rocker-lange blog

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 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.

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.