Render previews (I'm changing the texture as we speak, but the lighting will probably remain the way it is in these shots)...

Designing new corners...

More to come, of course.

If you know anyone who likes bricks quite a lot and happens to have a grand or two to spare, please let me know.

Here's the folder text:

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Diploma unit 9 at the Architectural Association is in-
terested in iconic architecture. Th is proposal suggests
a ‘local’ iconicity as opposed to the prevailing ‘global’
iconicity - obvious one-liner buildings such as the
fi sh structures of Gehry or the bird bridges of Cala-
trava. Th e notion is that of the corner being a spatial
generator: change the corner of a space, and the rest
of the volume will follow. Th rough the careful modu-
lation of the corner, new spaces can be born as old
ones die. Th is dichotomy between the life and death
of space through the corner is used to create a 180m
tall, slightly neo-gothic-looking skyscraper hotel on
the southern tip (or perhaps corner) of Manhattan.
Walking through the structure, one moves from
corner to corner, in a building made from one of the
most ‘corner-ous’ material we know: bricks.

MODEL
Th e next step of the project is to create a 1:1 scale
mock-up of a part of the building: a 1x1x3m physi-
cal model that will become part of the end-of-year
exhibition. Th is model would be created using
actual bricks, and would aim to show how brick
architecture can be reinterpreted in our day and age.
Th e Brick Development Association has agreed to
sponsor the project, as has HG Matthews bricks, who
waive their fees for the production. However, costs
still remain for the material itself, and for shipping
the fi nal model to the AA. We are therefore seeking
further sponsorship to make this model happen.

DISSEMINATION
Apart from being exhibited as part of the end-of-
year show (which is seen by an approximate 3,000
architects and members of the public each year), the
project will be further disseminated in the popular
press, websites, and magazines. Magnus Larsson’s
project from 2008, DUNE, was recently picked up by 
a wide range of publications, including Wired UK,
BLDGBLOG, Kottke.org, and Slashdot.

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...

Jim showing the clay they use to make the bricks.

This machine, if I remember it correctly, gets rid of the pieces of (flint) stone within the clay.

Molds used to create specials.

It's a pretty dusty work environment.

More molds. They're so beautiful.

Kneading the clay by hand before making specials.

One of the finished, fired bricks. It was more exciting to feel the 'green,' unfired ones.

The bricks are put outside to dry. It takes about two weeks. This process is now almost green at this plant, compared with the energy-intensive equivalents at more commercial manufacturers.

More to follow.

Index showing the placement of the 18 different corners + listing their programmatic/formal function. This will be turned into a circulation diagram.

More or less starting from the ground up, here are the corners:

1. The vague corner. Also known as the Batman foot. Does the corner begin at ground level or does it pierce through the ground? The building seems to grow out of the ground. This begins as single bricks jutting out of the asphalt, and ends with shapes 'growing' into the building fabric, on their way providing seating, spatial division, shade, and so on.

2. The recursive corner. The corner that forms the entrance of the building is an example of Greek space: the building pushing forward a corner to greet the visitor. A myriad of recursive corners making up one corner. Poché space for concierge, waiting areas, maybe an espresso bar...

3. The reflected corner. In this building, the elevator is no longer an enclosed box travelling up and down, but an open platform. This allows for new corner constellations, as each elevator wall picks up and reflects the forms inside of the space one is just about to enter.

4. The dancing corner. The famous boxing ring/oyster bar clash on the ninth floor of the original building is updated and turned into a space where one can do gyrotonics in the corners while sipping smart-drug tonics. Mirror-clad bricks supply reflective surfaces: a room-sized disco ball.

 

5. The growing corner. The hanging gardens of Babylon squeezed into a corner of the building. Similar to the melted corner and the network corner; a kind of root-like structure covered in plants grown in corner nisches for self-sufficiency...

6. The folded corner. Folding corners into a kitchen for the restaurant, pulling down parts and breaking them up into smaller corner units that can be used as work areas...

7. The melted corner. The restaurant offers al fresco, or maybe almost-al fresco (depending on how much glazing we want) dining behind 'melted' brick arches. Romantic corner tables. Lights are hidden inside of the brick wall, lighting up the niche left when a brick is taken out.

8+17. The icicle corner. The stepped corner. A pool shoots down through the building, across several floors, a sharp corner stabbing through the rest of the building like an icicle falling through snow. Next to it, a series of stepped corners provide relaxation space for sunbathers. Corners above the pool double up as jumping platforms: you throw yourself out into the air 150m above ground...

9. The disjointed corner. Along the light shaft, corners jut out as if they were ripped out of their corner spaces, providing balcony space for the people living in the flats within. At the bottom of the shaft, a communal area is focused on kids and play space.

10. The spiky corner. Stalagmite- and stalagtite-like corners dip down like extruded diamond vaults, letting direct and ambient light in through the ceiling and raising the floor into desks and shelves - a library/reading/working space.

11. The tee corner. The beginning of the interior golf course (one of the programmatic functions from the original building that I'm sticking with), which, like the pool, trickles down through the building. You tee off into a corner here and then take the elevator down to, say, the 14th floor, where you find the sand bunker corner and continue.

12. The glowing corner. The top floor features a sky bar/observatory, in which a corner-based structure covered in fluorescents strips collects UV light from the sun during the day, so as to glow at night. Cue Tobias Rehberger's excellent Night Shift exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo a few years ago.

13. The light corner. Any self-respecting neo-gothic skyscraper needs a Batman light on the roof, signalling its presence and driving people from this 'corner of light' via a lit-up corner of the sky to the corners within.

14. The inverted corner. The building's own corner shop is shaped as if someone pressed the corner into the building. And/or maybe several corners are pressed into each other.

15. The network corner. An underground space of corners, an all-corner space; nothing but corners, corners within a void. A huge, heated space with walkways between corners. Corners extending into each other. You walk from one corner to the next.

16. The interlocking corner. Interlocking in three dimensions, these corner-based flats are a nod to Escher and different proponents of mathematical tiling. Each programmatic function takes place in a corner, which carries the function in question: sleeping, washing, eating, working, entertaining...

18. The squashed corner. Once again picking up on the original program, the squash courts get a new twist as the corners of the original box-like halls are squashed, transforming the game into a new, much harder one. Architecture inventing new games, new sports, through a reconsideration of the corner.

There are a few more drawings to add to these, but after tomorrow, I'm basically switching to putting together the presentation/manifesto and drawing the experience of the different corners, rather than technical stuff.

Mmm. Great!

Monday afternoon:

(Blinds down.)

That's better.

And so, once again without an Internet connection (posting this from the lovely Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen), we are pretty much ready to get started again.

A couple of weeks of 'relaxation' (madly trying to find a new flat, finding a new flat, sorting out the moving in to the new flat, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum) actually contained a few highlights as well, such as this wine (how could I resist?) and this blog post. Let's call them two new favourites. And with that out of the way: back to the drawing board.