Day: July 6, 2006

Hybridity revisited

Mandelbrot – Tiuana – 2001

The Mandelbrot building integrates to distinct yet instrumental modes of building practices within the city. A traditional structural steel frame is merged with systematic production methods commonly found in the manufacturing plants (maquiladoras), encouraging a hybrid technique that performs to optimize space and labor through simultaneous fabrication on and off site.

Hybridity revisited

Mandelbrot – Tiuana – 2001

The Mandelbrot building integrates to distinct yet instrumental modes of building practices within the city. A traditional structural steel frame is merged with systematic production methods commonly found in the manufacturing plants (maquiladoras), encouraging a hybrid technique that performs to optimize space and labor through simultaneous fabrication on and off site.

Buildings are historically neoclassical, modernist, post modern etc, yet architectonically they are NOW.

The intention of conservationist is to freeze a building to a form it never had, because we think that searching for the origin gives a sense of clarity, e.g. searching for the meaning of a word by going back to its origin, consequently in a Hegelian manner some would say the essence of architecture is going back to the hut, therefore architecture is dwelling.

The project for the Florence Medical Center is not a restoration – the building has good karma – it is a reincarnation. The building was strip of its many appendages in order to shed a new skin. A façade that reflects it’s inside function and maintains an urban presence – street relationship.

Florence is a project that deals with history as process rather than an image.

The pattern of the facade acts as a skin that reads the programmatic activities of the building’s interior

Disclaimer: the red glass block in the corner has a symbolic function. Florence used to be owned by Dr, Aubanel, patriarch of the same family that decided to hire Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi to build Hospital del Prado a building that has a green glass façade as its main element. The red block is a small tribute.

Buildings are historically neoclassical, modernist, post modern etc, yet architectonically they are NOW.

The intention of conservationist is to freeze a building to a form it never had, because we think that searching for the origin gives a sense of clarity, e.g. searching for the meaning of a word by going back to its origin, consequently in a Hegelian manner some would say the essence of architecture is going back to the hut, therefore architecture is dwelling.

The project for the Florence Medical Center is not a restoration – the building has good karma – it is a reincarnation. The building was strip of its many appendages in order to shed a new skin. A façade that reflects it’s inside function and maintains an urban presence – street relationship.

Florence is a project that deals with history as process rather than an image.

The pattern of the facade acts as a skin that reads the programmatic activities of the building’s interior

Disclaimer: the red glass block in the corner has a symbolic function. Florence used to be owned by Dr, Aubanel, patriarch of the same family that decided to hire Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi to build Hospital del Prado a building that has a green glass façade as its main element. The red block is a small tribute.