nexus – a symbiotism Experiment
Project Formal Strategies: Symbiosis in architecture
The project focusses on the interrelationship of different orders in collision. The site as observed exhibits a plethora of such interactions and relationships relevant to the development of the district and city. This is consistent with the program of the building as a center for metropolitan transformation. Historic and planned development, residential and business districts, park and urban spaces, pedestrian and vehicular traffic, are among the more prominent of these collisions. As a result the site provides an interesting study on the relationships between differing orders as a condition of metropolitan function and development. The project proposes to capitalize on these factors in a study of orders in collision.
The formal origin of the project is derived from the harsh cartesian grid observable in the plan of the district and city, a rigid formal order in collision with a much less rigid non cartesian order. It is a reenactment of the urban fabric of the city as it may appear “under a magnifying glass”. This is executed to facilitate a chaotic interaction between the current traffic of the site and the proposed building users. It also allows for and stimulates the development of a desired future linear park imagined to run the length of, and span across, the rail line. It incorporates these users into the mix as well.
It is a symbiotic celebration of the transition between the present and the past, nature and human habitat, local and urban scales. As a center for Metropolitan transformation and on a site rich in the developmental history and strategy of the city, the project looks to the past, imagines the future and facilitates the movement between them.
