U UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date: May 22, 2009
I, Donald Mouch , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of:
Master in Architecture
It is entitled: Magnifying the Interstice:
exploring the dialogue between architecture's in-betweens
Student Signature: Donald Mouch
This work and its defense approved by:
Committee Chair: John Hancock G. Thomas Bible
Approval of the electronic document:
I have reviewed the Thesis/Dissertation in its final electronic format and certify that it is an accurate copy of the document reviewed and approved by the committee.
Committee Chair signature: John Hancock Magnifying the Interstice: exploring the dialogue between architecture’s in-betweens
May 22, 2009
A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of:
Master of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning
by Donald Mouch
Bachelor of Science in Architecture, University of Cincinnati, 2007
Committee Chairs: Professor John Hancock Professor G. Thomas Bible thesisabstract
1 • Donald Mouch, Analytic, 2008 The interstice is frequently disregarded as architecture’s remnant in-between space. Yet magnifying this zone of transition provides its own dialogue for spatial, experiential, and social interactions. The interstice can investigate architecture’s transitional spaces via form, time, site, and body.
At the forefront of the interstitial is the relationship of form: interactions between solid and solid, and solid and void. Voids grown out of the relationships between neighboring solids carry the potential to be experienced as unique zones of transition. This thesis, then, explores breaking down a solid form so as to accentuate the interstitial voids as transitory experiences in our constant movement through architecture. Time also provides architecture with a unique opportunity to accentuate its interstice as the transition from old to new, or from night to day. Rather than simply existing as a line of inconsistency, the interstice provides a space, a zone at which time’s transitions become manifest. Another zone of transition arises between building and site. The transition from street to building should not exist as a single doorway, but rather as a progression through an extended series of spatial experiences. Finally, the interstice engages the body through sensorial change. Architecture has the potential to awaken the senses such that design becomes a phenomenological experience expressing meaning and generating a vivid sensory experience through its magnification.
The intention of this thesis is to uncover and stress the importance of architecture’s leftover interstitial spaces. The energy present at the convergence of contrasting entities deserves spatial amplification and recognition. Within a mixed-use project designed for 5th and Elm in downtown Cincinnati, this thesis project emphasizes an exploration of architecture’s common interstices, the hallway, staircase, and threshold, resulting in a magnification of these components’ everydayness.
iii
tablecontents of
vi Image Reference viii
Chapter 0: Introduction: Defining the Interstice 12 As a Dialogue
Chapter 1: Form: The Dialogue Between Solid/Void and Solid/Solid 22
Chapter 2: Time: The Dialogue Between Past/Present and Night/Day 36
Chapter 3: Site: The Convergence of Spatial Layers in an Urban Fabric 50
Chapter 4: Body: The Sequential Phenomena Associated with 60 Movement and the Senses
Chapter 5: Site Description and Analysis 72
Chapter 6: Design Intention 80
Chapter 7: Bibliography 90
vii featuredimages
viii Introduction
1. Lederberg, Dov. “Dialogue #8,” Dialogues & Anti-Logues – 2004/09, http://www.art.net/%7Evision/dov2J.html. Accessed 24 April 2009. 2. “Circulation & Movement.” Diagram provided by author. 3. “Functional Duality.” Diagram provided by author. 4. “Simple Complexity.” Diagram provided by author. 5. “Passive ‘Parallelism.” Diagram provided by author. 6. Woods, Lebbeus. “T-Knot,” T-Knot Chengdhu 2007, http://lebbeuswoods.net/. Accessed 24 April 2009. 7. Woods, Lebbeus. “Berlin Free-Zone 3-2.” New York Times, “An Architect Unshackled by Limits of Real World,” Nicolai Ouroussoff, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/design/25wood.html. Accessed 24 April 2009. 8. “Distorting Geometry.” Diagrams provided by author.
Chapter 1: Form
1. Brychtova, Jaroslava et al. Spaces II, 1991-92. Image provided by author. 2. “Solid/Void.” Diagram provided by author. 3. “Solid/Solid.” Diagram provided by author. 4. “Smooth/Striated.” Image provided by author. 5. Eisenman Architects. “Guardiola House, 1988: Trace Diagrams.” Peter Eisenman, Written into the Void, 145. 6. Swiss Alps, Gimmelwald. Personal photograph by author. 31 July 2008. 7. Mangwanani. “Mid-Atlantic Range,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mid_Atlantic_Ridge.jpg. Accessed 19 May 2009. 8. “Simmons Hall, MIT.” Image provided by Mary Carroll-Coelho. 9. “Simmons Hall, MIT.” Image provided by Mary Carroll-Coelho. 10. “Solid/Void Relationship.” Diagram provided by author. 11. Paul Warchol Photography. “Simmons Hall, MIT.” Hilary French, New Urban Housing, 114. 12. Lh1h1h7. “Lll_0016,” http://www.flickr.com/photos/liangh/140665766/sizes/l/. Accessed 21 April 2009. 13. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas. “Jussieu Libraries.” Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 206. 14. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas. “Jussieu Libraries.” Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 214. 15. Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas. “Jussieu Libraries.” Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 215. 16. Delugan_Meissl. “Town House, Wimbergergasse.” Christian Muhr, “Delugan_Meissl: Housing and Office Block in Vienna,” A+U October 2002, 94. 17. Delugan_Meissl. “Town House, Wimbergergasse.” Hilary French, New Urban Housing, 76. 18. Spiluttini, Margherita. “Town House, Wimbergergasse.” Hilary French, New Urban Housing, 77. 19. Delugan_Meissl. “Town House, Wimbergergasse.” Christian Muhr, “Delugan_Meissl: Housing and Office Block in Vienna,” A+U October 2002, 93.
ix Chapter 2: Time
1. Fuss, Adam. “Now!” Personal photograph by author. 21 October 2007. 2. Personal Photograph by author. 27 June 2007. 3. Dali, Salvador. “Montre Molle au Moment,” Easy Art, http://www.easyart.it/posters/Salvador-Dali/Montre-Molle- au-Moment-150203.html. Accessed 23 April 2009. 4. Aaa-fed. “Museo di Castelvecchio – Carlo Scarpa,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/14173242@ N02/2066472850/. Accessed 11 February 2009. 5. Frahm, Klaus. Carlo Scarpa, 76. 6. Frahm, Klaus. Carlo Scarpa, 75. 7. Juergensen, Jochen. “museo di castelvecchio, verona-carlo scarpa,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ jochenjuergensen/2442344817/sizes/l/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 8. Aaa-fed. “Museo di Castelvecchio – Carlo Scarpa,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/14173242@ N02/1810913710/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 9. Cesar, Robert. “Le Fresnoy.” Bernard Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 98. 10. Tschumi, Bernard. Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 59. 11. Mauss, Peter. “Le Fresnoy.” Bernard Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 140-41. 12. Richters, Christian. “Le Fresnoy.” Bernard Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 135. 13. Douglas. “Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglas/297097992/sizes/o/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 14. Elvis F. “Chapel of St. Ignatius,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/fhke/3076001953/sizes/o/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 15. Elvis F. “Chapel of St. Ignatius by Steven Holl,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/fhke/3128089896/sizes/o/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 16. Holl, Steven. “Chapel of St. Ignatius,” http://www.stevenholl.com/project-detail.php?id=40. Accessed 23 April 2009.
Chapter 3: Site
1. Serra, Richard. “Clara Clara.” Personal photograph by the author. 27 August 2008. 2. Buytaert, Dries. “Random Alley,” http://www.buytaert.net/cache/images-vancouver-2004-vancouver-random-alley- 700x700.jpg. Accessed 25 April 2009. 3. Raine. “Marsh-Fence,” peekabooview.blogspot.com/ 2007/11/somenos.html. Accessed 25 April 2009. 4. Koho, Timo. Alvar Aalto - Urban Finland, 49. 5. Träskelin, Rauno. Villa Mairea: Alvar Aalto, 6. 6. Gross, David. “Villa Mairea,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/adventurepixels/982159106/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 7. Träskelin, Rauno. Villa Mairea: Alvar Aalto, 20. 8. Träskelin, Rauno. Villa Mairea: Alvar Aalto, 26. 9. Perrault, Dominique. Dominique Perrault Architecture, 126. 10. “Horizontal Movement.” Diagram provided by author. 11. Leung, Chirstopher. “Submerged Building,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherleung/3030026286/ sizes/l/. Accessed 23 April 2009. 12. Richters, Christian. “EWHA Womans University.” Robert Ivy, “EWHA Womans University,” Architectural Record, November 2008, 155.
x Chapter 4: Body
1. “Metal Mesh.” Personal Photograph by author. 28 August 2008. 2. “Hand.” Diagram provided by author. 3. Bayer, Herbert. The Lonely Metropolitan, https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/_silence_and/, Accessed 26 April 2009. 4. Binet, Hélène. Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals. Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals, 161. 5. “The Horizon of Meaning.” Diagram provided by author. 6. Holman, Cal. “Iron Bridge,” Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/cal_holman/3098537269/, Accessed 23 April 2009. 7. Holl, Steven. “Stretto House,” http://www.stevenholl.com/project-detail.php?type=houses&id=26&page=1, Accessed 28 April 2009. 8. Diagram provided by author. Background image from Paul Warchol Photography, Steven Holl Architect, 367. 9. Bela Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste. http://www.bayarea.net/%7Ekins/AboutMe/Bartok/Bartok_ as_Frame.html, Accessed 25 June 2007. 10. Diagram provided by author. Background image from Paul Warchol, Stretto House, 18. 11. Holl, Steven. Stretto House, 56. 12. Holl, Steven. Stretto House, 57. 13. Horsley, Carter B. “The American Folk Art Museum,” http://www.thecityreview.com/afolkart.html, Accessed 28 April 2009. 14. Moran, Michael. “The American Folk Art Museum.” Clifford A. Pearson, “The American Folk Art Museum,” Architectural Record, May 2002, 209. 15. Moran, Michael. “The American Folk Art Museum.” Clifford A. Pearson, “The American Folk Art Museum,” Architectural Record, May 2002, 206. 16. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. “American Folk Art Museum,” http://www.twbta.com/, Accessed 24 April 2009.
Chapter 5: Site Description and Analysis
Maps provided by GoogleMaps.com and LiveMaps.com Images and diagrams provided by author.
Chapter 6: Design Intention
Images, diagrams, and design iterations provided by author.
xi to the introductioninterstice 0 Defining the Interstice
The interstice can be defined as architecture’s in-between space. Lacking any programmatic function, it exists as a zone of indeterminance, the remnant between defined entities. Traditionally presented as a spatial remainder, the interstice is commonly disregarded as a trivial dialogue; its existence in the everyday environment is received with indifference and apathy. Yet as a spatial remainder, the interstice has the opportunity to act as a connective fabric, a palpable linkage between programmatic spaces. Through magnifying the interstice, architecture’s transitions can become accentuated as vibrant dialogue exchanges between disparate parts. The interstice then, may be celebrated as the thread tying together the succession of events between defined entities. This thesis will examine the interstices with regard to four distinct relationships in architecture: form, time, site, and body. Each in summary: Form, the dialogue between solid/void and solid/solid; Time, the dialogue between past/present and day/night; Site, the convergence and overlap of spatial layers in an urban fabric; and Body, the sequential phenomena associated with movement and the senses.
These relationships will accentuate the importance of the interstitial in its everydayness and adaptability, as well as in its potential to heighten spatial awareness. Quoting from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, “If we pay heed to these relations between locations and spaces, between spaces and space, we get a clue to help us in thinking of the relation of man and space.”1 The goal is to exemplify the potential of the interstitial spaces in order to “form a whole more stimulating that its individual parts.”2 The interstice as a joint thus becomes a magnified convergence of form, time, site, and body; it is the dialogue created at the junctures of these design relationships.
1 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 106. 2 Steven Holl et al., Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: William K. Stout Publishers, 2007), 129. 13 As a dialogue
‘Dialogue,’ coming from the Greek word logos (translated as thought, logic, reason, and meaning), is the exchange of meaning between two parts, whereby the whole becomes a conglomerate entity. Describing the interstitial as a dialogue then, defines its essence as the area where contrasting parts are juxtaposed and subsequently interact. The interstitial becomes a zone of spatial overlap and interlock, the sliver of dialogue which exists at the convergence of entities. When applied to architecture, this zone of spatial overlap and interlock generates an energy through the synthesis of its many parts. Without dialogue between its parts, the final architectural composition remains fragmentary. 1 • Dov Lederberg, Dialogue #8 Such fragments exist as temporary parts, and will continue to do so, until a permanent, whole, composition can be reached. Thus, temporality must be resolved by creating dialogues between these fragmentary parts. These dialogues become the interstices.
The interstice offers potential to formulate an everyday link with immediate surroundings and regional context. “We are always in relation with things in the world, and that relation is fundamentally spatial, characterized by a ‘inconspicuous familiarity’ and a ‘belongingness,’ and ‘insideness.’”3 Based on the late Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s ‘basic questions,’ the everydayness of the interstitial dialogue to be studied in this thesis is rooted in three architectural elements: the hall, as a dialogue between two programmatic spaces; the stair, the
3 Leslie Jaye Kavanaugh, “The Ontology of Dwelling,” in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 95. 14 dialogue between two levels; and the threshold, as the dialogue between interior and exterior. “Interlocking these frames or joining up all these planes – wall section, window section, floor section, slope section – is a composite system rich in points and counterpoints. The frames and their joints hold the compounds of sensations, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, their own appearance.”4 Each of these three elements also share the preconceived notion of movement. The 2 • Diagram of circulation and movement hall evokes horizontal movement; the stair, vertical movement; and the threshold, movement between interior and exterior. Yet in seeking to magnify the role of the interstice, the hall, the stair, and the threshold must not be limited to their singular preconception of movement. As fabrics of connectivity,5 the hall, stair, and threshold must stimulate each dialogue of movement. The hall, for example, cannot be limited as the planar connection between programmatic spaces. Categorization as an interstice demands a spatial cohesion of horizontal, vertical, and interior- to-exterior movement. Thus, regardless of how a design could celebrate a hallway, if it does so while only evoking horizontal movement, it cannot be considered an interstice.
The habitability of the interstice is determined by the method of weaving these connective fabrics. The uninhabitable interstice presents itself as an intangible architectural entity. In such a relationship, the interstice is unreachable, requiring instead an indirect interaction with its design intention; it can be seen, but cannot be touched. These interstices become visual anomalies,
4 Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 187. 5 Stephen Read, “The Urban Image: Becoming Visible,” in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 61. 15 inherently lacking tangibility. Rather than focusing on that which can be directly experienced, they instead concentrate on the intrigue, or deception, of perception. The uninhabitable interstices become the uncertainties of a seam. They can exist as voids, and thus be given a perceptually endless depth. They can refract light as a means of perceptually inverting its source. They can frame spaces, as to allow only a brief glimpse.
When habitable, meanwhile, the interstice presents itself as a tangible entity and experience. Given the interstice’s underlying function as a vessel of movement, habitability must 3 • Functional duality: be understood as a human’s spatial interaction while moving. A window simultaneously acting as a bookshelf Rather than advocating a purely visual experience, habitability instills a touchable, first-hand quality to the interstitial. By inhabiting the interstice, the temporality of movement is momentarily disrupted by a node of occupancy. Habitation essentially bestows a permanence to the variability of the interstice. The interstices can thus inherit a functional duality: a hallway can also act as a dining terrace, the stair as a coffee lounge, the window as a bookshelf. In each case, the interstice 4 • A single, complex form juxtaposed at its interstices to serves a role by providing the linkage between the assumed and express a series of discourses. the unconventionally applied spatial potential. By magnifying the interstice beyond its assumed functionality, the end goal is to create an intricate dialogue between entities by refreshing the experience of their in-betweens.
Yet while a disparity emerges between the interstitial that can be felt with the body (or more definitively, the hand) versus that which can only be seen with the eye, both instances maintain the underlying dynamism of a dialogue. Magnifying the interstitial reveals the methodology by which the whole is reconstituted. 16 It yields what architect Steven Holl describes as “a dynamic tension…of a unique meaning and intensity,” which evolved “in the effort to hold these together and work within that tension.”6 Holl further builds upon these dialogues as being “in the phenomena of the physical reality,”7 whereby the abundance of the idea is perceptible.
The habitable and uninhabitable also maintain the interstice as a transitional space, a space of dialogue between two opposites.
As a “zone of transition,” 8 the interstice creates the opportunity to express the discourse between solid and void, solid and solid, past and present, night and day, artificial and natural, human and building. Each serves as a juxtaposition through which the interstitial is examined in architecture. These zones of transition do not follow the methodology of “form ever follows function,”9 but rather, are manifested as “a conceived order; thus a being.”10
When two elements are merely neighboring, the architectural notion of parts to a whole follows Louis Sullivan’s design methodology, where each functional part comes together as a fragmented form. Inevitably, the result is a gridded layout. Each part has a particular language, and the whole is a compilation of these distinguishable languages. The shortcoming, however, is the lack of any exchange of dialogue between the parts. With 5 • Passive ‘parallelism:’ two forms resting side-by-side
6 Holl, Questions of Perception, 119. 7 Steven Holl, Stretto House (New York: The Menacelli Press, 1996), 9. 8 Christian Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci (New York: Rizzoli International, 1980), 63. 9 Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 208. 10 Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci, 198. 17 each part metaphorically speaking a different language, the whole becomes fragmented. Architecturally, the result is a series of forms, statically juxtaposed, running parallel with one another and connected only by the required seam. It is what Louis Sullivan describes in his book A System of Architectural Ornament as ‘parallelism,’ “a sense of separated parallel activities.”11 The application of parallelism is clearly apparent in Sullivan’s Guaranty Building, whose façade, for example, is restricted to holding neighboring relationships, whereby two components sit beside one another and share only that which divides them in common. In such a case, overlap is nonexistent, and the relationship formed is one of static juxtaposition. The two components simply sit next to one another, and “what is missing is the transaction and interactions between body, imagination, and environment.”12 It is this lack of intersection in neighboring parallelism that Sullivan himself calls out as a division “between man and nature, and between man and his works.”13
Yet, while Sullivan is content with architecture being separate from human engagement, magnifying the interstitial in architecture demands a conversation between building and nature, nature and man, man and building, building and form, and building and time. Lebbeus Woods, an artist and architect renowned for his theoretical explorations of design in crisis, expresses the potential of such cohesions in architecture in his book System Wein:
11 Louis Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament (New York: Eakins Press, 1967),15. 12 Kent C. Bloomer & Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press), 105. 13 Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament, 16. 18 Buildings, public spaces, and other forms of property can no longer be identified according to building types set by predetermined economic and functional categories, but by how they perform in a landscape shaped by complex interactions.14
As opposed to two spaces simply sitting side-by-side, a transitional overlap creates the interstice, a shared space between multiple components. The concepts of spatial distinction and absolute boundaries are instead replaced by an interlocking spatial interaction. Absolute parallel purity is replaced by an engaged overlap. The result: parts lose their individual perceptibility to become a cohesive dialogue involving four components: form, time, site, and body.
These four relationships in architecture also form the 6 • Lebbeus Woods, T-Knot, 2007 compositional structure of this thesis. Each principle is first broken down based upon habitability. Regardless of being habitable or uninhabitable, the interstitial remains a dialogue; yet the manner by which the dialogue engages the audience creates these two distinct categories. Both the habitable and uninhabitable are then analyzed in light of the three architectural 7 • Lebbeus Woods, Berlin Free-Zone 3-2, 1990 elements established earlier, the hallway, the staircase, and the threshold. The analysis of these three elements fundamentally begins in association with particular two-dimensional architectural orientations: the hallway is tied to plan, the staircase to section, and the threshold to elevation. However, plan, section, and elevation exist only as architecture’s framework, and thus must not prevent an understanding of the practical, emotional,
14 Lebbeus Woods, System Wein (Vienna, Austria: MAK, 2005), 18. 19 1-"/ )"--8": )03*;0/5"-.07&.&/5
)"#*5"#-& 4&$5*0/ 45"*3$"4& 7&35*$"-.07&.&/5
&-&7"5*0/ 5)3&4)0-% 4&/403*"-*/5&3"$5*0/
5)&*/5&345*$& 1-"/ )"--8": )03*;0/5"-.07&.&/5
6/*/)"#*5"#-& 4&$5*0/ 45"*3$"4& 7&35*$"-.07&.&/5
&-&7"5*0/ 5)3&4)0-% 4&/403*"-*/5&3"$5*0/
aesthetic, and imaginative outcomes.
Magnifying the interstice transforms the flat and two-dimensional into an engaging, three-dimensional, perceptual experience. The intention of this thesis, then, is to expand the perceptual role of the interstices. The hallway, for example, must evoke a dialogue beyond horizontal movement. While certainly tied to such a role as its conventional function, magnifying the interstitial demands an implementation of the interstice in secondary and tertiary ways. This thesis begins with the discussion of form, since it presents the most literal interpretation of the interstitial.
8 • Distorting geometry into the third dimension
20 21 form 1 the dialogue between solid/void and solid/solid
1 • Jaroslava Brychtova & Stanislav Libensky, Spaces II, 1991-92 Form exists in architecture as a solid of fixed, three-dimensional delineation. Based upon tested theories of science, form is grounded by the objectivity of truth. A certain preconception of rigidity and permanence likewise accompanies form. The interstice, meanwhile, acts as the dialogue by which form can be broken down. Two distinct dialogues emerge from the ensuing interstitial relationship of form. The first is a solid/void dialogue, whereby the interstice exists as a vacancy of form, a “space of crisis.”1 Standing in direct contrast is the solid/solid dialogue, whereby spacing takes hierarchy over form. In such a dialogue,
“the interstitial proposes a dissonant space of meaning,”2 standing not in junction, but rather in disparity, as the resultant of the spatial overlap. Architecture thus presents the interstitial as both the absence of form as well the relationship of multiple forms overlaid upon one another.
1 Lebbeus Woods, “No-Man’s Land,” in Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture, and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read (New York: Routledge, 2000), 200. 2 Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003), 69. 23 Solid/Void
The dialogue between solid and void recognizes the relationship between two fundamentally disparate entities. The solid is defined as a rigid composition of form, recognizable as a discernable mass prescribed for a singular function. The void, meanwhile, is regarded as a zone lacking a physically discernable form. Without self-definition, the void immediately becomes inferior to the prominence of the solid. The void relies upon the solid in order to be spatially defined. Thus, when the void is inferred as lacking form, it is subjugated to that which has form, the solid. However, evoking this thesis’ intention to magnify the importance of the void alters the hierarchal relationship it shares with the solid. When discerned as an interstice, the void is no longer dismissed as the empty space between two solids. Instead, it is the result of a rationally construed solid, which has been removed. A portion of the solid becomes the void upon its removal from its original context. The void, then, must be recognized as the product of evolution and action, rather than a coincidental remnant. The void is subtractive, in that as part of the solid is removed, its remainder emerges as this void. Thus, though the void relies upon the remaining solid for visual recognition, its form was preconceived, and subsequently removed, to create a definable interstice. Now the void inherits a hierarchy, whereby in principle, it defines itself. The remaining solid is thus subjugated to the product of the void’s self-delineation. 2 • Solid/Void Relationship; The void results from the removal of a portion of the solid.
Furthermore, where solids exist as singular entities, the void has the opportunity to assume the role as architecture’s connective fabric. Beyond being interpreted as lacking discernable form, 24 a void can also be defined as lacking a specified programmatic function. Yet these voids, defined in this thesis as the hallway, staircase, and threshold, present the cloth out of which a spatial dialogue can be sewn. By engaging in this dialogue, now the hallway, staircase, and threshold create the formal nucleus around which design can be construed. Magnifying the interstices again enables the void to define the relationship by which the solids are subjected.
Solid/Solid
The convergence of two solids also creates an opportunity for the magnification of the interstitial. Such a situation again requires the interstice to claim a dominance, a hierarchy, over these solids to which it is traditionally subjugated. Expanding the interstice’s role from solely being a void is explicated by Gilles Deleuze, the late French philosopher, in his analysis of ‘smooth’ spaces from the article “Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine:”
3 • Solid/Solid Relationship; Smooth or nomadic space lies between The void is that which exists at the overlap of two solids. two striated spaces: that of the forest, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids and generalized parallels… But being ‘between’ also means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it, oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a communicational role…3
Under Deleuze’s analysis, the formal role of the smooth space, or interstice, is not to be determined by the two flanking striated 4 • A study between the smooth and the striated.
3 Gilles Deleuze, “Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 286. 25 spaces, but rather, is to act as a spatial force, whereby its everydayness is no longer repetitive and lackluster, but rather distinguishably prominent, even aggressive. Given two solids of distinct environments, the interstice becomes the intermediate zone at their juncture. It is the dialogue which inherently exists at the collision of the two forms. The interstice’s dialogue of form is no longer a relationship of solid and void, but rather the aftermath of the relationship between solid and solid. “In the context of architecture, spacing as opposed to forming begins to suggest…a new possibility for the interstitial.”4 The spacing, which appears at the convergence of these two solids, now defines the interstice. A hierarchical reversal of spatial power now presumes the interstice to be the dictator, not the dictated.
Rather than existing as an extraction from form, the interstice is instead the spatial resultant of overlapping. As Peter Eisenman explains in an essay entitled “Processes of the Interstitial:” 1 Displacement 2 Intersection
…the interstitial has to be withdrawn from its figurative condition, that is as a solid poché, where a meaning is already in place, to a condition of spacing where it could be a void within a void, an overlapping within space of space, creating a density in space not given by the forming of a container with a profile.5
As a solid/solid relationship, movement is defined as a convergence of entities, rather than a removal to create a 3 Solid with Voided 4 Rotation Intersection vacancy. 5 • Eisenman’s diagrams depicting the process of creating interstices.
4 Eisenman, Blurred Zones, 69. 5 Eisenman, Blurred Zones, 69. 26 Thus, given that movement is crucial for the perceptual experience of the interstice, it is important to understand the duality of the interstice applied to architectural form. The interstice can either be the zone of convergence between two forms (solid/solid), or the resulting void following the extraction of form (solid/void). In each case, the monotony of the solid is being broken down. As a zone of convergence, the interstice is a result of a forceful juxtaposition. It is a visible energy zone, the result of a violent spatial clash. As an extraction of form, the interstice is the result of a methodical, deliberate process of removal.
The presence of each of these movements in nature can help explain the types of interstices in formal architectural relationships. Nature presents both the mountain and the ridge as the resultants of movement. As two of earth’s solid plates converge, mountains result as a product of the collision. On the contrary, as the earth’s plates separate from one another, as the surface is gouged by the movement of water and wind, 6 • The earth’s converging plates. the remnant void becomes a divergent boundary. Thus, despite their perceptual disparities, the mountain and the ridge exist as nature’s interstices. Assuming the earth initially as a flat surface, mountains serve as additions to the whole while ridges serve as subtractions from the whole. Each disrupts monotony with a new dialogue, a new relationship based upon two distinct types of movement.
As in nature, each interstitial dialogue of form produces zones of 7 • The earth’s plates diverging at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. varying habitability in architecture. The elevation, for example, is typically conceived as an uninhabitable planar envelope. Its primary function is to enclose space. Breaking the monotony of a building’s elevation thus begins to rupture the continuous two- 27 dimensional plane. The homogeneous elevation is transformed into a three-dimensional dialogue, or event-space, synthesized by the movement of two-dimensional planes. The flat elevation suddenly engages in a spatial dialogue involving surfaces, solids, and interstices. Analyzing a series of examples can show these relationships at work, in terms of elevation, section, and plan.
Simmons Hall elevation_ In Simmons Hall at MIT, Steven Holl first magnifies the interstitial on the building’s façade through a series of habitable voids. So as not to block the visual interaction of the
“normal city fabric on both sides,”6 these large-scale openings in the repetitious façade first act as a means of breaking down the imposing, ten-floor, 350-bed college dormitory into distinct 8 • The regularity of the façade at Simmons Hall is zones of residency. Yet while acting as voids in the elevation, interrupted down by a series of voids, breaking the build- ing down into distinct sections. they also create intermediate zones of occupancy, linking different residential sectors with shared common space. At the ground level, these voids correspond with main entrances. As these voids move up the building, they become outdoor activity terraces, joining programmatic spaces, such as a gymnasium, to the building’s exterior.
Holl also treats the uninhabitable voids as interstices across the Simmons Hall elevation. The window openings, as repetitious voids across the elevation, become magnified as interstices because of their exaggerated thickness. With a distinct differentiation now set up between interior and exterior, the interstice gains prominence as a spatial link. Defined by Holl 9 • The windowsills as Holl’s ‘no-man’s land.’
6 Steven Holl et al., Simmons Hall (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 22. 28 as “no-man’s land between interior and exterior,”7 the depth of the window opening is the only place where color is applied in the building. This “no-man’s land” suddenly becomes a critical interstice in the building form, and the result is seen as bleeding 10 • Solid/Void Relationship in Section into the rooms creating “a wash of colors within.”8
section_ A section analysis of the dormitory reveals Holl’s gesture towards strengthening the dialogue of vertical movement. The five staircases act as vertical funnels of light, people, and functions. The duality of these staircases, expressed through landings and zones of indeterminacy (areas lacking a clear function), allow them to become habitable interstices. In Simmon’s Hall, these landings become areas for students to study and congregate.
Likewise functioning as light funnels, the staircases also assume a role of uninhabitable interstices. They act as “the ‘lungs’ of the building, bringing natural light down and moving air up through the section.”9 Vertical movement is complemented by a series 11 • Sectional Void at the Staircase of framed views into functional spaces. The lack of accessibility to that which can be seen provides a sense of intrigue. Holl allows angled glimpses, where that which is perceptible is either the floor or the ceiling of the unreachable. The interstice is thus being used as an initiator for spatial exploration. plan_ In plan, Holl develops the hallway as an interstice by which horizontal movement is magnified. “As in (Alvar) Aalto’s
7 William J. Mitchell, Imagining MIT (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 58. 8 Mitchell, Imagining MIT, 58. 9 Steven Holl, Architecture Spoken (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), 118. 29 Baker House, the hallway can be more like a public place, a lounge.”10 Rather than simply achieving horizontal movement, Simmons Hall’s hallways provide nodes of public space to allow for small congregations, study groups, and performances. Holl also begins converging the dialogue of the hallway with that of the staircase. As the staircase shafts intersect the hallways, a void is created, resulting in a break in the plan. Repetition and 12 • Hallway converted to a lounge space. monotony are disrupted by the habitable staircase creating an area of inhabitability in the hallway.
Jussieu Libraries plan as section_ Stemming from a series of projects seeking to strategize the void, Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Jussieu Libraries focuses on circulation as the “performative discourse.”11 Discussed by Peter Eisenman in his book Ten Canonical Buildings, the design breaks circulation from its assumed horizontal continuum, instead manifesting it as an 13 • An unfolded section displaying circulation as a factor of continuity. undulating source of energy in section. “Floors become a series of continuous surfaces which tilt from the horizontal,”12 creating a habitable link between previously disparate levels. Thus, the only recognizable volumes are the interstices which epitomize a literal circulation path. With circulation as a connective framework, its disparity as a strictly solid/solid or strictly solid/ void relationship is forfeited. In one respect, the circulation paths are bound as figures by the floor planes, and can be seen as the subject of their residual. Yet the merger of circulation 14 • The interstice becomes the only discernable volume amidst the solid/solid overlap of programmatic spaces.
10 Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl Architect (Milan: Electaarchitecture, 2003), 98. 11 Peter Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000 (New York: Rizzoli International Publication, 2008), 205. 12 Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 205. 30 and the floor planes suggests a dominance of the circulation. The lack of being confined to a single axis likewise removes the presumption of what is solid, what is void, and what is governing.
Ascension achieved through the interstice traditionally defined by horizontal movement thus creates a connective dialogue between plan and section. Coupled with this modulation is a visual shift, whereby uninhabitable voids “shift the focus of opticality from the physical object to the subject, who looks through, around, beneath, above, and at spaces, becoming part of a different kind of spatial relationship between subject and object.”13 The play with the void in section determines the spatial perceptibility in plan. Yet these voids also serve as interruptions in the internal continuity of movement defining the habitable. Circulation serving as the centralizing figure is thrown off center by these voids, but their lack of presence 15 • Koolhaas interjects circulation with three different types of voids: cuts (A), tears (B). and holes (C). along the edge “produces a space of unresolved tension between center and edge.”14
elevation_ It is clear then, that Koolhaas has removed the elevation, or the building’s edge, from this dialogue of movement. Instead, focus is placed purely on the relationship of fill and void. Three sides of monotony setup the basis by which the fourth side “appears almost eaten away by interior voids.”15 The void begins at the building’s base as a transition between interior and exterior; but subsequently “twists up through the project, seemingly autonomous from the building’s
13 Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 205. 14 Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 207. 15 Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 206. 31 formal organization.”16
Town House, Wimbergergasse
Though to a lesser extent, the Austrian firm Delugan_Meissl likewise uses circulation as a way to break down architecture’s rigid form in plan and section. Town House Wimbergergasse uses a network of ramps to dictate a play with form. Designed as irregular breaks within the regularity of form, the ramps thus 16 • A concept model of Town House stressing the act to expose the spatial consequences of engaging relationships continuity and hierarchy of circulation. between the building and site, inside and outside, and the constructed and the natural. Hilary French, the head of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the Royal College of Art in London, described these ramps in her book, New Urban Housing, as a series of thresholds seeking the same convergence of plan and section that Rem Koolhaas was striving for with the Jussieu Libraries. In contrast to Koolhaas however, Delugan_ Meissl restricted these circulation thresholds to the building’s exterior. These sloped pathways distort the horizon line, thus creating an irregular relationship between the solid (building) and the void (sky). plan as section _ Interior circulation follows a predictable pattern of horizontal movement along the Town House’s lower floor levels. The central hallway serves as a relatively static connection between units on its left and right. On the project’s upper floors, however, a series of interstitial dialogues are finally established. Rather than remaining strictly planar, the circulation ruptures the monotony and predictability of horizontality as
17 • Slicing through the building’s regular form, the voids created by the ramped roofs act as a series of habitable interstices. 16 Eisenman, Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, 206. 32 it begins a sequence of ramping, acting as a link between the horizontal roof planes. Like the Jussieu Libraries, these ramps cannot be confined to a singular mode of movement. Instead, as interstices, they act in both plan and section as the zone in- between disparate forms. elevation _ The discrepancy between the east and west façades reveals the contrasting potential of the interstice as both habitable and uninhabitable. The west façade presents the interstices as habitable protrusions of form. Functioning as outdoor patios, these interstices offer one way to break the monotony of the homogeneous elevation. The east façade exists in direct contrast. 18 • The interstice created at the rupture of the roofline. In Rather than being the result of a spatial convergence, upon the background, the east façade. which the result protrudes outward, the uninhabitable interstice is an exaggerated inset. Its thresholds pose as voids, thus giving elevation’s form uninhabitable zones of disparity.
19 • Interstices protruding from the building’s west façade.
33 _Summary
All three of these precedents present architecture’s potential for an interstitial dialogue involving form. Interstices are created from both a solid/void dialogue, where a defined form is removed to create the void, and a solid/solid dialogue, where the convergence results in a spatial remainder. In each case, the original form is being broken down, simultaneously creating zones of variance within the plans, sections, and elevations. Thus, regardless of whether the interstice can be inhabited or not, a spatial distinction is created and magnified.
34 35 time 2 the dialogue between past/present and day/night
1 • Adam Fuss, Now!, 1988 Time is cyclical, constant, and regular. In its purity, it is
completely independent of all else. It does not rely on the
rising of the sun, the crashing of the waves, the ticking of the
clock; time continues regardless. It is the human perception
of time which disrupts its cycle of consistency. The human
quest to understand time distorts its regularity such that the only
thing that becomes constant is change. Time thus becomes a
temporal entity with direction and meaning. This temporality,
which French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as
the ambiguity of our worldly existence, “is the link between
ourselves as subjects and the world of objects that we perceive.”1 Our constructed perception of time removes its objectivity, permanence, resolve, and predictability. It instead becomes an “order of phenomenal succession and change.”2 And while the past does not dictate our present actions, it does provide the context by which we choose our actions to follow.
1 Eric Matthews, Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum International, 2006), 100. 2 Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci, 56. 37 This is essentially bound up with the temporality of our existence: the past no longer exists, but is nevertheless a necessary horizon for our present experience – the present is thus bound up with the past, but also necessarily goes beyond it.3
The body, Merleau-Ponty further asserts, unfolds amidst “a sequence of events in natural time.”4 In architecture, these events provide man with a temporal recognition of spatial properties within a static building. Time can only be temporarily detained, restrained, or constrained within a moment of fragility. Like the loud and obtrusive noise of a building’s construction, followed by the sacred silence of its completion, the human perceives time only in its variability. The intangibility of time provides 2 • The consistency of time. a certain omniscience; it anomalously “surrounds us,”5 it is us. As a servant to the time cycle that surpasses individual life, architecture is only constant in its fluctuation. It faces, “at each turn in history, a revision of the translations and transductions of urban substance on the back of changing substrates of continuities.”6
Time is further expanded upon by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa as generating space that “is deeply engaged in the metaphysical questions of self and the world.”7 Architecture has the potential of fusing space-matter and time “into a single dimension, into the substance of being, that penetrates the
3 Matthews, A Guide for the Perplexed, 101. 4 Matthews, A Guide for the Perplexed, 107. 5 Holl, Questions of Perception, 89. 6 Read, “The Urban Image: Becoming Visible,” 59. 7 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy), 16. 38 consciousness.”8 Central to this conjecture is that Pallasmaa, like Merleau-Ponty, believes the definition of time requires reference to human experience. Without human interaction, there is no basis for labeling the past, present, and future. Our understanding of time is reliant on our dialogue with time.
The temporality of the architectural experience will be explored in this thesis as an interactive expression between two dialogues: new/old and night/day. The interstice will serve as a canvas for the juxtaposition of these two different dialogues of time. “Architecture is not a matter of space but an experience… and therefore is a spatialisation of time.”9 Just as architecture domesticates limitless space for our inhabitance, so too shall it “domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continuum of time.”10
Old/New
In one respect, the interstice’s ability to magnify time rests upon its ability to engage with the existing architecture of its surroundings, to “weave work into the ongoing dialogue of an
evolving fabric.”11 This dialogue of time is the thread by which the new is sewn in with the old. Rather than simply resting beside the old as a disparate fabric, the new must engage with
8 Juhani Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven 3 • Salvador Dali, Montre Molle au Moment Senses,” in Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (San Francisco: William K. Stout Publishers, 2007), 37. 9 Eva Meyer, “Jacques Derrida Interviewed by Eva Meyer: Architecture Where Desire Can Live,” Domus, 149. 10 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 32. 11 Nicholas Olsberg, Carlo Scarpa Architect: Intervening with History (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1999), 9. 39 it through a series of penetrations. Such disparities in time can be woven together as a series of junctures, using the interstitial as the connective thread. This interstice, however, must not be confined to the conditions of the old and the new. Rather, it must reveal itself independently as a magnification of the joint, a celebration of the seam. The everydayness of this juncture in time must be accentuated by its temporal state of being.
It is this dialogue of time that Carlo Scarpa was able to epitomize throughout his work in Venice and Verona. Scarpa sought a design that would intervene and adapt, not revolutionize the urban built fabric.
The intention was to create a “speculative tension,”12 whereby the anticipation generated by the new became just as important as memory embodied in the old. Scarpa’s work, then, set up a confrontational dialogue between old and new through fabric seams, the layering of asymmetrical forms, the setting of new dimensions against old textures, and a conspicuous dialect that was virtually identical to the existing. What makes Scarpa’s dialogue with time distinctive is concentrated at what he termed the “connectors.” Identified as stairs, bridges, doors, and windows, these connectors constitute the text for a building’s vocabulary of materials and details that were crucial for capturing the senses. Such a variance in the “tactile, psychological, and mnemonic” of old and new opened “a work of architecture to maximum expression and meaning.’”13
12 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 14. 13 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 13. 40 Museo di Castelvecchio
Carlo Scarpa’s work at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona was completed with its primary focus placed upon a “profound reflection in the relationship between ancient and modern and their coexistence, with regard to the entire urban context.”14 The museum treats time spatially, as a sequence through history, strolling through both the exhibits and the evolving architectural
15 dialogue. The interstitial assumes a “historical transparency” 4 • The interstice created at the convergence of old and new, marked by the dialogue of contrasting materials. at its junctures between disparities of time. Such becomes the ‘place’ of exploitation between past and present, again a zone of indeterminacy, where there exists no boundary of time. Scarpa “layered history, allowing each historical moment to come alive and take its place next to the others.”16 The end goal was to create “a dialogue between old and new, provoking the older elements into conversation with the wholly invented new forms, surfaces, textures, and motifs,”17 and moreover, even causing the old to be seen in a radically new way. plan_ Habitability first emerges from this “well-ordered juxtaposition”18 of the new and the old fragments by way of circulation. The museum’s interior floor paving pattern becomes a dialogue between positive and negative space, thus perceptually creating a series of platforms along a single-level planar surface. Yet as this floor approaches the “irregularities of 5 • An iteration of Scarpa’s stone cladding paving system.
14 Guido Beltramini & Italo Zannier, Carlo Scarpa: Architecture and Design (New York: Rizzoli International, 2007), 144. 15 Sergio Los, Carlo Scarpa (Koln: Benedikt Taschen, 1993), 73. 16 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 70. 17 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 70. 18 Los, Carlo Scarpa, 73. 41 the old walls,”19 Scarpa leaves a trough. This void at the juncture of time begins to accentuate the disparity. Rather than falsely merging, Scarpa instead respectfully celebrates architecture’s distinction of time. This interstice, then, cannot be labeled as new or old, but rather, as the being at the convergence of time.
section_ In section, a clash of time arises where the existing stone wall is incised by Scarpa’s framed concrete staircase, where the clay roof is truncated by asphalt shingles and where white stone columns are complemented by black metal window frames. The details of the section are “evidence of Scarpa’s concern for
construction methods as well as his highly developed sense of 6 • Time is juxtaposed, allowing layers of history to create zones of indeterminacy. space.”20 The museum, as it is recognized today, is a compilation of four construction phases stretching back as far as ancient Roman times. It offers a series of junctures which Scarpa chose to accentuate. One such juncture, as just mentioned, was the convergence of the new floor with the existing walls. Another is the staircase which extends from the museum’s western wing into the courtyard. Framed by slabs of concrete, the staircase’s intended perception is slicing through the existing wall. A break from the regularity of the existing stone wall provides a blatant intervention with time; yet the progression at which the slabs of concrete dissipate back into the stone wall allow the two to carry on a mutual dialogue. Rather than assigning a dominance to the past or present, Scarpa instead used the interstice to create a harmonious equity between the two. elevation_ Scarpa also methodically exposes juxtapositions and dialogues of time along the building’s façade. 7 • The staircase bridges time as it slices through the museum’s existing stone wall.
19 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 72. 20 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 72. 42 There is a dialogue between different materials from different historical eras, placed close together yet apart. Hence the breaks: the newly-laid floors, like carpets, stop some distance short of the walls, while the walls in turn stop short of the ceilings. Scarpa completely demolished a narrow strip of the façade so as to expose the different hidden layers of the building. He made this break a place of synthesis for the whole structure.21
Scarpa’s breaks, or interstices, serve as visual indications at the line of variance with regard to time. Rather than simply butting two entities of time up against one another, Scarpa introduces a radically different dialogue at the interstice, with its discrepancies in the formal vocabulary that magnify the seams among multiple moments in time. “This juncture explodes with movement, structure, and detail.”22 8 • Volumetric breaks expose layers of distinction between the building’s new and old.
Scarpa’s accentuation of the archeology of the historic structure also stems from the raw voids he creates along the existing façade. These voids, again acting as seams of time, are presented as windows that express an interplay between the original form and the new threshold. The existing façade of plaster and iron is interrupted by an interjection of steel and glass. Yet as the façade is interrupted and made asymmetrical, Scarpa’s unified composition retains the building’s conception as a whole.
21 Los, Carlo Scarpa, 74. 22 Olsberg, Intervening with History, 70. 43 Le Fresnoy
Bernard Tschumi also engages in the dialogue between old and new with his project Le Fresnoy. The original buildings on the site, constructed in the 1920s, were part of an extensive leisure complex which included movie houses and facilities for skating, horseback riding, and dancing. Tschumi’s task was to convert the space for use as “a school, a film studio, a media center, performance and exhibition halls, two cinemas, laboratories…and a bar/restaurant.”23 In order to tie its many disparate parts together, Tschumi essentially perceived the project as a succession of the existing boxes within a new box. 9 • The new acts as a canopy, engulfing the existing volumes With this design concept, the roof became crucial as a “screen and providing a programmatic linkage. umbrella,”24 uniting buildings of conflicting function, style, and age. Such a juxtaposition is crucial for the expression of the in-between space, the interstitial, which Tschumi subsequently creates as “a place of fantasies and experiments, a condenser of interdisciplinary investigations between research and teaching, art and cinema, music and electronic images.”25 Far from being disregarded, the interstice is instead celebrated as a place, an 10 • Tschumi presents circulation as the horizontal and event, a zone of marginality. vertical connectors among Le Fresnoy’s disparate parts. plan as section_ Tschumi immediately interpreted circulation as a crucial means of connection among the project’s many disparate parts. Elevated walkways are employed in order to link an extensive program scattered throughout the series of buildings. Suspended from an intricate roofing structure, these 11 • Tschumi exploits interstitial volumes as circulation paths, which are suspended from the roof and wrap around the roofs of the existing buildings.
23 Bernard Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In-Between (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 11. 24 Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In-Between, 12. 25 Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In-Between, 13. 44 walkways serve as a common path of connectivity. Circulation thus complements the umbrella roof as a connective tissue between past and present.
Tschumi frequently interrupts this network of walkways across Le Fresnoy with variances in height. These changes, in the form of stairs, ramps, and lounging steps, require the section in order to convey their role as the spatial and functional linkages between separate walkways. It is through a common treatment of both the walkways and the interruptions that a fusion between these two elements is created. The blue metal treads, railings, and structural members of the walkways and the staircases act as a means of merging the plan and section together. Their conspicuous finish, in comparison to the existing fabrics which 12 • Time offers a constant contrast in the design’s composition. they serve to connect, reinforces the reading of these interstices as operating simultaneously in both plan and section.
Night/Day
Defining the interstice as an architectural dialogue in a constant state of fluctuation, tension, and disjunction, reveals a relation with time deeper than just a juncture between old and new. The variability of night and day can likewise be accentuated through a coordination with the interstitial. As Steven Holl writes, “The perceptual spirit and the metaphysical strength of architecture are driven by the quality of light and shadow shaped by solids and voids, by opacities, transparencies, and translucencies.”26 The brevity of environmental conditions can provide spaces with an exhilarating change in perception.
26 Holl, Questions of Perception, 63. 45 Chapel of St. Ignatius
The primary goal of Steven Holl’s Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, Washington is for architecture to accent this variance in lighting conditions. The spatial perception of the chapel’s interior fluctuates based upon the difference in lighting conditions between night and day. The interstices add color to the light and refract its rays, restricting a particular spatial perception to a 13 • Natural light concentrates color to the Chapel’s interior. single moment in time. White concrete walls become the canvas for a constant play between colored light and dark shadows. A certain mysteriousness thus consumes the space, as the chapel’s variability is based upon the time of day it is explored. Thus, the regularity of the plan is enhanced through its dialogue with changing lighting conditions which Holl makes perceptible in both section and elevation. elevation as section_ Holl explores the interstice in this 14 • Electric light from the Chapel’s interior dissipates color to the exterior. particular project as a series of uninhabitable thresholds. The role of these interstices is to act as “bottles of light emerging from a stone box.”27 Each interstice consists of a threshold and a solid surface. The solid surface, which penetrates into the interior spaces, serves both to refract light and to prevent a direct view through the threshold. While the interior side of the solid surface is painted white, its side facing the threshold is assigned a particular color based upon its location. The choir area, for example, is green, the nave is yellow, the Blessed Sacrament, orange. The threshold, meanwhile, is “a colored lens of a complementary color.”28 The choir area then, uses a
27 Steven Holl, The Chapel of St. Ignatius (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 30. 28 Holl, The Chapel of St. Ignatius, 82. 46 red lens, the nave has a blue lens, and the Blessed Sacrament, a purple lens. Holl is thus magnifying the interstice to create a
“visual phenomenon of complimentary colors.”29
During the day, given the light source as the sun, these colors flood into the Chapel, creating a tremendous light spectacle. 15 • At night, indirect lighting has a glowing effect around the Blocks of color move with the sun across the walls and floor, window opening. providing a vivid sense of spatial variability. At night, however, the process is completely reversed. Now with the source of light coming from the Chapel’s interior, the colored light floods out into the dark, black sky. Through the interstitial relationship between the threshold and the solid surface, the elevation now has the opportunity to become a canvas by which the change in time is perceptible.
This creates a situation unlike any of the others yet presented. Unlike the interstice between solid and solid, solid and void, or old and new, night and day can never engage in a direct dialogue with one another. Classifying it as an interstitial dialogue of time requires a recollection of recent memory. In order to understand the role the interstice plays in the example of the Chapel of St. Ignatius, one must experience it at its two extremes.
16 • Using surfaces to reflect direct solar rays, Holl controls not only the light’s direction, but its perceived color as well.
29 Holl, The Chapel of St. Ignatius, 82. 47 _Summary
Architecture is in a constant dialogue with the variance of time. Whether perceivable by the disparity of style, materials, or time of day, a celebration of the seam of time further accentuates the ever-evolving progress of architecture. The interstitial provides a juxtaposition of time when converging as two different dialogues; at this juncture, this discrepancy of time, architecture can either conceal or accentuate it. Developing an interstitial dialogue calls for these differences in time to be noticed and celebrated through the design.
48 49 site 3 the convergence of spatial layers in an urban fabric
1 • Richard Serra, Clara Clara, 1983 This thesis began by defining the interstitial as architecture’s in-between space. At the site scale, these in-betweens are commonly neglected spaces because they lack “a ‘place’ in individual or collective maps of urban life; they belong to the unnamed spaces of the urban field, recognized more by their uncomfortable uses rather than known by names, they are seen
as voids, missing places in the urban lived map.”1 As fragments of the environment, their “disarticulation of centre and periphery interrupt perceptions of continuity and proximity, generating a fabric of disjointed places served by specialized mobility
networks.”2 In his article “The Urban Image: Becoming Visible,” Stephen Read addressed this relationship between building and site through a critical analysis of existing conditions in an urban fabric:
We absorb it uncritically, falling like innocents for, and taking as given, the already there and materialized, which is itself the immediate evidence that we are connected to a world of whose workings we know next to nothing.3
1 Evora Mendonca, “In-Between Spaces: Evora Portugal,” in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 326. 2 Mendonca, “In-Between Spaces: Evora Portugal,” 325. 3 Read, “The Urban Image: Becoming Visible,” 51. 51 Urbanism must be viewed as the creation of form from moments and events, rather than the consequential form of social or economic framing. When appreciated as a ‘fabric of connectivity,’ the interstice prevents anything from being “experienced by itself, but (instead) always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.”4 The interstice becomes the 2 • The deserted alleyway. dialogue at the point where the site is “overlaid, interrupted, exploited, exaggerated, or… written onto.”5 It is the result of architecture folding in, on, or over the site, interacting with or explaining the landscape rather than simply covering it. First as an experiential connection, then a metaphysical merger, and
finally a poetic link, architecture must serve as “an extension”6 of the site. The site becomes the platform for the convergence of both the natural and the built, and the existing and the new. Bernard Tschumi refers to this juncture of time as an event, “a turning point…and notion of shock.”7 3 • The forgotten parking lot.
The site must be recognized as a canvas for the converging dialogues of two opposing contexts. While a dialectic exists initially, so too does the potential of co-existence. The interstitial, then, has a role of providing a contextualized relationship between the existing architectural disparities. In so doing, this in-between becomes a dialogue of exchange, a “space of
4 Ilka Ruby et al., Images: A Picture Book of Architecture, (New York: Prestel Verlag, 2004), 8. 5 Zaha Hadid, “Internal Terrains,” in Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture, and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read (New York: Routledge, 2000), 217. 6 Steven Holl, Anchoring (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), 9. 7 Bernard Tschumi, “Six Concepts,” in Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture, and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 175. 52 ‘transistance,”8 which creates a passage from one vector to the other. The overall intention of this dialogue is perhaps best explicated by the Portuguese architecture philosopher, Marta Mendonça:
…to investigate ways of supporting the social and perceptual integration of urban components, transforming these spaces into a continuous urban experience…Voids should be woven into a structure of urban-life connectivities and overlaps, allowing the appropriation of the emptiness and their transformation within life-patterns into named places.”9
The interstitial explores the overlaps of social and physical connectivity to the city such that the developing relationship between site and building can become more spatially specific. With the interstitial acting as “social rhythms in space and in time,”10 there emerges a strengthened relationship between new and existing places. By developing an intimate dialogue with the building and the ground, as well as the building and its physical surroundings, the same notion of duality established with form and time also becomes relevant to the site’s interstices.
With most of them near a century old, Alvar Aalto’s works today portray the constant evolution of their dialogues between his design and the site. Much of his earlier work was located in
Turku, a city Aalto referred to as a “growing organism”11 which welcomed a dialogue between a building and its existing urban
4 • Alvar Aalto, Sunila housing community
8 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), 14. 9 Mendonca, “In-Between Spaces: Evora Portugal,” 325. 10 Mendonca, “In-Between Spaces: Evora Portugal,” 326. 11 Timo Koho, Alvar Aalto: Urban Finland (Helsinki: The Finnish Building Centre Ltd, 1995), 26. 53 fabric. Although Turku and other Finnish towns presented the opportunity to engage in this dialogue, Aalto spent many years early in his career criticizing the proposed town planning
solutions as “utopias alien to life.”12 The towns, he claimed, “were sterile, and no signs of interesting characteristics ‘from the human viewpoint’ could be discerned in them.”13 Aalto regarded architecture as an “opportunity for variability, which guaranteed continual growth and renewal of the psychological
requirements of the environment.”14 Thus, when Aalto designed the residential community of Sunila in 1938, the goal was to give the development a strong sense of nature, such that man could be in a constant dialogue with the site. Nature quickly became Aalto’s model of standardization in architecture, seeking to emphasize architecture’s inner being as “a fluctuation and
development suggestive of natural organic life.”15
Villa Mairea
Completed in 1939, Aalto’s Villa Mairea presents this dialogue through a series of interstices created at the juncture between building and site. Designed as a free form within nature, the building and site converged as a “curving, living, unpredictable 5 • Aalto creates a clear resemblance between nature and line…that form(ed) a contrast in the modern world between structure at Villa Mairea.
brutal mechanicalness and religious beauty in life.”16 Aalto’s treatment of this line of intersection as a spatial construct thus gives it recognition as an interstice, acting as the physical link
12 Koho, Alvar Aalto: Urban Finland, 29. 13 Koho, Alvar Aalto: Urban Finland, 29. 14 Koho, Alvar Aalto: Urban Finland, 39. 15 Goran Schildt, ed., Sketches: Alvar Aalto (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 63. 16 Goran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: The Decisive Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 12. 54 between architecture and nature. The splayed double columns, for example, are curiously similar to the twin-stemmed silver birch trees native to the area. Likewise, the pine tree columns within the house’s interior make reference to the surrounding evergreen forest. Such allusions to nature within design again serve as tying mechanisms between the Villa and its site.
6 • The interstice utilizes its materials to create a transition elevation_ The main staircase within the Villa Mairea, located between the natural and man-made. adjacent to the entry and the living space, makes a strong sectional reference to the relationship between building and site. A screen of thin timbers lining each side of the staircase makes reference to the space as a forest, mimicking a feeling of wandering through trees as one ascends the stairs. Yet the building’s elevation provides the canvas for a direct interaction between building and site. The in-between space is treated as a series of irregular voids, allowing nature to grow up, within, and around them. A ‘forest’ of columns supports terrace canopies at each entryway. One “corner of the house is visually dissolved by the undulating poles and climbing plants.”17 Still another is deeply recessed, posing both as a void in the elevation and as a 7 • Aalto continues to blur the line that distinguishes the portal for nature’s growth beyond the two-dimensional façade. natural from the artificial. Aalto breaks down the concreteness of the elevation so as to allow nature a path of penetration to the interior. These occupiable zones of penetration thus become interstices, engaging both the audience and the architecture in a dialogue with nature.
Window thresholds also act on the elevation to tie the building to the site. “The timber-boarded studio and balcony wrap
17 Richard Weston, Villa Mairea (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 16. 55 around the corner of the house above the garden room,”18 again avoiding a hard edge of disparity between the built and the natural. Finish and material also make a strong reference to the surrounding site. plan_ In plan, Villa Mairea likewise presents a series of relationships “between forms and volumes, surfaces forming partly overlapping solids, creating an impression of space which is neither uniform nor unambiguously coherent.”19 The 8 • Materials continue to bring the natural into the open interior space. openness of the first floor presents the opportunity for a dialogue between spaces. Aalto avoids defining a particular functional use within a specific zone. The plan is instead a cohesive composition of undefined parts, each separately recognizable as a disparate image. The success of this project then, comes from Aalto’s ability to create a whole from its “vernacular and modern, natural and man-made, free-form and geometric, (and) romantic and rational”20 parts. Thus, despite being seventy years old, “the Villa Mairea retains a remarkable capacity to challenge and inspire the contemporary search for a humane, regionally- infected and ecologically-responsive Modern architecture.”21
Ewha Womans University
The Ewha Womans University by Dominique Perrault also serves as a precedent for utilizing the interstitial to emphasize urban contextuality. Given the already densely developed urban site on which the project was to be located, the building was 9 • Having a limited vertical presence, Perrault instead uses the University building as means of slicing a functional interstice into the urban fabric.
18 Weston, Villa Mairea, 20. 19 Goran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: The Early Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 220. 20 Weston, Villa Mairea, 10. 21 Weston, Villa Mairea, 10. 56 designed to unfold horizontally as “a vast green zone,” making the city “appear to prolong itself through architecture that gradually inverts the constructive logic.”22 plan as section_ The University’s mass, recessed into the ground and clearing the original site elevation by less than twenty feet at its highest point, is interjected by a central pathway that “cuts 10 • Horizontal movement assumes a strong sense of 23 through the new topography like a rectilinear valley.” This hierarchy within the project. circulation path slices into the ground and is flanked on either side by the remnant of the building mass it is cutting through. While using this void to divide the building’s mass, Perrault is also creating a crucial pathway for campus circulation. By way of this path, the site is essentially able to seep into the core of the building, creating a cohesive merger between architecture and site. “Blurring the line between construction and topography… (the) campus center for Ewha Womans University…is seamlessly 11 • The slope of the interstitial space is magnified by the 24 integrated into the sloping hillside it intersects.” Acting as a University’s repetitious form. connective fabric, this pathway can thus be recognized as an interstice.
Perrault, however, does not limit this path to evoking strictly horizontal movement. Instead, the path requires an understanding in section as it ramps up on one end and rises as a set of steps on the other. Circulation thus induces vertical movement within its interstice. The ramp offers a gentle assertion of the passage down to the school’s point of entrance. The staircase, however,
12 • The stairs, functioning both as circulation and concert 22 Editions HYX, ed., Dominique Perrault Architecture seating, serve as transition between interior and exterior. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008), 126. 23 Editions HYX, ed., Dominique Perrault Architecture, 126. 24 Robert Ivy, “Ewha Womans University,” Architectural Record, November 2008, 151. 57 presents a vivid verticality to the walkway, offering an informal seating area to potentially be used as an amphitheater. As both a link and a connective fabric for the surrounding community, the walkway thus achieves “a controlled progression of height to width that points downward to the interior activities…upward to the older buildings on the hills above,”25 and horizontally to activities of people along the path itself.
The green roof, posing as a natural landscape through which the building slices, offers a means of concealing the building’s footprint. The overhead park conceals all but two façades, which are made visible through the slicing interstice Perrault creates. Not seeking to write a new language of architecture at the urban scale, Perrault is instead revising the translations of urbanism based on the premise of changing substrates of continuity. He utilizes the potential of the interstice to create a seam which slices through the topography, creating a “hybrid space in which a variety of activities can unfold.”26 As the building is submerged into the ground, it creates a visual void in an environment of dense high-rises. Thus, the flexibility of architecture “permits the New Ewha campus center to inevitably weave itself into the landscape-sometimes a building, sometimes a landscape, sometimes a sculpture.”27
25 Ivy, “Ewha Womans University,” 152. 26 Dominique Perrault, “Ewha Campus Center,” A+U, February 2004, 58-59. 27 Perrault, “Ewha Campus Center,” 59. 58 _Summary
The site exists as a dynamic force to be “overlaid, interrupted, exploited, exaggerated, or… written onto.”28 Architecture, through a magnification of its interstices, has an opportunity to fold in, on, or over the site, interacting with and explaining the landscape or urban context rather than simply acting as its covering or simple in-fill. Planar, sectional, and elevational relationships can all contribute to merging the differences between the natural and the man-made, between the building and the site, between the existing and the new.
28 Hadid, “Internal Terrains,” 217. 59 body 4 the sequential phenomena associated with movement and the senses.
1 • Dominique Perrault, Metal Mesh Screen System “Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them.”1
Establishing a recognition of architecture’s place in the everyday experience relies on an abstraction of its ‘ordinary concreteness.’ This abstraction focuses on the connection and engagement between subject and object, or in architecture’s case, between audience and building. The interstice marks the location at which this connection and engagement occurs in architecture. The disparity between building and audience is trumped by a fusion, a dialogue between the two entities. Stretching beyond the threshold of objectivism and functionality, architecture, at its interstices, “is encountered – it is approached, confronted, … related to one’s body, moved about, utilized as a condition for other things.”2 By moving about and within, architecture’s 2 • Architecture as a process experienced by the hand. interstices become fully habitable sensory engagements. They stand as sensory fusions, the dialogue between subject and object.
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), XII. 2 Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses,” 35. 61 Juhani Pallasmaa describes architecture by the “seven realms of sensory experience,” in which the “eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton, and muscle”3 all act as connective tissue between the subject and the object. As Pallasmaa asserts, the body is in constant interaction with “the tectonic language of the building and the comprehensibility of the act of construction to the senses.”4 Importance arises then in how architecture attends to the interpretations of the sensory experiences. All spaces, by default, evoke the five senses; the noticeablility of this evocation, however, prescribes the dominance each sensorial dialogue achieves. The interstitial carries the opportunity to generate a sensory experience out of the monotony of functionality. As Steven Holl writes: 3 • Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan, 1932.
Rather than preoccupation with solid, independent, objectlike forms, it is experiential phenomena of spatial sequences with, around, and between which triggers emotions and joy in the experience of architecture.5
The interstice then, must be blatantly magnified in order to evoke a clear sensory juxtaposition.
In The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa expands upon the body as providing a scale evoking spatial depth and a subconscious vision. The overt significance placed upon the literal visual leads to what Pallasmaa describes as a “cancerous spread to superficial architectural imagery today, devoid of tectonic
4 • Peter Zumthor, The Thermal Baths at Vals
3 Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses,” 30. 4 Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses,” 35. 5 Holl, Architecture Spoken, 106. 62 logic and a sense of materiality and empathy.”6 In order for architecture to induce emotion, in order to be felt, both literally and figuratively, the experience must be molded by the tangibility of its details. All the senses exist as modes of “touching” an experience; in losing tactility, architecture so too loses its fourth dimension. Architecture exists purely as an object when lacking a projection of the body and its movement through a space. In order to achieve a metaphysical subjectivity, building must merge with body in a multi-sensory fusion. Establishing the interstice as a dialogue of movement and sensory interaction assures the engagement of the body with design, averting a structure’s mundane or repulsive inclination to be “flat, sharp- edged, immaterial, and un-real.”7 As a connective tissue, the interstice may become the sensory experience which “brings the world into the most intimate contact with the body.”8
Steven Holl further expands upon this fusion of body, imagination, and environment in architecture:
When the materiality of the details forming an architectural space become evident, the haptic realm is opened up. Sensory experience is intensified; psychological dimensions are engaged.9
Yet the success of the intensification of the sensory experience again rests upon the connection between subject and object. Movement of the subject/body, through the object/building, must become an event, an experience. The interstice is the
6 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 24. 7 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 31. 8 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 60. 9 Holl, Questions of Perception, 91. 63 moment of this connection, which, like Martin Heidegger’s “bridge,” causes the two sides to come into Being.
THE HORIZON OF MEANING
Phenomenology arose as a critique of scientific objectivism and sought instead to ground an understanding in the temporal, spatial, experiential, and self-awareness of our roles, actions, movements, and social interaction in the everyday activity of our surrounding life-world. The goal of phenomenology, then, is to SUBJECT OBJECT bring into focus the ways by which the preconscious or deeper meanings in these life-world relationships may be revealed 5 • A diagram of the contextual interactive; to us. In pursuing the notion of ‘Being,’ Heidegger analyzed Hermeneutics, the fusion between interpreter and thing already-existing relationships, such that a person could revert back to the “thing” in order to see it in its embedded place in the life-world. A contextual, hermeneutic process would begin to uncover a network of meanings and interpretations among the person, the “thing,” and the world. When applied to architecture, Heidegger’s analysis of the “work,” or the “thing,” extracts the meanings and engagements that embed it within our everydayness.
In his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger presents the analogy of the aforementioned bridge. The bridge serves as a connection, which “visualizes, symbolizes, and gathers, and makes the environment become a unified whole.”10 As Heidegger would claim, the separation of land is only recognized by the presence of a bridge offering a connection between the two sides. This ‘bridge’ now exists as a man-made place, a point of design departure with the opportunity to reveal 6 • Heidegger’s ‘bridge’ serves as a connection between two potential meanings in the environment, space, and character. disparate parts.
10 Alexander Cuthbert, Designing Cities (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003), 122. 64 Given the bridge’s ‘being’ as a connective tissue, movement stands as its corollary action. Likewise, movement is a critical commonality in architecture’s three fabrics of connectivity previously specified, the hall, the stair, and the threshold. The hall harbors movement between programmatic spaces, the stair, movement between levels, and the threshold, movement between interior and exterior. Given their ubiquity in the everyday world, such interstices are commonly relegated as infill or mere remnants of programmatic spaces. Yet it is the movement of place which carries the potential for a convergence of “engaged body movements”11 and spatial functions that can create spatial phenomena. As described by M. Christine Boyer, a theoretician of urbanism and culture, through architecture and the body “there is a deep-seated network of pathways and interrelationships between layers and parts.”12 Linking with the notion of overlap and interlock, then, this phenomenon orients the mind, and our subsequent behavior, “to ‘emerge’ from a system of interactions between layers of its subsystems.”13
Though the eye, acting as what Steven Holl describes as a ‘phenomenal lens,’ is essential in the interpretation of architecture as a “quality of light and shadow shaped by solids and voids, by opacities, transparencies, and translucencies,”14 the experience of architecture must be a multi-sensory fusion. Architecture has the potential to “simultaneously awaken all of the senses – all the complexities of perception.”15 In so
11 Holl, Questions of Perception, 124. 12 M. Christine Boyer, “The Body in the City: A Discourse on cyberscience,” in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 27. 13 Boyer, “The Body in the City” 27. 14 Holl, Questions of Perception, 63. 15 Holl, Questions of Perception, 41. 65 doing, a design strengthens beyond a functional solution, and into a phenomenological experience with embodied meaning; an event both site and circumstantially specific, molded for an architecture of the present.
Again breaking architecture down to its “connectors,” the body’s dialogues of movement, ascension, and touch can respectively be built up from plan, section, and elevation. Each holds the potential for an engagement of the human body. Thus, “connectors” can stretch beyond connecting programmatic spaces to connecting the body with the building.
Stretto House
Steven Holl investigates this engagement of the body in his design for the Stretto House. Analyzing the building at its interstices reveals the design’s dynamic juxtapositions of space, surface, and sound. These interstices become magnified given their direct engagement with the body. Holl essentially creates an impetus through design to engage the relationships which bring architecture “into a most intimate contact with the body.”16
7 • The Stretto House exposes its interstices at the juncture elevation_ One of the primary relationships Holl expresses of the rigid forms and the curved roofs. in elevation is the overlap of materials. A dialogue quickly develops between the implied squares of contrasting materials. In a single façade, Holl creates overlaps between glass and concrete, glass and copper panels, and concrete and galvanized copper. The voids and expansion joints which provide separation are no longer the consequences of construction, but rather the
16 Steven Holl, Stretto House (New York: The Manacelli Press, 1996), 8. 66 magnification of a material’s expression.
A dynamic juxtaposition carries beyond just the relationships between materials. It also pertains to the project’s design parti. As the name Stretto House implies, Holl used the project as an opportunity to “explore the musical concept of ‘stretto,’”17 a set of notes overlapping to create an increased musical tension. The particular stretto piece chosen, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste by Bela Bartok, consists of four movements which Holl describes as having “distinct division(s) between 8 • While appearing as irregular shapes, the different 18 heavy (percussion) and light (strings).” The diagrammatic materials were initially square blocks, which then overlapped and sliced into one another in order to create a composition breakdown of one of the piece’s movements shows the overlap of juxtapositions.. as the composition moves from the exposition, to the climax, to the descent. section_ Applied to architecture, the result entails two key points, an overlapping and fluid connections. The building consists of four ‘heavy’ core masses, capped off by a light, curvilinear metal roof. The resulting relationship between the masses 9 • Bela Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste and curves merge as two entities to create an interstice at their spatial cohesion. The active juxtaposition of the plane and curve creates overlaps and inferred voids, eliminating direct lighting into interior spaces and instead creating a mood. Lighting is strategically directed in order to, like the Chapel of St. Ignatius, provide an implication of the time of day within the space. As Holl says, “The pleasure of the architectural experiences – the phenomena of light and spatial sequence, texture, smells and sounds – is irreducible and ultimately enmeshed with situation,
10 • A diagram showing the resulting juxtaposition of stacking heavy solid masses and light, curved planes.
17 Holl, Stretto House, 7. 18 Holl, Stretto House, 2. 67 season and time of day.”19 Through the Stretto House, Holl expresses the need for architecture to be an event, a means of evoking the “phenomena of the physical reality” and an intuitive
“abundance of the idea (that) may be felt.”20
Yet, the lack of sensory significance placed upon the hand has led to what Pallasmaa describes as a “cancerous spread to superficial architectural imagery today, devoid of tectonic logic and a sense of materiality and empathy.”21 In order for 11 • The interstice emerging at the intersection of contrasting forms. architecture to induce feeling and emotion, in order to be felt, both literally and figuratively, the experience must be molded by the tangibility of its materiality. The body must engage in architecture as an experience. With the implementation of commercial industrial methods for production and construction, Holl asserts it is the “texture and essence of material and detail”22 that are being sacrificed. His work seeks to epitomize the sense of touch, whether it be the silk drape and sharp steel corners or the rough concrete finish and joint expression.
Museum of American Folk Art 12 • From the interior, this same interstice, given its obscure location, allows the body to engage in a typically non-engageable space.
The Museum of American Folk Art, meanwhile, offers a prime example of using the interstitial as a strong instigation of the body’s vertical movement and ascension. Completed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in 2005, the museum was designed around achieving “ethereal light, flowing spaces, and graceful circulation.”23 Fissures from the metal alloys
13 • The Museum of American Folk Art’s verticality expressed by the interstice’s role as a sliver of separation. 19 Holl, Stretto House, 12. 20 Holl, Stretto House, 14. 21 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 24. 22 Holl, Questions of Perception, 91. 23 Pearson, “American Folk Art Museum,” 204. 68 used to cast tombasil along the building’s elevation results in “a particularly tactile façade that – while not warm and fuzzy
– begs to be touched.”24 The play of texture, smooth versus rough, thick versus thin, transparent versus translucent, provides the elevations with a sensorial quality.
plan as section_ Confined to a narrow site, Williams and Tsien were forced to compress the gallery spaces into a small footprint. Yet instead of cramming the program into a dark, uncomfortable interior, the museum presents an intricate sectional stacking of spaces. This results in a series of rich spatial experiences that mark the shift visitors make from one gallery, or even
one floor, to the other. By “offering a variety of stairs on each 14 • Verticality is expressed by its magnification in the design’s interstices. floor, moving the location of the stairs in plan, changing the width and character of the stairs, and carving a central atrium
that changes dimensions at each level,”25 Williams and Tsien created an engaging series of interstitial dialogues for the play of bodily engagement. By developing “sectional changes in vertical circulation and shifting views up and through the
central atrium,”26 unique interstices emerge from each floor’s homogenized layout.
Williams and Tsien further accentuate the building’s section by using staircases and vertical atriums to display the museum’s permanent collection. This also provokes dialogues among the different galleries, rather than each being separately annexed from one another. 15 • Uninhabitable interstices create a break between gallery space and circulation space.
24 Pearson, “American Folk Art Museum,” 204. 25 Pearson, “American Folk Art Museum,” 204. 26 Pearson, “American Folk Art Museum,” 204. 69 The hierarchy of interstitial space is another variable experimented within section. Upon entry to the first floor, one is immediately exposed to upper floors through an open atrium space, revealing the design’s emphasis on verticality. Yet the staircase to access these upper levels is secluded in the northwest corner, requiring the visitor to first visit the entry level galleries. In fact, the main staircase (14) is not revealed until the museum’s fourth floor. Vertical ascension, then, is a drawn-out experience building up to its capstone. 16 • The juxtaposition of materials creates a definable interstice.
70 _Summary
As the connective fabric between multiple programmatic entities, the interstice also provides great opportunities to connect architecture with the human body. Architecture cannot simply be regarded as a composition of forms arranged on a particular site. It is instead the subject of an experiential dialogue with those forms. As a threshold of movement, a connective tissue, the interstice can stretch beyond the monotony of simply achieving functionality. It can be magnified as a sensory juxtaposition, providing a link between man and the man-made.
71 sitedescription5 & analysis The site of this thesis project is located on 5th Street between Elm Street and Plum Street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Directly across from the Cincinnati Convention Center, the site currently exists as a skateboard park and a parking lot. Rationale for this site selection stemmed from an analysis of Cincinnati’s urban fabric, a city littered with over sixty surface parking lots and twenty parking garages in its immediate downtown area alone. Consuming nearly 65% of the downtown land area, these parking facilities are greatly suppressing the growth of Cincinnati’s urban culture.
Provided by GoogleMaps.com
Surface Parking Lots Thesis Site 73 Provided by GoogleMaps.com
Provided by LiveMaps.com While certainly essential in a commuter city such as Cincinnati, parking is creating a barrier for developing a fluidity of culture and a true urban way of life. In addition, since people are driving less due to current environmental and economic issues, parking lots have been settling for quotas well under their built potential. Thus, despite arguments by Robert Venturi and John B. Jackson for conserving urban parking lots as a symbol of the American dream, the icon of the automobile and the freedom it offers, these urban wastelands must find a new means of being developed within the dialogue of their surroundings.
1
3 2 4
75 1
At the site’s northeast corner (at left in above photo) is an existing retail complex. Originally dubbed “Convention Place Mall,” the building is now used for offices. Completed in the early 1980s, the building consists of a series of planes, clad in a dark brown brick, and insets, as full-height bay windows.
At the corner of 5th Street and Elm Street, the complex is 2 stories tall. While keeping the same footprint, 125 feet south of 5th Street, the building adds five additional floors of office space. The building’s east side runs parallel with Elm Street, while on the west, the façade acts as a boundary line for a small skateboard park. Extending from the building’s east elevation is a skywalk over Elm Street, while extending out of the building’s west elevation is an open-air skywalk. 2
76 3 The open-air walkway weaves over the park until it eventually meets another skywalk coming out of the convention center. Underneath the open-air skywalk is a cluster of extruded concrete ledges, compositionally creating a circle. A seven-level parking garage defines the southern border of this park. The concrete monolith stretches to the office building, producing a continuous façade as the two merge. The west edge of the park is defined by an entrance ramp to the parking garage. Above the ramp, the skywalk branching from the convention center meets the open- air skywalk that originated at the office building.
4
77 5
A surface parking lot begins west of the skywalk, stretching from 5th Street as its north border to 4th Street on it south. Currently tree-lined, with sidewalks bordering its north, west, and south sides, the lot has a 300-car capacity, with access to an entry gate at the northwest corner of the parking garage. The seven-level parking garage, perceptually lightened on its west elevation by a concrete framing system with large openings, serves as the lot’s eastern border.
Opposite the site’s 4th Street border is 4th and Plum, a nine-floor commercial, business, and residential complex. The building, brick-clad and with window openings grouped in threes, creates a predictable, symmetrical façade. Along the west side of Plum Street is a series of buildings constructed in the early 20th century. Beginning at 4th Street, moving north, is a three-story boutique, an engineering office, an six-story abandoned apartment complex, a pair of abandoned four-story offices, and a series of small bars.
Unfortunately, Plum Street suffers for a number of reasons. When construction began on Cincinnati’s Convention
Center, Plum Street was demolished between 5th and 6th Streets. Breaking the street into north and south segments
6
7878 greatly reduced fluidity and disrupted traffic patterns. Plum Street South, which begins south of the Convention Center, now 5 relies solely on 5th Street for incoming access. Coupled with this break in circulation is the large surface parking lot flanking 7 the street’s east side. Even while conveniently accessible to 6 the convention center, Tower Place Mall, the Hyatt and the 8 Millennium hotels, and Paul Brown Stadium, the development of my thesis site has been consumed by parking infrastructure.
The site’s northern edge is flanked by the Duke Energy Convention Center. Recently extended to Central Avenue, the Center creates a strong horizontal border along 5th Street. Its 7 dialogue extends to the site by the skywalk across 5th Street. The design’s location, then, exhibits a great potential to reinterpret the circulation space connecting this skywalk with the one to the east of the site. It provides potential for the magnification of the interstice.
8
79 design intention6 This thesis design project is a mixed-use residential complex in downtown Cincinnati. Like the text, the design will focus on the four relationships used to define the interstitial dialogue in architecture. It is structured in order to magnify the interstices as developed from ideas of form, time, site, and body. Interstitial variations on hallways, staircases, and thresholds are the prominent dialogues which become the focal points of this particular project.
program_
first floor 24,700 sq. ft. Food market 4300 sq. ft. Bookstore 3600 sq. ft. Retail 2700 sq. ft. Restaurant(s) 6300 sq. ft. Café 3400 sq. ft. Residential Entry 1900 sq. ft. Back of House 2500 sq. ft.
second floor 17,800 sq. ft. Restaurant(s) 6300 sq. ft. Lounge Bar 2500 sq. ft. Reception Hall(s) 9000 sq. ft.
third - seventh floors 16,100 sq. ft. (per floor) Individual Residences (per floor): Studios 3 @ 800 sq. ft Two-Bedroom Units 6 @ 1200 sq. ft. Three Bedroom Units 3 @ 1800 sq. ft. Lounge Space 1100 sq. ft.
TOTAL SQUARE FOOTAGE 123,000 sq. ft. 81 Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3
Formal design experiments in search of the qualities and potentials of the “interstitial” began using the golden rectangle. Pivot points were established at the center points of the two possible squares orientations within the golden section. The next golden rectangle in the series then chose one pivot point, and rotated by a multiple of 15 degrees. While rules governed the actions made to create Figure 1, variability took over to determine which lines would constitute the perimeter of Figure 2. Solid segments removed from the form of Figure 2 created the dialogue between solid and void in Figure 3.
Figure 4 Extruding Figure 3 allowed the form to be read as a volume, and its voids as habitable interstices. Investigations were further done to experiment with the potential of these interstices and the strength of their presence in the overall composition. 82 INCREMENTAL SPACING
@GOLDEN FORCE LINE NATURE MEETS MAN
U S EC T I O IN F
Figure 5
The volumetric extrusion was then overlaid with regulated lines based on the site. A force line, created from the angle of vision from the northwest corner of the site to the southeast corner, set the precedence from which form and void incrementally stemmed. Primary circulation paths sliced through the building form, with secondary and tertiary circulation ‘infectiously’ branching off as the building rose. Vision force lines, also key in development, were not restrained to the two-dimensional plan, but also were investigated in the third dimension as well. Figure 6 Vision lines onto the site from existing buildings neighboring the site became planes.
Figure83 7 Figure 8
Figure 9
breaking down the interstice_
habitable uninhabitable
plan section elevation
Figure 10 hallway staircase threshold
horizontal vertical sensorial movement movement interaction
Focus then transferred to strictly developing three instances of the interstice, the hallway, the staircase, and the threshold. Each went through a series of iterations in order to speak to the different means of expressing the interstitial: form, time, site and body. Figure 11 84 Residential Units
Level 4,6,7
Residential Units
Level 3,5
Restaurants/Cafes Conference Rooms
Level 2
Restaurants/Cafes
Retail Level 1
Figure 12
Each level was then developed in order to investigate their relationships with one another. Detail models of particular Figures 13-17 interstices appearing in plan were built as a means of exploring different opportunities for indirect lighting.
85 Figure 18
Figure 8619 Rendered views were prepared as an investigation of magnifying a particular type of interstice. Figure 18 is a first floor retail entrance which investigates the interstices generated from the dialogue of form. Extrusions and setbacks address the relationships between solid/void and solid/solid.
The interstice construed from the relationship between building and site was explored in Figure 19. The outdoor staircase offers a “bridge” between the public and semi-public space. Acting also as a public theater, the space uses the interstice to become a functional link between the skywalk and the street.
By the use of translucent materials, Figure 20 explores the interstice as a dialogue between the spatial conditions of night and day. The wall running along the staircase provides an explicit fabric of change with time. As a beacon at night, light allows the wall to be illuminated as a plane slicing through the solid building form, acting as the source by which the neighboring void was generated. This also provides a direct connection between building and body, as this fluctuation of space generates a vivid sensory experience. Figure 20
Figure 8721 exploring the staircase_
Figure 22
Figure 8823 Figure 22
investigating the threshold_
Figure 24 Figure 25
Figure 2689 bibliography7
90 Batchelor, David et al. Donald Judd. New York: Distributed Art Publisher, 2004.
Bastos, Flávia M.C. and Hutzel, Karen. ‘The Art in the Market: Addressing Racial Issues through Community Art’, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, Vol. 22, 2004: 86-98.
Bell, Victoria Ballard and Rand, Patrick. Materials for Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).
Beltramini, Guido and Zannier, Italo (eds.). Carlo Scarpa: Architecture and Design. New York: Rizzoli International, 2007.
Benedikt, Michael. For an Architecture of Reality. New York: Lumen, 1987.
Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy: Repetition, Function, Alterity. Ch. 2, ‘Resisting Ambivalence’, 43-68. London: Althone, 2001.
Bloomer, Kent C and Moore, Charles W. Body, Memory, and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995.
Cahoone, Lawrence E. (ed.). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Crawford, Margaret and Speaks, Michael. Everyday Urbanism: Michigan Debates on Urbanism Volume 1. New York: Distributed Arts Press, 2005.
Cuthbert, Alexander. Designing Cities. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Editions HYX (ed.). Dominique Perrault Architecture. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008.
Eisenman, Peter. Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects, 1988-1998. New York: Monacelli Press, 2003. 91 Eisenman, Peter. Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000. New York: Rizzoli International Publication, 2008.
Eisenman, Peter. Written into the Void. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Ericson, Kate and Ziegler, Mel. America Starts Here. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2005.
Expoagua Zaragoza 2008 S.A. Expo Architecture Zaragoza, An Urban Project. Zaragoza: Actar, 2008.
Frampton, Kenneth. Steven Holl Architect. Milan, Spain: Electaarchitecture, 2003.
French, Hilary. New Urban Housing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Futagawa, Yukio (ed.). Tadao Ando. Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1987.
Gabo, Naum. Of Divers Arts. New York: Pantheon, 1962.
Gannon, Todd et al. Mack Scogin, Merrill Elam: Knowlton Hall. New York: Princeton Press, 2005.
Ghirardo, Diane. Architecture After Modernism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
Giovannini, Joseph et al. Zaha Hadid: Space for Art. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2004.
Hauptmann, Deborah (ed.). The Body in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006.
Hays, Michael (ed.). Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Yale University Press, 1959.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Perennial, 1976.
Holl, Steven. Anchoring. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.
Holl, Steven. Architecture Spoken. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007.
Holl , Steven. GA Architect: Steven Holl, edited by Yukio Futagawa. Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA, 1993.
Holl, Steven. House: Black Swan Theory. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
Holl, Steven. The Chapel of St. Ignatius. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
Holl, Steven. Intertwining. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.
Holl, Steven. Parallax. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.
92 Holl, Steven et al. Simmons Hall. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Holl, Steven. Steven Holl: Idea and Phenomena. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2002.
Holl, Steven et al. Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: William K Stout Publishers, 2007.
Holl, Steven. Stretto House. New York: The Menacelli Press, 1996.
Hooton, Bruce. ‘Interview with Donald Judd’, February 3, 1965, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ oralhistories/transcripts/judd65.htm. Accessed on April 24, 2008.
Hopps, Walter and Bancroft, Sarah. James Rosenquist: A Retrospective. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2003.
Ivy, Robert Adams. “Dominique Perrault blends built and natural environments in a new campus center for the growing student body of Seoul’s Ewha Womans University”. Architectural Record, November 2008, 148-155.
Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Koho, Timo. Alvar Aalto: Urban Finland. Helsinki: The Finnish Building Centre Ltd, 1995.
Libeskind, Daniel. Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter. New York: Universe, 2000.
Matthews, Eric. Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum International, 2006.
Mau, Bruce et al. Massive Change. London: Phaidon, 2004.
Meyer, Eva. ‘Jacques Derrida Interviewed: Architecture Where Desire Can Live’, Domus, 1986.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Mitchell, William J. Imagining MIT . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007.
Muhr, Christian. “Delugan_Meissl: Housing and Office Block in Vienna”. A+U, October 2002, 90-95.
Nesbitt, Kate (ed.). Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
Noever, Peter (ed.). Beyond the Blue. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2007.
Norberg-Schultz, Christian. Genius Loci. New York: Rizzoli International, 1980.
93 Olsberg, Nicholas, et. al. Carlo Scarpa Architect: Intervening with History. Montreal, Canada: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1999.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy, 2005.
Pearson, Clifford A. “ Tod Williams and Billie Tsien combine weighty materials and etheral space to make the small American Folk Art Museum into a big deal”. Architectural Record, February 2002, 202- 211.
Perrault, Dominique. Dominique Perrault Architecture. Paris: Editions HYX, 2008.
Perrault, Dominique. “Dominique Perrault: Ewha Campus Center, Seoul, Korea, 2004”. A+U, February 2004, 58-63.
Phillips, Derek. Daylighting: Natural Light in Architecture. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004.
Portoghesi, Paolo. Le inibizioni dell’architettura moderna. Unknown, 1974.
Prix, Wolf D. Get Off My Cloud. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Ray, Nicolas. Alvar Aalto. London: Yale University Press, 2005.
Read, Alan (ed.). Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture, and the Everyday. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Riedijk, Michiel and Neutelings, Willem Jan. At Work: Neutelings Riedijk Architects. Rotterdam, Netherlands: 010 Publishers, 2004.
Ruby, Ilka & Andreas and Ursprung, Philip. Images: A Picture Book of Architecture. New York: Prestel Verlag, 2004.
Schildt, Göran (ed.). Alvar Aalto: The Decisive Years. New York: Rizzoli, 1986.
Schildt, Göran (ed.). Alvar Aalto: The Early Years. New York: Rizzoli, 1984.
Schildt, Göran (ed.). Sketches: Alvar Aalto. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Smith-Miller, Henry and Hawkinson, Laurie. Between Spaces. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000.
Sullivan, Louis. Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Sullivan, Louis. A System of Architectural Ornament. New York: Eakins Press, 1967.
Tschumi, Bernard. Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999.
Tschumi, Bernard. Bernard Tschumi. New York: Universe, 2003. 94 Tschumi, Bernard. Event-Cities 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
Werner, Frank. Covering + Exposing the Architecture of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Boston, Birkhauser – Publishers for Architecture, 2000.
Weston, Richard. Villa Mairea. London: Phaidon Press, 1992.
Woods, Lebbeus. OneFiveFour. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.
Woods, Lebbeus. System Wien. Vienna, Austria: MAK, 2005.
Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2006.
Zumthor, Peter. Peter Zumthor Therme Vals. Zurich, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007.
95