Long-overdue update
It's been ages since I blogged - the previews pushed me rather off track. Here's an update (images first, then text) on what happened up until that presentation.
And so: some presentation text notes. This is the best version so far, though it obviously needs to be worked on quite a lot for the finals.
Corner by corner, brick by brick
(0. Magnus Larsson, Dip 9 Corner by Corner, Brick by Brick)
Introduction
[1. eames (cardgame?)/mies > 2. brick skyscraper teaser]
Architecture is the science of the corner. While Charles Eames famously told us to choose our corner and pick away at it carefully in order to change the world, Mies van der Rohe told us that "architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together." This project oscillates between those two statements: a corner that is carefully put together with bricks. And then another corner. And another one. Through this piecemeal strategy, in the end, we will have a 180 meter tall brick skyscraper hotel in Manhattan created from and modulated by a set of iconic corners. Show TS.
(3. brick intersection - frank lloyd wright's home)
Here is one iconic corner, from Frank Lloyd Wright's own house. But the corner is always iconic. As Peter Eisenman has made clear, when one draws the crossing of two lines, it produces a cross which is an obvious icon of point, centre, and focus. If we repeat this, we get a grid, that is, an index. These days, Eisenman focuses on what he calls a 'post-indexical' architecture, trying to somehow find his way back to the cross before it turned to the grid. But the corner precludes the cross. The corner is the point where the pen meets the paper. A line begins with a corner. Drag out a rectangle in a CAD application, and the software will ask you for the first and fourth corner points; extrude this rectangle in the verticle plane to yet another corner point, and you have an orthogonal polyhedron which we can think of as a room. The room begins and ends with a corner. The room we're in now was drawn with a pen or a computer from corner to corner. The only way we have to tell one space from the next is to mark its corners.
(4. what is a corner?)
So what is a corner? My technical definition of a three-dimensional, architectural corner is the real or implied intersection point between three or more surfaces. A more poetic definition is that the corner is where a space begins and ends. The corner is where space is born, and where it goes to die. The corner is what modulates the space in between. It is also the beginning and the end of this project.
What do we mean when we say that the corner modulates the space in between? That changing the geometry or materiality of the corner has an impact on the space it demarcates. I've defined three formal moves that can be used to create and control new corner conditions: we can either MOVE corner points, ADD points or SPLICE UP the corner into several points, or change the INFLECTION of the curve going into the corner, so as to create more curved forms.
(5. catalogue > 6. rebrief plates > 6.5 libeskind)
Historical corners > contemporary corner
In classical Greek architecture, the corner was put forward as the focal point of a building. In Roman architecture, the corner was almost forgotten in a celebration of frontality. The baroque played with curvaceous corners, whereas modern architects were often obsessed with how to turn the corner of a building.
The following five plates, created during our re-brief phase, show Philip Johnson's last day in the Glass House, the architect dying in a building that obliterated the walls in favour of a steel structure that is all corner.
My re-brief considers Philip Johnson's first and last day in the Glass House, focusing on the birth of the building and the death of its architect, completely negating the state of suspension in between the two moments. I would say it is a radical re-thinking of the iconic building's programme: rather than viewing it as a modernist masterpiece of transparent living, I read the house as one in which to die, a final resting place: a tomb, a monument, a temple.
Philip Johnson was obsessed with the corner. "My main concern," he writes about the Lake Pavilion, one of the many exploded pieces that make up the Glass House compound, "was to create a corner column that would keep the module without the Renaissance problem of 'disappearing' columns in the interior corners of the arcades." There are many similar quotes on how to come to terms with and best use the corner.
The three aspects that Johnson use to discipline his designs are all about the corner: the Procession, usually diagonal and/or changing in direction, presents the corner and the depth it gives to the building. The Cave is about the boundary function of the corner, the way it holds space, its generation of 'insideness'. The Sculpture, finally: Johnson describes his own Sculpture Gallery as a "play of simple angular volumes". The angle lives within the corner. Without the corner, no angles – be they 90 degrees or any of the 359 others. If we include the vertex of a sinuous curve in our definition, then most forms would be impossible without the corner.
Now, what happens when you create a house of glass, a structure that holds large walls of glass together, what Johnson calls "a steel cage with a glass skin"? During the day, the walls disappear; during night, they become mirrors reflecting the interior. As the light conditions change, so does the level of opacity, from transparency, via differing degrees of translucency, to reflectivity. What doesn't change is the point where these planes meet, the intersections of the black, solid steel structure: the corners. To the reading of the Glass House as a temple we can thus add another one: the Glass House is a temple of corners. The corner is the unchanging, the stable, the one thing that is there from the very beginning and to the bitter end.
This last collage is based on the painting "The Burial of Phocion," which was the only painting that Johnson kept in the Glass House. He prepared to be carried out of it.
But back to the birth and death of space, back to the corner. Johnson and the rest of the modernists rarely took the next logical step of reinventing the corner as a spatial generator. The interesting part is not so much how the corner is turned as what it finds, or creates, behind that turn.
(7. Manifesto - through four plates)
This led to me writing a manifesto that in essence says three things: 1) that architectural iconicity has become a quest for simple global formal moves, as exemplified for instance in Calatravas Turning Torso, which has gone from iconic moment to global iconicity – from icon to index, 2) That this global iconicity could possibly be counteracted by a string of local iconicities, the index turning back to icon, and 3) that the corner, due to its position as birthplace and graveyard of space, is the perfect vehicle for such an architecture. We strive for a building, then, in which you walk from corner to corner, from one iconic moment to the next.
(8. sketch models: renders + physical)
Starting with this notion, I set out trying to experiment with different ways of creating space through the modulation of the corner. I was predominantly working with Grasshopper scripts that allowed me to place corners inside of volumes in different ways, as you can see in these renders and physical models.
(9. brick system)
This is leading me to a sort alphabet of corners, organized in a matrix. This is work in progress and doesn't look like much, but on the left hand side I'm looking at the corner from a spatial point of view, thinking about room sizes and whether or not the corner operates freely within the space, if it's angled against a wall, or if it has a mass/void relationship to the wall. On the right, I'm focusing on the geometry and materiality of the corner: whether it is created by moving, adding, and/or inflecting corner points, and how the material articulation works. I'll get back to that. These matrices are really where this project becomes pure design research, and is one of the things I'll focus on for the rest of the year.
(12. Hugh Ferriss) Show Ferriss + long drawing in TS.
Researching an interesting site for this corner building, I looked into a lot in the southwestern corner of Manhattan, on which an existing building has withdrawn from the perimeter so as to create its own corner on the L-shaped site. The initial volume was redrawn according to Hugh Ferriss's famous renderings of New York's 1916 zoning laws, and then articulated further to provide an enigmatic and diffused, or rounded, overall corner effect on the exterior building, whereas the interior gets a more orthogonal treatment. Programmatically I decided to turn the building into a hotel, where each guest gets his or her own corner to live in. Hotels are also interesting within this context in that one of the major problems in their design is how to efficiently create access points to the corner rooms on each floor. I also looked into the programmatic reality of hotels, realising how split in two they are: the front-of-the-house being for guests that should never notice the back-of-the-house, where all services take place.
(14. script, 15. three articulations)
Simultaneously, I was searching for a material to carry the idea of the corner, ending up with the modest but modular brick - an element that usually has eight corners. Bricks can be used to create both smooth and angular corners, and to highlight the corner points in different ways; this is a script I wrote that proliferates bricks along a surface with set dimensions and angles of rotation. This is one of three different articulations that I use in my formal alphabet of corners, together with a pixelated, low-resolution one and a completely smooth version made from specially molded bricks. There was also the funicular model, a 1:100 representation of the catenary arches that hold up the structure, and the printed model here, which is a 1:50 version of the restaurant. I'm also trying really hard to get a 1:1 representation (show TS) of a part of the structure.
If the first term was about grounding the project in theory and writing its manifesto, and the second was about explaining the TS, these renders are the first part of the actual designwork, which in a way begun this term. My first step was to try and use the knowledge of hotels and brick and corners, and draw a first plan of the scheme, which perhaps became a bit wild. So I then went back to looking at how a 'normal' hotel might sit within this structure, and modulated corners from there.
I've started working with three corners...
Corner by corner, brick by brick
(0. Magnus Larsson, Dip 9 Corner by Corner, Brick by Brick)
Introduction
[1. eames (cardgame?)/mies > 2. brick skyscraper teaser]
Architecture is the science of the corner. While Charles Eames famously told us to choose our corner and pick away at it carefully in order to change the world, Mies van der Rohe told us that "architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together." This project oscillates between those two statements: a corner that is carefully put together with bricks. And then another corner. And another one. Through this piecemeal strategy, in the end, we will have a 180 meter tall brick skyscraper hotel in Manhattan created from and modulated by a set of iconic corners. Show TS.
(3. brick intersection - frank lloyd wright's home)
Here is one iconic corner, from Frank Lloyd Wright's own house. But the corner is always iconic. As Peter Eisenman has made clear, when one draws the crossing of two lines, it produces a cross which is an obvious icon of point, centre, and focus. If we repeat this, we get a grid, that is, an index. These days, Eisenman focuses on what he calls a 'post-indexical' architecture, trying to somehow find his way back to the cross before it turned to the grid. But the corner precludes the cross. The corner is the point where the pen meets the paper. A line begins with a corner. Drag out a rectangle in a CAD application, and the software will ask you for the first and fourth corner points; extrude this rectangle in the verticle plane to yet another corner point, and you have an orthogonal polyhedron which we can think of as a room. The room begins and ends with a corner. The room we're in now was drawn with a pen or a computer from corner to corner. The only way we have to tell one space from the next is to mark its corners.
(4. what is a corner?)
So what is a corner? My technical definition of a three-dimensional, architectural corner is the real or implied intersection point between three or more surfaces. A more poetic definition is that the corner is where a space begins and ends. The corner is where space is born, and where it goes to die. The corner is what modulates the space in between. It is also the beginning and the end of this project.
What do we mean when we say that the corner modulates the space in between? That changing the geometry or materiality of the corner has an impact on the space it demarcates. I've defined three formal moves that can be used to create and control new corner conditions: we can either MOVE corner points, ADD points or SPLICE UP the corner into several points, or change the INFLECTION of the curve going into the corner, so as to create more curved forms.
(5. catalogue > 6. rebrief plates > 6.5 libeskind)
Historical corners > contemporary corner
In classical Greek architecture, the corner was put forward as the focal point of a building. In Roman architecture, the corner was almost forgotten in a celebration of frontality. The baroque played with curvaceous corners, whereas modern architects were often obsessed with how to turn the corner of a building.
The following five plates, created during our re-brief phase, show Philip Johnson's last day in the Glass House, the architect dying in a building that obliterated the walls in favour of a steel structure that is all corner.
My re-brief considers Philip Johnson's first and last day in the Glass House, focusing on the birth of the building and the death of its architect, completely negating the state of suspension in between the two moments. I would say it is a radical re-thinking of the iconic building's programme: rather than viewing it as a modernist masterpiece of transparent living, I read the house as one in which to die, a final resting place: a tomb, a monument, a temple.
Philip Johnson was obsessed with the corner. "My main concern," he writes about the Lake Pavilion, one of the many exploded pieces that make up the Glass House compound, "was to create a corner column that would keep the module without the Renaissance problem of 'disappearing' columns in the interior corners of the arcades." There are many similar quotes on how to come to terms with and best use the corner.
The three aspects that Johnson use to discipline his designs are all about the corner: the Procession, usually diagonal and/or changing in direction, presents the corner and the depth it gives to the building. The Cave is about the boundary function of the corner, the way it holds space, its generation of 'insideness'. The Sculpture, finally: Johnson describes his own Sculpture Gallery as a "play of simple angular volumes". The angle lives within the corner. Without the corner, no angles – be they 90 degrees or any of the 359 others. If we include the vertex of a sinuous curve in our definition, then most forms would be impossible without the corner.
Now, what happens when you create a house of glass, a structure that holds large walls of glass together, what Johnson calls "a steel cage with a glass skin"? During the day, the walls disappear; during night, they become mirrors reflecting the interior. As the light conditions change, so does the level of opacity, from transparency, via differing degrees of translucency, to reflectivity. What doesn't change is the point where these planes meet, the intersections of the black, solid steel structure: the corners. To the reading of the Glass House as a temple we can thus add another one: the Glass House is a temple of corners. The corner is the unchanging, the stable, the one thing that is there from the very beginning and to the bitter end.
This last collage is based on the painting "The Burial of Phocion," which was the only painting that Johnson kept in the Glass House. He prepared to be carried out of it.
But back to the birth and death of space, back to the corner. Johnson and the rest of the modernists rarely took the next logical step of reinventing the corner as a spatial generator. The interesting part is not so much how the corner is turned as what it finds, or creates, behind that turn.
(7. Manifesto - through four plates)
This led to me writing a manifesto that in essence says three things: 1) that architectural iconicity has become a quest for simple global formal moves, as exemplified for instance in Calatravas Turning Torso, which has gone from iconic moment to global iconicity – from icon to index, 2) That this global iconicity could possibly be counteracted by a string of local iconicities, the index turning back to icon, and 3) that the corner, due to its position as birthplace and graveyard of space, is the perfect vehicle for such an architecture. We strive for a building, then, in which you walk from corner to corner, from one iconic moment to the next.
(8. sketch models: renders + physical)
Starting with this notion, I set out trying to experiment with different ways of creating space through the modulation of the corner. I was predominantly working with Grasshopper scripts that allowed me to place corners inside of volumes in different ways, as you can see in these renders and physical models.
(9. brick system)
This is leading me to a sort alphabet of corners, organized in a matrix. This is work in progress and doesn't look like much, but on the left hand side I'm looking at the corner from a spatial point of view, thinking about room sizes and whether or not the corner operates freely within the space, if it's angled against a wall, or if it has a mass/void relationship to the wall. On the right, I'm focusing on the geometry and materiality of the corner: whether it is created by moving, adding, and/or inflecting corner points, and how the material articulation works. I'll get back to that. These matrices are really where this project becomes pure design research, and is one of the things I'll focus on for the rest of the year.
(12. Hugh Ferriss) Show Ferriss + long drawing in TS.
Researching an interesting site for this corner building, I looked into a lot in the southwestern corner of Manhattan, on which an existing building has withdrawn from the perimeter so as to create its own corner on the L-shaped site. The initial volume was redrawn according to Hugh Ferriss's famous renderings of New York's 1916 zoning laws, and then articulated further to provide an enigmatic and diffused, or rounded, overall corner effect on the exterior building, whereas the interior gets a more orthogonal treatment. Programmatically I decided to turn the building into a hotel, where each guest gets his or her own corner to live in. Hotels are also interesting within this context in that one of the major problems in their design is how to efficiently create access points to the corner rooms on each floor. I also looked into the programmatic reality of hotels, realising how split in two they are: the front-of-the-house being for guests that should never notice the back-of-the-house, where all services take place.
(14. script, 15. three articulations)
Simultaneously, I was searching for a material to carry the idea of the corner, ending up with the modest but modular brick - an element that usually has eight corners. Bricks can be used to create both smooth and angular corners, and to highlight the corner points in different ways; this is a script I wrote that proliferates bricks along a surface with set dimensions and angles of rotation. This is one of three different articulations that I use in my formal alphabet of corners, together with a pixelated, low-resolution one and a completely smooth version made from specially molded bricks. There was also the funicular model, a 1:100 representation of the catenary arches that hold up the structure, and the printed model here, which is a 1:50 version of the restaurant. I'm also trying really hard to get a 1:1 representation (show TS) of a part of the structure.
If the first term was about grounding the project in theory and writing its manifesto, and the second was about explaining the TS, these renders are the first part of the actual designwork, which in a way begun this term. My first step was to try and use the knowledge of hotels and brick and corners, and draw a first plan of the scheme, which perhaps became a bit wild. So I then went back to looking at how a 'normal' hotel might sit within this structure, and modulated corners from there.
I've started working with three corners...
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