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/

The other robot revolution: Prefabrication 2.0

Australia’s tallest prefab tower tops out at double speed

This recent headline in The Fifth Estate suddenly brought into the spotlight a quiet development in the Australian construction scene.  I first posted about the Hickory Group's  One9 apartment tower in Melbourne, utilising their so-called Unitised Building (UB) System in Too good to be true? back in 2014.



Developed and championed by Australian architect Nonda Katsalidis, the UB system relies on factory-based modular construction with high levels of external and internal finishes and fit out, making for fast on-site assembly.  It claims, and with ongoing development, clearly delivers the big advantages of modular prefabricated construction.  Chief among them are the improved safety and working conditions for the skilled workers who put together the modules in a factory rather than on site.

Less easily accessed is information on the new balance between manual production line work for those human workers, and work performed by the robots inherited along with the defunct car manufacturing facility, in which the new building manufacture is located.

Gehry in Sydney too

On the occasion of its opening, I posted a lengthy piece about the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building at the University of Technology Sydney.  

My emphasis was on the remarkable way in which Gehry adheres to a highly disciplined, almost simplistically rational diagram, while producing wildly innovative sculptural buildings.

The first part of that proposition went down like a lead balloon, in the midst of much bluster by local critics and architects.

Now, looking for something altogether different, I come across a thoughtful article which actually pre-dates my piece, and about which I wish I had known at the time.  The title says it all:
Look past its facade: new UTS business school designed by Gehry from inside-out

Of perhaps greatest interest to me is the claim that the project is 'Australia’s first true 3D-documented building'.  We hear often enough of Gehry's use of Digital Project, the 3D design tool developed by Gehry Technologies as an overlay of the original Catia aircraft design software.  But we rarely have enough of a description of its consequences in how his uniquely complex buildings are tendered and built.

This easily read article adds welcome additional information, images and a video.  It should give anyone who is interested a significant extra understanding to Gerhy's success as arguably the most interesting architect alive.

I am also happy to report that the architectural tourist will be amply rewarded seeking out the building - the University keeps it surprisingly open and accessible.  You can indeed look behind the facade.

Vale Hadid

I woke up to receive my first news of the untimely death of Zaha Hadid, via Inhabitat.  Never carefully accurate, the Inhabitat reporting listed amongst Hadid's achievements the design of the London Olympics Stadium.  Small matter, but of course, Hadid did not do the London Olympics Stadium.  That was done by  Sir Robert McAlpine and Populous, taking an approach to sustainability which it is unlikely Hadid would have.  Her firm did the swimming and diving venue, with the famous controversy over restricted sight-lines.

Hadid will receive scholarly and personal obituaries commensurate with her stature, so I will not attempt one here. 

Zaha Hadid is a great loss; she has exerted a very large influence over contemporary architecture.  I tried very hard to admire her work, but it is likely she will be remembered with mixed feelings. 

If it can be said that the modern movement brought itself into discredit because of its adoption by developers and architects of lesser talents, Hadid's seminal formalism is being brought into disrepute by the shoddy examples produced by her own firm.

Had it with Hadid

I've been waiting for more images to emerge of the Guangzhou Opera House.  They have.  Look and weep.

This from a practice that supposedly employs world-class 'parametrics'.  I could have offered them any number of second year architecture students who understand that the point of 'meshing' a complex surface is to resolve the joints and nodes in the simplest, repetitive way....and that you don't impose an arbitrary 'tessellation strategy' which is guaranteed to defeat that potential.

If the problem were only that , painful as it might be.  Is there any excuse for the shoddy mess at the level where you 'touch' the building?  We have been doing that sort of stone detailing since the Greeks.  It's convenient to blame the rapid evolution of the Chinese building industry for the lack of skilled trades.  But it's not enough to explain why more of the architectural effort hasn't gone into 'designing out' the problems.

There are innumerable short essays and image galleries available now.  Just Google 'Guangzhou Opera House failures'.  The authors generally bend over backwards to be 'fair' to the architects.  I don't know why.....I am with Larry Speck (former dean at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin) on this one:

"Architectural Record recently gave Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House its Best Public Project: Honor Award in the Good Design Is Good Business: China competition and published it on the cover. http://archrecord.construction.com/ar_china/China_Awards/2012/Guangzhou-Opera-House/Guangzhou-Opera-House.asp

Unbelievable! I visited the building last January and was absolutely dismayed at how inept and poorly designed it is. Had anyone from the awards jury (which “included editors from Architectural Record and respected Chinese architects and experts”) actually visited the building? If so, I cannot believe they would consider it “good design.” The building’s failures are glaring and are certainly no secret. The fellow showing me around in Guangzhou did not want to take me to the opera house because he was “ashamed” of it.

The photos in Architectural Record do look dazzling—proof again that photos can be made to lie. The images are dominated by distant views and night shots that obscure the building skin.

If you were an arrogant westerner it would be easy to say that the embarrassing crudeness of the building is not the architect’s fault, but the result of a Chinese building industry not yet up to the visionary imagination of the designer. But that notion is belied by the fact that within view of the opera house are the extraordinary Guangzhou New Library by Nikken Sekkei, the Guangdong Museum by Rocco Design and the Guangzhou Tower by Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit—all of which are ambitious, meticulously designed and beautifully executed. The problem at the opera house is poor design.

Is it possible to create curvilinear forms with very tight radii, superimpose a series of triangular grid patterns, make the building out of a very heavy, brittle material like granite, and realistically expect any sort of success? These seem to be ill-fated conceptual directions. When things very went badly awry, fat caulk joints apparently were the universal solution to poorly resolved design.

The interiors have the same kinds of problems—chases that seem to have been added as an afterthought, indirect lighting imbedded in sumptuous glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum forms where the faceted T-5 fixtures are clearly visible because no one checked cut off angles to be sure the lamps would be concealed.

Promoting clearly flawed design as the “best” we have to offer is demeaning and makes us look ridiculous to people outside the architecture subculture. This is how we lose power in the larger society and become marginalized as a discipline. Elevating “stars” and “signature design” at the expense of deeply rooted and rigorous standards of excellence does a disservice to our field."

MacMansions on exhibition

Australia is represented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial by two young architectural collaborations, each stressing their research-based exploration of alternative practices.  Of particular interest to me is the project by David Neustein and Grace Mortlock, founders of Sydney-based otherothers. 

The opening review by Curbed.com goes to the heart of the problem, even while it oversimplifies the project:

"Turns out, America isn't the only place with a glut of over-sized suburban homes. Australians actually have the largest average home size in the world, which may explain why it took an Australian practice, otherothers, to create such an elegant solution to extraneous space. By building a covered courtyard within the frame of the home, the house-within-a-house concept downsizes in an intelligent way, reducing costs while adding new types of outdoor space."

Glass adventures

My admiration for glass as a material increases daily.  Which is not to say that I think all applications of this extraordinary material are equally virtuous.  But then again, virtue has never been enough to define good architecture.  Heightened emotion might be closer to the mark, and glass has a great way to create some pretty extreme emotions. 

Apparently death-defying transparent floors at great heights are not altogether new.  But I have to say this one, on a slender suspension bridge in China, makes more sense, than most.

Brought to you by inhabitat.com,with a text reflecting their usual casual approach to technical detail, the picture gallery is enough to suggest the awe inspiring thrill that the original timber planked bridges must have inspired in generations of tourist pilgrims.

My previous post about glass was the proposed swimming pool spanning some 25m between luxury apartment blocks at Embassy Gardens in London.  It interests me to speculate why I feel so strongly that there is an ethical as well as aesthetic comparison to be made between the two projects.  Yet the contrast comes sharply to mind, in spite of the fact that I made a case for some virtue in the London project.

The London pool is an impressive but perverse piece of material engineering.  But it is fair to ask: Why hold up many tons of water in mid air, for a haptic experience probably indistinguishable from an infinity edge pool conventionally supported?  And let's face it, the pool is only a rendering at the moment, promoting a developer's real estate sales.

In contrast, the Chinese suspension bridge is an elegant technical response to context and history, and guaranteed to maintain the thrill for the entire journey.  It ticks the boxes for a great use of glass in architecture.

Big things in the sky 2

Sky pool.  Sounds like an oxymoron, holding well over 600 tons of water up in the sky, especially when it's suggested that it will be done without a visible structure.

It is tempting to believe that floating a pool in the air is just a sales gimmick given life by photorealistic computer rendering, and that it won't be there when the building is actually built.  But since Jean Nouvel managed to disguise a cantilevered pleasure garden as a heliostat, I'm ready to believe that this latest fairytale is the genuine expression of a megalomaniac developer's fantasy.  A kind view in the Guardian quotes Sean Mulryan, of Irish developer Ballymore:

“My vision for the sky pool stemmed from a desire to push the boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering . . . I wanted to do something that had never been done before.” 

I can sympathise with that.  Without that kind of hubris, we wouldn't have had the Eiffel Tower, or for that matter, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.  Here, the 25-metre-long pool will be completely “structure free” and made of 20cm thick glass sheets, a proposition given credence only because it is  designed by engineering giant Arup Associates with Eckersley O’Callaghan, plus aquarium specialists Reynolds.

But my suspension of disbelief is tempered by the pragmatism of Henry Pryor, a buying agent for wealthy clients.  Pryor is reported as suggesting the plans for the pool were “genuinely crackers” and wondered “are there enough exhibitionists to fill it?”  “It’s not easy to say for sure what the extras like pools, tennis courts and home cinemas add to a home,” he told the Guardian. “But for the first time I can honestly say that, while my admiration for the architect is close to reverence, this absurd addition must surely be the biggest mistake I have ever come across.”

That said, the substance of what this apparently absurd gesture is about is the real thrust of the article in the Guardian:

For the overseas investor who has it all, what better trophy to add to the portfolio of properties you will never visit than an apartment with its own 'sky pool'?

The article describes not only the £1bn Embassy Gardens scheme where views of the new US Embassy from the pool are trumpeted as a key selling point – the Guardian asks why you would want to suspend an all-glass bridge beside a building that believes itself to be at such risk of a terror attack that it cowers behind a 30-metre-deep bomb-blast zone?   It goes on to list a series of other London projects with variations on the same theme.

Oh well, advertising in the sky was always effective, be it  a vertical forest as an apology for the real forests we have cut down, a compensation for the sunshine we have cut out, or for ostentatious wealth.  For architects and engineers it does bring a little excitement to their lives.


Read:

The ‘sky pool’ is just the start: London prepares for a flood of bathing oligarchs

Glass is dead, long live glass!

Once again, someone takes a pot shot at glass as the great Satan in building energy efficiency, and once again the glass industry huffs and puffs that there is more to architecture than living in an insulated box.  The two articles are worth reading.

Anything but superficial

A portrait of failed criticism

Under that clever title, Architects Without Frontiers chief Andrew Mackenzie reviews recent commentary in  ArchitectureAU, on ARM Architecture's Portrait building in Melbourne, Australia.  He finds the critical discourse 'marred by racial profiling, pedantry and unsubstantiated opinion'.  And I have to agree with him.

As often happens, the best thing I can do is point you at MacKenzie's excellent and readable article.  Click here to access.

But it's worth adding a little more information not highlighted in MacKenzie's piece.