This project combines into a single structure a shopping mall (where we play), an office tower (where we work) and a condo (where we live) – programs that are usually considered too disruptive to integrate in close proximity within current typological configurations. In this project, inhabitable unprogrammed spaces, or voids, can be expanded, can become habitable, to ameliorate the edges of the different programs. The project emphasises horizontality within current mixed-use housing complexes where residential spaces and commercial spaces are divided vertically, usually with the commercial spaces acting as a podium for the residential spaces on top. This inadvertently creates residential separations within the neighbourhood. By putting commercial, office and residential spaces side by side within the same shared floor space one is reconnected to the immediate urban and global context: a simple change within the conventional typology of mass housing. An example of shared space is SANAA’s Toledo Glass Pavilion which houses an art gallery, a glass workshop and a café all within the same space but divided by unprogrammed spaces that absorb intrusion from each program. In this project, synergy is produced by placing commercial spaces at the core of the structure, where they act as a buffer between the office and residential spaces that need direct sunlight to function. All three programs reconcile each other’s disturbance of the same bare space by placing voids of un-programmed indeterminate spaces between them: most private programmatic requirements at the edge of the building and the most social components at its core, stacked sectionally in a dense mixed-use tower. To make a free-flowing singular space in which these programs can truly interact uninhibited by structural and physical constraints, a structural system is required to liberate the space from columns and structural walls. Conventional structural layouts of modern condo buildings are based on Le Corbusier’s 1914 Maison Dom-ino structural diagram; my project uses an alternative structural system, one which Peter Eisenman called the umbrella diagram to describe Mies van der Rohe’s use of exterior structure to create large free span spaces. 2 A version of this is the Centre Pompidou in Paris where the interior gallery spaces are uninterrupted by structural walls or columns; all the floors in the Centre Pompidou are hung on an exterior structure instead of being stacked on interior columns. This project uses a modified version of Centre Pompidou’s structural system. Instead of having two parallel exterior structural walls, it has one set of structural supports inside the building and a lightweight transfer wall on the outside. Like a construction crane where the load on one side is distributed across a span through the truss of the crane to main support, in this project, the load that is transferred across an external composite truss to the exterior skin is counter-balanced by the weight of the building itself. From ground level, the building looks to be suspended and cantilevered on just one line of columns. The voids usually occupied by the hidden structure of the architectural object no longer exist; the mechanisms needed to make the object stand are completely revealed and no longer merely act as a objects that create separations. By partially externalising the structure, internal material considerations are liberated from physical constraints and can now focus primarily on experiential properties such as opacity and acoustics. Various opacities divide the spaces according to the relative acceptable amounts of intrusion a program can accept before destroying the experience. Commercial spaces are transparent, communal spaces such as living rooms are semi-opaque while private areas are marked by solid walls. This approach – confronting the use of voids to create separations and converting those void spaces to form a new communal space – has parallels with Jean Luc-Nancy’s story of his heart transplant where Nancy’s body has to reconcile another person living inside him—no longer is the heart beating in his chest his own but that of a stranger. 3 His body is forced to reconcile the choice between complete rejection (his immune system attacks the heart, a failed surgery) and complete acceptance (taking back his own heart, the original problem in the first place) where either extreme results in death. Life is only possible with the third option of neither complete rejection nor acceptance, but synthesis through reconciliation with the Other that lives within him. Similarly, we cannot reject structural demands, although in practice they dominate, nor can we build an architecture only on programmatic spaces. Architecture is only possible with a third option that synthesises the reconciliation of structure and space, where structure is in the service of program, not the object that we too often consider to be the architecture. ~
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Felix Suen
above: floors 10 and 11, showing the free flow floor plan combing residential, commercial and office spaces
2 Eisenmen, Peter. Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000 . New York: Rizzoli, 2008 3 Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008
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