For those of you who remember our visit to the extraordinary home collection by Charles Brooking: his XVIII century windows are part of this year’s Venice Biennale Exhibition.
for details about the 14th Biennale, below is the link to the article on Designboom
The Exhibition is open until Saturday 21st June, 1pm.
For details and opening times:
Hans Hollein died on April 24th 2014.
Hans Hollein, operated along the tenuous line between sculpture and architecture whilst being conscious of the changing definition of what we call our environment.
He argued that ‘architects have to stop thinking in terms of buildings only’ because, for him, ‘everything is architecture’ and what we call our environment has expanded.
In 1963, together with Walter Pichler, about ‘Forms and Designs’, Hans Hollein wrote:
“In architecture we are not concerned with beauty. If we want beauty then we want it less in form or proportion than in a sensual beauty of fundamental power.
“The shape of the building doesn’t develop out of the material condition of its purpose. A building shall not show its purpose. It is not an expression of structure and construction, it is not an enclosure or refuge.
“A building is itself.
“Architecture is without purpose.
“What we build will find its usefulness.
“Form does not follow function. Form doesn’t originate by itself. It is the great decision of man to make a building into a cube, a pyramid or a sphere.
“Today for the first time in the history of mankind, at this moment when immensely developed science and perfected technology offer the means, we are building what we want, making an architecture that is not determined by technique, but that uses technique – pure, absolute architecture.
Today, man is master over infinite space”.
more about Hans Hollein’s work on his website here
AVATAR Conference “Future Cities 3: Abundance” at Greenwich University
Thursday 10th April 2014 at 9.45am – 6.00pm
Howe Lecture Theatre [QA080], Greenwich Maritime Campus,
Old Royal Naval College, London SE10 9LS
more details here
Below is another Extract from the excellent TS: Intuition and Process, (1989) Themes IV, AA publications. Please take a look at it at the RIBA library or British Library, this rare book will be worth the visit.
Hock Huat Lim project, AA dip Unit 6 : Hotel on the Lido, Venice, 1984
Notes towards a technical study, Peter Salter, 1989, in TS: Intuition and Process, AA: London
“The job of the Technical Study is to reach beyond the limitations of physical evidence. Instead of allowing design and construction processes to become separate, it seeks to re-establish the whole and to explore ways of expressing the relevance of the strategy behind the making of the building.
The Technical Study is about a way of thinking. It is neither a science nor a training for the profession. Its aim is to add clarity to a piece, making it an occasion nurturing an optimism for building in difficult circumstances. Craft can only be developed within the context and experience of building.
Accuracy is about developing and testing instinct. It is the poignancy residing within the material fineness or structure that provokes the spark of clarity in a proposition.
It is the job of the Technical Study to test and reinforce the instinct behind the strategy. So the Technical Study runs in tandem with the design programme. It is like a terrier at its heels, demanding a restatement of its aims and a search for another kind of clarity of intention – an unequivocal proposition.
To understand the underlying intention of the proposal, it is necessary to decompose the designed building into a series of related fragments – just as an archeologist would make drawings of the finds uncovered at his site. Certain predominant concerns will determine the procedure. First, the scale of the building must be related to the dimensional order of the site. In Landscapes this may be given by the frequency of objects on the horizon that can be measured on a map. Thus in the seemingly unequivocal landscape of the salt marsh a building may have to be seen as an accretion, a new geographical landform subject to the processes of time and erosion. The resulting architecture will describe the horizon as a section of varying and layered deposits, registering a local scale which satisfies the landscape rather than the expediency of the programmatic brief.
It is also necessary to look at the fineness and order of the particular room to determine its material and structure. Without the instinctive desire to describe the room’s inner qualities and its remoteness from or sympathy with the outside world, any decisions about material and structure become hollow and trite exercises. The room may be so fine that it has its own ordering system incapable of servicing a building, only of being serviced. It may be a room of pilasters and frescos, a pergola screening the heavens. The components of the particular room cannot be of the same scale or family as those of other parts of the building, if it is to linger in the memory.
The scale of the room determined by human labour is inseparable from the scale of its material. They work together to arouse a kind of resonance in the casual occupant. Perhaps all that is needed to provide a certain familiarity with the space is this collusion between craftsman and material something as simple as a door architrave that is brushed passed every day suddenly revealing its fluting scribed into the material so perfectly that it matches the print of your fingers and the scale of your hand.”
On the use of axonometric drawings by artist Paul Noble.
Paul Noble axonometric drawings are vast. Several meters across, they deal with the landscape, the territory, whilst remaining very architectural in their inception through a careful assemblage of volumes and an attention to one and every minute details. Although the individual elements are very much three dimensional, the overall drawings, by their format and the extent they cover, remain, almost paradoxically, flat. Something between an axo and a map, not unlike the first birds eye views developed in the late 17th century – see Johannes Kip’s drawing below
article on Paul Noble’s exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in 2011:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/nov/15/paul-noble-nobson-review
Paul Noble, Nobson
Jan Kip & Leonard Knyff, Wollaton Hall Gardens
On the use of orthographic drawings by Morphosis: the case of the self-built 2-4-6-8 House by Morphosis, complete with assembly instructions.
Axonometrics are used to describe the construction method, as they are is deemed easier to understand. Here they show how the different parts are assembled.
The project also combines plan, reflected ceiling plan, unfolded elevations, axonometric and the additional perspective on a single drawing (first drawing below), thus using the quasi-full palette of traditional conventional architectural drawings on the same page, whilst, surprisingly perhaps, avoiding the cross section (though the plan of course is a section).
The house is one of Morphosis early projects (1978) and can be found, alongside many others, on their research/archive website: morphopedia
description of the project from morphopedia:
“Venice Beach, the context for much of our early work, is one of the few places in Los Angeles with a thriving and eclectic street life. The 2-4-6-8 House gave voice to this happenstantial quality, inflected by the serendipity and combustibility of Venice street life. A sense of play animates the 2-4-6-8 House. Variations on window sizes form the conceptual genesis for the project. A simple cube with a pyramidal roof, the exterior is clad in gray asphalt shingles, while the windows’ yellow cross, blue lintel, and red scupper inject a joyous note of color. The project was schematized in a Revell-model-like that detailed each aspect of its construction in a form any layperson could comprehend. To enhance this playful, do-it-yourself quality, the client was given pocket-sized working drawings. Within the finished space, ventilation and heating are manually operated through gadgets that beckon to be fiddled with.”
“Ennio Brion recounts that Scarpa claimed to be designing the Brion project even in his sleep, fulfilling Gio Ponti’s aphorism that gardens should be based not on designs but on dreams. The Brion sanctuary demonstrates that it may be possible and even desirable to dissolve the distinction between the world we dream and the one in which we dwell or, in the case of Scarpa and the Brion sanctuary, between desiring landscapes and landscapes of desire.”
Dodds, G. (2002) Desiring Landscapes / Landscapes of Desire, in Body and Buildings: Essays on the changing relation of body and architecture, Dodds, G. and Tavernor, R. Eds, MIT Press
La Lune en ses Quartiers by Erik Desmazières
image found here
Unit 01 Greenwich 