Fall 2018
CU R R EN T WOR K S
SALA HARS w w w. s a l a h a r s . c o m
The Annunciation After Titian, Gerhard Richter, 1973
I DEOL OGY OF PR AC T ICE Our practice begins with a simple question; in a time where everything is moving rapidly, how do we create a moment of pause? For us the modern project, a project that abandoned history, is not something we can pursue; we are interested in form that is deeply rooted in Architecture’s lineage. We see no contradiction between a dialogue with our Ancestors and the rise of authenticity. For us, tradition is an act of fueling the fire, not preserving the ashes. From the beginning, we have remained skeptical of the possibility of a genuinely novel or democratic architecture. Instead, we have decided to adopt the mindset of the Classics, a belief in something simpler: the power of architecture to adorn democracy. Ultimately, we aim for clairity and coherence to resonate at all stages of the design process, from initial concept to built object, an act of cultural production at all scales. Our Project, then, is an ongoing investigation of various resolutions to the conflict between abstraction and figuration in architecture. Always being distinctively Sala Hars, but never predictably Sala Hars.
I N DE X OF WOR K S WORK S IN 2018
WOR K W E L L T OW E R THE EVOCATI VE SY MBOLIC PA R IS ,FR A NCE , SPR ING 18
PAG E S 6 -19
SHINGLE HOUSE NEITHER TYPE NOR PROTOTYPE CH A R LOT TE SV ILL E , V IRGINI A , US A , SPR ING 18
PAG E S 2 0 -27
T OW E R HOUSE LOVE AT SECON D SIGHT S A N FR A NCISC O, C A LIFOR NI A , US A , SPR ING 18
PAG E S 2 8 -35
T-HOUSE TECTON IC STEREOTOM Y ASHE V ILL E , NORTH C A ROLINA , US A , FA LL 18
PAG E S 3 6 - 41
W I L L OW HOUSE U P DAT I N G T H E PA L A Z Z O LOS A NGEL E S , C A LIFOR NI A , US A , SPR ING 18
PAG E S 4 2 - 49
T H E PA R T H E N O N T OW E R A NC I E N T LY MODE R N MODE R N LY A NC I E N T NE W YOR K CIT Y, NE W YOR K , US A , SPR ING 18
PAG E S 50 -59
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WOR K W E L L T OW E R THE EVOCATI V E SY MBOLIC PA R IS ,FR A NCE , SPR ING 18
In the Workwell Tower, we embraced the challenge of addressing the central dilemma of the contemporary office: how can one foster both concentration and latent interaction? More-so, how could one negotiate the paradox between conceiving something that feels opulent and unique, yet also evoque a home-like sensation that simply celebrates life and the complexities of the everyday. As a point of departure, we went to our ancestors, in search of spaces that both congeragte and separate, arriving to the canons of the circular plans of Greek temples and the Renaissance. The circle, for us, is a unifying form, centripetal in nature, radiating outward from a center, yet always drawing back to this origin. In line with such scholastic traditions of the Greeks, the program for a contemporary office tower emphasizes an integral link between the exterior form and interior intellectual thought.
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Perimeter Beginning on the perimeter, these spaces for exchange, protected
in
comfort
and
shadow
for
intimacy,
provide a transition from the concentration of work, to opportunities for interaction, dialogue, or simply a pause for a lush breath of fresh air.
a
b
a. Site Plan b. Interior Lobby Perspective
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a
b
a. Office with Terrace Perspective b. Floor Plan Type 1
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a
b
a. Floor Plan Type 2 b. Street Office Perspective
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a
b
a. Agora Perspective b. Floor Plan Type 3
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Facade Large stretches of a shuttered wooden facade slide down on the outer edge of the circle, allowing the areas to fully open or close, in order to provide a maximum relationship between the user and the surrounding, depending on any need. Monumental but inconspicuous, it marks a territory but it doesn’t conquer it. It simply, and purely, resolves the initial dilemma.
The building
carries with it the dignity and permablity of the moderns, but the solidty and monolithic image of the classics.
a
b
a. Facade Shutters Opperation b. Picture of Model Detail
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Purity We have conceived of large sharing spaces that can also be turned into group cubicles with the ease of simply sliding a curtain. Flexibility simply remains at the core of the project because its very essence -the plan- so allows. The Maison Workwell tower is an exercise in making architecture out of pure devices.
a
b
a. Exterior Detail View a. Assembly Detail
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SHINGLE HOUSE NEITHER T Y PE NOR PROTOT Y PE CH A R LOT TE SV ILL E , V IRGINI A , US A , SPR ING 18
A house is not a home, but home is a house. Shingle House affronts the challenge of resonating with, yet deviating from the typical American shingle-style house, an image so synonymous with home, it cannot escape our memory. We are fascinated by the innocent pitched roof sheds that litter the American countryside and suburbia. They are iconic in their multiplicity, banal in their singularity, tranquility replicated ad nauseum. This then becomes a game in which we can only question what has already been perfected. In confronting the image we look to its parts. We find beautiful the individual elements and their complex relationship to the whole; the shingles as ornament, gutters as cornice, gables as pediments, and shuttered apertures as ordered composition. Yet for all of these, it is a typology recognizable simply in the naive image of its silhouette.
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Plinth The parts become plastic, open for interpretation. The roof ’s overhanging
canopy,
when
combined with the plinth, becomes an abstraction of traditional suburban porches.
a
b
a. Plan View b. Bedroom Perspective
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Type Windows transformed
are
oversized,
into
doors,
bleeding out to this porch which
provides
a
unique
moment in between shelter and landscape. Inside, the house is brought to its most humble state, a return to the very ideals of its type. It’s assembly occurs in the most vernacular of acts.
a a. House Section
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Image In transforming this icon, we are not suggesting novelty. Rather, we challenge the assumption that novelty ever existed in the first place, as this house existed in the Primitive Hut, man’s first discovery of Architecture. We sanction the copy and rejoice in its familiarity. We suspect this is what draws us so close; a refreshing rebirth of an age-old image.
a
b
a. Porche Exterior Perspective a. Porche Assembly Detail
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T OW E R HOUSE LOV E AT SECON D SIGHT S A N FR A NCISC O, C A LIFOR NI A , US A , SPR ING 18
The machine for living needed an update. Past are the days of celebrating the sterile box. The five points of architecture brought a new dignity and many promises, but also with them came a latent state of anxiety. By drinking this attractive cocktail, contemporary living become to a large degree depressed by desolation. Thus, how could one update this machine today? Perhaps by bringing it together with the aspect it always tried to circumvent: friendliness and character. To create something serious yet ludic, we turned to one of the most intellectually stimulating moments in architectural history for lessons: mannerism. Conditions in which disorders of the orders within the order are the rule, radical departures wrapped within conventions.
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Mannerism In the spirit of what Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and Andrea Palladio were doing to the 16th century Palazzi, we decided to embrace the modern slab and make it undergo a similar synthesis. Elements which seem aligned but upon a second view start to oscillate and miss-align. Concrete prefabricated elements are stacked but for the purpose of achieving a monolith of amicable character rather than a foreign monotonous
a
extrusion.
b
a. Floor Plan Apartments b. Site Plan
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Transition The contemporary American city is characterized by a conglomeration of glass vertical high rise extrusions, always in strong opposition to the single family residential vernacular fabric. Two conditions that modern life can simply not escape, but the elements of transition between these two scales are rare. How can one solve this problem? The building attempts to do it, seeming colossal in scale from afar, only to come close and realize it is only a few floors high.
a
b c
a. Exterior Detail Perspective b. Detail of Assembly 2 c. Detail of Assembly 3
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Perception The slabs are actually not precisely slabs, they are close to an illusion. We are in front of many possible buildings, one vertical in expression, one much more horizontal in aspect, or perhaps simply a structural hollow frame. It is perhaps, a rare case in which the memory of the ancient, the omnivorous logic of Modernity, and an interest in perception had a brief flirt.
a
b
a. Building Section b. Interior Apartment Perspective
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T-HOUSE TECTON IC STEREOTOM Y ASHE V ILL E , NORTH C A ROLINA , US A , FA LL 18
A site in the American woods presents a portrait of the perfect parameters for a rather silent but precise annihilation of formal lineage, so to speak. One must only look at a past not so long ago, and an excess of contemporary cases, to see what this intoxicating cocktail can yield. Not pleased with the reductive, not pleased with the simplistic, we here paved an alternative road. The project for us, then, naturally began considering the history of architecture as a value instead of a mere sequence of events. Classical tropes became inevitably our guidelines. Nevertheless, we were interested in the possibility of a building with a certain strangeness; one which suggests a plausible stereotomy but also a tectonic assemblage; one product of a classical precision yet a deliberate attitude to express a finite coldness which becomes warmth by inhabitation.
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Waver Could we suggest of a new kind of image which carries with it the intellect and iconography of allowing us to waver between all the elements that define dwelling?
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a d b c a. Floor Plan Level 2 b. Floor Plan Level 1 c. Ground Floor Plan d. House Section
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Oblique The building becomes rather oblique in it’s references yet plentiful in it’s classical promise to live in plenitude. We can deem this an act of figurative abstraction in the landscape. A stance, a position towards a latent classical iconography that pervades the hillsides of American Appalachia. While iconic in its presence the project resists the temptation to become a spectacle, and in this very act that the story of a site in the woods becomes less tragic and rather shines a beam of hope.
a a. House Interior Perspective
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T HE W I L L OW HOUSE U P DAT I N G T H E PA L A Z Z O LOS A NGEL E S , C A LIFOR NI A , US A , SPR ING 18
The Willow House attempts to revive the Palazzo as a possible housing type. We believe the actual type to be composed but negotiable, monumental but not colossal, defined but ambiguous. It suggest an urban architecture, yet maintains a domestic scale. It might be the perfect soulmate to tackle the insipid proliferation of gaudy Neoclassical single family houses in the United States. The Palazzo is the proof to all rules: three is the ideal number of compositional parts to create a monumental nature; the applique of window types, course banding, and symmetry proves to be the best partner in crime to create this monumentality; the search to create a gravitational presence simply always succumbs to any overscaled cornice. But how to update the Palazzo today? Perhaps with an earnest effort to put it face to face with the opponent it always tried to evade: frugality.
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Old Cliche Perhaps the answer lies in a monumentality afforded by everyday materials. Perhaps by turning bas reliefs into steel decks, pochees into ducts, decorative banding into slab edges, we can create something both banal and vivid. Perhaps if we confront the Palazzo with what it always tried to circumvent we can shed new light on this old cliche.
a
b
a. Detail of Assembly b. Exterior Detail Open
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46 3
A
3 B
C
A1 SCALE: 1/4"=1'
EXISTING BASEMENT PLAN
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Context We adopt this 600 year old motif but give it a new form. In its context, we contrast the blatant copies of Renaissance elements, stucco Bel Air 1
mansions with their arcades, column orders, cornices, and entablatures, 2
3
4
packed with sculpture niches and a terracotta roof on top.
a
b
a. Plans of House b. Section of House
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Frame Through this unconventional organization of conventional parts, the familiar nature of this contemporary Palazzo lends itself to memory, its freedom lies in the montage. The
project
achieves
the
highest state of an architectural object: evolutionary as well as revolutionary.
a a. Interior Perspective
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PA R T H E N O N T OW E R A NC I E N T LY MODE R N MODE R N LY A NC I E N T NE W YOR K CIT Y, NE W YOR K , US A , SPR ING 18
The tower is a project that challenges the lineage of architectural unity and proportion. It wants to be iconographic, yet standardized, monumental, yet functional, monolithic, yet discretized. In its evolution, we have seen the type radically transformed in exterior expression, yet lethargic in its interior progression of the open floor plan, column grids that adorn the needs of the workplace. We prefer the later, the slow, meticulous alteration of a type, adapting as needed, pushing the spatial limits through its inherited architectural assemblage. New York has a long history of these towers that overscaled palazzi and stretched temples. Triumphal in their conquest to perfect Antiquity as the symbol of a new empire, these towers used cast iron and terracotta entablatures copied from their Ancestors, columns and pediments that spoke the language of the Ancients, unashamedly repurposing them for the greatest city on Earth. It was a plastic use of the tropes of an unprecedented magnitude.
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Column Somewhere along the line, textured Corinthian columns were replaced by sleek I-beams, bas-reliefs now flat reflections of
neighboring
buildings
on glossy glass panels.
The
reference was abandoned in favor of an architecture of convenience and consumption. The Parthenon Tower proposes an
alternative.
Its
heavy,
rusticated presence of columns and thick slabs is felt at the city level, but fades to almost a drawing at its peak.
a
b
a. Building Section b. Site Plan
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Enclosure We see the column grid not as a generic deployment of structure, but as a thoughtful progression from
exterior
interior
structure
organization.
to
Greek
temples used the column not only to carry their trabeated canopies, but as a means of creating enclosure.
a
b
a. Office Perspective b. Office Floor Plan
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Device The columns of the temple interiors worked to form a variety of spaces that were informed by the sizing and spacing of the columns. Parthenon Tower tries to replicate this, through stacked temple plans, all using the column to push inward, creating moments of various densities and programmatic opportunity, allowing
flexibility,
without
ambiguity.
a
b
a. Lounge Floor Plan b. Lounge Floor Perpsective
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Temple The column is a device to differentiate and sometimes even inhabit. At its core, they merge,
creating
complete
enclosure for the necessities of this office temple. Parthenon tower is both iconic, pushing against
the
generic,
non-
referential highrise of the 21st Century, yet entirely rational, furthering its exploration of interior typological evolution.
c
a
b
a. Facade Detail View b. Assembly Details c. Assembly Details 2
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CU R R EN T WOR K S Cambridge, MA, United States
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SALA HARS w w w. s a l a h a r s . c o m