Gus Wray

Leaving Berlin

The Einbahn-Höfe proposal exists not as a continuation of the AIV Schinkel competition, but rather as a transfiguration.

Its forms - the re-used concrete slabs and pylons of the obsolete Autobahn 104 - are re-purposed for a new site. There is a new lease of life for the physical body, and a semiotic interpretation of the original, with a new form derived through projection, overlaying, and reconfigurative collage.  

Appropriate elements of the previous project - the concrete, the framework, the fracturing - were recreated as planar images and physical models, to then be imaged through the light of Berlin as a field of culture, texture, and memory, and distorted and layered as a series of photograms. I collaged the resultant photograms into a series of forms, to which the physically re-used slabs and pylons were applied, resulting in a dense nexus of housing that defines the wider field in which it sits. The original elements are transformed twice: once, as cut and shattered bodies, and another, as deformed and distorted, yet ontologically whole, projections of the original Forms.

The housing begins as the typical Berliner courtyard housing typology, replete with contemporary interpretations of the berlinerzimmer. The photogram-collage proceeds to splinter through, breaking and re-making the homes as fractured spaces. I applied a deconstructivist language, re-evaluating the preconception of “wall”, “slab”, and “window” as continuous and orthogonal planar surfaces. The splintering forms deep wells of light that penetrate through the massive, reused concrete, providing opportunities for flowering and growth. The dead motorway becomes a haven for human and non-human life to take root. 

 

Montage and Collage

The montage becomes the new method of being. 

This approach is a continuation of the AIV Schinkel architectural competition: a rearrangement of the existing in new, discrete, jagged forms. 

The components of the competition entry: existing slabs and pylons, new support frameworks and massings, the botanical and urban research of the site (diagrammed or redrawn, printed on acetate), the physical photographs of Berlin as what makes Berlin itself - exemplified in the Photoautomat photo kiosk, the texture of the paving, the tactility of the urban park - all these elements are rearranged on sheets of photo paper to create photograms.

The rearrangement is analogous to the aleatory architectures referenced earlier in the semester: the drawn, printed, and modelled components are arranged according to their physical composition, and nothing more. This three-dimensional arrangement of parts is translated to the two-dimensional photogram and becomes a new architecture: adjacencies of transparency, solidity, regularity, information and planarity.

These elements are cut out and rearranged again, collaged

These collages are reinterpreted as new architectures.

Over and Over

The methodology of my proposal is designed to be continuous - an endless stream of architectures derived from the overlaying and collaging of the previous. This image shows a multiple-exposure image of negatives of Berlin, enlarged and projected onto my final 1:500 site model. The cycle continues.