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Part 2 Project 2007
Gordon Chrystal
 University College Dublin | Ireland
Fundamental to architecture is that moment when occupant needs and internal complexities must negotiate external forces: physical, social or otherwise. This scramble for priority can very often lead to what Koolhaas refers to as an architecture that “divorces appearance from performance”. The other extreme is a functional determinism of form, leading to a fragmented and disparate architecture. Both positions are inextricable. To resolve this apparent dichotomy a consideration of the simultaneity of image and experience was necessary. Experiments throughout the year aimed at the reinterpretation of the window as base element; internally having a powerful influence over social activity while externally communicating purpose and enticing contact, thus understood as the negotiator between appearance and performance.

A reformatory institution was chosen as a typology as by its very nature it impedes basic human needs for interaction internally while its exterior form is traditionally solid and impenetrable, rarely addressing its immediate context. As a challenge to this preconception, the ‘contained object’, with all its negative connotations, is placed within a significant urban setting to enable a form of reciprocation to develop. The expansion of the primary edge condition, through abstraction and translation of the idea of window, from a two dimensional periphery to a three dimensional experience enables the building to operate as thickened spatial condition: reconnecting the community to the city by means of fracturing space and views through varying scales of enclosure and connection within a single expression.

Gordon Chrystal

A spirited, imaginative and critical investigation on the question of image versus experiential quality in architecture, a perennial debate which finds a challenge in this provocative resolution to the needs of a inner city juvenile detention centre.

Based on a critical and systematic analysis of the intermediary role of fenestration in representation and experience, investigations were undertaken through multiple scales and methodologies, including full scale prototypes, to measure and reconcile these apparently disparate agendas. The negotiation between spatial and formal qualities within the limited footprint of The Very Small House proved formative to later work on the conventionally restrictive environment of a detention centre, a typology liberated through a highly original reinterpretation of functional, experiential and representational concerns. The radical expansion of wall depth results in a thickening of space, shifting in density across activities, which serves to develop associations between internal and external communities while simultaneously offering a complex, porous yet cohesive form.

2007
“Docile bodies” (Foucault: 1979), and the “simple idea in architecture”
“I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by.” Oscar Wilde. The experiential and formal implications of the window
Experiment 2 > Very Small House – ‘Inhabiting the Interface’ – Deepening that layer to encompass both realms at once. Exploring the concept of Spatial thickness > The relationship between experience, thickness of enclosure and solidity.
Construction Diary > material and opening as the generator of form
Depth of façade > Experiencing depth through the opening of the solid
Experiment 3 > Temporary Supervised Accommodation for Juveniles – Expanding the ‘edge condition’ of the window. The entire building becomes an occupied façade; open spatially to the city. The walls ‘swell’ to become occupied structure.
Occupying the edge > Deepening the façade: each level of activity inhabits the other; each retaining a connection to the city. Walls occupy rooms, which in turn occupy the walls of collective spaces, which in turn define internal and external spaces
Site Strategy > Connecting ‘nodes’ of public interest; consolidating the existing block by forming a new public edge; and allowing the historic city wall to ‘breathe’.
Public Interface > Through its positioning, massing and organisation, the building frees up or ‘activates’ public space around it. The building and place interacts.
Connection& Engagement > The interior is punctuated with external spaces, thereby maintaining a constant outdoor link: be it the sky, a street, a distant view, private courtyards, or shared terraces. Resulting in ‘moments of enclosure and connection’.
Skin reads as volume by the way it’s opened and folded. With solidity, you experience the object, not the skin or the surface. You experience the ‘complete object’, not the part.
The unfolding space begins at the entrance and finishes at the bedrooms on the top two floors with the section constantly changing (compressing and releasing spaces), as one moves through the building.
The varying rhythm of the façade enables the activities contained within while reading as a synthetic, though varied, whole beyond.
The image of the building has emerged through an idea about occupancy.
The concept of connection and engagement, between occupant and city, building and public, is understood through its language; through the interwoven complexity of form & façade.
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