Brick: Thick/Thin

Frano Violich

Brick: Thick /Thin

Fall 2016

Studio Report

Frano Violich

Brick: Thick /Thin

Brick: Thick/Thin This studio explores a material paradox that the discipline of architecture has constructed the idea of brick and its status as a contemporary building material. The notion of thickness has been replaced by a desire for the opposite: transparency and thinness. The studio examines the role that this ubiquitous material plays in an increasingly global and digitized world of material production. Research reconsiders archetypal brick detailing techniques such as battering, corbeling, buttressing, vaulting, piercing, and racking, and forms an iterative process of digital surface-making and hands-on prototyping.

The studio shifts to the design of the Taller Metropolitana de Bogotá (TAMBO), a regional design center and creative live/ work incubator, in the historic center of Colombia’s “City of Brick.” As one of South America’s most culturally progressive and economically maligned cities, the informal nature of Bogotá’s material industries is out of sync with an emerging creative industry.

La Macarena becomes the site of confluence between historic architecture, modernist plans of urban renewal, and contemporary programs of material production.

Studio Instructor Frano Violich Teaching Associate Davis Owen Students Nada Alqallaf, Aleksis Bertoni, Hyojin Kwon, Hongjie Li, Jennifer Shen, Tianze Tong, YaShin Tzeng, Emerald Hanguang Wu, Haoxiang Yang, Huopu Zhang, Pu Zhang, Yuting Zhang, Yubai Zhou Mid-Review Critics Lorena Bello, Natalia Escobar Castrillón, Brandon Clifford, Jonathan Dessi-Olive, Iman Fayyad, Caitlin Mueller, Mark Mulligan, Cristina Parreño, Paul Richardson, Alex Timmer, Sasa Zivkovic Final Review Critics Stephen Cassell, Natalia Escobar Castrillón, Kenneth Frampton, Mariana Ibanez, Zhang Ke, Sheila Kennedy, John May, Carlos Pardo, Camilo Restrepo Ochoa, Paul Richardson, Neyran Turan

Inventory Yard, Triangle Brick Company, Wadesboro, North Carolina.

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Introduction Uncommon Bond: Explorations into the Matter of Brick Frano Violich

Part 1

Part 2

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16

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Dry Stack Probes

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A Brick Dilemma Camilo Restrepo Ochoa

Lattice Wall YaShin Tzeng, Huopu Zhang

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Taller Metropolitana de Bogotรก (TAMBO)

Dynamic Vault Aleksis Bertoni, Jennifer Shen

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Twisted Corbel Haoxiang Yang, Yuting Zhang Pierce

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56

Emerald Hanguang Wu

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YaShin Tzeng

70

Yuting Zhang

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Nada Alqallaf

84

Haoxiang Yang

92

Huopu Zhang

98

Pu Zhang

104

Hongjie Li

110

Yubai Zhou

118

Tianze Tong

124

Jennifer Shen

134

Contributors

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Pierced Cylinder Yubai Zhou, Emerald Hanguang Wu Rack / Corbel Hongjie Li, Pu Zhang Buttress Nada Alqallaf, Hyojin Kwon, Tianze Tong

Hyojin Kwon

8 From Chircales (“The Brickmakers”), documentary film, directed by Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva (1972; Colombia: Ministerio de Cultura, Fundación Cine Documental), video recording.

Frano Violich

At the 2016 Venice Biennale, Alejandro Aravena asked the question, “Why should we care?” This was in the context of a conversation involving participants from the exhibition Reporting From the Front, where, among others, Phillippe Block, Solano Benitez, and Gloria Cabral discussed their built installations representing perhaps the two most divergent approaches in the use of masonry and brick in contemporary architecture.

On the one hand, you have a school of thought, as in Block and Ochsendorf’s work, fighting a war on bending, trying to find the thinnest, lightest, and most efficient means to deliver space anywhere in the world using computation tools for design, engineering, fabrication, and occasionally for assembly. Block says the need to revert to techniques that have been forgotten in engineering is a constant battle since structure is looked at in only one way—by using “finite element analysis.” The discovery of form as accrued knowledge that stems from traditional construction has been rendered irrelevant. The Block and Ochsendorf team and others are now rediscovering form in the same way master builders did centuries ago and extending it through computation. Form is a resultant of forces that eliminate bending and create shell-like structures without the need for reinforcing steel and mortar. They call it a balance between “expression and efficiency.”

On the other hand, you have architects like Benitez and Cabral, who work with limited means without the same computational tools, resources, and skilled workforce as their counterparts; and yet the work is as formally and spatially ambitious all the while responding to global challenges of affordability, climate change, and social relevance. This latter strategy of knowledge through making is rooted in brick’s

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Uncommon Bond: Explorations into the Matter of Brick

on learning by doing. In appearance, these two conditions are in opposition to each other while in fact they could be seen as inversely related, opening the possibility of their convergence.

It is the convergence of these two systems and a critical understanding of three areas of research that characterize the trajectory of the work in this book. The first is brick, in its most fundamental form as a smooth, thick matter, made of clay that is fired and transformed into individual units used traditionally to form archetypal masonry structural elements. Second is geography, which in the case of Bogotá, was planned as a striated series of numbered cardinal coordinates—transversals and diagonals—which over time have been subsumed by the smooth, shifting, and nomadic patchwork of growth to which the striations of zoning, transportation, and capital development are irrelevant. Finally, tools, which require both the physical skill to work with materials and the computation skill to uncover and generate form from the inherent characteristics of the material itself. All three converge in an unlikely juxtaposition of smooth and striated conditions where matter and meaning cannot be severed.

“Why should we care?” Perhaps the question should be reframed: “How should we care?” A critical concern and physical care for matter is a beginning.

1 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out

of Steam? From Matters of Fact to

Matters of Concern,” Chicago Inquiry (The

University of Chicago) 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.

2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1987).

Uncommon Bond

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6,000-year history, where thickness, weight, and their resultant inefficiencies were natural by-products of form and surface, and where the tenets of masonry structure—the arch, vault, corbel, buttress, and the architectural poché— emerged. Whatever knowledge was created during this period of time came to an abrupt halt at the turn of the 20th century as the raw status of materials, and their assembly, began to transform into more manufactured products like steel and concrete that supported the speed and growth of the modern industrialized city.

Benitez speaks of the “capacity gap” between technology-centric economies with advanced computation and labor-centric models, like those of his native Paraguay, where common brick and a human workforce is the only alternative to build. What appears on the surface to be a limitation has in fact served as an agent for innovation. The transfer of knowledge from one generation of masons to the next has increased his country’s capacity to respond to social and economic issues and rethink efficiency as a standard for good practice. If you have time, people, and resources, efficiency seems secondary when facing the efficacy of improving quality of life.

What I will argue here is that these divergent paths of efficiency and efficacy are creating a critical convergence where the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude toward materials deal with what Bruno Latour calls matters of concern and not matters of fact.1 Are not matters of fact the culture of engineering that has led precisely to finite element analysis, which in turn limited the critical thinking of so many engineers unable to avoid the need to combat bending? How does one critique matters of fact if not to reframe the argument around the conditions that created them in the first place? Critique has not been critical enough despite its desire to deconstruct matters of fact.

It may be useful to refer to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of “the smooth and the striated” to contextualize the confluence of these strategies, where conditions of natural and constructed matter are seen in opposition to the cultural and economic context within which they operate.2 In the computationally driven form, the smooth surface is found as a result of following the ideal flows of gravitational pull through material, in this case brick, yet the means to do so invites a striated condition based on questions of applicability, affordability, and local context. It is precisely the lack of these that allows the manually driven striated condition to coexist with the smooth and informal networks of labor, material production, and making based

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Frano Violich Above: Inventory Yard, Triangle Brick Company, Wadesboro, North Carolina.

Following spread: Drone view of wet-stack prototyping, Fall 2016.

Title

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13

Firstname Lastname

PART 1

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Dry Stack Probes

Throughout history, the “thickness” of brick has been characterized by the excess need to structure buildings, bridges, and other forms of urban infrastructure while producing seminal instances of geometry, form-making, and, as a result, contributing to the architectural idea of the habitable poché. Today, the notion of thickness has been replaced by a desire for the opposite: one of transparency and thinness. Rather than accept an either/or condition, the Dry Stack Probes project explores and offers alternatives toward a more hybrid both/and strategy, and reveals the potential for developing a spatial condition at the exterior masonry envelope resulting from performative demands in response to environmental forces, programmatic desires for interior conditions, and the hollow spaces1 between them where climatic, programmatic, and structural systems converge.

To understand this condition, a reductive approach to prototyping is performed through an iterative process of parametric form-making and hands-on dry-stack prototyping. Individual brick units are tested using the universal yet relatively limited number of techniques of masonry construction, including battering, corbeling, buttressing, vaulting, piercing, and racking, techniques that have been used by many cultures throughout history. These explorations create new forms that use and misuse these traditional principles of masonry construction, creating hybrid surfaces where geometries are superimposed, inverted, and recombined.

1 Wolfgang Meisenheimer, “Of the Hollow Spaces of the Skin of the Architectural Body,” Daidalos: Berlin Architectural Journal (1985): 103.

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Lattice Wall

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YaShin Tzeng, Huopu Zhang

This project explores a construction methodology used in traditional Taiwanese masonry construction. This methodology uses bricks as stacked frame-like elements that are then filled to provide static integrity. The project began as an exploration into an unorthodox technique of laying bricks that creates varying internal spaces and pockets within the wall, especially under a gravitation-free circumstance. The wall gradually deconstructs the brick’s inherent materiality as it shifts from solid to void.

Front view of dry-stack prototype.

17 Top: 1:12 clay study model.

Bottom: Brick-course sequencing study.

Dynamic Vault

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Aleksis Bertoni, Jennifer Shen

Brick is a uniquely accessible and democratic building material.

Historically, it relies heavily on the labor and craft of individual workers to construct a building, as opposed to most contemporary systems which are simply “installed.” Contemporary brick projects have followed this trend, employing high-tech solutions such as using robotic arms or CNC jigs to construct parametric geometries. This method, which depends on large-scale investment in machinery, eliminates brick’s accessible nature. The project subverts this trend by developing a low-tech physical tool that would allow us to manipulate as many parameters as possible. Here, the vault is not about the design of a specific form; rather, it is demonstrative of a construction process and a set of tools that produces a more efficient relationship between form and waste. The solution to this dynamic-efficiency question was to create a formwork system that relied on a flexible member and compressive “feet,” the combination of which would approximate a structurally viable arch.

Front view of dry-stack prototype.

19 01 Footings 01 Footings

02 Kerf-cut Ply02 as Formwork

03 Add bricks 03and foam

01 Footings

02 Kerf-cut Ply as Formwork

03 Add bricks and foam

04 Maintain symmetry04during construction Maintain symmetry during construction

05 Complete 05 arch Complete arch

06 Remove Ply after 06 arch complete

04 Maintain symmetry during construction

05 Complete arch

06 Remove Ply after arch complete

07 Build with subsequent 07 formwork as guide

08 Lowest arch 08is built last Lowest arch is built last

09 Complete 09 Form Complete Form

07 Build with subsequent formwork as guide

08 Lowest arch is built last

09 Complete Form

Build with subsequent formwork as guide

Top: Detail at flexible formwork, foam block, and brick.

Kerf-cut Ply as Formwork

Bottom: Assembly sequence.

Add bricks and foam

Remove Ply after arch complete

Twisted Corbel

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Haoxiang Yang, Yuting Zhang

Three walls connected at their ends triangulate the space between, forming a solid appearance from the exterior and a spatial void at its interior. The project aims to challenge the limit of bricks when a ruled-surface geometry is applied to walls that rotate as they ascend vertically. While hair-thin contour lines and base surfaces digitally control the depth of each corbel and rack, the physical thickness and weight of this material calls for an effective construction method. Thus, a system of rotating templates is introduced.

Side view of dry-stack prototype.

21 Top: Time-lapse study.

Bottom: Assembly sequence.

Pierced Cylinder

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Yubai Zhou, Emerald Hanguang Wu

This project explores Wolfgang Meisenheimer’s three fundamental spatial conditions that exist when evaluating a statically loaded brick structure: the exterior, the interior, and the building mass itself—or the “work body,” as it is referred. This is the condition where the inside and the outside meet; it is a zone of contradiction, doubt, and imagination. To use brick is to embrace its imperfections, uneven textures, heaviness, and modular dimensionality. It is by utilizing these qualities that we can understand the idea of transforming the thick and thin aspects of this material.

Side view of dry-stack prototype.

23 Top: Time-lapse study.

Bottom: Choisy isometric.

Rack / Corbel

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Hongjie Li, Pu Zhang

This project combines two structural masonry principles, racking and corbeling, that occur on two faces of a double wythe masonry wall. The two conditions, one that incrementally steps back at each brick course and another that steps forward, meet strategically along a diagonal fold line, which becomes the wall’s pivot point. The wall’s static stability comes from the compressive forces acting on the lower racked portion, while the upper corbeled condition requires the insertion of metal falsework to counteract the tensile forces produced by the corbeling.

Side view of dry-stack prototype.

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trips

Construction Process- Metal Strips

the running-bond wall

form the “A� part through battering

two pieces are symmetrical

Top: Break-metal fabrication of 18 gauge tension ties.

Bottom: Form development study.

add supplementary structure

Buttress

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Nada Alqallaf, Hyojin Kwon, Tianze Tong

This project interrogates how the corner is made by engaging three conditions: resolving surfaces into acute and obtuse angles; pressing the interconnected and closed ends into the form of a triangle; and using torsion and tapering to push the structural limits and potential of dry-stacking brick. Computation became a critical and enabling tool to evaluate these conditions. Sketching, drawing, testing with 3-D diagrams, and the fabrication formwork comprised the majority of the effort, while construction of the prototype itself was relatively straightforward.

Side view of dry-stack prototype.

27 Three Corners

Three Corners

Dupulicating

- Structural Support - Structural Support - 60 degree Angled Corners - 60 degree Angled Corners - Corners details connect two walls - Corners in an angle. details connect two walls in an angle.

Rotating

Rotating

Balancing

- The wall is generated between -the Theopen wallends is generated of the corners between the open ends of the corners

Top: Time-lapse study.

Dupulicating

- Connecting ‘Infill’ wall - Connecting ‘Infill’ wall - The corner being purely structural - The corner being purely structural - Thickening the corner - Thickening the corner

Bottom: Corner and infill study.

Balancing

- The gaps between the individual - The gaps between the individual bricks are balanced over the wallbricks length. are balanced over the wall length.

Following spread: Midterm Dry Stack Probes review, Fall 2016.

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Title

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Firstname Lastname

PART 2

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Camilo Restrepo Ochoa

To brick or not to brick? This is the question that young practicing architects in Colombia have asked themselves over the last 15 years. There are diverse architectural strategies that continue to emerge throughout the country in the form of urban transformations and the implementation of social infrastructures, yet the use of tradition, and in particular the use of brick—despite its legacy in Colombian architecture—as a means to express these strategies, continues to be avoided and denied. When we look at the work of Felipe Uribe, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Plan:b, Estudio Transversal, Lorenzo Castro, Daniel Bonilla, and some of the work of Alejandro Echeverri or even in our work at AGENdA, it is common to see how we all turn away from and consciously avoid the use of brick.

The question is not simple and not so irrelevant. It means either to adopt and accept a false identity or to fight it and become a rebel against the establishment in a country where architectural media is nonexistent and where architectural expression is as diverse and fractured as the country’s landscape.

This cultural and geographical disconnect draws lines that limit the exchange of information that results in a form of architectural provincialism. It is necessary to step outside of these lines to claim critical space in the discussion of architectural strategies, to “play the game” and give a voice to the unspoken.

The question points out the asymmetric, imprecise, and imposed version of history, tradition, and technique developed in the second half of the 20th century by many academics and critics from the capital city of Bogotá, whose version of history is reduced to its geographical and academic domain.

Previous spread: Aerial view of the TAMBO site looking west across La Macarena toward the Andes range, Bogotá, Colombia, Fall 2016.

Opposite: Slide from the lecture “Rogelio Salmona,” presented to the studio by the engineer Francisco Valdenebro, Sociedad Colombiana de Arquitectos, Bogotá, September 28, 2016.

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A Brick Dilemma

use of brick in the most pragmatic terms. Maybe my generation and the ones before us were oversaturated by the mythic stature of Salmona and his use of brick. The exaggeration of his role in establishing an architectural identity for the country resulted in a wholesale rejection of the work, and with this interrupted or perhaps even eliminated the possibility of developing a real incipient tradition. The beauty of history is it can begin with an illusion.

1

Seminars such as SAL (Seminarios de arquitectura latinoamericana) appeared in 1985 with the purpose of consolidating and identifying Latin American architecture identities. Even though the principles were fair and necessary, they soon became a religion and a dogma for all architects to attend and respect. Those willing to defy it would become outsiders and were taken outside of the official narrative of history in their own countries.

A Brick Dilemma

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The 19th-century construction of nationalist identity mirrored a situation in the country that was consciously developed during the second half of the 20th century by the imposition of a single, clean, autodidactic version of an existing Colombian tradition of brick, as if a clear, direct, and adoptable lineage existed from previous centuries. The tradition of brick as a material of identity of Colombian architecture was constructed inside the classroom, through the emergence of seminarios and texts that were symbolized, pursued, pushed, and demonstrated through the image and work of Rogelio Salmona.1

Salmona was a great architect—no doubt the most relevant Colombian architect of the 20th century—with an interesting approach to the city and materiality in a moment where modern identities were questioned and cities neglected. His was an alternative vision for the most populated cities in the country, mainly in the Andes mountain regions, to use brick instead of concrete in a country where modernism was increasingly becoming a non-site-rooted language in times of self reflection and a growing social discontent against a modern national identity. At the same time, Salmona’s vision cleverly detached technology and materiality from the perception of modernism while simultaneously advancing the idea of the handcrafted and humbleness of materials as a revolutionary statement.

Brick in Colombia is a democratic material; it ties both ends of the social circle: on one hand it belongs to the most informal economies as a material that is bought unit by unit with savings to expand self-built houses, and on the other hand it is the easiest (cheapest) material that developers use to save money and increase profits in their high-end projects.

Colombia is a country where climates, geographies, and cultures collide, making architectural criticism a tricky form of business. Its geographic characteristics—coasts on the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea; different terrains, from jungles and forests to plains and deserts; its cities in the Andes Mountains—make it the perfect mixture of environments for diverse and multicultural architectural expression. Because this situation creates a wide variety of climates, conditions, and temperatures, the idea of brick as a democratic material can only be applied to cities, like Bogotá, located in the Andes mountain region, and that is only possible based on abundance of clay deposits. Coastal cities rely on concrete block, creating a very different atmosphere and urban grain.

Perhaps it is time that rebels will be considered those who fearlessly try to redefine the

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Camilo Restrepo Ochoa Above: Runnel detail in Rogelio Salmona’s Casa Amaral, Bogotá, Colombia.

Following spread: Studio visits Rogelio Salmona’s Eje Ambiental, Bogotá, Colombia, Fall 2016.

Title

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Firstname Lastname

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Taller Metropolitana de Bogotá (TAMBO)

Bogotá, Colombia, is at the intersection of a complex array of networks. Located in the high Andes mountain region at an altitude of 2,600 meters (8,600 feet), its climate is a subtropical highland, resulting in dry, warm summers and cool winters with no real need for heating or cooling. It is a city of almost 10 million—the largest on the continent—living in over a dozen neighborhoods, each taxed on an income-based scale of one to six.

Everyday 2.5 million Bogotános ride the TransMilenio, a busbased rapid transit system that opened in 2000 and is already overwhelmed by the city’s pace. Bogotá brands itself as progressive and ecological, which is in keeping with its cultural offerings, universities, and global finance markets, yet its economic realities contradict this impression, as many live below the poverty level without adequate access to education, transportation, and jobs.

In the midst of this tale of two cities is an emerging economy of small-scale talleres, or workshops, where an increasing number of trained and educated entrepreneurs are finding space to innovate using digital media and fabrication. This micro-economy has global access to a growing community of independent furniture makers, product designers, textile fashion designers, and digital media artists, yet there is no social or cultural meeting space in the city where ideas can be presented and exchanged.

This is the role of the Taller Metropolitana de Bogotá (TAMBO), a 6,000-square-meter live/work design center and creative incubator sited in the former marginalized industrial zone of La Macarena, now one of Bogotá’s hottest real estate markets.

The site falls in the path of both Le Corbusier’s 1948 Bogotá Plan and Rogelio Salmona’s 1987 unrealized urban plan to connect the Museo de Arte Moderna (MAMBO) and the Museo Nacional de Colombia (National Museum) with an open public esplanade.

TAMBO project site, La Macarena, Bogotรก, Colombia.

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Aleksis Bertoni

This project begins with the typology of the two-way slab, a construction technique employed in the informal structures directly west of our site.

This structural grid became fundamental to the project; however, due to its scale—and the many different scales of the programmatic requirements—the grid could only perform optimally for a certain scale of program. To counter this, structural brick vaults rupture the uniform concrete grid to accommodate program types that require larger spans or higher bays. The TAMBO’s smaller digital workshops and meeting rooms are housed in 10-meter-wide vaults, while heavier industrial processes are housed in 15-meter vaults.

The L-shaped scheme of the building was adopted in order to preserve the southwest corner of the site, the only portion that contains a commercial identity, housing small shops, restaurants, and bars. The two wings of the building are organized to take advantage of the La Macarena neighborhood’s physical qualities. On Calle 28 to the north, a narrow street with a steep grade directs traffic up and down the site, and functions almost like a fast-moving pedestrian elevator. Carrera 6 to the west is a flat alleyway. As the Gallery wing of the building pulls back two meters, the alleyway expands to create a promenade.

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Brick: Thick/Thin

42 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of facade and screen wall.

Above: Detail of wall assembly in partial elevation and section.

43

Aleksis Bertoni Danny McCarthy of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen Local 3 consults with Aleksis Bertoni.

Brick: Thick/Thin

44 Top: View through metal workshop vault.

Bottom: Longitudinal section.

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Aleksis Bertoni Top: View along workshop corridor.

Following spread: Model of proposal showing vault details.

Brick: Thick/Thin

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Emerald Hanguang Wu

This project began with an analysis of the presence of monuments in Bogotá. The site is situated between two monumental works of architecture, the National Museum to the north and the Plaza de Toros La Santamaría and Rogelio Salmona’s Torres Del Parque to the south. Both monuments are organized around strong formal systems: the orthogonal cross-form based on the National Museum’s panopticon geometry and the circular forms and organic circulation of the Plaza and Torres del Parque. The project formally ties into the urban fabric and responds to its adjacencies by integrating these two systems.

As a museum, maker space, and artist residence, the TAMBO also programmatically relates to the urban cultural axis envisioned by Salmona, the architect of many cultural sites in Bogotá.

The key device is the double-width wall that follows the loft between an arc and a right-angle line segment on a different level. This system allows for the coexistence of flexible workshops and gallery spaces with more rigid cells of services and residences. The tectonics of the Flemish bond brick wall also creates variation of light and texture on each side of the wall.

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Brick: Thick/Thin

50 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of interior/exterior ground stair.

Above: Detail of wall assembly in plan and section.

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Emerald Hanguang Wu Above: View from roof across courtyards toward central Bogotรก.

Following spread: Model of proposal showing courtyards.

Brick: Thick/Thin

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Brick: Thick/Thin

54 Top: View of exhibition space.

Bottom: Longitudinal elevation.

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Emerald Hanguang Wu Top: View of fabrication hall.

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Hyojin Kwon

This project, an extension of the National Museum, is based on three key ideas: 1. The recognition that Bogotá’s education system has a gap in its arts programs.

2. The potential of workshops and maker spaces to play a bigger role in the community by increasing their public presence and combining educational programming.

3. The transformation of the panopticon system into an idea of shared public observation, continuous and shifting views, and community connection.

The project’s design began from previous explorations in the Dry Stack Probes project. The formal ambition was to create a scalable and repeatable structure that is self-supporting, which could be inhabited or used as a series of structural objects. Twisting was introduced to explore corbeling and racking techniques as well as the relation to curvature in brick construction. The torsion form in the dry stack revealed the structural potential of brick beyond its role as a vertical load-bearing wall.

From there, the project studies the shifting of planes and viewpoints created from the space between the solid brick walls. As a result of twisting the grid, a shared space is created in the center that connects the space horizontally and vertically, brings light into many of the internalized public spaces of the TAMBO, and transforms geometry using brick in a way that reflects the tools we have at hand.

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Brick: Thick/Thin

58 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of column intersection.

Above: Hyojin Kwon sets up a snap-line for the next brick course.

59

Hyojin Kwon Isometric drawing of program.

Construction of Brick Wall Modules

Brick: Thick/Thin

60 Top: Exterior view of project’s entrance.

Bottom: Section through workshops and classrooms.

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Hyojin Kwon Top: Interior view of visitor walkways.

Following spread: Model of proposal showing interlocking masonry cores connected by pedestrian bridges.

Brick: Thick/Thin

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Aleksis Bertoni

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YaShin Tzeng

This project represents Bogotá’s goal to establish itself as a global leader in the arts and culture. The Santa Fe district and La Macarena neighborhood become an ideal urban laboratory to probe these objectives due to the special location of the site and its historic context. In this way, the design aims to erase the boundary of the site and extend the art-based programs and activities of the National Museum and the MAMBO. In the TAMBO project, landscaping serves as a way to manipulate the movement of people onto the ground floor “street” in order to meet artists and the artifacts they make. Combined with this treatment of the ground, the roof canopy responds to the topography. This creates unity in the project, as the workshops that dot the landscape are connected by a tissue of canopy and pathways. Forming semi-outdoor roof platforms between the canopy and the buildings, the roof design allows occasional exhibits and performances to happen.

At the tectonic scale, the variable density and transparency of the brick walls, produced through a technique called “piercing,” suggest the ambiguity between indoor and outdoor space. Even the most opaque sections of these walls have angled brick units, which, in their orientation to the public space, imply a direction of circulation. The project implements these multi-scalar techniques to form a sense of publicity for citizens and an intimate atmosphere for the artist community.

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Brick: Thick/Thin

Roof Canopy

density-variab brick wall

Landscapin

SITE PLAN

1 : 500

Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of screen facade.

Above: Relational diagram between roof assembly and program.

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YaShin Tzeng YaShin Tzeng levels a brick course.

Brick: Thick/Thin

68 Top, this page and following page: Photographs of courtyards in model.

Bottom: Longitudal section through project.

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YaShin Tzeng

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Yuting Zhang

Bogotá carries a great tradition of craftsmanship and is well known as the “City of Brick.” Maker spaces such as 1/4 Tech have been emerging throughout the city over the past few years; however, the wide dispersion of available materials in Bogotá has hindered the development of interdisciplinary creativity.

The project is a craftsmanship incubator, located between the National Museum and the Parque de la Independencia, as a visible and centrally located public institution open to entrepreneurs as well as the public. While providing open space for the community of the Santa Fe district, it also helps to realize Rogelio Salmona’s vison for a public corridor from the MAMBO to the National Museum.

The building is conceived as two thin floor plates suspended on six brick column-like light wells. The intention is to create hollow spaces within the columns, transforming them into places where TAMBO’s multidisciplinary workshops could benefit from natural daylighting, ventilation, and structural support.

Each light well reflects the diverse uses that represent the TAMBO’s program, including wood, metal, ceramic, textile, and electronic workshops. From the ground floor to the upper levels, spaces are organized from public to private, both visually and physically, through light wells. The pierced brick walls filter the light and view from the surroundings, softening the transition between exterior and interior.

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Brick: Thick/Thin

72 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of ground-floor stair core.

Above: Model of project with porous screen.

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Yuting Zhang Plans of project.

Brick: Thick/Thin

74 Top: View of interior workshops.

Above: Views of interior workshops and ventilated circulation routes.

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Yuting Zhang Top: View of ventilated circulation routes.

Following spread: Model of project.

Brick: Thick/Thin

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Nada Alqallaf

This project is inspired by an investigation into traditional and modern brick construction. Traditional brick construction is thick, massive, and compact in nature—both structurally and aesthetically. Contemporary brick construction involves thin and hollow walls, where brick provides aesthetic cladding.

This project builds upon these two typologies and adopts qualities from both to create a hybrid habitable wall. The wall is perceived and experienced at multiple scales. At an urban scale, the wall is a large monolithic icon that organizes flow through and around the site. At the human scale, the cavities of the wall form a neighborhood-scaled production center with an ecosystem of both creation and consumption.

The linear arrangement of space generates a field of effects along both surfaces of the wall. The wall widens at the center to accommodate larger uses of the TAMBO programs such as the auditorium and exhibition space without disturbing the flow, while it also invokes an internal matrix of smaller spaces that organize the processes and events not visible to the urban public. It becomes an infrastructure of an active surface, structuring conditions for multiple interactions and overlaps to take place within the changing neighborhood of La Macarena.

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80 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of roof parapet.

Above: Longitudinal elevations of project with capsule program.

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Nada Alqallaf Axonometric drawings detailing project’s relationship between envelope and program.

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82 Short section through capsule program and entrance.

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Nada Alqallaf Plans of project.

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Haoxiang Yang

The project starts with the understanding and separation of two flows: the flow of goods, which operates better vertically in an elevator; and the flow of people, who naturally tend to move and interact in a horizontal space. This leads to two drastically different architectural typologies for the TAMBO program: a workshop tower that maximizes efficiency; and a ring, comprised of an auditorium, exhibition rooms, and live/work spaces for artists, that creates enclosure.

The ring can be further divided into two parts separated by height difference. The public ring to the north, a semi-courtyard surrounded by an auditorium and exhibition rooms, is opened to the street. A private zone belongs to 50 live/work art incubators, each of which is a duplex unit with work space at the ground level and living space on the second.

The roof of the auditorium provides a slope (facing the direction of the National Museum) from which visitors may climb onto the roof of the ring. The roof then circles back to the tower and wraps around it, forming a spiral staircase.

Brick here plays an important role in its interplay with form and function. In general, bricks resolve the gradient twist by both corbeling and racking the masonry wall surface. In addition, pierced walls are used on the tower to highlight the location and movement of the spiral staircase while allowing people to look out through it to the city beyond. These walls also help to support the staircase bringing natural daylight and semi-transparent visual privacy into interior workshop and exhibition spaces.

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86 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of fifth-floor interior/exterior stair.

Above: Third-floor plan of project through live/work space and public areas.

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Haoxiang Yang Haoxiang Yang prepares a mortar bed.

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88 Top: Exterior view of entrance sequence.

Bottom: Longitudinal section through tower and live/work program.

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Haoxiang Yang Top: Interior view of workshops.

Bottom: Plans of project within tower.

Clockwise from top left: Floors 14, 15, 7, and 6.

Following page: Model of project.

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Huopu Zhang

This project originates in the critique of how the undefined, or unprotected, public realm of La Macarena was eventually taken over by traffic development due to urban expansion in the Santa Fe district of Bogotá. It is in contrast with the Plaza Bolívar and other smaller open spaces in Bogotá’s colonial center, where urban space has been governed and defined by civic life in continuous use for more than 150 years. This project is an attempt to reintroduce this sense of civic life.

The project overlays a series of circles at different scales as urban nodes, soft and curvilinear, to establish public spaces that bridge La Macarena’s adjacent areas. This circle-based language serves as an armature with open edges offering a network of circulation experiences that largely accommodates the radical change in topography in the area, easing pedestrian movement.

This overtly geometric spatial framework combined with the TAMBO’s public-based program forms a fortress-like structure that governs the site and establishes its civic presence.

The urban block perimeter is defined by the material of brick, heavy and thick, while the soft radial language carefully carves into the site. It gradually moves down in accordance with the topography and ties together the public programs, the exhibition space, and the auditorium, eventually making a continuous experience for the public through the site.

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94 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of screen facade.

Above: Plans of project.

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Huopu Zhang Model of project.

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96 Top: Exterior view of office tower.

Bottom: Longitudinal section across cascading topography.

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Huopu Zhang Top: Interior view through porous envelope.

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Pu Zhang

This project begins with a concern for the urban view. The site is located in the boundary where the vernacular urban fabric of La Macarena is being replaced by massive urban development.

Aimed at connecting these two parts and providing pedestrians a place of transition, the project starts by looking at the northern boundary of the block, which faces the main path of the pedestrian. The linear volume of the building follows the movement of the pedestrian from the surrounding streets. Since the form does not follow the slope of topography, it provides paths at different heights along the sloping site.

The TAMBO project develops a perspective for program. It consists of two bar typologies: one is a single-loaded live/work space, which is thin, solid, and private, with its bottom level as commercial space along the public path; the other is more public, accommodating program such as workshop and exhibition spaces. The public bar sits on the ground and rises with the topography, while the live/work bar passes over the public bar, providing another optional path for pedestrians at its bottom level. The public bar is constructed in concrete, as a silent base for the brick live/work bar. The contrast in material makes the brick distinct, appearing to float above the site and its concrete plinth.

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100 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of interior/exterior ground plan.

Top: Exterior view of project entrance.

Bottom: Longitudinal section through workshops and exhibition areas.

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Pu Zhang Top: Interior view of workshops.

Model of project.

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Pu Zhang Plans of project.

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Hongjie Li

The site of this project is in Bogotá, where brick is the dominant material of the urban context.

What makes brick buildings powerful and beautiful is the unity and replication of the single material—the efficiency of the module. Thus the main idea of the project is to create replicated architectural elements, such as spatial sequences, circulation, and walls, so as to make the project compatible with both the urban environment and the chosen material.

These elements are replicated but not entirely identical.

The thickness of space and walls parametrically changes in an organized manner. When the wall is thick, the poché space inside the wall is thin, and the function of space is to accommodate infrastructure. When the thick wall splits into two thinner walls, the space between them increases to facilitate circulation.

The TAMBO project’s main idea not only originates from the micro scale—the brick—but also from the urban scale. A major problem of this urban area is the tenuous connection between the National Museum is to the north of the site and a series of landscape and public facilities, such as the Parque de la Independencia and the MAMBO, to the south. Within this project, narrow streets are incised through the building according to the elevation of the topography to enhance the north–south circulation of the site. This results in a series of interconnected building and courtyard spaces of relatively equal volume that create crossblock urban connections for the La Macarena neighborhood.

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106 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of ground-level plan corner.

Above: Plan of classrooms and workshops.

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Hongjie Li Hongjie Li prepares mortar.

Model of project.

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Hongjie Li Section of wall assembly in exterior passages.

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Yubai Zhou

Given the context of Bogotá, the project’s goal is to create a museum ecosystem on the site that ties together the bifurcated urban conditions of the La Macarena neighborhood, the result of 20 years of uncontrolled development. By placing the TAMBO’s major public space—the market, the exhibition space, and the communal space—at each point of the triangular site, a potential cloister of exchange is offered. The continuity of the public space throughout the site activates the adjacent public spaces and joins the outside to the inside of the buildings.

Another important inspiration of the project comes from the initial Dry Stack Probes study. In that first exercise, we created an object that appears differently depending on one’s approach from different angles. The perception of solid-model form resulted in various viewers developing contradictory understandings of the whole. Similarly, the intent of the building design is to use the modular capacity of brick to challenge the conventional perceptions of architectural elements and building skins. What is tectonically perceived as one wall is in fact a pair of walls, an outer and an inner layer running parallel to each other. This pair of walls can either transform into a solid form into a room, or diminish into thin edges. Thus, when one encounters an unexpected wall or room, the resulting experience is that of spatial surprise.

Poché and thickness mediate the potential spatial conflict between exterior and interior. These elements also question the traditional spatial relationships of servant/served spaces in which the leftover space contains structure, storage, mechanical services, and circulation.

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Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of interior/exterior ground plan.

Above: Plans of project.

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Yubai Zhou Steve Bolognese of the International Masonry Institute shows Yubai Zhou techniques for raking joints.

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114 Top: Exterior rendering of project in context.

Bottom: Longitudinal section through gallery and public spaces.

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Yubai Zhou Top: Interior rendering of exhibition hall.

Following spread: Model of project.

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Tianze Tong

The separation and intertwining of the TAMBO’s public and private programs, along with the juxtaposition and paralleling of porous and solid wall patterns, form the conceptual foundation of this project. Formally, the building is a bar stretched by its two spiraling ends, which suggests a basic functional division between the exhibition space and the studio space of the program. Materially, the solid wall wraps around the exhibition space and the porous wall wraps around the studio space, due to each area’s distinct requirements for natural light. Inside, a third wall inserts itself between the two types of the envelope, which has an internal porosity between those of the exterior facade. Circulation attaches itself to the third wall on either side, meanwhile following the spiraling gestures of the massing.

Outside, two courtyards are bounded by the massing for each group of users—the artists and the visitors.

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120 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of corner facade.

Above: Plans of project.

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Tianze Tong Above: Tony Antonuccio of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen Local 3 shows Tianze Tong how to use a joint raker.

Following spread: Model of proposal showing interior and exterior courtyard spaces within intertwined walls.

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Jennifer Shen

The TAMBO, a workshop and residence for artists in Bogotá, seizes an opportunity to investigate masonry construction in a contemporary context.

Because the La Macarena site slopes significantly in an earthquake-prone city, the building is a modular, single-story structure that descends the natural topography. It is organized as a collection of medium-sized workspaces (approximately 200 square meters). A basic unit is comprised of a primary room for production, adjacent to its related services. As these modules aggregate, their form and construction system are consistent, but the proportion of service space gradually increases according to need. The roof above them, a gentle sine wave, softens the conflicting readings of the building as the product of a repetitive construction process and its users’ desire to experience an institutional whole.

It is through the choice of material and its related construction processes that the architecture acquires agency. By specifying brick, the building deliberately provides work to the artisan trades of Bogotá instead of to large-scale industry. The low-rise, loose-fit plan indicates the construction process is necessarily recursive; each module’s position must be built against its preceding neighbor. Builders can adapt it to on-site conditions without central planning. They will, through structural constraint and natural error, create spaces for work that are more human in their scale and idiosyncrasies.

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126 Previous page: Full-scale wet-stack detail of vault.

Above: Plan of project through classrooms, workshops, and exhibition hall.

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Jennifer Shen Details of repeated assembly structures.

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Exhibition

Top, this page and following page: Views of exhibition and workshop spaces.

Bottom: Section perspective through exhibition hall and classrooms.

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Jennifer Shen

Workshop and Entrance Threshold

Following spread: Model of project.

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Aleksis Bertoni

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Contributors

Frano Violich Frano Violich is founding principal of KVA Matx in Boston, an interdisciplinary design practice that engages material fabrication, digital technology, and the conservation of natural resources to expand the public life of buildings and cities. Violich studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his MArch from the Harvard GSD. Violich has lectured widely and taught at Rhode Island School of Design, UC Berkeley, the University of Virgina, Michigan State University, and was Cornell University’s Gensler Visiting Professor in Spring 2014.

Camilo Restrepo Ochoa Camilo Restrepo Ochoa is principal and founder of AGENdA architecture studio in Medellín, Colombia. He graduated as an architect from Universidad Pontificia Bolívariana in 1998, and holds a master’s degree from Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya through the METROPOLIS program in 2005. His Fall 2016 studio at the Harvard GSD, entitled “The Archipelago in the Archipelago. Medellín: A Tropical City in Fall,” reimagined Medellín through the writings of O. M. Ungers and Rem Koolhaas.

Previous spread: Full-scale wet-stack prototypes, Fall 2016.

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Colophon

Brick: Thick/Thin Instructor Frano Violich Report Editor and Design Davis Owen A Harvard University Graduate School of Design Publication Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Mohsen Mostafavi Assistant Dean and Director of Communications and Public Programs Ken Stewart Editor in Chief Jennifer Sigler Associate Editor Marielle Suba Publications Coordinator Meghan Sandberg Series design by Laura Grey and Zak Jensen ISBN 978-1-934510-62-9 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Text and images © 2017 by their authors.

Acknowledgments This studio and its trip to Bogotá, Colombia, was made possible by the generous support of the International Masonry Institute and the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. A special thanks is due to John Ochsendorf, Fundación Rogelio Salmona, Morin Brick, Spaulding Brick, Consigli Construction, Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 3, ReEnergy Holdings, and Casella Waste Systems.

Image Credits Cover image and pages 6, 11, 35, 43, 87, 102, 107, 108, 113, 121, 138: Frano Violich Page 39: Aleksis Bertoni Pages 41, 46–47, 49, 52–53, 57, 62–63, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76–77, 79, 85, 90–91, 93, 95, 99, 102, 105, 111, 116–117, 119, 122–123, 125: Adam DeTour Page 58 and 130–131: Maggie Janik Pages 28, 29, 30–31: Davis Owen Pages 36–37: Haoxiang Yang Page 134–135: Justin Knight, left middle and right bottom; Maggie Janik, all others The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used and apologize for any errors or omissions.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 publications@gsd.harvard.edu gsd.harvard.edu

Studio Report Fall 2016

Harvard GSD Department of Architecture

Students Nada Alqallaf, Aleksis Bertoni, Hyojin Kwon, Hongjie Li, Jennifer Shen, Tianze Tong, YaShin Tzeng, Emerald Hanguang Wu, Haoxiang Yang, Huopu Zhang, Pu Zhang, Yuting Zhang, Yubai Zhou

ISBN 978-1-934510-62- 9

9 781934 510629