• Centralized plan.
• Emulation of the Antique.
• Invention.
• Spatial harmony.
• Proportional façade.
• Delicacy.
  
  

Centralized plan

The Early Renaissance saw the fi rst experiments with the Neoplatonic ideal of the centralized plan. Brunelleschi’s S. Maria degli Angeli was begun in 1434, but left incomplete. Michelozzo’s east end of SS. Annunziata, Florence, begun in 1444, is a complete example, but Giuliano da Sangallo the Elder’s S. Maria delle Carceri is the most perfect of the early iterations.

Giuliano da Sangallo the Elder, S. Maria delle Carceri, Prato, 1486–95

Spatial harmony

Spatial harmony The fl at roof and round windows of Brunelleschi’s S. Spirito are vaguely Romanesque in derivation. Yet its arcade and volumes are the result of a deep understanding of the spatial harmony of classical architecture. The nave is twice as high as it wide, while in its entirety it is exactly four and a half cubes. The ground fl oor and clerestory are exactly equal in height.

Filippo Brunelleschi, S. Spirito, Florence, begun 1436

Emulation of the Antique

In his incomplete Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, Alberti attempted to employ the Roman triumphal arch motif in church architecture. He succeeded in doing so at the slightly later S. Andrea, Mantua, in which he used various Roman features, notably the coffered barrel vault, to reconcile its essentially longitudinal space with his preferred centralized ideal.

Leon Battista Alberti, S. Andrea, Mantua, begun 1470

Invention

Brunelleschi’s dome is symbolic of Florence as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The spirit of creative invention in early fi fteenth-century Florence was born from the coalescence of its political and social systems, fi nance and, most importantly, patrons such as the famous Cosimo de’ Medici, whose Humanist interests led him to commission some of the period’s greatest works of art.

Filippo Brunelleschi, Dome, Basilica di Sta. Maria del Fiore (Florence Cathedral), Florence, 1420–36

Proportional façade

The coherent proportional system of Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai emerges from its arrangement of the orders. Doric pilasters at ground level, Ionic on the fi rst fl oor and Corinthian above frame the repeating series of windows to give the whole façade a sense of order, a principle Alberti also deployed in the façade of S. Maria Novella in Florence.

Leon Battista Alberti, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, begun 1446

Delicacy

In contrast to its heavily rusticated, almost fortress-like exterior – security was a necessity for such a rich and controversial fi gure as Cosimo de’ Medici – the inner courtyard of Michelozzo’s Palazzo Medici is light and airy. Its slender columns, characteristic of the Early Renaissance, recall those of Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, as well as much earlier Florentine examples such as the Romanesque S. Miniato (1062–90 and later).

Michelozzo di Bartolomeo Michelozzi, courtyard, Palazzo Medici, Florence, 1445–60

 Located along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, this museum interlaces linked floors for exhibition and display with floors for retail and restau- rants through an atrium defined by the vertical shear of those levels.

In the rectangular plan, social and exhibition programs are located between two linear bars of circulation, one interior and one exterior. A performance hall is positioned below grade, and an open-air cinema inhabits the roof. On the facade continuous exterior paths and elongated stairs extend the historic Roberto Burle Marx–designed street promenade up the side of the building, transgressing divisions between interior and exterior and allowing direct access to programs above the ground level.


The figures of this vertical circulation provide the building’s image. Along this vertical sequence a portion of the facade’s skin is composed of custom open masonry block, choreographing views out of the museum and allowing light into the museum. Through an intricate combination of incline, stack, vertical shear, and hole, this section amplifies the social and cultural vitality of Rio de Janeiro.

This rectilinear volume contains a research institute and national archives for Dutch television and radio. Limited to a height of 82 ft (25 m) above ground, the building is divided into a thirteen-story block of offices and tech- nical installations, five stories of archives below grade, and three floors of exhibition space floating above a large central hall.

Entered at grade, the space of the central hall extends both down into a stepped canyon crossed by three bridges and up into a ziggurat-shaped void adjacent to the exhibition floors.

The descending and ascending spaces shear in perpendicular directions, torquing the internal space. This sheared section is less notable for its impact on the interiors within the sheared floors than for its shaping of the atrium. Carved into the center of the building, the atrium paradoxically emphasizes the programmatic division among three volumes while joining the assembly of this sheared section into a legible whole.

The Prada flagship store in Tokyo combines an overall figural shape with inset stacked floors and nested tubes to create a steel and glass shopping icon. A structural exoskeleton made from 7-1/16–by–8-1/16-in (18 by 20.5 cm) steel I-sections welded on site and encased in a fire-resistant layer of calcium silicate form a grid of rhomboids, each 10 ft 6 in by 6 ft 6 in (3.2 by 2 m).

The entire building is set into a concrete tub, where isolation mats stabilize the structure during earthquakes. Inside, seven regularly spaced concrete floor slabs span from the exterior skin and interior circulation cores and conceal mechanical and electrical distribution.

Three horizontal tubes, aligned with groups of four rhomboids on the facade, are nested in the floor plates. These tubes enclose areas for changing and checkout and provide lateral stability. Extruded from the diagrid facade, yet embedded within the figural building volume and bifurcating floors, these nested spaces complicate distinctions between exterior and interior or from floor to floor, producing an intricate fusion of skin, structure, space, and form.

Book Reference: 

Manual of Section
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The rare book and manuscript library at Yale University demonstrates the capa- city of inset nesting to modulate light and climate through a multilayered con- struction. The outer box is composed of four steel Vierendeel truss walls, clad in faceted stone and precast concrete.

The grid formed by the trusses is inset with 1-1/4-in-thick (3.2 cm) translucent marble panels that filter out ultraviolet rays while providing indirect illumination. The stone container is juxtaposed with an inner box composed of a steel structure and glass panels that provide precise thermal and climatic control.

This glass box allows the tower of fragile books to be placed on full view, yet within a highly controlled environment. An exhibition mezzanine wraps around the nested volume. The walls transfer structural load to four points at the corners, where pillars elevate the stone enclosure off the ground, making the outer frame seem to float monumentally above the stone plaza in the heart of the campus.



A sunken courtyard provides daylight to underground offices and library facilities. While the nested section produces the spectacle of this library, excavated space below contains the primary support facilities for the display above, including seminar rooms, offices, curatorial spaces, and the vast majority of the books.

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Luiz Zerbini Happiness Beyond Paradise, 2020

Context is an important idea in post-modernist design, and the machine metaphor denies this significance. An engine is an engine is an engine, and it always works the same way no matter where it is. —Stephen Friedman

Architecture is an extension; a modification establishing absolute meanings relative to a place.
 —Steven Holl

In its widest sense, the term context refers to all the issues and circumstances that surround a design of which the nature of the setting is the most tangible. As the derivation of the word means ‘weave together’, the spirit of its meaning denotes an interdependence—‘weaving’ or ‘knitting’ designs into existing site conditions and the striving for a sense of fit.


Context refers to the fact that most buildings are designed and made for a specific place; the characteristics of which represent many of the constraints and opportunities in which a design is determined. Because architecture cannot detach itself from its context, and because context is never the same, it is essential that knowledge and insight be gained.

The technique for gaining insight into a setting is the ‘site appraisal’ or ‘site analysis’, i.e. the systematic investigation of palpable (hard data) and intangible factors (soft data). Owing to the more subjective aspects of this analysis, the question of how the features of a site may impinge upon a design holds no clear-cut solution.

This is under the control of the designer; it is subject to ideas on which he or she has to make a stand. ‘Contextualism’ is an approach that respects the setting in terms of its history, topography, memory, route and so on.

 However, respect for context does not necessarily mean that a design has to conform. Steven Holl describes the site for a building as the setting in which all its intentions are gathered together. The design for a specific place may mean an inversion of inherent conditions. These may be based upon other related frameworks for invention, such as esoteric or poetic linkages. Holl argues that today the link between situation and architecture must be formed in new ways,’…which are a part of a constructive transformation in modern life’.

https://uploads6.wikiart.org/images/le-corbusier/untitled-1932.jpg

What give our dreams their dreaming is that they can be achieved. —Le Corbusier

 It might be possible to generate and develop images from concepts in the mind alone. But spatial ideas can become so extensive and complex that they can no longer be contained. Externalization in some tangible form is needed so that they can be clarified, assessed and articulated.

 At this point the idea has to pass through space and be translated into two or three dimensions, as a descriptive model which allows the designer to experience and advance the nature of the idea. Newly represented, the model of the idea can inspire the creative imagination on to other mental images, which are, in turn, realized and evaluated, This two-way language of design is a continuous dialogue between concept and expression— alternating until the creative process is exhausted.

'A System of Architectural Ornament' - Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan characterized the initial impulse of a design as the ‘seed germ’, a design catalyst that should be maintained throughout its many stages of development. Realization of newly-formed ideas can take the form of orthographic drawings. Of these, the plan view was famously described by Le Corbusier as the ‘design generator’. However, less famously, the sectional view was promoted by Paul Rudolph as the most searching graphic vehicle when generating a design.


Book Reference:
Archispeak: An Illustrated Guide to Architectural Terms
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The cubist canvas was the locus where the painter simultaneously presented several aspects gathered successively with the purpose of suggesting a higher reality. —Marta Braun

The solitaire

Occurring during 1909–11 and claiming to be a realist movement, Cubism came as the mother of all the radical art movements which coincided with the transformation taking place on the world stage at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the fields of science and technology.

The paintings of its main protagonists—Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque— came to counterpoint the arrival of new and revolutionary theories of matter and the challenging concepts of space, time and energy embedded in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905).

Georges Braque Bottle and Fishes c.1910–12

By allowing their paintings and collages to respond to a binocular (two-eyed) vision rather than a monocular (one-eyed) perception, Cubism came to shatter the single vanishing point of a Renaissance linear perspective into a multiplicity of viewpoints.

By compressing and flattening several views of an object into a single composite, and by expressing the idea of the object rather thanany one exclusive view of it, their experiments dramatically expanded the shifted viewpoints found in Paul Cézanne’s later paintings.

This also caused the two-dimensional image to fracture into tiny facets, and thereby release form from its hitherto naturalistic representation and move it towards its abstract conclusion. In parallel with the upsurge of a Modernist thinking, this shift toward fragmentation, which depended upon the relative position of the viewer, involved a temporal dimension.

In its recording of the lapse of time, the dynamic of the artist’s eye reflected that of shifting camera angles in movie-making—the ultimate image involving the ‘simultaneity’ of compressed time. This aspect of Cubism was profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson who saw time as an essentially intuitive experience and reality as resulting from a simultaneous flow of past and present into the future.

Le Corbusier was well aware of the Cubistic mode of juxtaposing a multitude of meaning into the simultaneity of a single statement. Indeed, some of his buildings reflect this ‘collage’ approach in their elevations and in the layering of contrasting cultural and historical references.

Design rationale is a term used to focus on the underlying reasoning behind a design intention.

It concerns the basic structure of thought that brought the design into being. Sometimes referred to as ‘intellectual underpinning’, the design rationale aims to distinguish between the intuitive and the cerebral, and to represent the bedrock on which concepts are structured.

However, it must be added that while it is difficult to apply logic to an instinctive approach, the ultimate response may represent a balance between the two.

‘Pet idea’ is a common type of design rationale that typically needs to be aired early on so it can be discarded or be allowed to evolve into a legitimate design rationale. When a developed intention is declared in a ‘mission statement’ or presented as a mini-manifesto and, hopefully, made visible in the proposed design, the design rationale flies in the face of whimsical or willy-nilly design attitudes and challenges a ‘prima donna’ approach.

"Natural landscapes may exhibit the beauty of rhyme and contrast simply in their static structure. But people who live in the landscape —as men live in cities—the dynamic structure, the diachronic rhymes, add a new dimension to aesthetic pleasure. They see the same landscape in a state of flux. But, through every change, the landscape retains its identity and each transformation gives them new insight into its essential character." — N.Humphrey

The word diachronic refers to comparisons we make through time. This term offers the architect a very direct and meaningful description of an arrangement or treatment of parts or events occurring not at the same time but through the variable of time.

Although the word is not in use in everyday conversation, it can capture the transformations in appearance through movement, weather, night and day, and time very clearly. One could conceptualize the comparison from one second to the next or from one season to another.

Another example in the field of colour theory is the concept of ‘successive colour contrast’, where the same colour appears to differ in chromatic strength (saturation) if preceded by its complementary colour.




If one walks through a green corridor, for example, prior to moving to a red one, the red appears stronger or more vivid.

In the context of the study of aesthetics, the term ‘diachronic rhyme’ has been specifically used by Nicholas Humphrey (Architecture for People [Mikellides [1980]) to refer to the pleasure we get when comparing something to its precious self—the rhyme of the flower with the bud, the rhyme of the recurring musical composition.

The sense of order gradually emerging as we pass through the streets of a town Like Amsterdam is an example of diachronic rhyme according to Professor Peter F.Smith: ‘Amsterdam is a case of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “likeness tempered with difference” extended over the city.’

Keith_Albarn,_Pattern_and_Belief_at_The_Minories_Galleries,_Installation_view_02

A diagram is a drawing that, stripped of all superfluous and distracting data, shows the general scheme or outline of an idea or object and its parts.

Operational, flow, and functional (bubble) diagrams.

 “True equilibrium is expressed by the straight line,” wrote Piet Mondrian.

 For him and his modernist allies, that line was inevitably black. Architects like Rietveld, and later the Eameses, gave architectural expression to arrangements of brightly colored planes organized by black.

In the same way, today’s architects and designers use black as an essential structural element.
Aloof from the vagaries of fashion and trendiness, black is a timeless choice. 

 It represents at once a totality—a convergence of all colors—and the most primal act of a designer: Taking black ink to white paper.

Peter Marino + Assoc Architects, Chanel Store, Paris, 2003.

Harrison and Abramovitz, Corning Glass Center, Corning, New York, 1951.

Peter Marino + Assoc Architects, Chanel Store, Paris, 2003. 

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003.

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003.

 

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003.

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003.

Zaha Hadid Architects, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003.

Eric J. Cobb Architect, Stretch Residence, Seattle, 2003

Eric J. Cobb Architect, Stretch Residence, Seattle, 2003.

Eric J. Cobb Architect, Stretch Residence, Seattle, 2003.

 

Eric J. Cobb Architect, Stretch Residence, Seattle, 2003.

Gabellini Associates, Park Avenue Apartment, New York, 1998

Gabellini Associates, Park Avenue Apartment, New York, 1998.

Gabellini Associates, Park Avenue Apartment, New York, 1998.

 

Gabellini Associates, Park Avenue Apartment, New York, 1998.