Category Archives: Adhitya Rathinam

CASE STUDY: YOKOHAMA TERMINAL – by F.MOUSSAVI & A.ZAERA- POLO

Yokohama International Passenger Terminal was the product of inventive architectural methodology and socially conscious thinking. This Project start by declaring the site as an open public space and proposes to have the roof of the building as an open plaza, continous with the surface of Yamashita Park as well as Akaranega Park. The greatest conceptual strength of the project is perhaps its sensitive relationship with the urban waterfront. With the observation deck doubling as a fully accessible public plaza, the terminal seamlessly emerges from the neighboring Yamashita and Akaranega Parks to make one uninterrupted, universally accessible urban parkscape.

The Project starts with what the architects have named as the “no-return pier” with the ambition to structure the pier as a fluid, uninterrupted and multi-directional space, rather than a gateway to flows of fixed orientation. While the contours of the building occasionally betray an element of randomness, they are in fact generated by a single circulation scheme that dictates spatial organization. Specific interlocking circulation loops allow the architects to subvert the traditional linear and branching characteistic of the building.

The project is produced as an extension of the urban ground, constructed as a systematic transformation of the lines of the circulation diagram into a folded and bifuracted surfaces. This structure is especially adequate in coping with the lateral forces generated by the seismic movements that affect the japanese topography.

Its radical, hyper-technological design explored new frontiers of architectural form and simultaneously provoked a powerful discourse on the social responsibility of large-scale projects to enrich shared urban spaces.

The floors of the second floor and rooftop are finished with wood to give a feeling of a ships deck. An extensive, gently curving observation deck with planted grass areas, open to the public on the rooftop. This way, the Terminal is designed to serve as a working pier as well as an enjoyable and relaxing park-like public facility for Yokohama residents.

Parametricism is a great new style “Finding forms not by thinking but through stimulations”.Yokohama terminal is an architeture based on advanced computational techniques. Parametricism would be the topic that I would like to do research on. This avant-grade architecture addresses to the social demand via a rich panoply of parametric design techniques.

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