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
https://amzn.to/3yjy9As

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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