Concours d’idées Evolo 2007. Conception d’une tour urbaine qui permet l’accès à différents niveaux d’espaces publiques en diversifiant les points de vue sur la ville.
Architecte: RAAI, Franck Murat
Ingénierie Structure: RAAI
Client: Privé
Date: 2008
THE NETWORK: A CONTEMPORARY TOOL FOR THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF URBANISM.
INTRODUCTION
This project is a conceptual response towards a generic high rise city in which the skyscraper is implanted. This generic situation is not contextual.
Doing so, we can attribute to it characteristics that seem to us common to all high rise cites, with out having to analyze were the high rise city that
gathers the most of our conceptual characteristics.
This conceptual approach makes us try to define a generic response to all high rise cities. If we would have responded to the contest by developing
one Skyscraper in a defined place it would have crystallized the response in such a way that it would have became a response to a defined situation.
It is not our will to give a response or to focus on the formal answer. Our aim is to insist on the interaction between: the site, the urban fabric, the
programs and the surrounding skyscrapers.
FROM ISOLATION TO URBANITY
High rise cities are made of a three dimen-
sional environment that is distributed by a
one plan system of irrigation. All the other
ways of circulating in the towers are private
and finish in a dead-end. The Hub aims to
give alternative ways of circulating in the
city. These circulations offer new urban qua-
lities to the users, giving new perspectives of
the urban space, making the Hub and its sur-
roundings work as a three dimensional urban
network.
High rise buildings are isolated from urban fabric.The Hub reduces the isolation by adding connections between the existing towers.
BUILT AND PERCEPTED VOIDBUILT AND PERCEPTED VOIDBUILT AND PERCEPTED VOID
This urbanism is characterized by cumulating all the circulations at the foot of buildings. The Hub offers human scale circulation that makes it possible to go trough the whole city, offering the existent void that becomes a real built urban space with a more human scale environment. The void becomes a built urban space because of the network of con- nections that irrigates it. The city becomes a multi dimensional environment in which a more radical and intense experience of spa- ce is possible.
Traditional high rise cities are out of scale because urbanism is on the ground.The development of several Hubs gives a third dimension to existing urbanism.
CIRCULATIONS
A Hub is made to concentrate flux in hence to redistribute them in a more equilibrated way. This equilibrium is reached by a new and diversified way of circulating trough the urban fabric. Circulations have different speeds depending on the distance to reach. They are composed of different mechanical systems, each one adapted to the local or global way of going trough the urban fabric. The vertical structure integrates all flux’s and vertical connections. Connecting them to the existent urban network of public transports.
Adding connections to the local underground and to the existing skyscrapers makes cities more fluid.
GRAVITY AND INERTY
The Hub is a complete and autonomous struc- ture. It‘s connections hold on there own. They do not need to stand on the existing buildings. The tower in built around a cen- tral core that is composed of a main vertical structure that holds plateaus that can be of very different shapes and that can transform freely. The Hubs shape is round to allow multiple connections all around the tower. This neu- trality is only shaped by the several connec- tions. This structural composition depends of the span distance of the towers that are in the environment of the Hub. The bigger the span the more important the extension has to be to equilibrate the tower. This system makes the formal aspect unique and totally depen- dent of the environment.
PROGRAM
The Hub is a multi programmatic autonomous structure that articulates it way of functioning with the existing environment. It gives the possibility to the surrounding skyscrapers to extend themselves and have a part of there programs functioning in it. Programs have the possibility of being along the link and extending in a series of plateaus depending on the needs of each situation. The plateaus are flexible to be able to give a larger amount of possibilities. These programs are irrigated and owe their cohesion to the system of public spaces and circulations that are the main central part of the building.
