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IVORY TOWER PROJECT
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This project aims to address a variety of challenges that have not been
seriously engaged in recent contemporary architecture. The idea is to
create an architecture for the middle eastern world that addresses
aspects of climate and cultural identity. The project aims at finding
new methods in architecture to deal with urgent questions of
responsibility in a period of transition to new energy resources. As an
example, traditional glass and steel high rise constructions, built and
developed during the last century for colder climates, basically have a
greenhouse effect in a desert climate and demand enormous levels of
energy consumption to remain functional. Current technology is widely
used to support existing but inappropriate design when instead it could
advance and revolutionize the process of building.
Climatic issues have always played an
important part in traditional
architecture of the region but contemporary architecture has yet to
draw on and develop these techniques. The natural world provides plenty
of further inspiration: complex organisms like termite colonies are
able to generate mounds with thermodynamic qualities. We are looking
into natures’ techniques to inform our use of materials and strategies,
drawing on principles like natural growth, and looking to materials
with certain durability and adaptability such as natural ceramics.
While today’s architectural methods still depend on prefabrication – a
technique dating from the industrial revolution - new methods developed
in other contexts such as rapid prototyping can be utilized to save
time, energy and material during construction and maintenance of a
tectonic structure.
Traditions of middle eastern
architecture, reflecting local cultures,
provide another principle. The project draws on specific ideas of
individuality and social behavior and aims to translate these into
architecture with results that resemble similar design patterns used
for centuries throughout the islamic world.
In the proposed high rise structure, there is no superimposition of
floors, no rigid inner core and no traditional facade. Inner spaces
have functions like the cells and organs of a body, necessary for the
building to breath, exchange energy and water, and control the climate.
The project is meant to serve as a model of how new kinds of
architectural solutions can emphasize balance and equilibrium. The
project reflects ideas of dynamism, specificity and a
new blurring of the borders between nature and artifice, science and
art, the virtual and the real.
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