Hugh Buhrich House studied by Susan Jin-Young Yu and Aristotle Marc Go, part 2

Susan and Aristotle went to Castlecragh and are still fascinated by the amazing site. They tried to share the strong sense of remotness, tranquility and materiality of the house in a very distinctive graphic style. Surprisingly they succeed to instigate a poetic aesthetic to Revit.
We are quite impress by the quality of their work which is constantly rich and dense.

Villa Malaparte studied by Amanda Kah Yee Siaw and Sarah Najm, part 2

Amanda and Sarah have made a fantastic set of diagrams this time. They created a very graphical analysis of the Villa Malaparte. The only problem might be the size of their diagrams for this blog.

Vertical Circulation

All circulation contained to the mountain side of the building.  Hidden and interwoven within the contours of the steep cliff circulation occurs over several planes

Intimacy Zones

Predominantly private zones fill the planning of the internal Villa. 

Hidden rooms such as the study on the top level, the unkown room and the entire cellar level seem to be specifically designed for Malaparte.

The obvious public zones leave no ambiguity as to their function and openness providing a release into the surrounding nature

Function & Circulation

The circulation on each level is similar to the original designs by Libera  where there is a central corridor with the rooms branching off on the ground floor and a more loose plan on the top floor.

 

Villa in Bordeaux studied by Mija Rose Yoon Hee Keane and Grant James Bates

Mija and Grant went through a gargantuesque amount of information to decipher the complexity of the Bordeaux Villa. Amongst films (Houselife), books (Living, Vivre, Leben) they finally took the direction to detach their investigation from the architect and focus on the house in itself. We can surely understand that the intimidating shadow of Rem Koohaas his satirical and often witty insights into the design process, can block any fresh attempt to understand his architecture.

We hope nevertheless that they would still try to understand and retranstcript the complex and innovative structural challenge very well documented by Cecil Balmond in "Informal" for this villa. It is as well important to notice the interesting image making of the Bordeaux House and one of the classical photo of the Riehl House by Mies van der Rohe. Again another direction to understand the different layers of references and theoretical reference in the rich body of work of OMA.

Villa Bordeaux (OMA) and Riehl House (Mies van der Rohe)

Moebius House studied by Amanda Jayne Stollery and Ami Meng Wang

Amanda and Ami found a lot of data and 3d models on the Moebius house. Without surprise there were a sketchup version and some weak power point presentation done by some 1st year student somewhere on the web. Out of this "junk" (as in Junkspace) they had to redraw their own version, including the garage (a set of published plans included the garage while some did not).
Here the emphasis was done on trajectory and movement within the house. It is possible to say that this house is the diagram of a relationship between 2 adults and their children. We appreciate the fact that this house is devoid of any romantic ideal on the couple. It is a clear surgical diagram, maybe a "psycho-diagram" of a family and their relationship, a game of mirrors and reflections, of surveillance and exhibitionism. In this matter it would be interesting to understand the domestic technology of the Moebius house as an apparatus for family regulation.

Charles Rice has studied the importance of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical interior in his book, "the Emergence of the Interior". Here is a quote of his book:

"In his foreword to Jacques Donzelot's study The Policing of Families, Gilles Deleuze writes: " Having a room of one's own" is a desire, but also a control". With the historical emergence of the interior, desire and control appear as two sides of the same coin: desiring an interior means submitting to its mechanisms of control. In the late nineteenth century, desire was theorized psychoanalytically in relation to the controlling mechanism of the domestic interior. In this way, psychoanalysis can be seen to have developed as a technology of subjectification.
For Nikolas Rose:
‘Technologies of subjectification, then, are the machinations, the being assembled-together with particular intellectual and practical instruments, components, entities, and devices that produce certain ways of being human, territorialize, stratify, fix, organize, and render durable particular relations that humans may truthfully establish with themselves’.
 The interior can be considered as a practical instrument or machine working as part of the technology of subjectification that psychoanalysis enacted. Within this technology, the interior territorialized particular relations to the self which were accorded the status of truth. In other words, an explicit relation between the interior and interiority was enacted within this technology. Both were assembled together. As Rose suggests: 'all the effects of psychological interiority, together with a whole range of other capacities and relations, are constituted through the linkage of humans into other objects and practices, multiplicities of forces'.

We can expect Amanda and Ami to map the psychology of the Moebius house, all the intricacy of the furniture, the play of interior glazing and exterior cantilevers, the subtlety of balconies within interior corridors crossing a room. 

Villa Malaparte studied by Amanda Kah Yee Siaw and Sarah Najm

Sarah and Amanda have redrawn the Villa Malaparte. After a brief introduction on Malaparte and his career as one of the last Italian Intellectual Dandy, they've shown a serie of diagrams representing "Intimacy Zones", hidden rooms, secret passages retreat area in the villa.

Here is an excerpt from a beautiful text on Curtzio Malaparte, written by Lawrence Russell:

Malaparte & Adalberto Libera

|| Many commentators see the Casa Malaparte as Malaparte's greatest work, surpassing even his superb writing. Certainly the project fits well with the Futurist idea of the Artist as Creator... a megalomaniacal notion also adopted by the French avant-gardist poet Antonin Artaud for his notion of a new theatre (Theatre of Cruelty). The stylistic contradiction -- is it rationalist or anti-rationalist -- fits perfectly with the surrealist dualism of conscious and unconscious expression. The rationalism comes from the original architect Libera (1903-63), who was published in an early issue of Prospettive a.k.a Perspective (1937-52) "an international journal of culture and the arts" that Malaparte produced and edited following his release from confinement. Libera was a favored architect with the fascist ruling elite, a hot item following the construction of his design for a new central post-office in Rome. The clean, simple arcade style of the post office's massed arches reconciled classicism with modernism, an integral precept of fascist aesthetic theory... and also seemed to play on the melancholy "Nietzche Autumn" atmosphere of the Italian surrealist/metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, also published in Prospettive (strangely, de Chirico never mentions Malaparte in his elegantly paranoid Memoir). Libera's original design was so linear and rational it was institutional in the most basic sense, with nothing to distinguish it from a primitive Mediterranean stucco box, and could easily be mistaken for a prison or a military bunker. In this sense, it was merely a drawing in progress, a positioning of a shape in space.



No matter -- Libera and Malaparte fell out during the initial stages of construction, and Malaparte was left to continue building in whatever direction his contrarian mind led him. The dangerous siting and unregulated aesthetic -- this is no house for kids -- is viewed both as religious and classical, a sort of retro-pantheism worthy of the anthropomorphic world of the pre-Christian Romans. Close to the sun, close to the sea... close to Death. Casa Malaparte is a dream of flying, a dream of falling.

In his masterpiece, The Volga Rises In Europe (1943), Malaparte describes visiting a Finnish observation post during the brutal siege of Lenningrad. This "picket-post" is within 200 yards of the Russians, a simple bunker of stacked pines, mud and snow, manned by a single sentry -- the vartio, the "dead man", he who walks the point. Malaparte's sympathy for the man assigned to this suicidal location is enormous, so he leaves a couple of paks of ciggies behind as consolation. The description of the visit is grim and clairvoyant. Malaparte concludes: "As we trudge in single file along the narrow path a stray bullet whistles past my ear and lodges with a ping in a tree trunk. But I scarcely notice it. I am haunted by the memory of that wrinkled, tear-stained face, I cannot forget that weeping man standing alone in the forest." Describing himself? or the archetype of Man in a hostile universe? Casa Malaparte is a picket-post on the edge of Nowhere. As the architect Robert Venturi asks, "Do its steps lead to infinity?"

Libera’s intial design saw the ground floor organized along a lateral hallway along which all the spaces into the house are distributed. 

The two short facades are windowless, rather these views are reserved for the terrace on the upper level. 

The services and private rooms are on the ground level and the public zones are on the top level with the entrance in the building via series of stairs on the ground. 

Predominantly private zones fill the planning of the internal Villa. 

Hidden rooms such as the study on the top level, the unkown room and the entire cellar level seem to be specifically designed for Malaparte.

The obvious public zones leave no ambiguity as to their function and openness providing a release into the surrounding nature

All circulation contained to the mountain side of the building.  Hidden and interwoven within the contours of the steep cliff circulation occurs over several planes

Inspirations for the next phase

Ok, we have been reading and doing a lot of study recently on Modern Icons. Let's have a little avant-gout of what would come after the second part of the semester... A much more wild approach on residential....

Here is some inspiration for you: Suckerpunch, an excellent website full of Contemporary art, Underground Graphic Design and Cyber Architecture.


Here include is a beautiful video from Michael Young. His work is balancing scripting inspiration with a very acute sense of poetic imagery.  An intelligent use of cinematic filters alters the video giving a more realistic approach to his design.



X-Lab Final Presentation Spring 2010 from michael young on Vimeo.

Spidernethewood studied by Susan Sohyun Kim and Matthew Mark Senkowycz

Susan and Mark are remodelling the Spidernethewood house. They contacted Francois Roche's office R&Sie(n) and had the opportunity to asked them all kind of questions. We are showing here a tiny portion of their work and are expecting to see the house projected in 30 years.
A very good tool for this could be the use of Sandbox2, and it's manual online
The floor plans reveal a lot of surprise, like an outdoor shower room on the 1st floor, and the centrality of the main corridor. Many directions for an investigation on the rizhomic nature of R&Sie architectural's drawing. Indeed they are more famous for their amazing theoritical stands, but I think a lot of things can be said as well on the organisation of space in their sections and floor plans.
The Spidernethewood is the perfect example for this kind of investigation as the interior is the outside of the house...and the "house" another layer of the inside.

Ground Floor

First Floor