January 2010 Archives

After the crit it became quite clear that I needed to clarify/ simplify the various 'chapters' of my project into one coherent story. In this short text below I have tried to condense my argument/ interests/ 'desert island discs' and been brutal/critical in the process of editing. I also try and allude to the questions my project asks.. more thinking less producing..

The Peak and The Re-brief

The original peak club was a seminal unbuilt project designed by Zaha Hadid in 1984. The original project (for a members-only gentleman's club) was commissioned by a property developer called Alfred Siu, who wanted to inject a sense of glamour into his family business. He ran an international competition of which Zaha won out of over 600 entrants.

 

This project was the crown jewel of Alfred Siu's property estate empire and a symbol of the hedonistic lifestyle it would house within. It was the extension to the I-Club, which Alfred Siu had created just a few years beforehand, based on Studio 54 in New York.

 

His aspiration for the Peak Club was to epitomize, capture and reflect this pleasure-seeking lifestyle, or at the very least to contain it.

 

My re-interpretation of the Peak project was looking at how perhaps the building language itself induces pleasure through variety. Rich materiality, cantilevers, voids vs. clashing geometry, and curves and angles and perspectives. I was interested in the way in which the project offered both formal variety in shape and form and suggested a defiance of gravity.

 

The Project

 

For the Main Project pleasure is explored in architectural form, through the themes of variety, escapism and defiance of gravity.

 

With a contemporary approach in mind, I wish to design a more inclusive manifestation of a pleasurable retreat, in the form of a Bath-House.

 

Like Zaha's Peak, a multiplicity of readings of the space is set up, through variety, using several formal devices:

 

1. The kinetic rotation of the rooms allows for ceilings to be read as walls or floors, and each asymmetrical room changes in nature with every rotation. A tall and narrow room becomes short and long. A wet room becomes dry. Like an Escher drawing, it implies multiple planes of gravity.

 

2. Glass is used to allow for people to read a room as an individual entity or part of a larger interlocking whole.

 

3. Water and thicknesses of the glass, magnifies, obscures and changes readings of spaces through magnification, distortion and opacity.

 

Zaha's Peak Project suggests movement and defiance of gravity though its expression, and introduces difference in experience through formal variety. The Bath-House, actually manifests movement, and in a re-interpretation of a gravity-defying language of architecture creates infinite spatial and experiential variation through rotation and re-configuration, in an attempt to stimulate the senses and provide a novel experience for both the user and the city.

 

I want this building to question the static nature of a building and city and how constant variety in reading and experience of a building can positively stimulate the users senses and perception of space.

Eschers: relativity

sorry about crappy quality, its a big image..

Cut away section revealing rotating wheeled mechanism and circulation axis in core of the 

bath-house and the interlocking and rotational pool/ steam/spa spaces.

Small, quick animation to show how the components of the rotating bath-house fit together and can rotate on 6 planes...