Architectural Association London AA Agendas No. 7
Articulated Grounds: mediating environment and culture Edited by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee
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AA Agendas is an ongoing series of books launched in 2006 and produced by the Architectural Association School of Architecture. The series is designed to capture work generated through any number of the school’s design units, courses and other AA events and initiatives. Through the range of projects illustrated, the series reveals the breadth of the AA’s teaching practices and the vitality of the resulting student and staff work. Agendas 1: A Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture Agendas 2: Bodyline Agendas 3: Before Object, After Image Agendas 4: Morpho-Ecologies Agendas 5: Typological Formations Agendas 6: Environmental Tectonics Agendas 7: Articulated Grounds
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Architectural Association London AA Agendas No. 7
Articulated Grounds : mediating environment and culture Edited by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee
Contents
AA Agendas No. 7
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Preface by Brett Steele Introduction by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee
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Synchrony of Environmental and Cultural Flows by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee
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Adaptive Environments Interview with Simos Yannas
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Site Mediations Unit Briefs 2005–08
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Responsive Structures Interview with Lawrence Friesen
Articulated Grounds: Mediating Environment and Culture Edited by Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee AA Agendas Series Editor: Brett Steele AA Publications Editor: Pamela Johnston AA Production Editor: Thomas Weaver AA Art Director: Zak Kyes Design: Claire McManus Editorial Assistant: Clare Barrett AA Publications are produced through the AA Print Studio. aaprintstudio.net Printed in Belgium by Cassochrome ISBN 978-1-902902-71-5 © 2009 Architectural Association and the Authors. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. To order a catalogue of AA Publications or specific titles visit aaschool.ac.uk/publications or email publications@aaschool.ac.uk AA Publications 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES T + 44 (0)20 7887 4021 F + 44 (0)20 7414 0783 Cover: The Embedded and the Expressed by Jin Hong Jeon
Projects: Articulating Grounds Edges 48 Shell Articulations by Suyeon (Sua) Song 58 Modulating Conformation by Yoon Han 62 Articulated Undulation by Pil Won Kim 68 Climatic Curves by Yoon Han 74 The Energy Meshwork by Phivos Skroumbelos 80 Micro-Exchange Centre by Maya Carni Monoliths 88 Communist Party HQ by Arthur Mamou-Mani 96 Porosity Generator for a Walled City by Ying Wang 102 Double Interfaces by Asako Hayashi 108 The Embedded and the Expressed by Jin Hong Jeon Fields 118 Aquapark Aquarium by Suyeon (Sua) Song 124 Açaí Cultural Centre by Ricky Rui Li 130 Ornamental Dérives by Julia Ka Yee Li 136 Articulated Residual System by Emmanouil (Manos) Matsis 142 Vascular Attraction Mediator by Charlotte Thomas 148 Component Curve Networks by Yoona Lee
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Getting a Life… by Catherine Ingraham
SYNCHRONY OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND CULTURAL FLOWS
Asako Hayashi, proposed Ferry City multiple-ground terminal markets, Rio de Janeiro, 2009
Brazilian Culture of accessibility Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee The totally open groundscapes of the European modernist project underwent a distinctly Brazilian transformation when applied to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo by architects such as Oscar Niemeyer or Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Drawing inspiration from the work of Le Corbusier, the Brazilians manipulated the ‘free-ground’ so that it articulated a tropical choreography of new public spaces that ran seamlessly from external contexts deep into the interior spaces, blurring the boundary between outside and inside. The goal of our unit project is to extend this articulation to encompass multiple-scale mediations for the conditioning of environmental forces. As part of its larger remit of critically assessing the monolithic, macro-scale manifestations of modernist urban planning and architecture, the unit uses intricate systems of micro-scale architectural mediations to intervene in and rearticulate these organisations. Le Corbusier saw architecture as an efficient stripped-down machine allowing a new freedom of movement and a diversity of flows of activity. At the larger urban scale, however, modernist planning failed to engender this type of animation – a fact that might be attributed in part to the planners’ failure to incorporate the role of organic eco-systems and anthropology into the design of ground organisations. Beyond a certain scale, flat and totally open expanses of ground become overly monolithic and homogeneous, leading to social and environmental stagnation. To counter this, they need a heterogeneous articulation able to channel, capture and redistribute dynamic flows such as the movement of water or pedestrians. Rather than deploying the European modernist construct of landscape as a separate ground – either a pastoral background or an infill between road-systems and buildings – the unit has explored precedents for a more integrative and performance-based approach towards landscape, aiming at a more symbiotic fusion between architecture, landscape and infrastructure. Such precedents can be found in concurrent early twentieth-century movements that rejected the modernist concept of discrete urban systems and speculated on an interconnection between the public ground condition of urban organisation and the figural interventions of architectural projects. As Sanford Kwinter observes, a ‘drawing forth from the ground to embrace the figure’ is present in both Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Sant’Elia’s drawings of the ‘Città Nuova’, for example. In Sant’Elia’s drawings a refined system of architectural and infrastructural devices, such as elevators, drainage systems, streets and train lines, are subdivided and proliferated to connect the buildings of the city within an intricate micro-network. The research of the unit seeks to update the project of these alternative movements, which in Kwinter’s words offer ‘a specific resistance to the threat of a dissolution’ of the figure within the ground of the contemporary urban landscape. 1 By working at multiple scales and focusing on the micro-structured interfaces and components that bind, subdivide and mediate the macro-structures of the urban environment, we investigate ways to create a diverse and heterogeneous urban fabric that allows for a more even distribution of forces in the city. Le Corbusier was instrumental in introducing modernist architecture to Brazil, not only through a series of lectures in which he set out his ‘Five Points’ on Architecture, but also through his collaboration with Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer on the Ministry of Health in Rio de Janeiro, a building that is generally considered Brazil’s first piece of modernist architecture. But the traffic in ideas was not one-way: a Brazilian tropical influence can be detected in the ideas of plastic fluidity that Le Corbusier introduced in 1 .
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Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) p. 97.
Precisions, which he wrote on the ship home from Brazil. The concept of the ‘meandering line’ – apparently inspired by his flights over the Amazon – is said to have influenced the more organic forms of the chapel at Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp and the urban plan for Algiers. More generally, the Carioca movement in Rio de Janeiro grew out of French influences on the city, including the imprint of a Haussmannian urban planning model. The potential of Brazilian culture to transform a European architectural tradition is too large a subject to be addressed in depth here. In brief, however, the religions of the indigenous Indians and African-Brazilians maintain a strong connection with nature, in contrast to western faiths such as Protestantism, which emphasise an otherworldly spirituality. The incredibly powerful landscapes of Brazil, including the Amazon rainforest, have helped to sustain this connection with nature and prevent these groups from being entirely subsumed into western culture. In his book, Oscar Niemeyer, Stamo Papadaki speculates that: The active ‘pursuit of happiness’, which is a prime motivator of the American people, could well be contrasted with the taste for the ‘good life’ which permeates Brazil. The goal is of the present and is continuously present, not to be achieved after a desperate struggle, since nature is not considered an enemy and man’s earthly condition does not depend wholly on his inevitable death […] [T]he sculptural variegated landscapes of Brazil, a climate which depends on a minimum of technological assistance, a way of life which depends on a presence rather than on an ambiguous flux of becoming, may explain some facets of the flowing Brazilian architecture.2 As Gilbert Luigi observes in Oscar Niemeyer: Une Esthétique de la Fluidité, modernist architects broke down conventional hierarchies and freed up the ground plane by reducing traditional, monumental entrances and staircases to purely functional, hidden escape-stair cores. 3 Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, in the Brazilian Pavilion for the 1939 International Exposition, transformed the monumental staircase into a large diagonal ramp that started outside the footprint of the building and guided people up diagonally, rather than axially and symmetrically as in a conventional grand-staircase. This ramp moved smoothly from exterior to interior, creating a ‘fluidity of space’. 4 Gilbert Luigi argues that dispensing with the mechanical climbing of stairs creates an ease of movement, with constantly renewed points of view, especially along the sinuous curving ramps. Niemeyer achieves this democratisation of the ground through a reversal of movement. In certain key projects, rather than ascending up to an important monolith, one descends down into the earth, in a symbolic reversal of the idea that a governing or religious body is above the public. This is the case in both the Parliament building and the Cathedral in Brasília, where the motion of descent strips away the western tradition of man defying nature, perhaps reflecting instead an African or native Indian mindset of being grounded and more connected to natural processes. In this same spirit of connecting with nature, the boundary between exterior and interior is dematerialised in Niemeyer’s work. In place of a single monumental point of entry, there is a dynamic continuous field defined by ramps that negotiate the space in different ways. 5 In Niemeyer’s earlier works, sinuous ramps sculpt space, creating a dynamic event sequence that joins contrasting viewpoints. The function of circulation is transformed into the ornament or decoration of modernist space, in a choreography of flow. 6 Niemeyer’s later works, however, do not display the same concern to integrate the ground within the building formation. Built after Niemeyer had spent 2 1 years in exile abroad – and at the same time become feted 2 . Stamo Papadaki, Oscar Niemeyer (New York: George Braziller, 1960). 3 . Gilbert Luigi, Oscar Niemeyer – Une Esthétique de la Fluidité (Marseilles: Parenthèses, 1987) pp. 57–71. 4 . Ibid.
5 . Ibid. 6 . Ibid.
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as an architect on the international stage – they appear overly monolithic. Ramps are now clichéd add-ons striated from the main organisation of highly formalist building masses. Kenneth Frampton says that this transformation occurred when Niemeyer ‘broke with the informal functionality on which his fluid plan forms had been based, to concentrate on the creating of pure form: to move closer that is, to the neo-classical tradition’. 7 Oscar Niemeyer’s formalist Carioca movement in Rio de Janeiro may be contrasted with the ‘Paulista School’ that emerged in the ‘rival’ city of São Paulo around the same time. Where the Cariocas were inspired by Le Corbusier and French modernism, the Paulistas looked to the United States – not to the models of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who had translated the European modernist project into a mainstream system of industrialised mass-production for commercial skyscrapers, but rather to an alternative approach exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright, which reflected a more democratic mediation of ground. João Batista Vilanova Artigas, one of the founders of the Paulista School, travelled to the United States in 1946 on a Guggenheim Fellowship and visited Wright at Taliesin West. Vilanova Artigas’ work reveals Wright’s influence in its continuity and fluidity of space and its smooth integration of floor and roof planes with surrounding conditions. 8 His treatment of the field or the ‘ground’ is akin to that of Frank Lloyd Wright, departing from the techniques employed by Niemeyer. More specifically, ‘open reaches of the ground may enter the building and the interior may reach out and associate these vistas of the ground. Ground and building will thus become more and more obvious as directly related to each other in openness and intimacy.’ 9 Both the modernist paradigm of Le Corbusier/Niemeyer and the organic paradigm of Frank Lloyd Wright/Vilanova Artigas fall within a modernist tradition of abstraction. The difference is that the former uses a ‘pure abstraction’ of form, while the latter employs an ‘abstraction’ of nature, 10 by which is meant not a representation of its forms, but rather the incorporation of certain natural behavioural patterns within the organisation of an architecture or ‘figure’ that emerges from and works with the systems of the ‘ground’. These concepts are demonstrated in projects such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water or Guggenheim Museum, and in the works of Paulista architects, such as in Vilanova Artigas’ Faculty of Architecture, Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Sculpture Museum and, later on, Eurico Prado Lopes and Luis Benedito Telles’ Centro Cultural de São Paulo. Another common strand for the Paulista architects and Frank Lloyd Wright is their claim to base their designs on democratic ideals of freedom. The Paulista School was most active in the period between 1945 and 1964, an interlude of American-style democracy in Brazil. In general, they designed public buildings that manipulated different contextual ground planes to create both a cultural and a physical sense of ‘accessibility’ allowing for smooth connections with the surrounding streets and populations. The Paulista School broke down the conventional hierarchies of traditional civic buildings by maximising permeability and setting up a fluid sequence of uses and circulation. The Centro Cultural de São Paulo, inaugurated in 1982, embodies these features. Enfolded in a number of ground planes within a highway embankment, it also transforms some of the more formal attributes of the early Paulista School, creating a fusion between natural landscape, architecture and infrastructure. Here, however, nature is used as metaphor and is not truly performative. It obtains a heterogeneity of different cultural flows, but does not effectively mediate natural flows. And while these buildings have the potential to promote natural ventilation through open ground planes, or shade sun through uniformly applied brise-soleil, the treatment of environment is in itself monolithic: building interiors are either totally dark or totally 7. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 256. 8 . A. Xavier Lemos & E. Corona, Arquitetura Moderna Paulistana (São Paulo: Editora Pini, 1983).
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exposed, lacking a calibrated mediation of environmental forces, such as a filtration of wind to avoid humidity and leaks, or the diffusion of sunlight to achieve gradations of indirect light. Nonetheless, these Brazilian ground projects served as important precedents for the topological architecture that began to emerge in the late 19 8 0s, notably in the Netherlands. The same cultural agenda of creating new smooth interconnections between otherwise striated programmes can be discerned in unrealised projects such as Rem Koolhaas’s Très Grande Bibliothèque or Zaha Hadid’s Cardiff Opera House proposal, as well as the physical manifestations of FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal or UN Studio’s Möbius House. In all of these, the principles of the Brazilian ground project were expanded with the aid of topological software. Yet the abstraction created by the new digital realm, combined with the unresolved environmental problems of the Brazilian precedents, have worked to create a largely monolithic architecture with no articulation of multiple-scale and differentiated mediations of environmental flows.
9 . Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the nature of materials, 1887–1941:The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Da Capo Press,[1975] c. 1942). 1 0 . Adriana Irigoyen, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright – Abstracion de la Naturelezza’ in Summa, No. 25, April-May 1997.
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Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Benedito Telles, landscape building, S達o Paulo Cultural Centre (CCSP), 1982
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Oscar Niemeyer, luminescent grounds, Oca Pavilion, Parque do Ibirapuera, S達o Paulo, 1954
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environmental choreography Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee In our aim to mediate between culture and nature, the unit has worked on making ground systems more environmentally responsive and on producing a type of ecological expressionism – an ‘environmental ornamentation’, as we termed it in our 2006– 07 unit brief. This involved defining a new aesthetic philosophy and social agenda for parametric environmental design, so that sustainable design practices are not seen as merely add-on devices from a checklist of established criteria, but are integral to the generation of the design and the day-to-day activities of the building itself. That is, by embedding ecological performances within ornamental structures, phenomenological effects, and convoluted circulation sequences, sustainability acquires a greater civic and cultural relevance. Yet the term ‘ornament’ has to be qualified. It suffers from connotations of being superlative and decorative, as it has traditionally been defined by mere surface articulations. However, there are several environmental attributes in the way it was used in the past which have been eliminated by the flat, exposed facades of modernist architecture. For example, cornices at the edge between roof and wall mediate drainage, while deep-set ornamental window frames help to diffuse light within buildings. That traditional ornament often incorporates bio-mimetic qualities – as seen in the floral motifs that adorn ornamental structures, from Corinthian capitals to Louis Sullivan skyscraper facades – also led us to question whether a formal copy of nature might perform ecologically. But rather than using only the ornamental form of flowers, our 2005– 06 unit brief proposed extracting the environmental mediating performances of plants and flowers to generate new building mediation components. For example, the convoluted and attractive shape of the petals of the epiphytic bromeliad flower directs water drainage, diffuses light to its water pools, and attracts prey so as to obtain energy and nutrients. These ornamental floral forms inspired the design of devices that similarly diffuse light and water in building systems. In contrast to the monolithic ubiquity of modernist architecture, ornamental design’s smallerscale, intricate and repetitive qualities have been instrumental in articulating a specifically localised mediation system to respond to the dynamic and differentiated forces of nature. Further, to escape the decorative, surface-based connotations of the term ‘ornament’, the 2008– 09 unit brief explored Choreography as a way to create an Ornamentation of Flow. Flow choreography allowed us to work more spatially in synchronising the movements of both environmental and cultural forces. The process involved, for example, incorporating an aesthetic driving force to design novel and beautiful lighting effects within convoluted circulation sequences. Choreography and three-dimensional attraction-field scripting were used to calibrate sensorial plays of diffused light and shadow, ventilating breezes and animated water flows for the transformation and environmental articulation of monolithic architectural formations. For more on ‘Environmental Ornamentation’ see our essay of the same title in AA Agendas No. 6, Environmental Tectonics: Forming Climatic Change (London: Architectural Association, 2008) pp. 42–47.
Ricky Rui Li, ornamental environmental effects, proposed SESC cultural centre, Paraisópolis, São Paulo, 2006
Hyun Jin Kim, ornamental effects: light and wind mediators, proposed performance hall, Belém do Pará, 2007
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SITE MEDIATIONS: Unit briefs
Jee Seon Lim, mesh remediations for proposed SESC cultural centre, Parais贸polis, S茫o Paulo, 2006
2005–06 Liquid Urbanism Site: Paraisópolis Favela, São Paulo, Brazil Liquid Urbanism was about developing a flexible, multi-scaled diffusion of different energy sources for both architectural and urban environments – a brief materialised through the creation of a new Social Service of Commerce (SESC) centre on the border between the Paraisópolis favela and the affluent Morumbi neighbourhood of São Paulo. Paraisópolis (literally: Paradise City) began life during the 1970s as a speculative subdivision. The developers imposed an orthogonal street grid on the watershed site, completely ignoring extreme slope conditions, water channels and surrounding road networks. This caused delays in building infrastructure and the owners were not able to move in. In the meanwhile, construction started on the Morumbi stadium nearby, and because of a lack of housing and transportation, the city turned a blind eye to the construction workers who had started to squat on the ‘public’ areas – the empty streets and sidewalks – of the new Paraísopolis development. Because the construction workers were not technically on private land, there were no legal grounds for removing them. Over a period of 30 years, this initial occupation evolved into the self-organised Paraisópolis favela. To establish harmony and prevent crime, the affluent neighbourhood’s elite hospital and schools established satellite clinics and classrooms inside the favela, making it one of the healthiest and best equipped of the shanty towns. In fact, in the northern zones of the Paraisópolis favela today, established streets are lined with shops where workers earn more money than they did before as servants and gardeners to their wealthy neighbours. However, conditions start to seriously deteriorate towards the southern border of the favela, where a rash of new wooden shacks is causing constant erosion, landslides and pollution.
Working in conjunction with the Ministry of Housing, the unit followed their strategy of improving infrastructure and creating new facilities to benefit a range of economic classes, thereby avoiding the removal of families and the gradual gentrification and privatisation of the favela. Students developed proposals for a new sports and culture centre that could be used by the inhabitants of both neighbourhoods. As part of a network of over 40 SESC centres funded by a 1.5 per cent payroll tax, the centre would play an important mediating role, bridging between different social groups and classes to bring culture to a diverse audience. On this environmentally sensitive site, mediation systems were developed to promote a more symbiotic relationship between culture, environmental conditioning and the natural landscape, while taking account of both formal and informal socio-economic and cultural entities. To achieve an effective distribution of energy, the unit focused on proliferating microscale environmental mediation devices that respond to different-scaled macro forces, enabling energy to be supplied to areas that previously were without power. Students worked to create a cultural and environmental intermodality by setting up varied circulation networks that order the proliferation of environmental components.
View from a tower block looking north, Paraisópolis, São Paulo, 2005
The ‘Gaudí of the Favela’, Paraisópolis, São Paulo, 2005
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RESPONSIVE STRUCTURES
Anna Schepper, double helical mรถbius hotel circulation core, Rio de Janeiro, 2009
Responsive Structures Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee in conversation with Lawrence Friesen Anne Save de Beaurecueil and Franklin Lee (SuBdv) To what extent can employing simulation and algorithmic design processes bring about a new kind of performative architecture? Lawrence Friesen Simulation bridges the virtual and the real. It’s a detailed mapping of invisible forces, something that designers and artists have been attempting to achieve throughout history. From Giambattista Nolli’s urban mapping, which was an attempt to express the non-event of the void space in and around buildings, to the Situationist mapping of emotions through the city of Paris, there has been a desire to extract information that is not completely obvious out of the environment, to see the immaterial forces and give presence to them. Simulation modelling articulates the way that information can be incorporated into the generation of environmentally responsive form. This mechanism for coding the relationship between worlds – between the virtual and the natural environments – represents a huge step forward in terms of interpreting information. The relationship between techniques and algorithmic structures is changing all the time, yet it seems we already have the tools that allow us to achieve a greater level of differentiation and control. For example, we can analyse the simulated impact of a solar path angle, and then script or code data from that analysis to generate a range of environmentally responsive forms. This iterative range of solutions frees us from the reductionism of conventional function-driven design and provides us with a more dynamic design process. Developing a methodology where form is driven directly by environmental analysis facilitates a greater engagement with environmental forces; it lets the architect be more creative in using environmental performance as a design criterion. SuBdv So the designing of algorithmic strategies gives the architect greater crossdisciplinary control? LF The data has been there for years, collected into a database that we can plug into to get strong visual simulation mapping. What’s different now is that we can also use this type of information to control a dynamic design process, moving away from conventional modelling techniques. To control this process we need to develop the algorithm that feeds into the data, extracting from it the information that will drive the form-generation. If we just use existing algorithms – downloadable plug-ins set to their default patterning systems – then we are not really creating an intelligent design solution; we are just playing around with a preconceived method. These tools are empowering architecture to go back to the idea of craft and crafted space. Architects can now have more control over the design process, at all levels, because they have the ability to manage the information within it. Computational control is about achieving greater precision in terms of information and data. Rather than imposing a single correct solution, it allows one to see, create and compose with a range of possible solutions. This is especially important when one is dealing with something as variable and dynamic as light, where a less optimal solution might allow for novel types of spatial configuration to emerge. SuBdv Given the automation that allows a large range of solutions to be generated very quickly, how does one streamline and manage the process?
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LF Automation achieved through these algorithms is anything but instant; it takes a long time to set up. Management comes down to choosing how many variables to deal with – if you can deal with two variables, you can get a result, if you start adding more complexity into the mix, you end up with an enormous amount of data that cannot be managed in any meaningful way. So fundamentally it is about picking the key things that you want to get out of the process, which means you limit the variables to two or three situations rather than trying to answer all the problems within a given context. For example, in a design program we developed using ANSYS finite element structural analysis, we added one variation that let us export the amount and vector direction of a deformation on a given point on a geometry, and programmed it so that the node position changed to increase the depth to withstand loading. This created a whole set of options: when we ran the test again the results improved, and thus it became an iterative process. It took 2 , 0 0 0 iterative transformations (or perhaps more) to move a whole series of nodes just 5mm, yet the outcome was a streamlining of depth sizes, so the structure required 3 0 per cent less material than would have been the case with conventional engineering techniques. SuBdv How do you manage multiple objectives: how can you streamline material properties as well as ethereal ones, like light? LF We dealt with this kind of management of light and material in an initial proposal for the RAK Gateway project for Snohetta, then improved on it in a project for the Middle East. The process started by producing an interpretive machine to filter the environmental data, based on a very simple rule structure describing a position on the facade in relation to panes of glazing. So within the curving geometry of the 3D facade, each point has a different type of solar exposure to be mediated. Using a daylight modelling database, we applied an objective modelling algorithm to produce a range of possible geometries based on different sun angles. The algorithm can be adapted in response to changes in the overall geometry as well, so as the building changes, an external positioning of points is offset away from the glazing; daylighting factors are read to trigger a sizing and configuration of louvres. But even with this approach, working on this building proved difficult, because communication with the design team was constrained by a linear process. The architects produce an overall geometric model and louvre design, which they then send to the engineer to evaluate, but there is no feedback loop between them. It becomes a guessing game for the architects – they only get yes or no answers about whether a particular configuration works; they aren’t able to engage directly with the process. An alternative approach would be for the environmental engineers to produce the light data which the architect could then incorporate into an algorithmic model. The model would use certain criteria to filter out solutions and determine a geometry that responds to environmental requirements; it could calculate the amount of sun that affects the facade elements or louvres, for example, and eliminate all of that to-and-fro hassle with the service-engineers. In a similar way, the configuration of the louvres is driven by environmental analysis. A program called IES produces an analysis grid that measures daylighting quality for the floor plates. It’s set up to automatically determine the optimal configuration for a louvre from each given position. It’s more accurate than the previous version, as it yields a percentage that drives a certain reaction. We used the daylighting grid to create a database and then made a Generative Components model that extracts pieces of information from it so that you can look at every position on the building and obtain resulting louvres.
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Climatic Curves Yoon Han, Fifth Year Project Brief: The Smooth and the Articulated Site: Parque do Ibirapuera, São Paulo, Brazil The project proposes a multiplebridge network structure that modulates sunlight and ventilation to house supplementary museum programmes and set up a dialogue with the existing Niemeyer buildings in the Parque do Ibirapuera. Overcrowding in the park is alleviated by extending its territory across a busy highway to link up with the former Department of Transportation site, which will be converted into a museum and gardens. To service the cultural clusters on either side of the highway, dining facilities and an information lounge are introduced into the existing mono-programmatic expo pavilions. Research was conducted into ways of extending Niemeyer’s use of curvature – which achieves circulatory fluidity and accessibility – so that it is able to mediate environmental flows as well. Niemeyer used curves to bridge between ground and building, producing a singular meandering path rather than a direct connection. The result was an isolated spatial environment set above the ground, where the isolated and uniform components of the structure fail to respond to the external climate. Reacting to this, the goal of the project was to achieve an integrated circulation/ environmental system that would mediate between the various external climatic conditions and the multiple path logics of the site. Tectonically, at the micro-component scale, cuts are introduced into smooth panel systems to create a system of folding with different depths of curved baffles for reflecting light as well as variable apertures for mediating wind and direct light. As these new folded baffles are secured by cables, different plays of tension and compression define varying degrees of aperture, baffle depth and their corresponding environmental effects, as well as varying degrees of overall curvature of the structural form.
The design integrates a structural connectivity within the composition of micro-components, whose different degrees of curvature are calibrated to create diffused light for information spaces and plays of shadow and light for café areas. At a larger scale, a new set of interconnections are created between the two sides of the park, not by a single path as would be favoured by Niemeyer, but through a braiding of multiple paths, from which emerge programmatic pockets of activity. The project achieves an integration of structure, environmental mediation and circulation: the more tension on the component, the larger the aperture, and the more overall curvature is achieved. Thus, large-radii arches are used for large spans, created by the fully tensioned component which transmits more direct light and shadow patterns through the stretched aperture, while shorter-span areas use less arching, with smaller aperture components which obtain diffused light. Programmes are distributed according to these structural and environmental performances.
Variable tensile forces define both light-baffle aperture sizing as well as overall vaulting geometry of the proposed gallery bridge
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Initial corrugating component-baffle configurations
A double light-baffle component diffuses reflected light within a ventilated buffer zone
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Multiple bridges link different parts of the city to the park programmes
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AquaPark Aquarium Suyeon (Sua) Song Brief: Environmental Ornamentation Site: Belém do Pará, Amazon Forest, Brazil The Amazon river basin has the greatest diversity of birds and freshwater fish in the world, but despite this natural richness its ecosystem is fragile and under threat from deforestation and urban encroachment. The riverfront city of Belém do Pará, with a population of two million, suffers from chronic water pollution, meaning that local people have difficulties in finding fresh drinking water or places to swim. To remedy this, the project proposes a freshwater ‘eco-park’ with a aquarium, water-recreation facilities and artificial wetland, created from both artificial and natural pools. The project’s ornamental surface articulations, generated by parametric curve systems, mediate light, wind and water at multiple scales – in contrast to the flatness of modernism. At the larger scale of the site, the former marshland is reclaimed as a corrugating artificial wetland that helps to slow down, filter and clean run-off surface water and canalised tributaries. Rather than straightening the Amazon’s tributaries into linear canals, an environmentally destructive strategy that causes flooding and pollution, the water is moved along meandering paths into curving pools which accommodate varying rainfall and tidal ranges and promote sedimentation. These corrugating water paths are coordinated with the extension of the urban sidewalks, creating an accessible public ground that links the city with the river. Programmatically, the AquaPark includes a pool/spa and aquarium as well as a research centre that promotes environmental conservation through education, recreation and research. In spite of the havoc caused by repeated floods, there are still many houses and shops lining the existing canal, which is filled with trash and wastewater. Restoring the environment here
would promote a greater understanding of freshwater habitats and the extraordinary biodiversity of the Amazon, thus reinforcing sustainable water-treatment strategies. At the building scale, the roof and ground incorporate pools for recreation as well as for rainwater harvesting, providing clean drinking water and recharging the aquifer. Vaulted roofs slow down water run-off and promote natural stack ventilation, while surface delaminations create double-skin buffer zones to mediate high temperatures. Finally, at the smaller scale, parametric curvilinear sun-shading systems help diffuse, reflect and/or block light in accordance with the different lighting levels required by the various activities of the AquaPark and the marine life on display in the aquarium.
Corrugated path systems follow drainage streams and ponds, slowing down and cleaning water from the city to the Amazon river
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Calibrating light control
Ornamental curve dynamic relaxations define a corrugated light reflector system
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Subdivision mesh skin and structure articulation for new aquarium and recreational roof pools
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