Oakland Arena (facade mutation)

As originally designed, the Oakland Arena façade is a study in engineered efficiency. Given a non-uniform structural parí and a complex site with frontage on what was then a shiny new BART line, the 880 freeway as well as major city arterials and traffic from Oakland International Airport, there was no shortage of factors to elicit differentiation within the façade; however, the solution was a perfectly rectilinear vertical joist system with flat Fink trusses deployed evenly around the perimeter to span from the top to bottom of the concrete primary structure rather than attaching mid-span where the wide X-bracing gives various possibilities for attachment.

My claim is that SOM's model of working had something to do with the undifferentiated detail deployed in this project. The organizational chart adjacent talks about the different players present on the design project; in this case, Architect (A) Mechanical Engineer (Me) and Structural Engineer (Str) are all SOM. The closeness of these roles and their collapse into a single epistemic community (where engineers and architects are often typified as having differing linguistic norms and teleologies) makes it difficult for any to act unilaterally, instead merging into an assemblage which acts to territorialize a large part of the project,  giving it an internal consistency created to mirror that of the formative organization not the many contextual cues contingent upon it. (De Landa, Assemblages Against Totalities, 13)

Oakland Arena
organization structure

Audi showroom design
organization structure

In my first mutation of this precedent, I grasped onto a different organizational structure, in this case a more standard one in which the architect acts first and apart from the engineers; for the purposes of an inter-generic hybrid, I chose Ingenhoven Architects and charted their Audi Showroom from 2010 as a structurally similar yet organizationally different undertaking. On the right is the organization chart for this project; you can immediately see that the architects are now on their own ring of the organization chart, given primary access to the client and more control of the contractors present in the project (including general contracting, roofing, fire protection and glazing contractors as well as structural- and mechanical engineers, among others).

The directly architectural design solution given very similar constraints uses a series of spider joints hung from a series of tensile steel members (rather than compressive steel cantilevered from concrete). This solution allows the façade structure to highlight and be reducible to (rather than ignore and undermine) the overarching structural partí of the project. Applying this to the Oakland Arena would allow the steel façade elements to bunch around the monolithic concrete braces, creating nodes which accentuate the primary structure diagram then spread into a cloud meshwork in the center of each glazing span.