INITIATIVE 99, OPEN COMPETITION by ICON, 2023/24
3D PRINTED AFFORDABLE HOUSING
IN Collaboration with matthiasgöttfert.at
DESIGN DESCRIPTION
TEAM "ADRMA"
Fundamental to our proposal: leverage economies of 3D printing to devise a novel living typology that on a community level is culture-generative & nature-generative, and on an individual level provides increasing interior room over time: an expanded space to create Art, to Craft and wherefrom to engage socially and economically. Therefore, we rationalized a flexible Architectural Boundary that is timeless in its expression, nurturing in manifestation, that provides a dignified and economic incipient habitation yet accommodates growth over lifetime without becoming outgrown.
The enforced low complexity to the finished architectural object via focused narrative and maximal 3D printed material, together with an economic start-out living space should hit the affordable (dignified) housing target set out by Initiative 99.
The enforced low complexity to the finished architectural object via focused narrative and maximal 3D printed material, together with an economic start-out living space should hit the affordable (dignified) housing target set out by Initiative 99.
We favoured an intellectual design process over a space-planning one: absorbed the notion of property lines into the house volume; proposed maximal walls within the print bed, with arcades permeable to nature and pedestrian comings and goings to semi-open gardens. Novel modes of interaction between neighboring homesteads are expected. Biodiverse iterations of the semi-open (sheltered) arcade courtyards are enabled.
We did away with interior partitions: they are user-added later items. Central: a private inhabitable middle space (Nave), within it an obstacle (Lith) that invites definitions of interior space through consideration and reaction & acts as a distributor for the MEP umbilicals. The extents of the interior habitable space are to be increased with the added adaptability of a modular roof and articulated glass membranes (walls).
The expandable interior space is aimed at self-sustaining (durable) cultural and economic activities. The emerging expressions of Life within the later-stage homestead overflow the semi-open courtyards beyond the arcades and into the larger social- (culture-generative) and natural- (nature-generative) space of the surrounding community, accreting in time into an authentic and sustainable local culture.
In our submittal ICON’s iterative technology amounts for the Architecture throughout: physically and conceptually.
LEXICON
Arcade Walls
- unify property-lines & house limits
- maximized to printbed
- semi-permeable to social & natural surroundings
- top crenelations affix roof units
- shaped for increased roof loads
- interior display alcoves
- unify property-lines & house limits
- maximized to printbed
- semi-permeable to social & natural surroundings
- top crenelations affix roof units
- shaped for increased roof loads
- interior display alcoves
Nave
- Inhabitable middle space
- starts-out at ca. 700 square feet (ca. 33 x 21 feet interior space )
- Expandable via modular roof
- & the x2 front and back articulated glass wall membranes
Lith
- interior space disruptor/ organizer
- of technical umbilicals base + 3D-printed monolith top
Roof
- Expandable via 3D-printed units
- Module 3D-printed at maximum allowable angle
- Operations: Printed, lifted, rotated, lowered and affixed into wall crenellations at final 30º angle for optimal Solar Panel installation
- merlons and embrasures for natural ventilation and lighting
SPATIAL CONCEPT
CONSTRUCTION
ECOLOGY
NARRATIVE DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE
"The artistry and industry of past masons is recontextualized. Ramparts, arches revisit toil rendered facile, its industrious ghostly hands, their cracking joints and shoulders coming down on stone: become bits, vectors, thoughts of themselves sped up a thousand-thousand times into coalescing coils of rock; memories twice removed of a Locus where only children yet dwell, their knighted plays closed-off from our esoteric mathematics of real estates.
The banality of meagre property: a fistful of expensive dirt 20 feet apart, considerations and worries of polycarbonate property to be kept behind flimsy fencing: gone. The arcades set now the soft boundaries of the homestead, they permeate with the comings and goings of grasses, hares at thawing dawn, hawks, bundles of cultured vines bearing savour.
99.000 to draw out the flowing coils and cool them, have them coalesce into arches and ramparts, then the Hold/Nave, its platform cast between the hulls, the core Stranger/ Lith and two glass walls, the permeable roof. The Stranger/ Lith centre is a participant, disruptive, an obstacle that invites reaction, interaction, consideration and consequently a division of space: rooms develop around it. Some break it down entirely. Alcoves in the lava walls of the Nave hold thoughtful manifestations. I consider how I am held now within great half-open Lava vines in a permanent space that expands and retracts with the ebbs and flows of assiduous life, wide enough apart so that I may transit through and back as I want, and any which way. I do, I reach out to the surrounding homesteads: similarly grafted vines onto the increasingly fertile landscape.
They (the arcade walls) are rather more nurturing warm branches and foliage than bars to a Voliere. Certainly not the run-down stale amalgamation of impassable past plates & boxes: their little way out, little way back into them, no means given to change or expand that cryptid Flat nought, only means offered to shrivel or shed the pressing walls at great loss of laboured life.
Here now in this Hold the astronaut will truly die a knightly death in his magistral worn-out Pextex shroud, where from the indomitable verdant seeds of his lifelong secluded artistry will overflow the Nave and burgeon now turbid Vesta, as they first fill her lungs with the ferrous odour of life.
A thought: the modular roof merlons and embrasures falsely remind me of the Barbican. My memory of it is corrupted with iteration.
The banality of meagre property: a fistful of expensive dirt 20 feet apart, considerations and worries of polycarbonate property to be kept behind flimsy fencing: gone. The arcades set now the soft boundaries of the homestead, they permeate with the comings and goings of grasses, hares at thawing dawn, hawks, bundles of cultured vines bearing savour.
99.000 to draw out the flowing coils and cool them, have them coalesce into arches and ramparts, then the Hold/Nave, its platform cast between the hulls, the core Stranger/ Lith and two glass walls, the permeable roof. The Stranger/ Lith centre is a participant, disruptive, an obstacle that invites reaction, interaction, consideration and consequently a division of space: rooms develop around it. Some break it down entirely. Alcoves in the lava walls of the Nave hold thoughtful manifestations. I consider how I am held now within great half-open Lava vines in a permanent space that expands and retracts with the ebbs and flows of assiduous life, wide enough apart so that I may transit through and back as I want, and any which way. I do, I reach out to the surrounding homesteads: similarly grafted vines onto the increasingly fertile landscape.
They (the arcade walls) are rather more nurturing warm branches and foliage than bars to a Voliere. Certainly not the run-down stale amalgamation of impassable past plates & boxes: their little way out, little way back into them, no means given to change or expand that cryptid Flat nought, only means offered to shrivel or shed the pressing walls at great loss of laboured life.
Here now in this Hold the astronaut will truly die a knightly death in his magistral worn-out Pextex shroud, where from the indomitable verdant seeds of his lifelong secluded artistry will overflow the Nave and burgeon now turbid Vesta, as they first fill her lungs with the ferrous odour of life.
A thought: the modular roof merlons and embrasures falsely remind me of the Barbican. My memory of it is corrupted with iteration.
I take in the stranger Lith inside the Hold. Is it fallen over? Ok, I’ll bite, let me slip off. I head on from here onto behind words, behind notions of societal bonds and grasping want at slipping restful sunset years. My life transcends the two weeks a year/ the three months every ten years/ now the nine months I have left at the tail end of indentured life. I’d rather check them all in now, yes? All at once and all the days I have outside these meagre resting sums, in-between and beyond them and I will live them out all together now, uninterrupted by fear of illusory missiles and crashing valuations. I’ll now plant my life here between these coiled arcades to know my spouse, know my children. I will see them grow and we will consider the sky every day, plant green life and reap savour from it with our hands, as wild hawks take down the wasteful buzzing drones slinging poison from the skies. Ours is a small hold now, here between the coiled arcades, but we fill it in and grow out in its loose embrace with ample Room for our future selves.
Tall, coiled arcades draw out in darkness and thunder: a cathedral’s Nave jutting out from a storming sea, open to the overflowing starlit firmament. A vastness of grasses-like and bushes-like now crashes through and on and on, choppy waves of carbon and sulfur spray under the roiling salt mist skies. Great trees-like fall now over the ramparts and through the tumbled roof onto shells, vestiges hold still the ghosts of pioneers, astronauts long recessed into the innumerable folded digital ancillaries to their bounty: cascading abstractions of angels and paradise therein." - Adrian Trifu
Tall, coiled arcades draw out in darkness and thunder: a cathedral’s Nave jutting out from a storming sea, open to the overflowing starlit firmament. A vastness of grasses-like and bushes-like now crashes through and on and on, choppy waves of carbon and sulfur spray under the roiling salt mist skies. Great trees-like fall now over the ramparts and through the tumbled roof onto shells, vestiges hold still the ghosts of pioneers, astronauts long recessed into the innumerable folded digital ancillaries to their bounty: cascading abstractions of angels and paradise therein." - Adrian Trifu