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Portfolio Design

2012-06-27T23:30:00.000+08:00

Your portfolio should record your ideas, the processes and the result of your work as a designer. It can also contain other information, such as your professional work in an architectural office, to creative work in related artistic disciplines, your built work if you have construction experience, and written work if it is very important.

The portfolio should have different shape regarding to the purpose it serves.

Your portfolio is not just your passport, but also the document through which how you understand architecture. It is your chance to clarify and share what you believe and aspire to, and to present new ideas, techniques, observations and experiences, mainly to others but sometimes just to yourself.

There is no longer a single type or format of portfolio that will fit all contexts. You need to decide depends on the destination or design culture.

PATIO VILLA, NETHERLANDS

2012-06-26T19:41:00.003+08:00

ROTTERDAM, 1988

A private residence

In a parody of the classical Dutch section of houses in the slope of a dike, this house was projected on the raised embankment of a highway that was never built. On the north, the road and the entrance level are one level below the main site. The garden and the main area of the house - on the higher level - are defined on the south by a canal.
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On the main floor of the house - more or less a square - a patio is placed in such a way that it generates, in combination with a free-standing wall, the living spaces of the house: a living area to the south, a dining zone to the north. The wall defines two "rooms" - a bedroom and a study - connected by a secret corridor that also gives access to the bathroom.

The garden elevation consists of four different kinds of glass - armoured, clear, etched and green, that create transparencies, obstructions and intensifications.

The (metal) east wall of the patio is a kitchen, the north and south wall are mobile, and the patio floor is made of glass planks that give daylight to the gymnasium below.

MIAMI PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

2012-06-26T19:37:00.003+08:00

USA, MIAMI, 1994

A performing arts centre that combines the two unique programs of a concert hall and an opera house

In physics, the notion of critical mass indicates the point whereby accumulating mass, an object passes from one condition into another, more dynamic one. To conceive of the two components of the Dade County Performing Arts Center (opera and concert hall) each in their own individual site, would be to waste a unique historical opportunity for Miami to create a new, exciting whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Not only would the separation itself cause many programmatic redundancies - in space mechanical plant, vertical transport, access demands - but by combining the two programs in a single building we introduce a number of important efficiencies, enormously extend its potential uses, and create a much more unique and memorable structure that makes a stronger statement about Miami’s present and future cultural potential. Hide
The building was sited on the Sears site. East-west through its center runs a high-rise technical zone that incorporates the Opera stagetower and the reverberation chamber of the concert Hall.

To reinforce the existing urban tissue those parts of the Building most active in the daytime are concentrated in the north in a profile that carefully mediates between the existing and the new. Black Box and Studio establish a direct relationship with 14th street. On the Biscayne Boulevard corner, the Burdines Building preserves a flavour of history. It is used for educational programs, functions and can also act as an entrance to the Concert Hall.

Faceted like jewels - one dark, the other light - the two auditoriums are directed to the south for maximum visibility from the sea, the highway and downtown.

So far the consultants have elaborated designs that guarantee acoustic and technical perfection, but the Opera and the Concert Hall are public buildings: it is our task to provide a setting that makes the experience of visiting an event. In the Paris Opéra, (the most successful precedent), the space reserved for foyer, lobby and grand staircase - the space for public display - exceeds that of the auditorium itself; in Miami, by joining the public areas reserved for the two individual auditoriums, we create a 3-dimensional "mixing chamber”, between them that will be an experience in itself. Negotiating the level differences playfully like the Guggenheim Museum, this continuous in-between-building organizes the two flows, but also turns the sum of visitors in a larger civic collective.

The bigger scale of the combined building not only eliminates waste - one system of elevators/escalators serves the two halls, one system of catering. It also creates diverse surfaces that are not mere dependencies of the two halls, but that can be used as "rooms” for more and more diverse functions such as fundraising, banqueting, etc. Below the auditoriums, our concept generates large scale spaces on street level for other cultural uses, to activate Biscayne Boulevard.

Urbanism
The siting of the building and the organization of the program aim to respect and reinforce the fragile urban context. By consolidating the two elements in a single block, we give a maximum impulse to the vigour of 14th street, reinforcing a vital connection to Overtown.

TATE MODERN

2012-06-26T19:34:00.004+08:00

UK, LONDON, 1994

conversion of a powerstation into a museum for modern art

The building offers space, but it is not suitable for art, it offers shelter, but it leaks and has to be repaired, it offers a location, but that is also problematic; it offers a beginning, a presence, which could be hard to organize working within contemporary parameters.
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The British attitude towards the 'great' gesture, poised delicately between aversion and incompetence... The building, an object (abject) lesson in symmetry, will be the only museum in the world marooned on a mud bank, twice every 24 hours. It may need drastic strategies of dissociation; a Turneresque blur of brick from which strategies of dissociation will have to rescue / recuperate it.

The Tower, strangely invisible in spite of its height, can be partly dismantled, liberated from its substance / mass, as could other sections of the building. In the City, the skeletal will be more noticeable than bulk.

A strategy whereby new additions will influence the building seems doomed to be overly demonstrative; circulation-driven, high-tech spiderwebs, to be plausible.

Perhaps an entirely interior site. The grounds have a potential for development: the park now is almost more visible and susceptible for programmatic implantation...

Danger: 66,000 volts

It is significant that an institution about to enter an electric power station on the wrong site of a notoriously divisive river and needing an architect to help mastermind such a radical two-way transformation, to be financed so far with a virtual budget, is confidently casting on these still theoretical architects at the expense of a collection which as yet resembles, in its eccentricity and incompleteness, not so much a mosaic but an eccentric bubble diagram of the past century's artistic achievement.

One of those hated bubble diagrams that is supposedly the architect's lodestone... We would be tempted to treat the complex as a single site of which a large part is open-air, one indoors, one section occupied by a nasty tenant that emits noticeable vibrations at 100Hz. On the east side, demolitions could leave plausible entry conditions. It is also certain that architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have contributed to this transformation. Therefore, involved but mistrusted for their contributions, the architects just substitute paintings for the word architecture, and a sense of how "incorrect" and brutal the line is. Maybe the best way would be to pretend it has one of Maleviches Architecton's invaded program...

MAISON À BORDEAUX

2012-06-26T19:23:00.003+08:00

FRANCE, BORDEAUX, 1998

Private residence overlooking the City of Bordeaux

The Maison à Bordeaux is a private residence of three floors on a cape-like hill overlooking Bordeaux. The lower level is a series of caverns carved out from the hill, designed for the most intimate life of the family; the ground floor on garden level is a glass room – half inside, half outside – for living; and the upper floor is divided into a children's and a parents' area. The heart of the house is a 3x3.5m elevator platform that moves freely between the three floors, becoming part of the living space or kitchen or transforming itself into an intimate office space, and granting access to books, artwork, and the wine cellar.

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A couple lived in a very old, beautiful house in Bordeaux. They wanted a new house, maybe a very simple house. They were looking at different architects. Then the husband had a car accident. He almost died, but he survived. Now he needs a wheelchair.
Two years later, the couple began to think about the house again. Now the new house could liberate the husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city had become. "Contrary to what you would expect," he told the architect, "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world..." They bought land on a hill with panoramic views over the city.

The architect proposed a house – or actually three houses on top of each other. The man had his own 'room', or rather 'station': the elevator platform. The movement of the elevator continuously changes the achitecture of the house. A machine is its heart.

JUSSIEU - TWO LIBRARIES

2012-06-26T19:19:00.003+08:00

FRANCE, PARIS, 1992

Winning competition entry for two libraries on the Jussieu campus in Paris

In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building.
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The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert's project.

However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building.

To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network.

These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below.

In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario.

Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.

AGADIR CONVENTION CENTRE

2012-06-26T19:16:00.005+08:00

MOROCCO, AGADIR, 1990

A beachfront convention centre

Our project can be read as a single building 'split' in two parts, a roof and a sockle, to create a major urban 'room', a covered plaza on the beach, facing the sea. The two axes culminate on the plaza. Floating above the verandah; the hotel: a single layer of rooms, each its own view. The conference centre forms the lower part, the sockle.
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It was our challenge in this competition to find an original architectural expression for this enormous program which is compatible with the beauty of the site.

The curvilinear landscape of the dunes continues as the 'hills’ and 'valleys’ of the sockle, which accommodate the major components of the program: auditorium, etc.

As in a mirror image, the same kind of relief appears on the roof where it accommodates the royal chamber.

In this way the experience of the plaza will be determined by the similarity between above and below.

The landscape which is generated with its concave and convex domes, with the 'forest’ of columns, its shafts of light, is a modern interpretation of Islamic space - Islam after Einstein relativity - which will also be expressed by the materials: polished concrete, mosaic, tiles etc.

The parking is arranged on several levels in a U-shape around the building. The sand-filled moat offers the complex a relative degree of autonomy and privacy.

The main axis extends into the garage, gives access to the lobbies of the mayor components, then turns to emerge on the plaza to serve the royal rooms.

The floor and the ceiling of the veranda are formed by concrete 'shells’, which have been cast upon the dunes, using the sand as a natural formwork. Ribs strengthen the shells and form patterns on the interior surfaces.

The uppershell is supported by columns, which are different in height, thickness, and spacing. The lower shell and the roof are supported by vierendeel beams.

Stability is achieved by means of the connection between the two shells combined with steel bracing. 'Soft’ joints have been integrated between the columns and upper beams because of seismic considerations.

The elevation and the roof, clad with polished and unpolished local stones, give the building its rock-like appearance.

ZENTRUM FUR KUNST UND MEDIENTECHNOLOGIE (ZKM)

2012-06-26T19:15:00.001+08:00

GERMANY, KARLSRUHE, 1992

Centre for art and media technology

Sandwiched between railway lines and autobahn loops at the southern entrance to the city lies this manifesto for a new kind of deep/large building. Organizing a large number of different programs, including sound laboratories, a library and museum, this potential development interwines with the existing systems of the city, while a public circulation system unfolds the activities from its core.

It is maximally intertwined with the existing systems of the city. Its location alone lends its maximum exposure and identity to 'construct' a public on a European scale.
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The Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) is an experiment, a Darwinian arena where different media - classical and futuristic - can compete and influence each other.

The building organizes a large number of different programs in such a way that while their particular needs are respected, their coexistence insures maximum mutual influence; their interface generates hybrid condition.

Its five programs:
1. laboratories for sound and (computer and video) image, media theater
2. media museum
3. museum for contemporary art
4. library
5. lecture hall and other facilities are stacked in a single 'tower' - its lower half productive spaces, devoted to research; its upper half concerned with display

A public circulation system snakes around the core, invading it at strategic moments in a continuous unfolding of the center's activities.

Manifesto
Architecturally, ZKM is a manifesto for a new kind of deep/large building where the splintered elements of recent architectures can be reassembled in an organization which is not dependent on compositional or aesthetic criteria - a technologically sophisticated domain where complexity and freedom can be pursued at the same time.

Zeebrugge Sea Terminal

2012-06-26T19:11:00.004+08:00

BELGIUM, ZEEBRUGGE, 1989

Ferry terminal for crossing the channel

To stay viable after the opening of the tunnel between England and the continent, the ferry companies operating across the channel propose to make the crossing more exciting. Not only would the boats turn into floating entertainment worlds, but their destinations – the terminals – would shed their utilitarian character and become attractions. Hide
Sign
How to inject a new 'sign' into a landscape that, through scale and atmosphere alone, renders any object both arbitrary and inevitable?
To become a landmark, this project adopts a form that resists easy classification to freevassociate with successive moods the mechanical, the industrial, the utilitarian, the abstract, the poetic, the surreal. It combines maximum artistry with maximum efficiency.

Theme
Its chosen theme, A Working Babel, reflects Europe's new ambition: its different tribes – the users of the terminal – embarking on a unified future.

The original Babel was a symbol of ambition, chaos, and ultimately failure; this machine proclaims a functional Babel that effortlessly swallows, entertains, and processes the traveling masses.

Site
Parallel to the dike, the site is divided into incoming and outgoing bands. Waiting cars assemble in an S around a circular playground and a drive-in restaurant.

Building
The building crosses a sphere with a cone.

The two lowest floors organize traffic to and from the ferries with maximum efficiency; four ships can load and unload simultaneously without interrupting traffic flow.

A bus station is projected above this sorting machine; pedestrian acces is through a separate external loop. Above, two floors of parking wind in an ascending spiral culminating in a great public hall, where the panorama of sea and land is revealed for the first time.

Then the cone splits into vertical segments: a wedge of offices divides the sphere into hotel and promotional sections. The void between these two parts offers an upward view to the sky and a downward view, through a glass floor, to the depths of the parking garage.

The entire building is capped by a glass dome. Under the dome, the two halves are connected by ramps and bridges. The hotel roof accommodates the ulitmate "North Sea Casino;" an amphitheater that slopes down toward the sea can be used as a conference center.

TRÈS GRANDE BIBLIOTHÈQUE

2012-06-26T18:04:00.001+08:00

TRÈS GRANDE BIBLIOTHÈQUE, FRANCE, PARIS, 1989 A library that considers past and future forms of information OMA received an honorable mention for Très Grande Bibliothèque, a competition to build a new national library in France. The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public spaces – absence floating in memory. The ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom aggressively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architecture's last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectivity. At the moment when the electronics revolution seems about to melt all that is solid - to eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical embodiment - it seems absurd to imagine the ultimate library. But that was exactly what the French government proposed when it organized a competition for the TGB in the summer of 1998: 250,000m2 on the east side of Paris on a site near the Periphérique, facing the Seine. Along with conference centers, restaurants, offices, etc., it would consolidate five separate and autonomous institutions in which the complete production of words and images since 1945 - the Bibliothèque is as much cinema as library - would be contained: a cinemateque, a library of catalogues, and a scientific research library. The scheme is based on technological scenarios developed with inventors, systems analysts, writers and electronics companies. They all anticipate the utopia of fully integrated information systems to materialize before the opening of the building: books, films, music, computers will be read on the same magic tablets. The future will not spell the end of the book but a period of new equalities. The Very Big Library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory - books, laser disks, microfiche, computers and databases. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absences of building, voids carved out of the information solid. Floating in memory, they are multiple embryos, each with its own technological placenta.

The responsibility of library was on the edge of change. Information storage was on the revolution from solid to electronics. What form of library can serve this massive transformation? Or what is the new library type? Rem Koolhaas answered this question in 1989 through National Library of France project.

Library was interpreted as a solid block, a repository of all memory, including printed and non-printed materials. On the other hand, public space was defined as the void.

Because the individual libraries are defined as solid, they can be spaces strictly of their own logics and independent to each other, even free from classical obstacles, such as gravity.

The battery of 9 elevators liberated and randomized the different architecture components. They are the only connection for the interiors of each library.

Through the 9 elevators, the Great Hall leads to:
1. The Pebbles: The Sound and Moving Image Library
Spaces for film, tv, music – auditoria & booths – embedded in podium
2. The Cross: The Recent Acquisitions Library
Two voids that intersect: the reading room is horizontal, the audio and TV spaces form a continuous auditorium that slopes toward the river. At their intersection is the amphitheater. The walls are lined with transparent viewing booths.
3. The Spiral: The Reference Library
The Reference Library is a continuous spiral that connects, in three turns, five floors of partly open storage, carrels, study booths. Each intersection allows for thematic or spatial variation.
4. The Shell: The Catalogue Room
On the exterior appearing like a pebble, it connects the spiral to the loop and provides a panoramic view of Paris, itself catalogue.
5. The Loop: The Research Library
A scientific interior where floor becomes wall, becomes ceiling, becomes wall… Mobius-strip that performs a loop-the-loop in the catacombs of the building.
6. Top: On top, a restaurant, a gymnasium, a garden, a swimming pool.

All other floors contains various forms of storage. North face is offices, including administrative offices, personal services and other institutions.

2012-06-26T14:43:00.000+08:00

NETHERLANDS ARCHITECTURE INSTITUTE
Architects: OMA (Rem Koolhaas)
Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands
Year: 1988
Status: Competition
Type: Culture
Program: Archives (models, drawings, etc.), exhibition facilities (750m2, 300m2, 200m2 and 130m2), library, restaurant, auditorium (overall volume: 42.000m3)

By OMA © All rights reserved

Archives (models, drawings, etc.), exhibition facilities The Netherlands Architecture Institute will house the national architectural archives, facilitate its scholars and show architectural objects in its museum to a broader public.

The building consists of a confrontation of a quadrangular podium – for the activities that need intimacy – in a triangular form is such a way that this generates the other elements of the program: exhibitions and library. Hide
On top of this – enclosed – podium the auditorium, reading room (connected to the archives) and cafeteria. Around the podium to the east the entrance lobby, to the north the permanent exhibitions and niches, to the west the changing exhibitions, to the south the library.

The triangular roof rests on slim steel columns. The podium symbolises ‘ownership’ – collection and research – surrounded by spaces open to the public. Quadrangle and triangle are parallel in front of the entrance, here is the central hall – a cavety in the podium – and here the visitors are directed via separate routes.

Also excavated in the podium – continuation of the general entrance hall – is the auditorium, enlarging in the system of ramps that eventually lead to the top of the podium. A mechanical yellow silk curtain can separate the auditorium. The podium is partially storage space – for the models – and contains offices, research facilities, administration and the editors of a review.

Our scheme sets the archives – the very reason of existence of the institute – in an inclining black concrete tower – perpendicular to the sloping roof – connected to a podium with the work spaces around a light well.

Over the building a golden roof, to the east green glass, to the north corrugated fibre glass, to the south natural glass with external mechanical shades and grey glass around the light well. As the roof slopes up, the diameter of the columns increases in three steps, the smallest are black, then grey and the tallest white.

The institute shares the park site with the Rotterdam Museum of Art (Boymans van Beuningen) and a building for large exhibitions (Art Centre, being designed by OMA); the sloping roof marks the transition from Museum Park to the city.750m2, 300m2, 200m2 and 130m2), library, restaurant, auditorium (overall volume: 42.000m3)