MODULE 5

Hyper theories of Architecture-1:

Development of postmodern architecture in 1980s is the ideas of Deconstructivism including,

Daniel Leibskind (Jewish Museum, Berlin and World Trade Centre, New York ),

Rem Koolhas(Dance Theatre, The Hague and Netherlands Sports Museum).

PREPARED BY
JAMBAVATI GOUDA
 Daniel Leibskind
(Jewish Museum, Berlin and World Trade Centre, New York ),
Design philosophy:

· "Libeskind is usually described as a 'deconstructivist'—an architect who takes the basic rectangle of a
building, breaks it up on the drawing board and then reassembles the pieces in a much different way.

· "Libeskind collects ideas about the social and historical context of a project, mixes in his own thoughts,
and transforms it all into a physical structure.“

· His ability to create a building that has a practical purpose as well as a deep symbolic meaning.

· Libeskind's has a unique ability to take lofty ideas and powerful emotions and translate them into the
physical forms of buildings.
Design philosophy:
His style constitutes a recognizable "brand". The brand consists of sharp, angular, metallic shards, with
gravity-defying walls, and conveys the unmistakable thrill of transgression.

· In Libeskind's buildings speak above all of despair, exile, and annihilation, there is a deliberate "geometry
of death" (predominates in his forms) at work -- one so powerfully present that it threatens to suffocate any
tokens of life that dare occupy its spaces. At the same time we see in those buildings speak of
regeneration, a corresponding "geometry of life ".
 Daniel Leibskind -
Jewish Museum, Berlin
THE JEWISH MUSEUM BERLIN

· The Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to the public in 2001, exhibits the social, political and cultural
history of the Jews in Germany from the 4th century to the present.

· The museum explicitly presents and integrates, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions
of the Holocaust.

· The building is very distinctive from other museums, since it does not respond to any functional
requirements, but is rather constructed to create spaces that tell the story of the Jewish people in
Germany. The museum itself is a work of art, blurring the lines between architecture and sculpture.
The view from above is that of a large zig-zag line, which earned it the nickname
"blitz", German word for thunderbolt.
· The main building is covered with zinc plating, and the windows are just lines that cross
the surface in a random fashion. These lines were created from connecting different sites
in a Berlin map that are important to Jewish history.
THE JEWISH MUSEUM BERLIN

· The facades are disrupted by gashes - windows that look like scars. Its angular shape and sharp edges
give it an almost violent appearance, though the surrounding gardens ensure the site is not entirely devoid of
life.

· This building has no access of any kind from the street

·· The new design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down
was based on three conception that formed the museum’s foundation:

First, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous
intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by the Jewish citizens of Berlin.

Second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the
consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin.

· Third, that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this erasure and void of Jewish life
in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
In order to move from one side of the museum to the other, visitors must cross one of the 60 bridges that
open onto this void.

· The basic form is is a zizag with a number of voids. These voids are 5 stories high. As visitors follow the
zig zag pattern through the museum as dictated by the layout of the building they are repeatedly
confronted by these voids.

The voids are accessible nowhere and appear to be meaningless or senseless. They are just cold gloomy
depths. The flowing movement breaks down.

· According to the Jewish Museum Berlin, "The line of Voids, a series of empty rooms ... expresses the
emptiness remaining in Europe after the banishment and murder of its Jews during World War II.

The Axis of Exile, which leads to an exterior square courtyard, composed of concrete columns and that
has been tilted in one of its corners, called The Garden of Exile; and

The Axis of Continuity, that goes through the other two hallways, representing the permanence of Jews
in Germany in spite of the Holocaust and the Exile.
Daniel Leibskind -World Trade Centre, New York ,
· Competing against many of the world's most accomplished architects, Libeskind conceived a design that
incorporated, in its every aspect, the significance of the tragedy that took place at that site on September 11,
2001, when terrorists crashed two jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

· Since it was felt that a strong connection to Libeskind's design, and he was declared the winner in February
2003.

· Libeskind plan, titled Memory Foundations, included a number of features, all interconnected and serving
to express his vision of the site as a tribute to the victims of 9/11 and as a landmark architectural project for
New York and the entire United States.
His original design designated large areas of open space, including the Park of Heroes as a tribute to
those police, fire fighters, and rescue workers who lost their lives on 9/11.

· Another open space was called the Wedge of Light, a triangular area that, every September 11, would
be bathed in natural light, unobscured by shadows from the surrounding buildings, between 8:46 A.M. , when
the first plane struck one of the twin towers, and 10:28 A.M. , when the second tower collapsed.

· Libeskind's design specified that the seventy-foot-deep "footprints," or foundations, of the collapsed
towers—where hundreds worked for many months after September 11, 2001, removing debris and searching
for remains—would be left intact as sunken memorial space.
Libeskind also wanted to leave standing the slurry walls, which made up part of the foundation of the twin
towers, the only part of those buildings to survive the collapse.

· His concept included a series of buildings to hold offices, residences, a performing arts center, and
shopping centers;

the tallest building was to be 1,776 feet, a number chosen by Libeskind to recall the year the United
States gained independence from Britain.

The shape of the building, which was to be topped by a tall spire, would echo that of the nearby Statue
of Liberty
The World Trade Center development added a new dimension to this complexity: for the families of the
victims of 9/11, and for many others as well, the ground at this site is sacred, and the process for developing
that land is charged with strong opinions and deeply felt emotions .
Rem Koolhas(Dance Theatre, The Hague and Netherlands Sports Museum).
Philosophy

• The "Program" became the key theme of architectural design . The notion of the Program involves "an
act to edit function and human activities“

• Rem Koolhaas is strategist, and formulates his works as a matter of strategy. “Koolhaas has always
been interested in the analysis of production.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, who developed a distinctive aesthetic, Koolhaas did not establish a
constant look from project to project. Instead, he created architecture that, utilizing the best of modern
technology and materials, spoke to the needs of a particular site and client.

Koolhaas refused to refer to past styles (he called for an “end to sentimentality”),
choosing instead to engage directly with the true gritty character of the modern world.

The combination of Koolhaas theoretical writings with his fondness for asymmetry,
challenging spatial explorations, and unexpected uses of color led many to classify him as a
deconstructivist .

In his works, he not only produces practical solutions to a definite problem, but also
formulates this problem with generic architectural concepts.
Rem Koolhas- Dance Theatre, The Hague
The Netherlands Dance Theatre, completed in 1987, was originally conceived in 1980
• The building is framed by a bland high-rise hotel, two looming government office towers, a highway
entrance ramp, and a spired 17th-century church, which stands as lonely testimony to the centers historic
past.

• Sandwiched between the hotel and the concert hall, the dance theatre looks so unassuming that it is hard
to distinguish just where van Mourik's design stops and Koolhaas' begins.

• Now the Dance Theatre shares the Spui Complex with a concert hall (van Mourik, architect), the town hall
(white building by Richard Meier) and a hotel designed by Carel Weeber (also the planner of the complex).

• The plan, which is partially determined by the grid of the parking garage below, divides the building into
three parallel programmatic zones.

• The theatre has structure of steel beams and girders, using metal cladding with sheet rock covered with
stucco, marble and gold foil.
The site intended for the Koolhaas project leads into a pedestrian area which
shares space with other new buildings: a hotel, a concert hall and its offices.

• The major interruption of the simple disposition of spaces occurs in the

entrance area. The entrance is initially disturbed by the golden conical form of the
restaurant which penetrates through the glass curtain wall of the perimeter block.
Further interruptions occur where the fanshaped back and underside of the
tapering auditorium form contact the rectangularity.

• This physical proximity issue was resolved by instituting a shared area, located
in the tinted glass lobby, where the access doors to the respective buildings are
placed side by side.

• The sobriety of the background and minimalist rationality of the interior design
turns the Dutch dance theatre into a lucid example of a new way of
understanding architecture in the 20 th century.
The structure is designed in three individual yet integrated components:
1. An inverted conical building, glazed at the top with a golden finish, which
houses the box office and cafeteria.

2. The sinuous, undulating profile of the auditorium roof (large zone) contains
the stage (35 x 18m2) and 1001 seat auditorium, the middle accommodates
rehearsal studios, and the smallest includes offices, dressing rooms, the dancers`
common rooms.

3. And finally the vast cube of the gridiron tower ( over the stage ), presided over
by a magnificent mural, which suggests pictorially what happens inside the
theatre.

• Koolhaas ingeniously gained public space for the theatre by appropriating the
underside of the raked auditorium seating as a quirky angled niche for a copper-
covered bar. Supported by multi-coloured columns, the niche's tilted ceiling
boomerangs into the foyer to form a balcony reached by a twisting staircase."
The curve of the bar area becomes a gallery access to the auditorium at first floor
level and suspended partially above this and partially above the ground floor is a
further platform known as the Sky bar.

• The corrugated wave form roof over the auditorium begins above these accumulated
technical histrionics and then continues to undulate gently over the much calmer
auditorium interior:

• The dance theatre is the more informally composed of the pair, with a variegated
grouping of low slabs, rendered in a monochromatic palette of corrugated steel,
stucco, glazed brick, and glass.

• Koolhaas maintains that the elevations (of the Dance Theatre) are inconspicuous by
design, in response to the theatre's cramped site and commercial context.

• Gold-rubbed wooden acoustic wall panels and blue velvet seats contribute material
richness to an intimate setting. Overhead, the asymmetrically curved soffit of a
corrugated steel roof is carried by a single central truss."
Occasionally this rectangularity is interrupted by asymmetrically curved soffit of
a corrugated steel self-supporting structure of a double layer of trapezoid
folded sheet steel roof carried by a single central truss.
Rem Koolhas-Netherlands Sports Museum
Site:
5,000m2
Program:
Exhibition space for sports memorabilia, temporary exhibition space, library, video archives, sports and
demonstration hall, auditorium, cafeteria, facilities for various indoor and outdoor sports activities
(baseball, golf,
mountaineering, cross-country skiing, swimming)
Inevitable in a museum of sports is the collection of worn out football pants, used track shoes and
obsolete cups of
championships.
In this design the total of these ‘obligations’ is located in a continuous ‘vitrine’, that leads along the
different elements: entrance, video archives, exposition space, library, artificial rock, sports and
demonstration hall, from the
passive to the active, video games, indoor sports.

In this design the total of these ‘obligations’ is located in a continuous ‘vitrine’, that leads along the
different elements: entrance, video archives, exposition space, library, artificial rock, sports and
demonstration hall, from the passive to the active, video games, indoor sports.

Outside – partially on the roof – different kinds of sports can be practiced and enjoyed in an intensified
way, cross-country skiing, baseball, golf, mountaineering .
plan
• In this design the total of these ‘obligations’ is located in a continuous ‘vitrine’, that leads along the different elements:
entrance, video archives, exposition space, library, artificial rock, sports and demonstration hall, rom the passive to the
active, video games, indoor sports.

• Outside – partially on the roof – different kinds of sports can be practiced and enjoyed in an
intensified way, cross-country skiing, baseball, golf, mountaineering .
 MODULE 5
Hyper theories of Architecture-2:

Ideas of Deconstructivism including, Peter Eisenman,

Zaha Hadid (The Peak Club, HongKong and IBA Housing Block 2, West Berlin),

Coop Himmelb(l)au,

PREPARED BY
JAMBAVATI GOUDA
Zaha Hadid (The Peak Club, HongKong and IBA Housing Block 2, West
Berlin),
Design philosophy:

· The key idea, which was to make possible all the works that followed, was fragmentation: shattering
conventional modern forms into eccentric bits, then
placing them back together in new ways." Making the building, more like a habitable sculpture,
conveys a sort of visceral excitement that unthinkable in most buildings.“

· Lead up to this new visual language is what would happen if one shattered the pure geometric forms
of Classical Modernism which have become increasingly
unpopular.

· The building appears to be "in the process of tearing itself apart and flying off in all directions. This
fragmentary style addresses the needs of the inhabitants of
the building more than the pure Classical Modernist forms ever did.

· It allows for a dozen different functions and characteristics to be tailored to consumer need
She’s moved away from existing typology, from high tech, and has shifted the
geometry of buildings.
· Her work is referred to as “Baroque Modernism ” i.e. Baroque classicists like
Borromini shattered Renaissance ideas of a single viewpoint perspective in
favor of dizzying spaces designed to lift the eyes and the heart to God.

· Likewise, Hadid shatters both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space — walls,
ceilings, bfront and back, right angles.

· She then reassembles them as what she calls “ a new fluid kind of spatiality ”
of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry, designed to embody
the chaotic fluidity of modern life.
· Hadid's designs exhibits that a building can float and defy gravity creating an
abstract, dynamic beauty; this is a body of work that explores and expresses
the world we live in.

· Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and
changes as we pass through.

· Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and
changes as we pass through.
Zaha Hadid -The Peak Club, HongKong
THE PEAK CLUB

· This project by Hadid was the winning design in a competition for a private club.

· Among Hadid's early influences were the supremacists, the Russian artists of the revolutionary
period, who were trying to merge ideas about abstraction, geometry and function.

· Hadid's Peak Club seemed to break away from the mountain in cascading floors, as if tearing
itself off the ground.
Site Conditions…

· The site demands programmatic inventiveness and an overwhelming significance in relation

to and as a relief from, the congestion of the city itself.

· The prevailing conditions are varied; abetting the spirit of intensity and prosperity in Hong
Kong and Kowloon.

· Literally set over the city, high on a hill, the site rests free from the condensed urban
environment yet is still integrated with the land and water below.
Response to Context…

· Hadid proposed a transformation of the site itself by excavating the hills and using the excavated rock
to build artificial cliffs .

· Into this new topography, she interjected cantilevered beams, shard like fragments, and other elements
that seemed to splinter the structure into its myriad constituent parts, as if it had been subjected to some
powerful de–stabilizing force.

· Hadid defined each surface of her building, the buildings that surround it, and the crevices of the
mountaintop topography through different planes of color.
· These planes of color establish a moving rapport between her building, which she paints from several
angles on the same canvas, and the environment.

· By establishing a dialogue of grays and greens between the leisure club, the other buildings, and the
mountaintop, Hadid brings attention to various surfaces.
Far from taking ownership of the ground on which the work is to be built, Hadid's
design reveals a more symbiotic approach and emphasizes the qualities of its
surroundings.

· Hadid proposes an active, inquisitive relationship, with which people can

explore the environment.

· In molding the leisure club along the contours of the ground, Hadid's design
makes the viewers conscious of their immediate, physical foundations. That
consciousness heightens one's sensitivity to local features, such as
striations in a certain part of the topography.

· One notices the striations precisely because the shape of Hadid's building directs
the eye towards them.

· Additionally, the gray surface of the club mimics the subtle grays of the
mountaintop.
Unfortunately, the money wasn't forthcoming for the Peak Club and hence
Hadid’s admired design remained unbuilt.

· What excites the human senses is the rhythmic movement of Hadid's

shapes and the unusual bird's-eye view, a
perspective the human eye would not ordinarily have.

· Notable too, is Hadid's precision of line and color.

IBA HOUSING
Zaha Hadid -IBA Housing Block 2, West Berlin
IBA HOUSING

CONCEPT…

The architect had to confront two fundamental issues:

• The IBA strategy to infill and repair.

The tight building regulations for social housing, which contradict modern open plan layouts.

• In addition to these constraints were the surrounding buildings, which represented a wide range
of different
types and periods.

• Hence the guidelines stipulating that new developments in the area must contain an average of
5 storey’s, could
virtually never be met.
Planning
• The 5 storey planning restriction was interpreted by creating a long 3-storey block that terminated in an 8 storey tower
at the corner.

• The longer block’s lower floors contain commercial premises with standardized dwellings above.

• On top is a roof garden with a children’s playground.

• The sculpted tower, clad in anodized sheet metal, contains three wedge-shaped lofts on each floor.