes the whole space flow as one. The white ground below the station ties everything together to make it one harmonious space.