Robert Bowen

Almost every architecture design project is fictional, and every building tells a story.

 

This is a brief synopsis and personal note on my thesis project. For a little more detail read the 'Prelude' and for a lot more detail read the history and tech papers too.

 

I set about asking whether if every building talks of its time, context & creator, deliberately or not, is that not a value architects can employ in order to make buildings more engaging. Is it not a means of applying another layer to bricks and mortar?

 

This project followed the tail of an extraordinary man- David Graaff. A Victorian pioneer of cold storage in South Africa, Graaff became incredibly wealthy and wonderfully interesting character for young students of the future to discover. While searching for an entry point into my thesis I found that by slightly manipulating real historical documents and grouping them together differently I could tell a mildly different history of Cape Town.

 

I began to distort Graaff's history and imagined that he had created a building which made use of modern sustainable means of cooling his cold chambers. This led me into researching district cooling and particular those which make use of large bodies of cold water.

 

At this point it was already clear I was telling a story of my own. It was however time to write up tech and theory papers. The tech paper examined the effect air conditioning has had on architecture as a whole and performed a case study on the Cornell lake source cooling plant.

 

With this expanded knowledge I continued the tale of Graaff's building and designed both its ruins and back story. Eventually I had to create a fictional client to re-occupy the site. Enter GIEC, a global energy company wishing to provide a district cooling service, ride on the reputation of David Graaff and make some money in the process.

 

They provided me with a brief and ended up designing both a district cooling plant and local head-office for my fictional client. In order to hide some less favourable fracking work from the public they requested a 'green building'. This was a tongue and cheek nod to buildings by global energy companies.

 

These green technologies provided me with an opportunity to challenge the Victorian approach to industrial buildings, that being to hide the machine behind the facade. In this case the facade becomes the machine. Each structural element, depending on its position, equipped with a PV Cell and windbelt powered a battery supply.

 

The building's primary function was to provide cooling for the nearby foreshore. To do this it pumped water from the cold ocean, sent it through its heat exchange and exhausted it into a series of pools which in turn fed a nearby canal. The heat absorbed from a separate circuit of pipes returned to the CBD to cool those buildings.

 

These pools and baths followed the tradition set up by Graaff in the original building, they were a means of making the company seem like it cared about the community. These baths were an attempt y me to apply some of Leach's theories in order that people might feel comfortable in an industrial buildings. The building also in an attempt to seduce the public provided a museum, public walkway (which stitches together the local urban fabric) and restaurant and park.

 

The narrative would not have been successfully written into the building if it did not consider the actual ruins of the Amsterdam battery, The original form of the battery walls are hinted at in plan and its volume displayed by great big steel arches.

 

Personally throughout the project I had been playing a sort of game with regards to representation and fiction. We all produce projects which are fictional and justify our fictional buildings through site analysis or research. While I had been justifying my building and its design through research I failed to mention that much of the research had been fictionalised. In the 'Prelude' document clues are dropped that allude to the fact that all is not true. Attempting to justify Victorian arches based on a fictional narrative to examiners who had only just learned of the giant hoax they had fallen for is no easy task, and I would advise future graduates to tread this ground with caution.