Platform_Architecture_and_Design_1.pdf

8 ABOUT FRAMES
LIGHTNESS IN
ARCHITECTURE
by Lucy Bullivant
Lightness in architecture is a design
concept or structure that touches
the ground lightly, non-invasively,
necessary and ideal when the ground
is fragile or its eco-systems need to be
preserved. This might include floating
on the water, an increasingly recognized
category of housing on many continents,
or an integrated plan for introducing
bio-diversity into an area. Lightness is a
versatile, multi-faceted quality that can
be powerfully interrelated with solidity.
A solid structure can be light, looking
and functioning with resilience and yet
possessing delicacy.
Lightness is literal lightness, born
of a design that is open, or openable
to nature, porous, diffusing light, or
made light and sensory through its
luminosity and other subtle design
tactics. SO-IL’s office in Brooklyn,
NYC, with its luminous, stretched
PVC ceiling and fabric walls conveys
a sense of depth of field changes, with
layers diffusing the daylight. Magma
Architecture’s Olympic Shooting
Arenas are light structures conforming
to a concept of reduce, reuse and
recycle, with two levels of membrane to
hide the structure and rings to tension
the façade.
5+1AA’s design for the new
headquarters of BNP Paribas in
Rome is light, in the sense that it is
probably the most reflective building
in the whole city, with an identity that
dissolves and changes in perception as
the viewer walks from the trains, from
the station, or from different locations.
The new images of the buildings on
the Electric Boulevard, designed by
Foster + Partners and Gehry Partners,
at the Battersea Power Station for the
Development Company undertaking
regeneration of the site, released
last October, have dynamism, rather
than lightness. The challenge of this
site is how best to surround the sheer
monumental identity of the Power
Station, complementing rather than
overwhelming it.
Remedial design interventions in
an urban landscape should be light.
Everyone is tired of heavy infrastructure
that looks as if it was thrown down
over the land, carving up communities,
Robert Moses-style, in order to assert a
single use. Grupo Aranea’s beautifully
sinuous Twisted Valley scheme, in
Elche, Alicante, in Spain, emulates the
complexity of nature in its crossing
points, with a system that can adapt
to bring different crossing points over
light pedestrian and cycling bridges.
Anti-monumental, and seemingly
growing from the sides of the disused
river bank, it is light in its touch, and
has helped to regenerate vegetation and
local ecosystems. The multidisciplinary
landscape urbanism practice
Groundlab, which won the competition
for Sokolniki Park in Moscow, the
largest of its kind in Europe, together
with Urbanica, a Russian practice (their
team is named Wowhaus), took account
of, and enhanced the site’s proximity
to a nature reserve, its historical axial
structure and undifferentiated forest
area, strengthening identity, enhancing
heritage and the Park’s diverse
characteristics. There is no heavy
and destructive eradication of land,
but a light touch in the urban design,
confidently drawing out a new identity.
Good architecture and urban design
is about sound inspiring strategies for
complementary processes that build
synergy, connectivity and resource.
They need to guide us, like the lights
of a candle, to places of sustenance and
delight, places that we can care for and
feel part of.