space laboratory for architectural
research and design
Today, as ever, it is imperative for us to think of alternative visions of society that at the same time act as critical vehicles for what is happening now. Our plans for the future must therefore constantly negotiate between freedom and limits, between the unexpectedness of the future and the lessons of the past. This is what forms and grounds the education of an architect.
Mohsen Mostafavi, London 2002
There is an important need for honest engagement with the making of architecture, the thoughtful shaping of space, and the right response to site. And since we judge our speculations about the future against the past, our imagination necessarily operates in response to the world it both refigures and prefigures.
I seek to make the 3rd year studio a site for on-going speculative investigations about the area defined by a ring around Brisbane's CBD and respective networks. This publication and the public exhibition document the work undertaken by the 3 rd year studio, 2003. The studio investigated two inner-city sites proposed to accommodate new urban schools. The studio included contributions from practitioners, visits to Queensland's new school buildings, lectures providing supporting background and intense pin-up sessions with invited guests. Over the 13 week studio, space has been found for experiment and research involving a continuity of work, the evolution of ideas and the slow, often painful emergence of confidence and sense of personal style. In the final analysis, design has always to do with making a statement about our culture: who we are and what we are doing. In this process, Architects have the primary responsibility to imagine better alternatives to what already exists: homes, sch ools, places of work, spaces of leisure, etc.
Similar to the museum or library, the school building is an active as well as representational mechanism of the city. This begs a number of questions:
• What is the role of the contemporary educational institution today?
• What architectural form expresses this role?
• What was the historical context which resulted in many commanding education buildings in Brisbane's urbanism?
• What are the new forms of education buildings?
• Kangaroo Point
• Melbourne Street
Extensive analysis and critical reformulation of the sites to consolidate and intensify the urban fabric raised a number of problems:
• How to interpret the specific city grain of both sites.
• How to overcome the paradigm of Contextualism and its demand that any new design has to be developed out of the existing site characteristics and attributes only.
• What makes a school a good public building?
It became obvious that a new typology of school building for inner-city areas needed to be developed - a form of education urbanity.
We begin by describing the journey taken in the studio.
To solve the internal solution of the program's functional requirements, for instance the arrangement of classrooms or classroom clusters, posed complex problem to the 3rd Year student. Also how to integrate the unique functions, such as the auditorium, library, music room? Very soon we discussed questions of fragmentation: Should it be a large monolithic block or is it better divided in individual parts? If in parts, what is the composition? How are these parts related to each other, and what are the buildings' response to the site? Obviously the notion of territory had to be studied - according to the Smithson's proposition that 'the building's action on the shaping of the territory and the spatial shaping of the territory itself should be at the centre of the work.'
We discovered that a reasonable attitude to start the project might be: First to analyse exactly the brief, to find out how much volume will need to be created. And to remember: all the sizes given in the brief were net usable floor areas, this meant: the actual building size would almost be double. The volume was tested with early, quick massing models. Then to start with user research and visits to similar buildings. Parallel to this, the site conditions were studied to find out what inevitable factors there are. Then the volume was again tested with a more cohesive working model. What is the buildings' footprint? The students had to consider the traditional relationship of buildings to street, something one might want to keep and reinforce.
Parallel to this, we made small diagrams and sketches to organize the space and internal movement. Which functions needed to be next to each other? We programmed the hierarchies and put together relevant organization schemes. We found that this was best done in scale 1:1000 and then in 1:500. The students were asked to develop answers to the problem: How do you deal with the traffic noise? Would it be better if the circulation areas face the loud streets? And: What is the geometry of the standard classroom? It became obvious that the stacking and grouping of classrooms over several levels is necessary. We asked the students to develop design options with alternatives and variations, trying to improve the proposal step-by-step and not to fall in love too quick with the first concept, as there will be even better ones, more clear and stronger, that can be developed. Work in the Design Studio is to teach methods in the process of design development.
The outcomes of this design process established figural compositions that tried to re-establish the notion of public building as the foundation for urban consolidation. We studied the sketches of Aldo Rossi, which he called 'grouping of formal, urban elements'; and Alvaro Siza's school building in Porto (1987-97). These buildings were built as a campus, over 10 years, step by step. Also a triangular site with about 500 students, but not an inner-city location, the comparison worked only half way. But interesting - the way the pavilions are connected; it is a monumentality that is not intimidating. The new scenarios, generated by patterns progressively transformed into diagrams, address the road along their long side, and the way such a civic building might be perceived in its context.
During this time we became especially interested in the spatial ordering, in the grouping of parts, and how edges are formulated. We discovered: the relationship of the different parts with each other is not arbitrary. We started to develop our compositional skills. We developed conceptual diagrams for an urban strategy, for instance small-scale organizational diagrams. The aim was to achieve a clear differentiation between served and servant spaces, being clearly readable in the plan: space for assembly, like the entrance hall or the auditorium, opposed to spaces for circulation, like staircases and corridors. Some students started now to think of a circulation spine which rises all the way through the full cross section of the building, a wonderful idea as this would also provide clear orientation inside.
Schools existed already in Greece and Roman times, but up until 1770, when there was the differentiation between the Church and the State, the whole education was the domain of the Church. We learned that already around 1600 in many parts of Europe, school education became compulsory. How could we create a new program for such a traditional building typology: We asked the students to &lsquoinvent' their own particular school building by adding another unexpected public function of 1,000 square metres. Would this be a sports facility, or student housing, or an art gallery, or a swimming pool in a garden, or an internet-café, or an aquarium? By looking for an inventive way of combination to avoid the conventional program, we arrived at a whole range of different new typologies. And in this way, the building could return public space to the city and bring in other users in contact with the students.
We asked the students to think how to make use of the rooftop, maybe with a rooftop landscaping like at the 'Villa Malaparte' by the Italian architect Adalberto Libera (1935). We needed to consider: if the roof is a large horizontal plane that cantilevers wide to establish a shadow line, something very typical in Queensland. Climate and Tectonic: What is known as 'Tropical Modernism' has a special interest in today's need to build low-energy structures to avoid the need for air conditioning, and as an architecture that breaks down the barriers between inside and outside, between building and landscape, to offer a blueprint for new ways to live in a tropical city. We realised the need to find a way to control the natural light and the heat. As an architect, where do you offer transparency and openness to the city? At the same time, the tectonic needed to be considered. The underground car parking required a structural grid of columns for a multi-storey concrete or steel structure. In such a structure the staircase-towers need to run all the way through, from top to basement. Which façade materials did you want to suggest, and how would you ensure good sun shading? At the same time to make best use of daylight to have well-lit classrooms for the students. Time had come to develop the first elevations.
Louis Kahn said, in telling of his design for Exeter Library: "You plan a library as though no library ever existed." As the architect and teacher who did the most to re-engage modern architecture to its history and its disciplinary legacy, Kahn certainly did not mean to imply that architects were to work in a creative vacuum - on the contrary, his statement should be understood as calling for each design to be a new beginning, determined by the individual designer's intuitive and innate understanding of human nature and spatial experience. Of course there is a big difference between a school building in the city, with five storeys, and a school building in the countryside or in the suburb. But also, there is a difference to an office building! We did not want our school to look like an isolated office building; we wanted it to appear open, friendly, accessible and to engage with the local context.
At this point, we studied the Leicester University in England, Faculty of Engineering, a building by James Stirling and James Gowan (1959-63): a radical example of 'machine age architecture', as Reyner Banham called it. The 60s idea of 'the building as a machine'. It is a clever bricolage, strongly influenced by Russian Constructivism, but it also functions very well. The way the wedge-shaped volume of the auditorium sticks out reminds of the Worker's Club of Melnikow in Moscow (1928). It expresses its usage, the ramps leading into the entrances, to the place where people move up and down. We learned that the expression of the building should always be related to what the building is all about its major spaces, how they relate to each other, the way people enter the building, how they move through it and how they use the building. It became crucial that the experience for the passer-by in ground floor needed to be looked at. Would it be like Norman Fosters early work ( 1975), the totallyglazed Willis Faber Office building in the old town center of Ipswich in England? In the 70s this was still something completely new: the mirror glass reflected all and everything around and covered the entire building from the bottom to the top. But what does it do to the walker-by? We found that a school building today needs to have another kind of appearance.
Some student groups started to think of a public arcade that would give a strip of the site along the main street back to the public, to enjoy a wider and well shaded walk along the building. The typical floor plans above could cantilever out and protect the pedestrians. Suddenly the idea developed that the primary public level was not necessarily on street level, but upstairs, on level two. The projects started to explore possibilities of creating new public space, to stimulate public activity, new audiences and maybe the unexpected. Some of the students made an analysis of the zoning phenomenon whereby developers legally trade privately owned public space for increased building size. Undertaking to maintain and manage such space, these spaces were analysed to see if urbanism can succeed on this level and in the face of contemporary security concerns in the city.
How is the principal entrance formulated appropriately? How do you want to bring the public into meaningful contact with the building? How do you design the public space outdoor/ in front? How does the entrance-hall connect with the circulation core? Looking at Steven Holl's entry to the extension of the Cranbrook Institute in Michigan (1998), we found he managed so well to create a friendly looking entry that invites the visitor to come inside.
Both sites offered exciting opportunities to manipulate the terrain. In many of the student projects, site and building level changes throughout the plans to provide a sensitive series of reference points, platforms, foyers, ramps, decks and so on which allow useful connection to the existing site topography and the creation of public space like a "civic room" (as in the projects of Joey Adsett or Aaron Peters).
How does the circulation develop, from entry to rooftop? How are the different volumes and spaces inter-connected? We studied Rafael Moneo's work, he is the master of entrance halls of public buildings, for instance his town hall in Logorno, in the North of Spain (1989); and the skylights above the main stairs in his Film Center at the Wellesley College in Massachusetts (1993), to get inspired.
In some of the student projects we can find equally careful choreographed circulation patterns using compositional strategies, sometimes creating a complex spatial matrix, with a sunken garden (as in the projects of Ben Carson / Lachlan Nielsen or Amos Pang / Vincent Teo).
Alvar Aalto's famous library with the reading room in the National Pensions Institute in Helsinki (1948-56) uses a series of round skylights in the ceiling: Aalto used again and again the motif of the sunken center space in his buildings. By sinking the reading room, he gives the reader an atmosphere to concentrate better on his book. The indirect natural lighting from above enters through roof windows with 1,80 meter diameter.
And there could be a whole typology of ways to control the daylight, like in Louis Kahn's large oeuvre: he developed an extraordinary broad spectrum of solutions in his sections. Each time he was trying to find the coherent answer or typology, which characterized the complete building: Which is the most effective way to control the direct sunlight? These openings provide also ventilation and frame the specific views to the outside.
In another student project we can find a convincing classroom concept, compressed in a floating block above hard and soft landscaping. The distribution of volumes gives a high clarity around a central staircase tower (as in the project of Lay Cheong / Thian Phang Lee).
The above mentioned new ideas that emerged from the studio show that this project was also an optimistic proposal to re-read and to re-interpret existing school building typologies. The students were required to conduct their analysis through intensive model making and expose layers of problems that they had never really considered before. This documentation reveals how due account can be taken of the needs arising from such developments by proposing schemes that incorporate the flexibilisation of urban use patterns, the growing demands for links with various urban networks and the establishment of a higher density for such inner-city sites in Brisbane.
The design studio continues to lie at the core of architectural education. Studios are active sites for students to engage and to undertake projects with social relevance in real situations. The design studio teaches critical thinking and creates an environment where students are taught to question all things in order to create better designs. According to the Boyer scholarship model, the design studio represents the integration of all three environments: teaching - discovery (research) - application (practice). Thus the principles on which the design studio is based, are: 1. site analysis and problem analysis, 2. design speculation, 3. an action plan, and 4. the design review.
I always find the 3rd Year studios very exciting; somehow a student who is unselfconscious of his or her skills is more prepared to take chances and risks. It is important for the students to understand that it is not true that the creation of architecture should be a solo, artistic struggle, or that collaboration with other students means giving up the best ideas. At QUT students are exposed to many different approaches to design. Meanwhile as teachers we listen and occasionally explore the underside of the keyboard. The 'city', the 'context', the 'room' they are only starters, mere excuses for getting a conversation going, while the School as a whole has continued to renew itself through the energy, dedication and unusual talents of a well-placed group of teachers. By constantly redefining and reshaping Architecture education at QUT, we stay fully committed to our strong links with the local profession, and continue to promote an awareness of the value and need for good architecture to the public.
elective advanced studio
year 3 studio