The project was produced with the help of Jon Scelsa, Ben Lehrer, Doug Jack, & Julian Wu. The material is baltic birch plywood with a polyurethane finish, there were no mechanical fasteners used.  There are over 3000 unique pieces in the sculpture which were cut using a laser-cutter and a CNC milling machine. All geometry was generated and numbered by Rhinoscript to organize the production and assembly of the pieces.

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.

Architecture Studio Shanghai is a three-week program held at The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture Study Centre, at the center of Shanghai. Taught by professors from The University of Hong Kong, as well as architects and scholars from Shanghai, the course offers participants a design studio experience within Asia’s most vibrant and fastest growing city. A fundamental element of the course is to introduce students to architectural issues and design practices, in contemporary China. The studio topic is embedded in the context of Shanghai and addresses contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism.

The structure of the workshop is coordinated around a studio-based core accompanied by short lecture courses covering issues in Chinese architectural history, architectural theory and computational technology. The program is taught in English. The HKU Study Centre provides state-of-the-art studio space in the heart of Shanghai. Field trips to significant architectural sites and visits to local and international design firms will provide participants with a broad view of contemporary Chinese culture, architecture and urbanism. Students work closely with the teaching staff, using the dynamic city of Shanghai as a context for understanding architecture’s role in the built environment.

Dates:
The program will take place at the Shanghai Study Centre from June 14 to July 2, 2010. Students should arrive no later than June 13.

Expo 2010 Shanghai:
The program will run in parallel with the 2010 World Exposition in Shanghai, forecast to be the largest in history. Participating students will have special access to the Expo through guided tours, lectures and presentations by international architects responsible for several structures and pavilions.

Enrollment:
Applicants who are interested to enroll should have completed at least two undergraduate or graduate level design studios in, or be a recent graduate of, an accredited school of architecture. Enrollment is limited to 50 students. The comprehensive course is designed to augment participants’ architectural studies at home with a rigorous international experience. This is a university level course and The University of Hong Kong will assist participants to transfer college credits to their home university.

Tuition:
The fee for the summer program is US$3,000, covering the cost of the program in Shanghai (field trips, admissions, etc). It does not include flights or accommodation. Accommodation can be arranged for additional costs at a reasonably priced four-star hotel adjacent to the Shanghai Study Centre.

Program Coordinators:
Christian J. Lange
Jason F. Carlow

Location:
Shanghai Study Centre
2/F, 298 North Suzhou Road,
Hong Kou District, Shanghai, China

Registration:
Deadline for registration is June 1, 2010. Online registration is required.
For details and forms, please go to http://fac.arch.hku.hk/summer/sh/a
Questions may be sent via email to: asprog@arch.hku.hk

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.

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.

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.

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.