Living Tomorrow is a combination of a laboratory, a gallery and an auditorium. It is a temporary accommodation where a variety of businesses can demonstrate their innovative techniques and researches for our future homes or workplaces.
Visitors can get acquainted with the products and services, which can enhance the quality of living or working in the near future.
In addition to the latest technologies the building features alternative heating and cooling methods.
Living Tomorrow is a combination of a laboratory, a gallery and an auditorium. It is a temporary accommodation where a variety of businesses can demonstrate their innovative techniques and researches for our future homes or workplaces.
Visitors can get acquainted with the products and services, which can enhance the quality of living or working in the near future.
In addition to the latest technologies the building features alternative heating and cooling methods.
The Möbius House project, besides the normal living space and sleeping quarters for the family composed of four members, included a guest apartment, a two-car garage and two large studios.
Another factor that could not be ignored during the planning stage was the spectacular surrounding scenery: a peninsula between two rivers, encircled by beech trees and with a strip of grass in the middle.
Van Berkel & Boss took this opportunity to study their own thoughts on contemporary living more thoroughly as well as the idea of movement as a structural principle.
The conceptual reference for development of the project was the Möbius strip, a diagram made up of two continuous lines that intersect to form a double spiral similar to an elongated eight.
Speaking of the process that led him to choose this reference diagram, Van Berkel says: “The idea for the design of the Möbius house started with a diagram of two interlocking lines, which complemented our theory about the two users of the house; the husband and wife, who are going to work and live in this house. Within the 24-hour cycle of working and living they will want to be together at some times, but at other times not. The two lines from the diagram could be related to the two people living in the house. This diagram, which, due to its abstraction is open to different interpretations, in turn initiated the idea of working with two materials, of using the notion of time in relation to the distribution of the program.”
The Möbius loop, the spatial quality of which means that it is present in both plan and section, translates into the interior into a 24-hour cycle of sleeping, working and living. As the loop turns inside out the materialization follows these change-overs; glazed details and concrete structural elements swap roles as glazed facades are put in front of the concrete construction, dividing walls are made of glass and furniture such as tables and stairs are made of concrete.
The Möbius house integrates programe, circulation and structure seamlessly. The house interweaves the various states accompanying the condensation of differentiating activities into one structure: work, social life, family life and individual time alone all find their places in the loop structure. Movement through this loop follows the pattern of an active day.
The fold in built form – One of the most difficult propositions of the “fold” is transition from abstraction to tangible. It is easy enough to read and understand Deleuze, Grosz, Lynn, and Vidler but overwhelmingly difficult to translate their concepts to built form. (Keep in mind that this is all relative, meaning, understanding them is not easy and hence translating from abstraction to tangible seems nearly impossible.)
The work of Ben van Berkle and Caroline Bos of UN Studio cleverly and clear actualizes these abstract ideas. Most directly they have taken the mobius strip and it’s 3-dimensional equivalent, the klien bottle, objects that literally have no inside or outside, and lack orientation or direction, and translated them into built form. They have used the mobius strip as the basis for their Mobius House to sponsor overlap and interaction between all aspects of living and working cycles.
On March 1st, the MUMUTH faculty building at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz by
UNstudio will officially be open. The new music theatre design by UN studio principal architect
Ben Van Berkel is described as ‘classical with a twist’. The studio was selected from 212 entries in an
architectural design competition to design the building. Construction of the building cost 19 million
euro and first began in March 2006.
Van Berkel’s main focus was to design a building that is as much
about music as a building can be. This concept took the form of a ‘spring-structure’ that gave form to
the building and its layout. This structure was envisaged as an elongated spring, which would be
stretched, suppressed and folded up inside it to offer structure to the various volumes through one
continuous line. This line slowly embedded itself in the final design, no longer appearing visibly.
The studio also used the idea of a blob-to-box model, altering the form of the building from movement
based at one end and unit-based at the other end. This concept provided further structure to the spring
model. The design also features a sticking concrete staircase and a glittering outer facade that makes
use of repetition.
Source: http://www.architectour.net
The first of these two themes is the so-called ‘spring structure’ which bears the most direct relationship to music. In the first stage of the competition, the design was still very conceptual and was envisaged as an elongated spring of varying diameter size, which would alternately be stretched, suppressed and folded up inside itself to offer structure to the various volumes that together make up the theatrical, audience, rehearsal and utility spaces. We saw the spiral as the organising element of the MUMUTH in much the same way as Serialism works in contemporary music; the continuous line absorbs and regulates intervals and interruptions, changes of direction and leaps of scale without losing its continuity. Things hang on this line like laundry: glass, concrete and installations. In many ways this principle still holds, although in the building as it stands today the coil motif is no longer prominently displayed on the facades, as it was in that first conceptual design, but is now invisibly absorbed in the construction.
Source: http://www.architectour.net
In fact, the legibility of the spring was dissolved only gradually. The design that was made for the second stage of the competition shows a refined spiral concept, which, like an octopus, is simple, orthogonal and horizontally orientated on one side and turns into a complex, smaller-scaled principle on the opposite side. This principle of a spiral that divides itself into a number of interconnected smaller spirals that take on a vertical and diagonal direction became an important design model for us which we called the blob-to-box model.
Church Dio Padre Misericordioso (Jubilee Church) sits on a flat, triangular site in Tor Tre Teste (named for a bas relief of three heads carved in a medieval guard tower dating back to the 4th Century) about six miles east of central Rome. It is adjacent to a lower/middle-income housing complex built in the 1970s on the boundary of a public park.
The 108,414 square-foot complex contains both a church and a Community Center, connected by a four-story atrium. The project features concrete, stucco, travertine, and glass. The south side of the church features three large curved walls of pre-cast concrete. (The walls form segments of spheres.) Three dramatic concrete shells arc in graduated heights from 56 to 88 feet that bring to mind gliding white sails. The large thermal mass of the concrete walls control internal heat gain; the result is less temperature variation, and supposedly more efficient use of energy. The walls also contain titanium dioxide to keep the appearance of the church white.
Glass ceilings and skylights in the church span the entire length of the building filling the space with natural light. At night, light emanates from within creating an ethereal presence and animating the landscape. The main nave seats 240, and a day chapel seats 24.
The plan relates to the triangular site. The sacred realm to the south, where the nave is located, is separated from the secular precinct to the north; pedestrian approaches are from both the housing complex to the east and the parking lot to the west.
The proportions of the complex are based on a series of displaced squares and four circles. Three circles of equal radius generate the profiles of the three shells that, together with the spine-wall, make up the body of the church nave – and discretely imply the Holy Trinity.
The western side of the church site is laid out as two courts separated by a paved causeway running east/west between the community center to the north and the church to the south. The northern most court adjacent to the center has a recreational garden. The second court features a reflecting pool and is intended as a meditation space.
The four-level community center functions as a key gathering place for social, educational, and recreational activities. A paved pedestrian approach or sagrato (churchyard) on the east, near the center of the adjacent Tor Tre Teste housing project, encourages parishioners to gather in the piazza as was done in the sagrati of medieval Italy.
The south side of the church features three large curved walls of pre-cast concrete. (The walls form segments of spheres.) Meier claims to have designed the church to minimize thermal pea loads inside. The large thermal mass of the concrete walls control internal heat gain; the result is less tempeature variation, and supposedly more efficient use of energy. The walls also contain titanium dioxide to keep the appearance of the church white.
The proportions of the complex are based on a series of displaced squares and four circles. Three circles of equal radius create thee concrete shells.
It is essential for a programme that provides more options for massing and curtain walls, which formed a large part of the building we needed to generate.
