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the magic of direct to media printing. 
the entrance to Corviale was opened up, and people flooded in…
]]>The massismore church is a CINEMA MULTIPLEX-CHURCH HYBRID. Programmatically cinemas become the chapels surrounding the nave
Basilica San Lorenzo Michelangelo and Brunelleschi chapels sold off to wealthy families, these subsidised the building and maintenance of the church as a whole.
Adopting the chapel model from San Lorenzo and using them to support the church financially and physically;
The massismore church develops the function of the funding chapels into funding cinemas that stack join together to form the main structure of the church
The traditional plan configuration of a church nave (blue) surrounded by chapels (yellow) for example in San Lorenzo on
The left has been transformed in this project on the right into a church nave (blue) surrounded by cinema screens (yellow). As a means to energise the space throughout the week.
The green areas show where the cinemas spring over the knave.
POCHE (French for pocket or pouch), is where structural depth is sculpted out and inhabited with programme within the interstitial space. Typically chapels in a standard church
In the massismore church the poché spaces are the structural voids, circulation spaces and cinemas surrounding the nave (the cinemas form voids within the walls and roof of the church)
Plan showing the church nave inhabiting the space beneath the cinematic and structural poché
This is located in the Corviale district of Rome, a peripheral suburb to the south west of the city.
The Site is at the northern end of the one kilometre long Corviale housing block designed by Mario Fiorentino and completed in 1974.
The housing block forms the new roman wall, abruptly demarcating the transition from the city to the countryside.
The housing block has a Utopian public level or ‘free level’ on the 4th floor, which has never been completely used to the architect's original ambition, as a 'vibrant street in the sky at the heart of the building, fostering the growth of small businesses and shops'. The free level is predominantly inaccessible owing to the informally built apartments that have taken over the space.
The building needs a focus to energize the free level. I propose a church hybridized with a Cineplex to provide a much needed amenity for the people of Corviale and to attract people from further afield to bring life to the building. The church for the spirit and the cinema to financially maintain the church.
View of the site from the east, with the site in red
View from the west of the 1km long building panning from south to north, with the site at the end of the building
View from north, here you can see the site in the foreground and the sheer concrete end wall of the Corviale building, behind, where the proposed church adjoins.
Prior to being cinemas the physical & financial support for the church was to be the more conventional chapels; stacked to raise the church above the ground
Here you see the poché space opening up within the raised roof, supported by the stacked chapels
This series of axonometric drawings show the following construction considerations
Spans
Craneage access to the site
Public realm
Axonometric as an outline for construction.
The building essentially works structurally as a series of vaults with a successive layer of vaults above
The weight being brought down to 5 points on the ground
This has parallels to Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, which works on a structural principle of stacking semi domes and dome. The weight of the roof brought down through successive vaults into a small area on the ground. Although it is on a completely different scale it is similar on principle
This is a densely packed multiplex cinema in Rotterdam with circulation occupying the residual poché space surrounding the auditorias
Sequence showing the stacking of the cinemas to leave the nave space open
Here in this sectional model cinemas in pink, covered under croft in yellow, and footing in green
Sculpting the church as a mass spanning between the cinema volumes to form the complete building encompassing all the cinemas.
The circulation paths within are shown in white, then fleshed out.
To form the volume, the circulation paths then become the circulatory poché
Here is where the church connects with the Corviale building; the entrance is located under the rake of the cinema on the right
Main nave space, with the poché spaces surrounding the nave, circulatory, structural, and cinematic pochés,
Again this one more structural poché with structural voids within the concrete,
Another structural poché, with the load paths travelling down past the cinema, with the end of the nave beneath one of the upper cinemas
Dense packing of buffering layers of poché
dense packing of cinemas with foyer beneath and cafe on roof
Overlaying sections in their correct position. Illustrating three dimensionally the different levels of poché
The structural circulatory and cinematic poché.
The pochés act as a physical buffer both between programmes and between programmes and the exterior
Interior view of the nave during mass
The massismore church re-energises the dysfunctional free level and allows it to become the heart and soul of the building as was originally intended.
The main aim of the project is to raise the entirety of the church above the ground plane to connect with the pedestrian ‘free level’ within the existing building; providing a long awaited magnet/anchor for the ’free level’.
The church becomes the main focus for the building, drawing in people in from the whole district.
A result of the jacking up massismore church to address the free level is the subsequent covered open air under croft below, this then becomes a community market space.
The sheer scale and massing of the building is a key driver towards maximising the presence and longevity of the church,
This is an aerial view of connection between the massismore church and the Corviale building seen from above
This rendering gives an understanding as to how the church compares with the housing block tailing away 1kilometer into the distance
In order to cast the building it needs to be constructed in a series of sections,
first each of the footings,
then the nave level then subsequently smaller sections above
allowing spans to be constructed on top of the already cured concrete
Extracting the different conditions of formwork. From the 3d model. To understand the constructional
This drawing gives an understanding of the progressive layout through the building.
Gives the church a substantial presence and ... retains the formal brutalist aesthetic of the adjoining building
The concrete in its Plastic nature allows a poché to be created and inhabited with circulation and other intermediary programmes
Examining one section of the building in detail- where the church springs from the ground (where the cinemas touching down)
CNC cut polystyrene sacrificial void fillers encased in concrete giving the building its structural poché. Thereby reducing the self weight of the building while maintaining structural strength
to cast the exterior, plywood conventional shuttering is used on the larger planes of the building, with specially pre assembled plywood formwork sections for angled corners (bringing the rougher joints away from the corners), and CNC cut polystyrene formwork for the complexities of junctions of different corners
Here CNC cut plywood sections are arrayed to receive film faced plywood formwork surfaces. These are connected together with shot fixings.
The maximum dimension of each individual cell is 2.5m square.
This is the analysis of the form-work of a section of Zaha’s Pheno science centre where it is a similar setup. With the planar flank sides consist of conventional formwork, where as the curved corners are constructed with timber slats, fixed to plywood ribs. Here where the geometry is too complex i.e. doubly curved the formwork is then changed to polyester faced CNC cut polystyrene formwork
Multishot of the models together
This is a photo taken during the construction of the 1:50 formwork model construction of a small section of the building with a miniature plywood formwork system
This image simultaneously shows both the inside and outside of the formwork system. The plywood pattern will be transferred to the plaster giving the model a scaled texture for a better understanding of the size of the church.
Testing the plywood for different position of the cut line to ensure a snug fit
Prototype formwork facet components: all the pieces snap together. These were the prototypes at fractionally different sizes to ensure the snuggest of fits, reducing the amount of gluing required in assembly (essential as there were to be nearly 1500 numbered plywood pieces, and more unnumbered grid pieces)
Assembly of the facets starts off with the rough assembly of standard miniature cut 4 x 8 pieces being connected together by clicking them into the backing grid, and then the remaining uniquely numbered special pieces are slotted into position.
Teamwork facet assembly production line.
The blue and black template drawing was totally invaluable, both printed out and on the screen
most of the pieces snap together. Only the mini cut pieces with no snap holes needed to be glued
the laying out and numbering of the individual lazercut templates for each of the plywood pieces was developed using a set of custom JavaScript scripts written specially for the task. Unfortunately the scripts didn't stretch to arrangement on a sheet for cutting; this unfortunately had to be done manually, as the nesting software didn't take kindly to the template's complexity and format.
Once all the facets were assembled all of them were individually varnished
Then assembly of the formwork began using a hotmelt gluegun, some of the pieces had to have the excess backing grid trimmed to allow them to mesh together at the corners
although the model can’t give a compete representation of the construction of the formwork, it can achieve a pretty accurate model of the finished casting, allowing for tweaking of the plywood set out prior to starting construction on site.
The massismore church postulates a new paradigm for ecclesiastical construction, combining the spiritual necessities of a celestial commune with the more practical requirements for a continuously vibrant community inhabited building.
The nave (blue) is cocooned by mass riddled with a poché (yellow) of cinemas, ancillary programmes, circulation and structural voids.
1:1 facet templates. The black pieces are the cut pieces over a threshold size.
The rectangular see-through pieces are the standardized 1:50 scale 4 x 8 sheets
and the small see-through pieces are the undersized pieces that cannot take the whole length of code that the larger pieces have, so require a shorter set of codes]]>
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so it turns out that placing a 366megabyte layered photoshop file wasn’t such the good idea it seemed in the first instance.
maybe flattening it first would solve the problem(this is the second time it has died saving this)
the supersized detail in the background is not totally convincing.
it probably wont return. on the third go
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lighter grey: inaccessable structural voids
]]>but still some more arrows to do and some voids to kill
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this man is to scale
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unfortunately Newton’s laws apply to my models, and so it cant stand on its own two feet!
this view would not have been possible without the assistance of some patient fingers
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