the space that performed a multi‐media facility for Newtown
where pre‐formed space sets up a series of expectations, a pre‐determined chronology, performed space is expectation‐less (thus sensational) and non‐chronological (thus re‐experience‐able)
sophie hamer ARCI412 October 2010
Sophie Hamer the space that performed 2 Entering from the North, we are greeted by a semi‐transparent floating prism, set behind rounded grass hillock and a large knotted tree. Sliding the concave door around us, our view turns back outside the building, before being drawn round to the major concrete shell of the building; the auditorium, with an information desk set into its volume. People are eating and chatting on long tables at a floating level to the right, then the floor falls away to the foyer ahead. Following the curved external surface of the auditorium round, a wide ramp ascends, bringing us into the interior of the building. Overhead, concrete shells appear to hang effortlessly. Aluminium ceiling louvers oriented E‐W stop short of where concrete shells protrude into the ceiling, pouring sunlight down their faces. Cantilevering, staircases trace the double curvature of the shells before reaching out to their destination shells. Now in the open library, the ground plane shifts, defining spaces for research, study, and composition. Between soaring transparent fins, doors pivot, opening the East side out to performance. Ahead, another concrete shell curves away, housing practice rooms under a high sky light. The path curls left, we pop out the other side of the shell into a keyboard alley, the floor disappearing to right and left. Large shells bustle for space overhead. The path narrows, then we find ourselves in another foyer – the cinema foyer, it turns out – the full height of the ceiling returned to us, our steps echoing with no one else around to absorb their noise, the light filtering down softer at this end, and us not feeling able to just turn around and walk home.
ground floor plan
Sophie Hamer the space that performed 3 The ‘space that performed’ transforms the leftover space of the mid 20th century Newtown Show Grounds, currently a car park, into a sensational multi‐media facility. With the design’s improved accessibility and desirability for pedestrians, the site is able to function as an exciting new understanding of space in which the co‐existence of public and private functions, community and institutional needs is demonstrated. The long, semi‐transparent, prismatic volume of the Media Facility is located adjacent to Hutchison Road, which runs up over the town belt and is aligned parallel to the axis of Toi Whakaari. Set on a kinked axis, the building resists parallel views, and it proves impossible to view the entire structure from any one standpoint. Viewed off axis, the deep transparent fins refuse views into the building. A new pedestrian‐only paved thoroughfare hugs the Eastern edge, permitting entry at the North (auditorium entry), South (cinema entry) and centre(library entry) of the building, and giving the Media Facility a clear institutional identity separate from the existing Toi Whakaari facility. An open‐ air performance space integrated into the sequence provides a collective pause point. In the hot sun of the transparent shell, or the cool of the afternoon hill shadow, the thick structural concrete provides stable temperatures. The transparency of the finned shell, and multiple entry points for public, helps to maintain the public sense of ownership while introducing a predominantly private facility onto traditionally public land. Natural lighting yields unexpected changing intensities, generating internal shadows which play a role in the performing of space. Light shafts soar into each concrete shell through deep incisions. In the evening, the building emerges as a lantern on the Western side of Newtown, protruding concrete shells articulated in darkness. At roof level, the direction fins cast the eyes of viewers on Hutchison Rd out across Newtown.
Sophie Hamer the space that performed 4 The brief for a Music and Film School in Newtown presented an opportunity to rethink both the act of ‘architecting’ and the act of inhabiting. The design driver was the notion of performed space, whereby space is conceived as endless and definable only by the individual subject’s motions within it, as opposed to space being tightly modulated and defined by the formal, restrictive norms of walls, floors and roofs. The concept picks up on both the concepts of space which film and music operate with, and on the need for an institutional setting to encourage visions of the world which are not pre‐determined. The project deals with the questions of: ‐
Is there an edge, or isn’t there an edge?
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Is space framed, enframing, or something else entirely?
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What is the relation of interiority to exteriority?
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What possibility is afforded to the individual’s corporeal conscious via performed space?
The response to brief called for a design method which would allow space, not form, to be the primary design output. Based on the concern that computer and physical modeling methods typically reduce space to a by‐product of their preoccupation with massing and formal design aspects while also restricting the design outcome to within the designer’s previous limit capacity, the decision was made to craft the project through hand drawn methods only. The method was successful in allowing me to work between various scales at once, to inhabit each scale individually, and to privilege experience of space over formal qualities. The result is a project designed almost beyond my limit capability – with design problems being solved in experimental, concept‐specific ways. The building has no hidden logic; simple and efficient structural systems speak this truth. The two structural and material languages inform a conversation between internalized programmes (operating inside concrete shells) and external public integration zones (located in open space under the great transparent external shell). The connections of material languages is expressed not through joints, but through displacements of space. The concrete shells set up a double spatial focus within the project – on inner space and outer space. Their surfaces are smooth and silent, appearing to disappear into endlessness from every approach. Typical architectural components of walls, floors and roofs no longer act as discrete formal spatial dividers. Space is full and fluid; boundless; performed. The shells, which could burst straight through the light exterior shell, instead give it no more than a tentative push; inversing the strong/light dialect of the material palette, giving space a material strength. Their protrusions question to notion
Sophie Hamer the space that performed 5 of ‘edge’ as the independent pre‐fabricated, deeply finned GRP facade seeks to set it out. The planning of the building activates accidental encounters and generates open space which can shift from active to passive through inhabitation. Edges are swallowed by depths of darkness and lightness until they are unclear. The ‘space that performed’ bears a manifold relation of place, space, use, materiality, and light. The outcome of the project has a tendency to read as a paper architecture proposal – which it does not intend to be. The refusal to reduce the endless space as designed to a series of discrete ‘perspective’ shots leaves the project lacking in the scale of intimacy and inhabitation. I juggled this question repeatedly – resorting to the answer that traditional, orthogonal drawings give understanding of the spatial shift in ways that a perspective never could. Moving the project out of the design phase and into the construction phase would no doubt require 3D modeling. I would assert that a large scale model – 1:20, preferably – would best suffice the understanding of the space. A computer model, having undertaken the majority of the design, would be possible to construct without shifting the emphasis to form. Further structural and constructional analysis, and probably design, would have to be undertaken. Overall, the project is, I believe, very successful with solving the overlapping levels of complexity which it set as tasks for itself at the outset, and I am very sad to see it rest as a set of drawings on a large amount of butter paper.