MARC5000 ‘A Huge House’ Urban Destination: The Block Shifter House
The Block Shifter House is a 500 capacity student accomodation that attempts at the relief of spatial tensions commonly associated with urban high-rise livings. The design is primarily informed by adopting the typological approach of a ‘village’, where its communal informalities have been translated into vertical expressions and led to the emergence of atriums in a dense block. The resulting building is 27-storey height, with 26 units per habitable floors and a doubleheighted breathing void each 6 habitable floors to create volumetric relieves. It takes on a steel rigid frames with composite steel/concrete flooring system, with partial structural skeletal members exposed to articulate visible tectonics. Observing from the building envelope, we have made the otherwise perfectly symmetrical form to ‘step’ inwards in an attempt to reduce the bulk of architecture, creating a displacement on the reactilinear geometry. This stepping is a ‘shifted’ block in a continuous volume, which creates a fractured relief when viewed at street level, essentially inducing a parallax that ‘disguises’ the heavy mass to render a slender presence. The ground floor is configured in a way to mitigate partitions that formalises the space, the entirety of the ground floor is viewed as an invitational gesture between public and private realms. The street-facing facade distinguishes the interior programmes of living units and communal areas, by the separation of porosity between the two with a double layered The typical plan orchestrates a domestic condition where the balcony simultaneously serve as circulatory passages and social pocket spaces, essentially eradicating the monolithic purpose of any corridors with prescribed usage. Three spatial bands virtually define each typical living unit by sub-dividing it into a crescendo of intimacy: Semipublic, private and personal - all woven together but not clearly delieanated by the use of curtains, glazing and integrated services-cum-partition system, the flexibility of the unit fortells the ambiguity and multiplicity in the proposed ways of living together. This ambiguity leads to a non-binary state of occupation - as one could be partly inside an extroverted space or partly outside an introverted space. Facing out towards the north, each unit’s elevation is defined by a floor-to-ceiling rotary louvre system in a 2 x 3 grid, when observed in unison with the attaching units, one receives a dynamic rhythm of varying degrees of phenomenal transparencies as the panels reveal and disguises the second skin behind, whilst the exposed structural bands remain rigid and static. The east and western atriums converse with the adjacent industrious and residential vernacular, these openings again breaks the tension of a suppressed enclosure, shredding back the defensive facet prescribed by the decorum of the street, further allowing a space for reconciliation in its context. The proposed tower, is a contextually disproportionate superstructure to its vicinity, yet it does so in an apologetic gesture that retreats from an dominant, aggressive occupation of the space, resolving itself from the crisis of the object.
Ground Plan 0
1
5
10m
Typical Plan 0
1
5
10m
North Elevation 1:200 0
1
5
10m
Section through western atrium 1:200 0
1
5
10m
Typical Unit Plan 0
0.2
1m
Elevation 1:20
Section 1:20
Plan 1:20
Unit Details 0
0.2
1m
Shifted Block and Parallax Twins
The thin one and The bulk in disguise
Varying Transparencies
A Place to Live
Furniture:Partition:Structure
Turning corners: Places to socialise