Sixteen architectural bureaus, including Zaha Hadid, Mecanoo, O.M.A., and Diller Scofidio Renfro, submitted their designs for a new dance and music center on the Spuiplein in The Hague, The Netherlands. Their work can be seen in an exhibition in the Atrium of The Hague City Hall from April 20 to May 7, 2010. Bustler
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some of the best competition coverage i've seen in a while! thanks, bustler!
because you get not only the models, all presented by themselves in the same way so that you can compare, but also get access to the materials on the boards, you can really see what the presentations were about.
this looks like a tough competition - basically because there is too much program for the site and a lot of the results look out of scale. you can see the various strategies for dealing with this included:
-carving out the corner on the church axis (aedas, rau, hadid),
-pushing the larger part of the volume to the other side of the site (mecanoo),
-attempting to break apart/'dematerialize' the volume (dsr/soil, hadid),
-and accepting a big block but then trying to cut voids out of it to break down scale (oma, arets, simpson/klinkhamer).
some other strategies that are less clear, but still dealing with the same issues (coenen, neutlings/riedijk).
obviously, the same base strategy in different hands can work completely differently.
i've got my opinions about what works, but i'll keep 'em to myself. this should be featured more fully so we can have a real discussion!
[don't miss the 'see more', folks. pdf downloads aren't the fastest, but worth it.]
Haven't I seen this Zaha project already?
From parts to whole; the metaphor works.
Metaphorical language (building) is a surface manifestation of conceptual (program, design and contact documents) metaphor. The built metaphor is the residue, excrement, product and periphery of the deep and complex reality of the building’s creative process and extent reality. As we don’t know the inner workings of our car and yet are able to drive so we can use our buildings. What we design and what we read, not the metaphor, but a surface manifestation of the concept metaphor.
A concept which we can only know as well as we is able to discern metaphorical language. The construction and the metaphor beneath are mapped by the building being the manifestation of the hidden conceptual metaphor. To know the conceptual metaphor we must read the building.
Since metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning: what is built is first thought and conceived separately from building, as thinking and conceiving is separate from the outward expression, so metaphor is a process; and, architectural metaphor is a process, and what we see is what the process issues; not the manifest metaphor. If the metaphor were to manifest it would be a series of interacting feelings about thoughts, words, impulses and decisions.
A part may be more comprehensive; transcending; change or transformation used with the metaphor to designate its new but related function so as to deal critically with the original concept of the metaphor.
Functional performance is a quality that depends and varies with another: as elements of a metaphor. Music and architecture are experienced in the same way. They are both composed through the experience of another person and in his context. The strange context and other person's experience are encapsulated ina composition, design, assemblage, or some other work of applied art for us to experience in our context in the future. That future is the present where we, in our context, experience the original composition. The two times, past and future contexts: the composers and ours converge on the work. We perceive the work in the present stimulated by signals These signals in music are in the form of volume, syncopation, crescendos, tones, notes etc.
In architecture it is materials, structures, textures, light, shadow etc. Both music and architecture can create scale, harmony, space, tension, compression, vision, illusions, etc. Music and architecture both are joined together by metaphoric works. Sorjs through the signals in the work the place, events, and history of the origins of the work. We compare them with our place, time and context. We see commonalities and differences: it is a metaphoric experience.
some nice proposals here. i was struck by how indebted we are to koolhaas. such prominent firms here. and many of the projects reference one oma project or other -- tres grande bibliotheque, jussieu, zkm, and the various oma projects since that themselves referenced those.
i mean this less as a critique than an acknowledgment. i always felt that koolhaas clearly changed the way we *talk* about architecture...
i, for one, will do my own agadir one day.
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