FOCUS ON LIGHT AND IMMATERIAL
Photo: Filippo Fortis
NOT MASSIVE, BUT LIGHT, OPEN, AND VIRTUALLY IMMATERIAL: THERE ARE CERTAIN BUILDINGS THAT LOOK NOTHING LIKE BUILDINGS. THEY ARE MORE LIKE ENVIRONMENTS, LIKE ATMOSPHERES.
Architecture, connected as it is with building, is anything but immaterial. You could regard architecture as an attribute that is intangible in a building, as an aspect that is elevated to more than just construction. Nonetheless, it must eventually take the form of substance. This is clearly bound up with the necessity for buildings to challenge gravity. What has to stay standing – a roof or walls – ought to be supported in as far as possible. Such was the dogma, seemingly eternal, especially in the history of Western architecture.
You might therefore consider it unnatural for certain architects who make every effort to deny or mask that immateriality and endow it with a light, insubstantial aura, as though it were not so much a building as an atmosphere or an environment, or as something intangible like a cloud or even a mirage where you would pause for a moment and move on. That applies above all to buildings that are entirely clad in mirror glass – nothing but clouds, blue skies and what is in its immediate vicinity such as trees, masts and nearby buildings. You could describe it as the easiest and most superficial solution, literally, since there is always a sturdy structure of concrete and steel beneath the reflective skin.
More interesting are architects who dare go further, who aim to arouse a sense of immateriality and weightlessness by manipulating both the structure and the skin. By so doing they express the spirit of our times. As the ultimate consequence of modernity, we are today everywhere and nowhere. The world has in a certain sense become borderless, thanks to the internet and the effortless ease with which we can travel. You may then wonder what significance the materiality of a building ultimately possesses. In a context where the physical aspect is not too important, materiality seems less convincing, this being forever anchored in a specific place of a building.
No wonder that there are architects who seek out the opposite of that materiality and who try to bring out an expression of lightness, openness and fluidity; a life that we lead free of a fixed place, as though nowadays we have all become what we long used to be – namely nomads. The projects featured below – the new urban campus by SANAA for Bocconi University in Milan, the Sandi Simon Center for Dance by Lorcan O'Harlihy Architects at Chapman University in Orange County, and the Bahrein pavilion by Christian Kerez for Expo 2020 in Dubai – are excellent examples of light, transparency and indeed almost immaterial architecture.
NEW URBAN CAMPUS FOR BOCCONI UNIVERSITY Milan, Italy
If there is a single architecture firm that has developed an immaterial aura convincingly and at the same time subtly, it is SANAA. That is how the Japanese office gained its reputation; the architecture of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa borders on the unreal, and its transparency and lightness is unparalleled. You could barely have less materiality when it comes to their buildings.
The design of the new Urban Campus for Bocconi University in Milan is no exception. Various functions had to be accommodated there: management and administration, meeting rooms, classrooms, an auditorium, a café and a sports facility that includes a basketball court and a swimming pool. SANAA divided the programme over six white, organic, unicellular buildings, some of which slightly touch and are thus connected. Referring to the closed buildings with courtyards in the nearby historic centre of Milan, four of the six new blocks also enclose their own courtyard.
Together the buildings make an extremely light impression, and the transitions between inside and outside are so fluid and ambiguous that they seem to have no gaps, but rather form a smooth continuum. The six buildings are surrounded by lawns that form part of a larger park, with a covered walkway meandering and looping through the open spaces. The fusion of inside and outside is all the more palpable, to the effect that the outside is enclosed within.
What would otherwise appear heavy and monolithic is made less so by the curved facades and the wavy, textile-like mesh that hangs from the balconies to protect against the sun's rays, and surrounds all the buildings like a skirt up to a few metres above the ground. During the day, the mesh gives the buildings a silvery sheen; in the evening light, it bathes them in a soft glow.
ARCHITECT: SANAA Photos: Filippo Fortis
SANDI SIMON CENTRE FOR DANCE AT CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY Orange, California, USA
By suggesting movement in contrast to the static nature of architecture, it becomes equally possible to arouse an immaterial impression. After all, if a sense of movement is predominant, what would otherwise appear solid and impenetrable resolves of its own accord.
For the Sandi Simon Center for Dance, designed by the Californian firm Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, it was exactly making that motility of the space the aim of the design. Transforming the agricultural building into a dance centre entailed movement and volatility, the essence of dance, that the architects wanted to resonate in the architecture. They achieved this by cutting an opening in the ground floor and exposing the unused cellar. Under the industrial sawtooth roof with north-facing skylights, supported by an impressive structure of white-painted wooden trusses, a large space was created in which three curved volumes were placed. It houses offices, a meeting room and a performance and rehearsal space.
Together with the stairs, these free-standing volumes constitute a dynamic space that changes circulation between the space for relaxation and social contact, as well as more peripheral dance studios and classrooms, into a dance in its own right. You can hardly help but swing through it and have the sensation that you are floating.
Abundant skylight illumination, the extensive use of glass, and sheets of transluscent channeled polycarbonate that are widely adopted for partitions, contribute to the feeling that nothing stands in your way in this building. You can move as you will, in complete freedom.
Movement was formerly paramount to this historic building, too, but then it was an efficient, standardized motion for sorting and packing oranges. By exposing the gigantic sawtooth roof and trusses and reusing the maple wood of the former floor as wall cladding, the past is not dispensed with but respected.
ARCHITECT: LOHA Photos: Eric Staudenmaier
PAVILION FOR BAHRAIN EXPO 2020 Dubai
While construction normally means erecting a building firmly on the ground, the opposite seems to be the case for the project of Swiss architect Christian Kerez. The construction has spun so far out of control that you get a feeling that its loadbearing function has become irrelevant.
Unusually, there are no columns to transfer the weight to the ground via the shortest route, vertically in other words, and the pavilion is kept upright by a web of thin tubes all disposed at different angles. How they relate to one another makes a random impression at first sight, although you may suspect an algorithm behind it, such as developed in the fifties by the modernist composer Yannis Xenakis. He was the first to produce complex musical harmonies that you would never conceive without the help of a computer.
Where the pipes touch, they are welded together. This increases their loadbearing capacity, and the structure can remain thin, as fine as filigree. Together with aluminium rods buried in the walls, they form a single structural whole.
Owing to his sophisticated composition of the tubes, Kerez has succeeded in creating an arrangement of parts by which the tubes form a dense forest, so to speak.
The structure can be inspected from an angle such that a space suddenly appears wide-open, presenting surprising views. A further fusion of structure and space is produced by reflections in the flexible aluminum plates with which the walls are clad. Conversely, the structural frame in the walls shines through the outer cladding.
Slits of light continue the inscrutable Mikado pattern of angled tubes, further fragmenting the space. The effect of the whole is so radical that the pavilion can hardly be experienced as a physical object. Rather, beyond the material, it is transformed into nothing but space, the space in which the future reveals itself to the visitor.
ARCHITECT: KEREZ Photos: Roland Halbe
