Transparent Cells and Flying Trees

Ethel Baraona Pohl posted the Transparent Cells in ArchDaily. The project was published in 2009 from TU Delft and it concerns the design for a New School of Architecture after the old Jacob Berend Bakema's building was burnt. The building interprets visually an invisible network of people communicating through the Internet. It concerns a new school of Architecture and its form is given to the invisible social student life by the placing of independent glass units in an elevation that serves as an interface or as a simple presentation screen. The main elevation is meant to function as web site, where we see users online. Things changed radically in the conditions of a university studio of architecture during the nineties.

The big amphitheatric studio of Harvard's GSD, could represent a structure embodying one of the more spectacular possible frames for an architecture workshop in the early past.












(Harvard GSD, from yan da's flickr box)

Such a concept for a studio has no real practical value today. The conditions of sitting and working on architectural drawings are different. A studio today is a space of mediated communication through existing invisible networks. The networks are present and the communities are formed in flexible ways without that we see them.

The studio was performed as a table work, now it is a work done through screenings. The student works are operations done in front of screens; the works do not differ so much from normal office works as was the case in the past. The network circulation of drawings and photos is more quick and efficient than the traditional public presentation of them. The school works as a tv channel or a newspaper; it has to follow the media rationale: work to be produced in order to be seen and criticized by a community that is not necessarily found inside the school. This condition needs other conditions of sharing that depend more to a net strategy than to a communal space syntax. Communities are formed in an abstract space and the dialogue is to be performed in sophisticated Internet platforms.