FXCollaborative Podium: Boundary Issues

Boundary Issues

built form, site form, urban form

Image

From Walking the High Line Photo: Joel Sternfeld

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Boundary Issues

built form, site form, urban form

David Wallance, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Sr. Associate, FXCollaborative Austin Sakong, AIA, LEED GA, Sr. Associate, FXCollaborative

Introduction 1. “Unlike an object, a condition is not determined by its boundary or its form, but rather through a multiplicity of connections to its context. If the object calls for us to ‘take a step back’ in order to differentiate and understand it, the condition as a phenomenon requires that one remains within it and studies the composite nature and the transformational forces within it.”

—Anders Abraham, A New Nature1

By now, we may surmise from our contemporary condition—merely a decade past an economic crisis and squarely in the middle of an ecological one—that the notion of an architecture-as-objét, as iconic as it is autonomous, is nearing a state of conceptual exhaustion. And to that condition, we may attribute the rising popularity of architectural strategies aimed explicitly at blurring the boundaries of the figural objét: “pixilation” in search of a territory which is neither field nor figure; socalled “Jenga” buildings in search of qualities neither unique nor generic; “sky gardens” in search of spaces neither natural nor artificial; the list goes on. All are rooted in the ambition to introduce an architectural form language receptive to the conditions and contingencies of the field.

Of these, one strategy has specifically explored the merging of architectural form with landscape, developed and iterated through a number of important projects in the recent past. But if this strategy has mostly been characterized by an essential horizontality, what remains to be seen is how that horizontality might be reconciled with the essential verticality of the contemporary city.

What transformational forces might we see within such a reconciliation, and what new architectural conditions would they yield?

2. Since the early 1990s, architects have experimented with a typologically distinct category of form-making, which can be broadly characterized by the smooth and literal merging of site form to built form, or ground to object. That

1 A braham, Anders. 2015. A New Nature: 9 Architectural Conditions Between Liquid and Solid.

Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers

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this experiment, documented comprehensively by architects ranging from Stan Allen2 to Joel Sanders,3 has produced not only a ubiquitous and instantly recognizable architectural vocabulary (roofs ramping down to the landscape, topography becoming topology, and so on), but also a plethora of seminal built projects which have decisively altered the trajectory of the discipline, speaks to the powerful resonance between its formal logic and a number of issues both within and outside the discourse of architecture.

Within architecture, this “landform building”4 type facilitated a new way to respond to what Colin Rowe famously referred to as “the crisis of the object,”5 firmly rejecting the Modernist tendency towards structures floating above their sites on pilotis,6 while also sidestepping the stylistic dead-ends of late twentiethcentury Postmodernism. Moreover, embracing fluidity in the definitions of and the meanings assigned to traditional architectural elements meant that the Modernist insistence on functional determinism could also be left behind; thus walls could become ceilings and ground could become roof.

Outside of architecture, this formal and semiotic fluidity reflected the concomitant values of connectivity, continuity, and the dissolution

the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neoliberal dream of the “end of history,”and even the emergence and explosion of the internet, all signaled the possibility for an architectural language that could, in built form, manifest the vision of an endlessly interconnected, endlessly accessible world. of boundaries of all kinds. The larger societal context here is as familiar to us now as it is impossible to overstate: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neoliberal dream of the “end of history,”7 and even the emergence and explosion of the internet, all signaled the possibility for an architectural language that could, in built form, manifest the vision of an endlessly interconnected, endlessly accessible world. And today, the landform type has been embedded with new meanings, serving as contemporary embodiments of ecological, social, and cultural values.

Architectural form could, for example, stress the relationship between the microclimate nurtured by its green roof and the changing climate of the globe.8 Or, it could assert the need for universal accessibility by blurring the thresholds of surrounding public spaces.

2 Allen, Stan, and McQuade, Marc. 2011. Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain.

Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers 3 Sanders, Joel, and Balmori, Diana. 2011. Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture.

New York, NY: Monacelli Press 4 Allen, Stan, and McQuade, Marc. 2011. Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain.

Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers 5 Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred. 1983. Collage City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 6 Le Corbusier, and Jeanneret, Pierre. 1935. Oeuvre Complete de 1929-1934. Zurich, Switzerland: Éditions H. Girsberge 7 Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster 8 See FXCollaborative Podium Paper, Follow the Water for an in-depth case study. http://www.fxcollaborative.com/activity/publications/11/follow-the-water/

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

The inexorable horizontality of this architectural language merits emphasis here. If a building, by merging with the ground, carries a metonymic potency to articulate larger values beyond the limits of its form, such potency rests nevertheless on what could be described as that building’s terramorphism, that is, the degree to which it expresses the ground’s formal characteristics, which more often than not remain predominantly horizontal.

Here, it is important to clarify the terms of discourse: by “ground,” we simply mean that which constitutes a site’s perceivably continuous and habitable territory, open to the sky, providing the primary means of access between a building and its environs.

The ground is not necessarily natural, since streets and sidewalks are constructed and topography is often regraded; nor is it necessarily a solid stratum on which the building rests, since transit systems, concourses, and parking levels often exist below the apparent ground plane. The “terra” of the term terramorphism refers, then, to common ground—understood as the shared datum mediating both buildings and people alike.

But how might we understand the terramorphic in the context of the contemporary city, and its concomitant values of density, economy, and verticality? What implications do the past two and half decades of formal experimentation hold for an architecture that can commit to both

a seamless integration into its site on the one hand and a sustainable form of urbanism on the other? How might such an architecture transform our understanding of cities, and of the ground itself?

3. “Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entropic change ... You see that photograph there showing a pit in Central Park. Now you might say that’s a kind of architecture, a kind of entropic architecture or a de-architecturization. In other words it’s not really manifesting itself the way let’s say Skidmore Owings & Merrill might manifest itself. It’s almost the reverse of that, so that you can observe these kinds of entropic building situations which develop around construction. That pit will eventually be covered, but it’s there right now with all its scaffolding, and people have been confused by that pit, they think it has something to do with the Met. There’s a lot of graffiti on it attacking the Met, but it’s really the city.”

—Robert Smithson, 19739 Like all distinct types, the emergence of the terramorphic can be situated against a number of contexts that have exerted aesthetic, philosophical, and technological influences over the practice of architecture.

In the 1970s, for example, sculptors like Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, and Michael Heizer wrested the discourse on figure/ground away from its

9 Flam, Jack. 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. London, England: The University of California Press

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Figure 1

Partially Buried Woodshed, Robert Smithson, 1970 Source: Holt-Smithson Foundation

conventional dialectic, with works that articulated sites rather than merely occupying them. What projects like Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) (Figure 1) or Heizer’s Double

Negative (1969-70) signaled was the evolution of how the literal ground was understood—not as a neutral datum between art and viewer, but as an artistic medium subject to inquiry and manipulation. These projects were therefore not only made of the ground, but of our mediated relationships to art itself.

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

The conceptual legacy of this breakthrough within architecture is by now well known: projects like Peter Eisenman’s Cannaregio Town Square (1978) and Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial (1981) shifted their focus away from buildings/objects/ forms to the site/ground/context—or, more precisely, to their complex interrelationships. Like Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, these projects upended architecture’s hierarchical primacy over the site: the Cannaregio project, by arraying a series of voids across an explicitly fictional landscape; and the Vietnam War Memorial, by creating a space for reflection and remembrance as a cut into the earth.

The resonance of, and the return to, the ground as an opportunity to examine architecture’s relationship to the ground was perhaps best articulated by Kenneth Frampton, in his ongoing project to re-position Modernism as a critical mediator between the homogenizing forces of “universal civilization” and essential values of regional culture10. Frampton cites Gottfried Semper’s four elements—earthwork, enclosure, hearth, roof—to show how Modernist projects such as Jorn Utzon’s Opera House depended on a podium and “earthwork” element to ground, or situate, an iconic superstructure in its place. If, for Frampton, the alliterative triad of Topos, Typos, and Tekton served as a useful conceptual

structure to think about site-bound architecture, we are focused on the Typos of the Topos as a way to think about an un-bound architecture; about the implications of the terramorphic as a typological exploration of interrogating, blurring, and eroding the boundaries between building and site.

The technological context of the emergence of the terramorphic is also not insignificant: specifically, the advent of complex drafting and modeling software in the early 1990s allowed architects to experiment with dramatically increased formal complexity. Spline-based modeling programs enabled the creation and computation of freeform threedimensional surfaces, dovetailing neatly with the architectural profession’s newfound interest in the formal properties of the ground. Through digitized means of architectural production, buildings became analogues of the ground: mimicking, abstracting, merging into, and drawing from their sites.

From this merging multitude of contexts, a number of seminal architectural projects, as illustrated in the following section, were proposed and built, testing the potential—and the limits—of the terramorphic. Each is an example par excellence of a specific formal strategy, and each explores how the terramorphic, as an architectural type characterized by seamlessly interconnected horizontal surfaces, dissolved boundaries, and earth-

10 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, in The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, Seattle.

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the surface is physically traversable, effectively expanding or annexing the public realm (both in plan and section) and therefore making that surface inherently political. merged forms, meets (or doesn’t meet) the requirements of different programs, structural systems, and contexts.

The Emergence of the Terramorphic 1. To speculate on the future evolution of the terramorphic, it is useful to review its development, from its emergence within the multiple contexts outlined above, to the present day—a span of approximately twenty-five years. In that time, a number of key projects, of all different scales and sites, have explored the promise and limitations of the terramorphic. These projects can be catalogued according to a series of specific formal strategies, with each operation relating the project’s built form to site form in a distinct way: Peeling Warping Weaving Incising

Splitting

Excavating

Extending Terracing Contouring The commonalities that link these operations together are important: for each one, the surface that connects built form to site form is decidedly continuous—excluded, for example, are projects featuring disconnected

green roofs and terraces. Another commonality: the surface is physically traversable, effectively expanding or annexing the public realm (both in plan and section) and therefore making that surface inherently political. And finally, the nature of this continuous, traversable surface, as an analogue of the ground, has a direct and formbased impact on how the building’s program is accommodated.

And beyond these shared traits, this taxonomy of operations also reveals that the morphological differences in these strategies of manipulating the ground are directly related to substantive philosophical differences in conceptualizing the meaning of the ground.

For example, the primary design feature of the Center for Global Conservation designed by FXCollaborative in 2009 (Figure 2) is a landscaped ramp as wide as a street, wildly planted—almost overgrown—with a meandering field stone pathway leading to its upper landing. Yet it is also a definitive architectonic element, split from the ground as if to evoke the powerful geologic forces that shaped its setting.

If the experience of being on the ramp is to see landscape, the experience of looking at the ramp is to see architecture.

This tension, which is a product of both a formal and experiential splitting, confronts the problem of defining “manmade” versus “natural,” or “built form” versus “site form,” as a complex and ambiguous undertaking.

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Figure 2

Center for Global Conservation, FXCollaborative Architects, 2009.

Figure 3

Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Foreign Office Architects, 2002.

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1. Peeling The ground is conceived as a thickened plane, which is cut and peeled up like a carpet to reveal architectural program below.

Statue of Liberty Museum, FXCollaborative

2. Warping The ground is conceived as an elastic surface, which is warped and distorted in place to make room for architectural program below.

City of Culture of Galicia, Eisenman Architects

4. Incising The ground is conceived as a topographical mound, into which surgical incisions provide access, light, and air to architectural program below.

Ewha Womans University, Dominique Perrault Architecture

5. Splitting The ground is conceived as a locus for tectonic movement, which heaves and splits to reveal and articulate architectural program below.

Center for Global Conservation, FXCollaborative

7. Extending The ground is conceived as a plastic mass, which is shaped and extended to increase habitable areas and create a plinth for architectural program either above or below.

West Point Humanities Center Competition Entry, FXCollaborative

8. Terracing The ground is conceived as a serially modulated slope, with stepped terraces to indicate architectural program within.

Qala Alti Hotel Spa, FXCollaborative

Diagrams by Magdalena Zink/FXCollaborative

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

3. Weaving The ground is conceived as a braid of multiple circulation flows, which connect and juxtapose different architectural programs throughout.

Yokohama International Passenger Terminal, Foreign Office Architects

On the other hand, a project like the Yokohama International Passenger Terminal designed by Foreign Office Architects in 1995 (Figure 3) confronts the problem of defining the ground less through the stuff of stone and flora (it is a pier above water, after all), and more through the analysis of public circulation and movement, bundled and braided together to yield an abstract, and decisively “artificial”, topography. Like any pier, the thrust of its overall plan juts into the water, reinforcing the pier’s linearity. But the topography of its deck weaves 6. Excavating together a series of looping circulation The ground is strands, which resist any expected conceived as an inert linearity and introduce a rich and mass, from which variegated series of experiences for volumetric figures are commuters and visitors alike. Like the excavated to provide Center for Global Conservation, the access, light, and air to the architectural Yokohama Terminal produces a number program below. of tensions, through the operation Danish National of weaving, in the task of defining the Maritime Museum, ground: direction versus diffusion, BIG terminal versus loop, destination versus circulation, topography versus topology.

9. Contouring The ground is conceived as a series of explicitly artificial overlays, with separated contours providing access, light, and air to architectural program within.

Kinmen Ferry Terminal, Junya Ishigami Associates

For some projects, the ground is a planar surface; for others, it’s a solid mass. For some, the ground is elastic; for others, it’s immutable; and for others still, it’s entirely a simulacrum.

Each operation stakes out a different position on what comprises the site, and therefore what comprises a corresponding terramorphology.

But throughout them all, several re-occurring problems outline some typologically fundamental challenges of the terramorphic.

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Figure 4

Ewha Womans University, Dominique Perrault Architecture, 2008.

Photo: André Morin/Adagp

The first problem relates to the content of these projects’ interiors, and is therefore primarily an issue of program accommodation. When the ground becomes a roof—and the legibility of that transmutation relies on the roof’s uninterrupted expanse—there are simply a limited number of programs that such a roof can appropriately accommodate without the need for vertically glazed surfaces for access to light, air, and views. Therefore the introduction of fenestration, which inevitably read as interruptions in the horizontal continuity of the ground-as-roof, becomes a driving factor in the nature of each operation (Figure 4).

The second problem relates to the context of these projects’ surroundings, and is therefore primarily an issue of site integration.

To date, most successful examples of the terramorphic have been standalone pavilions, often on greenfield sites; the horizontality of their forms have relied on the horizontality of their contexts for legibility (Figure 5). The resulting irony, of course, is that a typology which so strenuously eschews the detachment and distance of an isolated “object” seems nonetheless to require that same detachment and distance to communicate its philosophical position of not being an object at all. Therefore the ability for these operations to adapt to non-natural and non-horizontal contexts—mid-block sites, transit infrastructure, industrial zones, even interiors—seems thus far limited, or at least, inadequately tested.

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Figure 5

Novartis Visitor Reception Building, Weiss / Manfredi, 2014.

Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

Looking Forward

By Looking Back 1. The way forward is, perhaps, to be found among old ideas that for one reason or another were eclipsed but which in the context of current tendencies toward the blurring of boundaries, interconnectivity, and inclusiveness seem newly pregnant with potential. The idea of the conventional avant-garde (aren’t we now, a century after the first stirrings of Modernism, able to call the idea of the avant-garde conventional?) is to perpetually challenge and subvert the status quo. The received Modernist narrative is understood as a forward and progressive “Movement,” and

rarely as dialectical. The pattern that emerges in hindsight, however, suggests oscillation: avant-garde disruption followed by reaction and return to tradition, which in turn gives rise to the next disruption. The tabula rasa urbanism of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse retreated from architectural discourse when, a generation later, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Inspired in large part by Jacobs, architects and planners embraced contextual urbanism, incremental change, and a municipal planning process that honored precedent. These first two cycles, of course, are broadly associated with Modernism and Postmodernism. It would seem that for the last twenty years or so, a period that may have begun with Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997, we have again experienced

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a cycle of disruption that is notable for successively escalating formal experiments and an almost exclusive focus on the building as object. And yet, as if exerting a countervailing critical pressure, terramorphism suppresses and merges the figure with the field. Perhaps we can discern here a dialectic: might we now be on the cusp of a new synthesis?

Disruption, then, yields critical breakthroughs, which have re-shaped our perception of architectural space, form, and of architecture as an expression of urbanism; and without doubt these breakthroughs have periodically reinvigorated and enriched architectural discourse. By the same token, the return to tradition and precedent has had its own value in the rediscovery of accumulated wisdom, but too much reliance on precedent can stifle the creative response demanded by changing cultural conditions. Culture, from Latin culturare—to work the soil—is by definition a long project. Soil is improved by a continual process of amendment and alternating fallow and fertile cycles; perhaps we can re-frame the narrative of architectural progress along these lines.

Upon revisiting Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City11, which coincided with the ascent of Postmodernism, we are struck that their insight into the Modernist crisis of the object, which pre-figured the corrective impulse that later emerged as terramorphism. In a

11 Ibid.

tour-de-force analysis, they perform a figure-ground diagnostic on Modernist urbanism in comparison and in contrast with the historic city. They present the astonishing revelation that the courtyard of the Uffizi Gallery can be read as the “jelly-mold” from which Le Corbusier’s sculpted Unité was, metaphorically speaking, cast.

The deeply textured historic city, with streets carved out of heavy poché, is contrasted with the barren voids surrounding the techno-rationalist object-buildings of the modern city. Disparaging “tower-in-thepark” urbanism, Rowe and Koetter’s unabashed mission is to abolish the modern and recover traditional patterns of city-building.

While Rowe and Koetter’s argument (which aligns with Jacobs’s) has subsequently had some real-world impact, e.g. contextual zoning, the ensuing decades have seen a surge of development pressures that overwhelm mid-rise contextual urbanism, which is simply unable to satisfy the demand for density.

High land values dictate high-rise development, and the contemporary

Soil is improved by a continual process of amendment and alternating fallow and fertile cycles; perhaps we can re-frame the narrative of architectural progress along these lines.

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Figure 6

Olivetti Headquarters project (unbuilt), Le Corbusier, 1962. Model photograph.

Source: Fondation Le Corbusier

Figure 7

Olivetti Headquarters project (unbuilt), Le Corbusier, Milan, 1962. Cross-section.

Source: Fondation Le Corbusier

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city of “tower-on-the-street,” augmented by the pressures of branding and marketing, seems to have an economic inevitability.

With the preceding thoughts in mind we propose to retrieve some ideas from the history of Modernism that remain latent, relevant, and underleveraged—although several recent projects point towards an emergence of new directions.

2. A decade or so before Collage City, Le Corbusier’s late work of the 1960s exhibited a keen awareness that Modernism’s crisis of the object had reached a dead end, and an interest in exploring new directions.

The unbuilt Venice Hospital project posited a horizontal, contextually sensitive fabric building, absorbed into the texture and scale of Venice, with a predominantly pochéd figureground. More to the point of this paper, however, during that late period Le Corbusier’s proposal for the Olivetti headquarters advanced a nascent terramorphism (Figure 6), with an elegantly curved, figural tower poised above an organic podium inspired by microscopic photographs of cells and microorganisms.12 The duality of the Olivetti proposal—a biomimetic earthform with a “plantation” roof13 housing a communal/social program, and a techno-rationalist tower for a modern corporate research laboratory— answered to an emotional need for connection to the earth as well as the economic requirements of an efficient and productive work place (Figure 7).

Whether consciously recalling Olivetti, or simply arriving through parallel critiques at the same conclusions, there are a handful of contemporary examples of the Olivetti type. The Vanke Center in Shenzhen by Steven Holl Architects incorporates an arrangement of mixed-use “horizontal skyscraper” bar buildings that span over an undulating green roofscape (Figure 8). Located under the green roof are a conference center, spa, and parking area. Utilizing a strategy common to a number of terramorphic projects (see figure 4 above), glasslined voids sunken into the podium admit daylight to spa and convention spaces below. The bar buildings are lifted high enough to allow sufficient daylight on the green roof for plantings that would otherwise perish.

The green roof provides the usual sustainable advantages—storm water management and thermal regulation of the spaces below—but the power of the concept derives from a sense that one can move freely on the green field of the new terramorphic ground plane.

In the Giant Interactive Group Headquarters by Morphosis (Figure 9) there is a similar logic to the allocation of program space in superstructure and podium. The superstructure, while undulating organically, is rationally dimensioned width-wise for layouts in open-office as well as private and suite configurations; below the newly established podium roof/ground plane are a library, an auditorium, an exhibition space, and a café, all “loose-

12 Pablo Allard, “Bridge over Venice”, etc., in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, eds. Harshim Arkis, Pablo Allard, and Timothy Hyde (Munich: Prestel, 2011), p. 22 13 http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=607 6&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=134&itemSort=en-en_sort_string1%20&itemCount=21 6&sysParentName=&sysParentId=

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Figure 8

Vanke Center, Steven Holl, Shenzen, 2009 Photo: Iwan Baan

Figure 9

Giant Interactive Group Headquarters, Morphosis Architects, Shanghai, 2010 Source: SWA Group

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Figure 10

podium and superstructure is suppressed in favor of an overall organic (or possibly geologic) reading.

fit” programs that lend themselves to an extensive floor plate, and which are not entirely dependent on access to daylight. Where daylight is required, a strategy of “peeling” is used. The circulation scheme weaves multiple strands of vehicular movement under the podium, including a highway underpass, two drop-off zones, and parking.

3. At about the same time as Le Corbusier was conceiving the Olivetti proposal, Moshe Safdie, then barely out of graduate school, had started working on a proposal for modular housing that was eventually realized as Habitat 67 (Figure 10). Consciously striving to find a modern expression of the Mediterranean hill town (Safdie recalls the terraced hillsides of his childhood in Jaffa, Israel14), Habitat 67 was a stepped accretion of cubic forms, in which each living unit had a private terrace on the roof of a unit below. The form of Habitat can be understood as an expression

Habitat 67, Safdie Architects, Montreal, 1967 Photo: James Brittain Photography

Unlike the Vanke Center, the superstructure—held low to the podium with a hill-shaped silhouette— tends to merge into the podium form. Here the formal expression of programmatic difference between

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Figure 11

Habitat 67, Safdie Architects, Montreal, 1967. View from rear.

Photo: Stéphane Groleau

of terramorphism albeit without a direct connection to the ground plane.

(The clarity of intention to create a traversable surface emerges later in Safdie’s unrealized Habitat proposal for the San Francisco State College Student Union, in which the roof is explicitly conceived as an extension of the ground plane intended for pedestrian circulation.)

There is a fundamental distinction to be made between Olivetti and Habitat, representing two poles of discourse. Unlike Olivetti (and its more recent successors) Habitat attempts to resurrect Safdie’s memory of a Mediterranean hill town as an entire constructed work rather than interpose a constructed terramorphic ground plane between a low-rise podium and a high-rise superstructure. What is often overlooked, however, and what limits the typological potential of the Habitat

14 Moshe Safdie, Habitat, Montreal. Tundra Books, 1967

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Figure 12

1000 Trees, Heatherwick Studio.

Source: Mir

approach, is that stepped or sloped massing applied to housing inevitably creates a largely unusable undercroft.

Habitat as viewed from the rarely photographed rear is a forbidding, utilitarian overhang, recalling the underside of a stadium. This is where cars are parked, and is where Habitat’s system of elevators, stairs, and open-air walkways provides more or less normative circulation to the complex (Figure 11).

The problem of the undercroft shows up in recent projects that could be said to descend from the Habitat type.

In Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees project (Figure 12), a soaring atrium brings in light and air to the hollowedout sectional center—a solution that underscores, and is made viable by, the exceptional circumstances and complexity of the project’s high-end mixed-use program. Zaha Hadid Architect’s Kartal Masterplan (Figure 13) applies parametric design techniques to massing that thrusts upwards into a mounded high-rise topography. However, a true terramorphism, in which there is an indistinguishable and traversable boundary between the pre-existing

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Figure 13

Kartal Pendik Masterplan Volumetric Study.

Source: Zaha Hadid Architects

ground and the new constructed roof/ground, is absent. The Kartal Masterplan creates the appearance of hills in the aggregate, but each building remains a discrete object.

Programmatic and technical demands, not to mention real-estate economics, make high-rise urban typologies (office and residential buildings) resistant to arbitrary form-making. With sufficient resources it is always possible to force a departure from typological form, but if terramorphism is to offer a way forward in the context of highdensity urbanism, then the Olivetti

type has the virtue of pragmatism, with a rational distinction between the terramorphic podium housing appropriate program components, and the typologically driven tower tectonically independent of, yet compositionally related to, the podium.

This is not to deprive the Habitat model, and its progeny, of archetypal significance. Images of ancient Babel (Figure 14), buried in our collective storehouse of architectural memory and myth, and projects ranging from the 1970s to the present that summon those associations exert an undeniable attraction (Figure 15). The dialectic between Olivetti and Habitat, between the Vanke Center and 1000 Trees, will and should continue to

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Image

Giant Interactive Group Headquarters. Exploded isometric.

Diagram suggests potential for vertical expansion of superstructure.

Ribeatibus abore vendunt estibus am ex Ribeatibus abore vendunt estibus am ex Source: https://www.archdaily.com/113632/giant-interactive-group-corporate-headquarterset quas ea vit, que laboribus, officti usapis et quas ea vit, que laboribus, officti usapis morphosis-architects doluptae dis non custionseni niam nonesto doluptae dis non custionseni niam nonesto Diagram by Magdalena Zink/FXCollaborative taturibus aturiore nis et omni dellaboris reped taturibus aturiore nis et omni dellaboris reped modipsum dolor sundis sectota tempel et is modipsum dolor sundis sectota tempel et is essimpost, qui ressunt usamus provid unt. essimpost, qui ressunt usamus provid unt.

Loribusam fugiatur sinciducit aIgna, que Loribusam fugiatur sinciducit aNum imus iurores auctum quam labis ia? Se pulatiqui is peribuncus notiaederi pero, omaio consid in virimoe ntilint icibus effresce vissa confect consumum defacepotien ium duciis ad imo esupici fordii pos et reculesis ad imilicit, Ti. usperra remquitemod apero te comnos, non

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Image

Lace Hill (unbuilt), Forrest Fulton Architect. Exploded isometric.

Compare unprogrammed undercroft with Giant Interactive Group Headquarters.

Source: https://www.archdaily.com/58797/lace-hill-forrest-fulton-architecture Diagram by Magdalena Zink & Edbert Cheng/FXCollaborative

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Figure 14

The Tower of Babel, Lucas van Valkenborch, 1595

Figure 15

Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall, Fukuoka, Japan, Emilio Ambasz & Associates, 1990 Photo: Hiromi Watanabe

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Figure 16 Scala Tower Source: BIG

underpin our thinking about urban terramorphism. Perhaps in the end a dialectical approach, useful as a way to illuminate an argument, should yield to a more nuanced view. If Olivetti and Habitat, Vanke and 1000 Trees occupy the poles, a project like BIG’s Scala Tower (Figure 16) is situated at a tectonically plausible yet evocative position somewhere on the spectrum.

Towards an Urban Terramorphism 1. The impetus to densify urban cores, coupled with heightened awareness of transit systems as a linchpin of sustainable land-use

strategies15, has focused municipal planners’ attention on heretofore neglected infrastructure overbuild opportunities (Figure 17). The twin American legacies of 19th century rail cuts and 20th century depressed expressways remain unhealed urban scar tissue. The deleterious consequences of unbridled transportation infrastructure, slashing through close-knit neighborhoods or restricting waterfront access are, today, a global affliction, and cities throughout the world—including those in emergent as well as developed economies—all possess large-scale overbuild sites that are now attracting development. Urban terramorphism as a design strategy can remediate

15 Jonathan Rose Companies, “Location Efficiency and Housing Type: Boiling it Down to BTUs”, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-03/documents/location_efficiency_btu.pdf

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Figure 17 Atlanta’s “Gulch”

and regenerate damaged urban tissue, and at the same time introduce new patterns of sustainable city-building.

FXCollaborative’s proposed Georgia Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal (MMPT) (Figure 18), a 119-acre master plan for a regional and metropolitan transportation center, would deck over the existing rail yards (known as the “Gulch”) that divide downtown Atlanta from the city’s sports and convention center complex. An elevated rooftop park, peeling up from the surrounding ground plane, covers an intricately stacked and interconnected complex

that would serve commuter rail, highspeed rail, and local, regional and inter-city buses. (Figure 19) A major public concourse would interweave pedestrian circulation with the various modes of transit. Intended for development through a public-private partnership, the MMPT would create a new civic presence and act as a catalyst for private development and urban regeneration. The master plan, embodying the principles of dense, high-rise development along with revitalized links to mass transit (i.e.

Transit Oriented Development, or TOD) envisions an ensemble of mixed-use, high-rise residential and commercial buildings, achieving a scale appropriate to a major urban center.

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Figure 18

Georgia Mutli-Modal Passenger Terminal, FXCollaborative, 2013

The program for an intermodal transit terminal, so well suited to a terramorphic podium, points toward a new urban typology. A loosefit strategy, in which the various functional requirements of a terminal are accommodated within an organic form, can work without significant loss of efficiency. Where daylight is needed it can be drawn into the interior using strategies of peeling, penetrating, and incising. Long spans requiring a deep structure can readily be accommodated, even optimized. Expansive areas of landscaped roof can be used for storm water management.

The further development of urban form based on high-rise mixed use typologies above a terramorphic podium requires the right mix of uses, and, generally speaking, sites large enough to allow new patterns—of circulation, of massing, of crosssection—to be established. Given the ubiquity of infrastructure overbuild opportunities, the principles established by FXCollaborative’s MMPT proposal, namely terramorphic mixed-use TOD, are widely applicable.

Other sites come to mind—New York’s Sunnyside Yards, Philadelphia’s Penn’s Landing, and London’s Euston Station—just to name a few where a new kind of terramorphic urbanism could find real-world application.

(Figures 19 and 20)

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Figure 19

Three Cross-Sections Through Terramorphic Podiums Georgia Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal, FXCollaborative Architects, Atlanta Carlyle Plaza, FXCollaborative Architects, Alexandria, VA Penn’s Landing Redevelopment, FXCollaborative, Philadelphia

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Image

The Hills at Vallco, Rafael Vinoly Architects.

Low-rise urban terramorphism on a neighborhood scale. Cupertino, CA Photo: Albert Vecerka/Esto

2. “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition16

Our exploration provokes the question: is terramorphism in architecture merely a passing moment, soon to be surpassed by other more or less recondite formal preoccupations that cycle through architecture culture every couple of decades; or is there something in our current global ecological and psychological predicament that calls for a new project to re-organize the urban topos? In a rapidly urbanizing world the unremitting density of a modern megalopolis can be soul crushing. For example, the Pearl River delta megalopolis contains nearly 60 million people in its nine largest cities—which are soon to merge indistinguishably into one.17 It is worth noting that the twenty-six largest global cities are not in developed western countries, i.e. North America/Europe.18 Cities are growing at a scale and rate unprecedented in human history, with urban pressures that have never before been experienced.

16 A rendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition, Chicago, CA: University of Chicago Press 17 http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-mayors-intro.html 18 Ibid.

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Figure 20

Sunnyside Yards Feasibility Study, FXCollaborative Architects, New York, 2018

Yet, from an ecological point of view density linked to mass-transit is by far the most sustainable form of land development and the most effective way to reduce energy consumption.19 How, then, to reconcile density and livability? The early Modernists, contending with the first wave of urban migrations, emphasized light, air, hygiene, and access to greenery. Le Corbusier, with a certain incontrovertible logic, advocated tirelessly for his Radiant City. The results have been vilified, although on occasion a qualified defense is

mounted.20 The critics are mostly right—mid-century tower-in-the-park urbanism robbed the street of vitality and created unusable, inaccessible, and often dangerous, leftover space— urban space that is neither public nor private. Yet open space, sunlight, access to greenery, and opportunities for recreation are undeniable necessities for health and well-being.

3. In our exploration we arrived at the insight that until now the problem has been understood in plan, but never before in section. Having established the limits to a pure, horizontally extended terramorphism we identified hybrid typologies that accommodate the density and verticality of a vibrant interconnected city while at the same

19 Jonathan Rose Companies, Location Efficiency and Housing Type: Boiling it Down to BTUs 20 Michael Kimmelman, Towers of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare, New York Times, January 25, 2012

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Image

Winning competition submission for a plaza re-development, showing how urban terramorphism can re-frame our perception of the ground plane as suspended within an existing high-rise context. FXCollaborative, 2015

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is there something in our current global ecological and psychological predicament to calls for a new project that re-organize the urban topos? time establishing a new roof/ground plane. Two seemingly opposed figureground conditions can indeed co-exist: dense, street-making urban poche within a low-rise terramorphic zone; and typologically driven high-rise development adequately separated for light and air. Rowe’s conception is superimposed: Uffizi below, Corb’s Unité above. Street networks below provide urban connectivity and human scale, while freely disposed highrise elements need only touch down to the street at cores. The warped and contoured topology of the roof/ ground plane mediates the two zones, inhabited above as well as below, and is seamlessly merged with the “natural” ground plane to create a new condition of public space. This constructed city commons is suspended within the urban fabric, a kind of condominium in reverse, in the sense of built form under public, as opposed to private, ownership. Why not expand the idea of the commons, originally understood in the context of agricultural settlements as a shared natural resource (hence the term “commoner”), to include the artificial terramorphic ground plane?

New property ownership concepts, essentially easements granted

to urban commoners, will need to be developed, along with rules for stewardship. The new urban commons can have myriad uses—recreation, public gatherings, gardening, urban farming, perhaps even animal grazing!

4. We are approaching the ten-year anniversary of the inflection point at which, for the first time in human history, fifty percent of the world’s population became city dwellers.

There is hope for a sustainable future if we can learn to live densely and with less dependence on the automobile. Yet, as this trend in settlement patterns continues; as megalopolises expand, the pressures of urban habitation will cause cities to grow increasingly dissociated from nature, from a sense of place, and from a sense of community, with all of the associated stresses on the human psyche, and without doubt, on our systems of governance.

These problems in urbanism are as old as Modernism—in fact they are the very essence of it—and they continue to define the present challenge, and that of the foreseeable future, for anyone who shapes the built environment. In looking back and looking forward we can discern that the necessary yet not inevitable arc of the Modern project as it has evolved over the past century has the potential to bend toward human purposes.

We only have to will it.

David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

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David Wallance, Austin Sakong | FXCollaborative

Building on a deep understanding of theory and practice, David pursues an innovative design approach that synthesizes architectural form and technics. Throughout his thirty-five year career he has been honing this approach, making seminal contributions as senior designer on the Rose Center for Earth and Space and the University of Michigan Biomedical Science Research Building, among other awardwinning projects. In 2015, he published “Moving Parts: Modular Architecture in a Flat World”, as part of Podium’s ongoing series of research papers.

David has presented at conferences and symposia, and from 1997 to 2017 he taught in the graduate architecture program at Columbia University.

Austin’s practice is informed by his belief that architecture and urban design are humanist pursuits, and that the quality of our built environment, like that of literature, hinges on its ability to articulate meaning, stories, and life. Austin’s work focuses on educational projects for K-12, higher education, and international institutions. In 2017, he published “Room to Learn: Questions and Strategies in Designing Learning Environments”, as part of Podium’s ongoing series of research papers.

Austin teaches architecture and urban design at Columbia University and New York University, and serves as a Commissioner on the Jersey City Historic Preservation Commission.

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