Download Suhhee Yang

Suhhee Yang
Prof. Woofter
Case Studies I
December 6, 2004
The Skin Architecture of Toledo House
The principal element of the Toledo House in Bilbao, Spain, by Office dA, is the skin. This
project profoundly focuses on the surface manipulation and the envelope of the skin membrane,
and the high-tech materials that affect the design of the skin. The language that is discovered after
the study of the Toledo House is in fact all related to the skin, and to ascertain the theory of this
architecture, it is crucial to know how to communicate the skin to its design. The essential
functions of the skin are enclosure, aestheticism, and association between the exterior and the
interior spaces, and all of these aspects are constituted in the skin architecture of the Toledo
House.
The word ‘skin’ described in architecture is apparently personified, since the matter of a
skin is rather like a human flesh, in which biologically, skin is in truth the largest organ in the human
body that function as the central immune system against any harm, ranging from bacteria to
physical injuries. The skin of the human body is similar to the skin of architecture because both are
the first element to be in touch with exterior air, water, and other weathering conditions that interact
with the public. Both skins have to be well taken care of because they give the finest primary
impression of the body, and it is important to utilize their main purpose to the fullest account
similarly in architecture and in organisms.
The study of the skin architecture in the Toledo House includes the exterior and interior
relationship and the tectonics of which the skin comprises. It is undoubtedly essential to discover
the relationship between skin and main structure, though they may not always correlate each other.
“Once the skin of the building became independent of its structure, it could just as well hang like a
curtain or clothing. The relationship between structure and skin has preoccupied much
architectural production since this period and remains contested today. The site of this contest is
the architectural surface.”1 The structure and the skin of the Toledo House do remain independent
and it is through the skin and the path of the envelope, one could presume the interior spaces.
The very necessity for a skin is in the study of enclosure and for it to be hermetic. This is
resolved with many ways, from tradition and culture to the condition of the location and climate.
For cold places, it is strongly crucial to keep out wind, rain, and snow, which eventually follow
dampness that will provide more severe concerns. In overcastted grey places, much light needs to
be brought in. Therefore, there is an incessant debate between people’s preference of rigid
protection against the weather and the urge for more air, light, and sun. However, for warmer
climate, the need for hermetic element is not much of an issue to be brought up. Their sole
problem with aperture would be in a means of security. Because the summers and winters are
modestly hot and cold in Bilbao, it would seem ideal to allow southern light in the house while
keeping the skin thick enough for insulation.
Reflected by the changing world in front of us, there need not be a problem with a means
of protection from the public due to the degree of defense the skin can control. The doors that is
generated in the skin can be of thick, heaving iron that perhaps could be inaccessible, or it could
perhaps be accessible only after a complex path created by series of barriers. On the other hand,
a window within the skin could be exposed for a large view of an ocean or a park, bringing much
light and sunshine. The skin should use hierarchical functional system to determine each openings
of a façade, and ask, is this aperture for the public or for the private? Is it shameful to use cheaper
materials for the skin where the public is less likely to encounter? The Toledo House distinguishes
the aperture from the public view and the private view, in which the skin is opaque on the side that
encounters the public, whereas the private space is given much view to the environment through
the glass curtain wall that is astray from the skin that I have defined. In other words, the skin
architecture covers more than half of the facades of the Toledo House, allowing very little light from
the public.
While studying the orifices on the skin, which serves as a protection and flexible line of
territory, the materiality of the façade becomes more abstract due to the cuts that result in a
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gesture of potentiality. The orifice must be kept simple, like the Modernist ‘slit’ that leads straight
into the interior space or out the exterior ground. If the orifice overcomes the building
ostentatiously, then it would literally become a building in front of a building. The importance of the
doorway is shown by Cook, where “The doorway is still a functional element of deep significance,
the point of initiation, and most often identifiable with the human dimension”2 The doorway is
ostensibly more important than a window, but a window should emerge into the façade on a
position that is pleasantly seen from both the outside view and the inside view.
The orifice in the Toledo House reflects the characteristic of the skin as a whole, in which
the skin in this project is opaque, letting little light in. The doorway is crafted by making a slit into
the skin, elongating out one piece of skin and making a curve. The windows are mere cracks on
the skin, where more gaps, whether small or large, create more light into the building. (More
southern light is let in by a glass curtain wall, which is not a part of the main skin of this project.)
The skin is also stretched out sometimes near the roof or near the ground, and it is folded and
squeezed to reflect interior spaces.
The freely-skinned Toledo House is divided into two buildings: the inner and the outer. In
setting up languages for these two different objects one may wonder if it is logical for the language
of one to reflect the language of the other. The inner building, carcass, should be able to support
its skin through sophisticatedly built form. Moreover, it is important to discern the formal
connection between the geometry and aesthetic of the inner and the outer buildings, and the
capability to know the difference of scale and interval between one and the other. The desired
space is then composed through the movement of the free envelope that manipulate the inner
building. Peter Cook defines the linkage between the inner and the outer building; “The creation of
a membrane of sufficient integrity and facility establishes much of the activity of environmental
support: so that the inner building is effectively released from much of its servicing and is therefore
somewhat ‘balanced’ with the membrane”3 The sense of balance has a significant effect on the
building as a whole due to the tendency to over-exaggerate the technological use of the material.
Subsequently, the more systematic and architectural elements are utilized on the enveloping skin,
the better the membrane will appear.
In coming across the subject of skin in the Toledo House, it is inevitable to study the
façade, which has more to do with architecture than building. The façade is a part of the skin, and
most of the times it is influenced by the envelopment. In creating the façade, there are ambitions to
make folds or aperture, planes or undulations, and decoys or cuts, however, these elements should
not interfere with the components of the skin. It has a direct relationship to the plan, and the
aperture that it contains allow different light quality into the special organization of the building. It
must be complete, whether or not this completeness feed into the interior, and it must be free, just
like what Le Corbusier suggested in his Five Points of a New Architecture. Moreover, the façade is
an approach to perceive the real architecture. It is also through the façade that brings a closer
relationship from the skin to the interior. It need not be the traditional major element, the main
doorway, that drive this condition, but a clever element on the façade that penetrates into the 2dimentional planar façade, and into the interior 3-dimentional space. Here, understanding the plan
of the project will help bring the relationship closer because it easily manipulates the sections with
light openings, overhangs, and changes of levels and altitudes. It is hard to create an intentionally
subtle façade, but to tie the building together, one should contemplate on the rigorous narrow set of
partis.
During the study of aperture within the skin, it is essential to look at the geometry and the
horizontal versus vertical lines. Apparently, openings are the main source of providing different
point of views, and straying from confinement. The geometry of the openings should parallel the
responses from the skin, and be acutely figured. There are only few buildings where the formal
architectural skin is formed from drifts and diagonals, folds and undulations. But these
characteristics are developed with a need to find a seamless fashion of the skin, which technology
has proved with silicone joint, almost jointless granite face, and the slightly billowing strips of timber.
The Toledo House is seemingly one of these skin architecture, where it uses much random folds
and undulations that is ironically necessary for the building itself.
The clear language of geometry in the skin is shown in the headquarters for Johnson Wax
at Racine, Wisconsin (1936-1939) by Frank Lloyd Wright. He uses ‘banding’ of thin window strip
horizontally to its extremes and the more the building changes the direction and size of its curves in
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plan, the more it looks like an envelope. He uses horizontal glass tubes for the window strips that
become relevant to the contemporary language of architecture. Similarly, the exterior skin of the
Toledo House determines the form of the interior skin, which forms the spaces inside. This has to
do with the study of the geometry I discovered, in which the dining room is elliptical, living room is
rectangular, staircases to the rooftop is triangular, and the library is a square. All these pieces are
randomly placed to form a building, but it is through the existence of the skin that these
components adhere to each other. It seems as if a strip of a ribbon is vertically placed on a desk
and beads are glued on a single side of the ribbon. The exterior and interior skin then fuses
together, and eventually reflects each other. Wherever there is a curve on a wall of the dining
room, the skin has a curve, and wherever the living room has a pinched wall, the skin also has a
pinch. Then we are relieved that technology finally allowed architecture to enjoy a freedom in
pattern, components, and geometry.
In an aesthetic mannerism of skin, human beings have tried to ameliorate their
countenance through cosmetics in a same way the cultural development revolutionized the every
living facades. With the discovery of new materials since the beginning of the early 20th century,
the skin was not only about decoration, but of new technology and concept. Through iron and steel
and new technological machines that allowed convenience in cutting wood, the language of formal
decoration mixed with the language of the material. The act of industrialization was the driving
force for the transformation of the skin for its unique attitude in the architecture. It became easier
to manufacture a once brittle glass into larger and tougher sheets of glass, for example glass
curtain wall. Then the next step was taken, where the question was not only geared towards the
basics of survival and endurance of the building itself, but also the language that the skin
expressed in terms of its recognition and beauty by a spectator.
In response to the expanding technology and the local conditions in Bilbao, the Toledo
House became the result of computer-aided design process and local stone and masonry
construction techniques. It is an experience of the adherence to the traditional classic Basque
building and the urge to move on to a new spatial influence from technology and tectonics. The
Toledo House in effect uses a laser-cut marine grade plywood member for the scaffolding structure
that embraces load-bearing stone veneer and concrete block cavity wall. The use of these
materials affect the envelope of the skin, and through the study of tectonics, the skin would be
much easier to understand.
Since buildings are man-made and thus an ‘artificial’ object, the skin is in due course
artificial. Although the goal for some architects is for the building to look organic and contextual to
the site, it can’t literally be grown from the ground. Therefore the skin architecture has evolved
from the classical ‘edged’ architectural banding to the 20th century ‘gliding’ element onto the ground
surface. Whether or not the building should look organic depends on the architect, but it is through
the skin architecture that generates such movement. The Toledo House, in reference to the site
context, typifies the suburban condition in Bilbao, and the sloped hill that it sits on reflects the
contour of the skin. The slope rises from the northeast to southwest while the house faces the
north. The skin starts from the southeastern kitchen, and it curves along the dining room in the
northeast, towards the entrance and living room in the north, and bends at the library, and dies into
the hill towards the southwest. At this point of experience, we could see the powerful relationship
between the building and the site, because through this last part of the skin, it becomes easier to
understand how the building could emerge from the ground.
The way I analyzed the Toledo House was through a model because the main element that
gave a theme to this house was the idea of skin and tectonics. Office dA holds a very original, yet
intriguing theory in their projects: the importance of a connection between the house and its
landscape that it sits on, the envelope of the house, and the material that it constitutes. Likewise,
the Toledo House sits on a strangely sloped hill in Bilbao, which cannot be found anywhere else. It
could be seen as a strip of ribbon that curves and bends around to make spaces and dies into the
hill. Therefore, I created this same effect through styrene, since one single strip of styrene could
be easily manipulated, bent, and curved to form spaces. The thickness of the styrene (3/32 in.)
was determined by the thickness of the building skin, 1ft. This “ribbon” starts out from the south
wall and around toward west and into the hill toward south again. Since the Toledo House was not
much about the volume inside the house, I did not enclose the ribbon. However I showed the
movement of the wall and material through cuts, extensions, and curves.
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The material for the site is the same material and same thickness as the building because
the building and the site fuses together, and they should not be seen as two different objects
holding on to each other, or stacked up. I set the site vertically to show how the house sits on it
horizontally, carving into the landscape. It would have been easier to cut out the topography into
layers and stack them up horizontally; however, the house is not about volume, but about skin.
Therefore, I did not want to create a massive configuration of the site. Then this led me to form the
site into a grid, by consequently placing vertical strips from west to east and from north to south.
The unit I chose for the grid was 16ft. because 16 was a factor of the 96 and 128, the dimension of
the width and the length of the house in feet. Moreover, the house is a retirement home for a
couple and the size is neither extensive nor diminutive. The best scale to represent the house in a
model was 3/32in.=1ft.
To show the interior spaces inside the skin, I later included another strip of styrene that
curved and bent to form the oval shaped dining room, pinched rectangular living room, triangular
staircases, and square shaped library. This piece is neither joined to the site nor to the skin
because it should not interrupt the continual flow between the site and the exterior skin. However,
this last piece is crucial in the making of the model and analyzing the building because this element
of utilizing different geometrical shapes to form walls and spaces in the building govern the
structure of the skin and its envelope. This united the exterior skin and the interior space because
it reflects each other. The building is in fact about the skin, and how that 2-dimensional planer strip
creates a volume and firmly retains geometrical spaces inside.
After the study of the Toledo House, I appreciated the concept of skin architecture, and its
influence on the building. I understood that the skin is not only about the material that was formed
with, but about the abstract beauty of the flexibility in enclosure, aperture, and the relationship
between the outer skin and the inner skin or structure. Office dA’s Toledo House was successful
due to its ambitious aspiration for surface architecture through the means of technology and
intricate movement of the skin.
1
David Leatherbarrow, Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture (Cambridge,
2002), 8.
2
Peter Cook, Primer (London: Academy Group Ltd., 1996), 100.
3
Peter Cook, Primer (London: Academy Group Ltd., 1996), 95.
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MA: MIT Press,
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Bibliography
Cook, Peter, Primer, London: Academy Group Ltd., 1996
Leatherbarrow, David, Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture, Cambridge,
Press, 2002.
El-Khoury, Rodolphe, Oscar Riera Ojeda, Office dA, Gloucester, MA: Rockport
Publishers, 2000.
Space vol. 441, Seoul, Korea: Space Magazine, August, 2004.
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MA: MIT
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