UNStudio

PRESENTED BY

J SONIKA

UNStudio (formerly Van Berkel en Bos

Architecten bureau) is a Dutch architectural practice specializing in architecture, urban development and "infrastructural" projects.

The practice was founded in 1988 by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos. The initials "UN" stand for United Network, a reference to the collaborative nature of the practice comprising individuals from various countries with backgrounds and technical training in

numerous fields. In 2009 UNStudio Asia was established, with its first office located in

Shanghai, China. UNStudio Asia is a full daughter of UNStudio and is intricately connected to UNStudio Amsterdam.

wide range of work ranging from public buildings, infrastructure, offices, living, products, to urban masterplans.

Knowledge Sharing platform

BOOKS UNStudio in motion- Project book 2012 REFLECTIONS -A small stuff by UNStudio DESIGN MODELS- Architecture Urbanism Infrastructure BUY ME A MERCEDES-BENZ- The book of the museum MOVE UNSTUDIO VAN BERKEL DIGITALE UNSTUDIO The Floating Space UNSTUDIO UN FOLD MOBILE FORCES DELINQUENT VISIONARIES CATALOUGE EVOLUTION OF SPACE BAUWELT 17/06 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF LOVEI IT LIVE IT- Monograph UNStudio GENO(V)A FUTURES- (Developing and rebooting a waterfront city) DESIGN EVOLUTION- Mercedes-Benz Museum UNSTUDIO ERASMUS BRIDGE- Source books in Architecture 4 BEN VAN BERKEL, ARCHITECTU BEN VAN BERKEL

DESIGN TECHNIQUES

ATTAINABLE DESIGN UNStudio is committed to the promotion and practice of sustainable design. Environmental issues such as economic, social and ecological sustainability are considered from the initial stages of each project both at a global and local level.

INTEGRAL METHODOLOGY The practice favors an integral approach to architecture; a non-hierarchical, complex, generative and integral design process that takes on board all aspects of architecture. Time, use, circulation, construction and all other material and virtual systems and underlying values are studied, visualized, related to each other, and finally joined into an inclusive organizational structure.

RESPONSIBLE APPROACH UNStudio understands the changing role of architects. New production methods developed by the building industry, the current transnational condition of architecture, new design techniques and the changed, more functionally complex, nature of the architectural project itself have led us to develop new working strategies.

Diagrams

Diagrammatic technique provides a foothold in the fast streams of mediated information. The meaninglessness that repetition and mediation create is overcome by diagrams, which generate new, instrumental meanings and steer architecture away from typological fixation.

What is a diagram?

In general, diagrams are best known and understood as visual tools used for the compression of information. A specialist diagram, such as a statistics table or a schematic image, can

contain, as much information in a few lines as would fill pages in writing.

In architecture, diagrams have in the last few years been introduced as part of a

technique that promotes a proliferating, generating and instrumentalising approach to design. The essence of the diagrammatic technique is that it introduces into a work qualities that are unspoken, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic - qualities that can be physical, structural, spatial or technical.

There are three stages to the diagram:

selection, application and operation, enabling the imagination to extend to subjects outside it and draw them inside, changing itself in the process.

Diagrams are packed with information on many levels. A diagram is an assemblage of solidified situations, techniques, tactics and functionings.

Different types of diagrams used ideograms, line diagrams, image diagrams and finally operational diagrams, found in technical manuals, reproductions of paintings or random images that we collect.

DESIGN MODELS

Design model share hybrid entities that are akin to a conceptual parti. They often center on circulation. One example would be a Center Courtyard Design Model. Imagine if UNStudio would have designed Rapson Hall. They would have started with the Center Courtyard Design Model. As the project progressed and they figured out the impact of a central courtyard on this type of project, this information stays attached to the Design Model.

PROJECTS Mercedes- Bens Museum

35,000sqm area Designed between 2001-2006 includes also a restaurants,

stores, offices and an auditorium.

Parametric Model: Arnold Walz

Exhibits split into two groups

The Legend Tour The Collections Tour.

The architects looked to a Double Helix Design Model, and began to envision a museum where the two paths constantly circled one another.

The Double Helix Design Model was augmented by a Trefoil Design, allowing the two paths to constantly converge and diverge as visitors circumambulated the exhibits.

The end result was a geometry of a clover, with display spaces connected between two helical ascending ramps, around a central atrium.

The unending loops of a trefoil translate directly into the spatial arrangement of displays within the museum

According to Ben van Berkel, The Mercedes-Benz

Museum sets up an interface for a series of radical spatial principles in order to create a completely new typology.

And by this, he refers to how visitors experience the museum: They do not begin their visit to the exhibition at a conventional entrance at the base of the building. They are transported by lift to the top floor. Here they have the choice of two tours, during which they descend through the building. The paths of each tour meet on each floor, enabling visitors to switch between tours the Collections tour and Legend tour should they wish to do so.

The main difference between the direct geometry modelling, and the

associative model comes from the "topological effect" of the digital environment enabling re-configuration of the geometric structure

Parametric Modeling

A parametric model does not contain a description of a rigid

form, but the definition of spatial relations, the principles of inheritance of specific geometric features by secondary structure elements, the method of allocation and method of generating successive levels of spatial relationships. A pre-generated form may be modified by changing the value of certain parameters, until it meets certain criteria for e.g. aesthetic or structural

The project concept was based on the composition of three circles, tangents and intersections to be reduced gradually to the geometry needed to create the object.

The definition of the shape of each element of the building depends on the basic layout of the trefoil plane. Everything in this building from the ramp width and the dimensions of concrete slabs on the floor was coordinated and designed using a parametric model, which allowed analysis of all alternative solutions that meet the given criteria. Parametric modelling is particularly useful for modelling the geometry of buildings with a complex form.

INTERIOR Spaces dedicated to The Legend Tour are single height spaces that often face the central atrium to control light. These spaces concentrate on telling the history of Mercedes Benz. The Collections Tour, however, features double height spaces, natural light, and views to the outside to highlight the collections of cars they contain.

The design constantly juxtaposes a visitors foreground with open views to the rest of the museum, in effect placing each individual exhibit within the continuum of Mercedes Benz history.

EXTERIOR The exterior is simply an aluminium and glass skin that wraps the structure and responds directly to its programmatic layout.

Design to production: implemented a parametric 3D-model of the whole building to coordinate all the subsequent planning steps of the numerous trades involved. Thousands of plans were generated from this master geometry during the building process.

Design to production : developed a method that enabled the assembly of the doubly curved formwork form planar boards. The panels precisely pre-cut on a CNC-router were bent to the desired shape in situ during the construction process, exploiting their elasticity.

EFFECTS Radiant synthetic

To make an architecture that is truly utilitarian, we need to know, calculate and direct its effects. But how does one define architectural effect? Effects do not resemble the thing that causes them; 'pain does not resemble a needle' Effects are manifestations of the phenomenon, which includes sensory experiences of the external world, experiences of the inner world, such as fantasies and ideas, and, finally, experiences of emotion or affect. An architectural effect synthesises these three aspects of phenomenology, bringing about reverberations on many levels.

Time and Space Space is the emptiness or space is the NOTHING Time is not understood as something that is produced in various ways, but, like space, it is simply there; infinite, its beginning and ending undefined Space is seen as topologically formed. New visualisations of space arise, like the imaginary phase space. With these new conceptualisations comes an increased malleability of substance. Mathematically surface has 2 sides Orientability thus pertains to a spatially obvious situation. Nonorientability describes a hybrid surface condition, in which the to sides are warped. Instances of orientable effects on architectural organisation are spring structures and Seifert surfaces.

The Seifert surface is an orientable surface of which one boundary component is embedded in such a way that it is a knot, resulting in planes changing direction and flipping over. Under the influence of time, the pliability of space becomes even greater, especially when time is itself seen as an entity subject to transformation.

ViLA NM is playful, sexy and fun. The house is a complex design simply evoked.

genetic modification of architecture

Design twist The flat-roofed 300 square-metre villa is split into two parts one follows the slope of the hill, the other rises above it. The central vertical axis forms a twisted shape that contains the bathroom, kitchen and fireplace. The twist is central to the design, providing not just column-free space for unobstructed movement but structural support for the first floor cantilever. Expansive perimeter glass walls and large windows allow the family to enjoy 360 views of the surrounding landscape.

The spring structure is a spatial effect consisting of a line that transforms itself as it writhes through space, coiling, supercoiling and uncoiling as it twists and flattens itself out again, stretches itself widely and narrows once more in an uninterrupted sequence of deformations.

MUMUTH MUSIC THEATRE, GRAZ AUSTRIA

TWIST

Complex spatial structure, non-uniform-rational B-splines (NURBS), composite construction, formworks made by CNC mills, self compacting concrete (SCC)

The volatile, differentiated aspects of time contribute to the potential of topological knots for architecture. Topology, as the study of the properties of superficial structures under deformations, is the hybridization of differential space and differential time. When the continuous deformation of a surface leads to the intersection of interior and exterior planes, the transformability of topological surfaces results in nonorientable objects.

The perfect continuity of nonorientability initiates new categories of surfaces and effects. The Mobius band, used architecturally, makes a thematic connection operate differentially in a field of time. The surface integrates distribution of the programme, infrastructure, construction, events and time.

The mathematical proposition of the Klein bottle gives rise to even more far-reaching architectural effects. As an edgeless, nonorientable geometric structure that intersects itself, it has no closed interior. It can be used to achieve an integral construction that works like a landscape acted on by dynamic force fields. .

The surface of the Klein bottle can be translated into a channelling system, incorporating all the ingredients that it encounters and propelling them into a new type of internally interrelated, integral organisation

MOBIUS HOUSE

The organizational and formal structure of the private house is based on a double-locked torus, the mobius loop. The intertwining trajectory of the loop relates to the 24-hour living and working cycle of the family, where individual working spaces and bedrooms are aligned but collective areas are situated at the crossing points of the paths. In a similar manner these unfolding lines are materialized with glass and concrete, swapping the conventional use of these materials.

Topologically inspired diagrams like the spring structure, Seifert surface, Mobius band and Klein bottle are not applied to architecture in a stringent mathematical way, but they are not mere metaphors or themes either. These orientable and nonorientable organisations provide unifying, abstract, three-dimensional models that can be wholly or partially projected onto real-life locations to integrate the imagination and the policy at the basis of the project and its programmes, techniques, organisation and public utility.

REFLECTIONS

THE BURNHAM PAVILION

Located in the middle of Millennium Park Framed by lake Michigan on one side and Michigan avenue on the other. Relates to diverse city-contexts, programs and scales Programmed invite people to gather, walk around and through and to explore and observe The UNStudio pavilion is sculptural, highly accessible and functions as an urban activator.

Based on the specificity of the site, the design of the pavilion elaborates on the relationship to the existing rigid geometry, but it also introduces a floating and multi-directional space. Most importantly introduces diverse vistas towards the park and city surroundings. The pavilion is open at its sides, between the two horizontal planes of the podium and roof

The pavilion introduces a gradient between its ingredients of floor, wall and ceiling in a floating and continuous form. The hierarchy of the horizontal or vertical plane is converted into an understanding of a space as a continuous transformation and fluidity.

The initially horizontal panorama on top of the pavilions podium smoothly shifts diagonally into the three roof openings, framing vertical views of the city skyline. The ambivalence of directionality and the introduction of continuous flow in the structure allows for a smooth opening-up of spaces, directions and, importantly, the most diverse vistas from which to frame and read the city context

It orients itself to the city texture, to the flows of visitors exploring Millennium Park

OTHER ESSAYS