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Perforations of Transparency

Part 2 Project 2005
Laurie Marlow
Tord Mardoff Nielsen
 University of Brighton | UK
A ‘machine’, a process rather than an object, was conceived and used to generate multiple surfaces. The initial step was selecting and making a scaled drawing of a found object, a loom. Combined with research into how other disciplines use graphical methods to display data, composite drawings were formulated and analyzed through specific strategic processes. This spawned the ‘surface’ drawings.

Mis-readings of H.O.K’s proposal for the Royal London Hospital were developed within the language articulated by surface drawings. This allowed a new architecture to emerge, one based on qualities of transparency and visual distortion contained within image.

Laurie Marlow
Tord Mardoff Nielsen

This proposal for the controversial Royal London Hospital project is uncommonly clear-cut, but the poignancy of its confrontation with architecture’s increasingly ephemeral surface and its revelation of the flagrant passivity of PFI projects is timely. Even if the Government won’t sanction a project resonant of post-war Beirut it is incontrovertible that by isolating the generic facade from HOK’s proposal Marlow’s urbanite comes face-to-face with architecture’s potentially brutal Piranesian materiality, re-awakening architecture’s daunting space-making capacity. Marlow erases architecture’s late Modern formalism with a Mannerist-like dismantling of HOK’s project. The negative rampart mediating between the city and patient demands to know whether the NHS is a fortress or an accessible institution as we are given to believe.
Tutor(s)
2005
Reinterpreted south façade, pm. The scheme can be seen to be 'reinterpreted' because it has been put through a process based upon a specific technique of reading HOK’s drawings for the new Royal London Hospital.
North façade and site context, pm. The new facades drive for depth of field, ambiguity, interference, timelessness, and a sensation of a multi-layered and multi-interpreted surface one which could easily fall into the pitfalls of graphical noise.
Internal face of north façade. Surface drawings have been applied to the existing HOK scheme creating a collision between their proposed scheme and the surface drawing.
Void eroded through floor plates. Where this collision occurred floor plates have been eroded generating a void between them and the new façade. This internal void is used to circulate the hospital and to house façade extensions.
The panels which clad the primary structure have been developed from five groups each generating a progressive level of transparency. Cladding panels take composition from specific surface drawings.
Cladding panels. The material palette moves from thick concrete for the areas of least transparency, through to drilled thinner concrete, drilled corten steel, fritted glass and finally clear glass panels for the areas of greatest transparency.
Internal perspective looking through south façade. The individual visual composition of the panels are based upon surface drawings, utilising surfaces that correspond to the desired transparency level and image composition.
The mesh surface drawings endeavour to reproduce the qualities present in the dot surface drawings through line. This generated a greater understanding of how to reproduce the qualities discovered by using a different unit, line.
Process 01: Research and documentation of a loom, the abstract graphical methods of data display (Shukan Asahi/Cho Shinta) and the precision manufacturing processes.
Process 02: End points of a moving part of the loom have been plotted and connected. Each curve was used to generate a digital three dimensional landscape which relates directly to the peaks and troughs of the curves plotted from the moving hammerhead.
Process 03: This drawing shows selected hammerheads in plan, section and elevation, there consequent curves which were plotted in the same way as before and the landscapes which these generated.
Process 04: These landscapes were then overlaid with a grid of extruded dots which were positioned in three dimensions to mirror the contours of the landscape exactly. These are shown rotated about a point at six locations horizontally when x = 0°, a furt
Surface 01: The dot landscapes were then viewed in plan. One of each of the dot landscapes were then overlaid, with a measured degree of transparency, on to photographs which had been taken whilst visiting High-Tech, the Precision Engineers.
Surface 02: These surfaces contain qualities of depth of field, ambiguity, interference/static, a timelessness and a sensation of a multi layered and multi interpreted surface.
Redrawing the HOK façade: Dot and mesh surfaces are progressively overlaid onto the redrawing of HOK's façade in order to distort and create greater mis-readings from the image. The result is a tone based transparency diagram of the new façade.
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