Design Research ● Spatial Design ● Construction
It is the curse of museums that so many of their treasures appear insignificant at first sight.
The Netherlands Architecture Institute holds a vast archive of artifacts considered to be jewels by architectural historians. However the archive was exclusively consulted by matured experts, and remained invisible to the Netherlands' diver design community. NAi director Ole Bouman decided to exhibit 100 of the NAi’s archive most interesting artifacts in a non-permanent gallery designed to appeal to a public of non-experts. A space located in a subterranean room previously inaccesible to the public. OMA, the architectural firm at which I worked was hired to design the new gallery.
Following an iterative research process, the retained project retained to trigger curiosity was to setup a process of voyeurism. Such process works on a close and secret relationship between viewer and artifact that is made visible to other people to generate the desire to see.
The Treasury is organized across two display systems: a circular area in which an assertive curatorial approach fosters an overall understanding of the collection; and small private booths at the perimeter, where single pieces are shown to the individual visitor.
The objects are exhibited behind translucent curtains, which leaves the intermediate space free of information, but not without the sense of the presence of treasures. Within the cabinets and within the circular center, the sense of space is never lost as the semi-transparent walls reveal the presence of the adjacent treasures.
The NAi Treasury's scope was small in architectural size but large in discursive terms. The project was constrained with the necessity of a high conceptual rigor generating narratives that would make design appealing to experts as much as those uninitiated in the field.
One of the project's main challenges was finding a concept both discursive and architectural that OMA's internal team would be convinced by. Our team decided to work with OMA's famous design process of quick and strategic iterations, generating many options
Once that concept was outlined, the architectural detailing had to translate the concepts allure into material and spatial frameworks.
The architectural process if typically divided in a handful of phases. WC studio authored the diagram below summarizing these steps. I entered this project in Schematic Design and carried it o the end of Construction Administration (CA). As a side note, architecture practices are increasingly working through an addition phase after CA called Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) in which "the process of evaluating buildings in a systematic and rigorous manner after they have been built and occupied for some time" (Preiser and colleagues ).
In the case of NAi Treasury, the pre-design phased was worked through by the Business Development department (which I worked in for several months, but not on this specific project) . The contractual terms of architecture projects are the ones in which the foundations of for the design process of an architecture project are usually laid.
The Schematic Design phase is arguably the most exciting for architects. During SD ideas are browsed through with an editorial lens, and narratives are built. For this project, images references were a crucial tool in researching and tuning into a most relevant atmosphere for the space, as well as think about staging, role play for visitors, and materials. Reference images were used to come up with design proposals. These two sets of images -- references and proposals -- are weaved together below.
The space allocated is small compared to the wealth of models present in the NAi archives. At the beginning of the project, the NAi curators and project client are also extremely vague about the curatorial program and express the desires to show as many models as possible at once, while maintaining a sense of editorial relevance and order. A requirement is also to use the staging to make the models attractive and interesting to an audience of non-designers and non-architects. How to make architectural models and drawings appear dramatically significant becomes the problem driving the work.
A challenge in finding the solution therefore became how to display a wide variety of objects in a confined space to appeal to a wide audience and allow exploration. The archive inspired us, while we were aware that we needed to make them less alienating. Other references became important, such as the peep show, the prison phone interface, and marketing techniques pertaining to shopping in dense urban environments. The design process is displayed with a succession of images below.
One of the project's main challenges was finding a concept both discursive and architectural that OMA's internal team would be convinced by. Our team decided to work with OMA's famous design process of quick and strategic iterations, generating many options.
Once that concept was outlined, the architectural detailing had to translate the concepts allure into material and spatial frameworks.
'Le chêne,' pronounced [leuh-sheh-n' means oak tree in French, my native language.
