Design1: Micro-Nature

02MICRO-NATURE

The person of the future looks at the architecture of the past as an existing condition, a constellation of decaying objects, all part of an evolving environment.

In this semester, I first explored the micronature of Vanna Venturi house by integrating a new material into the existing structure. Through house analysis, I re-imagined the house by keeping the original context but changing the house structure by integrating a new material.

Spatial organisation

- The fireplace and the staircase are the hearth of the house which compete for space with the entrance

- The interior of the house centered around the fireplace and staircase

- Ant eye view is adopted to show the how different activities and services can happen around the core

Conflicts of scale

- The chimney and the entrance are ‘too big’ for the house when people look outside but in fact smaller in their real state

- It is a little house that uses big scale to counterbalance the complexity

- The big scale in this small building achieves an appropriate architectural tension

Research study (Further House Analysis)

Venturi’s contradiction can also be found in his plans.

According to Venturi’s own explanation of the house in his book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”, Venruri describes his plan as a distorted derivation of ‘Palladian rigidity and symmetry’.

Palladian Architecture: - Arranged according to a division into three in both directions - Dominant central space, surrounded by subsidiary rooms - Symmetrical & have strict proportions

Venturi broke the Palladian rules and discipline in different ways:- Establishing and then destroying symmetry: asymmetrical plan, windows

- Creating then denying axes : putting the fireplace and staircase together and blocking the axis of entrance (which is open in the palladian plans)

Re-imagining by reconstrtucting elements from Palladian architecture.