JOSE VASCONCELAS LIB.

The project integrates the public library with a botanical garden. A 250 meter steel, concrete and glass structure surrounded by greenery and water.

The design is based in four fundamental considerations :

1. Mexico City is one of the largest, most polluted and agresive urban environments in the planet. We believe that the planning of public funded buildings should always encourage the expansion of car-free open spaces and greenery
2. The specific area where the project was built was a barren urban landscape
3. The buildings and gardens generate a new pole of urban ecological regeneration that expands over a densely populated area
4. The library is itself an attempt at reorganizing available human knowledge

The Botanical Garden houses a comprehensive array of Mexicos endemic flora. Culture and nature, often on opposing sides, form a unity in which the visitor can reconcile their co-existence. The reading areas offer the user an opportunity for experimenting direct contact with nature. All areas profit from natural lighting and ventilation.

The library is a great ship that navigates through time enveloped in a garden that´s always itself and always new.

The library is a tripartite bilateral symmetrical structure with three bays of hanging book stacks in the center, readings areas on the perimeter. The grand lobby is a civic landscape, with stairs leading up to the bookstacks on both sides. The concrete slabs are functioning as grids. The ventilation system is a special one where air comes in through the slits on the facades and comes into the central atrium up to the roof. The essence of the library is the space between the staggered bookstacks, with the rhyme of the bays accentuating the perspectives. The books are objectified and are almost data-like, rather inaccesible

thesis questions

A friend of mine is working on his thesis, and he showed me the GSD thesis prize winner of 2011 Greg Tran titled as Mediating Mediums (http://vimeo.com/24860709). He proposed a possibility of a digital 3-D reality which ties to the real world material and accentuated the designer's role on meditating the two. It came up with the question of whether 2-D representation is still viable since we essentially design with 3-D rhino models nowadays. I think it is a good idea to think about what I am interested in as of now to start the collection of potential thesis, because I believe that thesis is the culmination of the architectural problems that I have been contemplative about and propose a potential paradigm to resolve them.

As of now,

1) how people start a design, how the design progress, and how to make the final jump to invent the cleverness in a design.
2) How to translate the architecture in other subjects into the real architectural language



I went to the MIT thesis review a few days ago and I found out that I am only interested in the proposals that are radical and question the fundamentals of architecture. It should be more than a building, it should be a proposal, a paradigm shifting design or even a new kind of ideology on both psychological and material level.

THE WAR HAS ENDED? - CORE 1 finished!

I guess to this point I kinda of know what I can do better with all my projects. But I have to admit that not all projects are supposed to be perfect - there is no perfect design, it is just about how someone interpret the design and appreciate the cleverness in the design.

For this last project, still the cleverness is missing. Though the circulation is invented to reinvest the spatial property, but the whole thing is not responsive to the thermal impacts, and the whole thing is totally not thermal dynamically driven. The excuse I have is that it was thrown to me two weeks ago when I could not really understand and formulate my take on the continuous surface that my instructor liked. I should have been more opinionated about my design. I had a beautiful project with the hidden room, when she was not pushy and I developed my design to achieve the interesting spatial quality. Being systematic and diagramtic is not a problem, same with the parametric design method. actually the space created through diagram operation can be really beautiful, after all, architecture can be a diagram of all the forces. The cleverness, then, is the way we manipulate the spatial arrangement - for the most time the sectional property within a volume. The plan is the flow, while the section is the essence of variation in spatial experience.

I cannot tell if it is a good thing for me as a designer to have such a dictating instructor, and I have tried several method in design - antithesis leading concept, diagramatical operation, systematic aggregation, form dictating strategy...

After all, be self critical and radical, and always seek the cleverness in the design - being aware of what space you are creating, no matter what approach I am using and what path the project is leading towards, but accept mediocrity.

COMBING THROUGH THE PQ INTERLOPER

The previous scheme died because the systemiczation was too dominant and the beauty of architecture got lost in the rather diagrammatic production. Then my instructor sees a lot of potential in my PQ surface exercise. Therefore...I started over with my rather sexy surface.

The new surface is a combo of two identical surfaces with a extrusion and a recession along the central axis. The connection of the two surface is a simple hinge where the recession of one surface and the extrusion of the other meet, through which self shading is created. The shape of the surface is aiming towards maximizing the surface area for solar gain. Different shading conditions and degree of privacy are inscribed in the overall form. Circulation and aggregation opportunities are embedded in the grains of the discretization (horizontal) and and central axis (vertical).

Right now I need to work out the organization of the labs and clean up the circulation to make it a tight system - the integration of horizontal and vertical circulation.




Review Take-away:
1) Seek contradiction in a design to produce great architecture.
2) Interlacing of simple non-linear relationship that produces complexity/variation.
3) Produce otherness in synthesis,  both geometrically and thermal dynamically.

The Misshapen Pearl: A Baroque Manifesto

The Baroque is a misshapen pearl: shining and attractive but somehow flawed. It is interested in systemization – mathematical understanding of space and development of perspective as a rational tool to systemize space. The systemization is not about the homogeneity but about relational heterogeneity bounded within a seemingly homogeneous field. That objects are qualitatively different even though they are composed of rather homogeneous elements, in the sense that it is rather the relationship is being examined rather than the objects as placeholders. The homogeneity of geometric space is reflected through the notion that all the points are mere determinations of position, they are purely relational rather than substantial reality, and there is no independent content of their own outside of this relation. It is liberation from the view of individuality to a web of relationships, a systemized singularity.

As a beautiful pearl of systemization, the misshapen aspect of the Baroque is embedded in its emanating quality and generating forces – the transformation from linear to painterly, from planar to diagonal recession, and from closed form to open form. It is about the tactile, plastic, loose, making shadow and light integral and superseding to contours as fixed boundaries; the diagonal, scenographic deployment of two or three point perspective, which engages the spectators in the spatial relationships and oblique views; architecture as an open system of relationships which involves the fabric of the city and the landscape.

The fact that Baroque is a synthesis of dynamism and the systemization concludes that it is a not a representation of a simple decoration system but rather a system that adopts multiple references: its nature as eclecticism. Baroque architecture is embedded in the tradition, and extends the tradition. Baroque finds multiple connectivity to different ornamentation/structure, spatial, typological references to infinity. It is a machine of making connections of all sorts: connectivity in addition to multiplicity and variation. It combines abstraction with realism, in an allegorized fashion; it connects corporeal realm to the spiritual/heaven realm. The visualization of such connectivity and synthesis would be the membrane that begins to stretch and almost folds back to itself – creating distortions to create different connections. The fold, multiplying the membrane to reach beyond the simple imagination plane is the generator to produce knowledge. The Baroque as misshapen pearl is a representation for itself as a fetish of complexity and contradictions, a marriage of systems and dynamism, and an allegory of seemingly objectivity in relation to the boundless infinity.

CASE STUDIES - POROSITY

OMA- Tres Grandes Bibliotheque

The concept of their proposal resided in the notion of the library spaces being excavated as voids from a ‘solid cube’ containing the archives. The concept offered great architectural freedom, with the public spaces (or voids) being liberated from the constraints of a predeterminded structure or form. 

STEVEN HOLL - SIMMONS HALL MIT 

Holl’s design solution was that the building would metaphorically work as a sponge. It would be a porous structure that would soak up light through a series of large openings that would cut into the building so that light would filter through in section. These breaks in section would then become main interactive spaces for the students, providing views onto different levels. In his original drawings, Holl referred to these breaks as the building’s “lungs” as they would bring natural light down while circulating air up.

TOYO ITO - Taichung Metropolitan Opera House

FIELD CONDITIONS

NATURE OF THE FIELD

A field should be a representation of a collective form that is a diagram of forces (the operations of energy) in equilibrium. Then it is essential to elucidate what forces are at work and to find the most appropriate ways to represent each force and the relation it entails. (e.g. magnetic lines, topo lines)

FORMAL RELATIONSHIP

A field condition would be any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each (monads?). Field conditions are relational, and not figural, they are based on interval and measure. Field configurations are inherently expandable; the possibility of incremental growth is anticipated in the mathematical relations of the parts.

To retain the classical principle that hierarchical distribution of parts to whole is constant, and individual elements are maintained in hierarchical order by extensive geometric relationships in order to preserve overall unity. Geometry is the invisible scaffold that at once controls the distribution of parts, but disappears in the final building.

Basic repeatable blocks/units -> placed in the field that is reflective of the forces->hierarchical distribution of the units based on the assumptions associated with the forces within a single system-> extensive geometric relationships created by overlapping systems-> overall form is an elaboration of conditions established locally.

Generate a simple algorithm, and the run it out like what we did with the ARCH 1502 exercise.