The tall building- Reconsidered.
In collaboration with Asya Nur Celik.
Instructor : Maxi Spina
The tall building’s curtain wall and its large glazed surfaces pose a problem for both design and representation. The moment one starts dealing with glass one signs up for the semi permeability aspect of it, specially if surveyed from medium to large distances. The resultant image that we perceive from glazed surfaces present a difficult question regarding the ever changing conditions of light reflections throughout the day. If then, our material of interest is never fully invisible, especially from the distances from which the iconography of the tall building is associated, one begs the question - what is the image we really retrieve from it’s appearance? The Tall Building’s curtain wall therefore demands to be worked through both images and objects, not as two separate sites of production, but as a synthetic act. This project has also been published by multiple blogs.
Slices
The Massing is derived from the context- the blocks were arranged considering the flow to be created across Grand Avenue and Olive Street. The Cuts made to the blocks were derived from the buildings around the site. The Cuts and Rotations of masses are further translated into the folds in the envelope of the tower, generating different views and conditions on every side of the site, dividing and multiplying the resultant image further. The building deals with the “image” generated on different scales, therefore multiplying it in three different ways: The first one being by the cuts made by the contextual geometry used to generate tension between the programs in the two towers. The second one being the folds made through the cuts to close the massing, and the third one being rotating individual glass panels made by a grid projected onto the initial masses.
