| Berlin – Foam City |
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Berlin is a city of left-over spaces – of voids. Individual responses to these voids can vary, often in alignment with generational attitudes, from sites frozen by the burden of memory to unregulated spaces of unlimited potential. The site in Berlin, in Friedrichshain, contains a large void, extending from a wasteland adjacent to the S-Bahn line, to the windswept paved expanse surrounding a new stadium, whose monumental scale and lack of active frontage sterilizes its surroundings and blocks urban flows. The multi-scaled ‘foam’ proposed in this scheme then is a response to this negligent act of post-traumatic urbanism.
German philosopher, Peter Solderdijk, argues that the concept of the masses, of vast conglomerations of people with common desires and a collective will, and which “allowed for the most harmful ideologies of the last two centuries”, is no longer appropriate nor useful. Sloterdijk suggests that society acts more like foam, which is not only inclusive of individual wills, but that more disparate and temporary collectives form at various scales according to transient commonalities and partial desires. Importantly, the common cell walls are membranes which permit exchange between ensembles, so that collectively the foam is considerably more than the sum of individual autistic bubbles.This scheme seeks to take the Sloterdijk’s foam concept literally, as an architectural and urban device. This is not without precedent – there has been an emergence of foam and bubble buildings over the past decade, such as PTW’s Watercube, Grimshaw’s Eden Project, and Foster + Partners recent proposal for the Crystal Island in Moscow, a vast mega-structure covering a total floor area of 2.5 million square metres, and conceived as a self-contained city within a city. While reminiscent of utopian superstructures, such as Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or Archigram’s Plug-In City, the Crystal Island is a serious proposal which is being justified on the basis of environmental performance. The structure controls its own of atmosphere, through an active or passive interface with the external environment, and where the lower envelope ratio in comparison to the same volume of buildings in a conventional urban configuration, leads to energy savings (see Alejandro Polo Zaero, ‘The Politics of the Envelope’, Volume 17). The associated blurring of concepts of interiority in these buildings is reminiscent of Olafur Eliasson’s atmospheric Weather Project (Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2003/2004). The danger, then, is that of exclusion, where Foster + Partners’ Crystal Island for instance, with its exclusive program of hotels and entertainment facilities, only caters for one (stratospheric) sector of society. The response of this urban megastructure to multiple physical scales is illustrated in the Performance to Scale Elevation, which ranges from solar shading and insulation cells at scales of tens of millimetres to scales of tens of metres for car and train access when the structure arches over roads and railway lines. In addition to the requirement that the foam is highly permeable and operates at multiple (physical) scales, it must also function at multiple socioeconomic and temporal scales, so that for example, a kebab stand immediately adjoins a Mercedes Benz showroom. The foam is constructed as a robust skeletal superstructure with multiple structural redundancies. It is intended to outlive the specific programmatic elements that inhabit the foam, each of which can have lifetimes ranging from hours to decades, in response to local demands, desires and contingencies. The superstructure is based on a quasiperiodic tiling geometry, and can accommodate both linear and nonlinear gradients. Variations in solar shading or ventilation across a zone require linear gradients, whereas nonlinear gradients involve a multi-scale entanglement, as is the true nature of foams. This could be a relatively abrupt change in scale to demarcate pedestrian and vehicular flows, such as where the foam forms a dense canopy over the S-Bahn platform for sun shading, followed by a rapid shift to large scales to allow the passage of trains, and the scale then shifts back to an even denser foam for acoustic diffusion to shield the residential zone beyond. The fractal foam also envelops existing buildings. The foam geometry expands the existing building envelope, increasing the contact surface area between the interior and the public realm, and thus catalyzing flows of exchange. Linear gradients in the building envelope allow for the more gradual integration of the natural environment within the building. It creates an intermediate zone of indeterminate interiority. |
| Social Transformations Studio | Master of Architecture | University of Technology Sydney | Spring 2008 | Instructors: Adrian Lahoud + Sam Spurr |
