UNStudio

PRESENTED BY
J SONIKA
UNStudio (formerly Van Berkel en Bos
Architecten bureau) is a Dutch architectural
practice specializing in architecture, urban
development and "infrastructural" projects.
The practice was founded in 1988 by Ben van
Berkel and Caroline Bos. The initials "UN"
stand for United Network, a reference to the
collaborative nature of the practice comprising
individuals from various countries with
backgrounds and technical training in
numerous fields. In 2009 UNStudio Asia was
established, with its first office located in
Shanghai, China. UNStudio Asia is a full
daughter of UNStudio and is intricately
connected to UNStudio Amsterdam.
wide range of
work ranging
from public
buildings,
infrastructure,
offices, living,
products, to
urban
masterplans.
Knowledge
Sharing
platform
BOOKS
UNStudio in motion- Project book 2012
REFLECTIONS -A small stuff by UNStudio
DESIGN MODELS- Architecture Urbanism Infrastructure
BUY ME A MERCEDES-BENZ- The book of the museum
MOVE
UNSTUDIO
VAN BERKEL DIGITALE
UNSTUDIO The Floating Space
UNSTUDIO UN FOLD
MOBILE FORCES
DELINQUENT VISIONARIES
CATALOUGE EVOLUTION OF SPACE
BAUWELT 17/06
MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
LOVEI IT LIVE IT- Monograph UNStudio
GENO(V)A FUTURES- (Developing and rebooting a waterfront city)
DESIGN EVOLUTION- Mercedes-Benz Museum
UNSTUDIO ERASMUS BRIDGE- Source books in Architecture 4
BEN VAN BERKEL, ARCHITECTU
BEN VAN BERKEL
DESI GN TECHNI QUES
ATTAINABLE DESIGN
UNStudio is committed to the promotion and practice of sustainable design.
Environmental issues such as economic, social and ecological sustainability are
considered from the initial stages of each project both at a global and local level.
INTEGRAL METHODOLOGY
The practice favors an integral approach to architecture; a non-hierarchical,
complex, generative and integral design process that takes on board all
aspects of architecture. Time, use, circulation, construction and all other
material and virtual systems and underlying values are studied, visualized,
related to each other, and finally joined into an inclusive organizational
structure.
RESPONSIBLE APPROACH
UNStudio understands the changing role of architects. New production methods
developed by the building industry, the current transnational condition of
architecture, new design techniques and the changed, more functionally
complex, nature of the architectural project itself have led us to develop new
working strategies.
Diagrams
Diagrammatic technique provides
a foothold in the fast streams of
mediated information. The
meaninglessness that repetition
and mediation create is overcome
by diagrams, which generate new,
instrumental meanings and steer
architecture away from typological
fixation.
What is a diagram?
In general, diagrams are
best known and understood as
visual tools used for the
compression of information. A
specialist diagram, such as a statistics
table or a schematic image, can
contain, as much information in a
few lines as would fill pages in writing.
In architecture, diagrams have in the last
few years been introduced as part of a
technique that promotes a proliferating,
generating and instrumentalising
approach to design. The essence of the
diagrammatic technique is that it
introduces into a work qualities that
are unspoken, disconnected from an
ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive,
subjective, not bound to a linear logic -
qualities that can be physical, structural,
spatial or technical.
There are three stages to the diagram:
selection, application and operation,
enabling the imagination to extend to subjects outside it and draw them inside,
changing itself in the process.

Diagrams are packed with information on many levels. A diagram
is an assemblage of solidified situations, techniques, tactics and functionings.
Different types of diagrams used
ideograms, line diagrams, image diagrams and finally operational
diagrams, found in technical manuals, reproductions of paintings or random
images that we collect.
DESI GN MODELS
Design model share hybrid entities that are akin
to a conceptual parti.
They often center on circulation.

One example would be a Center Courtyard Design Model.
Imagine if UNStudio would have designed Rapson Hall. They would have
started with the Center Courtyard Design Model. As the project
progressed and they figured out the impact of a central courtyard on
this type of project, this information stays attached to the Design Model.
PROJECTS
Mercedes- Bens Museum
35,000sqm area
Designed between 2001-2006
includes also a restaurants,
stores, offices and an
auditorium.
Parametric Model: Arnold Walz
Exhibits split into two groups
The Legend Tour
The Collections Tour.
The architects looked to a Double Helix Design Model, and began to envision a
museum where the two paths constantly circled one another.
The Double Helix Design
Model was augmented by a Trefoil Design, allowing the two
paths to constantly converge and diverge as visitors
circumambulated the exhibits.

The end result was a geometry of a clover,
with display spaces connected between two
helical ascending ramps, around a central
atrium.
The unending loops of a trefoil
translate directly into the
spatial arrangement of displays
within the museum
According to Ben van Berkel, The Mercedes-Benz
Museum sets up an interface for a series of
radical spatial principles in order to
create a completely new typology.

And by this, he refers to how visitors experience the
museum:
They do not begin their visit to the exhibition
at a conventional entrance at the base of the building.
They are transported by lift to the top floor.
Here they have the choice of two tours,
during which they descend through the building.
The paths of each tour meet on each floor,
enabling visitors to switch between tours the
Collections tour and Legend tour should they wish to
do so.
The main difference between the direct geometry modelling, and the
associative model comes from the "topological effect" of the digital
environment enabling re-configuration of the geometric structure
Parametric Modeling
A parametric model does not contain a description of a rigid
form, but the definition of spatial relations, the
principles of inheritance of specific geometric features
by secondary structure elements, the method of
allocation and method of generating successive levels
of spatial relationships.
A pre-generated form may be modified by changing the value of
certain parameters, until it meets certain criteria for e.g.
aesthetic or structural
The project concept was based on the composition of three
circles, tangents and intersections to be reduced gradually to the geometry
needed to create the object.
The definition of the shape of each element of the
building depends on the basic layout of the trefoil plane.
Everything in this building from the ramp width and the
dimensions of concrete slabs on the floor was coordinated and designed
using a parametric model, which allowed analysis of all alternative
solutions that meet the given criteria.
Parametric modelling is particularly useful for modelling the geometry of buildings
with a complex form.
INTERIOR
Spaces dedicated to The Legend Tour are single height spaces that often
face the central atrium to control light.

These spaces concentrate on telling the history of Mercedes Benz.

The Collections Tour, however, features double height spaces, natural light,
and views to the outside to highlight the collections of cars they contain.
The design constantly juxtaposes a visitors foreground with open views to
the rest of the museum, in effect placing each individual exhibit within the continuum
of Mercedes Benz history.
EXTERIOR
The exterior is simply an aluminium and glass skin that wraps the structure and
responds directly to its programmatic layout.
Design to production: implemented a parametric 3D-model of the whole building to
coordinate all the subsequent planning steps of the numerous trades involved.
Thousands of plans were generated from this master geometry during the
building process.
Design to production : developed a method that enabled the assembly of the doubly
curved formwork form planar boards. The panels precisely pre-cut on a CNC-router
were bent to the desired shape in situ during the construction process, exploiting their
elasticity.
EFFECTS
Radiant synthetic
To make an architecture that is truly utilitarian, we need to know, calculate and
direct its effects.
But how does one define architectural effect?

Effects do not resemble the thing that causes them; 'pain does not resemble a
needle'


Effects are manifestations of the phenomenon, which includes sensory experiences
of the external world, experiences of the inner world, such as fantasies and ideas,
and, finally, experiences of emotion or affect.


An architectural effect synthesises these three aspects of phenomenology, bringing
about reverberations on many levels.

Time and Space
Space is the emptiness or space is the NOTHING


Time is not understood as something that is produced in various ways, but, like
space, it is simply there; infinite, its beginning and ending undefined


Space is seen as topologically formed. New visualisations of space arise, like the
imaginary phase space. With these new conceptualisations comes an increased
malleability of substance.


Mathematically surface has 2 sides

Orientability thus pertains to a spatially obvious situation. Nonorientability describes
a hybrid surface condition, in which the to sides are warped. Instances of orientable
effects on architectural organisation are spring structures and Seifert surfaces.

The Seifert surface is an orientable surface of
which one boundary component is embedded
in such a way that it is a knot, resulting in
planes changing direction and flipping over.
Under the influence of time, the pliability of
space becomes even greater, especially when
time is itself seen as an entity subject to
transformation.
ViLA NM is
playf ul,
sexy and
f un. The
ho use is
a co mplex
desig n
simply
ev o ked.
genetic modification of architecture
Design twist
The flat-roofed 300 square-metre
villa is split into two parts one follows the
slope of the hill, the other rises above it.
The central vertical axis forms a twisted
shape that contains the bathroom, kitchen
and fireplace.
The twist is central to the design,
providing not just column-free space
for unobstructed movement but structural
support for the first floor cantilever.
Expansive perimeter glass walls and
large windows allow the family to enjoy 360
views of the surrounding landscape.
The spring structure is a spatial effect consisting of a line that transforms itself as it
writhes through space, coiling, supercoiling and uncoiling as it twists and flattens itself
out again, stretches itself widely and narrows once more in an uninterrupted sequence
of deformations.
MUMUTH MUSI C THEATRE, GRAZ
AUSTRI A
TWIST
Complex spatial structure, non-uniform-rational B-splines (NURBS),
composite construction, formworks made by CNC mills, self compacting concrete
(SCC)
The volatile, differentiated
aspects of time contribute to the
potential of topological knots for
architecture.
Topology, as the study of
the properties of superficial
structures under deformations, is the
hybridization of differential space
and differential time.
When the continuous
deformation of a surface leads to the
intersection of interior and exterior
planes, the transformability of
topological surfaces results in
nonorientable objects.

The perfect continuity of nonorientability initiates new categories of surfaces and effects.
The Mobius band, used architecturally, makes a thematic connection operate
differentially in a field of time. The surface integrates distribution of the programme,
infrastructure, construction, events and time.

The mathematical proposition of the
Klein bottle gives rise to even more far-reaching
architectural effects.
As an edgeless, nonorientable
geometric structure that intersects itself, it has
no closed interior.
It can be used to achieve an integral
construction that works like a landscape acted on
by dynamic force fields.
.
The surface of the Klein bottle can be
translated into a channelling system, incorporating
all the ingredients that it encounters and
propelling them into a new type of internally
interrelated, integral organisation
MOBI US HOUSE
The organizational and formal structure of the private house is
based on a double-locked torus, the mobius loop. The intertwining
trajectory of the loop relates to the 24-hour living and working
cycle of the family, where individual working spaces and bedrooms
are aligned but collective areas are situated at the crossing points
of the paths. In a similar manner these unfolding lines are
materialized with glass and concrete, swapping the conventional
use of these materials.
Topologically inspired diagrams like the spring
structure, Seifert surface, Mobius band and Klein
bottle are not applied to architecture in a stringent
mathematical way, but they are not mere metaphors
or themes either.
These orientable and nonorientable
organisations provide unifying, abstract, three-
dimensional models that can be wholly or partially
projected onto real-life locations to integrate the
imagination and the policy at the basis of the project
and its programmes, techniques, organisation and
public utility.
REFLECTIONS
THE BURNHAM PAVILION
Located in the middle of Millennium Park
Framed by lake Michigan on one side and Michigan
avenue on the other.

Relates to diverse city-contexts, programs and
scales

Programmed invite people to gather, walk around
and through and to explore and observe

The UNStudio pavilion is sculptural, highly
accessible and functions as an urban
activator.
Based on the specificity of the site, the design of the pavilion
elaborates on the relationship to the existing rigid geometry, but it
also introduces a floating and multi-directional space.

Most importantly introduces diverse vistas towards the park and city
surroundings.
The pavilion is open at its sides, between the two horizontal planes of
the podium and roof
The pavilion introduces a gradient between its ingredients of
floor, wall and ceiling in a floating and continuous form.

The hierarchy of the horizontal or vertical plane is converted
into an understanding of a space as a continuous
transformation and fluidity.
The initially horizontal panorama on top of the
pavilions podium smoothly shifts diagonally into
the three roof openings, framing vertical views of
the city skyline.
The ambivalence of directionality and the
introduction of continuous flow in the structure
allows for a smooth opening-up of spaces,
directions and, importantly, the most diverse
vistas from which to frame and read the city
context
It orients itself to
the city texture,
to the flows of
visitors exploring
Millennium Park
OTHER ESSAYS