King Street West

Lamice Halabi & Pariya Mohammaditabar

Architects BIG Location Toronto, Ontarion, Canada Client Westbank Projects Corp., Allied Properties REIT. Program Business district master plan Area 67.355 m² Date 2016

Project Description

The building is organized as a traditional perimeter block with a public plaza in the center. Each pixel is set at the size of a room; rotated 45 degrees from the new, an open community atmosphere in an intimate setting, calming green scenery within a bustling urban context.

Source: www.big.dk

Amsterdam Orphenage, Aldo Van Eyck

The 1960 design focused on a balance of forces to create both a home and a small city on the outskirts of Amsterdam. As a member of CIAM and a founding partner of Team 10, van Eyck held strong opinions on post-war architecture. The building is constructed out of two sizes of modules, a smaller size for the residences, and a larger size for community spaces.

As a critique on early post-war architecture lacking a human element, the Orphanage design sought to design a modern building with a new urban vision from those of his CIAM house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house, a city like a larger house if it’s to be a real city”. Van Eyck was interested in a nonhierarchical development of cities and in the Orphanage he created a building with many in-between conditions to break down the hierarchy of spaces.

Cube Houses, Piet Blom

With Kubuswoningen or Cube Houses, architect Piet Blom strived to dissolve the attitude that a building has to be recognizable as a house for it to qualify as housing. As a result of a change in government, urban regeneration and housing becam top priorities for the municipal council of Rotterdam. Kubuswoningen was one of a three part development in the Oude Haven area. The entire development contains 270 dwellings, 1000 square meters of catering and shops, and parking for 300 cars.

Blom believed that urban communities should feel like villages. Metaphorically he considered the experience of living in trees; each elevated cube represented a tree and therefore they collectively represented a forest. He realized that elevating inhabitable masses on narrow trunks would maximize public space below while creating ideal views pedestrian bridge that connects the nearby market to the harbour.

KNSM-Eiland Apartment Building, Hans Kollhoff

The exitsing rectangular plan form of the block, meassuring 170 x 60 metres and including a circular courtyard gradually underwent a morphological transformation: an existing residential building had to be incorporated into the scheme and asymmetrical chunks were cut out of the block. The aim to provide the side of the building with daylight and a view led to the side wing being made to recede further.

The contradiction between courtyard building and a waterfront site had to be resolved, so the the front of the block facing the water was pushed in as to let sunlight from the south north facade while on the other side two-storey high galleries have been hollowed out of the volume.

Source: Kollhoff Architekten

Morphology

Plan transformation study from Aldon van Eycks Orphanage into Hans Kollhoffs KNSM Apartment Building.

Section transformation study from Aldo van Eycks Orphanage into Piet Bloms Cube Houses.

#1

Geometrical studies based on the section- and plan transformations of selected precedents.

Peter Trummer is University Professor at the University of Innsbruck and holds the Chair of the Institute of Urban Design – ioud.

Innsbruck.

All content was produced by the EDGE “Design of Cities” program at the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture - SCI-Arc, for a design research project directed by Peter Trummer and assisted by Sven Winkler in 2017.

Participants: Zhifei Chen, Dila Erten, Lamice Halabi, ChihYi Kuo, David Lee, Pariya Mohammaditabar, Ivan Orquera, Noel Ortega , Ji Qi, Song Qiu, Sarasvati Segura, Jakob Sieder-Semlitsch, Dongwoo Suk, Yifan Zhang

Editor: Peter Trummer

Production: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler Layout: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler, Sophie C. Krause

IMPRESSUM 201

IOUD

Univ.-Prof. Peter Trummer Technikerstraße 21c 6020 Innsbruck AUSTRIA