French designer Marc Fornes and his Brooklyn studio THEVERYMANY have shared with Archinect images from a recent collaboration with Porsche on a pavilion design that was created for the automaker as part of Singapore Art Week.
There, his new My Two Cars Garage pavilion helped welcome the new Porsche all-electric Macan model. The pavilion derives its structural integrity from a unique monocoque shell shape that eliminates the need for internal supports or a traditional frame. Fornes refers to this process as "Frozen Tension."
As its name suggests, there is space for up to two cars with a sequence of "reveals" resulting from a geometrically complex, double-curved surface made from ultra-thin (1.5mm) aluminum strips. The pavilion's dimensions are equal to 43.6 feet in length, 35.4 feet in width, and 23 feet in height. It required a total of 202,203 rivets to assemble.
Each of the 6,380 aluminum strips is shaped to fit within the overall geometry of the pavilion, contributing to both its fluid aesthetic quality and the tensile resilience needed to withstand external wind loads and other structural stressors. Precise perforations in the aluminum are inspired by the detailing on the updated Macan's bodywork.
These select openings allow light to filter through into the space to create patterns that shift along with the sun's movement.
Its interior likewise glows at night to evoke a "sense of time and motion" while allowing the interplay of light and shadow to become the central experiential key to the design. This also works to reinforce a sense of discovery in visitors.
The pavilion was realized through a modular approach, with each component being prefabricated off-site and then assembled into modules. These modules were then stitched together on-site in order to significantly reduce the need for construction time and labor.
The studio says finally: "More than just a stage for the car, the pavilion is an experience in itself, designed to spark curiosity and imagination in visitors, much like the innovation and performance of the vehicle it showcases."
22 Comments
Who has time for this nonsense when the world is burning. FFS.
This stuff feels incredibly out of touch post-pandemic and at this moment. Who is it for and why and how does it improve things?
In the context of Singapore is it really that crazy? A stones throw away is a spherical island Apple store and the Marina Bay Sands skybridge infinity pool.
to be fair, the audience is the people for whom the problems of this world don't matter. as is usually the case with high art.
That's not fair. That's kind of like being pissed off at your fancy furniture because it isn't repudiating fascism (or the opposite, if that is your bag). Not everything has to work at that level. Its art paid for by a patron. Do you really want to declare that entire field of activity as wasteful bullshit? It might be, but I suppose I prefer to have it, whether I like it or not.
It's still pretty cool work. I was a lot more impressed when the idea was new, and am less interested in the recent iterations. Digital fabrication in general has moved to different subjects and fixations, and it is a lot more interesting to me as result, personally. But I don't mind that Marc has found a niche and is staying there for awhile.
If I was being critical the worse I could say is that this feels like the receding edge of an eddy and is not the main stream anymore. Interesting, but less obviously impactful than other work out there.
Well said except I would substitute "art paid for by a patron" with "installation paid for by a corporation."
i dont know that there is any difference? Especially in the USA, where corporations are people, apparently ;-)
I don't know. Marc is super smart but it's been the same thing for 15 years now.
Though I get it and certainly don't begrudge anyone cashing in on this absolutely brutal profession. I've worked with him and at the time it was super interesting solving these structural and fabrication problems in a way that had never been done before - in 2010 that seemed sufficient justification to be doing the work.
Now, I don't think it is self-justifying any longer, and at any rate I always wanted to see the scripting applied to things besides shiny pavilions for Porsche. Or rather, that's fine for 15 years, but what then...? Alas, the era of Nervi has passed.
yeah i tend to agree. It is still pretty amazing work. Very few people can do it, even now. But it is not the cutting edge that it was. Its very hard to move digital fabrication out of the pavilion market though. Menges is making steps in that direction and everywhere else it is slowly creeping into practice, but its a slow thing. I tend to read this work as art work more than anything lately, in which case this is a very reasonable outcome (and client).
Don't take it personally but it does look like wasteful bullshit. I was just at the U of M architecture school in Ann Arbor, and right in the lobby they had a painting of a vagina so this kind of work is no surprise.
lol. Art transgresses, I guess?
Yeah but what's wrong with a painting of a vagina?
There’s nothing wrong with a painting of a vagina. Every single one of us came out of one (excepting C-sections, of course. Yay, medical science!).
Will, I agree with you that it is very, very hard to move this kind of work out of pavilions and into architecture aka safe, warm, dry, accessible enclosures. I’m disappointed honestly that it hasn’t happened yet - there’s no significant example I can think of.
Marc did an ampitheater covering that I believe at least keeps the rain off. The Timber Labs at the AA, Stuttgart, and IACC have built some pavilions that get closer to being "liveable". I just don't think this kind of digital fab / scripting design is compatible with habitable spaces given our current level of materials technology and the current paradigm construction occurs in.
Even the craziest looking Morphosis, Zaha, or Ghery project is still using fundamentals of building science to deliver a building (vs a piece of art).
I know talking about mass water and moisture and vapor control layers isn't as sexy as scripting a fancy shape, but it is how we make building perform.
I'm comfortable with vaginas in any context, it was meant as a criticism of the unseriousness of many architecture schools. If I saw this as a freshman, I'd think the place was a joke, but if your cool with it... enjoy!
Lol, love it. We used to do all kind of guerilla installations in the lobby if our school.
Maybe it's like the Woman's March of 2017 after Trump was elected, an electric event where many images of vaginas were visible. To me it's not about the image but how detached academia seems from the kind of problems their graduates will encounter in the work place. I apologize if the image caused anyone offense.
Will, I just went a looked up Menges, the work is beautiful and he’s a hottie. This building - it’s called a pavilion but it *does* have insulation, cladding, and windows- is fantastic. Purely wood structure, computationally designed to be thin and lightweight (I assume using less wood than other types of framing, of maybe since it can be made with thin plys it’s less intensive to process?). I can’t imagine it being super highly insulated, and integrating plumbing etc. would be a fun challenge, but it’s definitely a step in a really good direction! Beautiful.
http://www.achimmenges.net/?p=5731
Agreed donna! That was my Stuttgart reference above - Menges with the support of his advanced students is probably pushing this as far as it can currently go.
Finger jointed CNC cut marine grade plywood hexagons...
*Homer Simpson drooling noises*
Agree Donna. Achim's work is leading the way as far as I am concerned. He is lucky to be in the heart of the automotive industry where robots are all over the place and there is (hopefully still) money for research and execution at this scale. Achim comes from the AA, but has made an attempt to let the dog wag the tail rather than the other way around, which is where most computation design has landed. The tower he recently completed is astonishing. There is also a lot of banal serious building science work going on with his group that could lead to some cool outcomes eventually.
That's the thing, a lot of research is not pretty to look at but ends up leading to cool stuff. Fornes' and others seem to take the visual appeal of this work and stop there, to make pretty pavilions in engaging colors that don't actually show or teach anything new.
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