Please note: This is a global event and will be held in Melbourne, Australia as part of the Melbourne AA Visiting School.
Metropolitan areas worldwide keep growing and our buildings and structures become ever taller. Information Based Architecture has made it a spear point to develop strategies that cater for this XL scale. Large projects have the interesting aspect that the stakes are high. High quantity means environmental consequences, high impact on the city context, high structural tonnage, and high cost. High quantity means also potentially high savings and high benefits. Therefore XL projects specifically offer the perfect breeding ground for scientific research tweaking and tuning the radio buttons of large structures in an attempt to generate an optimized multifaceted meaningful design; meaningful aesthetically but also performing economically, adding value to the world and using our scarce resources in a responsible way.
The side-effect of Bigness is so that it offers the opportunity to approach architecture as research. Since even the smallest steps or progress on a large scale accumulates to be a sizable amount. Architecture on a XL scale is beside the personal, social or aesthetic vision of the architect thus also about scientific optimization. Architect Mark Hemel of Information Based Architecture in Amsterdam will show some of his XL-projects.
Mark Hemel is the director of Information Based Architecture, with offices in Amsterdam and Guangzhou. Since 2015 he is bio-based ambassador for the Northern region of Holland. He is currently involved in research concerning 3D concrete printing. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London where he has been Unit-master from 1999 to 2007, and as design tutor in the Environment & Energy Program. Furthermore he has taught at the Hong Kong University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Goteborg Sweden and at the TU Delft and Eindhoven.
Image Caption: Canton Tower
Image Credit: Information Based Architecture