Steven Holl: 1st Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture (March 2, 2011)

good evening nice to see all of you the day Raymond Abraham died Steve Hall sent me a note offering to do a talk at sci-arc remember that this evening I want to thank Stephen for his offer and let him know that we accept tonight is the first annual Raymond Abraham Memorial Lecture Raymond was an architect who resided everywhere New York Austria California Mexico and belonged nowhere Raymond's home was in his head a kind of intellectual Bedouin whatever the many differences between Raymond and Stephen perhaps they are both intellectuals in transit I recall Raymond discussing the parable of the Gordian knot that intricately intricately entwined rope with no visible end or beginning all the esoteric practitioners over many years attempt to untie it the architect arrives pulls his sword cuts the knot leaving the rope and pieces a slightly modified version the decisiveness of the cut and the surprise nature of the risks of the assault on that in disciple not our what's conventionally celebrated but I've always wondered what the amended parable would symbolize if the architect retied the rope I think Steven Holl is attempting to retie the rope in the world where most of us operate quick glib caricatures of events and people are the rule impatience feed feeds impatience feeds short attention spans the architecture discourse is loaded with capsule characterizations labels and acronyms in lieu of a more time-consuming interrogatory but from time to time in the midst of that abbreviated thought process the inadequacy of instant content becomes obvious holes work for instance don't start with folds contexts or porosities no green clean or digital forget parametric allegiances Lacan Deleuze and Foucault aren't part of the advisory team whole offers us an alternative worldview he implicates us makes us participants in his story and insists the participants respond he designs us in and we're obligated to imagine a way around and out if we can Hall makes architecture mandatory abstention isn't an option Stephen is the rare architect who produces astonishing objects by refusing to produce astonishing objects why Columbus Hall sails west to go east the conventional bracketing of Architects works into our priori categories amidst the prospect of a categorical imperative the transcends categorization Stephen makes the usual categories extraneous no modern machine decon parametric green experiment yes to affiliations but none of those listed uncovers the motives not to simply experiment but to discover the Prem son which the experiment sits as an abstract the whole venue is the world of ideas not as fixed propositions but rather as the tension between contradictory possibilities paradoxically the whole architecture is never an abstract to build his argument the architect situates himself in the midst of a tangible human dilemma and builds that contradictory experience how does he do that psychological probing no Prozac no sessions on the couch but rather a chronology that resonates with the mind as a mind encounters the variability of form and space tried to cheer ecause darkness at noon for instance not just the shadow not just the capacity to build that shadow it's the Assembly of darkness and light that makes the experience breathe not arbitrary its necessity ever been treated by a physical therapist bend your body stretch your mind it's the integration of the two that repairs the damage physical therapy is part of the whole pro forma and then there's the choreography a wandering wandering dance from the end to the beginning but no tricks no rabbits no hats joy - joy - not the cheerleaders kind more an admixture of human joy and sadness and a sense of what's tragic in human affairs more ecclesiastes less zippity-doo-dah then there's the cosmology somewhere between Darwinian gradualism and a rock hitting the Yucatan never the object qua object but the object virtually metamorphosizing what if laughter were really tears not just architecture but an ethos for architecture please welcome Steven Hall to the first annual Raymond Abraham memorial lecture it's an honor to be here of course it's always an honor to be at CyArk when Eric asked me to give this talk I said yes but then I didn't realize how difficult it would be because I began to think about Raymond who is for me as difficult in his absence as he wasn't in his presence difficult and I wanted to speak a little bit about him but I've decided I'm just going to read a poem time is dying on the moon I hear the minutes limping round and round forgive me this minute the hours are creaking past these midnight bones that's Theodore off-key straw for the fire this talk I've never given before so it's really rough around the edges and it's for Raymond so I thought of a kind of let's say link and I'm thinking of bearnaise a of course and how important the unbuilt architecture is in the history of architecture for those of you who know about the an enormous polemic that went on during the 1750s between Winckelmann and and P Rene's a peer nazy argued for the new always argued for invention Winckelmann argued for the neoclassical you know we've seen these kinds of battles going on and when I think about this gerri drawing I think about okay the Asscher like incompleteness Eric's untied knots but I think it but in a way the essence of this is ambiguity and the ambiguity can be something kind of frightening but at the same time very positive so that's sort of that's sort of my hinge point in fact I think we're all working in an enormous time of ambiguity the instant communication blurs time and place in a continuous flow the idea of a site as it is as digital as it is physical still architecture is bound to situation architecture can conquer ties meaning on a site that's Internet traffic ambiguity of scale scale is measured comprehension of space the urban densities in new sectional configurations provoke mega forms of ambiguous scale these mysterious scales can be exhilarating they're juxtapositions sublime that would be a positive ambiguity ambiguous systems instead of stable systems we must work with dynamic systems in a hyper mobile population with constant flux of people information materials dissolve and despair dispersed architecture can act as a partial stabilizer public space is a kind of DNA for democracy ambiguous programs instead of programmatic precision we must work with contingent and diverse programs instead of precision of use we must work with crossbred systems and combine methods yet the hybrid building may be the most vital new urban tool living working recreation and culture in a compact fragment clarity of concept a clear concept acts as a force that drives design beyond a minuite x' and contingencies architecture today unlike any time in history is free to be inspired by any source music literature or science might VOC new concepts so to take this ambiguity and then take it into let's say a few projects the first project is in Beijing a very centrally located site at the FIR at the second Ring Road and the problem on Beijing may be a little bit like LA but more so in Beijing is if you have one appointment it can take you all day to get over the city and back again and the city is you know in a way enormous ly polluted anyway so the idea of a kind of dense a dense place where living working and cultural activity and Recreation can all take place in one one area was a kind of a priori thought we had when we were invited to work here the pre 1980 Beijing is horizontal you see no building can be higher than the Forbidden City post 1980 Beijing becomes vertical and when it becomes vertical it becomes isolated it becomes point towers it becomes gated communities so our project became a kind of let's say utopian effort to do something other than that in a way to make a kind of place where all these activities could be compressed and condensed and on several levels because the city is so dense you could have shops at the ground level shot a office at a midpoint and a whole ring of shops in the air so this became a kind of method of thinking about the project and by the way this the program from the client was just 800 apartments and we had the idea of making a public space and making the maximum amount of programs so we said look give us three months and a certain amount of honorarium and we'll go away we're going to come back with an ideal vision so we came back with a Montessori School kindergarten a cinema tech many different kinds of shops hotels spa this place becomes a place that's like a city within a city and it was interesting and here you see the top the top level with you can see spa you can see a swimming pool in one of the bridges you can see cafes you can see a bookstore and the interesting thing about this condition of the ambiguity of program is the client is so in a way without direction that they say after a certain pause they say we like first of all I thought there's no way they're gonna build all this right they're not going to do it it's just too much it's like a student project I'm putting all these different things in here you know I mean I think to myself how could I even you know proposal that stuff and suddenly you know they decided they wanted to build the whole thing and I said my god how could they go from 8 towers and 800 apartments to building a Cinematheque a Montessori School all these bridges one with a swimming pool in it then I thought there's gonna be a problem with the budget so we sent the drawings and they sent back after about a month they sent back an email they said your project greatly exceeds our budget however we're raising our budget to meet your project don't take anything out so but the kick the kicker was there would be no increase in fee so basically we did the Cinematheque for free we did a Montessori School for free we did and we lost something like nine hundred thousand dollars on the project anyway the other thing about the the these kinds of clients is they were super ambitious in terms of energy so this was the largest geothermal project when it was built in I think in residential history 660 geothermal wells a hundred meters deep and they are up and running now they've been going on for three years four years providing all the cooling and heating for the whole complex that means no cooling towers and none of that noise and none of that off off heat also it's a hundred percent recycled water that means everything every apartment has two plumbing systems and they go to a gigantic zapping tank with a with a special carbon neutral system that basically changes everything into potable water another slide will show you that the the ponds in the middle and then the construction the process of construction that was also a kind of nightmare that made me have to open a Beijing office which I didn't want to do but we still have it now but the the buildings themselves are exoskeletal frames concrete frames and the bridges or suspended between them and Gein orton s'en did the engineering and they were jacked into place by four very thin cable hydraulic jacks but because of earthquake loads they had to be on ball bearings they couldn't be attacked attached to either Tower so these bridges are all disconnected to the fabric of the buildings the process is also something crazy here you see the workers occupying the hotel during construction all those none of those bridges are actually attached to any of the towers they're all on big gigantic rollers so when an earthquake comes these these towers can move a meter a metre and a half in each direction and the bridges just roll back and forth there's inside some of the sort of performance space a library and exhibition space there's the Cinematheque and and the Cinematheque was crucial to the life of the project there's a central pond all recycled water which also is a big public space and the way you experience this project is in a way partial views between buildings coming at it from different directions and it becomes a kind of experience in partial views and porosity what can go inside from any any aspect from any from any level exoskeletal frame expressed in sanded aluminum and the lighting becomes a kind of polychrome harking back to ancient Chinese pala chrome but the reality of the project is that the developer still had in his mind a gated community and they tried to build a wall around the project but they couldn't because we'd placed the Cinematheque and the shops inside and that would kill the life of the Cinematheque so it was like a strategy a counter strategy to keep the place as a public open space and today it's a public open space so while that was going on we were invited to do another project and and this was a competition this is like Shenzhen which is one of the most mysterious places on earth as it was something like 8,000 people in 1980 and now it's over 12 million so it's the fastest growing piece of urban territory on the hit in the history of the planet so this this ambiguity of place what is the place of Shenzhen you know what what really is it where's what's the context there isn't really a context that you can get ahold of because it changes daily weekly and actually I really encourage you to visit it it's absolutely fascinating so our site was a little bit to the east of Shenzhen and it was backed by a mountain and it was on the seashore so I began to think about a building that would be somehow as if it was floating on the sea and the sea had receded as if it was propped up on legs and somehow there was another force that caused it to be there was a 35 meter height limit and in that 35 meters you couldn't you really didn't have enough program to fill it so the first the diagram at the top is what what many of the other planners did there were like five people in the competition and we decided to just try something in a way this is a competition you know I feel like I'm in school I'll just try something so let's put the whole building up at 35 meters and put it on like eight legs then every every piece of the program gets a view of the ocean and there's a microclimate of below it this is a tropical space this is Hong Kong it's you know shade is really something wonderful so the idea that everyone is with an ocean view and then everything has a kind of a microclimate below it and Gardens below it so these are the different programs two types of offices a condominium and a hotel and then we added more we added a 500-seat auditorium and and shops and restaurants in the mounds below and that's the scale again it's a kind of project you would you know give your students and you would never expect to build right I mean and here's the mountains behind it so this is perfect Fung Shui you're in function you're supposed to be with your back against the mountains and facing the south and facing a body of water so the shape of the building the form of the building really takes the form of the site and the idea of this back drop and a Fung Shui view to the sea there was the original master plan at the top and you can see the figure ground that allows for only 28,000 square meters of green space then our proposal which is to keep the whole site green and actually have a green roof so we end up with 75,000 square meters of green space so the whole building floats above this landscape which we also shaped with different functions in the mounds and you can see the figure hovering over the landscape I remember the in the competition I went down to Shenzhen and the the client whose this is the largest housing developer in South China the clients name is Wang che the whole meeting went very silently because he doesn't speak a word of English and so it was translated from my English to the Chinese and then at the end of the meeting he waited for everyone to make a remark and then simply said I love it I love the shape so then we had the problem of trying to build it and the the the cores were 50 meters apart and we said well let's let's bring them 30 meters together so they won't be so difficult but our engineer Kaohsiung Jiang had the idea of putting cable-stay technology to work with a rigid concrete frame there he is in the Beijing laboratory where they tested the building and they loaded it with 40 tons of lead and it's a scale model of a rigid concrete frame with cable-stayed technology that proves that this system which has never been tried before could could work the key to the system of course is the joints where the load has to be shifted from the high degree of tension to the concrete frame some of these tension cables take something like three thousand two hundred and eighty tons of tension force which is higher than any tension force ever attempted in building construction before and there become that's my partner Lee hue who's was key and development of this project and there's there's the big problem in the in the idea and that is the transfer of the high degree of tension to the rigid concrete frame so these enormous cast-iron joints had to be made in Nanjing and shipped down sort of two or three on a truck and what was interesting is like in America if you you run into a problem like this you'll get these screaming phone calls and they'll threaten to throw you off the job in China they just do it and you just see it showing up on the site and everybody on the site was very happy I helped clean up the site often when I was there I don't know what the story is about all these sad workers in China but every time I went to this site I found people very happy there they are jacking that an enormous load for the concrete of for the attention cables so these are sort of pressure meters they build the building kind of backwards with putting tension on the bottom control plate and then filling in the floors afterwards so the the key is the the the sort of axis of tension has to pass through exactly the axis of the column so you end up with these rather magnificent lollipop like columns with holes in them I don't know what happened to that slide and also the speed we won the competition in July of 2006 and they started construction November and this is a view two years later in 2008 some friends visiting the site so this 50 meter span is a building without trusses so some some of these buildings the recently there are all trusses on the inside this building has no trusses just these thin tension cables and then sort of to invigorate the program we added different pieces in parts like this 500-seat auditorium which is also another strange thing about these clients is on a Saturday afternoon we decided one of these mounds should be hollowed out and we wanted to add a 500-seat auditorium so we emailed back and they said fine add it so it's all in foamed aluminum and this in the the furniture was from pole Tron of FRA in Italy and the foamed aluminum was made in Canada because they couldn't get the texture proper to our our specifications so like a contrary to some situations where everything is made in China and shipped here we're making things in Italy and Canada and shipping it to China and by the way we do most of the design work in America so the the idea of jobs going to China is not true and we're employing people intimate in New York to work in China there's pol Toronto froze seating the entrance lobby in that then coming down sort of escalators coming down to the auditorium and a convention level and the idea of the Sun this is a very tropical climate so it's very hot and I was in a tropical situation sketching palm fronds and I thought of the reverse to make the palm frond shape be actually that the penetration in in aluminum and make those be the louvers of the building so what's nice is here that they make everything so with all this is custom-made and it's all activated by computer so it follows the track of the Sun detailing on the interiors down to the doorknob the Jeff Kipnis hates he said Stephen whatever you do don't do that door knob good old Jeff the digitally cuts screens to regulate the sunlight instead of curtains this is bamboo a section through the the main offices which we call the untie bowtie section because no one wears a tie at that office so we're just going to take a bow tie and untie it and make the whole section of the building respond to that geometry at night this the sort of place takes another life and down those cores each of those cores carry all the services from above so because of the complexity of the program above you need access to all the plumbing and services and the glass rides outside the concrete core about a meter and a half so that means there they all have access to all the utilities this is also all recycled water some of my photographs of the of the louvers and the undersized the feeling of kind of flying above and this sort of connection to the landscape below fire escapes then puncture the underside of the building and you can see the sort of tie lines of the the tension cables are exposed in the spirit of Kenneth Frampton that structure should somehow be expressed and the idea of this ambiguity I think this ambiguity of scale the building has an ambiguity when you come onto the site you really don't see it it's 20 meters in the air so you can actually you come on to the site and it feels like there's no there's no building there it's just a landscape and then when you look up like from the courtyard below there's a there's a layering between the underside which is the sixth elevation of the building the facade and let's say the courtyard down below so we invented this thing a 360 window which drops down out of the six elevation and allows you to see all around the site all the windows open there's a kind of vapor court there at the kind of conference center down below that creates its own microclimate we did the landscape but then they ran they ran out of funds at a certain point so we said let's just let its tropical and let's just let the birds and the natural take its course and this it grew up into an amazing series of natural weeds and natural grasses and natural plants some of it we actually manicured there you see bamboo growing so this is a kind of public landscape open to everyone and the hotel I think opens in the fall so this project is really something I think was something I never thought it would build and it's quite amazing to have it be realized something closer to home in Kansas City and this has to do with the ambiguity of figure and ground of building and landscape the fusing of building and landscape was a competition and the five other architects and the competition followed the rules they said you must add onto the north side of the building and you're not allowed to go down into the landscape I went to the site and I decided that was what we weren't going to do we were going to break the rules and actually make a kind of dialectic where the original building is a kind of stone the new building would be like a feather where the original building is an awful lot of circulation the new building would be open circulation so this old dialectic back and forth so this this becomes something quite in contrast to that and the when I presented this to the competition to the jury I said excuse me for breaking the rules but I found the the courage in inscription in your stone facade where it said the soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real so they they went for it this is a painting in their collection which is which I found fascinating it's by zhao shen it's it's called the north sea from the year 366 and this idea of fusing landscape and architecture something that's kind of deep in their collection and they're in their Asian collection was that also helped me argue for the for the project the building itself becomes almost like chunks of ice floating in the grass and this notion of the physical form really taking on this this absolute let's say drifting landscape aspect so the main connection to the old building was crucial and that's that was discovered by my partner Chris McVoy where you could remove two walls here and actually create a secondary axis so the whole building is like a kind of skyscraper lying down in the landscape sculpture gardens are created between these lenses the the whole circulation of this building then connects to the back to the circulation of the main building through this incision that creates a kind of complete two-part architecture everything is serviced from below and then one enters either at the parking level or at the top level at the grade level and it's a whole series of open-ended circulations that move through all the galleries in many different ways you can buy spy pass some galleries cut through some galleries the entrance is a piece by Walter de Maria called one son and 34 moons this is his one son which is a disc 500 feet in diameter of goldleaf sliced at the top and the 34 moons were really part of our competition entry so we allowed him to replace those and become part of his artwork that way they would never put a boat or something in the front of the museum so even at during the winter these bring light down to the parking garage below so become part of his artwork but also changing the space of arrival and this is a kind of dramatic space in fact before the museum opened we found people downstairs in this garage having picnics putting their tables up underneath these spotters of light and in the water above making these move down below the main entrance connecting the main lens connecting the whole sequence connecting the upper level and the lower level the stair up to the trustees room in the library which key Norton did as a single beam which had to be actually put in place before the pavilion was built and then exposing the truss the single trust that holds up that that glass pavilion this is an invention for the light and also for the air conditioning called fluttering T's so all the services for the air is moved up through these T's and this holds up the lens but brings in north light on one side and south light on the other side so bringing that kind of cool blue light and the sort of warm light of the south and mixing it just subtly you can see it here where there's the warm south light and this is the cool blue North light mixing it in each of the galleries giving the whole museum as a special condition of natural light of course curators always black this out but we provide it anyway you know and there's that moment where the condition of the old building is sliced through and you get the circulation connecting both the old and the new some of the great parts of their collection is the largest and the Gucci collection in America so we envision right in competition and the Gucci's peace fountain with a section of an unfinished piece out in the distance in the landscape that's pretty close to the way it was realized and a Gucci cord and special material was devised 16 inches wide and German optical glass this this is a structural plank which really brings a kind of diffuse light to everything in the lenses so these become almost it's almost as if the building is built out of blocks of light and it's all open 7 days a week in 24 hours a day so the people of Kansas City can actually really enjoy this as a public space it's also a building that's free unlike the museum modern art which cost you a lot of money to go in in Kansas City you can go to this museum for free and the sculpture garden is accessible from about eight places along the edges of the building so this notion of how the thing changes in time here it is on a sunny day there it is in the winter and at night the sole feeling I mean it there's the idea that's driving the design but also the phenomena of how the building changes how we experience that change this is the one of the newest projects just opening in a month and a half City deserve at Lowe's young in Biarritz France it was a competition for a surf museum right in the coast of the the real surfing area of actually the only surfing area of Europe Biarritz is right here and it's also a project about the health of the ocean so the idea of the of the of the mayor and his staff was to make a surfing museum but also make a museum that could tell everyone about ecology and about the health or the lack of health of the ocean so when I made my presentation I added I made my introduction that in fact I'm from the West Coast and when I graduated from high school with my best friend we surfed every beach from Washington State down to Mexico and that gave me a little bit of knowledge about the surf everybody else was dressed in black all the other architects were dressed in black looking very academic and there you see that the the two rocks which are part of the big surfing Beach and brought back as glass rocks in the building and the whole landscape going out to the ocean edge is now being realized so the basic concept of the building is under the sky and under the sea a single simple idea which creates a big public space on top and creates the sort of implosion of the feeling of the curvilinear feeling of space at the bottom and a public space tilted towards the ocean horizon so that was from the competition drawings the models we made on numerous models over the period of about two years we won the competition in 2005 this notion of being able to see down and see the great exhibition hall from the entrance I think this has a this has a bit of a video but maybe it's not working no it's not that's alright every beam in this building was different because of the curvilinear aspect so every beam had to be cast in a special casting and then moulds had to be made for for the the swimming pool which is was inspired by dog town the idea of incorporating a swimming pool that was dry that allowed the skateboarders to use it of course the mayor really got up in arms about this but they began using it before the building was finished so that that kind of life of surf cultures was alive and well in France as well as America building is all in white concrete all cast in place and you can see the kind of glass of the entrance they in the sort of ramp inviting you to the main plaza the view out to the sea this is all portuguese stone with grass growing between the restaurant with it with a kind of terrace overlooking the ocean and that feeling of a kind of let's say magical space connected to the sky under the sky under the sea so this feeling of the clouds going by and the the guardrails are all in german optical glass so the sun catches those guardrails and they create sort of wonderful lines and sometimes cast on the plaza itself or the change in weather is picked up by these very thin sandblasted glass german optical glass guardrails the feeling of coming in and going down the curve curvature of the space details in enameled steel toronto stairs coming down to the wood floor there's one skylight in the space this will be filled with exhibitions by exhibition designers in Paris which we can't control but we did we did have one skylight that which is a kind of oculus that brings its natural light down and underneath the skate pool a kind of pregnant whale feeling of space the the kiosk and the restaurant are enough to light the whole building at night so the whole public space is lit at night just from the nature of the of these buildings glowing and it's made the the glass itself is made of oka Lux which looks like foam and when you look at the end of it it's like polar bear hair with little straws and the way I sold it to the mayor as I said it's Laocoon de la Mer the foam of the sea and he said oh well in that case we have to have it so it's not a space you can skate in you can skate in the pool the Portuguese stones make it too rough but it is a space that curves out to the sea and cups in a way cups the space of the sky two other little projects that I think are full of ambiguity this one the Museum of the Visigoths in Toledo Spain is really about the abbé the ambiguity of the origin of other people which became the object of this this museum this was a competition I don't know if any of you have been to Toledo which is an amazing dense town in the middle of Spain with the tojo River that kind of wraps it like a rubber band causing this dense fabric but our site is out here in the plain the sort of nothing zone but kind of let's say flat territory and the in the end like researching the the the the the sort of origin of the Visigoths they came from barbaric tribes they came from the Germanic the Byzantine Roman Christian there really is a mystery of this culture which really somehow needed be captured in a building some way and I mean the first thought was that the building needed to be dispersed and in a sense in the opposite feeling of the compression of the city the sort of these I made on site this is an amazing place to visit the the hill shape and the Taj River the way they compressed this whole town this fabric of this town but in a way our site is the opposite it's dispersed so we had the thought of in a way warping the ground and causing in a way the building to just occur almost as if it was a piece of the earth and that was the first sketch made about the about the site bring a piece of the tosh.o River into the space and the idea of the the whole idea of the form of the building then came a little bit from El Greco's views of Toledo I thought of those wonderful incredible mysterious paintings of El Greco and what if we could just take the holes in the clouds and make those holes in the clouds become holes in a folded plane of earth and that would be in a way the whole building would be a pergola of shadows so we actually this is a this is before we decided literally to take the holes in the clouds so these holes are a little less articulate but in finally in the in the final project we actually took the holes in the clouds from El Greco and you can see the building is just in one level and it's in this kind of fold of the earth exhibition space completely flexible lit from from the holes in the clouds that go all the way down to the to the to the water court which is a this great pergola of shadows a place of arrival so for me the project is about time it's about this mysterious origin of the Visigoths where do they come from you know what fragments we have and how does that connect to now and I thought about st. Augustine in fact I'm writing a text about time which is a very difficult text very ambiguous what then is time if no one asked me I know if I want to explain it to a questioner I do not know we measure times but how can we measure what does not exist the past is no longer the future not yet and what of the present so another project which is ambiguously fusing urbanism architecture and landscape and somehow it's mixing all these into some third thing a project for a competition that I'm sorry to say we didn't win Zaha won it and Zhou Haas pieces under construction I was visiting it the other day but this notion here for us was the idea of a weave it's in the Ken book area of Seoul Korea which is a very dense fabric almost like woven together one of the rules of the competition was you had to indicate the old castle wall so we decided we would build that in glass glass planks or glass block and then the entire building itself would be a three-dimensional Park in a triaxial weave of structure so there would be Park space on three different levels and it would gradually merge with a tower figure so this whole structure that would then fold up and become a tower figure it's called world design Park but there's an enormous programmatic component you know Convention Center the Koreans are really great about saying of what a park is because it has like 20 other you know programmatic requirements so this really was a way of addressing all these things and somehow making it this this figure which is yet another thing and it the forms of the hexagon really results from the tri-axial weave of the structure all in post-tension steel in a concrete frame so we thought also as the building grew up there would somehow turn into a fabric form and that would somehow give it a glow as it would go through this sort of phase change and transform itself in the vertical dimension and there's some of the programs the the park the Education Center design Information Center convention hall special exhibition hall underground shopping mall many different aspects to the program which I'm sure are still changing and just views of how it integrates itself the sort of fuzzy edges of how it would integrate itself in that urban frame you could come and go in all different zones this used to be a football stadium and now the whole thing is taken over as a public space there's the old castle wall which passes through the space of the of the new forum and at night the sort of condition of three-dimensional Park glowing as it turns into a tower so to drop down in scale also in Seoul and and and to go to this sort of dimension of anything can can be architecture anything could be the beginning point of architecture this is a project for an ideal client in a way someone who wants to build a giant gallery and have a house in a guest house I I did it I think I did 25 different schemes it's a very impacted and dense site and at a certain point I decided you know it's a place about art and music and in a certain point I found this score by arnholt isfahan from 1967 and decided that this building could be based on a musical score to take these fragments of the musical composition pull them apart and make the staff actually become skylights so the piece was called symphony of modules and we sort of took it apart and made that become basically the formation of the the structure of the project so there's a guest house entrance pavilion and a main house all over a great gallery that underlies the pawn system now you can see how they talk back and forth across this water pond that's the sort of impacted area of these houses and this this their gallery that underlies this whole space and the skylight system going above 55 different skylights that bring light into this complex the entrance pavilion which you arrive from below and a certain moment you're you're at shoulder you're at sort of elbow height you see across the water pond and you see both the guest house and the main house and it's as if the the building is pushing up from below so this whole gallery system which is the main underpinning of the house gets pushed up in three different pavilions from below it's a it's the project is for the the director of dieng shipping company and he wanted a perfect project for his guests to sort of his art collection and it's in a way it's it's one of those projects where you really can do every single detail and it's a rare you know those opportunities where every every part and every piece every light fixture every aspect which brings me back to my earlier work which really was about houses about apartments the joy of making those every single detail in the drawings there you see it under construction you can see the skylight system in the roof the steel roof structure bamboo form concrete at the base we split bamboo in half and become a kind of formwork which hides the form ties the steel structure over the water pond and at a certain point I wanted to do this in red and brass but at a certain point the Korean contractor couldn't make the red and brass the color and the texture so we said we really have to do this at saner x' in Kansas City now the client said fine it has to be perfect so all the whole skin of this building is being made in Kansas City and shipped and being installed in Korea so this is again this opposite flow being made in America and shipped and installed in Asia there it is under construction the entrance right at the entrance a kind of relief of the whole project sort of fountain at right at the entrance and cast cast brass so the last project is the most exciting one for me it's a community library for Queens and it's the condition is really a site that's over built these there are several new towers being built now right right around here so the library is supposed to service this whole new community it's impossible because the towers are sort of 50 times larger than the size of the library so this ambiguity of the problem is that the library at 20,000 square feet which is supposed to serve this whole community has no physical presence the site is large enough you could build the whole building in one story I think we did like 20 schemes and I thought the real problem of this project is it needs a presence I mean it's a public space it's it's serving the community it is a library so I saw the context it really has in a way the pepsi-cola sign in a way the whole this it's right on the edge of the water this is the gantry Park and it's a very particular site because there's Luke owns FDR memorial under construction there's oscar niemeyer and leigh Corbusier's UN building and right there is our site this and these are all those big condominium towers kind of bulky but this little little piece of land will be a community library so the context in model form that's the size of the building so the idea was to inscribe the elevation in a circuit that would always reveal the Manhattan of views so one of the one of the aspects of the client they said we must take advantage of the view in Manhattan so we decided that the whole movement through the building could be in a way sliced in the facade so you could in a way the whole circulation system would cut a figure in this facade it's sort of 80 feet high and 40 feet wide that was one idea and the second idea is what's the problem I mean today in a library it's it's the problem of digital media and the book when I go into REMS library in Seattle I go into the first floor the entire first floor is just people on computers there's no sign of any any book so this idea of somehow uniting the feeling of a library so here everybody is on computers they're all on computers but at their backs are the books so when you come in and and look up you see stacks so the whole view in from the inside the first view is stack stack stack but everybody's on their computers so there's a kind of fusion of these two elements and the building section really is expressive of the children's library the teens library and the main library so the three cuts there these three cuts in this gigantic facade which give it a kind of presence inside the children's library and there you see this this feeling of a building which is really sliced by all these forces that are going on inside of it otherwise a very simple prism 80 feet by 40 feet defining a public space so this is how we argued that we didn't want to build the building all on one level we said we're gonna define a reading Garden here Michael Van Valkenburg is the the landscape architect so these would be gingko trees one enters the building through this reading garden and then there's a strip of restored ancient East River water garden here with frogs and turtles and everything that they could have an educational laboratory of water here but the building itself is a kind of prism of this vertical condition there's a view through the arrival garden of the ginkgo trees the feeling of those cuts showing the children's library the main library and the slice of the circulation route up that stair moving across the facade so the entire the entire building is concrete no columns with spanning 40 feet and the entire building is sheath and 100% recycled foamed aluminum so it'll be an insulation on the outside and then this this foamed aluminum skin on the on the exterior so it has this kind of glowing quality at night and it has the kind of texture otherwise and then views from the inside back to Manhattan are also shaped by these cuts everything is open so it's like one big space here is my my reading my research I worked on this for six months and I read every single book about libraries like Umberto Eco lost in libraries and the view the the sort of presence of the building from Manhattan looking back again the context of the pepsi-cola scene and this sort of presence of this building in the distance so this notion of us of a small building an ambiguous form in a way becomes a kind of iconic presence for the for the community library drawing the community in so conclusion how can you conclude on ambiguity this is an ambiguous photograph of the Mars Lander spirit stuck in the lunar or in the Martian talcum dust it's been there for I think a couple years now it's stuck in the dust but it's still sending back photographs and they thought it wouldn't be able to send back photographs because they thought the solar panels would clog up with dust but the the wind on Mars blows them clean and free so it still sending back images I think today my idea of ambiguity is really something that has to do with taking the ambiguity as it positive as well as a negative but then saying in a way that concept as a heuristic device is a way of transcending the ambiguity and a way of giving architecture a kind of backbone a kind of let's say a kind of force but in the end I go back to my original book about idea and phenomena it's really not just the idea that's driving the design but it's the phenomena of the experience of architecture which is the most important thank you [Applause]

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 958

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Ambiguity, Landscapes, Materials, Megastructures, Art museums, Natural history museums, Libraries, Houses, Art galleries, Vertical parks, Raimund Abraham, Raimund Abraham Memorial Lectures

Id: 1n-x5mP-izU

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2017