What do you think of that? Contextual response? Driven by the desire to "create" visibilty? By imaginative extension a contemporary version of the curtain that John Berger described? It's time to stretch your mind and explore what cannot (yet) be observed.
Any references to the themes on top of the blog? Dare you tie this back to some of the readings last week.
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4 comments:
The randomness of the windows creates an interesting texture which both contrasts and complements the neighboring buildings. You had mentioned that published work tends to focus on the object and not the context in an earlier post. The one skyline photo gives you an overall impression of the context. It appears there is an older stone/brick building on the left and a more streamlined contemporary glazed building across the street to the right.
The different views framed by these random glazing patterns are spectacular. I was glad to see that clear glass was used so as not to distort these views. It appears that this glazing is only on the Hudson River side of the building. I would like to see the other sides of the building to help with the context question. There are some photos of the south side of the building showing punched openings. Again, the photo shown appears to frame images of the neighboring fabric.
The glazed interior spaces in conjunction with the water and trees reminds me of the basic opposition between interior space and exterior space mentioned in Birksted’s article of the Maeght Foundation to a limited basis. The interior photos showing the water and trees represents external interior spaces. The images of the apartments showing the distant views and vistas are an internal exterior space (with the blinds up). Opening the blinds brings the exterior into the interior space making you a part of fabric of the city. The definition of this space becomes much larger, expanding the experience to the larger space defined by the context, nature, lighting to the limits of your views.
On Oswald Matthias Ungers's quote.
Architecture should speak, interact and relate to its surroundings. It shouldn't be alieanated and detached from its context. It should take advantage of what the site have to tell us, by completely ignoring these relationships architecture lose the opportunity of meaning something.
When I look at this building I think of it as an expansion of Johnson's Glass House and Mies's Farnsworth house. Instead of working at the small country scale, Nouvel has taken the concept of outside/inside to a grander level. I like the way Nouvel has taken the irregular sizes of glass panels and meshed them into a cohesive feature that seems like it would alter your view depending on where you would stand in a room.
The question to me is are the occupants the viewers or the viewed of the world around them.
I was most struck by the dissemination of boundary, not just horizontally but vertically. The building seems to pop in and out in section, and the "floating trees" are an anomaly of the ground that has been pulled vertically away from their natural plane. I have never seen this technique applied to entire trees before. Its not just a rooftop garden, its a mid-building forest.
The image I find most striking however is the facade as seen from across the Hudson river. I know it's just a rendering, but if the actual building shimmers like that, it will truly be an icon. Less of form than of light.
I wonder what it will look like constructed.
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