Capsule Corporation

Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo

Project idea

PROJECT IDEA.

What do we understand by the term Project?
We understand the Project as a process stripped of prejudices and purely aesthetic searches. We try to define a problem, a concern for which to build an intelligent response through experimentation and trial, loaded with intuition, reflection and invention.

How do we approach it?
From a project intelligence that, through an instrumental platform, allows us to isolate the "problem" or architectural object, dismember it, classify its components and conceive it as a device with its own rules and logic.
Understand how this device behaves, what are the links and relationships that it establishes, what elements it puts at stake and in what way it is going to build a certain experience.
Therefore, our project becomes a dense, systematized and above all reflected object. A consistent object that builds an intelligent response, addressing relational, qualifying, organizational and expressive aspects.

PROJECT LOCATION.

Life in this operating city.
Dizzying desire of the anxious spectator. The rested lenses of the observer accompany a zenith movement towards the crown of great perspectives.
These great masses disguise what life gives us, covering us with coats in search of thermal equilibrium.
Noises governed by the dynamism of people slide like water between their hands, it is impossible to stop such phenomenon. In conjunction with the human inability to diminish those noises, passive spaces free of all tension are implored.
Thousands of causes generate the effect of excitement, which through nervous impulses lead to such greed of dissatisfaction.
Living past, present and future in the same space, a time machine city that is the result of its history.
New York is reborn, distorted, altered, and reprogrammed. Sometimes it is silenced, but it never sleeps...

Project description

| P | the systemic

Projecting implies making decisions constantly; conscious decisions that generate a validation framework that becomes even more fundamental than the resulting material fact.
Rehearsing the act of projecting beyond prefiguration and formalism is the main objective, where the architectural project is not simply understood as an object, but as a device. Focusing the interest in the behaviour of the architecture, in what that device enables and not in its appearance. Understanding how the building behaves implies knowing what the links are, the relationships it establishes, what elements it puts into play and how they are going to build a certain experience.
Evidencing what determines this behaviour makes the notion of systems operational. Understanding them as a project tool.
Diverse, flexible, effective, systematic structures incorporate aspects of order, design intelligence and make the architectural project a consistent and concrete act. These structures establish and synthesize relationships between the parts and their environment, marking clear correspondences with the project that is sought to generate.
Therefore, the project is understood as an expression that manifests itself through its parts. Each of them executes a precise role as "part of", "to the service of", "support of". Therefore, the systemic will be the opposition to chaos and disorder with a primarily organizing and optimizing objective (without leaving the criteria and intuitive values for the formation of possible solutions).

Consequence of a design strategy.
Project understood through the decisions taken to respond to both functional requirements and game tactics in the contemporary city, which requires an architecture whose lexicon is defined by terms such as flexibility, superposition and freedom.
In this way, the building unfolds as a machine where certain rules govern, which form systems that operate together and make the totality work. The formal is just a consequence of this whole process.

THE RELATIONAL.

The program:
Building destined to the design of video games whose relations in a demanding program, which goes through different creative stages, are conditioned to the necessity of making recreation and work coexist. At the same time, it’s fundamental to strengthen the link between public and private in a program that demands for its survival to captivate people with the product that is offered and make them feel part of it.
Therefore, it is vital that workers and visitors coexist and even share common spaces. This changing demand in activity leads to the search for spaces capable of mutating and altering its spectrum of functions over time.
For these events to occur, it is essential to give the service areas a high level of hierarchy, granting them an infrastructural role in the program.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL.

Context:
The implantation place is located in a corner next to the High Line, a linear public park that floats ten meters above ground level and coexists with the high urban density of the city of New York. This situation exponentially elevates the public character of the space, and in addition generates a double access both at ground level and in the park itself.
These characteristics impose on the project the responsibility of defining a space, which through its qualities, is capable of offering situations, experiences, atmospheres and services to the High Line and the people who pass through it.
Likewise, responding to climatic factors and environmental comfort also is also relevant in this compositional stage. The functionality of the architectural object, as well as the sensitivity to attend to these particularities begin to configure the project.

The circulatory:
Functional logics.
Two circulatory systems manage, organize and articulate the route through opposite logics with odd aims.
Functional circulation: vertical, direct, instantaneous and strictly functional, aimed for internal staff, giving access to all levels and allowing a more efficient and dynamic movement.
Recreational circulation: heart of the project, it undertakes a long and oblique journey, progressively associating the visitor with the different manifestations that the building offers.
Escalators act as an enhancer of this circulatory dynamic, avoiding the distraction that would involve climbing a conventional staircase and therefore stimulating even more the contemplative act while ascending.
At the same time, an auxiliary elevator block, discontinuous in its arrests, is established to allow direct ascent or descent if necessary.
We are looking for a unique route, a single direction to feel the program.

Narrative logics.
1.Standing in the high line I see, through black scales, a movement of people in regular and constant ascension that encourages me to enter. At the beginning, I elevate in double height and I can see people from above, but then I am absorbed by an escalator that takes me to a different world. I no longer see the high line, but it is collective work and an overwhelming movement of people that now invades my senses.
From the noise, the machines, the games and the congestion I transition to a limited space, empty, closed, that forces me to continue climbing; I do not know what is hidden behind those enclosures.
Suddenly the oblique path offers me a break, and I can choose between stopping to eat, or let myself be tempted by the next escalator. In the end, a contemplative patio lets me see the city through dense vegetation, finishing off the story and the series of episodes that made up the experience.

2.Walking through the high line, a big black box that rises over the park seduces me, intrigues me, but at the same time it intimidates me, and this time I choose to go down instead of going up. Knowing what supports the big box may give me the necessary courage to visit it.
At the beginning, I find myself in a surreal, irrational space, where I am invaded by a world of screens and video games of all kinds and colours. The passage obligates me to go through it and participate in it before I can continue to go down. Once it allows me, a conventional staircase takes me back to the real world, to level zero, where I can choose between leaving, resting, or continuing the trip through the great infrastructure. I keep going down, and a large double height auditorium makes me want to stay. There is something else below, the road continues, but for some reason I cannot access it.
It only remains to go back up, motivated by knowing what is hidden inside that big black box.

The structure:
Heterogeneous system where two antagonistic structures coexist: On the one hand the stereotomic. Heavy, dense and continuous. Support and articulator, this structure is born underground and grows materialized in the circulatory block, linking all the levels and transmitting all the loads to the ground. Spaces that propose unity, opacity and cave feel are exclusive protagonists of the spatial experience, achieving a remarkable contrast with the high areas of the building.
On the other hand, the tectonic, light, modular, metallic. It rises on the high line and grows laterally, allowing the necessary volumetric expansion in the building and following a fundamental logic of the project. Likewise, this structure separates programmatic zones, orders them and shapes them, reaffirming their static condition in the project.
Open to the landscape, it must be complemented by the surrounding skin, which accentuates the light bath produced by this type of structure.

THE SPACE.

The material:
Emphasize the volumetric expansion in order to further evidence the consistency and forcefulness of the project.
Metal bands painted in black are mounted vertically one above the other along this expansion, generating a contrast with the rest of the building, and defining a pattern composed of three types of constant variables within the set. These scales are closed, folded and opened as the program demands the attention of the visitor inside or outside respectively. The senses are awaken, sensations of heaviness and lightness, of opacity and transparency, of clear and diffuse limits are achieved.
On the other hand, the south facade, hidden from the high urban movement, opens to the sun through a continuous glazed surface, conditioning the interior spaces, and contrasting with the black metal bands.

Supports:
The static, the susceptible and the indeterminate.
Triple condition that proposes to establish itself as the guiding idea of the project, as a programmatic infrastructure to enable certain behaviours.
The project operates under these conditions, which strategically gravitate between specificity and adaptability. This leads to having supports, hard elements, which materialize in the structure, services and an already established circulation. On the other hand, and as an organizational consequence of these supports, free spaces to be filled with activities are available thanks to this conduct imposed on the project.
In this way, the building becomes sustainable, understood in a broad sense, capable of adapting to changing demands over time and in the program.

Technical information

THE STRUCTURAL.
Elements:
1. Lightened soul metallic beams, modular, composed of a primary type, parallel to the X axis (high line) and a secondary type of support, parallel to the Y axis (street).
2. metal pillars double PNC, divide the plant into two zones and create project lines.
3. Prefabricated concrete slabs, reduce the weight in the structure, and its dry construction facilitates its installation.
4. Reinforced concrete beams, they create a rhythm in the spaces and are part of the main structure.
5. Reinforced concrete supporting walls, supports of the building, compact, receive the total load and transmit it to the ground.

THE MATERIAL.
For constructive detail:
1. PNC double metal profile.
2. System four-way spider.
3. Curtain wall.
4. Enclosure glazed dvh (double hermetic glass).
5. Lightened soul metallic beam (allow the transfer of installations, ventilation ducts, etc).
6. Made of precast concrete 60cm wide.
7. Modular panel on raised floor (allows to house electrical installations).
8. Pedestals
9. PNC double metal profile