rocker-lange blog

Rocker Lange Architects are participating in this year’s Hong Kong & Shenzhen bi-city biennale with their proposal for a new urban furniture concept.

Hong Kong’s urban furniture contains multiple functional objects. Each of them belongs to a different set of formal expression or is part of a different style. While variation is obvious in the style mix of Hong Kong’s public furniture, there is a lack of uniformity in the formal expression that could foster a unique Hong Kong identity..

This design proposal for a contemporary city bench seeks to understand the concept of street furniture as a holistic design problem. Instead of offering only one single static design, this scheme suggests multiple varying solutions that meet specific fitness criteria.
The project “Urban Adapter” is based on a digital parametric model. At its core the model utilizes explicit site information and programmatic data to react and interact with its environment. That way the model’s DNA structure is capable of producing a variety of unique furniture results. Together they generate an endless family of new urban bench furniture.

Rather than having a fixed form the members of the family can adapt to different site conditions and programmatic needs. While all of the designs have the ability to serve as a seating element, some have additional programmatic values added, such as recycling containers, flower buckets or billboards serving for advertisement or educational purposes. The generated functional surface invites the user to new seating and communication arrangements and establishes a unique identity for the urban space of Hong Kong.

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their competition entry for Denmark’s New Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen.

The proposed scheme serves urbanistically as well as architecturally as a catalytic connector: it connects and enhances the existing buildings with which it creates the new Museum of Natural History. It creates a visual marker in the city signaling the national and international importance of the new institution. The result is an open welcoming museum complex, embedded in the beautiful landscape of the botanic garden, surrounded by the traditional – renovated - brick buildings of the Geologisk Museum and the Solvtorvskomplekset.

Embedded within the landscape the museum functions quite literally as a interlocutor between the natural- and the cultural-scape. Both the park- and the urban-scape flow in and through the building, creating public interior and exterior plazas, allowing for views onto the giant whale and dinosaur skeletons in the museum’s exhibition halls.

3 major exhibition areas traverse the new museum reflecting the different exhibition areas: Fauna, Flora, and Geology. The meandering paths traverse the exhibitions providing spectacular overviews and close insights into the museum’s collections.

A variety of different spaces are inscribed in the building’s envelope: larger and smaller exhibition zones alternate, and special media presentation spaces are also provided. On the open floors swarms of animal species can be admired while in the smaller rooms carefully elaborated analysis are on display.

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their proposal for the “London Bridge 800: Inhabited Bridge” competition. The proposal for a Living Bridge over the River Thames was one of the schemes of the Living Bridge Competition for the 800’s aniversery of London Bridge, London. The scheme was selected by the jury to be included in several exhibitions in London and Manchester.

The proposal seeks to readdress the typology of the terraced house in a contemporary interpretation by implementing the concept of cross scalar variation to achieve varying programmatic and formal identity and a unique spatial configuration. On the other hand the scheme provides a uniform and holistic building envelope for the entire composition on London Bridge, ensuring a strong iconic identity for the structure and the city.

The bridge provides two main promenades that are situated on the perimeter of the bridge. While the east promenade is accessible to both, vehicles and pedestrians the west promenade is only accessible to pedestrians. Intervals of cross connectivity through the commercial folded landscape are structured by the terraced housing arrangement and generate an easy movement between the two promenades.

Rocker-Lange architects Ordos 100 project has been recently featured in MARK Magazine, Harvard Design Magazine and Architecture Avivre.

Rocker-Lange Architects were invited to participate in the exhibition “Ordos100, The inevitable cultural negotiations when building a city in the 21st Century” at ART Basel.
The exhibition on architecture, urbanisation and globalisation will feature all 100 Villas for the Ordos 100 projects in Ordos, Inner Mongolia.

During ART Basel

June 10th – 14th, 2009
Open daily 5PM-8PM

Opening June 10th, 5PM-8PM

www.ordos100basel.info

E-Halle Basel, Erlenstrasse 15
Switzerland
For directions: www.e-halle.ch

For more information: ordos@territorialagency.com

Professor Ingeborg M. Rocker, Rocker-Lange Architects - developed with students at the GSD, Harvard University a robotic built wall.

Student quotes:
“This was the best experience so far at the GSD: generating a digital design, fabricating a model and then building it in a 1:1 scale.”  Jeff LaBoskey

“A whole set of new challenges occurred when we started to build the design – and a constant re-adjustments of design and building process had to happen – overall great fun and a fantastic learning experience for all of us. The most rewarding is to be in the space we have created and to watch people experiencing it.” Misato Odanaka

“This is the type of experience for which I came to the GSD! More of this!” Teresa McWalters

Credits:
On the Bri-n-ck project, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design

Advisor:
Ingeborg M.Rocker

Leading Team:
Jeff LaBoskey
Misato Odanaka
Benjamin Franceschi
Teresa McWalters

Coding:
Jessica Rosenkrantz, Nervous System
Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, Nervous System
Christian J. Lange, Rocker-Lange Architects

Core Team:
Natalya Egon
Ricardo Munoz
Matthew Swaidan
Tory Wolcott

Team:
Masana Amamiya, Sen Ando, Ben Brady, Julian Bushman-Copp, Lindsay Chandler-Alexander, Brad Crane, Theodore Diehl, Elizabeth Farley, Matthew Fiely, Chelsea Garunay, Jeremy Jih, Tessa Kelly, Jeongyon Kim, Jessica Knobloch, Carl Koepcke, Annie Kountz, Eva Leung, Cara Liberatore, Lesley McTague. Paul Merrill, Brian Militana, Yuhka Miura, Jason Phipps, Alicia Taylor, Jessica Vaughn, Ka Yip

Special Thanks:
Stephen Hickey
Martin Bechthold

Funding:
Junior Faculty Grant and Preston Scott Cohen, Chair of the Architecture Department

rocker-lange architects are releasing their design of a 1000 square meter Villa in Ordos Inner Mongolia, P.R. China.
The project called “Inside Out|Outside In” is part of the Ordos 100 project and discusses the relationship and fusion of interior and exterior space.
Rocker-Lange calls for an architecture of milieu that an architecture of the circumstances and conditions by which it is surrounded.
An Architecture of Milieu no longer strictly distinguishes between its inside and outside it rather considers itself as always at once on multiple scales inside and outside, as architecture and environment.

Consequently architecture and its environment are thought of not only as inside and outside of one another, but as zones of possible relationships, in which inside and outside vary and shift to accommodate changing seasons and usage patterns.
The Architecture of Milieu is an architecture of situation rather than site:

An indefinitely expandable and differentiable ribbon serves as the continuous organizational strategy, inscribing zones of different degrees of interior and exterior space vanishing the separation between them.
Especially in the widely varying Mongolian climate, seasonal usages of living areas may change dramatically between the cold winters and warm summers;
by creating an architecture which is interwoven with its surroundings, we allow the climate to work with the inhabitants, rather than against them.

rocker-lange architects where invited to take part in the Ordos 100 project, an urban development of 100 unique villas inthe cultural district ofthe city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, China.

The project was initiated bythe Client, Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, the curatorFAKE Design, Ai Wei Wei studio, Beijing and architects Herzog & de Meuron, Basel.While FAKE Design,Ai Wei Wei studio developed the masterplan for the 100 parcels of land,Herzog & de Meuron selected 100 young architects from 27 countries around the globe. The project started in early April of 2008 with an architects symposium in Ordos. First villas are expected to be finished in late 2009.

Ingeborg M. Rocker of Rocker-Lange Architects announces her book “Computation in Command?” The book that discusses the implication of computation on the theory and praxis of architecture is expected to be published in Fall 2009.