rocker-lange blog

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their competition entry for the idea’s competition “Busan Opera House” in Busan, South Korea.

Our project for the Busan opera house is an interior/exterior plaza for the arts, in which the public may engage with various art programs during the daytime and nighttime, in settings ranging from an opera to a public plaza. The design is an extended landscape intended for display and for being displayed, for engaging with the arts. Much of the scheme is a sloped ground, designed for seating and viewing. The interlocking of the urban fabric, the land, and the water in a single design creates a stage for the city, as much as it re-frames the city as stage. Public life, high-arts performances and exhibitions, as well as the beauty of Busan’s natural surrounding are equally on display. The exterior strategies for the design are continued inside, where the scheme promotes a continuity of the landscape in the public plaza beneath and surrounding the theaters and the opera. The public realm ‘folds up’ as a large landscape-like staircase in order to reach the large, suspended auditorium spaces inside and the viewing terrace on the roof outside.

The design enables the public to participate in cultural events in and nearby the new Busan Performing Arts Center. The building’s public space is accessible throughout the day and night. The design of interior and exterior public space is suggested as a space and place of performances, of enactments informed through relationships as they unfold in time. The design is structured to stimulate and care for relationships, for the spaces in between. Upon arrival, different paths disclose the sites of performance on the sloped architectural-landscape inside and outside the building. The stages that may hereby be encountered are both fixed and temporal, as the performances energize them with life. Changing events, pattern’s of life’s activity, are anticipated rather than determined through the design.

Located on a peninsula in direct proximity to the Busan Port, and the city center of Busan, our project aims to offer to Busan citizens a public interior and exterior space that is equally engaging the water as well as the park and the city scape. The opera is designed as a landmark, in the literal sense of the word, it is marking the land, marking the new cultural scape of Busan at the same time it is an icon for Busan. The overall structure of the opera is designed as a large habitable ground that slowly ramps from the water and the park up to become an architecture that allows the viewer to link to both the water and the city. The building becomes a stage located in the water, as it also stages the beautiful bay, the ocean on one side and the lively city and its skyline on the other side.

Students at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Ingeborg M. Rocker of Rocker-Lange Architects , have built a wall structure out of chipboard bricks.

The research seminar On the Bri(n)ck II: Architectural Envelope traces the historical development of a debate about the architectural envelope that began at the end of the 19th century. It was a critical period in the industrial revolution when new materials and technologies became available and started to inform architectural design and debate. Architects began to question the role that mass-production should play in architecture, and also questioned the influence that new notation and construction-techniques had on the architects’ work. Today these and similar questions are resurfacing as the digital medium literally informs the conceptualization and production of architecture.

In the beginning of the 20^th century brick became the dominant local material, embodying the socially and politically motivated expansions of rapidly growing European cities. Brick was particularly favored in the urban centers of the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. Today the role of brick has evolved, though solid and capable of bearing great loads, it is now mostly used as cladding. On the Bri(n)ck II focused consequently on the changing role and materiality of brick today.

The project engaged several teams to develop architectural envelopes that were constituted from either mass-produced or mass-customized load bearing brick units, or alternatively mass-produced or mass-customized non-structural brick cladding. In addition to the research on different discretization techniques and structural properties of surfaces, the research-seminar also sought to identify alternative brick materials that were widely available, sustainable, light and inexpensive. On the Bri(n)ck II (1:1) project employed several hundred cardboard brick units to form the geometry of a Limaçon surface. This is a continuous geometry that inscribes an interior space with a single surface. The openings of the brick-units along with the units adapt in size, geometry and width to the surface’s geometry. At the same time the overall surface geometry is challenged through the discretization techniques generating the bricks. Using a 2-dimensional material to create a 3-dimensional brick unit was challenging. Research had to overcome obstacles such as the geometric construction of the unit, its ability to unfold and resourceful use of the material. Working with chipboard also required a very precise study of the units’ geometry in relation to their structural stability. Much attention was paid to the units, their seams and the ease in which one was able to assemble and disassemble them. A chipboard rib further stabilized the unit connections.

The project was designed and built using the CAD/CAM facilities at the GSD. Overall the design and building process brought up questions regarding mass-production and mass-customization. The project explored the limits of a mass-customization process; examining how the same procedure can lead to an array of possible results.

Credits:

Instructor:
Ingeborg M. Rocker, Ph.D.

Research Collaborator:
Hiroshi Jacobs (MDES)

Core Team: Mais Al Azab, William Choi, Hernan Garcia, Casey Hughes, John Jakubiec, Lesley McTague, Marta Nowak, and Mark Pomarico

Team: Harvard GSD Students

Drawings: Hiroshi Jacobs + Casey Hughes
Renderings: Will Choi

Funding:  Junior Faculty Grant from the Department of Architecture, Harvard University, GSD

Ingeborg M. Rocker of Rocker-Lange Architects will present a lecture entitled “Emerging Structures: Concept and Realizations in the 1960’s” at the faculty of architecture TU Graz on Thursday March 16th 2011. For more information about this event please goto TU Graz.

Rocker-Lange Architects are participating in this year’s Venice Biennale with their project entitled “Serial Architecture – Systems of Multiplicities”. The scheme on display is part of the exhibition “Quotidian Architectures” in the Hong Kong Pavilion.

Hong Kong housing is based predominantly on the typology of the tower. While this configuration allows for many different interpretations, the common approach to this design task is based on repetitive, reductive and profit driven ideas. The potential for innovation in form and organisation of this typology remains yet unbuilt.

This project interrogates these circumstances by investigating possible alternative design techniques that can result into a series of tower configurations that vary and possibly produce unique identities.

With the introduction of digital media and digital manufacturing processes, the conception of modularized architecture constructed out of nearly identical industrially mass-produced components has been challenged. Today, with the use of the computer and various open software packages, architecture can instead be realized as varying prototypes of a series. Within each series a variety of design versions can be realized. Each of these design versions is unique and yet also part of the series.

Rather than having a fixed form, this approach offers the ability to develop models that describe a flexible space that is based on a set of relationships of discrete elements. Hence, the designer is able to constantly redefine and alter the model, capable of producing many possible versions based on varying input data.

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their competition entry for the idea’s competition “Fashion Museum Omotesando” in Tokyo.

The design of a fashion museum on Tokyo’s renowned Omotesando district asks for a unique answer. While the height of the tower in a low-rise area guarantees that the building will have an iconic flavour by default, one has to express still its significance and otherness in comparison to generic towers. Conventional tower configurations lead usually to a stratified system. In order to avoid a disconnected and discrete spatial succession, this design utilizes the concept of an expandable and differentiable ribbon as a continuous organizational strategy.

The ribbon that resembles a trefoil knot ensures that the narrative of the Fashion history is told in an uninterrupted way. The ramp is providing an easy access for handicapped people by maintaining a slope of 6%. The system ramps up the entire height of the tower and provides a user interface for a continuous experience in revealing the history of the fashion industry chronologically from the 1900’s to the 2000’s.


Since the circulatory principal is the main concept behind the design, it is used furthermore to organize and articulate the façade system. This outer membrane is a direct interpretation and transformation of the interior movement inside the tower space. The design seeks to achieve a unique formal character and a unique spatial configuration by implementing cross scalar variation.

By maintaining a uniform and holistic building envelope the proposal ensures a strong iconic identity for the building and the entire urban area of Omotesando. This enhances the unique and special atmosphere of this district. The façade material is made of white enamelled metal panels with bronzed tinted glass elements that provide sufficient protection to the exhibited fashion artefacts. The façade with its porous nature offers continuous and constant 360 degree views over the city of Tokyo.


In order to provide maximum interaction with the ramping system the structure opens up an extended urban space underneath the building. The enclosed space of the museum is lifted up by 4.00 m to provide alternative relations with the urban surrounding. This way the ramp can be understood as an extension of the urban space by providing a gradual transition from exterior to interior space.

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 were invited to participate in the show “Parametric Prototypes: New Computational Paradigms in Architecture”, International Exhibition, Conference & Workshop. Xi’an, China, October 2009. The project on display investigates the role of versioning in contemporary theory and the practice of design.

The introduction of computation in architecture allowed for complex mathematical calculations and their visualization, which were for a long time simply too complex. Today, differential calculus – underlying most interactive 3D modeling software – has significantly informed the production and conceptualization of architecture. The upshot of this transformation is that we are now witnessing a shift from an architecture of modularity towards an architecture of seriality. The core idea of versioning exceeds simple variation between different parameterized design iterations; Versioning rather also operates at the micro-scale, within the structure and aesthetic of the digital design itself.

With the introduction of digital media, the conception of modularized architecture constructed out of nearly identical industrially mass-produced components, and thus Gropius’ thesis, that “The creation of [standardized] types […] is an effective tool to create better and cheaper with industrial production a new manifold of products,” has been challenged. Today, with the use of the computer and calculus-based software, architecture can instead be realized as parametric prototypes of a series. A series is a framework of parameters designed by the architect, within which a variety of design versions may be realized. Each of these design versions is unique and yet also part of the series. The parts assembling each of the series’ designs are no longer necessarily mass-produced but could rather be mass customized.

Our work furthermore calls for a critical assessment of differential calculus and its potential to challenge traditional modes of designing, producing, and constructing architecture and its milieu.

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

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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.