olivia hillery | architectural graduate | portfolio 2012
contents
0.
introduction 3
1. architecture 1.1 Goldsmith School 1.2 Bee House 1.3 Music House 1.4 subURBia 1.5 Double House 1.6 Dance School
2.
5 26 34 44 46 58
furniture 2.1 Studio Storage 2.2 Handrail
3.
conceptual 3.1 Boundary?
4.
55
writing 4.1 Between Boundary & Freedom
5.
52 53
61
conclusion 73
architecture
1
1.1 Goldsmith School - Introduction
1.1 Goldsmith School - Introduction The bog is an ambiguous boundary - it is neither solid nor liquid but exists in an ambiguous state between the two. Time plays an important role on the boundaries in the bog constantly shifting the boundaries between land and water. These boundaries will change once again when Bord na Mona finish peat harvesting. Forty-one per cent of Bord na Mona land is artificially drained and will flood once the drainage pumps are turned off post peat -production This project investigates the potential of this future wetland landscape of the post-production boglands. Ireland has a rich history of inhabited wetlands, such as crannogs and the lake dwellings of early Ireland. This project draws on these examples as a precedent for future wetland living. For centuries the bogs have acted as natural boundaries in the landscape and because of this they held a special symbolism in early Ireland becoming a place to deposit precious objects for ritual or sacrafice. The National Museum of Ireland holds one of Europe’s most important pre-historic Gold collections, the majority of it discovered in boglands. The brief for the project is a Jewellery and Goldsmithing School and it draws on the rich archaeology of the area and the boglands to revive lost traditions. The site for the project was chosen from a detailed analysis of the archaeology of the area. The area around the site has been inhabited for over four and a half thousand years. This settlement landscape involves numerous habitation and ritual sites on the hills surrounding the bog. My research led me to the discovery of a Bronze Age Stone Enclosure in the centre of the bog, recently discovered, it is of significant archaeological importance as it is the first stone constuction discovered in boglands. The stone enclosure is currently being preserved in-situ by Bord na Mona and will exist as a mound of peat in the bog when peat production finishes and the bog returns to its natural wetland state. This project retains these fragments of the past and adds another layer of occupation to that area of ground. The project deals with the ambiguous nature of the ground. The ground level has changed over time - being built up by peat formation for over two thousand years and then being eroded by Bord na Mona through peat harvesting. I became interested in this idea of a constantly shifting ground plane and the action of time on the landscape. Constructing a ground plane became an opportunity to embrace this ambiguity and to integrate this into the building. The building deals with ambiguity in a number of places. Firstly, in how the building touches the ground, secondly, in how the building embraces a flooding ground plane and thirdly, in the seperation of structure and skin.
6
The Bogs of Ireland olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
This project explores the ambiguous nature of the bog and the construction of boundary that integrates this ambiguity.
1.1 Goldsmith School
The Bog of Allen, Co. Westmeath, Ireland
Clonard
Athlone
Enfield Kilbeggan
Clonmacnoise
Ballinasloe
Galway
Athenry
Aughrim
Boher Doon
Blackwater Railway
Lemenagh
Ballycumber Lynally
Ferbane
Shannonbridge
Shannon Harbour
Clara Bog
Rahan
Croghan
Durrow
Maynooth Grange
Rhode
Kilclonfert
Cloncurry
Monasteroris
Dublin
Edenderry
Tullamore Charleville
Lough Boora
Clonfert
Killiegh
Loughrea Banagher
The site in an Irish context Birr
Kinnity
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
7
Living with Water
Ireland’s temperate climate, high effective percipitation, topography, and extensive low-lying, waterlogged soils mean that its landscape abounds with wetlands. Dwelling in wetland regions, whether through choice or necessity, has a long history in the Irish landscape. The Irish wetland dwelling, the Crannog, can be defined as a wholly or largely artificial island in a water-logged area. There are over 1200 known Crannog sites in Ireland. Taking the Crannog as a precedent this project investigates future methods of lake dwelling and wetland communities in Ireland.
Site Plan
Atmospheric study #1
Seasonal Flooding of the landscape
Summer
8
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Spring
Autumn
Winter
Transport & Settlement
The rail and road connections in Ireland today connect major urban centres to each other and influence the location of human settlements, similar to the influence of the Eiscir Riada on ancient settlements. The site lies in close proximity to the Dublin-Galway motorway and the type of settlement in the area is heavily influenced by its presence.
A Coastal Population
50% of Ireland’s population live within 15 km of the sea in settlements of Viking origin whose location is no longer tied intrinsicly to water and boat travel.
An Expanding Commuter Belt
The areas in grey signify the places where there was an increase in population in the 2011 census. In this census there was a decrease in population in Irish cities, continuing the trend of increased population in the commuter belt. The project looks at the possibility of population increase in the centre of the country.
Distribution map of Crannogs in Ireland
There are at least 1200 known sites, mostly clustered in the lakelands of the north-west and drumlin belt regions, although numerous sites are located elsewhere aswell. (Source: Crannogs; Lake-dwellings of early Ireland, Aidan O’Sullivan, 2000)
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
9
A Community in the Bog
A community in the bog tests the idea of living in the future wetland landscape of the post-production bog. Shared houses link to a central platform attached to the narrow guage rail networks, which provide transport but also services, such as, waste collection, travelling libraries, specialist shops and entertainment.
A Structure for Living
This model explores the possibility of building a structural platform in the landscape that would allow living to occur within it. It is similar to a primary structural tree which holds, within it, a structure for living in.
A Chain of Linked islands in the Wetland - Wax & Card Model
Connection between family unit and central rail connection
Development of structural system and foundations
Inhabited spaces & seasonal rooms
10
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Evolution of Landscape & Layering 2500BC
2500BC Bronze Age - Glacial lake Bronze Age Toghers & Hunting Hides On the edge of a glacial lake. Fen formation.
1810
1810 Raised bog development - Glacial lake retreats
Raised Bog buries traces of human occupation Glacial lake retreats to become known as the “Lake of the Jewels�.
1960
1960 Peat Harvesting - Land drainage
Bord na Mona Peat Harvesting Land is drained. Traces of occupation revealed.
2020
2020 Post-peat production - Wetland formation
Bronze Age Sites preserved in-situ. Land becomes wetland, post-peat production. Jewellery and Goldsmithing School occupies the island.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
11
Exploratory Section 1:50
Detailed Drawing 1:20 A section of the building explored in detail at 1:20 incorporating flooded rooms in the bog, living structure on the bog and an inhabited roofscape above the bog.
12
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Structural Model 1:20 The structural model explores the potential of combining primary and secondary structure to create spaces for living in between.
Overlapping Timber Frame & Concrete Structure (far left) Photograph of interior space of 1:20 structural model. Concrete overlaps with timber frames of different spans to capture space in between.
Detailed Drawing 1:10 (left) Concrete structure supporting timber roof. This detail shows where the concrete structure sits outside the enclosed envelope of the building and the internal lining is wrapped around this creating a moment where the interior punches through to become visible on the exterior.
(Below) Photograph of Flooded Space from 1:20 Structural Model
Detailed Cut-Away Axonometric (bottom left) Drawing illustrates internal and external linings and system for seperating wet and dry areas of structure above and below the flood line.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
13
The Character of a Flooded Room #1 The flooded rooms in the bog have a visual connection to the living spaces above. There is a constant connection to the landscape and seasonal variations. In Winter this space is full of water and the inhabitants like to swim in the bog water. In Summer this space becomes an outdoor picnic area where old men play chess and children play hide-and-seek, friends drink tea in their living rooms above and watch the drama below.
14
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
The Character of a Flooded Room #2 A room in the bog at high water level. This space is for docking boats before ascending into the living space above.
Below Ground Level - The Gold Vault The occupation of the building is layered. There are spaces only accessible to certain groups of people, spaces exist in parallel, for example, the gold vault in the bog can only be accessed by the course trainer. A secret entrance wraps around the vault which sits at the heart of the plan.
Ground Level - The Entrance At ground level the plan is split into public and private. The entrance space is accessible to the public, while the workshop spaces are seperated from this world by a circulation space at the heart of the plan.
Above Ground Level - The Workshop The goldsmith’s workshop is set like a jewel into the heart of the building. Looking out over the lake, it is an introspective space separated from the public sphere of the building. Opes within the building create occassional moments of overlooking, boundaries are broke by these visual connections within the building.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
15
Below Ground Level - Bedrooms
Section - Life as a student in the school
16
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Ground Level - Communal Living Areas & Entrance
Structural Model 1:50
Above Ground Level - Study Area
Structural Model 1:50
School Building & Student Centre
School Building & Student Centre
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
17
1:50 Model Director’s House School & Public Area Student’s Acommodation
18
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Section A-A
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
19
20
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
A
A
Ground Floor Plan
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
21
Student Accommodation & Director’s House
22
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
23
Goldsmith Workshop & School
24
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1:20 Detailed Section through workshop space olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
25
1.2 Bee House Abbeyleix Honey and Bee-Keeping
My proposal for Abbeyleix is to create a honey industry in the town. This industry begins in the bog where bee-hives will be kept during the summer months. The bee hives will then be brought to the various production facilities seeded in the backlands of the town of abbeyleix. The production units are intended to reinforce the main street and will have a distinctive medieval character. Products produced in these units are then sold from existing retail units on the main street. The honey industry will create a strong local economy in the town of abbeyleix, giving the town an identity. With the development in the honey industry there will be an inevitable increase in population. This population increase is catered for in new residential units integrated into the production facility units. An increase in population will be supported by facilities (schools, creches, gym, community centre) leading to a sustainable future for the town of Abbeyleix.
The Bee House
is the first step in the honey industry. Seeded at the back of the market, the bee house will take honey from the bee hives and prepare it for selling, either to consumers at the market or to other production units as an ingredient in mead, soap, beeswax, fudge, lipstick, or other items. The beehouse contains three residential units to accommodate an increasing population. These residential units are intended to consolidate the main street and offer an alternative to rural one-off housing.
Site Plan
26
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1.2 Bee House
Approach to the Bee House
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
27
200
years as the most important market town in Laois
900 years of a bee-keeping tradition in Laois Abbey
100 hectares of bog in the ownership of the town of abbeyleix
28
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
002 new routes through abbeyleix for the circulation of honey
New roads for heavier traffic designed to create a sustainable urban network for Abbeyleix, within which future sustainable development will take place. These roads serve to open up the backlands of the town and consolidate it around the market square.
New pedestrian routes within a five minute walk of the market square. The honey production units will be accessible from this network of pedestrian routes as honey and its associated products are made and transported in an assembly line production on a town scale.
Site Section 1:400 olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
29
Section B-B 1:100
Section A-A 1:200
30
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
5
B
1
2
A
3
4 A
B
Plan 1:450 1 Office and Services 2 Honey Room: honey extracted & seperated 3 Packaging and Storage 4 Wax workshops 5 Flower Gardens olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
31
32
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
33
1.3 Music House RIAM
The Royal Irish Academy of Music is an organisation that promotes excellence in the performing arts in Ireland through education and innovation. Their brief for a new school of music has two main goals; firstly, tuition and practice spaces for RIAM students and, secondly, to engage the public with the school. These two aims define the nature of the school; private school spaces and public performance areas.
Thomas Street
Dublin’s Thomas Street is in the heart of one of Dublin’s oldest quarters, the Liberties. This area is characterised by a small-scale urban grain and a medieval street layout. Thomas Street is lined by a facade of small shop fronts with residential overhead. These facades engage with the street, while the residential area overhead is a private world. In this way, the original typology of Thomas Street, that of living over the shop, satisfies the two aims of the RIAM for their new school.
Site Plan scale 1:1000
34
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1.3 Music House
Introduction
The new school on Thomas Street is an adaptation of the existing Georgian buildings on the street. In section the school has three levels of occupancy; group music below ground, tuition spaces above ground and individual practice spaces in the roofscape. The larger ensemble spaces are below ground in a concrete piece that slides under Thomas Street and below the central courtyard. Above ground, light wells take the place of the original shop windows, allowing passers-by a glimpse of the world below. There are three levels above ground which house the tuition spaces. These houses above ground are divided into five units, each housing a different type of music. Each unit is composed of three houses, of a similar proportion to the existing Georgian buildings on the street, with a central access core. These levels are clad in brick and open onto the street and onto the central courtyard. The individual practice rooms are located in the roofscape, or the attic, the most removed area from the hustle and bustle of the school and the performance spaces. The overall composition of the building is a U-shaped courtyard, orientated to receive afternoon and evening sun. The courtyard opens onto the existing green area behind St. Catherine’s Church, where there is a space for outdoor performances. The school occupies the perimeter of the building while the performance areas are at the heart of the community of buildings, reflecting the nature of the school. The complex as a whole is composed of houses, school houses and an opera house, together they form a community of buildings giving the RIAM a home in the city centre.
Sectional Model
Courtyard Sketch
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
35
1
1
2
2
1
2
2
2
1
1
1
2 3
3
4 5
4
2
5
1
2 1
6
1
Lower Basement Floor Plan
36
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1 Keyboard Tuition Room 2 Ensemble Space 3 Recital Hall 4 Toilets and Storage 5 Instrument Bank 6 Sub-stage Area
Basement Floor Plan
6
1 Keyboard Tuition Room 2 Ensemble Space 3 Recital Hall 4 Toilets and Storage 5 Back-Stage Dressing Rooms 6 Sub-stage Area
Section B-B B
B
Elevation to Thomas Street
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
37
Section A-A
A
38
A
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
4 7
6 5
3
2
8
Ground Floor Plan
9
1
1 Opera House 2 Cafe, Foyer & Ticket Office 3 Outdoor Performance Space 4 Symphony Hall 5 School of Wind and Brass 6 School of Percussion 7 School of String 8 School of Singing 9 Musicianship House
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
39
1
1 1
1
1
1 6
2
4
4
1
3
1
2
6
5
5 3 6
First Floor Plan
40
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1 Tuition Rooms 2 18th Century Music Room 3 Musicianship Rooms 4 Opera Hall Balcony 5 Stage 6 Back-stage Area
Fourth Floor Plan
1 Rehearsal/Practice Space 2 Library 3 Music Technology Room 4 Opera Hall Upper Balcony 5 Stage 6 Offices
6 Roof structure
5 Laminated timber beams supports for roof structure
4. 12.5mm acoustic plasterboard
3. 60/100 mm timber stud frame
Working Models 2. Floor 53mm counter battens
1. Concrete structure
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
41
Theatre Sectional Model
Theatre From Stage
42
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Theatre Seating Area
roof
standing-seam lead sheet bituminous sheeting, glued 3mm sound absorbing mat 22mm wood fibreboard 60mm ventilation cavity 19mm external grade plywood 120mm thermal insulation between rafters 12.5mm acoustic plasterboard vapour barrier 40mm counter battens w/25mm acoustic insulation 26mm limed oak boarding
floor
26mm limed oak boarding 2mm sound absorbing strip 53mm counter battens at 600mm c.c. 50mm acoustic insulation 300mm structural concrete floor slab
external wall
26mm limed oak boarding 40mm counter battens at 600mm c.c. 25mm acoustic insulation vabour barrier 12.5mm acoustic plasterboard 60/100mm timber studs 100mm thermal insulation 300mm structural concrete wall
partition wall
26mm limed oak boarding 40mm counter battens at 600mm c.c. 40mm ventilation/services gap 12.5mm acoustic plasterboard 60/100mm timber studs 100mm acoustic insulation 12.5mm acoustic plasterboard 40mm ventilation/services gap 40mm counter battens at 600mm c.c. 26mm limed oak boarding
roof light
10mm toughened glass 16mm cavity 20mm laminated safety glass in steel frame
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
43
1.4 subURBia A suburban estate in Paddington created by filling in the fragments of land that are London’s legacy from large infrastructure. The estate comprises of 5 blocks, each block has 2 access cores servicing 10 homes. Residential units are south-facing, with a view of the canal, dual aspect with a front and back garden. They are designed to accommodate living and sleeping but also to accommodate a spare room which can be used for any activity or purpose. Community facilities are located on level one and accessed directly from the elevated park. these include a community meeting room, a creche and a gathering room with wi-fi, learning resources, after-school clubs and a library. Twenty small-scale commercial units, of varying sizes, occupy the ground level. residential entrances are carved from the center of these units. The units are designed to be front to back and thereby can have main shop frontage on one or both of it’s sides, while the corner units have frontage onto three sides. This is made possible by containing storage beneath the plinth. A public realm accessible to all that connects the fragmented areas of the city, routes are generous and allow not only connections but spaces for markets, performances, hopscotch and karyoke. Each route has a distinctive character whether it is the elevated park, the buried atrium space or the market route, combining to create an activated public realm at ground level.
residential
community
townscape
plinth
44
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1.4 subURBia Four Bed Apartment
ELBOW ROOM Every unit has a spare room, elbow room, which has a dual purpose; contextually it forms a sound buffer between the living areas of each house and the busy roads which surround the site. It also allows each occupant to have a space in their home for something more, such as an office, a garden shed, a pool table or a grand piano. The elbow room is extremely flexible as it has a seperate entrance to the rest of the house and thus can be used independently offering the opportunity for the complex as a whole to be three dimensionally mixed-use.
LINKING & JOINING “Today the environment is fragmented into separate pieces; separate houses, separate trees, separate zones like a series of totally unrelated notes played with one finger on a piano....to bring all the parts of the environment together into dramatic relationship so that the same notes are used but arranged to form coherent chords and sequences�. The Concise Townscape Gordon Cullen
Two Bed Apartment
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
45
1.5 Double House Introduction
This project seeks to create two units in which craftsmen, specializing in the heritage crafts of joinery and plasterwork, live and work. The two houses are created within one volume which is then internally divided by its structure to create a three dimensional party wall between the two houses in order to take advantage of the corner site.Each house is seperated into three distinct areas - work, live, sleep. Workshop areas on the ground floor are shared, the space between the two marked only by a centrally located grand staircase. First and second floors are dedicated to living, while bedrooms are located on the top floor, these areas are private and neither house meets on the upper floors.
Level 3
Site Plan
Level 0 - Working
Level 1/2 - Living
Lane entrance
Level 2
Level 3 - Sleeping
Level 1
b
a
a
Level 0 b
46
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
1.5 Double House Structure & Space
The house is divided internally by storey-height beams. Each beam is supported by two structural columns and by the beam below. This system of columns and beams structurally supports the floor slabs and ensures that no span is greater than eight metres. The columns define space within the house, such as staircases and fireplaces, while the beams seperate one house from the other, acting as the three-dimensional party wall.
Structural beams seperate space on the upper levels
Structural Piers & Shared Staircase from Ground Level
Section b-b
Section a-a olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
47
1.6 Dance School Introduction
This building was conceived to address the programmatic requirements of a dance school; dance studios require ceiling heights of six metres, relatively square plans, alot of daylight and uninterrupted spans. Structure became the main issue in delivering a successful programme. Following from the programme and the necessity for six metre high ceilings the design became a series of three metre high beams which acted as walls. These provided two kinds of spaces; the main dance studios, which combined two or more beams to give high ceilings, and the secondary spaces such as classrooms and offices, which could be accomodated in the three metre interstitial spaces between the studios. A third type of space, the service space, wraps around two sides of the building and allows the main space to exist as an independent core.
Site Plan
Approach from Capel Street
Aerial View
Circulation Area
Dance Studio
Section bb
48
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Plan
Structure
Programme
Level 18m
Canteen, Roof Garden
Level 15m
Main Studio, Classroom
Level 12m
Treatment Rooms
Level 9m
Studio Gym, Admin
Level 6m
Studio, Classroom
Level 3m
Studio
Level 0
Foyer
Level -3m
Studio Theatre
Entrance to new Market Square
Level -6m
Section aa
Service Core
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
49
50
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
furniture
2
2.1 Studio Storage The challenge was to create a piece of furniture, for use in an architectural studio, made from one (1.22 x 2.44m) sheet of plywood, and built using hand-held power tools. This piece takes its measurements from the A-Series of International Paper (most common measurments used in an architectural studio). It provides a three-dimensional storage and display unit, useful in any studio environment.
Construction Sequence
52
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
2.2 Handrail
Modular Construction Using six equal sized pieces of timber the handrail is constructed from one module. These modules are joined by metal bolts. The handrail’s construction is legible to the touch through the different textures of wood and metal, warm and cold, module and joint.
Inside : Outside The handrail is constructed of wooden pieces joined with steel bolts. The visible exterior is hard. Internally, in the fold beneath the timber, the handrail is lined with felt, a soft interior. The eye never sees the felt, it can only feel it.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
53
3 conceptual
3.1 casting
Kong Gan
is the Korean word for a far eastern concept about nature by the 6th Century BC Taoist philosopher Lao Tse. Kong gan means emptiness and the architectural meaning is space, space in between. This concept applies to all scales of architecture, small and large, interior and exterior. Object does not exist before space. Space makes object. Space is the essence of architecture, not object.
(Florian Begel -from a lecture preview given to the architectural research unit at the london metropolitan school of architecture)
Space as the Inverse of enclosure and boundary. This idea involved casting space as a tangible entity in an attempt to reverse the subject and the object. The arrangement of spatial units allows for light to become a volume within space with a seperate character. In the model there is an examination of the effect of the horizontal on the vertical. How horizontal units can make a vertical space. Boundary and Enclosure How does a frame capture space? This model involved capturing space suggestively by creating a frame. The frame contains space without surface. By wrapping thread around the frame a surface was created. A dual aspect surface; the inside being completely seperate from the outside. The character of the internal space is dependent on the surface enclosing it.
56
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
3.2 inhabiting
On the beach
There are a number of places for inhabitation in the caves at the base of the cliffs. Eroded concave spaces that protect you from three sides with only one opening facing the horizon It is a space for counting waves as the sea makes its cyclical journey, gradually approaching or retreating. It is a space constantly in flux that has the power to both comfort and frighten. I am comforted by its presence but frightened by its power. Beyond the stream is a place called the Goilin. A sandy enclave at the furthest removed area of the beach from the public. I like to think of it as a secret place. It is hard to get to as it is separated from the main part of the beach by a stream. You can only get there if the tide is out and there isn’t much water in the stream. It is a treacherous journey across slimy green rocks and loose stones. Most of the time I don’t go there, I just stand on the other side of the river and look over at it, it is enough that it exists and that there are no footprints in the sand over there.
3.3 tasting Banana Sandwich
In thinking about how I would explore boundary in a sandwich it started to become apparent that it wasn't about the filling so much as about the bread. The same filling can taste different in different types of bread. In testing this it became clear that different types of filling suited different types of bread. It affects how you hold it and eat it. Whether the filling is contained or loose. In this experiment, the pitta bread maintains its structure and the sandwhich maintains its individual stratas of bread and filling throughout. However, the more porous brown bread combines with the banana filling so that after a while the parts of filling and bread are no longer distinguishable as individual parts but have combined to create something new, a third thing which is neither one thing nor the other. And so this is what I am interested in, how a way of life can be enriched by the enclosure that contains it.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
57
3.4 dissolving Layering
In order to explore the layering of the earth I cast a plaster model. Then I cast a layer of wax below the plaster. The process of one material adherring to another and generating its form from that material, similar to soil horizons.
Dissolving planes
This is one of a series of studies into the idea of absorbtion in soil. Soil is composed of horizons of detritus that bleed into each other to compose one homogenous body of earth. The object of this investigation was to think of soil as maleable, like water. The horizons of soil are connected vertically through their transgressed boundaries. The transgressed boundaries bind the soil in three dimensions creating a stronger whole than twodimensional layering.
58
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
3.5 trasgressing This photograph (left), taken in a public plaza in Amsterdam, illustrates three modes of movement in Amsterdam. Firstly, an underlying structure in the orthogonal grid of the paving. On top of this is a route inscribed for the corresct use of bicycles in the space. Thirdly, a man cycling as he wishes, paying no attention to either. In everything there is an underlying structure, a prescribed circulation route and the unpredictable nature of human behaviour. Model (far left) (made from 2mm copper wire, grey card mould and candle wax) represents a route trapped inside a block, occassionaly penetrating the surface. The Amsterdam Walkway In walking through the city of Amsterdam we are presented with the facades of buildings. The mind begins to wonder what happens behind the facades. This project is a flight of the imagination through a group of houses in Amsterdam.
3.6 defining Crit Pocket (Group Project) To create a designated zone in the hallway where crits can take place using colour and materials, not the main crit space, but an area where crits between friends could happen or informal crits with tutors. The project interested me as an investigation into occupation without physical boundaries.
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
59
4 writing
Boundary and Freedom in Architecture between the ideal and the real
1. Introduction (i) What is Boundary? A boundary is the limit of anything. A boundary can be material or immaterial.1 A boundary is both the action of enclosure and the enclosure itself. Thus, boundary is both the action of an ideology, the ideal, and the physical manifestation of that ideology, the real. The ideal is created by the social, political and cultural forces acting on a society. The real is the architectural interpretation of the ideal. The boundary, and its meaning, is the beginning and end of architecture. In Ancient Greek the boundary and the body politic were co-dependent. The Greeks divided the world into the Public and the Private Realm. The Private Realm was concerned with necessity. Only when the necessities of the private world had been satisfied could the Greek citizen engage in the public world. The Public Realm was concerned with the question of beauty, either the consumption of beauty, the doing of beautiful deeds (in the polis) or the contemplation of lasting beauty (the philosopher). The boundary was necessary for the Greeks in order to define where one world ended and another began. Each house was a political enclosure. The boundary that seperated the public and the private was not a wall but a space. This space was a kind-of no man's land between the public and the private, sheltering and protecting both while at the same time, seperating them from each other.2 In the Greek world, without a wall there could be no law. The metaphorical boundaries of our world today are not as clear as they were in Ancient Greece. There is a third realm, “the social realm”, which blurs the line between the public and the private world. The word “social” does not exist in Greek language or thought. The Greeks did not consider the “social” to be a specifically human characteristic, it was something human life had in common with animal life. The word “social” is Roman in origin and its Latin meaning is; “an alliance between people for a specific purpose or to commit a crime”. With the rise of the nation-state in the ninteenth century the boundary between the public and the private world was blurred even further. The new nation-state combined activities relating to the common world, the Public Realm, and those relating to the maintenance of life, the Private Realm. The nation-state is a body of people in the image of a family whose everyday affairs must be taken care of by a gigantic nationwide administration of housekeeping. The architecture of the new ideologies of freedom and the nation-state required a new form to articulate a more complex society. In the search for a new style, eighteenth century architects turned to the classical
62
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
world of Greece and Rome. Neo-classical architecture developed along two distinct paths. The first was a belief in structure as the ultimate expression of the new state. The Vitruvian attributes of architecture; utility, solidity and beauty, now became; utility, solidity and fitness or appropriateness to purpose. Structural rationalism is best expressed in Laugier's “primitive hut” which is a 'natural' architecture composed only of structure where the space between coloumns was to be as fully glazed as possible. The second path of eighteenth century architecture was a desire to express the romantic aspects of Classical architecture. Architect's like Ledoux and Gily made an eclectic use of antique motifs to give Neo-Classical architecture an instant heritage, such as in Ledoux's ideal city of Chaux, in which elements were rendered according to character. This search for a new style was accompanied by the search for a new form. Ledoux's ideal city of Chaux, represents the architectural form of the new social order created by the industrial revolution. Integrating worker's housing, productive units and the manager's house. Collective housing for a new non-repressive society in this “new industrial world” could be located in ideal communities in buildings reminiscent of palaces such as in Fourier's Phalansteres, modeled on the palace at Versailles. With the rise of capitalism, increased technical possibilities and new ways of living the ideal architecture of the nineteenth century was to prove highly influential to architects of the Modern Movement. Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse sought to eliminate all boundary in a new world built for modern needs; “....a city in which all authority was to be dissolved; all convention superseded; in which change was to be continuous and order, simultaneously complete; in which the public realm, without further reason to excuse itself, was to emerge undisguised by the protection of facade”3 (ii) Objectives The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the idea freedom and the construction of boundary in architecture. This dissertation poses two question: How is freedom represented in architecture? And, consequently, how can architecture be used to mediate between the ideal and the real? (iii) Overview of Dissertation The dissertation will investigate the connection between an ideology and its built form. It will explore the ambiguous boundary in Modern
1. Oxford English Dictionary [online] Available at: http://0-www.oed.com.ditlib.dit.ie/ view/Entry/22048?redirectedFrom=boundary#eid [Accessed on: 20th October 2011] 2. Arrendt, H (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 3. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London. (Introduction, p. 4)
architecture and its psychological impact. How do we represent boundary and freedom? The work of an architect will be explored through this theme and a particular building studied in depth. Case studies will be used throughout to illustrate the points made. A collection of conclusions will be presented at the end which summarise the results of the research undertaken.
2. The Ideology of Freedom (i) Utopia The first use of the word “utopia” in English comes from Sir Thomas More's depiction in 1516 of an imaginary island which enjoys a perfect social, legal and political system. The word in its original Greek context means a “non-place”, however, in English it is now taken to mean a “good place”4. The classical utopia of Plato's Republic is one of the mind. It exists as an object of contemplation and behaves as a detached reference. It's architectural form; “the ideal city” is a hypothetical image, to be observed and enjoyed for its own sake or used as a reference. It was not prescriptive. However, as the ideological landscape changed, post-Enlightenment, the contemplative utopia became an achievable objective. This occured due to the fall of the ancient regimes and the rise of a new concept of society in a move towards democracy. Also, as the “measurable could increasingly be equated with the real”5, an idea based on Newton and rationalism, the ideal concept of “Utopia” could now become real. This fuelled an “activist utopia”, the active pursuit of a utopian society, that formed the basis of the Modern movement.
to the sublime is illogical, having abandoned all effort to control our surroundings we are either overcome by feelings of terror at our fragility or feelings of joy at our freedom. The sublime demonstrates that feelings of pain and danger are in close proximity to feelings of joy and tranquility and they all revolve around something we cannot control, such as nature or freedom. The sublime is a reaction to something which cannot be measured and it is, therefore, difficult to create a physical object to inspire the sublime. And so we might say that the sublime is an ideal, like a utopia, a metaphorical reference that is useful in the creation of the real but is itself never realizable. It is, in Kahn's words, the difference between Feeling and Thought, where feelings are the unmeasurable dreams of what we desire to create and thought is the expression of feeling by measurable means. That in attempting to make an architecture from our dreams we must concede that; “The first line on paper is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully. The first line on paper is less”7. However, the power of the sublime to inspire can never be underestimated; a reproduction of Piranesi's etching of the Campus Martius in Rome hung on the wall above Kahn's desk8 and doubtless inspired Kahn in the building of an architecture which aspired toward the monumental and the sublime.
(ii) The Sublime and the Monument Boundary and freedom have often found expression in the architectural monument and its ability to approach a sublime aesthetic experience. The difference between the beautiful and the sublime is the difference between the mundane and the extraordinary. The sublime is often associated with nature and Burke6 describes it as “productive of the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable of.” Could it be possible to reach the sublime in a built form? Two infamous examples of the sublime in architecture are Piranesi's drawings of Roman ruins and Boullee's project for a cenotaph for Issac Newton, both of which have the power to evoke emotions of terror and tranquility. However, the difficulty of achieving the sublime through architecture becomes clear from these examples, it is often unbuildable. The sublime is a response to something we cannot understand or control. Our reaction Fig. 1: Sir. Thomas More: frontispiece from Utopia, 1516
4. Oxford English Dictionary [online] Available at:http://0-www.oed.com.ditlib.dit.ie/ view/Entry/220784?redirectedFom=utopia#eid [Accessed on: 20th October 2011] 5. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London, 1983, Utopia: Decline and Fall? p. 15. First published;1978. 6. Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke, E., London, 1756 7. Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962), p. 114-21. 8. Scully, ibid., p. 37 olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012 63
3. Ambiguous Boundaries (i) Dissolving the Wall: Frank Llyod Wright As technology improved at the beginning of the twentieth century new configurations of space became possible to respond to new social orders, particularly in the home. In the work of Frank Llyod Wright we can see the desire to “break the box” of Victorian living. Wright manipulated the corners between rooms to create a new type of flowing space, an increased openess in the home in the overlap between one room and another. In the Ross house (Appendix 1) of 1902 the shifting of the corner between the dining and the living room created a greater visual connection between the two rooms, both rooms could now make use of an area within the other room's space9. By freeing the wall from its corners it became a slab, and in becoming a slab its position was not fixed in space and could be reassembled to define something new. (Fig. 2) However, as Wright dissolved the wall he needed other ways of defining space within the building and he turned to the horizontal slabs of ceiling and floor to define the use-area in a region where the walls had been removed. In the composition of Wright's earlier houses there is a single mass to the front, the external spatial order, while at the back the building breaks up into multiple forms sliding up and past each other, the internal spatial order. In his later Prairie Houses the external order of the building was no longer of any consequence to Wright as he came to the idea that; “a building should be formed from the inside outwards, just as a person of integrity and conviction derives strength and actions from within rather than from external social mores”10. As he continued to reduce the wall to its absolute structural essentials, Wright could allow space to flow in accordance with his ideology for the freedom of horizontal movement. He could also now expplore a new external order to express interior space on the outside. Wright developed a number of symbolic openings that could be read externally to express the interior space, “a higher roof and banks of glazed French doors signalled a more private living space; modest windows facing a protected court were those of a bedroom”. In this way Wright came to a synthesis of interior and exterior order in the facade which for him, was the expression of the interior, the most important element of the home.
spatial order gives an order to the collection of things that make up our lives. An external spatial order is an ordering of ourselves in relation to others, such as the public or landscape. The two are interlinked; “In our search for a home, we give our interior home order an exterior context”. 11 Architecture is concerned with the resolution of interior and exterior spatial orders. Frampton cites Loos as having first posed the question in a Modern context; “how to combine the comfort and informality of the Arts and Crafts plan with the asperities of geometrical, if not Neo-Classical, form?”12 Venturi13 does not see this as a Modern problem, only one which Modernism is incapable of dealing with. He gives examples of the “eventful exception” in fenestration, always within an ordered or symmetrical form, such as at Mount Vernon (Fig. 3)14 He does not cite any Modern examples of a facade that successfully reconciles inside and outside while maintaining the complexities of the circumstantial program in the way the Doge's Palace does or the the chapel wing at Versailles. This may be due, in part, to Le Corbusier's “free facade” which meant that from 1929 onwards there was a complete seperation between inside and outside. By the seperation of the elements of a building into parts, each performing a different function, one need no longer relate to the other, structure became independent of facade (Fig. 4). The complexities of modern living internally were realised in the “free plan” while externally the facade of the building increasingly moved toward a mass-produced envelope, such as the glazed curtain-wall, or toward symbolism.
Fig. 3: Mount Vernon, Fairfax County, Va.
(ii) The Facade The facade is the face of the building. It mediates between inside and outside. The facade is the point of compromise between the complexities of the interior program and the public face of the building. Buildings have both an internal and an external spatial order. An internal
64
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Fig. 2: Schematic Plan of a Usonian House A : typical room with walls joined at four corners; B: Wright eliminates the corners – walls become slabs; C: Wright reassembles segments of these slabs
Fig. 4: Maison Dom-ino, Le Corbusier, 1915
9. Wright and the Destruction of the Box, H. Allen Brooks, from the book Writings on Wright, originally from the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, March 1979, pp. 7-14. 10. A psychology of building : how we shape and experience our structured spaces; Glenn Robert Lym; Imprint Englewood Cliffs ; London : Prentice-Hall, 1980. p. 57 11. Lym, Ibid., p. 48 12. Modern Architecture; A Critical History, Frampton, K, fourth ed., 2007, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, p. 158. 13. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 48 14. Venturi, Ibid., p. 48
4. Psychology and Boundary
Fig. 5: The first-floor jardin suspendu. Villa Savoye, Poissy, Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, 1929-31.
Fig. 6: Relativism between building and nature. Dominican Motherhouse, Kahn, plan 1967.
Fig. 7: Alison and Peter Smithson, House of the Future, Ideal Home Exhibition, Olympia, London. 1955 – 1966.
(i) The Body in Space Architecture is the means for defining relationships between things; between inside and outside, architecture and nature, place and space, built and unbuilt. Architecture can either place the body as a participant or as an observer in a particular context. In placing the inhabitant as an observer the architect takes an attitude of supremacy of inside over outside. An example of this can be seen in Le Corbusier's villas. The purpose of the jardin suspendu (Fig. 5)15 was to create a place from which nature could be observed and the surrounding picturesque landscape surveyed. Placing the inhabitant as participant involves the architecture interacting with the surrounding environment. Kahn attempts this through the idea of relativism and non-dualism (Fig. 6), i.e. a universe made up of mutually exclusive but cogenerate things; “....a means for experiencing that inside and outside are never absolute, always relative to each other; that each architectural space is a partial space: a portion of a greater space from which it has been seperated.”16 (ii) Cell, Court, Domain There is an existential need for bodily shelter and for concentric layers of enclosure. In the writings of Van der Laan he identifies three layers of human enclosure (Fig. 8) in which habitation occurs, the cell, the court and the domain. There are interesting correlations between the degrees of enclosure of space and their sociological implications. In reference to Dunbar's number17 and the behavioural patterns of groups of people based on anthropological research we can begin to understand the psychology of creating a boundary to house a face-to-face community18 or the desire to create a neighbourhood, which is a difficult task in the reference-based community of cities. Jane Jacobs identifies the danger of creating physical boundaries to demarcate city areas, “It is not boundaries that make a district, but the cross-use and life.”19 Here, we must consider the use of boundaries in the city and their psychological and sociological implications by exploring the work of Alison and Peter Smithson and their Robin Hood Gardens Complex, London (1966-1972). (iii) Interior v Exterior: Alison and Peter Smithson Alison and Peter Smithson's work examines the relationship between interior and exterior space. Their architectural response to this often takes the form of a series of filters leading to an intimate interior space. Thus, their work is the result of a belief in the primacy of the interior over the exterior. It is the layering of spaces from public to private through a series of boundaries until the interior “stress-free-zone” is reached. In the House for the Future (Fig. 7) and the Appliance House
15. Modern Architecture; A Critical History, Frampton, K, fourth ed., 2007, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, Chapter 17; Le Corbusier and the Esprit Nouveau 1907-31, p. 158. Originally from; Precisions sur un etat present de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (1930), Le Corbusier. 16. Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. P. 161
an enclosure is established by the external wall and is reinforced internally by a ring of designated spaces, “clothes, dressing, bed, bath”20. At the centre of the plan there is a protected private space, the heart. It is a graduated series of things in things or enclosures within enclosures, characteristic of temples and churches. (iv) Robin Hood Gardens The theme for the Robin Hood Gardens Housing Complex (Appendix 2) was protection. In fullfilling this they applied the ideas embodied in their earlier experimental work, the importance of privacy of the interior, on a large scale. The outside chaos of the busy site is mediated through four layers of enclosure until the “calm centre” is reached. The first layer being the boundary wall, acting as the first sound barrier. Secondly, the access decks to the apartments diffuse external noise with domestic noise. Internal circulation within the individual apartments acts as the third buffer. Finally, the bedrooms, the quietest rooms in the house, face internally onto the protected garden. Balconies from the bedrooms further extend the private space of the house into the protected garden. In essence Robin Hood Gardens is a fortification, “the pressures of the external world are held off by the buildings and outworks.” Its only connections to the “external world” are visual, points on a skyline (Fig. 9). The success or failure of the Robin Hood Gardens Complex in it's ambition to “protect” its inhabitants through architecture can be assessed in terms of its sociological and psychological implications. The current debate as to the future of the complex, which is in danger of demolition, has led to an investigation of it as a lived reality. The theme of protection is still evident in recent descriptions; The complex is surrounded by a ring of forbidding concrete walls tilted outward to block out noise. Just beyond this ring, ramps lead to underground parking, forming a kind of moat between the buildings and the street.21 The journalist of this article visits the complex and in her description compliments the beauty of the interior spaces and the spatial complexity of the living units. The problem, it would seem, is that in an effort to protect it's inhabitants the Robin Hood Garden complex becomes a fortress. The exterior is shunned for an idealised interior, a utopian island as depicted by Sir. Thomas More. A utopia, in reality, depends on a degree of limitation where the exterior becomes a method for excluding rather than mediating between the Public and the Private Realm.
17. Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. 18. A psychology of building : how we shape and experience our structured spaces; Glenn Robert Lym; Imprint Englewood Cliffs ; London : Prentice-Hall, 1980 19. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Vintage Books, NY, 1961, p. 132 20. The Charged Void: Architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2001. 21. Rethinking postwar design in london, Nicolai Ouroussoff , Article In The Ny Times, Published: March 18, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/arts/design/19robi.htm olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
65
Fig 8: Dom Hans van der Lann, threefold demarcation of space, in De architectonische ruimte, 1977
Fig. 9: Diagram of visual connections of the people to their district. Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, 1966-1972.
66
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Fig. 10: Protection: axonometric from the north-west. Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, 1966-1972.
5. Representing Boundary/ Freedom (i) From Jefferson to Superstudio - the Carthesian Grid Superstudio represents a 1960's desire to eliminate all hierarchy and to create an architectural landscape in which man could be free. Superstudio engaged in three areas of research; the monument, the image and the technological. The conclusion of this research was a totalizing monumental architecture in which an egalitarian society could live. “The architecture of the image” became a platform for extensive visual experimentation into techniques and appliques, appropriating from diverse sources, such as collage, pop art, cinema and dada.22 The world is represented as an abstract carthesian grid where objects have no meaning (Fig. 11). A world in which architecture is not seperate from life but becomes intrinsic to it. It was the representation of this free society, the image or the ideal, that became the lasting influence of Superstudio's work.
Fig 11: Representing Freedom, Superstudio, Fundamental Acts: Life, Supersurface, 1973.
This same desire, as expressed by Superstudio, for a free society in a rationaly organised monumental structure can be seen in the division of land in eighteenth century America. “....The absolute statis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but – more importantly, its hostility to narrative....”23 Where the ideology is the same the representation of freedom differs (Fig. 12). Both seek to order the world according to principles of equality and freedom. Could it then be assessed that the logical conclusion of a Superstudio world would be the field patterns of Western America (Fig. 13)? It again is a question of the ideal and the real and the literal translation of the ideal into a physical world, regardless of the idiosyncracies of life. In Colin Rowe's critique of Superstudio he challenges the term freedom; “that insistence upon total freedom is to deny the small approximate freedoms which are all that, historically, have been available and are probably all that we can ever anticipate?”24. To apply this to the Jeffersonian grid and the New World that it symbolised is to understand that it represented freedom for a particular group of people, not all, and this may be seen as the essential quality of freedom, it is exclusionary. It is based on having a boundary, and every boundary has an inside and an outside. An example of where this principle is embraced architecturally is in Koolhaas and Zenghelis's: Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (Fig. 14-15). It is most poignantly stated in literature by Edmund Burke;
Fig. 12: The Jeffersonian Grid, View of Savvanah as it stood the 29th March 1734.
Fig. 13: Google Earth Image of Iowa landscape, 2012.
“Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”25
22. Superstudio – Life Without Objects, Lang, P., and Menking, W., Published by; Skira Editore, Italy, 2003. “Only Architecture Will Be Our Lives”, p. 16 23. Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007. p. 67 24. Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, MIT Press, London, 1983, After the Millenium, p. 47. First published;1978. 25. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke, E., 1790. World Classics Ed., 1950. p. 109 olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012 67
6. Architecture and Boundary: Louis Kahn (i) Border-Space The architecture of Louis Kahn is concerned with the creation and manipulation of boundary, ideologically and tectonically. For the purposes of this investigation, it is interesting to study Kahn's work as the mediator between two generations of thought on the creation of bounded space. He mediates between a Beaux-Arts classical romanticism for the architectural monumentality of Greece and Rome and the modern movement's experimentation with new materials and their use in creating light-weight and expansive structures that captured space in a new way. “In Gothic times, architects built in solid stones. Now we can build with hollow stones.” He realised that depth could be virtual and set out to redefine the modernist membrane as the shaper of a spatial layer, in a process he described as “wrapping ruins around buildings”. This concept of creating solid through void, “captured air”26, in the border-space (Fig. 16) between realms is a key theme throughout Kahn's work. By the mid- 1950's Kahn and Venturi27 were in agreement that the greatest poverty of modern architecture was the reduction of the wall to its basic climatic necessity. (ii) Form – the Ideal Kahn saw architecture as being a twofold process; that of form and design. Form being the ideal condition, having nothing to do with circumstancial conditions. In architecture form characterizes a harmony of spaces good for a certain activity of man. Design involves a process of applying circumstances to that form, the real to the ideal, circumstances such as; budget, site, client, extent of knowledge, etc. Design is the realization of form in response to particular conditions and circumstances.
reality (budget, site, materials, building codes, etc.). The “form” either holds “true” against these tests or a new “form” diagram must be conceived. In this way Kahn's method of designing situated itself between the two poles of Modernism, between the “Ideal” and the “Real”. (iii) Design – the Real Structure, the measurable and the laws of gravity were at the heart of Kahn's definition of the architect. He took great care in the detailing and tectonic properties of his buildings. His earlier structural experiments are highly influenced by Buckminster Fuller and the manipulation of new materials. In his project for Philadelphia City Kahn28 challenges the Modernist skyscraper with a geodesic structure, stabilized by tetra-hedronal concrete floors. Here, Kahn aims to reveal the diagonal bracing of the Modern skyscraper in a structural honesty which he cannot see in Mies' and Johnson's work, describing their Seagram building as “a beautiful lady with hidden corsets” (Fig. 17). However, in Kahn's constant dialectic between the functional and the expressive, in this case the expressive triumphs at the expense of the functional vertical elements of elevator and usuable ground space.29 It was only in Kahn's mature work that the functional and the expressive synthesised to create architectural wholes.
Fig. 14: Prologue (exerpt) from Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, London, 1972.
A search for form is essentially a search for “meaning”, it is an attempt to find the root human inspiration behind that program. Form is the search for “man's commonality” or “man's sense of appropriateness”, found in either intuition or an embodied knowledge of human history. As such, design is Kahn's means of questioning the basic human need that created the institution, whether “house”, “school”, “library”, etc. Kahn's search for form through human history leads to the exploration of archetypical forms or “basic modes of being-in-the-world”. The form of an institution defines the hierarchial and reciprocal relationships between its activities. Form generates a spatial order to which all further decisions must be referred. “Design” then confronts this form with a
68
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
Fig. 15: Axonometric of the 'strip', Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, London, 1972
26. The term was coined by the Smithsons in 1960 in relation to Kahn’s Adler House. Quote from Alison and Peter Smithson in Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been, p. 298. Originally published in The Architect’s Yearbook, 1960 27. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out – The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture, Merril, M., Lare Muller Publishers, Germany, 2010. P. 82. Originally from; Robert Venturi, “Ideas of Reconcilitation in Architectural Composition,” proposal sent to John Entenza of the Graham Foundation, February 15, 1962, p. 10. Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. 28. Designed with Ann Tyng, 1952-57. Modern Architecture, a critical history, K Frampton, Thames & Hudson, London, Fourth Edition, 2007, p. 244-245. 29. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 50
7. Case Study: The Dominican Motherhouse
Fig. 16: Border – Space: An initial sketch section through the cell and cloister of the Dominican Motherhouse, Kahn, 1966.
The Dominican Motherhouse (Appendix 3) is chosen as a case study to illustrate the points made in this dissertation. Through its ideology the Dominicans represen a community with a very particular definition of freedom. The organisation of the sisters’ way of life is based on defined areas of activity. The architect, Louis Kahn, devises a form for this way of life that involves creating a boundary between the pubic and the private realm of the Motherhouse. The case study serves to illustrate the creation of the real from the ideal, attaining freedom through boundary. (i) Background The Dominican Congregation of St. Catherine de Ricci was formed in 1880 outside New York as a convent and laywomen’s retreat house. The congregation grew rapidly in its first few decades and new congregations were established in Philadelphia and Cuba by 1900. In 1964, after their aging convent failed to meet new fire safety regulations, the congregation was forced to look for a new home. The sisters bought a country estate in Pennsylvania and began to settle in. However, their congregation was experiencing a hugh increase in popularity and soon their new home could no longer cater for the crowd. It was decided to build a new motherhouse on the estate. At the time Kahn had just completed the First Unitarian Church in Rochester (1959-63) and, based on this, he was chosen as the architect for the sisters new motherhouse. The type of order in question became the sounding board for the various phases of the design. The Dominican life is one of action and contemplation. In this way it is different from other Orders, such as the Carmelites, in which contemplation and solitude are their own ends. There is a dualism inherent in the Dominican way of life where apparently contradictory virtues are brought together, such as, “gentleness and energy, love of study with love of action, genius for contemplation with the spirit of organisation.”30 On this basis the building for the congregation had to be conceived as a building for a community of people, fundamentally egalitarian, maintaining a delicate balance between thought and action. Also, the life of the Dominican Sister (or Brother) is one dedicated to voluntary poverty. The building to house the Sisters must acknowledge this core principle.
Fig. 17: Between the functional and the expressive: Seagram Building, Mies and Johnson (above) and Project for an Office Tower, Philadelphia. Model. Kahn (below).
(ii) Form: Program The program for the motherhouse was one encompassing the “double life” of the sisters. On the one hand, their private life in the dorms and, on the other, their communal and public life. The form of the building took its initial bearings from these twin realms. Kahn believed that
the programming of a building was an open-ended dialogue between client and architect. In searching for a form the architect must understand the reasons for the program, he/she must strip away all the layers of cultural detritus and search for the essence of the institution. In the search for a form for the Dominican Motherhouse Kahn reduced the sisters’ program to its essentials. Initial schemes describe a form similar to a medieval Carthusian Monastery. He asserted that “Form” does not belong to anyone, no more than “the waltz belongs to any musician or oxygen to the discoverer of that element.31” Instead, he believed, that in searching for a form the architect uncovers a “certain nature” and that nature for the Dominican Motherhouse echoed the nature discovered by the medieval monks in the search for a form for their monasteries (Fig. 18). (iii) Design: An “Architecture of Connection” Initial schemes presented an elaborate system of arcades and ambulatories showing a myriad of interfaces and types of possible relationships between spaces. From the beginning there was a strong idea about the cloisters, the raison d’etre of the organisation in Kahn’s inital romantic view of monastic life. However, the sisters were dissatisfied with this over-emphasis on the contemplation side of their existence and the disjunction between their voluntary poverty and these extravagant arcades. Kahn came to the realisation that a modern monastic life involved spirituality in everyday activities and so the cloisters became the buildings. By integrating the cloisters within the program of the building Kahn celebrated the circulation through the Monastery (Fig. 19). Offering the occupant many choices of routes through the building in order to get to a destination and not just in the horizontal direction but also in the vertical. The final plan has twelve different stairs giving the building a labyrinthine quality, not unlike a Piranesi drawing (Fig. 20). (iv) Assessment The final design of the Dominican Motherhouse represents a deep investigation of the boundary between the public and the private world of the sisters. Beginning quite literally as one world seperated from another (Fig. 21), the design morphed into a final plan that saw one world harbouring the other (Fig. 22). Kahn’s form diagram of a monastery was seriously called into question in the process of the design. In the end the functional generated a more intricate and complex design that testifies to the ambiguity of life. Life is not a figure-ground pattern of black and white but lies in the grey area between the two, this is what makes life interesting, a medieval street layout rather than a classical
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
69
one, or as Venturi put it, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning32”. In judging whether Kahn was true to his “Form” in the “Design” of the Motherhouse we can only conclude that the ideal found its own order through a process of design involving collage and re-working the plan. An idea about how the sisters’ would live permeated the entire process and to this unmeasurable end the measurable attained. Although the final plan of August 1968 appears as a random collision of bodies in space there is an underlying geometrical order that gives rigour to the plan. The orthogonal arrangement of the cells finds its closure in the geometrically in-line entrance tower. Within this unfinished rectangle the communal rooms of the monastery ‘float’. In this arrangement the Motherhouse is an example of contained intricacy, one geometry contains another creating a tension in their collision. Here, we can see that one of the elements of “design” is the architect’s knowledge. The plan is a porous pattern of solid and void, a Gestalt plan which may be attributed to Kahn’s Beaux-Arts education. Gestalt psychology involves the representation and percrption of virtual depth and its spatial application, for example in figure ground, aswell as in the perception of boundary. “There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.33” The final plan of the Dominican Motherhouse represents this in its series of communal rooms assembled within an orthogonal space consolidated with a system of circulation devised to give the monastery the feeling of a “big house”.
Fig. 18: First scheme for the Dominican Motherhouse as an interpretation of Kahn's form diagram of the sisters' monastic life.
The over-arching theme in the circulation of the Motherhouse is choice, a freedom to partake in some or all of the Monasteries activities. Here, one can clearly see Kahn’s defiance of the Modernist prescribed circulation route and the conception of space as a series of “zones”. It could be said that there is an emphasis today on the “zone” and not on the space between the “zones”, things bleed or blur into each other leading to a lack of definition between things, emphasis on the interfaces rather than on the journey, leading to a disconnection in the spacetime continuum (similar in experience to the London Underground.) For Kahn, the journey is everything, the connection between one space and another and the freedom to make that choice. Perhaps choice is the ultimate freedom. Fig. 19-20: Kahn's “architecture of connection” has a labyrinthine quality. Atmospheric plan of Motherhouse (left), Piranesi drawing (right).
30. Louis Kahn; Drawing to Find Out – The Dominican Motherhouse and the Patient Search for Architecture, Merril, M., Lare Muller Publishers, Germany, 2010. P. 106 31. Merril, Ibid., p. 36 32. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi, R., Published by: MoMA, NY, 2002, p. 16 33. Louis Kahn and the Thoughtful Making of Spaces; The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space, Michael Merrill, Lars Muller Publishers, 2010, Switzerland. (“The twin phenomenon of inside and outside – “Dichotomous Things” or the theme of reciprocity” p. 145 – 179) 70 olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
8. Conclusion (i) All architecture is essentially political, it projects or concretizes a way of life. This dissertation began as an analysis of boundary in architecture. It began as an analysis of the physical condition that seperated one thing from another and the various ways this could be manipulated. However, as the enquiry deepened the question “why?” became more important than “how?”. It is clear that there is a reason behind every boundary. The reason is almost always to limit or extend freedom. This is true of every civilization from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Each has its own model of freedom expressed in its boundaries; for example: “....for Le Corbusier, society obliges everyman to fulfil his personal and productive capacities and find nobility within a context of rigid hierarchy and administrative control....” 34
Fig. 21: Initial schemes where the communal rooms are seperated from the cells.
Fig. 22: Sketch showing how one world began to find a home in the other.
(ii) Freedom must have boundary. A boundary has an inside and an outside. Therefore, a fundamental condition of freedom is exclusion. The exclusionary nature of a built utopia is clearly evident in the Smithsons' Robin Hood Gardens Complex. Here, the boundary protects the idealised interior life while ignoring the complexities of the exterior world. A similar nature of exclusion is prevalent in Superstudio's project for “The Continuous Monument” in which architecture leads to nowhere but itself, internalising an ideal society and externalizing reality. Thus, in creating freedom we are creating an enclosure around that freedom, into which some may enter and others are kept outside, into which certain aspects of life are admitted and others excluded. (iii) In some form or another, the desire for freedom leads to a desire for architectural monumentality. (iv) The ideal is distinct from the real as form becomes design and freedom defines boundary.
Fig. 23: Architecture and a way of life; a nun in her cell.
34. Within and Without; essays on territory and the interior, Mark Pimlott, episode publishers, Rotterdam 2007. Picturing Fictions, p. 57. olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012 71
5.
conclusion
bakery swop shop
bike
love architects
olivia hillery | architectural graduate |portfolio 2012
73