Jesse Reiser

Jesse Reiser, Projects and their Consequences, 2 de agosto de 2018. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.

Projects and their Consequences Jesse Reiser

La conferencia presenta proyectos de RUR Architecture, desde su concepción hasta su realización, al tiempo que elabora una especie de manifiesto y analiza las complejas interrelaciones que su arquitectura entreteje entre tecnología, expresión y política en el contexto del nowhere place de la ciudad global. Se exponen el Taipei Pop Music Center y la Kaohsiung Port Terminal. En 2017 el Taipei Pop Music Center ha alcanzado su máxima altura y avanza rápidamente su construcción en su zona norte y sur. La Kaohsiung Port Terminal ha celebrado la ceremonia de izado de viga en julio de 2018, revelando la silueta del edificio. Finalmente, se presenta una propuesta residencial urbana en Hong Kong en exhibición en la Bienal de Venecia, así como otros proyectos recientes, incluida la Torre O-14 en Dubai y la propuesta para la Universität für Angewandte Kunst en Viena.

Legacies

I am going to describe the intersection between the work of RUR and that of our contemporaries. As a young architect, you enter into a culture that you know has a legacy that should be extended. There is no ideal starting point. You happen to arrive, by means of accidents of time and place, at a moment when certain projects in the discipline are being carried out. I am going to describe our reaction to work contemporary to ours, and how that initiated an internal project in the office. This is not necessarily the way in which all architects practice, but because Nanako and I have been constantly teaching in parallel to our practice, both students and colleagues who have engaged and conditioned the type of practice and the kind of work that we do. Inclined Bar

Everything is inward looking. Our proposal was operating in this peculiar space, this courtyard, and its universe. The program was an addition to the school of architecture, and involved extensions of the building spaces. The inclined bar was connected directly to the studio master’s spaces, crossed the courtyard in a tense way, and entered in a peculiar relationship with both the courtyard and the city fabric. The library underneath forms its own entry way, off the ring, through a literal triumphal arch, and then gives access to the universe of professors and students.

Wraps and Process

We deliberately wanted to formalize that relationship as a critique of projects that attempt to be democratic in terms of mixing students, faculty, and the general public. We thought it was important to maintain the theatricality of research production behind the scenes, and that there would be a particular social interface between the public and the work produced. We did not want to mix those groups, only at specific places when the work was ready. We thus took a different approach than a modernist one, where there would be an assumption about the goodness of an equal mixing of all spaces at all times. We wanted to go back to a nineteenth century model, where art production happens under wraps and process, and there is a particular time and place when the ritual of showing the work happens.

Puncture and Bracing

It became a challenging structural problem. We had to do a building that looked like it was emerging out of the 1960s building,

which did not have the capacity to carry its weight. An independent structure had to puncture through it, and there were columns extending down through the spaces. It was an X shaped structure, and its density was mingling through the inside, allowing for greater transparency. Additionally, there was another structural prop connected to vertical circulation, to brace the angled bar to the building. The intersection between the inclined bar and the spaces produces interesting intermediate conditions.

Structural Lineage

This project is part of a lineage that started with our Kansai Library back in the 1990s. Even though we had been engaging completely different sites and programs, there was a fascination with using strong structural principles that we would invert and vary according to the conditions. In this case, like in Kansai, the slabs hang from the superstructure. In other projects, we inverted the logic and the project was supported from below. The Angewandte project took the structure and brought it inside, into a crisscross design. Each version deals with a certain set of transformable logics, but within a limited number.

Surface Lineage

The Yokohama Port Terminal by FOA is a crucial moment of the so-called surface project in architecture. What distinguishes Seinuk’s folded plate from Watanabe’s solution is that, to keep the thinness of the continuous surface, the folded plate becomes a superstructure separated from the slabs. The FOA project fuses both. By separating the folded plates, the slab does not get fat. We followed this trajectory, which established the folded plate as a superstructure, and, because the building was in a seismic area, a diagrid defined its perimeter. This lineage goes back to OMA’s Jussieu Library, and connects to Toyo Ito and to the people that followed.

Problems

The Japanese engineers solved the single surface as a technical problem, but solving this abstract problem may not even be as good, architecturally, as the complex problem itself. The engineers could never really solve the façade issue, for example, because ending the single surface projects was problematic from the start. There was an ambition for continuity and, with it, an inbuilt contradiction: the desire to produce an infinitely continuous building, knowing that it cannot be so. That impossible situation is a true architectural problem, to be celebrated. It is an artistic problem of the architect, as opposed to a purely technical resolution. This separates architecture and engineering.

Inverse

We put aside the initial scheme and, in consultation with Ysrael Seinuk, our engineer, we came up with a more radical scheme that would rethink the meaning of building in the desert using an exoskeleton, both a brise soleil and the structure of the building. There is an analogy to Frank Lloyd Wright’s St. Mark’s tower, although his paradigm was that of a tree trunk with trays. What we did was inverse. We put the structural mass on the outside. The core of the building could be light because most of the lateral forces were taken by this exoskeleton shell. Not the cheapest way of doing it, but architecturally interesting. The columns migrated outward, and this involved a particular relationship between the inside and the outside.

Non evident

What characterizes our way of dealing with material conditions can be both a performative and an aesthetic question. The diagrid structure of the O14 tower is inherently redundant. The exoskeleton gave us tremendous liberty in terms of dealing with closedness and openness, and we were assured that the forces would find their way down to the ground and the structure would have integrity. But there was an aesthetic problem too. We wanted to track the thick zones of columns in a way that would not be so evident. We tried to defeat the determinacy of

the grid by producing what Seinuk called the trickled-down logic of the thickness in plan. The irregularities are a network that slowly brings the forces down, but they are not the result of a straight thickening of the diagrid. It has iterations resulting of performative conditions, because the gap between structure and window allows the building to cool itself down. Those material questions relate to performance and the aesthetics of the building, and become, in an equally strong manner, part of the task of the project.

Cosmetics

Expressionism is seen in a negative light in schools. How one deals with architectural expression immediately gets affiliated with structural expressionism. But we are not doing the overpoweringly muscular architecture of Calatrava. If modernism can be defined as a skin and bones architecture, we are interested in a territory that is neither structural expressionism nor the articulation of the model that separates structures in a purely rational way. The cosmetic becomes interesting in this context. There is this Japanese woman who puts an artificially large eye in her face. But it does not look like an addition. It naturalizes an artificial imposition. It is an inclusion, not a collage. We were interested in both conditions: working with the monolithic form of the towers and its simplicity, but having a highly figured surface. Television Urbanism

The Taipei Pop Music Centre, even in the brief, emphasized how the complex should work locally, and that it had to be an iconic photogenic project. It was about how it looked on television as much as about its real life performance. From our point of view, it was important thing that this would not be a venue or workplace that would shut down in non-working hours. We went through the exercise about how various portions of the project could be used over a certain time, both inside and outside. The ambition was that it would not be just a closed piece of architecture, but a piece of urbanism. Nested Aggressiveness

We strategized the project as a new datum. It would all be elevated. Bridges are already part of how Taipei works, and we figured we would create a new landscape with groundwork in the lower zone, and then architectural objects that would sit on that groundwork, orienting you within the complex. The two crystalline forms and the cubic form sit above this built horizon. The resonance to the landscape around was one of the surprises. The project is contextual in a peculiar way: it makes the buildings around it look like they should be torn down. It nests very well in the natural landscape and is somewhat aggressive to the older fabric and factories around it.

Extractos de la conferencia de Jesse Reiser, con introducción de Ciro Najle, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 2 de agosto de 2018.