a Criminal Building

How can architecture represent the essence of law today, in a world focusing on decentralization and proximity? OMA’s project for the new Parisian Courthouse is a unitary building where the program is organized into three clearly identified parts: Civil, Criminal and Offices.

By inserting the tower (offices) in between the Criminal and Civil public spaces (courtrooms), OMA first optimizes the flow between different parts of the program (the tower is linked to the courtrooms with a hypercore system) while also giving a reason for height in the Parisian skyline. The emerging building, visible in the metropolitan landscape, is balanced and stable. The tower is about impartiality, discretion and the sublime.

The Criminal and Civil public spaces develop their own spatial identity. The Criminal, more introverted, is organized around a three-dimensional void. The Civil, more extroverted, looks towards the city. Each of them has a specific distribution system based on the frequency of use. To avoid the exclusiveness of an elevated Paris sky experience, the Salle des Pas Perdus — the main public space of the future Courthouse — is suspended to the edge of the Parisian rooftops.

a Parametric Fabergé

Fourfoursixsix (Daniel Welham & Mark Nicol) were invited to participate as one of the artists for the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt. The city will became home to 200 giant and uniquely crafted Easter eggs for an event that is a first of its kind, aiming to raise vital funds for charities Action for Children and Elephant Family, inviting tourists, locals, and visitors to join in a truly magical experience.

As an architecture practice, Fourfoursixsix  felt it would be both topical and interesting to apply a set of architectural principles to the overall geometric form of the egg. Through this process they played with structure, light, and shadow and began to develop a three dimensional architectural terrain.

Conceptually, the design works around a rational grid of components that have been configured to react to both light and scale over the surface of the egg. Each component was designed to incorporate an aperture which could adapt to these changing surface conditions, thus altering the patternation of the egg.

Working with EOS, the world leading manufacturer of laser-sintering systems and Ogle Models, exquisite cutting edge Model Makers, has enabled the construction of a piece that is at the forefront of three dimensional printing technology. The end result is a delicate, intricate and complex piece that intrinsically connects back to the original Fabergé brand concept. In some ways, their design brings this concept into the modern era on a larger physical scale; a piece of 21st Century digital opulence.
 

to Reflect Contingencies

This project designed by Arthur Azoulai and Melody Rees is a morphological study that assumes an extended field of movement and circulating forces. It is designed by simulating self-organizing biological systems where selective decision making is used to sculpt innate yet deliberate spatial relationships and formal qualities. At its pure essence, this project is an infrastructural system that acts as a receiver and link-up for formal architectural systems. The inherent continuity of the overall form as a topological surface allows for the emergence of roadways, interstitial interior space, and landscape.

With imbricating structural support systems, the collective tectonics provide a network of circulation paths for pedestrians, cars and trams in addition to an emphasis on temporary pavilion spaces such as transitory food markets, pop-up retail shops and time-share housing. With a temporal and ephemeral program the local culture of Santurce in San Juan becomes active. Correspondingly, the adaptive qualities of the infrastructural surface allow the building and site form an organic semiotic relationship where the building seamvlessly emerges from the land below. This is emphasized as the ecologically evasive character of Puerto Rico’s environment merges into the architecture. Thus this project articulates new formal relationships and interstitial space while also reflecting the contingencies of the current moment in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

via suckerPUNCH
 

a Master Vision Of Sea

Three Spirits” is the master’s thesis of Filip Kurzewski, from the Warsaw University of Technology. The project proposes a floating tourist base and hotel in the form of three ships. Each of the three ships functions as an independent unit. The initial vision of the project was propelled by the author’s numerous personal drawings and painting studies. A great inspiration for the direction of the form, colors, and spatial arrangement came from personal diving experiences. Hand drawing and personal reflections and experiences became a driving force for the author, and are visible throughout the project. They intentionally connect the design with the context of underwater world which hotel guests explore. The thesis topic was carefully selected to reflect the design process, leaving traces of hand sketches and gestures on the final unit. Hand drawings and sketching played an important role in keeping the conceptual idea through all the stages of the design process. The theme was very demanding when it came to the program, justifying the design. The project was also consulted with naval architects. The ships making up a complex ,to a certain degree, differ as for the applied program. If the appropriate localization is chosen, they may form the common assumption – an island “Lang”. Guests can then benefit from the broader scale of supplementary attractions. On the first ship they have a ballroom at their disposal, on the second one – a casino and on the third one – the hall of multifunctional purposes where, inter alia, film shows and theatrical performances are possible. When the ships “meet” they generate a common water area for guests to swim.

One of the main attractions of a particular ship is a diving capsule. Guests can not only practice scuba diving but also they can dive safely in significant depth to see ,for example coral reefs or wrecks. The set of boats is also delivered for guests, and it enables them to choose an appropriate place for recreation, among other things also for scuba diving during the stopover of the ship.

Since each ship is a separate unit there is a possibility of temporary separation of the “vessels” (“vehicles”) in order to carry out different cruises and afterwards a possibility of ships meeting again.

to Be Builded of War

Ružica Church (Rose church) is located in the Kalemegdan Fortress, in Belgrade, Serbia. A church of the same name existed on the site in the time of Stefan Lazarević. It was demolished in 1521 by the invading Ottoman Turks. Today's church was a gunpowder magazine in the 18th century, and was converted into a military church between 1867 and 1869. Heavily damaged during the First World War, the church was renovated in 1925. The iconostasis was carved by Kosta Todorović, and the icons painted by Rafailo Momčilović. The walls were covered in paintings by Andrej Bicenko, a Russian artist.

be Re Loved

Chris Bosse has sliced up the Panton chair as part of the Re-loved: designer stories at the Powerhouse Museum from July 31  to October 10.

Bosse, director of innovative architectural firm LAVA, is one of several designers commissioned by the Powerhouse to use a pre-loved chair to tell a story about a piece of furniture they love. He chose a design classic that relates to current design and manufacturing techniques.

The gravity defying Panton chair c1967 by Danish designer Verner Panton was a radical departure from traditional design and manufacturing techniques. It anticipated the digital revolution by 30 years and is the first freeform, organic molded piece of furniture. “I’ve chosen to represent this shape as slices, similar to an MRI scan in order to make visible its complex 3dimensional geometry. The chair is metaphorically and physically carved out of a sliced box ” says Bosse.

“The project retro-digitises the chair design, although it was the chair that preceded the digital design revolution.”

“What made the Panton chair so spectacular when it came on the market and what makes it so interesting today in terms of design history is not only its shape, which is as extravagant as it is elegant, but also the fact that it was the first chair made out of one piece of plastic. Every chair at the time was about the assembly techniques of materials, compression, tension, and junction. Verner Panton exploited the possibilities offered by the new material in order to achieve a total departure from classical design thinking.”

the Taichung City

The ambition to provoke urban change can be understood as a desire to create an icon such as the Taiwan tower designed by STL Architects that highlights the unique character of Taichung city. The architects envisioned this reality as coherent blend through an architectural landscape anchored by iconic venues that will satisfy the needs of locals, the industries and future trends. The idea is to generate a flow network that communicates the Taichung gateway city project with the most important landmarks of the city.

The skin itself is a system: it is pixilated with glazed openings in the programmed and occupiable zones while permeable with openings in the central area. The degradation of the openings, varying between 20% and 60%, is done in order to achieve greater lightness in the central part of the tower, therefore using less material and saving.

The density and arrangement of beams in the structure provides higher levels of stiffness at the base, and a horizontal arrangement that does not obscure views at the top. The beams are minimized wherever possible to reduce dead load and create an overall visual lightness for the structure. While the body of the tower resists twisting and bending, the overall structure is held upright by the foundations. The foundations is created by the bottom of the ring, which is embedded several stories into the earth to resist lateral movement and stop the tower from falling.

The programmed and occupiable parts of the tower are fitted with a double skin. By contrast, the central zone is permeable; the openings are not glazed and the composition consists of only vertical structure and outer skin. By using only the necessary materials to ensure skin continuity, combined with systems for renewable energy, achieves a building that is lighter and more permeable.

The tower is designed to resist the dynamic force of the wind. Modal frequencies are those vibration frequencies where cyclical motion naturally occurs as a result of resonance between wind movement and the mass and shape of a building. A preliminary analysis of the tower shows that the modal frequencies of the ring result in the tower moving forward and back, side to side, and twisting. To resist these forces, the tower is thickened at the bottom to create stiffness, and provided with dampers to resist twisting. The low center of gravity allows the top of the ring to lean, carrying the observation platform out over the park.

to Redefine a Waterfront

Acknowledging that the city is nothing but the product of a myriad network of interactions and emergent flows, re-organized and regulated by a highly evolved system of pattern recognition, the project designed by Gijo Paul George from Studio Toggle aims to find urban solutions for the city of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy.

Taking fields, nodes and agents as the building blocks of urbanity, the relations and perturbations are mapped, giving rise to generative patterns. Based on this logic, the project strives to find a balance between adaptive non-programmed spaces and typological specificity. The site, SantÉlia has the notoriety for being the badlands of Cagliari. Often this image is exaggerated, contributing to the resident’s hostility to the city and vice versa. This spectacular stretch of waterfront land towards the southern tip of Cagliari happens to be disconnected from the rest of Cagliari due to massive infrastructural figures, which creates canyons in the urban fabric, also due to the negative ramifications arising from a dysfunctional social housing project, from 1970’s.

The project had specific goals including, reconnecting SantÉlia to the rest of Cagliari by colliding the island grids, bringing the city closer to the sea and thus developing the waterfront, revitalizing the social housing and improve conditions and to develop strategic nodes into multimodal urban ecologies. The focus was on de-canyonizing the fabric and overlaying the terrain with a new urban organism, which irrigates the territory and bridges the programmatic archipelago.

Rediscovering the spatial matrix of field conditions as described by Stan Allen, and further elaborated by Keiichi Matsuda in his ‘Cities for Cyborgs’, an emergent matrix of potential (pheromonal) fields acts as the substrate on which an agent-based system is populated. The constant material and information feedback between the to systems gives rise to generative patterns and densities which in turn mutate into inhabitable spaces and nested typologies, there by creating the fabric.

The project in itself becomes a discourse in how the intuitive and emergent processes can work together to produce an urban fabric, and occupy it at the same time, not losing the balance between adaptable emergent spaces, and the specific typologies which seed the territory.