i might be stating the obvious, buut have you looked at the mobius house by van berkel and Bos?
they rearranged the program of a house around the mobius strip, placing the different rooms/function along a diagram according to their position in an ideal timeframe of daily use and their relations to each other.
you know, nowadays is all about the diagram, you take a program, think about it really really hard, make some changes to the usual modernist parti, make a diagram, and make a building that not only derives from the diagram but also looks like the diagram. hence the mobius strip, that like zeibin said, looks cool and its kinda easy to work with. a stab: another weapon in the arsenal of the postrationalizing mob?
Mobius House was built by UN Studio, otherwise known as Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos, in 1998. This house was one of the (in)famous buildings included in the Un-Private House exhibition at MOMA.
the foa house is the Virtual House, 1997. i just got the El croquis...(architectural geek taking over)
little off topic:there's an elcroquis on 5 young spanish practices, about 300 pages, loads of projects...price 50 euros. the foa issue, which is less than half the size (roughly 120p) and the fucking thing costed 71 euros...now...why is that? still, highly recomended.
bigness:
yes, and I'm still waiting for someone to make a funky museum diagram out of Euler's "Seven bridges of Königsberg".
Seriously, the geometric topology of the Möbius strip is what's interesting for architects. The strip is a continuous surface with only one side. However, as it says on the website of UN Studio, the geometrical model of the strip was never used for the house. This is of course very logical, since it's impossible to create an "inside" with a single-sided surface. The topological properties of the Möbius strip makes it possible to cut it along it's whole length, and still end up with a single strip. The strip is then a closed loop that is "neighbouring itself", giving the impression of two adjacent strips. This seems to be implied in the Möbius house, with the mentioning of "two entities running their own trajectories but sharing certain moments, possibly also reversing roles at certain points", but the visualization is so unclear at this point, that I'm almost certain it was never used.
Funnily enough, there's a lot of talk about the liberating aspects of the diagram, however this freedom is meant neither for the architect nor for the user. The old Hugo Häring vs. Mies van der Rohe discussion comes to mind...
topological architecture, it's getting a bit long in the tooth... half the time the kids at school get it confused with "topographical" and the other half it gets used as a an excuse for a "diagram" which obviously cannot be built... those who have tried to build topological diagrams end up with something which has about 0.01% of the potential of the geometric diagram they are referencing, take the Living Tomorrow Pavilion by UN Studio, supposed to be a Klein Bottle but it turned out to be a monstrosity of steel cladding and normative window placement... it speaks nothing of the geometry or potential of a mathamatical Klein Bottle...
and yeah while were on this one, another thing i find hard to swallow is the fact that the justification for using topology is often that the complexity of the geometry somehow reflects the complexity of contemporary life and that this is somehow a departure from the ironic complexity of post-modernism and the rationalisation of modernism. The argument goes that grids and squares and boxes don't cut it these days, but isn't deriving architecture from mobius strips or klein bottles or Scherks Minimal Surfaces just another form of fetishising geometry? what i'm getting at is where are the connections between a geometric figure and space as lived experience. The geometric figure becomes a symbol which is inaccessible to users of the space in the same way that the symbolism embedded in the likes of venturi scott brown is lost to people who don't know/understand the reference...
on one hand i agree with you, to say that "he complexity of the geometry somehow reflects the complexity of contemporary life" means reducing architecture to a decorative gesture. to really undestand the complexity of today's life and to react to it by creating "complicated for complicatedness sake" architecture is a knee jerk reaction, which is something insects do, not sentient human beings. all that happens outside architecture should be mediated before being introduced in the achitectural discourse, strongly doubt any 'as it is' introductions of concepts coming from external fields...
on the other, is only postrationalization, put another dime in the jukebox baby!
note on the venturi comment: i think the symbolism had also the function of providing a theoretical background to a higher level of complexity in the architectural composition (be it programmatic of aesthetic), which i believe can be appreciated even if you dont know the references (0r know that there are references to be known)
..whether as a 'diagram' , a 'parti' (virtually a diagram.and thats in the Beaux Arts tradition)...a physical realization of a visual/ other sensory allusion...architecture always starts of as being reductive and then ends up, necessarily, with material,proportional and scale complexities. The silliest assumption that an architect makes is that her idea is that of habitability and unwittingly ignores that it is 'habitibility according to her/her clients'. The Mobius House is not an ideal house (as it is sometimes being portrayed...and perhaps largely due to its allusion to a (ideal)geometry (Mobius) for the times ('post-Euclidean').
..it is an ideal house, maybe, for its upper middle class clients who can afford this definition of 'architecture'.
It is a bit sick that (myself included) we always suspend our knowledge of the predominantly miserable reality of the world and present mostly bullshit rhetoric as isotropic omnipresent shards of irrevocable self referential Platonic truisms.
Well, I think there's a little bit of potential in at least being aware of things like topological depth, in the style of Hillier's <url=http://www.spacesyntax.com>space syntax</url> method. The problem is that the transposition from diagram to building can often become a little too static, especially the projects that add statistics as an extra "Platonic truism". For example MVRDV:s Silodam, that was supposedly based on a market research of housing types, sizes and prices. Of course, these factors had changed a lot when the project was finished, so one could ask what the point with the research was in the first place, except being rhetorical. Or UN Studio's station in Arnhem where the flow data of commuters shapes the building - let us hope that the amount of people going from the trains to the bicycles remains static every hour, every day, the whole year around, forever, and in both directions!
BIGNESS El Croquis of FOA its a great magazine, maybe its more expensive since is more monographical of FOA (and the lack of publications of their work before that) than the new one u said u bought (w more spanish offices).... have u seen the PHILOGENESIS book??
ah, the book about the exhibition?
did not like the exhibition, so i'm kinda doubtful about the book...i guess it the same stuff that's in the croquis...or not? main differences, MAD? (thanks)
FOA: stuff for ya'll archi-geek to get exiced about!
Aug 9, 04 1:56 pm ·
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mobius
what are the implications of the mobius strip in architecture? does it have any underlying statements...
i might be stating the obvious, buut have you looked at the mobius house by van berkel and Bos?
they rearranged the program of a house around the mobius strip, placing the different rooms/function along a diagram according to their position in an ideal timeframe of daily use and their relations to each other.
yeah i have seen it.
but why would some one use the mobius strip as a concept...what are the implications?
Just taking a stab, but since it's "one-sided," you end up along a continuous, repeating loop, much like your daily life, for example.
On the other hand, considering daily life is very much more than a 1D line, I would guess that it also "just looks cool."
you know, nowadays is all about the diagram, you take a program, think about it really really hard, make some changes to the usual modernist parti, make a diagram, and make a building that not only derives from the diagram but also looks like the diagram. hence the mobius strip, that like zeibin said, looks cool and its kinda easy to work with. a stab: another weapon in the arsenal of the postrationalizing mob?
what's the name of that house?? FUTURE HOUSE project?? by FOA?? literal moebius strip
Not too hard to google for a link...
Mobius House was built by UN Studio, otherwise known as Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos, in 1998. This house was one of the (in)famous buildings included in the Un-Private House exhibition at MOMA.
the foa house is the Virtual House, 1997. i just got the El croquis...(architectural geek taking over)
little off topic:there's an elcroquis on 5 young spanish practices, about 300 pages, loads of projects...price 50 euros. the foa issue, which is less than half the size (roughly 120p) and the fucking thing costed 71 euros...now...why is that? still, highly recomended.
bigness:
yes, and I'm still waiting for someone to make a funky museum diagram out of Euler's "Seven bridges of Königsberg".
Seriously, the geometric topology of the Möbius strip is what's interesting for architects. The strip is a continuous surface with only one side. However, as it says on the website of UN Studio, the geometrical model of the strip was never used for the house. This is of course very logical, since it's impossible to create an "inside" with a single-sided surface. The topological properties of the Möbius strip makes it possible to cut it along it's whole length, and still end up with a single strip. The strip is then a closed loop that is "neighbouring itself", giving the impression of two adjacent strips. This seems to be implied in the Möbius house, with the mentioning of "two entities running their own trajectories but sharing certain moments, possibly also reversing roles at certain points", but the visualization is so unclear at this point, that I'm almost certain it was never used.
Funnily enough, there's a lot of talk about the liberating aspects of the diagram, however this freedom is meant neither for the architect nor for the user. The old Hugo Häring vs. Mies van der Rohe discussion comes to mind...
topological architecture, it's getting a bit long in the tooth... half the time the kids at school get it confused with "topographical" and the other half it gets used as a an excuse for a "diagram" which obviously cannot be built... those who have tried to build topological diagrams end up with something which has about 0.01% of the potential of the geometric diagram they are referencing, take the Living Tomorrow Pavilion by UN Studio, supposed to be a Klein Bottle but it turned out to be a monstrosity of steel cladding and normative window placement... it speaks nothing of the geometry or potential of a mathamatical Klein Bottle...
and yeah while were on this one, another thing i find hard to swallow is the fact that the justification for using topology is often that the complexity of the geometry somehow reflects the complexity of contemporary life and that this is somehow a departure from the ironic complexity of post-modernism and the rationalisation of modernism. The argument goes that grids and squares and boxes don't cut it these days, but isn't deriving architecture from mobius strips or klein bottles or Scherks Minimal Surfaces just another form of fetishising geometry? what i'm getting at is where are the connections between a geometric figure and space as lived experience. The geometric figure becomes a symbol which is inaccessible to users of the space in the same way that the symbolism embedded in the likes of venturi scott brown is lost to people who don't know/understand the reference...
my point of view...
on one hand i agree with you, to say that "he complexity of the geometry somehow reflects the complexity of contemporary life" means reducing architecture to a decorative gesture. to really undestand the complexity of today's life and to react to it by creating "complicated for complicatedness sake" architecture is a knee jerk reaction, which is something insects do, not sentient human beings. all that happens outside architecture should be mediated before being introduced in the achitectural discourse, strongly doubt any 'as it is' introductions of concepts coming from external fields...
on the other, is only postrationalization, put another dime in the jukebox baby!
note on the venturi comment: i think the symbolism had also the function of providing a theoretical background to a higher level of complexity in the architectural composition (be it programmatic of aesthetic), which i believe can be appreciated even if you dont know the references (0r know that there are references to be known)
"reducing architecture"
but isn't a design always an exercise in reduction. It has to be singular in intention (even if it alludes to a complex ('urban') arrangement in the vein of Gehry and Miralles (a divergent fragmentary gesture that echos the Borromini baroque ) Portzamparc's Cité de la Musique is a good example that does not get noticed as much, because its diagram is more in keeping with a planar harmonic geometry making. It is possibly discord (between the established 'norm' and the unconventional new) that draws attention to the diagram, and then the razzmatazz gets blamed on a certain way of working (diagramatically)..there is nothing new about the diagram
..whether as a 'diagram' , a 'parti' (virtually a diagram.and thats in the Beaux Arts tradition)...a physical realization of a visual/ other sensory allusion...architecture always starts of as being reductive and then ends up, necessarily, with material,proportional and scale complexities. The silliest assumption that an architect makes is that her idea is that of habitability and unwittingly ignores that it is 'habitibility according to her/her clients'. The Mobius House is not an ideal house (as it is sometimes being portrayed...and perhaps largely due to its allusion to a (ideal)geometry (Mobius) for the times ('post-Euclidean').
..it is an ideal house, maybe, for its upper middle class clients who can afford this definition of 'architecture'.
It is a bit sick that (myself included) we always suspend our knowledge of the predominantly miserable reality of the world and present mostly bullshit rhetoric as isotropic omnipresent shards of irrevocable self referential Platonic truisms.
Well, I think there's a little bit of potential in at least being aware of things like topological depth, in the style of Hillier's <url=http://www.spacesyntax.com>space syntax</url> method. The problem is that the transposition from diagram to building can often become a little too static, especially the projects that add statistics as an extra "Platonic truism". For example MVRDV:s Silodam, that was supposedly based on a market research of housing types, sizes and prices. Of course, these factors had changed a lot when the project was finished, so one could ask what the point with the research was in the first place, except being rhetorical. Or UN Studio's station in Arnhem where the flow data of commuters shapes the building - let us hope that the amount of people going from the trains to the bicycles remains static every hour, every day, the whole year around, forever, and in both directions!
BIGNESS El Croquis of FOA its a great magazine, maybe its more expensive since is more monographical of FOA (and the lack of publications of their work before that) than the new one u said u bought (w more spanish offices).... have u seen the PHILOGENESIS book??
i prefer synthesis to reduction.
MAD:never heard of the philogenesis book...who's it about?
MAD you are kinda name dropper aren't ya! hehe
ah, the book about the exhibition?
did not like the exhibition, so i'm kinda doubtful about the book...i guess it the same stuff that's in the croquis...or not? main differences, MAD? (thanks)
FOA: stuff for ya'll archi-geek to get exiced about!
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