DYNAMIC TENSIONS
Forma Urbana é un libro che raccoglie i progetti dello studio Architensions, ogni progetto è accompagnato da un testo che non solo lo descrive ma segna la linea di pensiero del suo fondatore, Alessandro Orsini, una architetto Italiano, che ha deciso di vivere e lavorare a New York, è un libro interesante ben curato che raccoglie anche dei saggi brevi di Yehuda E. Safran, Giancarlo Mazzanti e del sottoscritto.
Forma Urbana
Architensions
a cura di Alessandro Orsini
Libria 2015
Architensions does not produce pretty images but defines a field of action for its architecture. It is used as a lens to observe an urban condition. It produces projects that interact with the landscapes that host them, whether natural or urban landscapes, the projects register the movements of the user and take shape, an accomplished shape, only once inserted in the context for which they were created.
Many of these projects are unbuilt, but they have the same strength of projects experienced daily.
These are projects that act at different scales, because architecture, when it follows an idea, is not forced to define an iconography of reference and it is not necessary to define a language, but it is important that it acts on the matter of things, managing the continuous tensions that exist between architecture, landscape, and urban structures.
Architensions does not produce pretty images but defines a field of action for its architecture. It is used as a lens to observe an urban condition. It produces projects that interact with the landscapes that host them, whether natural or urban landscapes, the projects register the movements of the user and take shape, an accomplished shape, only once inserted in the context for which they were created.
Many of these projects are unbuilt, but they have the same strength of projects experienced daily.
These are projects that act at different scales, because architecture, when it follows an idea, is not forced to define an iconography of reference and it is not necessary to define a language, but it is important that it acts on the matter of things, managing the continuous tensions that exist between architecture, landscape, and urban structures.
These projects are not radical but at the same time not totally immersed in the real, they are suspended in a form of abstraction, which makes them always equal to themselves but different, they are urban devices that interpret the context and reality.
In recent years, we have been observing different directions in architecture that have evolved separately. On one hand the digital architecture, which search in the form and production technique its definitive affirmation, and the urban project that defines conditions through which the architecture itself becomes an occasion of theoretical speculation.
Architensions avoids both, searching through the simplicity of the project for a third way.
Through their process, an idea of architecture finds its place, between design and city, capable of investigating first a mental place that operates between individual projects, and immediately after its formal representation generated by motion diagrams. This space is not, as I said, aimed at creating episodic images ready to be consumed but rather the development of a thought within the discipline. The project always tells a story, the invention is replaced with a reflection.
But let’s go in order, to explain my interpretation I want to refer to three specific projects. Each of these projects has been designed for a different region of the world, they are formally all different. But if analyzed carefully, they all work according to the same logic, which instead of homologate it makes them different. This does nothing but confirms my idea of an attitude to the project that is derived from carefully reading the sites and of what architecture can produce in these places, its necessity to the life of the city. Where architecture is possible the city lives and exists, where there isn’t the city slowly dies.
The dimensions are different, yet the multiple visions of users act on different scales, in a similar way and produce comparable effects.
In Sorgenti del Piave a system of unique pavilions along a predetermined path generates a reading experience of the landscape. The building stems from an archetype form and reinvents it consistently, through a modification of the method of use of the building itself, the spatial experience builds a machine that narrates the place for which it was created.
The project of Badel Block in Croatia develops the program on a linear path that acts on multiple levels, deforming the traditional block and amplifying the spatial possibilities of different functional programs, the experience defines the reading of the context and its assimilation by whoever experience the building, the same morphological operation at different scales produces different actions, related to the body in the case of the Pavilion, the functional program in the project in Croatia.
The Yeosu Expo pavillion in Korea dedicated to the ecology of the oceans transformed the building into a complex system of tangent volumes, which seems to just touching. To the deformation of a single object, it adds the complexity resulting from their aggregation. The types change, but it remains unchanged the desire to generate and create tensions within the city through the use of architecture, that at this scale becomes a city itself.
Flipping through the pages of this little book I’m not attracted to individual objects but by the evolution of a thought.
It is no coincidence that Alessandro Orsini has worked extensively for Steven Holl. He seems to have absorbed by osmosis from the American master the ability to look at the world from inside his own architecture, which chases to the end a logic of sensation.
Flipping through the pages of this little book I’m not attracted to individual objects but by the evolution of a thought.
It is no coincidence that Alessandro Orsini has worked extensively for Steven Holl. He seems to have absorbed by osmosis from the American master the ability to look at the world from inside his own architecture, which chases to the end a logic of sensation.
