Contemporary Mod5

CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
REM KOOLHAAS
AR. INDU SATHYENDRAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, BGSSAP
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Rem Koolhaas is that rare combination of visionary and implementer —
philosopher and pragmatist — theorist and prophet — an architect
whose ideas about buildings and urban planning made him one of the
most discussed contemporary architects in the world even before any
of his design projects came to fruition
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He is not a formalist, yet he creates form. He is not a functionalist, yet
programs are the generators of his solutions; he is not a theoretician, yet
ideas dominate his work.
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DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
• Boldly produces buildings that differ visually to their surroundings
• Celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city
• Interrogated the "Program“ to oppose the notion “ an act to edit

function and human activities “ as the pretext of architectural
design
• His work emphatically embraces the contradictions of two

disciplines- architecture and urban design
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Mega-structures should emerge organically from the community
and culture to meet contemporary needs.
“Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from

the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about
anything – a discipline that represents relationships, proportions,
connections, effects, the diagram of everything.”
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Netherlands Dance Museum, The Hague
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Casa de Musica, Porto
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De Rotterdam complex
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Seattle Public Library
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Museum of Contemporary art,Moscow
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Seoul Museum
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NETHERLANDS DANCE THEATRE
THE HAGUE 1987
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The design features volumes of varying form and materiality
colliding in unique ways to create new types of space and a
visually stimulating composition
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The Dance Theatre had to share
the Spui Complex with a concert
hall (van Mourik, architect) and a
hotel designed by Carel Weeber
(also the planner of the complex).
Although there was minimal

collaboration between OMA and
the architects of the concert hall,
the buildings' physical proximity
generated a shared foyer - a 7-
metre wide alley between the two
buildings - in which an exterior wall
of the concert hall becomes part
of the NDT interior.
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The foyer consists of three levels: the lowest slotted beneath the auditorium
tiers, above it a half-moon balcony, the highest - a 'floating' skybar.
The plan, which was partially determined by the grid of the parking garage
below, divides the building into three parallel programmatic zones.
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The large zone contains the stage (35 x 18m2) and 1,001 seat auditorium;
the middle accommodates rehearsal studios; and the
smallest includes offices, dressing rooms, the dancers' common rooms.
An restaurant and an espresso bar are contained in the gold cone, which also
serves as a cafeteria for dancers and staff.
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The theatre has a structure of steel beams and girders, using metal
cladding with sheet rock covered with stucco, marble and gold foil.
The roof has a self-supporting structure of a double layer of

trapezoid folded sheet steel.
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Multicolored columns, terrazzo
floors, a floating sky bar in the
entrance foyer that straddled an
impossibly thin red beam of
support, as well as gold sound
reflectors in the auditorium—all of
which starkly contrast with the dark,
geometric silhouette of the
exterior.
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Spread over two volumes articulated in
black corrugated steel—its stage tower
stood adjacent to a lower-height
auditorium—the NDT was lauded for
the structural ingenuity of its catenary-
curve roof, the stellar acoustics and
intimacy of the 1,001-seat auditorium
and proscenium stage.
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Demolished in 2015
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PETER EISENMAN
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He was born in 1932 in Newark, New jersey, USA. He received a bachelor
of architecture degree from Cornell university in 1955,a master of
architecture degree from Columbia university.
Eisenman founded Institute for architecture and urban studies. He has
published numerous essays and articles on his architectural theories in
international magazines and journals.
Perhaps more than any other architect practicing today, Eisenman has
made a career out of devising and employing a dialect of oppositions in
architecture. with references to rhetorical strategies, societal alienation,
and existing architectural forms.
Peter Eisenman was the leader of a loosely knit group of new York
architects, called ‘The New York five' (with john Hejduk, Michael Graves,
Charles Gwathmey, and Richard Meier) who made an effort to introduce
a theory and artistry of architecture as rigorous as that of the European
avant-garde.
He has held teaching positions at Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, Yale,
and Ohio state universities.
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• After many years of teaching,
writing and producing
respected theoretical work, he
established his professional
practice in new York, Eisenman
architects, to focus exclusively
on building.
• He has designed a wide range
of projects, including large-scale
housing and urban design
schemes, innovative facilities
for educational institutions, and
a series of inventive private
houses.
Eisenman Wexner center for the
visual arts and fine arts library at
Ohio state university,
completed in 1989, received a
1993 national honor award from
the American institute of
architects.
• He is the only one among the
New York Five, who has held on
to his commitment to produce
architecture which is
conceptual and content rich.
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1. Eisenman Practice can be called as
tactical. He has consistently denied the present, past and current basis
of creating and conceptualizing architecture.
2. Although he depended on the writings of Derrida for Deconstruction,

all his architecture has not been in the same genre. Deconstruction
has been the point of departure.
3. Tactical experience is one of seized “occasions”.

His architecture is assembled in movement, in this spirit, movement
generates invasion, disruption and recombination.
3. Three levels in which his architecture can be

understood; 1. Historical- Intellectual, 2. Discursive-textural and
3.Material- Formal.
4. Unlike the earlier utopian architects who were

essentially social utopians, Eisenman is a
form utopian, they open and show future possibilities.
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• His architecture has been described
as high art; its intentions are
superfluous, radical, and political.
• Idea of architecture ( or building) as
a presence in creating feelings of
security, comfort has resulted in a
predictable space. Eisenman tries to
destabilize these factors by
introducing the notion of de-stability
and disturbance.
• We should expand architecture
beyond the usual motivation of
shelter, enclosure, stability, ground, to
the realm of unconsciousness where
desire operates.
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House II (1970)- Vermont
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House II (1970)- Vermont
The house is situated in a large 100 acre
farm.
The house is of two levels with a square
foot print.
1. The House is generated through
formal exercises without any relation
to function, site or context.
2. The house is a good example of
card board architecture. Exclusion of
meaning in determining the shape of an
artifact.
3. The building is meaningless but seeks
to establish a “core” to his future
buildings in which the theme of
“unmotivation” is further explored.
4. It was the first built attempt at
the idea of insubordination of architecture
to any other related field of human
endeavor.
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Wexner Center for the Arts- Columbus, 1989
De Rotterdam complex
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Wexner Center for the Arts- Columbus, 1989
The best example of a non building. Eisenman has called this
“building” as an archaeological earth work, as an excavated entity.
The essential elements are scaffolding and landscaping.
1. The facility is to act as a center for experimental arts of computers
and lasers , with temp galleries archive facility, library, resource center,
black box theater, café, book store and allied facilities.
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2. The facility is conceived as a set of
events between existing buildings on site
and a buried gun turret tower, which is
symbolically resurrected .
3. Two grids are the generators of the

building
Campus and the City. The grid is expressed
as a three dimensional grid work of steel
columns and beams straddling between
the existing buildings and terminating
at the campus oval. This grid has been
called as a scaffolding for a building
process which is perpetually continuing.
4. A rare example of combining

landscape, symbolic entities, formal
gestures of non ending columns, the
meaningless spaces, reference to the
geological process of the earth like faults,
and finally materials.
5. Building is an art rather than a facility

for art. CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
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Seoul Museum
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BERNARD TSCHUMI
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• Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, 1944, educated in Paris and Zurich
(ETH), 1969.
• Taught at Portsmouth, AA, Institute of Architecture, Cooper Union and
finally Dean of Columbia.
• Bernard Tschumi Associates was formed in 1983 with the first project of
Parc de la Villette, Paris 1986.
• He has been placed in the first three winners in many of the
international competitions: Kansai International Airport, Berlin Library,
National library of France.
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• Architecture is about the event that takes place in a space
than space itself. Interchangeability of function in a space is a
reality that needs to be accepted and hence the theory of
form follows function or function follows form is irrelevant and
needs to be discarded.
• If form and function can interact and produce shock then

events are important and not just functions.
• Architecture should be seen as combination of spaces, events

and movements. Events are not merely a logical sequence of
words or actions but they are the moment of questioning the
assumptions of the setting for which the drama is planned.
These kind of spaces are the future of architecture.
• Philosophers can write, mathematicians can develop virtual

space, but architects are the only ones who need to create
this art where concept and experience, image and use and
image and structure have to co-exist and experience.
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• Order: The idea of order ( structure,
form, space, or scale) is constantly
questioned.
• Disjunction: Combination of
elements which in their logical
sequence need not be combined.
• Limits: In every project Tschumi has
tried to work at the limits of
architecture. The project is never
achieved, nor are the boundaries
ever definite.
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• In this way he suggested that habitual routines of daily life could be
more effectively challenged by a full spectrum of design tactics
ranging from shock to deception: by regulating events, a more
subtle and sophisticated regime of defamiliarization can be
produced than by aesthetic and symbolic systems of shock. The
extreme limit-conditions of architectural program became criteria to
evaluate a building's capacity to function as a device capable of
social organization.
• Tschumi's critical understanding of architecture remains at the core
of his practice today. By arguing that there is no space without
event, he designs conditions for a reinvention of living, rather than
repeating established aesthetic or symbolic conditions of design.
Through these means architecture becomes a frame for
"constructed situations”.
• By advocating recombination's of program, space, and cultural
narrative, Tschumi asks the user to critically reinvent him/herself as a
subject.
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PHILISOPHIES
Technologies of Defamiliarization : Tschumi advocates that in architecture
defamiliarization is a clear tool to move away from superficiality.
The Mediated Shock: In a mediatized world, we communicate through shock.

The increase in change & superficiality weakens architecture as a form of
domination, power and authority.
De-Structuring: The relationship between structure and image, structure and skin
is used to examine Structure versus ornament. Ornament is meant to be additive;
it must not challenge or weaken the structure
Superimposition: Superimposing deconstruction which is anti-form, anti-hierarchy,

anti-structure the opposite of all that architecture stands for over architecture to
blur the distinction between genres.
Cross-Programming: Architecture is as much about the events that takes place

in the space as about the space itself. It needs an interchangeability of form
and function.
Events: The turning point : The hierarchical cause-and-effect relationship

between function and form is one of the great certainties of architectural
thinking. He says, “ one cannot design Deconstruction, but he can design the
conditions” . AR. INDU SATHYENDRAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, BGSSAP
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PARC DE LA VILLETE (PARIS)
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• Parc de la Villette
The competition for the Parc de la Villette was organized by
the French Government in1982. Its objectives were both to
mark the vision of an era and to act upon the future economic
and cultural development of a key area in Paris.
• The Parc de la Villette is located on one of the last remaining

large sites in Paris, a 125 acre expanse previously occupied by
the central slaughter houses and situated on the northeast
corner of the city, between the Metro stations Porte de Pantin
and Porte de la Villette. Over one kilometer long in one
direction and seven hundred meters In the other,
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Despite its name, the park as designated in the competition
was to be no simple landscape replica. On the contrary, the
brief for this “Urban Park for the 21st Century” develops a
complex program of cultural and entertainment facilities,
encompassing open-air theaters, restaurants, art galleries,
music and painting workshops, playgrounds, video and
computer displays, as well as the obligatory gardens where
cultural invention, rather than natural recreation, was
encouraged.
• The object of the competition was to select a chief architect
who would oversee the master plan and also build the
structuring elements of the park. Artists, landscape designers,
and other architects were to contribute a variety of gardens or
buildings. CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
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• Le Parc de la Villette
Porte de la Villette
The Parc de la Villette was developed as part

of an urban renewal plan on the site the
former national meat market and
slaughterhouse. Tschumi won a competition
for the design of Paris’ largest park in 1982.
• Related to his theoretical work on ‘event
space’, his proposal for a distinctly urban
park called for the deployment of a
number of abstract, programless structures,
dubbed 'follies'. It was intended that the
bright red structures would then house
various events and groups related to the
activities of the park. Many do just that, but
not all, and not always the activities
envisaged.
• The design questions the conventional
conception of a park as green open
space. While there is plenty of grass here,
the ‘natural’ park is clearly designed to
express the fact that it is artificial,
domesticated. Several thematic gardens
are incorporated into the scheme, offering
places of discovery and unexpected
encounters and juxtapositions between
seemingly natural and man-made artifacts.
• CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
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• The Folie grid is related to a
larger coordinate structure (the
Coordinates), an orthogonal
system of high-density
pedestrian movement that
marks the site with a cross. The
North-South Passage or
Coordinate links the two Paris
gates and subway stations of
Porte de la Villette and Porte de
Pantin; the East-West
Coordinate joins Paris to its
suburbs. A five-meter-wide,
open, covered structure runs the
length of both Coordinates.
Organized around the
Coordinates so as to facilitate
and encourage access are
Folios designated for the most
frequented activities: the City of
Music, restaurants, Square of the
Baths, art and science displays,
children’s playgrounds, video
workshops and Sports Center.
CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE 35
The Follies are placed according to a
point-grid coordinate system at 120-
meter intervals. They provide a
common denominator for all events
generated by the program. Each is
basically a 10 x 10 x 10 meter cube, or a
three-story construction of neutral
space, that can be transformed and
elaborated according to specific
programmatic needs.
The strict repetition of the basic 10 x 10 x
10 meter Folie is aimed at developing a
clear symbol for the park, a
recognizable identity as strong as the
original British public telephone booth
or the Paris Metro gates.
The structure provides a comprehensive
image or shape for an otherwise ill-
defined terrain. The regularity of routes
and positioning makes orientation
simple for those unfamiliar with the
area. The advantage of the point-grid
system is that it provides for the
minimum adequate equipment of the
urban park relative to the number of its
visitors.
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•
The Line system also includes the Path
of Thematic Gardens, the seemingly
random curvilinear route that links
various parts of the park in the form of
a carefully-planned circuit. The Path of
Thematic Gardens intersects the
Coordinate axes at various places,
providing unexpected encounters with
unusual aspects of domesticated or
“programmed” nature.
The surfaces of the park receive all

activities requiring large expanses of
horizontal space for play, games,
exercises, mass entertainment,
markets, etc. So-called left-over
surfaces (when every aspect of the
program has been fulfilled) are
composed of compacted earth and
gravel, a park material familiar to all
Parisians. Earth and gravel surfaces
allow for complete programmatic
freedom.
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CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE

• Celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city

• Interrogated the "Program“ to oppose the notion “ an act to edit

• His work emphatically embraces the contradictions of two

“Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from

Although there was minimal

the middle accommodates rehearsal studios; and the

smallest includes offices, dressing rooms, the dancers' common rooms.

The roof has a self-supporting structure of a double layer of

2. Although he depended on the writings of Derrida for Deconstruction,

3. Tactical experience is one of seized “occasions”.

3. Three levels in which his architecture can be

4. Unlike the earlier utopian architects who were

3. Two grids are the generators of the

4. A rare example of combining

5. Building is an art rather than a facility

• If form and function can interact and produce shock then

• Architecture should be seen as combination of spaces, events

• Philosophers can write, mathematicians can develop virtual

The Mediated Shock: In a mediatized world, we communicate through shock.

Superimposition: Superimposing deconstruction which is anti-form, anti-hierarchy,

Cross-Programming: Architecture is as much about the events that takes place

Events: The turning point : The hierarchical cause-and-effect relationship

• The Parc de la Villette is located on one of the last remaining

The Parc de la Villette was developed as part

The surfaces of the park receive all

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