18 transformation
These transformations can be literal, implied, or often both. In other words, a panel can slide from one position to another, or as light moves across its surface, it can transform from reflective solid to transparent. But in all cases, this transformative capacity can sponsor alternative programs, inhabitations, appearances, and performances—in other words, architecture really is never very static at all.
Literal
A kinetic architecture not only registers and adapts to the effects of external stimuli but it also provokes behaviors as a function of its transformation. External stimuli can be environmental (shutters adapting to the
movement of the Sun), programmatic (a train compartment transforms from living room by day to bedroom by night with the lowering of the bunks), or spatial (a volume enlarges as its occupancy increases).
Transformations occur at multiple scales, from the smallest particle to an entire building, and at any interval, from a one- time event to a cyclical transformation.
For example, it is very common in modern theaters for the audience/performance relationship to be physically altered by rotating stages, lifts, and movable loge seating; while projection technologies can perceptually alter the sense of enclosure, weather, and time.
Temporal (Animation)
Architecture registers the passage of time.
Embedded within its transformations are the traces of human rituals and environmental stimuli. The sliding, rotating, opening, and closing of surfaces have the ability to transform spatial scales and relationships, determine conditions of public and private, and transform functions and operations.
Topological
Architectural space, form, and surface can also transform through the deformation of underlying structural patterns, based on mathematical models that subsequently inform the qualitative aspects of such patterns. As an alternative to literal
allowing for both personalized orientations and environ- mental responsiveness.
The origamilike surface continually transforms the experience of the building and the landscape from within and from without.
Ernst Giselbrecht in 2005–07 created the “Dynamic Façade” for the Kiefer Technic Showroom in Bad Gleichenberg, Austria. Here an independent surface of perforated light metal bifold panels can be positioned in an infinite variety of ways,
By inserting a series of full- height steel doors into the vast, seemingly limitless space of the former slaughterhouse structure, Iñaqui Carnicero’s 2012
Hangar 16 in Madrid, Spain, creates multiple spatial readings that also facilitate a range of programmatic scales—
from intimate art openings to full-blown rock concerts.
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
153152 movement, these seamless physical
transformations produce a fluidity of form where walls become floors become ceilings as they respond to programmatic stimuli.
Smart Materials
Programmable materials—synthetic materials that can be “stitched” into everyday materials and that self-activate when exposed to heat, water, and electricity—transform the surfaces and forms into which they are embedded through processes such as contracting, swelling, and thinning. Often these activations occur at the nanoscopic scale—
the scale at which particles, hence material, undergo change.
Implied
Architecture transforms in nonkinetic ways as well, where the implication of transforma-tion can reside in programmatic, formal, or perceptual interpretations.
Programmatic
Buildings that undergo programmatic transformation appropriate elements that were once designed for another specific purpose. For example, light projected through the stained glass windows of a church-turned-nightclub transforms the meaning of those windows from religious texts to disco balls. While nothing has physically changed, it is the context of the experience that transforms one’s perception of the work.
furnishings transform to serve multiple spatial and functional programs. The entry hall’s extendable wardrobe expands to accommodate its changing contents, but in doing so, transforms the entry hall’s spatial sequence.
absorbing material equips the resulting composite material with a built-in functionality when exposed to water, one that, when multiplied and introduced over a larger territory, anticipates the transfor- mation of form as it responds to external stimuli.
Eileen Gray’s expanding wardrobes in Tempe à Pailla—the house she designed for herself in Castelar, France, from 1932–34, are but one example of an interior conceived as an enormous piece of furniture—where both surfaces and freestanding
In 2013, Skylar Tibbits of the Self Assembly Lab at MIT, along with Stratasys and Autodesk Inc., have developed a process whereby a composite material can expand and deform according to preprogrammed constraints.
The binding together of a malleable material with a polymer-based, water-
18
TransformationTHE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Theme and Variation
Recognizable repetition that constructs a recognizable and cohesive overall “pattern”
permits uniqueness and difference to exist within it without destroying the cohesiveness of the whole.
Role of Perception and Memory
Things once experienced in a specific way appear to undergo change when perceived from a context that has been altered.
Architecture has the ability to anticipate, and even produce, this altered context.
On the other hand, memories of previously experienced architectures rarely remain intact when revisited, as meanings are often drawn from and transformed by experiences collected over time.
produce a continuous spiraling path, a three- dimensional Möbius strip, that begins as a horizontal space but that shifts to a
vertical one, where the patterns of its surfaces map the thermal requirements of its changing orientations.
space used by Filipina domestics. Plugged into an existing infrastructure of pedestrian, vehicular, and subterranean networks, it is a continuously transforming public space with the ability to be appropriated by an evolving urban culture.
to enclosed on only the two short sides. Any single volume does not literally transform, but when experienced as a collection, the implication is that each container and each cluster is a formal variation of the other, as if an animated filmstrip were dissected into
its individual frames and strewn across the landscape.
The comprehensive understanding is of a form and of a space that is undergoing transformation—
and as a result transforming the perception of the landscape in which they have been located.
In their 2009 design for the Astana National Library in Kazakhstan, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) combines a series of geometries to
The ground floor of Norman Foster’s HSBC building in Hong Kong (1978–85) is a permeable space that, during working hours, operates as institutional entry to the banking halls and offices towering above, yet on Sundays is transformed into a marketplace and gathering
Donald Judd’s 1980–84 collection of sixty-four 2.5 x 2.5 x 5 m (2.8 x 2.8 x 6 yd) concrete boxes distributed in fifteen clusters across the Chinati Foundation’s valley in Marfa, Texas, are each constructed in one of several states of enclosure, from enclosed on all sides save one
155154
11.8 x 11.8 yd]), its material (steel), and its color (red), each pavilion is a unique spatial exploration of the cubic volume, developing its specificity in relation to the spontaneous programs that they were intended to sponsor.
ceiling of the interior is perceptually dematerialized, transforming the space into an exterior arbor supported by trunks of steel and bark.
Bernard Tschumi‘s Parc de la Villette in Paris, France (1982–98) presents a grid of thirty-five pavilions super- imposed onto an open field to create an urban park. While each pavilion is related to the other in its basic dimension (10.8 x 10.8 x 10.8 m [11.8 x
Through the carefully calibrated orientation of the exterior glass surfaces of Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, the solid plaster
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE