Æsthe/tech:Tonik
Building | Beauty | Consuming | ImageArchive for April, 2007
Pretty in Pink
It was recently announced that Mecanoo architecten has won the design competition for the new National Performing Arts Centre. At 100,000 m2 the National Performing Arts Centre is to become the largest theatre complex in Taiwan. An important source of inspiration for Mecanoo’s building design were the existing banyan trees on location.
Banyans are trees that usually start life as a seedling growing on another tree (or on structures like buildings and bridges), where a fig-eating bird has deposited the seed. The roots descend over the trunk of the host, seeking out the soil below. Once they have rooted into this, the fig roots rapidly thicken and (become wooden). Where the fig roots cross each other they fuse, thus creating a lattice around the host tree trunk. The fig competes with its host for light, water and nutrients, while its roots prevent the host trunk from growing. Eventually the host dies and rots away, leaving the fig self supporting as an ordinary tree, but with a tubular lattice of lignified roots instead of a trunk.
What’s most interesting to me, however, is the way the design is conveyed through the renderings. I think it is fair to say that we have seen a shift in architectural discourse and practice to preferencing the rendering as the most important drawing. While we still rely on orthographics and projections for literally realizing a design, we have come to recognize that as much as modernism was captured in the plan and PoMo in the isometric drawing, we have begun to capture our projects’ essence through rendering. The caveat in this is the degree to which the client becomes attached to specifics within the rendering due to the degree of realism, which is why the Mecanoo drawings presented here are so deft in the was they are deployed. Not only does the pink convey to us vague references about banyan foliage, but also interior experience, and the potentials therein. It does so through a combination of realism and abstraction that leaves room for development, yet a place to return to when honing the project.
MS
Update: Per the previous comments, I found some great animations on YouTube:
Building Almaty: Republic Square Competition
Recently there has been an extreme interest in place-making for a remote corner of the world in Kazakhstan (as documented here). Almaty, once the capital of Kazakhstan, still remains its financial and cultural hub. A number of international competitions have recently been sponsored to develop a new financial and cultural district in the southeastern part of the city. Among these, one competition in particular was to design a new mixed use development (consisting of high end residences, a luxury hotel, office and retail spaces) adjacent to the most significant civic space in the city, Republic Square. Remnants of Soviet occupation still reverberate through the city, and the undercurrent for this (and all) of the competitions seems be revealing an image of the city and culture that has always been there, but never focused.
The question is how to do this in light of embracing some of the progressive measures found in western architecture, but keeping a strong tie to a cultural situation as the city moves forward with this vision.
Jury members for the competition were Hani Rashid, Michael Sorkin, Suha Ozkan, and Mohsen Mostafavi.
The competition participants were Eric Owen Moss Architects, Eisenman Architects, Zaha Hadid Architects, and a team of E/Ye Design & NBBJ. The following were the entries, minus the Eisenman scheme, which I can’t find images of. The Hadid and EOM schemes were recently exhibited at SCI-Arc in February. Blurbs can be found on the school’s website.
The E/Ye Design + NBBJ scheme specifically deals with the relationship of the built and the landscape, and exploits the spaces left between as a direct outcropping of the dichotomies created by a true “mixed use” program. Check out the images – commentary welcome…
Eric Owen Moss, Architects
Zaha Hadid Architects
MS
Collective Individuality
What happens when groups of people come together to design a project, each wearing their own “black cape?”
How do we solidify, or more specifically aestheticize an architectural project that objectively wants to be of one persons hand, but fundamentally needs to have input from groups of individuals?
We are forced to broach this topic as our field and consultants become inherently more collective in nature, and projects become larger and more complex. Solutions can’t be pinned back to one “big idea”, but flounder if not given some type of criteria to fall back on. We consistently look for the big idea (conceptually), but quickly realize that we can’t really articulate it without a 5 minute monologue, and consequently are embarrassed that projects addressing multiple scales, economies, and other vectors can’t be tied up with a single bow. Why?
The benefit of the big idea is that it gives us a way to collectively solve a design problem, but it is too broad and non specific. But who comes up with the big idea? One person? What if it sucks? It is an exclusive, rather than inclusive practice of problem solving, and one that leaves too much wiggle room when the rubber meets the road. Complex problems have a need to be resolved as sets of organizations in concert with one another. How we strategize and delegate those parameters, under the umbrella of a fluid and evolving attitude relative the project, can be a better way of approaching design problem that would accommodate multiple mindsets.
Some thought has gone into what that process could potentially look like, and put into a graphic format, but it is still is in flux to a certain degree. See what you think…
MS
