P1.2 08/02/13_15/02/13

P1.2 Who? What? Why? / constructing_fiction

Metaphorical nomadism and post-urban society

„The permanent discrepancy that exists between our society, which is in perpetual movement, and the professional – indeed, institutional – architecture, that is to be found everywhere.

(...)The subsequent generation has been viewed since the Eighties in terms of the concept of the urban nomad who, according to work requirements, quickly moves his domicile to the vicinity of the place of work.

 

(...)Without going into details, let us note that Japanese consumer society goes much further than Europeans imagine: cities and urban life have undergone extraordinary upheavals in Japan. Although everyone has the impression of sharing the same sort of happiness, there is growing inequality within the different social categories. (...)Japanese society goes beyond the consumer society; it has become the first post-consumer society.

 

(...)'Nomad' is nothing other than a metaphor to describe the way of life of the inhabitants of a metropolis.

(...)Toyo Ito has radically changed the tradtional idea of architecture as something static and lasting. If he were asked to define the difference between architecture and fashion, he would reply that the difference is minimal.

(...)A pao can be easily folded and transported; it is therefore highly suitable for the life of the nomad. I intend to invest the word 'pao' with the connotations of a primitive house which can wrap around the inhabitant like an oversized coat; it is a sort of transportable residence.

(...) Architecture becomes mobile like fashion design. (...)If we take Toyo ito's metaphor to the extreme, architecture is reduced to something that covers the human body as comfortably as clothes.(...) He is also interested in fashion and the 'pop' world. 'Pop' is, moreover, the word he uses to describe urban life and life itself.“

(...)The metaphor of the 'nomad', which is the fruit of his observation of city life, is the result of his own imagination.

(...)The city is split up, is fluid, dynamic, and within such a context the house has lost its symbolical meaning. (...)In Tokyo, the inhabitants do not want to stay put; they are forever on the move.

(...)The residents of Tokyo can, I believe, be compared to nomads wandering in artificial forests.(...) No one stays at home during the day.

(...)If you life alone, your house is just the space where you sleep. (...)Even if it is only a place for sleeping, there should be a bed, a table, a chair, a minimum of comfort, as it is a place of rest.

(..)Of the three pieces of furniture installed one is for gathering information. The nomad woman must know what is going on, and where. (…) The second is a dressing-table, where she can make up and get ready to go out. (…) The last piece is a table, where she can sit down and sip a cup of coffee when she comes home for a short break.

(...)A city is the result of a concentration of populations; but today the city centre is almost deserted by its inhabitants. This centre now functions like an economical-political-cultural machine, producing information. The city has become a sea of signs, without any shape or limits.

(...)In the ephemeral urban space, (…) meaningless symbols are accummulated in expectation of pleasure; but can we not do anything other than reproduce these symbols as attempts at architecture, and play like a nomad with these meaningless symbols?“

                            
 source: Toyo Ito - Architecture of the ephemeral, Sophie Roulet and Sophie Soulet

„The nomad girl does not act or pressure the environment, but rather is prepared to be the object herself of the actions and offers proposed by consumerism.“ Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros                                                                                     

 

P1.2 10/02/13

„All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.“

                                                    Friedrich Nietzsche

P1.2 10/02/13

"Short lived Habits. I love short lived habits, and regard them as an invaluable means for gaining knowledge of many things and states, to the very bottom of their sweetness and bitterness; my nature is altogether arranged for short lived habits, even in the needs of its bodily health, and in general, as far as I can see, from the lowest up to the highest matters. 

 

I always think that this will at last satisfy me permanently (the short lived habit has also this characteristic belief of passion, the belief in everlasting duration; I am to be envied for having found it and recognised it), and then it nourishes me at noon and at eve, and spreads a profound satisfaction around me and in me, so that I have no longing for anything else, not needing to compare, or despise, or hate. But one day the habit has had its time: the good thing separates from me, not as something which then inspires disgust in me but peaceably, and as though satisfied with me, as I am with it; as if we had to be mutually thankful, and thus shook hands for farewell. And already the new habit waits at the door, and similarly also my belief indestructible fool and sage that I am!  That this new habit will be the right one, the ultimate right one. So it is with me as regards foods, thoughts, men, cities, poems, music, doctrines, arrangements of the day, and modes of life.

 

On the other hand, I hate permanent habits, and feel as if a tyrant came into my neighbourhood, and as if my life's breath condensed, when events take such a form that permanent habits seem necessarily to grow out of them: for example, through an official position, through constant companionship with the same persons, through a settled abode, or through a uniform state of health. Indeed, from the bottom of my soul I am gratefully disposed to all my misery and sickness, and to whatever is imperfect in me, because such things leave me a hundred back doors through which I can escape from permanent habits.

 

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation: that would be my banishment and my Siberia."

                                                       The Gay Science / Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Friedrich Nietzsche
                                                                                                                             First published in 1882.

P1.2 09/02/13

„Even if I am only in a place for a short while I quickly build up a routine: I want not just to visit a city but to inhabit it as rapidly as possible.“

„We are always taking the same routes through cities. The tube or the metro forces us to do this, and so – less claustrophobically – do buses. Even on a bike, when we can take any route, we allow ourselves to get funneled along familiar paths, preferring the often slightly longer but nicer cycle lanes because they are ostensibly safer, even though they can actually be more dangerous because one is in a state of less than heightened alert. As pedestrians, too, we not only stick to the same routes, but prefer to cling to the same side of the road.“

„We tend always to approach a given place from the same direction, via the same route. I am always surprised how thoroughly disorientating it is if I arrange to meet someone at a café I know well but, for whatever reason – an earlier appointment somewhere else – end up approaching it from an unusual direction. It's completely bewildering. As if the place we are supposed to be meeting at has disappeared. What's happened to it? Psychlogically, the location of a place is not fixed. It is determined not by where it is but how we get to it.“

„But even if nothing changes, even if the place and the food and the staff remain unchanged, there is still no going back, even though, of course, one does exactly that: one goes back.“

„Nietzsche loved what he called 'brief habits', but he so hated 'enduring habits' that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit (though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be 'a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation.“

                                                                                                   Inhabiting, Restless Cities, Geoff Dyer

P1.2 08/02/13

 

„No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.“

                                                                The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster

P1.1 04/02/13-08/02/13

P1.1 The Williamsburg Trilogy/ constructing a scenario

atlas/constructing an archieve

locality, affiliation, atmosphere - approaching the atlas as abstract tool, the focus lies on the intangible, social, personal, emotional level. Connecting past and future scenarios to create a narrative.

NY Williamsburg mappings

Williamsburg notes

North west and east corner of Keap Street and South 4th Street, Williamsburg, New York.
Mappings on site:

"ten steps 1" series of photographs one taken
 every ten steps around the north west corner
site.                                                              

"ten steps 2" series of photographs one taken
every ten steps around the north east corner
site.                                                              

 

 

 

 

 

Categories of typographic signs in the immediate area of the site.                   

 

NY notebook_23/11/12_30/11/12

New York City Notes

Carnet de Voyage / Travel Log

"Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time."
                                                                                        Paul Auster

 

 Ideally that might be so, but memory can be a tricky and deceitful thing. When remembering details and scenarios can change. Keeping a travel log observations become fixtures, data for studying and interpretation, making the log a valuable tool.

 

 

 

 

"By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was."

 

"On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again."                                           

                                                                                                                                           Paul Auster

 

Being my first visit to New York City, it matters to me where I've been. Tracing my wanderings with the context of a tourist map (in the back of the notebook). I try to create a personal view of the city.

 





North west + east corner of Keap Street and South 4th Street, Williamsburg, New York

 

NY LOBBY ASSIGNMENT_28/11/12

New York Lobbies

Seagram

 

The Seagram Building is a modern office tower designed by german architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Philip Johnson in New York, 1958.

This office skyscraper is in some ways the culmination of the purification process of expression, started decades earlier by functionalism. The high-rise building is a sign of the rationalist mentality of Mies van der Rohe. It illustrates the architect’s motto "Less is more", showing that a simple building can be just as surprising as a building with more composite designs. The Seagram Building is a refined synthesis of rationalist architecture, the socalled International Style and the american high-rise building composing the modern office building.

As usual in functionalism, the concept of the design was to develope form defined by function, reducing ornaments and everything else that was considered unnecessairy to minimum. Preferably the design was constructed from industrial massproduced parts using materials such as steel, glass and concrete. It constitutes an open architecture filled with light.

An opening, like a window in the wall, permits light the transition between the outside and inside of this wall. A lobby is a metaphorical window, a spatial opening, as it in itself is a space of transition between two spaces.

OPENING in relation to the physical connections – site/program/cirkulation

The Seagram presents itself as a bronze glas cube of simple elegance, which is slightly moved backwards from Park Avenue to free an open space, a kind of plaza in front of the building. This open space, which formes a kind of void, a pocket of air, between the tight skyscrapers of Manhattan, functions as a physical and mental transition between the street and the lobby. The fact that it is elevated three steeps from ground- and street level, makes one aware about the entering of a new kind of space.

Since the facade of the first level is fully glassed, it leads automatically across the plaza to the lobby and the clearly through steelframes marked entrancedoors. Entering the lobby and the otherwise empty entrance zone with a small front desk placed in the center, one immediately faces four white huge cubes which seem to penetrate the building from the groundlevel upwards. The cubes constitutes the transportation/cirkulation system of the building, deviding the space into three tall and slim passages whith four elevator shafts on both sides. In the farest part of the lobby there should be two doors leading to the staircases, but they aren’t visible unless passing the elevators. As the Seagram is a tall building, most of the cirkulation will be of vertical character and occure through the elevators, making the lobby the only link between the base floor and the other floors.

OPENING in relation to the visual connections

This connection of the lobby and the other floors is only spatial. There are no visual connections across the different levels, which makes them kind of isolated and private. As the bearing structure is inside the building it allows the use of a non-bearing facade, an open curtainwall. To make the construction still readable, the structure is only inferred by an I-beam steelframe in the facade giving the whole building a uniform harmonious look.

The more public area of the lobby is clearly emphasized through a slightly change into a fully glassed fasade creating visual connections between the outside groundlevel and the inside slightly elevated base level.

OPENING in relation to the atmosphere

Architecturally seen this building creates an open and public lobby space with a serious businesslike atmosphere knowing that it leads to other more private spaces. The structure expresses openness and the materials used on the ex- and the interior are clearly part of consideration towards the user. But in the experience it feels like an unachievable place with an elevated, exclusive and very private atmosphere.

Actually I’ve only experienced it from the outside, since it is intimidating to have to climb three stairs, cross an open space, enter through one of the two entrances and pass the security just to face the front desk.

 

 

 

 

NY LOBBY ASSIGNMENT_28/11/12

New York lobbies

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation Building is an office building in Manhattan designed by architect Kevin Roche and his engineering partner, John Dinkeloo, in 1968.

The twelve-story high box represents a new approach towards the expansion of the limits of the International Style by exploring new architectural vocabulary. Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo aimed to restore the social function of modernism, furthering the goal of human community through facilitation of effective charity by the Ford Foundation. Without abandoning the rationalist principles they learned, they added new ideas to the stagnating concept of the modern office building, which had been unchanged from the completion of the Seagram Building in 1958.

The Ford Foundation building occupies the width of a block, and has facades of about 60 meters on either side, creating a near-perfect square, out of which a large volume has been removed to create an atrium, a garden courtyard. The resulting L-shaped block is occupied by office space which opens to the atrium on one side and to the street on the other. The atrium was the first of it’s kind in Manhattan, and it is credited as setting a highly regarded example for indoor public spaces in office buildings.

The placement of the courtyard with it’s large windows is thought out as to maximize sunlight for the plants. Entering the Ford Foundation Building the lobby shows itself as an opening for the adjoining and tree-filled atrium. This opening seen as a transition between two spaces, makes the lobby a metaphorical window, as it in itself is a space of transition between the inside and the outside.

OPENING in relation to the physical connections – site/program/cirkulation

Situated on a hill, the architect has made an effort to integrate the Ford Foundation Building into the landscape and the neighborhood.

Walking by, one is almost automatically lead into the building by a back stepping facade. The movement of the exterior is expressed in the interior through terraces that lead up to and above the main entrance. The retraction of the lower floors towards the atrium mimic the curve of the site, creating a covered driveway and making the lobby open and free to public. Entering through the glassdoors, you find yourself at at the top of a wide stair moving downwards like the hillside, fusing together the lobby and courtyard garden. The front desk to the right is almost overseen, as one is attracted and invited by the green and open atrium space.

The courtyard is a space as high as the building itself around which all working cirkulation revolves. It is the most public space designed for visitor flow and recreation during workbreaks. As the lobby still is the only link between the public and the private/working area, the elevators and staircases that lead to the office and conference rooms are hidden to limit the accessebility and make them more private. This lobby is not as formed by it’s function as it is formed by the will of Roche. He wants the visitor to cirkulate on the base floor only, closing off the other floors by making the elevator something one has to ask for.

OPENING in relation to the visual connections

The facade of the Ford Foundation Building is composed by a structural steelframe, granite wrapping concrete elements and large windows filling the voids. The glass is a crucial element, reflecting both rationalist transparency and the visual experiences that Roche intended.

There are visual connections from all adjoining rooms to the open atrium, meant to cause occasional interactions between employee and employee, visitor and employee, and visitor and foundation. Even though much glass is used as an element of transparency, the visual connection between the inside and the outside of the building is vague as one has to enter it to locate the lobby and get a overview of the space.

OPENING in relation to the atmosphere

Entering through the glassed entrancedoors one finds oneself in a wide passage of about normal hight, walking further the hight of the space rises suddenly several stories up to the roof, while the groundlevel cascades downwards a stair like a hill. This open space filled with light (natural or artificial) is truly an architectural opening, somehow it is experienced like the end of a tunnel.

A private garden in the density of the city, surprising, green and inviting.

 

 

 

NY LOBBY ASSIGNMENT_28/11/12

New York lobbies

Mariott Marquis Hotel

 

 

The New York Marriott Marquis is a Marriott International hotel designed by architect John Portman in 1985. The hotel was born out of a controversy because five historic theaters, the Helen Hayes, the Morosco, the Astor, the Bijou, and the Gaiety were demolished to clear the site. The socalled "Great Theater Massacre of 1982" was a scandal, but went forward to make way for the hotel. By the time construction could begin, the original operators Western International Hotels (today Westin) had dropped out of the project and Marriott had stepped in.

The hotel was the first major project in the Times Square revitalization, and has been credited as the starting point for today’s development at Times Square. Now it is the eye and window of New York, an opening transitioning what has happened and what is to come. A lobby is a metaphorical window, a spatial opening, as it in itself is a space of transition. Entering the Mariott Marquis, the lobby shows itself as an opening for the hotel itself.

OPENING in relation to the physical connections – site/program/cirkulation

The New York Marriott Marquis hotel, located on Times Square, played a significant role in the revitalization of the theater district. The lower levels of the hotel offers facilities for conventions and other events, including the cities largest ballroom and its own Broadway legitimate theater.

It is a hall hotel or atrium hotel, which is characterized by being build as an enclosure around an open courtyard space. With the hotel lobby on the 8th floor, the present redevelopment of Times Square as an urban destination point has left the Marriott Marquis detached from the street. Portman has been criticized for creating a design that is turning its back to Times Square. However, at the time the hotel was built, the theater district was only beginning to turn around and Portman’s style of inwardly-oriented spaces made logical sense.

The whole building rising 45 stories to The View, New York’s only rooftop revolving restaurant and lounge, holds 36 guest room floors on the upper levels. The hotel atrium doesn’t only function as lobby, but contains also a bar, a restaurant and shops, it is a programmatic hybrid just like the rest of the building.

The Mariott Marquis is served by twelve scenic high-tech elevators, which face into the atrium that stretches the height of the hotel. The elevator cabs travel at 300 m per minute. In 2005 a modernization included reducing waiting times from originally more than 30 minutes, in the past, down to less than 5 minutes by introducing a computer technology, which allows people to key in their destination floor number on a keypad and get assigned an elevator to use afterward. As most important element of cirkulation the elevators are the key to the transitioning function of the lobby. The hotel is depending on the vertical movement to cirkulate arriving and leaving visitors.

OPENING in relation to the visual connections

Only a huge sign on the building indicates that the Mariott Marquis hotel is situated here, there are no other visible hints showing the lobby on the 8th floor. Entering the lobby through the glass cab elevators, visual connections are established once inside. The open space of the atrium wrapped with the insidely-oriented roomfloors, makes the hotel looking into itself, creating many visual connections between the lobby and other hotel floors. Only the sunlight indicates a connection to the world outside

OPENING in relation to the atmosphere

Occupying a full city block, being an enourmous canvas for commercials, the New York Marriott Marquis hotel externally reinforces the energy of Times Square, while the interior provides a retreat from the activity.

The lobby is open, airy and calm, however the interior atmosphere is detached from the life outside. The look inside is uniform and the interior materials are made to appear expensive like marmor ang granit. Having to take an elevator several stories to reach the lobby makes it feel like a very private, exclusive space only reserved for a chosen elite.

 

 

 

NY WINDOW SAFARI_23/11/12_30/11/12

NY WINDOW SAFARI

 

 

 

Transitions - between spaces (continued)

(. . .)These openings are like architectual eyes reminding us about what is left

behind or showing us a preview of what is waiting. . . . . . .
As agents of orientation and information, openings provide a visible link be-
tween spaces we know, spaces we don’t know and spaces we will be able to
see, but never to experience.

Like the metaphor of a trainstation seen as a window, so can a tunnel, a ventila-

tion shaft between two tracks or a door be contemplated so.

By opening our eyes to new imaginations of the window, we will be able to see

that life is taking place and revolving about different kinds of openings providing
transitions between spaces.

Imke Schubert