OSLO CONVERGENCE
The Project is an example for integrating programmatic, spatial, structural and environmental associative modelling is a design for a 24-hour multifunctional building at the North-eastern corner of the Palace Park in Oslo atop of a reused underground train station. The project is located at the edge of the Park at a much used circulation route and the continuous spiralling surface of the project seeks to tap into this flow while distributing public programmes and activities along its rising route. The activities are correlated with the multiple envelope strategy of the scheme, which provides fully enclosed and transitional spaces between the exterior and the interior. The integrated associative model serves to ensure that the open interior space without subdivision is making suitable provisions for its intended public and collective activities and sets out a vision for architecture that is driven by demographic changes and diversifying needs of Oslo’s citizens.
The relationship between continuity and discontinuity, solid and void is what makes urban life in the city. Mixity more than density could characterize the contemporary urbanity.
The distance relationship between public buildings, different uses and voids is what makes the city act as the stage for urbanity proliferation. The area of Slottsparken has the characteristics to act as a junction between two different conditions (Bogstadsveien and Karl Johans Gate) and generator of new urbanity in the city. A real mixed program area, with cultural richness, nightlife, commercial and a big amount of people going through it. It is a space of transition, a place where the scale, section and perception change.
Time is something we use to articulate our succession of activites during the day,but how does that relate to an architecture and its programmatic layout?
The project explores the concept of time as a flow, that continues with different interactions translated into the physical space where the rigidity of the regular relationship between walls and slabs give space to a continuous extended walkable surface where it is impossibile to define a start and an end, where horizontality meets verticality (rheotomic surface), where interior meets the exterior (layered envelope). The spatial experience as experience of time, of a flow, with extreme possibility of circulation, where the path is always different and leads every time to different points.
The use and the generation of an associative model has been fundamental to control the complexity of the overall design.
This led to the possibility of testing the design strategies through an iterative process which involved different and peculiar elements of the design, such as the geometry definition, the programmatic layout, sunlight and radiation analysis, structural analysis and the envelope system.
