In the design of the façade, we had to address those issues. When my three-and-a-half year old son saw the water, he said, “Eh, waterfall!” So I put this picture in to capture the sense of flow that we wanted to achieve in the blocks, the façade. The vertical lines actually help us to break down the mass of the blocks and reduce the perceived mass. This is a picture of a DNA sequencing. Essentially small little bits of data but strung together, you can actually read the DNA of a person. So we saw this picture and we were quite excited as well. This is a picture taken from The Matrix. Essentially, the physical architecture or the physical nature, degenerates into data or transforms into data. I hope it shows what we are trying to do.
Essentially we atomised the entire façade into smaller components and then we reassembled them. So, we ended up with eighteen different types of panels. The red or warmer tones show the front façade and the blue, or cooler tones are on the side and back. The number of these elements, you can read off here and basically, this represents the percentage of occurrences throughout the entire development. [Text has been cut as it would have been unclear without the visuals. The editors.]
Ok, we come to the units now. What you see on this slide shows how we sorted out the units. Essentially the structure is placed in the corner or the periphery of the building and we designated zones where you can move your walls without affecting the façade. When we renovate flats, the toilets and the façade give us the most restrictions, so when we designed these units, we decided to try and get rid of those restrictions. This is the basic unit, which allows you to move this wall this way for a smaller bedroom 1 and a bigger bedroom 2, or if you move this wall here, you can have a bigger master bedroom, etc, etc. [The text has been cut as it would have been unclear without the visuals. The editors.]
Last modified: 30 October 2002