Case study # 1 “Prada Epicenter”, by Herzon & de Meuron
An unconventional and attractive feature in Tokyo’s prestigious Aoyama district, Herzon & de Meuron’s “Prada Epicenter” store is sheeted on a façade that works both as a decorative element and as the structural support of the entire construction’s six floors, where stairs and rooms morph seemingly out of the skin composed of diamond shaped units.
This skin, all around the building’s five façades, is also seen as an interactive element due the shape of the various windows around it, which vary from green and bluish colors to flat, convex and concave shapes, creating an illusion of movement along the building.
These diamond units are aggregated on one another to form a solid structural shell. This system is quite convenient since it creates resistance based on a single unit that can be repeated to the Nth power, plus it is also quite easy to keep track of the individual pieces during the fabrication process, unlike other similar buildings where each individual piece is created around different dimensions.
Case study # 2 “Pavilion at Serpentine Gallery”, by Toyo Ito
Built to stand for just three months on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery, at Hide Park in London, the Pavilion is a light construction made out aluminum plates. These plates are all of irregular patterns, being a sharp contrast to Herzog & de Meuron’s orderly grid. These irregular patterns form the basic, compact, structure of the pavilion.
The process can be seen as the extraction of material off a solid volume where a mathematically generated grid or map was overlaid, forming a pattern of patches. These patches then can be chosen to either remain within the solid or being extracted.
In the end what is obtained is a cubic body understood as being made out of an agglutination of different shapes that together form the sole structural support. It does becomes a holistic object.
