HIGH-RISE HYBRIDS
DIPLOMA THESIS BRIEF
This year’s Diploma Thesis brief addresses the high-rise or skyscraper typology in an urban setting. The brief calls for daring revisions of this typology based on hybrid or composite architectural programs. The brief presents three optional sites in Frankfurt am Main, the European city that has most clearly and strongly subscribed to the high-rise typology as part of its recent development and post-war reconstruction.
The current status of high-rises, in part fuelled by developments in the near and far East and in part by ever-mounting pressures on scarce inner-city areas, begs a re-examination of the building typology in general. One reason for this is the often discredited history of much post-war urban development, not the least that in housing.
The Diploma Thesis brief of 2008 asks: How can we remodel the typology of the high-rise considering any set of contemporary needs, currents and requirements to urban development in general and the development in Frankfurt in particular. Such considerations would include functional area optimisation, strategies for sustainable construction and use, energy efficiency, a strong design profile and identity in relation to capital investment and market interests, as well as any number of other considerations pending the specific program and site of the building.
One consideration presents itself as particular potent with respect to a critical examination of the high-rise typology and its current role in urban development. That is the role of the building program. In order to break with conventional planning and design of high-rises, you are asked to define and propose an integrated and hybrid or composite program for your proposal. One part of this architectural program must accommodate an institutional function. The brief is based on the hypothesis that a far-reaching engagement with an institutional program in conjunction with another, related type of program presents the possibility to rethink the role and function of the high-rise, both on a formal and a practical level.
EFFERVESCENT SURFACES
THE ARCHITECTURE OF SURFACE FORMATION AND ORGANIZATION
The current research endeavors in SAC are undertaken under the general rubric, ‘Effervescent Surfaces.’ This title refers to the modeling and construction of surfaces that are volumetric, spatial and enabled by specific material variables that in turn produce specific sets of architectural effects.
Surfaces represent the quintessential architectural condition of enveloping and separating through the setting out of boundaries.
Whereas surface conditions once were given as reified and unique homogenous material conditions, the current work pursues the underlying dynamics that lies behind the emergence and formation of surfaces. The underlying dynamics can be understood as an invisible or hidden system that regulates the formation and behaviour of the surface. It is a system that all-in-all is given by relations between different types of variables. The principal task is therefore to construct the system with which one can stage the variables in question.
The work is undertaken on the premise that surfaces are geometric extensions with a given depth - something entirely different to how surfaces are engendered within the current vogue of parametric design in architecture. In order words, a surface gives more than the superficies of an architectural object or volume; it renders the outermost boundary of this object or volume as a spatial condition with the capacity to process information and do work. That is to say, surfaces are not constituted as 2D conditions without depth, they are the initial life-giving premise for the architectural space.
In each respective research portfolio within SAC, the experimental approach seeks to define a set of variables that define and regulate a system that in turn becomes the design process. These basic conditions and variables for surface formation are deducted from the existing portfolio on fibrous and textile geometry. These studies allow the direct import of fundamental input for setting up new sets of studies.
In this context, key considerations are:
- Dynamic conditions given by models of fibrous and textile systems
- Singularities formed within the envelope of select models
- Orientation and directionality given by the initial system