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shading elements

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half of the terrace is unwalkable, the other part will need shading since the building is located in mediterranean climate.

impermanency and neighbourhood

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the tower has a skeleton and stable parts, shown in red on this drawing.

20100211slice01.jpg

the skeleton is also serving as circulation.
in this drawing the shared / maximum neighbourhood space in the tower is shown in gray. however my aim is to have a broken shared space instead of a giant atrium / courtyard condition.

parralel chain (panther)

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20100211render01.jpg
top: connection types
middle: sandwiched
bottom: cross combinations

there are three types of parralel connections between the rings that you can see on the top next to eachother. all having different type of alignments to the corridore/skeleton.

please note that these rings are assumed to be "filled" in these drawings ignoring the snake ring I previously worked on.

defining a ring (snake)

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20100208plan01.jpg
the circulation / corridore is the link between the personal spaces, just like a snake chain.
what is new in this plan is, the circulation and the spaces are seperated. this will potentially allow more flexibility.

neighbourhoods

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chain rooms

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chain types

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I am interested in three types of chains for making links between spaces.
on the left, the link is called box chain.
the middle one is the panther link chain
and the one on right is the snake chain.

chain organisation

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20100118chain01.jpg              20100118chain02.jpg


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chain space experimentation

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plan axonometric

20091214chainspace01.jpg 20091216render03.jpg 20091216render02.jpg 20091216render04.jpg 20091216render08.jpg 20091216render09.jpg

20091217animation02.gifthe chain rings get larger moving towards the north forming shared spaces and spaces for circulation.


20091216render15.jpg 20091216render19.jpg

the chain doesn't have to be a meter wide, it can be narrow lines of concrete forming an overall chain space.

smaller scaled chains

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20091214chainspace08.jpg
here is a smaller scaled chain space.

the smallest frame in this study is 8m x 6m x 8m.

larger one is sized 16m x 12m x 16m.

in this model there is only one tissue type hosting 3 double floors dwellings, mirrored and duplicated again.

20091214chainspace09.jpg



20091216chain01.jpg

effects and occupation

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20091214space01.jpg  20091214space02.jpg

two of the layers can be seen in this collage, the front (southern) layer would be the white floor, the transitional space would be the gray floor in this case. while the front layer is an extension to the personal space at many points, slower activies are expected to take place there. the change rate through the day in this layer is less.


chain space

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20091214chainspace02.jpg
chain space creation

chain space is about the composition, collage of different type of rings, their alignments and their correspondence.

1. it starts with the most basic frame can be ever imagined with a dimension of
20 x 10m (floor)

2. before exploring the chain space, by duplicating the first element we get a space of
20 x 20m

3. to start a chain space, second frame is shifted 10m's towards right
20 x (10m x 20m) x 10m

4. second frame is lifted 10m up
20 x 10m, 20mx 10m

5. duplication of the ring at the background allows the ring at the front become a more important ring strategically.
20091214chainspace03.jpg
a very basic prototype for a chain space.

this kind of interlocking spaces can allow litterally the tear down of certain parts and let them be replaced in time.
20091214chainspace04.jpgafter introducing a third layer in the foreground, the frame of the space becomes functioning on both directions instead of a cellular organization like Kurokawa's Nakagin Tower.
20091214chainspace05.jpga tissue can mean a group of rings around a central ring. the black areas should be seen as shared spaces and circulation between the units. personal spaces would be aligned inside the frames.

20091214chainspace06.jpgthis is a previously done study in last weeks. these islands were randomly copy pasted at that time. they can be seen as the black intersections you can see up in this post. the rings can be wrapping these islands and function structurally at the same time.

thickness of the frame


20091214chainspace07.jpglooking from south, on the eastern side of this tissue, potentially the space is a public programme just next to the main road. Instead of having two elements; the ring as the frame and the floorslabs attached to it, i'm trying to have a more uniform, continuous space.

continuous space will let me not have circulation as a seperate element insterted into this configuration.


three aligned towers

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personal space

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london underground

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The easiest example for us to understand what the idea of Metabolism is London Underground. Every weekend we experience the closures and repairing, and we see the London Underground as a living organisim, growing through the last century.

The building will work similar to the London Underground.

20091126tube01.jpg

This is a representation I created by overlaying the maps of LU since 1933 until 2009.

metabolist movement

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site and programme

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metabolist kurokawa

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"We have in Japan an aesthetic of death whereas you have an aesthetic of eternity. the Ise Shrines are rebuilt every twenty years in the same form or spirit; whereas you try to preserve the actual Greek Temple, the original material, as if it could last for eternity."
Kisho Kurokawa

...City as an organism changes at various rates.

...Replace the mechnanical analogy of orthodox modern architecture.

...By clearly seperating parts of a building or city which have different rates of change, they allow certain structures to remain undistributed when others wear out.

...One doesn't have to destroy a whole building, or part of a city, every time one part breaks down.

three iconic buildings

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1970 Nakagin Tower (Tokyo)

iconic dream:
Nakagin Capsule Tower became the symbol of the Japanese obsession for inventing the highest technology. It would not have a chance to exist for this long in any other city than the city of future, Tokyo. Unfortunately if it can't be financed for renovation, very soon it will be demolished.

1955 Inland Steel (Chicago)

The Inland Steel building was designed by two architects one after the other, Walter Netsch was the first architect and later SOM's Bruce Graham took over the project. Out of these three post-war buildings, the most successful one was Inland Steel.

Programmatically it was very succesful because of the innovative idea of collecting the services and the office floors in two different towers.

iconic materiality, iconic power:
The "steel" building was directly associated with the products of the company itself and liked by public. It was also backed by the newly elected Chicago mayor as a icon of rebirth for Chicago after the World War II.

1950 Lever House (New York)

architect client:
The architects of Lever House were very lucky because their client was a trained but not practicing architect heading Unilever. The brief he gave to the architects was very unusual and was letting them explore the simple beauty of the modern architecture for the first time in New York.

iconic advertising:

More than being succesful as a building to live in, Lever House was an icon, a symbol for the simple and elegant architecture of the century in New York. It survived because Unilever thought it's different and clean look was a good advertising tool for themselves.

nakagin tower (1970)

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20091008nakagin01.jpg
This is one of the Google Image Search result for "Nakagin Capsule Tower"

A group of Japanese architects including Kurokawa was interested in introducing a new philosophy of change to the western world in 1960s. They were dreaming of utopian schemes giving birth to the notion of the city as an organism which changes at various rates. One of the architect, Kikutake wanted to become a doctor before he became an architect so the word "Metabolism" was coined for their manifesto and philosophy.

Metabolism became an extended biological analogy meant to replace the mechanical analogy of orthodox modern architecture. It compared buildings and cities to an energy process found in all of life: the cycles of change, the constant renewal and destruction of organic tissue. By clearly seperating parts of a building or city which have different rates of change, they allow certain structures to remain undisturbed when others wear out.

"We have in Japan an aesthetic of death, whereas you have an aesthetic of eternity. The Ise Shrines are rebuilt every twenty years in the same form, or spirit; whereas you try to preserve the actual Greek Temple, the original material, as if it could last for eternity."

The Nakagin Capsule Tower is the world's first capsule architecture built for actual use. Capsule architecture design, establishment of the capsule as room and insertion of the capsule into a mega-structure, expresses its contemporaneousness with other works of liberated architecture from the later 1960's, in particular England's Archigram Group, France's Paul Memon, and Yona Friedman.[1]

All the furniture is built in - the bedside control console, the stereo tape-dect and calculators - and yet the tiny space and propotions are the conventional ones. He combines steel capsules (modified from shipping containers) with all sorts of traditional components existing on the market.

20091007capsule01.jpg
This is how the Nakagin Tower looks in 2000s

The Nakagin Tower has 140 capsules, each sold for between £5.000 - £7.000 within one month of erection. A prototype was placed on the ground and inspected before people bought them. The quick sale represents a pay-off on a financial gamble since the market was not known -except roughly as that of "in-town bachelors". Actually, 30 per cent of the units have been bought by companies whose head office is in another city. When a representative companies whose head office is in another city. When a representative comes to Tokyo to negotiate he stays in the company capsule rather than a hotel as it is cheaper in the long run. Another 30 per cent are used by families as an extension to their house - as studies, playrooms, studios or dens. This unpredicted usage led Kurokawa to a new notion (and neologism) the "time-community", that is a community of individuals not based on the community", that is a community of individuals not based on the traditional determinants of place or location, but the different activities any individual would perform over time.

A businessman might inhabit five or six different places in any one day, each of them being a momentary community. This, it turns out, is again somewhat traditional since the Japanese do not usually entertain at home, but rather take guests to one the evening clubs that exists everywhere: transposed living rooms as it were.



As Kurokawa points out, Homo movens, the man who spends much of his time travelling and moving house, is a phenomenon of modern America and Japan, but, as he adds characteristically, there is a traditional precedent. The sixteenth-century poet Basho said "travelling is a kind of home". Kurokawa himself spends roughly 20 per cent of his time outside Japan and another 20 per cent in local cities outside of Tokyo - which means he spends a lot of his life in hotels, cars, aeroplanes (a point he wishes to extend generally as "capsule architecture"

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