UN studio project just caught my eyes. Browsing through the web and discover some design. It is not extreme yet it stands for its purpose in a striking way. From buildings to chairs just like the Barcelona chair by Mies Van Der Rohe. The different is the chair design and name. MYchair does has it purpose as a seat just like Barcelona. The fact is when you are an architect, you never run away from designing anything useful in daily life. Anything not only buildings.
MOMEMA in Dubai by UN studio is a more tender idea compared to Frank Gehrys. The exploration of space is a great. Its interior somehow is not that expressive as the exterior. It tends to adapt another style. A style more to Daniel Libeskind. Yet to said, the MOMEMA does stand great in Dubai along with other vertical growing buildings.
UN studio also has the Star facade in Taiwan - Technically acting as a sunscreen and weather barrier the curved facade is fully glazed and combines the curtain wall glazing with horizontal lamellas and vertical glass fins. The position and size of each of the façade elements are derived from a twisted frame system, which is related to the interior organisation of the building. The concave front of the building displays different fluent forms when seen from varying distances and directs the visual field of the customers traveling on the spiraling escalators. Edge-lighting for the vertical glass fins spreads soft colours onto the façade by night. The lighting intensity and colour effects are digitally controlled and choreographed adding another layer of fluidity to the building’s skin.
That was the review of the facade of the building. The building depends on the exterior to make it tally with other buildings. It still represents Taiwan in a new way. The idea is there.
UN studio make its debut in the labratory. Science is no longer the same with this building. Some of Zaha Hadid first impression as in the Montepelliar building. It looks familiar to one of the building in final project either.
The research labroratory - The facade is constructed from flat, vertical aluminum slats, which, in places, are twisted outwards in bowed forms. Tall, vertical undulations are generated, which present an open or a closed aspect depending on the angle under which they are viewed. On the lower level the colour yellow is used, which gradually changes to green towards the top of the building. In the interior, two internal vertical voids allow daylight to enter the interior functioning as a form of internal facade. The two voids have the geometry of asymmetrical truncated cones which mirror each other vertically. Shared walkways surround these internal voids, creating a clear organisation whereby dark corridor systems can be avoided. On the ground floor, where daylight is at its lowest, yellow is used. Per floor this colour then deepens through to orange and finally to red on the uppermost level.
The next project : The design for the Theatre Spijkenisse focuses on the placement and orientation of the building in the urban location, whilst simultaneously providing architectural solutions for programming needs and public access. The placing of the programmes within the building aims for efficient routing through the theatre, coupled with a logical relationship to the surroundings, whilst the design and placement of the various volumes make use of the natural variations in the levels of the site. The two main theatre spaces are positioned to receive the visitor flow directly from the foyer and the public square. From the foyer, a sculptural stairway forms the binding element towards the entrances to the theatre rooms. The theatre cafe is located adjacent to the nearby water and is designed as a third theatre, in the form of an amphitheatre.
The building is structured to combine a unit-based volume (the black box of the theatre) and a series of movement-based volumes (foyer and public circulation). Because this organising principle is made constructive, a fluent internal spatial arrangement is actualised, efficiently connecting spaces to each other. The multipurpose auditorium can seat up to 450, and that is adaptable to a great variety of performances. The free-flowing space of the foyer is made possible by a spiraling constructive element that connects the entrance to the auditorium and to the music rooms above, thus welding together ‘with a twist’ the three levels of this side of the building. This twist forms a 3D interpretation of the repetitive pattern, executed in the muted tones of stage make-up, which is applied to the facades and then enveloped by a glittering mesh.
Colourful just like a building in Kuching by DNA. The Boulevard shopping centres that look simple during the day and lighting make it alive at the night. Brilliant idea for sharp effect and minimalism cost. Credit to Mr. William. Haha.
Rhino facade strip from UN studio is not a bad idea after all. The moving lines do potray every single space well. As it is unique that a megayacht shipyard allows publicity regarding their design and manufacturing process.
The Burnham Pavilion in Chicago is not a bad term either. The shape is smooth and it just looks nice from the picture itself.
Out There: Architecture beyond Building
There is a distinct dystopian thread running through Out There: Architecture Beyond Building that leaves you more concerned about the mental health of the exhibitors than the world they attempt to critique.
Its curator and director of the Architecture Biennale Aaron Betsky tasked around two dozen international architects to produce a piece — not of architecture, but about architecture — to explore how the profession can domesticate technological systems to make people feel “more at home in the modern world”.
The majority of the exhibitors are showing in the Arsenale, a 300m-long, 10m-high linear procession of large rooms in what was the city’s old rope works. The scale and character of the installations they have produced suit this windowless space well, but those expecting the shock of the new may be disappointed. Many of the pieces, knowingly or otherwise, have a space-age rhetoric that has become instantly recognisable.
Moving through the first space, David Rockwell’s and Jones/Kroloff’s Hall of Fragments, is a bit like going through a kaleidoscopic egg timer. Projected onto two large screens that in plan curve towards each other are fractured images from a hundred classic films, from Hitchcock’s North by North-West to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These filmic fragments follow your progress as dynamic shards, even coalesce around you if you pause for a moment, but melt into nothing once you leave your seat.
Other architects explored interactivity such as Barkow Leibinger’s Nomadic Garden, where laser-cut tubular steel pieces of various heights can be reconfigured by visitors throughout the duration of the biennale. Its description as an “ephemeral version of poché” chimes with other gaming metaphors in the show such as the computer game that models interactive planning processes by MVRDV, and the installation organised on a giant chessboard by Penezic & Regina. Here, the rigid logic of a game, with its necessary abstractions and clear-cut rules, hints at the dehumanising approach to architecture that is one of the show’s major themes.
One of the high points is Nigel Coates’ Hypnerotosphere which, taking the obverse approach, puts human experience at its centre.
A suspended screen creates a circular enclosure, inside which are fleshy pieces of furniture, loosely suggestive of a domestic interior. Projected onto the screen are two interacting male dancers interspersed with images of the Corviale, the doomed mile-long housing block on the outskirts of Rome. The suggestion is that architecture should amplify, not disrupt, such lines of human desire.
But elsewhere, images of domesticity have a darker agenda. UN Studio’s installation of three interconnected white chambers, for example, aims to evoke feelings of emptiness and alienation, The pessimist undertow really reaches full strength with Matthew Ritchie’s and Arand/Lasch’s “anti-pavilion” which “inverts the obsolete technocratic optimism usually associated with pavilions.” Its creators suggest that the truncated polyhedral shapes, which can be scaled up and down and attached together in limitless different ways, could be multiplied across the universe.
This notion of infinity is extended by Patrik Schumacher, who wants us to imagine an urbanism where “there are no more landmarks to hold onto, no axis to follow and no more boundaries to cross.” Both these practitioners, with their emphasis on multiple centres, reveal their profound interest in the network society. And yet these endless, amorphous propositions seem far too literally inferred from the immense scale of emerging global communication systems.
Betsky’s view, that we are controlled by technology and imprisoned by architecture, is certainly popular within a certain wing of the architectural intelligentsia, but is it true?
Technology will increasingly marginalise architecture as the means to connect people in the 21st century, and it would have been great to see a show that explored more convincingly how the profession can help shape the merging of virtual and real worlds in a positive way. But in deliberately ducking the thorny question of building, the show fails to place architecture firmly, materially, and imperatively on this territory. The ideas are too frequently so tentative, so ungrounded in reality, as to offer little insight.
At the end of the main Arsenale exhibition hall, out to the left, are a handful of pavilions for nations too new or too small to yet have a place in the Giardini. One of these, the Croatian Pavilion, has as its motto: “We are positive we can destroy our world, yet we do not easily give up the idea that we can improve it. Into the sea of possibilities we jump and swim.” You can’t help wishing that more of the exhibitors had grabbed their trunks and dived in too.
There is a distinct dystopian thread running through Out There: Architecture Beyond Building that leaves you more concerned about the mental health of the exhibitors than the world they attempt to critique.
Its curator and director of the Architecture Biennale Aaron Betsky tasked around two dozen international architects to produce a piece — not of architecture, but about architecture — to explore how the profession can domesticate technological systems to make people feel “more at home in the modern world”.
The majority of the exhibitors are showing in the Arsenale, a 300m-long, 10m-high linear procession of large rooms in what was the city’s old rope works. The scale and character of the installations they have produced suit this windowless space well, but those expecting the shock of the new may be disappointed. Many of the pieces, knowingly or otherwise, have a space-age rhetoric that has become instantly recognisable.
Moving through the first space, David Rockwell’s and Jones/Kroloff’s Hall of Fragments, is a bit like going through a kaleidoscopic egg timer. Projected onto two large screens that in plan curve towards each other are fractured images from a hundred classic films, from Hitchcock’s North by North-West to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These filmic fragments follow your progress as dynamic shards, even coalesce around you if you pause for a moment, but melt into nothing once you leave your seat.
Other architects explored interactivity such as Barkow Leibinger’s Nomadic Garden, where laser-cut tubular steel pieces of various heights can be reconfigured by visitors throughout the duration of the biennale. Its description as an “ephemeral version of poché” chimes with other gaming metaphors in the show such as the computer game that models interactive planning processes by MVRDV, and the installation organised on a giant chessboard by Penezic & Regina. Here, the rigid logic of a game, with its necessary abstractions and clear-cut rules, hints at the dehumanising approach to architecture that is one of the show’s major themes.
One of the high points is Nigel Coates’ Hypnerotosphere which, taking the obverse approach, puts human experience at its centre.
A suspended screen creates a circular enclosure, inside which are fleshy pieces of furniture, loosely suggestive of a domestic interior. Projected onto the screen are two interacting male dancers interspersed with images of the Corviale, the doomed mile-long housing block on the outskirts of Rome. The suggestion is that architecture should amplify, not disrupt, such lines of human desire.
But elsewhere, images of domesticity have a darker agenda. UN Studio’s installation of three interconnected white chambers, for example, aims to evoke feelings of emptiness and alienation, The pessimist undertow really reaches full strength with Matthew Ritchie’s and Arand/Lasch’s “anti-pavilion” which “inverts the obsolete technocratic optimism usually associated with pavilions.” Its creators suggest that the truncated polyhedral shapes, which can be scaled up and down and attached together in limitless different ways, could be multiplied across the universe.
This notion of infinity is extended by Patrik Schumacher, who wants us to imagine an urbanism where “there are no more landmarks to hold onto, no axis to follow and no more boundaries to cross.” Both these practitioners, with their emphasis on multiple centres, reveal their profound interest in the network society. And yet these endless, amorphous propositions seem far too literally inferred from the immense scale of emerging global communication systems.
Betsky’s view, that we are controlled by technology and imprisoned by architecture, is certainly popular within a certain wing of the architectural intelligentsia, but is it true?
Technology will increasingly marginalise architecture as the means to connect people in the 21st century, and it would have been great to see a show that explored more convincingly how the profession can help shape the merging of virtual and real worlds in a positive way. But in deliberately ducking the thorny question of building, the show fails to place architecture firmly, materially, and imperatively on this territory. The ideas are too frequently so tentative, so ungrounded in reality, as to offer little insight.
At the end of the main Arsenale exhibition hall, out to the left, are a handful of pavilions for nations too new or too small to yet have a place in the Giardini. One of these, the Croatian Pavilion, has as its motto: “We are positive we can destroy our world, yet we do not easily give up the idea that we can improve it. Into the sea of possibilities we jump and swim.” You can’t help wishing that more of the exhibitors had grabbed their trunks and dived in too.
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