artist's impressions of conceptual design

Super Colossal - UTS Broadway Tower

This is an alternative design by Supper Colossal Architects for the UTS Tower in Sydney criticised as being an eye sore in the skyline. This has some resemblance to the direction in which model 1 is headed, the variety of vertical and horizontal space enables diverse use of the spaces and experience.

The UTS Tower is taken, split into four and distributed across the site. The podium space is elevated, linking the new slender towers at multiple points creating large flexible teaching spaces.

Model 1 Developement

Urban Screens: Toward the convergence of architecture and audiovisual media

The high visibility of the Barangaroo site, particularly from the harbour, and the heavily transient population of tourists and professionals that will inhabit the area, make it an ideal location for an exploration of architecture meets audiovisual media, or in present day terms, the 'urban screen'. No longer the domain of advertising companies and their blatant and usually objective billboards, which have brought about the universally recognisable Picadilly Circus, London or Times Square, New York, architects have begun to take an active interest in digital screens and a particularly successful example is given below.

Picadilly Circus

Times Square

As Tore Slattaa writes, "[recent urban screen architecture] ...is analysed as reflecting shifting corporate and cultural ideas about the relations between media and society: a new material and symbolic relation between constructed spaces for symbolic creativity in the global audio visual industry and global urban centres."

She identifies the use of digital screens in the Danmarks Radio (DR) building, a national public broadcasting institution in Copenhagen. In particular, of this very large scale development, the concert hall, a design competition won by French architects Atelier Jean Nouvel.
"Building in emerging neighborhoods is a risk that has often proved fatal in recent years. When there is no built environment upon which to found our work...we have to turn the question around: what qualities can we bring to this future? We can respond positively to an uncertainty by using its most positive attribute, that is, mystery. Mystery is never far from seduction. When the surroundings are too neutral we must create a transition, a distance between them, and us, not as a retreat into ourselves, but as a means to establish conditions that will allow a particular territory to blossom. In other words we need to bring value to the context, whatever it may be. For this we must establish a presence, an identity. I propose to materialise the context by creating an exceptional urban building respecting the planned layout of the site. It will be a volume, a mysterious parallelepiped that changes under the light of day and night whose interior can only be guessed at. At night the volume will come alive with images, colors, and lights expressing the life going on inside. The interior is a world in itself, complex and diversified..." (Jean Nouvel)

Perhaps most compelling about the digital screen in this architecture is that is no longer a visual tool that we simply observe once or twice, but rather it is fully inhabited. The people moving around heighten the visual seduction and the changing projected images provide a complex narrative to the building's use.

Naoshima Ferry Terminal - SANNAA 2003 to 2006 - Kagawa, Japan

Joseph and Lucy were luck enough to go to this terminal while visiting japan in 2008. It is the gateway to Naoshima Island and art precinct that is home to significant traditional japanese inspired modern and Tado Ando architectural marvels, most famously the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum and the Chicheo Museum. Both these focus on concrete & glass / cave & light.

This ferry terminal is significant because while serving a set function it is an enabling space facilitating free programing when not in use. Furthermore, the structure is allusive, columns are slender and minimal and where required to be larger are incased in mirror; reflecting the surroundings. This details along with the thin quality of the roof suggests a sublime invisibility and defiance of conventional structure.