Spring 2011 Palette Book

PALETTE:HANNAH CAO/SPRING 2011 MATERIAL: THE USUAL SUSPECTS DESIGN PRACTICE: ZUMTHOR/OMA MATERIAL PALETTE

MATERIAL: THE USUAL SUSPECTS

WOOD VANKE PAVILION Shanghai, China 2010 The pavilion, with its facade made of wheat straw, comprises seven independent tube-shaped buildings with their tops connected through blue light-filtering ETFE plastic films.

The seven tube-shaped buildings are surrounded by over 1,000 square meters of water. Straw was used to produce the 300,000 elements for the external cladding. Some people have raised questions about straw’s ability to resist damp and fire. The assurance is that, after undergoing high-temperature, high-pressure and other processes, the Vanke straw is not only fire-resistant, it is even more damp-resistant than normal timber.

WOOD YUSUHARA TOWN HALL Kengo Kuma Yusuhara, Japan 2004-06 The hall is uses locally harvested sugi (Japanese cedar) as the primary building material. All wooden members are spaced at the minimum structural dimensions allowable, making this one of Japans largest wooden town halls. Double lattices of engineered laminated lumber span 59 feet to create the atrium. Cedar panels in combination with aluminum and low-e composite glazing are configured into a horizontal grid on the facade.

CONCRETE BROTHER KLAUS FIELD CHAPEL Peter Zumthor Eifel, Germany 2007 A technique called “rammed concrete� where farmers poured a layer of concrete over a teepee of timber every day for 24 days, leaving a texture similar to that of rammed earth. The timber is then burnt out by colliers, using the same process as making charcoal, leaving a charred inside.

The chapel is entered through a pivoted triangular lead door. The floor is poured lead. An oculus at the top is open to the sky letting in rain and light. Filtered light also enters through holes in the walls.

CONCRETE MEISO NO MORI MUNICIPAL FUNERAL HALL Toyo Ito Kakamigahara, Gifu, Japan 2004-06 “A space formed by a roof that is like a cloud which, drifting through the sky, has come to settle upon the site�

A gently curved reinforced-concrete shell structure is used to construct a roof characterized by concavities and convexities. The final shape of the roof structure was determined by an algorithm that generates the optimum structural solution. There are four structural cores and twelve columns with built-in rainwater collection pipes are placed according to structural balance under the roof structure.

STEEL LA MAISON UNIQUE Heatherwick studio New York, USA 2006 Undulating ribbons of rubbercoated hot-rolled steel are used to create a stair that seems to unfold as it rises, and orchestrating a procession from a tight, groundfloor lobby to the expansive secondfloor retail. The stair is a “landscape,” a topographical feature inserted within a 46-by-27-foot atrium, cut from the corner of the building.

Magnetic properties of the landscape stair enable movable lights and display stands to be attached with magnets. The atrium rises 60 feet to a sloped skylight and required 55 tons of steel. When Heatherwick envisioned the stairscape, he thought of “a hillside with goats climbing up winding paths.”

STEEL M. H. DE YOUNG MUSEUM Herzog & de Meuron San Francisco, CA, USA 2005 8000 unique panels whose collective whole replicate the impression made by light filtering through a tree canopy. The ZIRA™ Process streamlined this complex series of variable holes in the copper, allowing engineers to run chosen imagery through the algorithmic system, translating it to the thousands of copper plates. The desire was for the museum to blend and emerge from its forested surroundings like an ancient indigenous structure.

The integrity, resilience, and unpredictability of copper required faith in the material that over time it would transition from it’s bright golden red, to a dark brown, to a black, and finally, slowly emerge into earthy greens.

GLASS NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART Steven Holl Kansas City, MO, USA 2007 The string of iridescent frosted-glass boxes pop out of the grassy lawn and filter sunlight into a series of dramatic underground galleries. The threaded movement between the lightgathering lenses of the new addition weaves the new building with the landscape in a fluid dynamism based on a sensitive relationship to its context. The lenses’ multiple layers of translucent glass gather, diffuse and refract light, at times materializing light like blocks of ice.

GLASS GLASS PAVILION SANAA Toledo, OH, USA 2006 The curved glass walls give visitors visual contact with the outside, glass making activities, and art at all times. The spaces are arranged and shaped to separate, but also connect as visitors flow through the form in a series of interconnected bubbles.

The “in between” spaces, a result of the independent shapes, function as a dynamic buffer, sometimes emphasizing closeness, something strengthening the distance. The approximate 32,000 square feet of glass originates from a batch of float glass in Austria that, prior to being shipped to the site in Toledo, was curved and laminated in China. Thin solid steel columns and the use of 3/4” solid plate steel wall for lateral bracing create the lightness of structure to enhance the sense of clarity.

DESIGN PRACTICE:

ZUMTHOR

“I believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the tasks and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language. I believe that the language of architecture is not a question of a specific style. Every building is built for a specific use in a specific place and for a specific society. My buildings try to answer the questions that emerge from these simple facts as precisely and critically as they can.�

-Peter Zumthor

THERMAL BATHS Vals, Switzerland 1990-96 “Mountain, stone, water, buidling in stone, building with stone, building into the mouintain, building out of the mountain-our attempts to give this chain of words an architectural interpretation, to translate into architecture its meanings and sensuousness, guided our design for the buidling and step by step gave it form�

SWISS PAVILION Hanover, Switzerland 2000 The pavilion is made of twelve stacks of spruce totaling to 40,000 wooden beams piled nine meters high. The pavilion presents an appearacne of an indeterminate architectural space that takes on the sounds of music and the color of the weather. Zumthor worked with Daniel Ott to create sounds that establishes a modernity which finds its roots in the past.

SAINT BENEDICT CHAPEL Sumvigt, Switzerland 1988 Like the old farmhouses it will darken in the sunlight and become black on the south side and silver gray on the northern. The building material traditionally used by the local people, has been used for the church. The new building shows local tradition and the people’s skill in working with this material. The gently curved floor of wooden boards, which floats freely on the joists, is slightly springy underfoot.

OMA

“The permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the metropolis are incompatible. In this conflict the metropolis is, by definition, the victor; in its pervasive reality architecture is reduced to the status of a plaything, tolerated as decor for the illusions of history and memory. In manhattan this paradox is resolved in a brilliant way: through the development of a mutant architecture that combines the aura of monumentality with the performance of instability. Its interiors accommodate compositions of program and activity that change constantly and independently of each other without affecting what is called, with accidental profundity, the envelope. The genius of Manhattan is the simplicity of this divorce between appearance and performance: it keeps the illusion of architecture intact, while surrendering wholeheartedly to the needs of the metropolis. This architecture relates to the forces of the Groszstadt like a surfer to the waves.�

-Rem Koolhaus

KUNSTHAL Rotterdam, Netherlands 1992 “With these givens, and the fact that these crossings would divide the square into four parts, the challenge became: how to design a museum as four autonomous projects - a sequence of contradictory experiences which would nevertheless form a continuous spiral. In other words, how to imagine a spiral in four separate squares. The concept of the building is a continuous circuit.�

SEATTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY Seattle, USA 2004 “Redefine the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but rather as an information store where all potent forms of media – new and old – are presented equally and legibly. In an age in which information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of media and (more importantly) the curatorship of its contents that will make the library vital.”

WEST KOWLOON CULTURAL DISTRICT Hong Kong 2010 “Fun and serious, planned and spontaneous, large but intimate, Chinese but international, iconic but practical, understandable yet surprising...that the current frantic atmosphere of trading is not replaced by the plastic perfection of contemporary public space...to enliven the existing streetscape with outposts of WKCD so that Kowloon and WKCD will eventually merge into a single, hyper-diverse community.�

MATERIAL PALETTE

METAL PETALS TRACK AIR State Grid Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo

BLINKING SMART FACADE Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (Jean Nouvel)

FLOATING HONEYCOMB Bruges Pavilion, Belgium (Toyo Ito)

ROBOTIC LIGHTNESS Gantenbein Vineyard Facade, Fl채sch, Switzerland (Gramazio & Kohler)

OYA POROUSITY AND STEEL PLATE SYMBIOSIS Chokkura Plaza and Shelter, Takanezawa, Tochigi Prefecture (Kengo Kuma)

DANCING BRICKS Case Joint Pavilion 4, Shanghai World Expo

STARY SKY Case Joint Pavilion 4, Shanghai World Expo

FLAKES OF SKIN Spanish Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo

MOULDED GYPSUM CAVE Guangzhou Opera House, China (Zaha Hadid)

THE SPACE BETWEEN Dominus Winery, California (Herzong and de Meuron)

EXPOSED ONYX VEINS LVMH, Chuo-ku, Osaka (Kengo Kuma)

BY DAY. BY NIGHT. Novartis Pharma Headquarters, Basel (Diener & Diener)

LIFE SIZED Hemeroscoopium House, Madrid, Spain (Anton Garcia-Abril & Ensamble Studio)

STITCHING BACK EARTH Igualada Cemetery, Spain (Enric Miralles)

FREEDOM THROUGH SIMPLIFIED COMPLEXITY The Perforated Wall, Zurich, Switzerland (Jean Nouvel)