Tag Archives: engineering

a towering decision

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Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation. Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. 

Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

As if ripped from the fiction pages of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the collective press have clamoured to condemn designs for a skyscraper that daringly breaks with convention.

Called The Cloud, Dutch architect firm MVRDV‘s radical residential design in Seoul, South Korea, calls for a 260m and 300m modern twin skyscraper. Linking the towers together 27 stories above ground, an organically shaped mid-section of enclosed public spaces frees ground space below for open parkland. The project is expected to be completed in 2015.

The twin form rises majestically vertical, its pixellated glazing reaching full expression in the link-form, where a staggered intersection of cubed spaces create an aggregate cloud-like formation. The design is futuristic, recalling other forward thinking designs such as Moshie Safdie’s Habitat building (1967) in Montreal, Canada, or Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Japan. This cubic formation can be also be seen in the context of many previous MVRDV projects.

MDRDV ‘The Cloud’ Detail of ‘link’ form

The New York Post has called the design ‘sick!’, The Weekly Standard  and the HuffingtonPost condemning The Cloud as ’awkwardly resembling’ passing smoke from 9/11. To demonstrate its argument, the NewYork Post carefully juxtaposed pictures of the smoke blowing from the World Trade Center following from the plane flight explosions in New York City which claimed the lives of 3000 people, against the design images for The Cloud.

Their own smoke of conspiracy is furthered by seeking to prove that the MVRDV “must have been aware” of its resemblance, as if possible that any in the West could not recall those indelible images of destruction. It noted that Daniel Libeskind was the project developer for both the Ground Zero site and the Yongsan Business District in Seoul. One St Louis news site even asked if the design sought to “mock“ the 9/11 tragedy.

On a superficial level, the images, if not the reality could be configured to resemble one another, but for the fact that on every other level, the project and the event are diametric opposites. Which should we choose? To build a monument to an enemy’s ancient lust for death within our memory, or monumentalize our own modern love for innovation in the world? To encourage the construction of beauty or propose that even more such buildings never appear in view?

How to oppose a collective that seeks to raze buildings to the ground: By joining a collective that seeks to prevent them from ever rising? Or, is it time to really strike fear into the hearts of those seeking an end to modern civilisation, by continuing to build it? ♦

buildings that wave to us?

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When we think of stone and concrete buildings the words movement, flow and waving don’t come readily as descriptors. For centuries, architecture has exploited inert stability to create feelings of permanence from these favoured materials. The Parthenon, its stone base atop the Acropolis, the stone buttresses that guard like giant sentinels around gothic cathedrals. These buildings ‘move’ us, yet stand quite still.

Now these feelings may change- change being the ‘operative’ style of architect Santiago Calatrava.

The Spanish-born designer/engineer is the purveyor of a revolution in architecture, devoted to displaying Nature’s constant ability to move and shift.

Montjuic Tele-Comm. Tower, Barcelona (Photo by Christopher Michel)

Famous for his dramatic bridges which often feature tensioned masts suspending huge spans across rivers, there are also buildings such as his Lyon TGV station, where sweeping organic forms depict the sense of speed and excitement of travel.

His Montjuic Tower, Barcelona, leans and counterbalances, supported like a dancer in ballet, limbs outstretched at the most dramatic moment of equipoise.

These buildings have an easy imagination of movement, of physics diagrams – all pressing forces – drawn large and imposing. Instead they form and function as telecommunications towers and town halls.

Calatrava’s latest projects however, literally move, machines gesturing for our closer attention. With Calatrava, his robot buildings can unfold, rotate and undulate, acting as we act, describing movements as living sculpture. Calatrava’s work- often bare, white, and sharing many of the forms of the body, are not decorative in any traditional sense. Instead, moving parts provoke our own movement and function.

This is Calatrava’s most astounding achievement. Consider the widespread sense that we approach buildings only as passive viewers, leading to buildings decorated or ornamented as something primarily of appearance. Yet buildings critically house our active movement, and shape them.

Milwaukee Art Museum (Photo by Ken Ilio)

Consider his Milwaukee Art Museum, describing its lakeside connection to the water with mechanical arms, symbolising the wing motions of birds in the surrounding landscape. When the museum closes, so do these arms, or change according to other movements in Nature- wind and solar conditions in an architecture that is responsive.

In his birthplace Valencia, Calatrava designed its planetarium, a spherical planet form, with its opening and shutting roof acting like an observing, moving eye.

These forms and motions do not simply adorn these buildings- they are the buildings themselves. Rather than functioning as signs for the building- they are the buildings signalling. Not only are they important visual elements, but kinetic ones also- occupying and defining space, but also moving and describing it. They symbolise what buildings seemingly never do- change.

This literally moving architecture challenges us to imagine not only changing Nature to live in it, but living in a changing Nature. A ‘future written in stone’ now waves to us instead with the hand of Calatrava.♦

City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia (Photo by Victor Abellon)

[images sourced and attributed from Flickr Commons]