Patrizia Lake
Manifesto Projects 4 2016/ 2017
Contents
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Casa en never never land The original story and drawings of the house.
Video Extracted images from the video presentation.
Stories of houses Reading of the stories and the criteria for selecting a particular one.
Transformation Collages illustating the concepts of the stories chosen- cocept ot the 20th Century and its transformation into the 21st Century, including the member of the family with a neurodegenerative disorder.
Action Drawing of the action showing the cultural element that made the house contemorary. Each student must demonstrate the contribution to the proposal. Therefor, an individual and a collective drawing must be included.
Technical drawings Technical drawings of the original house- a section of a detail- of an action in the space.
Teamwork The most interesting conversations between team members; how arguments were constructed and reached a consensus about how to move forward in the proposals. Finally, evaluate and reflect on the teamwork/ team effort in your group.
Bibliography
Manifesto Personal conclusion of the research project, Re-reading stories of houses.
1 Casa en never never Land
Plan ground floor
Section
The Casa en never never Land is a house on Ibiza, Spain, designed by Andres Jaque Arquitectos in 2007. Ibiza's commonplace is in contrast to the rest of the island a place to experience the needs of the middle working class with rationality and a linear optimization. That is why the house is placed far from the centre of the island on an 1300 m² sloping plot. The main point the architect wanted to realize was the adaption of the geometry of the house to the existing vegetation and to carve out the construction in the open spaces between the trees and bushes, even to the extent of incorporating trees at certain points. There are open spaces like the terrace or the pools that gives a proximity to nature and the environment, which is typical for the mediterranean way of life. The architect was searching for desire by imaging different possible everyday situations in the house. He was also thinking about the actual economic situation, in which buying property is always a good opportunity to investigate in the future and guarantee a financial status. So, Andre Jaque created a building with three distinct elements. One main house with two independent cabins that are connected by bridges with the main part. Furthermore, all the houses are independent from each other and have seperate access and facilities. The location of the house allows every part of the building a good access to the garden and a beautiful view over the sea. All in all, the projects reflects an environmentally responsible building, which is in harmony with the surrounded valley and which creates an interplay with private and communicative space.
2
Video
In our video, we tried to show all the important aspects of the house. First, we showed the location, which is in the wast of Ibiza, far away from the toursitic area. Then we focussed on the house in general and its interior. The focus here is to design decisions to exploit the potential of the site and to provide desirable conditions of habitability: Raise the interiors to the level that can ensure the distant views. Give the interiors of a large transparent glass enclosure to allow the contribution of light on one side and on the other access to views of a landscape illuminated. Opening windows throughout the interior is a porch. Closing is a salon. Paint interior elements of blue intended to soften the visual transition between the built elements and the sky. The different buildings are connected by a network of stairs and ramps of different layout.
The proposal imposes the need to preserve the natural support of the valley through a series of tactical decisions: Minimize the cutting or removal of trees and shrubs of the plot. Raise over 80% of the mass built on pillars thus avoiding any kind of land transformation. Grouping all the facilities in a concrete chamber. The built complex is divided into three elements: main house, cabin 1 and cabin 2.
Autism Autism is a neurodevelopment disorder, which is connected with social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication and restricted and repetitive behaviour. The signs become usually obvious in the first two years of a childs life. It is due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. To deal with the problems, it is important to work on it early. The parents should do speech and behaviour interventions, so that the child gain self-care, social and communication skills. Although there is no known cure, there are cases existing, where children were recovered. Not many autistic persons live independently after becoming an adult. A lot of them have special interests, in which there are really good in. They also work with concentration and precision. Another fact in their life is that they have to plan everything exactly and it distracts them if something happens they did not expected. In social life, they have a lot of problems to connect with people. They can not understand facial expressions and how to analyze them. It is difficullt for them to talk to people and having a social life in general.
Behaviour People with Autism have most of the time a special behaviour, because they do not know how to respond to their environment. It is generally an attempt by them to communicate their feelings or to cope with a situation. It could also be a result of their heightened sesitivity to a sound or something they could have seen or felt. For them, it is better to live in routines and spend their times in repetitive behaviours because they can reduce uncertainty and maintain the predictability of their environment.
Social interaction Autism is a cause for difficulty etablishing and maintaining realtionships. They are not good in dealing with facial expressions, physical gestures and eye contact. They often do not know how to understand and express their needs , because they also can not understand the needs of others. This is why they often appear as distant and aloof.
Communication Difficluties in communication are often in one form or the other. Some people with Autism speak fluently, while there are others whose speach is impaired to varying degrees and also others to are unable to speak at all. Their line of conversation may involve repaeting your phrase or words back to you or asking the same questions again. They often just talk about topics they are interested in, which makes the communication easier for them.
03 Stories of houses In the first lessons of projects, we dealt with houses in spain, which have their own special history. In the following pages, I would like to present the stories that impressed me the most and why I have chosen the Casa en never never land in the end.
Maison Ă Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas
A couple with three children decided to build this house, because the husband had a car accident and needed a wheelchair, so they needed a space which is suitable for his new requirements. The architect designed a house on three levels, which the husband can reach by an elevator, which is as big as a room and looks like an office. The elevator is on every floor a part of the room and the husband can, contrary to the other family members, enter every room of the house. My opinion to this prooject is that the architect has not done, what a lot of architects would have done in his stead. Everybody expected him to create a house that facilitates the life of the husband in the wheelchair, like a groundfloor house with easy, wide rooms. But his thoughts were going into another direction. Because the man would spend a lot of time in that house,Koolhaas decided to make a complex house with many details that makes the house so special.
The U-House by Toyo Ito
A woman in Tokyo lost her husband by cancer and engaged the architect to build a new house for her and her daughters. The house should be L-shaped to strengthen the relationship between family members. Instead of that, Toyo Ito designed a U-shaped house in the centre of Tokyo. The architect built a house for the family, where you had nearly no possibility of private space. All the rooms were connected and even the courtyard was cut off from the outside world. One of the children compared the house with a coffin, so it looks like it was really difficult for the family to live in there. They moved out after 20 years. So I think that it was a good temporary solution to alleviate the pain after the death of the husband and to strengthen their connection. But it was not a real home for the family, where they could live for the rest of their lifes.
Villa Anbar by Peter Barber A woman from Saudi-Arabia, who worked for a novelist and spend half of her time in London and the other half in Saudi-Arabia, engaged a british architect to design a house for her in Dammam. The Architect had to deal with the islamic culture and how the houses are constructed. The house has to show the segregation between the sexes, servants and family members and also between family and the world outside. Also the politics had a big influence in that city, which why is Peter Barber saw the house as a political space. For me it is really impressive that the architect had to deal with the combination of western and islamic architecure, without any experience in islamic culture. He had to think about who would come in each room and what could happen there, so if it should be devided or not. He also included the western culture by adding some deatils in the rooms. All in all, the architect had a really difficult job by combining both cultures in one building and to give his client exactly what she wanted.
Casa en never never Land by AndrĂŠs Jaque For me, the most impressive story of all the ones we had to read, is the U-house. It fascinated me how the family could live in such a small space and still have a good realtionship to each other. It was the combination of psychology and architecure, I was really interested in. That is why this was my first choice when I was asked with which I want to work with the rest of the semester. But this was not possible, so I chose the Casa en never never Land, which is also a really interesting project. The aspects that i liked the most were the complicated structure of it and the combination of colours and materials, which are really eye-catching there.
4 Transformation The first task we had in Projects was to create a Microarchitecture to show the adavntages people with our disorder have. This was a main point that influenced our work with the house, which is why I would like to introduce it first. With our model, we would like to conduct normal people into the life of an autistic person. On the one hand, we want to show how difficult it can be to live with this disorder, but on the other hand, we also want to express what advantages you get when you have this different kind of feeling. That is why our experiment deals with the special senses autistic persons have. First of all we thought about how to make these impressions as realistic as possible, and so we come up with the idea of creating a helmet. The helmet will have a geometric form and is made out of wood. The part in front of the eyes is beaked and you look throgh a loupe. This has the effect that you can not see everything around you and the things you can see are diffuse, but get really clear, when you come close to them. The same happens to the austistic people, who have often problems with their eyes, but they are focussed on details, that a lot of other people would not see. Another sense that is affected by the illness is hearing. Loud noises have a huge effect on autistic persons, because they hear these sounds louder than normally. So we thought about funnels for the ears of the person that is wearing the helmet. Our experiment target to force the person to concentrate all the time on every sense they have. It shoud show how important our senses are and that they are not self-evident. It should confuse the person that they do not see, hear and feel the things they expected and make them understand in which good way Autism can affect your life and make you see things in a different way.
Seeing
Hearing
The part in front of the eyes is beaked and you look throgh a loupe. This has the effect that you can not see everything around you and the things you can see are diffuse, but get really clear, when you come close to them. The same happens to the austistic people, who have often problems with their eyes, but they are focussed on details, that a lot of other people would not see. Next to the ears are funnels attached, which should make all the sounds around louder. To focuss on particular nioses, we want to varnishing the inside of the funnels with long strings, which filter the background noises
Senses
Action
Temple of nature
Glassy spaces The galssy spaces are in different parts of the house. It allows the person to have a special sight to the outside and be really close to nature and environment. They are made out of glass and geometric shaped, so they fit to the structure of the existing house. The person can take a shower in them, lay in the bad or side in a comfirtable chair and realx.
Ceiling The ceiling has a wave formed shape in the whole room. It goes up and down. The shape is different in every room and because of the different heights, it makes the sound in the rooms loud or quiet, depending on the shape. With this function, the autistic person get the chance to decide, if he wants to be surrounded by noises or not. If he does not feel comfortable, he can just escape and go to one of the quiet room and if he feels strong enough, he can go to the louder room. It should also help the person cure a bit dealing with loud noises, because he can not always escape from the loud rooms.
Table The table is connected with the structure of the ceiling. It makes the persons on the table connected by being surrounded by the structure. The persons can totally concentrate on what the other persons on the table are saying and are not disturbed by noises from outside the table. With this function, it makes it easier for the autistic person to speak to the others and concentrate on them.
Playing pavement
We created a Mechanism that informs the habitans when people are coming to their house. It is under the pavement and inspired by cumbuls. When the coming person presses the wooden board, a little hammer hits a metal plate, which creates a pleasurable sound. It comes into the house through a metal pipe located below the plate. This idea helps the autistic person dealing with a spontanious situation, when a person is coming over.
6
Technical drawings
Plan with furniture
Action: Person realxing in one of the cabins
7 Teamwork I worked in a group with MarĂa VerdĂş and Marysia Barczentewicz and we have been a really good team. Each of us had her own ideas and we discussed a lot to transform all of them, so that everybody was pleased with the results. For the microarchitecture, the idea with the helmet was really quickly in our heads. We thought about involving all of our senses. We wanted to construct something to strengthen the view, the smelling, the hearing, the tasting and the touching. It was difficult to combine all these ideas in just one helmet, so we also thought about creating glows to work with the touching. In our first works, we also wanted to include smells into the helmet and to feed the carrier. For the eyes, we had the idea to put a lense on it and for the ears, we first thought about earphones with different noises. The idea with the funnels came later. So all in all, we wanted to combine all the senses by using views that belong to the noises, smells, touches and tasts. In the picture below, you can see the drawings of our first ideas. But this was not as easy as we thought and after the corrections with Javier, we came to the result that it would be better to just concentrate on the view and the noises, so that the person with the helmet does not have to concetrate on so many senses. And we all liked the helmet, because our idea was working that the person can feel a bit more that not everything that has to do with Autism is bad and that they understand the way they feel their surroundings.
With the house development, it was a bit more difficult, because we all had different ideas first and we had to think about if we just use the idea of one person, or to combine all of our ideas or to think about a completely new concept we all liked.
8 Bibliography - ArchDaily. http://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5011/8ae4/28ba/0d70/4200/1052/ large_jpg/stringio.jpg?1414537996 [05.01.2017] - Pinterest. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/09/79/28/09792882f44692384 4dcbfbfd8650434.jpg [04.01.2017] - ArchDaily. http://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5011/8b0a/28ba/0d70/4200/105b/ large_jpg/stringio.jpg?1414538025 [05.01.2017] - ArchDaily. http://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5011/8af7/28ba/0d70/4200/1057/ large_jpg/stringio.jpg?1414538012 [05.01.2017] - ArchDaily. http://www.archdaily.com/38196/never-never-land-house-andres-jaquearquitectos [05.01.2017] - DOT Agency for architectural affairs. http://cdn.revistaad.es/uploads/images/thumbs/ 201450/andres_jaque_477756407_1204x1200.jpg [04.01.2017] - Andrès Jaque. http://a3.images.divisare.com/images/dpr_1.0,f_auto,q_auto,w_800/v1/ project_images/1562353/03-never-neverland-Andres-Jaque-Arquitectos/andres-jaqueoffice-for-political-innovation-miguel-de-guzman-casa-en-never-never-land.jpg [06.01.2017] - OMA office work search. http://oma.eu/projects/maison-a-bordeaux [07.01.2017] -Archeyes. http://archeyes.com/white-house-u-toyo-ito/ [07.01.2017] -Peter Barber Architects. http://www.peterbarberarchitects.com/villa-anbar/ [07.01.2017]
9 Manifesto The project we had this term was a unique chance for us. We were able to work in groups with people from all over the world and learned more about the way people from other countries work. We all had to speak another language than our native language, which connected us. We met in groups really often and had classes every week, so we got to know each other really well and there were emerging a lot of new friendships. It was also good that they was always just one person from one country, because I have seen in other subjects that people start talking in their mother language when there are at least two from one country in one group. In our group it worked really well and in my opinio, group work in general is important in studies to make people able to make comprimises and learn from each other. It was also interesting that every country places importance to different aspects of architecure. In Germany, we used to work much more with technical aspects but here in Spain, he had the chance to strengthen our creativity, which we could not if we stayed at home this year. But also the topic of the project was really interesting. Usually, you do not think about the persons who are going to live in your house. You just create spaces that you think are the best. But to focuss on the habitants and their need is a new point of view and it enriched my view of architecture. In this case we really had to empathize with the ill person and what he would like or do in the house. It was more easy to work with this topic, because the house was already existing and we did not have to think about a completely new structure. I think this is more of what a real architect does. Furthermore, it was really nice that we had a own room to work in in the last few weeks. It helped us concentrate and it was a more relaxed atmosphere than in the normal classroom. We hada lot of space for us and we could just leave our models and papers there. Also on the other days, we met there to work on our project, but also to just stay in touch with each other. In the lessons, we all had to talk and critizise the projects of the other groups. With this, we learned how to take critism and to not always say that everything is good the way it already is. All in all, I am really happy that I was part of this project and it really helped my in my advancement to become an Architect. I would always recommend it to the students that are coming the next years to Alicante.