Rooms + Cities: Air Rights, Sixteen Rooms by Rooms + Cities

Rooms + Cities

Sixteen Rooms

University of Dundee, School of Environment

Fifteen Rooms, a study

beyond my reflection

through the skylight

at the partition

ascending the city

the clock, the fireplace, the picture frames

ornament defines the interior

layers of artefacts

urban connecting device

multiple perspectives of a room

a container of memories

information and order

space dissolved by time

layers of enclosure

in the darkness I am projected outwards

home, away from home

Four Comparative Diagrams

Air Rights, a project

object, surface, frame

Fifteen Rooms: described through text, plans, diagrams and images

Tenement Room I

The small, rectangular, domestic room has one door and one bay window. There are musical instruments mounted on the walls. The room contains a sofa, which is pushed hard up against the North wall. The door opens into the room, the window looks out over the estuary.

0 2

3m 3

Fictional Room II

A room described in a novel. A typical garden shed containing all of the appliances necessary for everyday life. A single locked door opens into the room. A skylight provides the only view out. The room is lined with corked tiles. It is a room constructed in the imaginary.

0 6

3m 7

Apartment Room III

An almost square room with two shuttered windows that open onto a piazza to the East. The room is enclosed by white lacquered timber frame and infill panel walls, linoleum covered floor and plastered cloth ceiling. There are four doors, three open into the room and one out. The room contains a double mattress with white sheets, there are two chairs. One chair faces a desk made from timber sheet and two trestles, the other a small table and frayed oriental rug. A laptop computer sits on the small table. There is a radiator on the North wall, the pipes are exposed. A pendant light with a spherical paper and wire shade hangs to waist height from the ceiling, just off centre.

0 10

3m 11

Water Tower

A tower, circular in plan, enclosed by thick stone walls punctured with small windows. The tall and narrow space enclosed within is occupied by a helical staircase, allowing access to an observatory platform and views over the city.

0 1 14

3m 15

Living Room

The rectangular living room is enclosed by plastered walls and ceiling, the floor is covered by a fitted carpet. Two windows open to the outside and two internal doors open into the room. A wood burning stove stands in a fireplace in the centre of the East wall. The room contains many personal objects and images.

0 18

3m 19

Parlour

A room of ornate cornice and ceiling detail, the plan form of the parlour consists of a geometric circle placed in addition to a square. Four doors open into the timber panelled square room, there is a fireplace set at the centre of the South wall. From the circular addition there is a view to the garden through seven timber framed windows. Eight supporting columns stand externally to the bay window.

0 22

5m 23

Museum Room

VII

A room with ambiguous boundaries, formed by a series of layered rectilinear enclosing walls. A domestic space preserved and curated for public viewing, it is adorned with the artefacts collected by its former inhabitant.

0 26

5m 27

Foot Tunnel

VIII

A long narrow foot tunnel is enclosed by two white tiled walls, the floor and ceiling are both cast in concrete. Fourteen fluorescent lamps distributed evenly along the two walls provide light. A mosaic decorates one of the walls. Puddles of water have formed on the uneven floor.

0 30

10m 31

Bar Room

The room contains a bar and old mismatching furniture arranged in scattered fashion. Two large windows in the South wall open onto the street, framing the performances that take place within. People are buying drinks at the bar, or sitting at the tables talking and drinking. A woman plays the guitar.

0 34

5m 35

Attic

The attic contains timber trusses framing a triangular space three meters high at its apex. The enclosing surfaces of the room which are formed by timber sheets. The room, which is used for storage, contains many personal objects. A single pendant lights the room and there are no windows, there are no visual connections to the outside and no natural light enters the space. The sound of the weather, as it acts upon the timber skin of the room, creates a heightened awareness of the outside.

0 38

5m 39

Archive

The room is a rotunda form, enclosed by a dome with a central oculus as the solitary source of natural light. There are eight entrances at regular intervals; four on the ground and four which open onto a continuous balcony above. Entablatures and recesses create a series of datum lines. Shelving holding volumes of public records line the wall.

0 1 42

10m 43

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT

Programme Axonometric of General Register House showing the public programme arranged as a sequence of archive rooms through the centre of the building

PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT

Common Room

XII

An open skeletal concrete frame comprises floor slab, columns and ceiling. The room is created by the two solid surfaces, the clearly defined rectangular platform below and canopy created by the floor above. Although unoccupied and open to the elements, a sense of a room, formerly enclosed, remains.

0 1 46

10m 47

Egyptian Room

XIII

A raised Glass platform, rectangular in plan. Within a brick clad courtyard, below a glazed ceiling, sits a room within a room.

0 1 50

10m 51

Grand Cave

XIV

The interior of a coastal cave. A single surface of limestone rock forms the walls and ceiling of the room, sand and water form the floor. The space enclosed is more than 80 meters in length and 6 meters across at its widest point. Light enters from the two entrances at either end.

0 54

50m 55

Undercroft

A vast rectangular foyer, defined by the concrete megastructure above, is transformed into a public room by the act of social gathering on Sundays. The space is structured by 24 massive columns and two escalators that carry people up and down from the building above. Glass curtain walls reaching down to a point four meters above floor level define the boundaries of the space.

0 58

25m 59

Fifteen Rooms: four comparative diagrams

fig. 1, size Fifteen rooms set in relation to the average size of a room in a new British home

production of labour

production of knowledge

fig. 2, context Fifteen rooms (r) set in relation to their containing building (i) and reciprocal public space (x)

III

VII

VIII

XII

XIII

XIV

fig. 3, form Fifteen rooms represented through plan form, section form, and isometric

fig. 4, surface Fifteen rooms compared according to the porosity of their unfolded interior surfaces

40%

Air Rights: a project

The site for the project, Air Rights, is an

of three over arching elements which

However, this is not the register in which

open-to-below space, a 2.5m by 46m atrium,

encompass the nature of rooms: object,

we can understand the project: it cannot

directly adjacent to our studios, which

surface and frame; that is to say, what the

care how we build it, who we are, or what

overpasses a busy communal thoroughfare

room holds, how the room holds us and

trajectories we take, so what can it do?

and exhibition hall. This interior is defined

where the room holds us in relation to.

“ the inside i s in the outside

by both tangible and intangible boundaries. A board marked cast-in-situ concrete

“ Its

balustrade encloses its horizontal plane, its

sur faces

are

our

boundar ies, we read them,

upper and lower edges defining the more

and, like w i s e, the outside i s in the inside ”

locus

projec t ours elves onto them,

ambiguous vertical limits.

and past them through its

Air Rights frames a gap, an imperceptible

opening s ”

surface. Simultaneously it incloses an interior

Sight, sound and light unify the floors

By developing a language for the interior, we

outside and, likewise, the outside is in the

into one large room, while physical

have begun to define the essence of a room,

inside and yet here is a third space which is

connections remain divided. The balconies

to recognise its limits and its reaches, and

and balustrades provide both platform and

thus the complexity of the spatial conditions

shelter, allowing one to see and be seen; this

it creates. Its surfaces are our boundaries, we

it is not a lesson or a demonstration. We

is shared space that mediates between public

read them, project ourselves onto them, and

understand Air Rights as architecture in

and private experiences. This tension of this

past them through its openings. Through

that we understand architecture as spatial,

duality imposes a constant conflict on its

them we place ourselves not just in an

we have created a space. As architecture

spatial conditions. Tangibly, we inhabit this

immediate context, but also into a wider

we hope that Air Rights will function as a

space only from above or below; intangibly,

framework; rooms to rooms, and ultimately

framework, a site for further discourse. This

we travel its surfaces and occupy its whole.

rooms to city.

The form of the project has arisen from our

It is important to understand here that Air

initial analysis of the 15 studies of rooms

Rights is a real project. It has a real budget

as documented in the preceding pages,

with real investors, real permissions to be

implemented in a new context and with a

acquired, real time frames, real learning

greater attention to the collective thinking

curves and real set-backs, real back

of the unit. Using these studies, we sought

scratching and real head scratching, real

to reduce each room to a fragment to be

feuds, real sub-plots and real red-herrings,

installed within the open-to-below space.

real misnomers, nay-sayers and antagonists,

We describe this physically unoccupiable space as the building’s most significant.

and excloses an exterior. The inside is in the

neither. Air Rights is not an exhibition, it

rotation

is not an installation, a sculpture, or other,

remaining, nothing remains to be said.

partition

Rooms + Cities Studio / 14.12.2012

fracture

and gladly, at the end, real dei ex machina.

These initial proposals saw the emergence 74

Room XVI

Rooms + Cities

An assembly of six welded flat bar mild steel frames each connected to 4 others at right angles by an equivalent length of mild steel angles to form a box frame. Each angle is separated from its two attached flat bar frames by a 3mm gap with the connection made between each adjoining frame by four bolts. The frame is suspended 2.6 meters above the floor of a communal atrium between the surfaces of two concrete balustrades, spanning the open-to-below space. A standard light fitting hangs by its electrical cable, off centre, into the interior described by the frame.

0 1 78

10m 79

Supervisors:

Dr. Lorens Holm Helen Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor

Assistant:

Cameron McEwan

Critique:

Charles Rattray Neil Verow

Rooms + Cities Studio:

Fraser Davie Michael Grieve Lorna Hughes Qutham Jamjoom Laura Keane Alasdair McAlpine Jennifer Moffatt Jill Morton Tom Piggott Orlaith Phelan Magnus Popplewell Tom Rainey Euan Russell Charlotte Stewart Fifian Yip

Fabricator:

R. Y. Thompson & Sons, Dundee

Installation:

G.T. Diamond Drilling Services

Thanks:

Gratefully, Greig Mackintosh and G.T. Diamond Drilling Services; Brian Adams, Dr. Neil Burford and Lyle McCance at University of Dundee School of Architecture; Alister Cuthill at University of Dundee Estates & Buildings; Laura Simpson at Duncan of Jordanstone Exhibitions; Ruaridh Macdonald, James Scott, Claire Summers and Cecilie Waersted at University of Dundee Division of Civil Engineering