Do you find any other flavor of hypar appealing or do just prefer the rectangular brick concept?
Posted on 12/17/2012 8:58:55 AM PST by Cvengr
A clampdown on so-called architectural extravagance means British schools will no longer feature anything other than straight lines. Why is the joy of curves lost on our education secretary?
That's Frank Gehry out of the running then. And don't expect to see any new schools paying homage to Antoni Gaudi, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier or even Christopher Wren. And Zaha Hadid might have won the Stirling prize for a school last year (Brixton's Evelyn Grace Academy) but she can forget about building another one here any time soon, no thank you, Dame. You might want to check your child's pockets for protractors as well.
Why? Because the government has banned curves from new school buildings. Not just curves but also "faceted curves", indents, dog legs and notches. In other words, any shape you like as long as it's a plain box. The Department for Education is cracking down on what it saw as architectural extravagance in the now-scrapped Building Schools for The Future (BSF) programme. Its new "baseline designs", unveiled on Monday, call for affordable, stripped-down, purely functional school buildings. Nothing wrong with that per se, but in taking his war with architecture into abstract geometrical realms, Michael Gove is revealing the source of his secret trauma.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Still standing after 62 years ... unfortunately.
Do you find any other flavor of hypar appealing or do just prefer the rectangular brick concept?
We dislike government employees for a reason. With very few exceptions you are parasites.
Buildings should look like bacon. A perfect balance of curve and rectangle.
From http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/10/121017-Brits-Declare-War-on-School-Curves.asp
Michael Gove, Tory member of Parliament and the U.K.’s secretary of state for education since 2010, has declared a controversial war on “curves or ‘faceted’ curves” in school buildings—as well as “minimal indents, ‘dog legs,’ and notches in the plan shapes.” Folding partitions, glazed walls, roof terraces, and ETFE roofing are also banned.
...
At this year’s Venice Biennale, Aberrant Architecture, whose very name seems designed to offend Gove, created an installation in the British Pavilion inspired by Oscar Niemeyer’s experimental 1980s school-building program in Brazil. In and around Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer and his collaborators built 508 precast concrete schools of standardized design. The architects proposed this radical scheme as a model for austerity in Britain, but Niemeyer’s Modernist designs would have failed Gove’s test. The undercrofts of these buildings are surrounded by arched loggias, and the facades are punctuated by lozenge-shaped windows. Even the Bauhaus had curves.
Taken to its logical conclusion, an indoor running track may not be an ellipse, but must be a rectangular running path.
Structurally and seismically, horizontal plan irregularities might require additional design effort, but this is different than an edict disallowing a final shape of a structure to have these appearances.
The below are typical irregularities which have special concerns when calculating structural design requirements. Maybe he read about this, but doesn't know how to design within the codes.
“Maybe he read about this, but doesn’t know how to design within the codes.”
Sounds like it. When will we ever learn that micro-managing and centralized planning don’t work?
lol~! gee thanx! ;-)
Keystones are a good example of a traditional motif that shows up in contemporary architecture. Its typical role these days is ornamentation, but its original use was to hold up an arch.
Labor, cost, codes, and cultural constraints determines movements in architecture. I personally don’t want to see anymore EIFS keystones. The masses are comfortable with tradition, but tradition doesn’t mean style. I don’t know if architecture is the only art form that allows the masses to dictate its aesthetics, but they do, and they shouldn’t.
I believe digital fabrication is going to be the end of traditional architecture,and for that, I’m grateful. I hate postmodernism, but I’m glad it freed us from top down aesthetic taste. I believe much of what we call tradition has endured by quasi-force, like this guy in England is doing.
We’ll still have the old buildings around, and we should preserve them. I like the old buildings. What I don’t like is trying to reproduce them, or using their motifs in clumsy ways.
This is all my humble(but accurate) opinion. No, I don’t hate neo-traditionalists. What I hate is when architects design neo-traditional architecture even though they don’t like it.
Fake keystones are not what I’m talking about.
We could have architecture that is authentic. There is hokiness in so-called “traditional” architecture and in modern architecture as well. We don’t need to be wasting resources on hokiness.
The fluted disk in interesting and I’m glad someone tries these things, but I don’t think this is architecture that is durable and userful for the long term. It’s a novelty.
Novelties are fine as far as they go. But these buildings have no context, they are objects in space, not what would make a cohesive fabric of useful buildings for our cities.
Shape, form, and function.
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