Thinking Outside the Box

(page 4 of 5)

He points to the corners at the base of the pavilion, but there is nothing there. Because the building supports the structure through the crisscrossing lines, the corners have no structural purpose, so he suspended them to make it obvious they weren’t carrying weight, while the load-bearing lines were made of thicker steel. The resulting building was a box, but one Balmond could approve of—without columns or anything that would make one think of a box; the pattern on it created the structure.

For CCTV, the mammoth telecommunications center currently under construction, the process was different: “totally opposite,” though the building still bears the hallmark of Balmond’s interest in pattern and how you can create something that defies the generic solution. From the outset he and Koolhaas worked closely on it. It started with a late-night phone call—and a mad flurry of faxes. Balmond sent one of a building that, he says, “was much more brutal than it looks now.” He sketches and says, “I knew with this doglegging form that the whole skin was being mobilized without knowing what it was. I wanted to get Rem away from any feelings of core. I knew we had to work hard on the skin, that we needed it because of the torsion from the shape. Plus it’s an earthquake zone, so I was worrying about all those things.”

In New York on the day the CCTV show opens at MoMA, Koolhaas sits hunched over a low table in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel. “We developed the building in a series of organic sketches and models,” he says, sketching one of Balmond’s early ideas, drawing the upside-down asymmetric U that has made the building so famous. He traces a quick spiral of tight circles around it. “Cecil was interested in finding a structure that wrapped the whole thing in an organic ringed system of structure. We pursued that for a while, then it got away from that idea to something more classical where it had to be divided in equal sections.” But neither of them would let go of the idea of a skin. “We felt that the sectional system wasn’t doing it much justice and felt this continuity,” Koolhaas taps his pen on the spiraling drawing, “was more desirable, but we asked, ‘Does every member have to work equally hard?’”

In London Balmond answers that question easily. “We quickly realized that if you take the generic skin, it changes its patterns as it moves around the body, so without studying it we just drew zones to begin.” With a traditional building—the Hancock Center, say—all external bracing has a set pattern, and Balmond didn’t think they needed that here. “With typical engineering, you take a peak condition, take a section and spread it across the whole project, and to me that’s wasteful. I’d rather make this work here and that work there if it has a place within the architecture.” So he put his ideas into the computer to see what happened. “Sure enough it was giving different patterns all over the place with different stresses,” he says and smiles.

He and Koolhaas decided to put material where they needed it and leave it off where they didn’t. For the skin they created a diamond pattern that could be deployed at different scales. The pattern itself never changes, but because of its serially repeating nature they could use a larger version of it with less bracing where they needed less support, and where they needed more a smaller one, with tighter diamonds and additional bracing. “Rem understood that this would give a power to the building. He knew this form needed something—and this was it, purely structurally driven.”

“You know,” Koolhaas says, “neither of us is interested in radicality per se. It’s more of a kind of resistance to the obvious—or a further investigation of the obvious.” That questioning of expectation is what has informed Balmond’s bridge in Coimbra, where he was fighting against the foregone conclusion that when you step onto a bridge you get to the other side, the teleological imperative of a pedestrian bridge.