OMA's student center on the IIT campus in chicago

the program is organized around the paths students used to take from the dorms on the east of state st to class on the west side before the building existed and there was a parking lot there. Theoretically the entire building is 'shaped from a path'

ah yes, great one.
thanks.

guggenheim


seattle public library (stacks)


jewish museum berlin

more good ones, thanks guys

corb and promenade architecturale, anyone? from villa savoye to infinite museum project, etc. from there, related work that riffed on the promenade architecturale by lars lerup, richard meier, john hedjuk, josef kleihues...

and - while i don't recommend getting too much inspiration from it, but only learning what you can - exhibit and theme park design could be helpful to look at.

acconci island, graz

National Museum of Australia by Raggat MacDougal Whatever

eisenman's aronof center for design

Terragni's Danteum.

lletdownl , i just went to see OMA's student center on the IIT campus in chicago, and i thought it was pretty shit. they actually stuffed up all of the paths by putting the building the way it is. now everybody has to walk around it.

i'm not quite sure what our parameters are - is it simply a space or highly proscribed circuit through a building that is far more vertical in orientation than horizontal? or are we looking for something else?

for example, i'd say richard serra's double ellipse or spiral sculptures are as architectural an experience as anything being quoted above. same for his '4 lines' landscape sculpture. also, robert smithson's 'spiral jetty', bruce nauman's 'corridor with mirrors and white lights', or andy goldsworthy's installation in the deyoung entry court.

how about any really good renaissance garden? versailles? how about hadrian's villa?

are you talking about single unbroken pathways? if so, how about 'russian ark', a film which traces a path through 300 years of russian history, done as a single, 75 min.+ take/sequence. (a simply stunning technical achievement if you see it).

point being, a path in architecture can mean a whole lot of things. are you looking specifically for examples in very recent buildings? and when you say 'buildings shaped by a path', what do you mean? that there is a well defined, singular path that is the primary focus of the architectural design or that the building includes a well defined path? finding a building that is genuinely shaped by a pre-existing path is much more difficult than finding buildings that tightly inscribe their own set of strongly defined pathways.

The whole
City of Boston....around the Commons.....old cow paths.....radiating from the Commons and public gardens

oscar niemeyers art museum in Rio

kunsthaus bregenz

laru

to answer your question, its more of the former than the latter. our site is within a park that has a clear use pattern, certain trajectories that either exist as infrastructure [paths, etc] or exist more implicitly.

so the idea is to study different strategies for incorporating these paths and trajectories into the building, or maybe they cut through, etc, etc.

at present i feel as though im building around these paths but i don't feel like im engaging them like i could be or probably should be.


thanks for responses everyone.

i'm surprised that no one has mentioned corb's carpenter center at harvard...

maybe it's off topic but there is this one:










Diller+scofidio's slow house:
"
A weekend retreat on the Long Island waterfront, it was designed in 1989 for a Japanese art investor. 'Our client came to us and said he wanted a house with a view,' Diller recalls. That request provoked them to explore the very notion of a view -- for instance, the evolution of the picture window and the terminology in real-estate ads. 'Why is architecture a technology that creates a view?' Diller recounts. 'Because it mediates it with a window frame.' The couple argued that the picture window represents a more advanced technology than the video display -- 'because it strips away the hardware that you have on a TV monitor and leaves only the effect.'[fn.66[ Go to footnote! ]]
[ ]
Out of this research emerged a design that, depending on where you are coming from, is either dazzling or lunatic. Although ''Slow House'' does include certain necessities (like a kitchen and guest bedrooms), it is essentially a retreat with a view. The design has a clarity that architectural lingo, including the discourse of Diller + Scofidio, usually lacks. Knowing that the client would arrive at his weekend hideaway after an automobile trip (with its own windshield-framed view), the architects extended the journey with a long driveway up to a narrow building facade that was just a doorway. The house curved like a banana; once you were inside, the shape prevented you at first from seeing the window in the back. When you finally got to the window-framed view, it was partly obstructed by a video monitor, displaying the same vista. In a revelation worthy of Duchamp, you realized that while the sea has always been there, only man can make a view."

slow house