Taking this opportunity, I chose five projects that I was lucky enough to see live. Naturally, I was tempted to include in this list those that touched my feelings from the pages of books, magazines or blogs, but the selection of works of architecture contemplated in reality seems to me more honest: at least based on the fact that at the first meeting with an absent-minded object sometimes illusions collapse, and sometimes admiration comes unexpectedly.
1. Caixa Forum in Madrid.
Bureau Herzog & de Meuron. 2007
By occupation, algorithmic / generative architecture is the closest to me. In this building, computer algorithms were applied only to his "skin", which has long become the hallmark of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. However, the elimination of the first floor (the console is supported by a powerful monolithic core), deformation (triangulation) of the ground level and the lower part of the console, the preservation of the brick 2nd and 3rd floors and the rusty superstructure made of the said pixelated "skin", repeating the contour of the roofs of buildings in the neighborhood - all this leaves an indelible impression on the Caixa Forum, which is something of a transitional stage from deconstructivism to parametricism.
I also got a warm impression of the Caixa Forum after visiting the exhibition of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s – 30s that took place there in 2011.
2. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
Architect Frank Gehry. 1997
This object is a landmark for the computational architecture. Although it was not “invented” digitally, this museum - along with Peter Cook's Kunsthaus in Graz and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw's International Waterloo Terminal in London - challenged the capabilities of the latest CAD technologies, which included complex curvilinear forms of the shell and the conjugation of structural elements at arbitrary angles in space have been implemented; drawing them by hand was considered too expensive and time-consuming.
The museum gave its city an incredible tourist attraction and was an economic miracle: the “inexpedient” costs of constructing its building paid off many times over. It was then that computer algorithms came into the service of architecture.
3. Cafe The Magazine at Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Architect Zaha Hadid. London. 2013
I managed to contemplate the freshly baked brainchild of Zaha Hadid Architects the next day after its opening. Like the Chanel pavilion of the same authors (the latter, however, is a collapsible and transportable object), the cafe demonstrates smooth geometry not only in terms of shell shapes, but also in terms of the transition from exterior to interior: they are simply inseparable from each other. Arbitrary curvature design is setting new standards in the automated manufacturing industry (we are witnessing the transition from the era of unification to the era of diversity and complexity): this method has already become part of the individual style of ZHA.
Of the details I liked - a structural scheme with a curved beam hidden behind solid panels and transition nodes into an elastic roofing membrane. A kind of smaller and more complicated Guggenheim with new modeling capabilities applied in this case from the very beginning of shaping, and robotic precision of parts.
4. AA cafeteria building in Hook Park, Dorset
Fry Otto, ABK, Buro Happold. 1985
Fry Otto, along with Buckminster Fuller, is the forerunner of modern computing architecture. This master's analogue design and research on minimal surfaces influenced, directly and indirectly, many "parametrists", in particular Lars Spybrock.
The Architectural Association Dining Room at Hook Park struck me first and foremost with the “making everything out of nothing” phenomenon: a custom self-stabilizing structure made from local timber. The frame consists of a net of roughly finished pine trunks, bending like shrouds.
This is one of those examples where a small project of a great architect is more admired than a multi-billion dollar town-planning complex. Cheap, sustainable and resourceful. The building inspired the later buildings of the Hook Park ensemble (including the project of the students of Fry Otto - a nearby workshop for a similar constructive system), which fully reflects the new paradigm of thinking with the use of parametric tools in design and implementation.
5. Ravensbourne College London
FOA Architects. 2010
This piece of architecture is interesting primarily for its "skin". With the help of three types of panels (or four if we count the symmetrical subtype), it is possible to obtain seven types of windows and an irregular facade pattern. Tessellation refers to fractal geometry and non-linear non-repeating patterns like the Penrose mosaic.
Despite its smaller scale, the building is not lost in the least against the backdrop of Richard Rogers' huge O2 Arena. On the contrary, everything is natural in its development: Euclidean rigor and high-tech symmetry give way to Mandelbrot complexity, albeit in this case tending more to the plane than to the volume.
Dmitry Aranchiy was born in Kiev in 1986. He received two degrees: technical at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and architectural at the Kiev National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture (KNUSA), where he defended his master's degree in 2011 "Algorithmic Methods of Architectural Shaping". In 2007 he founded the studio Dmytro Aranchii Architects in Kiev. Works in the direction of generative architecture and algorithmic design.
