Balkrishna V. Doshi: "So, What is Our Heritage?"

Doshi: Chapter 8 - "So, what is our heritage?" from Hinterland Films on Vimeo.

This short clip is very compelling and I believe that it captures a lot of the thoughts that I have towards contemporary building. B.V. Doshi poses the question, "What is our heritage?" Of course it is aimed towards the contemporary Indian architect, but I believe it can be applied to architects the world over. I am constantly amazed at the compromises that we, architects, are willing to make in the pursuit of the dollar; denigrating ourselves to the lowest realms of the professional world. Where is our value? In ancient time, or for that matter, the not too distant past, architects were valued. They were expert builders. They were expert in design. Constantly we are devaluing our position in society and are constantly pushed around. So, what is our heritage? Not just our building heritage, but our professional heritage. I believe that we need to take back our profession and inject ourselves and the public realm with some architectural validity.

Langara Student Union - Teeple Architects in association with IBI/HB Architects

By Kelly Minner

The new Langara Student Union is designed as a focal point and center of the main quad at Langara College. It flows out from between two existing buildings bringing students from the 49th Street entrance into the heart of the campus and public square – drawing life into the outdoor space.

Architects: Teeple Architects Inc in association with IBI/HB Architects
Location: Vancouver, Canada

The architecture solidifies the dynamics of this flow – capturing its energetic movement in built form. An outdoor accessible ramp brings students from the street to the heart of the campus without passing through the building, thus allowing 24 hour access. The vibrant program of the Student Union is distributed along its edges, animating the quad with indoor and outdoor student activity.

Both the College and the Students sought an innovative approach to sustainability from the outset of the design process. The design of the building is a unique response to energy use in buildings that is based on designing a heat reclaim system first – ensuring that no heat is rejected from the building until there is more thermal energy in the building than it needs, and no heat is added to the building until it has reused all of its own thermal energy. The result is a reduction in energy use and green house gas emissions without a large capital cost.

In this system all internal energy is reused before any energy is drawn from its ground source system. The result is an extraordinary level of energy efficiency, resulting in 10/10 LEED energy points and LEED Gold status. The LSU is both an energy hub and an exciting new locus of student activity on the Langara campus.

The design and construction of the new LSU Student Centre at Langara College marks the second phase in an ongoing transformation of the college into a Sustainable campus, as prescribed in the Master Plan completed by the architectural team. The new project employs a unique Direct Energy Transfer system stores energy and moves it throughout the buildings to areas where it is required for heating and cooling, making the completed buildings amongst the most energy efficient buildings in the country.

Information taken from ArchDaily.

Luzern Stadtarchiv - XTEN Architecture

by Kelly Minner

The Luzern Stadtarchive is conceived as a marker in the landscape. XTEN Architecture‘s entry for a library competition in Switzerland the design was driven by orienting the public areas to the landscape, the site topography and adjacent mountains.

Due to the complexity of the site access and orientation, the building addresses each elevation as a primary façade, with one large opening per elevation in the otherwise solid concrete body of the building. The East elevation is dominated by large panorama window the full width of the library volume. The South elevation is the result of a smaller volume, similarly expressed with a large horizontal window to daylight the administrative spaces. The West elevation frames the entry plaza and foyer. The North elevation is oriented around a large clerestory glass wall to daylight the interior of the reading room.

The building is organized around the main magasin/ storage rooms of the Archiv, which arranged parallel to Ruopigenstrasse with four magasins on each of two levels. By locating the magasins below grade the majority of the site is maintained as landscape. The soil from the necessary excavation is used to landscape the plaza, the rooftops, and to berm against the archive, resulting in excellent energy efficiency, climate control and security for the archive documents.

Future growth of the archive is accommodated in a straightforward manner by extending magasin modules to the North based on the evolving requirements of the Stadtarchiv. The structural bays and spacing of the magasins establish the structural bays for the Library, Reading Room and Office spaces located on the main level. Each of these spaces is oriented on the site according to their specific requirements, with a single circulation core at the center of the articulated pinwheel plan. The public enters the library via a covered roof and large foyer with adjacent services. The library is transparent in the direction of travel from the entrance, with a roof that slopes gently upwards toward a wide window overlooking Luzern that provides ample natural daylight to the space.

The Reading Room is conceived as a cloistered space with the only light entering through a single large opening near the top of the 10m high volume. The base of this volume is formed by extending the magasin walls from below. The top of the volume is rotated to provide natural, balanced Northern daylight for the delicate documents being studied.

The Stadtarchiv is conceived as a white concrete building. The concrete is formed in 50cm lifts, with a sandy cement mix rammed into the formwork to achieve joint lines that are slightly irregular. The concrete walls register the accumulation of the concrete pours with the same naturalness that sedimentation is rendered in geological cross sections. The intention is that the material and the volumetric forms of the building will create a resonance between the Stadtarchive and that greater natural landscape.

information taken from ArchDaily

A+D Museum of Los Angeles: SOUPERgreen

Text and image above taken from A+D Museum of LA

SOUPERgreen
This exhibition presents new architectural work that offers a critical and compelling alternative to the prevailing approaches to environmentally conscious architecture. It specifically challenges the architectural discipline’s inexcusably normative application of technology in response to the environmental crisis, which has to date resulted in work that either approaches the environmental crisis as an engineering problem to be simply “solved” through a banal or invisible technology, or else speciously uses the rhetoric of technological performance in an attempt to justify an otherwise irrelevant formalism. Given the seriousness of the environmental crisis, the complacency of both of these existing approaches is severely problematic.

In contrast, this exhibition features five architectural propositions that explore the way that technology—reviled by many as the source of the environmental problem and revered by others as its potential solution—can promote and enhance a far more constructive engagement between architecture and the environment. This “souped up” approach to green architecture is achieved by leveraging the expressive potential of a meaner, greener technology in order to produce architecture that is not only environmentally responsible by quantifiable measures, but which also critically and positively promotes more expressive, exuberant, rad, boss, and totally stoked green experiences.

This exhibition features newly completed projects by Doug Jackson, Wes Jones, Aryan Omar, Steven Purvis, and Randolph Ruiz—five architects and designers who have each produced widely publicized and celebrated work renowned for its emphasis on the expressive and transformative potential of technology. Collectively this group represents a vision that is both unique and uniquely consistent within the discipline of architecture, but one that is also rich and nuanced, informed by a broad range of experience and expertise:

Doug Jackson is the principal of the Doug Jackson Design Office and is also a professor at the Cal Poly College of Architecture and Environmental Design in San Luis Obispo; Wes Jones is the principal of Jones, Partners: Architecture and a professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture; Aryan Omar is a designer with Richard Meier & Partners Architects; Steven Purvis is the principal of APLSD Design; and Randolph Ruiz is the principal of AAA Architecture and a professor at the California College of the Arts.

The work that these five have produced for this exhibition capitalizes on their collective expertise, as well as their proven unwillingness to play it safe. While other architects have so far elected to only timidly engage the environmental crisis, the work in this show demonstrates the superlative approach to greenness that architecture should take, and leaves all previous efforts at green architecture in the dust.

The following are a selection of photographs that I took of the above mentioned projects during my trip to the A+D Museum of LA.

Los Angeles Art District - Photo Collage

Recently I took a group of students to Los Angeles in preparation for our next studio project - a BodyArt Studio/Tattoo Parlor. The site is in the heart of the Art (Warehouse) District, about a block away from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). At first glance the combination of graffiti art and rusticated architecture is impressive and provides an aesthetic milieu of texture, color and energy. This palimpsestic canvas of layered history is juxtaposed by a VOID. The void is a construction (or deconstruction), developed through an elimination of the urban context and local history. The students have been asked to [re]claim this void and interject a self-defined, process-driven architectural response.

Below are a couple of photo collages that I put together. I believe that they capture the essence of the place and help to express its unique characteristics and tectonics.

Collage 01: The human experience is always different than what is captured on film. Each snapshot represents a unique moment in time; captured and preserved. The accumulation of each image begins to reconstruct an ever changing world and its elements. As I reconstructed this experience I realized, in amazement, at the voids and slivers of negative spaces that have been left. At times these slivers create visible scars on this tapestry while other moments are completely neglected or omitted all together - leaving the mind to attempt to fill in the blanks and reconsider reality.

Collage 02: Rhythm, pattern, movement, order: All expressions of the contextual condition. Perhaps less experiential, this collage attempts to capture the structural and rhythmic phenomenon that occur on the site. Each panel depicts the "bays" of the structures; beginning with a glimpse of the street-scape, then warehouse, next fencing, returning to warehouse and back again to the street. You suddenly notice the breaking down of the site into smaller modules that can begin to relate more closely to the human scale and experience. The void in the middle of the block, although larger in scale, is actually more intimate and inviting (despite the restrictive fencing that somehow was breached by inquisitive students).