Structure, Space and Skin: On the Autonomy of Enclosure

Contemporary architecture, composed as it is of assembled components, contains elements that appear to behave as commodities—following rapidly changing trends, reflecting tastes that mutate in patterns of industrially dictated and marketed planned obsolescence. The surface or cladding of contemporary architecture is most affected by this consumerist tendency of contemporary western civilization. Some of the most successful buildings are spectacular in terms of their envelope, while containing sometimes quite ordinary mass-produced slices of horizontal space inside. Since the advent of curtain wall technologies, the notion of the architectural elevation as an expression or expressive development of the plan, has been supplanted in some practices by a concept of enclosure as wrapping the building envelope. This has combined with the capacity of architectural design software to conceive of built volume as swathed, enfolded, or draped in angular or undulating surfaces. this paper studies several recent projects, including projects by Livio Vacchini, Peter Zumthor, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, in order to determine if the design of the building envelope is a process autonomous form the plan and program design development.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2