Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital

Venice: first city of engineered ground. Equal parts Iron age naval power and Renaissance cultural icon, it has for hundreds of years attracted artists, architects and engineers intent on changing the way humanity interacts with the world around us --- from the original builders who first reinforced the 115 islands of Venice then constructed completely new ground around them to the specialists now erecting the MOSE project to protect the city from rising tides and aquifer collapse.

Venice is also the site for one of the most (in)famous examples of unbuilt high modernity, in particular Le Corbusier's proposal for the Venice Hospital. This seminal project promulgated so close to Le Corb's death is perhaps the first and best described instance of the building typology we call "mats, fields, grounds, carpets, matrices, [which answer the] recurring calls for efficiency in land use, indeterminacy in size and shape, flexibility in building use, and mixture in program. It expresses architecture's increasing encroachment on both city and landscape and the open exchange between structure (building) and infrastructure (context)." (Sarkis, Hashim. Case: Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital. 13)

Aranda - Lasch / Seattle Public Library (geometrically-driven design)

Despite the multifarious entities with some partial claim to authorship of a large construction project, the architect remains at the forefront in terms of formulating public legibility as the player empowered to decide both the structure of the organization giving rise to the project and the overarching aesthetic rules under which they operate. 

"[If a] system is dynamic there has to be the ability to exchange information all the time. At all scales data is fed through and transformed...what begins as a small set of instructions is multiplied into a complex web.” (Cecil Balmond, Element, 7)

What happens when the small set of instructions that begins the design process is purely formal, rather than being about the discreetization of use (as was OMA's plan for the Seattle Public Library)? How does might the evolution of a façade progress when the rules are geometrically derived, not program-based? In order to explore this question, I imagined that OMA was fired from the Seattle Public Library project after the team was assembled but before schematic design had progressed; Aranda-Lasch was brought on board to promulgate a recursively geometrical formulation for the library. This formulation I took from their Tooling volume of Pamphlet Architecture; the two geometrical rulesets I extracted (cracking and tiling) are summarized above.

Magnusson Klemencic Assoc. / Seattle Public Library (integrated local project)

For my second transformative (re)vision for OMA's Seattle Public Library I wanted to make a marked difference in the functioning of the project team; in this case, questioning the utility of the transnational scale at which the design organization functioned seemed like the most decisive change. Rather than transforming the project by inserting new specialist firms into the organized assemblage, what if OMA had utilized the particular skills already present in the core local design team?

Magnusson Klemencic Associates' built portfolio is full of truss systems. Their deployment of this typology is a particularly engineered response to design problems; hybridizing this vernacular with the program-driven partí from OMA and its deformed skin allows for a new structural vocabulary to overtake the project, drawing attention to the complexity and differentiation of use which is generalized and obscured by the existing façade.

FRONT Inc / Seattle Public Library (facade reiterates diagram)

FRONT Inc. is a façade and storefront specialty firm known for their sophisticated manipulation of varied structural and formal systems; that is, rather than having a standard response to a given design problem they endeavor to manipulate the systems provided them per project so as to create elegant solutions arising directly from each project.

Given the folding of the "self supporting" façade around the OMA-designed programmatically composed library mass which dictates the form of the building from every urban perspective, the addition of compound folds for structural stability is a logical extension of the overarching design diagram to address lateral structural requirements as well as programmatic ones. If properly deployed, the FRONT-detailed compound reinforcing fold could act like a break in sheet metal, creating stability through the multi-planar diaphragms of the fold.

OMA / Seattle Public Library (globalized studio typology)

The main theoretical alternative to [the largely structuralist conception of] totalities is what the philosopher Gilles DeLeuze calls assemblages, [that is] wholes characterized by relations of exteriority...assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent [so] that a part may be detached and made am element of another assemblage. Assemblages are characterized along two dimensions: along the first dimension are specified the variable roles which the component parts may play, from a purely material role to a purely expressive one...a second dimension characterizes processes in which the components are involved processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage (territorialization and deterritorialization).  (De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society, 10-19)

Among the projects I analyzed in the fall, OMA's Seattle Public Library (SPL) façade details stood out as perfect tools to investigate the complexity inherent in the transnational cooperative agreements which parsed its design process. At the most fundamental level, take the fact that OMA is a Rotterdam-based firm, which (despite the presence of an American branch) chose to partner with a local design firm — Seattle-based LMN Architects — to complete this project; furthermore, as the design team coalesced it became increasingly split into several functional groups, one centered on OMA and their European manufacturing contacts (the former provided the parti for the building and massing models for early fundraising and the latter — Seele GmbH — fabricated the façade); a second focused on the concrete and steel of the central masses of the library (Hoffman Construction and Magnusson Klemencic Associates), and a third on the discreet programmatically-defined interior finishes and public procession through the building (LMN and Arup Services Division). This territorialization of subsets of the assemblage actually acts to destabilize the identity of the overall assemblage, I would argue.

Seattle Public Library design organization chart.

The ad-hoc team tasked with creating the SPL was a highly differentiated one, with many stratifications between the architects of record and the trades physicalizing the project; the clustering of the players into groups create what social and behavioral researcher Adele Clarke would refer to as discursive discontinuities rendering more difficult daily communications between the several functional clusters of the team.

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)

Farshid Moussavi @ CCA _ Feb. 13, 2012

(photo: The Architecture Foundation)

Tomorrow (Monday, February 13, 2012) Farshid Moussavi will be lecturing at my graduate school, the California College of the Arts. I'm looking forward to this lecture for a number of reasons, chief among them her embrace of transversal approaches to design, an approach that has strongly influenced my methodological choices for thesis. In her words, "a transversal approach [is one] neither top-down nor bottom up...in which causes and concerns that are immanent...are combined to generate forms [enabling] us to incorporate greater levels of complexity within built forms, allowing multiple inputs to interact simultaneously on the same plane to generate a multitude of novel forms, each with unique expression." (Moussavi, The Function of Form, 34).