City Rooms

Design Statement

Urban Intention

Vitality through urban intimacy

The Cityrooms project is based on the idea that the separation of use is excessive and that urban vitality can come about through programmatic overlap and friction. Is the planning tool of use classes longer helpful or could buildings be considered “useless”, or rather “useful”. The design sets out to create a spatial structure that allows contradictory urban elements to come in close contact whilst preventing them to clash violently.

The place of work as public asset

Workplaces are vital elements of the city fabric and it is of interest to the public that they are spread across the city. The simple fact that they are active during the day means that they bring life and vitality to the city around them. By looking at workplaces as public facilities a new architectural relationship between workplace and city can be considered. This new perspective could be advantageous for the city, it is encouraging to see that thinkers in the field of Facilities Management are adopting a similar approach but from a totally diffrent angle (see Advocacy).

Industry in the city

The workplace as public facility applies to all workplaces but is perhaps most interesting when it comes to workplaces that deal with actual public infrastructure such as waste and transportation but also other kinds of production/industry where there are environmental advantages (transportation) of a location near the source of business.

Proposed Urban Elements

Buildings

• Body Buildings - The three buildings facing Brookmill Road. Are to be a family of heavy bodylike buildings.
• Spine - The connecting element following the slope of the DLR. The device that negotiates and brings together the public and the private in the closest way.
• Platforms - Public platforms with views of the city sized to be capable of receiving tennis or basket courts.

City Rooms

The Urban Elements described above form a small part of the city organised as a City Rooms. Interior and exterior spaces are organized as rooms that can be experienced in a room to room sequence. There is a certain kind of flexibility inherent in the room to room organisation, a flexibility very diffrent from the generality of traditional flexibility. There are strong boundaries between the cells of the structure and they are easily controlled, “doors” can be closed or opened, fine tuning the structure according to use and ownership. The rooms all have an identity created by their views, next to's and the articulation of thresholds.

Construction

Masonry construction

Room to room

The unit has been looking at the room to room plan. The logic of the room to room plan is closely connected to masonry construction as the cellular structure suggests loadbearing walls. One could build a frame building with a room to room plan but it would be less convincing than its masonry counterpart.

Change

One of the most appealing aspects of industrial buildings is how they, more than other building types, bear the marks of change. The industrial building often have strong and simple design, the structural bays or other features give the building a sense of order and sometimes a grandeur with a hint of temple or public building. This nobleness is counteracted by necessity and time. Programme ensures that the high ideal can never be achieved instead the symmetries and forms are casually violated and a pragmatic composition arrise. The dialogue between a strong, strict ideal and a lively pragmatic reality is rich and enjoyable.

Masonry enbles new openings to be made and old ones to be filled in with relative ease. The structure/envelope of the wall dictates how openings are made and ensure a certain language. Changes to a frame building are not as deep or as enjoyable since the structure is separated from the envelope. A masonry wall can be repaired in a way analoguos to healing whereas repairs to other walls will, at best, be covered up.

Modern construction

The invention of thin joint construction and high performance, large, blocks such as Poroton has once again made masonry a credible form of construction. Economy, speed and performance can now be compared to other forms of construction.

Structural strategy

Hard spots

The uneven spacing of loadbearing walls in the room to room plan creates a floor where the structural capacity varies across the floor. This is advantageous when building for uncertain use as hard spots in the floor will be capable of carrying heavy loads without an excessively thick floorslab. If the programme requires heavy machinery or heavy storage suitable areas of the floor will be easily identified.

Finishes

Floor

The concrete floors need to be finished with a dustproof surface as the concrete itself would wear and create dust. The type of finish would have to be partially determined by type of use for instance electronic industries would require finishes with specific electrostatic properties for parts of the building.

Pumpable floor screed PX-1 Hardwearing self-smoothing cement polymer floor that can be laid on large (2000 m2) areas in one go.

External envelope of masonry buildings

A water resistant finish must be applied to the exterior poroton wall. A very thin paint or render would be best as the texture of the masonry would give scale and life to the wall. A lightweight render would add thermal as well as sound insulation and is the proven, but perhaps less architectural, alternative.

Bayosan LL66 Air entrained lightweight lime, cement, sand render for external use. Base and/or coarse topcoat. Minimum thickness 10 mm basecoat + 3 mm topcoat. Thermal Conductivity ≤ 0.93 W/(mK).

Beeck structural silicate plaster Available factory-toned in pastel color intensity (Beeck Colorsil chart). Comes in three grain sizes 0.5, 1.5 or 2.5 mm.

A 15 mm render system would remove any trace of the poroton materiality instead the nature of render as covering paint would take over. If render is used the opportunity of colour and decor should not be lost.

Polycarbonate wall

The vertically fluted translucent wall of the semi-outdoor space in the spine should be made by opal coloured polycarbonate sheets. Some of the sheets should bulge outwards to create a play of light and reflection on the alternating flat and curved surfaces. This detailing of the wall would also achieve a light and curtainlike effect (image) that is appropriate for this long element that either stretches between the body buildings or becomes a long horisontal element of the park.

Lexan Thermoclick(pdf) Multiwall polycarbonate sheet with tounge and groove joints. The fixings and tounge and groove joints seem suitable for the proposed wall. Toughness and structural requirements would determine the type of multiwall structure. U-values are uninteresting as the space is semi-outdoor.

Danpalon DP 610 Multicell Is less straigtforward for the kind of wall proposed. The standing seam (flash animation) system could maybe be turned inside out and sealed with silicone but the detailing with the hooks would probably make the sheets very stiff at the joints which would make bending the sheets more difficult.

The sheets can be either preformed to a gently curved shape or simply bent on site and held in shape either by compression or by elements pushing them into shape. The simplest method of preforming would probably be drape forming (page 7) at 140˚ C - 155˚ C the genle curvature proposed should be easily achieved with this method. The downside of cold curving the sheets is the additional structure required to either hold the mullions together or push the sheets into shape respectively. The Lexan sheets can be cold curved (page 15) at a radius of 100-175 times the sheet thickness depending on coating.

*[DLR]: Docklands Light Railway