Shallow Manifesto

Sometimes you just have to laugh. But not because the piece of architecture is funny ridiculous. Rather, because perhaps it does something relatively simply and very, very well.

In this case, Manifesto Architecture dressed up a former gaggingly bland building in the otherwise chaotic Myeongdong district of Seoul. A showy bit of retrofit, mainly for a global fashion brand, but with an intersting, if simple twist.

To quote ArchDaily:

The process of M-Plaza's "volumization" can be described in three steps, each with increasing intensity. First the glass curtain wall was etched with a ceramic frit pattern inspired by stacked cubes giving the smooth facade an initial charge of volume. Then a grid of vertical and horizontal extruded frames was installed to divide the facade into a set of puzzle pieces each 500mm deep.

Finally, a series of “funnels”, new glass openings framed by sloped stainless steel panels that take full advantage of the 500mm depth achieved by the extruded frames, are plugged into various puzzle pieces. These three architectural languages give the facade a greater level of depth and dynamism, but are applied in a consistent manner over the large facades allowing the irregularities to exist within a certain boundary of order.

At first reading, it sounds pretentious. One way of putting it is that this is hardly a profound piece of architecture. Another way of seeing it is to recognise the way the architects applied their core skills of formal, compositional, programmatic and spatial, within an extremely constrained set of limits.

Manifesto Architecture deserves to be taken seriously, with a significant body of work, both built and rhetorical, that spans the scale from wooden cutlery to monumental buildings.

I feel guilty for the cheap shot of my title for this post.

Read: http://www.archdaily.com/556223/m-plaza-manifesto-architecture/

Occam's Razor cuts to the bleeding obvious

Occasionally (excuse the pun) you see a statement about a piece of architecture, that could be an elegant principle, worthy of repeating.  Sort of like conforming with Occam's Razor that the simplest theory that explains everything is the best theory.  Or Einstein's famous dictum, that all explanations should be reduced to their simplest, but no more.

It was in that spirit that I opened the post on DETAIL das architecture portal headed Four Different Façades – Sports Centre, expecting to see a building with an elegantly inflected marriage of responses to distinct functions, compelling in their 'just rightness'.

Well, the 'work' done by the facades takes the logic of this building a certain distance.  The south-east oriented façade of the swimming pool uses polycarbonate panels as air collectors to generate heat for the building.  And it makes perfect sense that it should be this same facade that has a large operable 'gate', so that the indoor pool can be opened up to the outside in summer. Unfortunately, the other three 'vertical' facades look either arbitrary or simplistic, and frankly don't have any compelling urban or other conditions with which to engage in any emphatic way.  How disappointing.

But also a reality check.  Let's face it, this particular 'principle' has always been used by most buildings, anyway.  You actually have to go pretty far out of your way to produce ruthless 'four part similarity' as in say Palladio's Villa Rotonda.  A good building doesn't actually have to make a virtue of its accommodating the influences of the site, and is likely to be modulated in three dimensions in a manner more complex than simplistically in the planes of four facades.

Perhaps my favourite personal example of this other fearsomely direct approach suggested by the DETAIL blog post, is Nouvel's Musée du quai Branly. But that building is infinitely more subtle. Think about it: the glass veil completing the Parisian street while creating the garden within a site.  The necessary reinforcement of the street corner with the right scale of solid building (I get upset that the iconic green wall distracts from the elementally potent urban design gesture).  The freedom to produce gleefully complicated 'backs' of the bounding buildings for use as studios for artists in residence, the porosity of the 'back' of the garden where it adjoins a residential community away from the boulevards......and so on.

Comparing the Nouvel's building and the "Inselparkhalle" in Hamburg reminds me of the confrontation in a NY street between Crocodile Dundee and the hopeful little thug with the thin little knife.  Like Dundee, Nouvel, might say as he points to the Branly: "That's a building with different facades!"

Willful ignorance

I hasten to concede that what I'm about to write may be contributing to the beginning of an urban myth.  But if not, it is a perfect example to support the dominant theme of my blog – that the acquisition of knowledge in architecture is bedeviled by a culture of willful ignorance.

Inhabitat this week carries the story of one more star architect causing havoc with the unintended consequences of his playfully superficial aesthetic concepts.  This time it's Rafael Viñoly’s distinctively curved ‘Walkie Talkie’ building under construction in London, concentrating reflected glare more suitable to solar power station than to an urban building.  Glare from 'Walkie Talkie' Skyscraper Melts Parked Cars in London screams the headline, and one's first inclination is to say 'Yea, right, pull the other leg.'  Until one reads the detail.

It turns out to be pretty simple.The east and west walls of the new skyscraper are prevented by the use of external louvres from causing coherent reflections.  But the north and south facades are left unencumbered by such devices, and deliberately designed with maximum areas of glass to take advantage of the views.The south facade is not only concave in plan but also gently tapered to a subtle curve in section.  From photographs, it appears that the combination is particularly successful in directing specular (mirror-like) reflections from a large part of the facade, in concentrated beams to its surroundings.

While the degree of the problem could be described as novel, the basic causes should be hardly surprising.  I would have thought that any major building in a city like London would have had to submit a reflectivity study as part of its development approval application.

But there is no shortage of precedent of other prominent architects or iconic buildings having experienced similar problems – think Frank Gehry's Disney Hall.  My favourite example is the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas where concentrated reflections raise poolside temperatures uncomfortably, and undoubtedly shorten the time to an uncomfortable sunburn. That particular case is made all the more interesting by observing not just how the Vdara focuses rays onto its own pool, but also how the reflections from the neighboring Aria Hotel are dispersed outward from its convex surface only to be refocused by the Vdara's concave one.

But let's not get too carried away that this is special knowledge.  Anybody who has ever paid any attention at all to lenses and reflectors, in everyday life, should have been able to predict that some version of this problem was going to be associated with any unobstructed, concave reflective surface.

So which part of everyman's experience is not part of the knowledge base of a famous architectural office?  Because this is not just an issue of a single creative mind wielding a 6B pencil, it is also that the entire team working on this building remained either blissfully unaware or – as I am fond of suggesting – willfully ignorant during months of design development.

In case anyone is in any doubt that we are not talking about trivial little problems, or even the low-grade misery more usually associated with architects getting things wrong, it is worth listening to the video on the Independent newspaper web site here.

The news media make much of melted plastic in cars parked opposite the building, and mention in passing the possibility of blinding glare for motorists.  The popular papers and archipop blogs and zines don't even begin to canvass the additional load on cooling systems of surrounding buildings.  That will happen when the court cases begin – citing all the times and places that this has happened before.  And that is when we will find out that lawyers, unlike architects, do not forget their precedents.

Read more: Glare from 'Walkie Talkie' Skyscraper Melts Parked Cars in London | Inhabitat
More quotes in the Independent, here.

See a video clip case study analysis of solar design problems at the Vdra Hotel, Las Vegas at Gnarly Architecture.  It uses a massing model in Rhino and the Heliotrope plugin with Grasshopper to raytrace solar vectors reflecting off the building surfaces into the swimming pool area.  OK, so I am a bit nerdy, but I want to make the point that architects do have the tools.  Guessing is no longer an option.