Engaging Topographies
Folding space into space, Plasma draw landscapes into buildings, streets into facades, inside to outside.
Transformative tectonics set spaces, planes and bodies into unforeseen relationships that challenge conventional topographies and spatial codes. While the angular and complex qualities of their forms might superficially affiliate them with 'computer-generated' architecture, decision-making is never relinquished to the computer.
Strategic reasoning and the desire to produce specificity in place of generics drive tectonic form. In this respect, they have more common ground with the so-called 'Organic Modernists', such as Scharoun, whose Berlin Philarmonie is composed of angular forms derived from the most efficient functional solutions.
Plasma are unconcerned with the creation of a visual 'style', transcending architectural photogenics and, informed by a rich dialogue with philosophical and social theory, they pursue the social in its quotidian and experiential aspects. They venture that the construction of topographic dialogues 'may enable and potentialize new and different forms of social interaction'.
These topographic dialogues are enacted by an architecture of trajectory and momentum, which responds to the nature of the topographies and the possibilities of engagement. At the smallest scale, Plasma's Bench represents the construction of a continuous entity that supports a range of office applications in an integrative manner.
The highly articulated form folds and pleats not merely its own surface, but the functions held within that surface. This folding and unfolding of the surface thus suggests relations between actions that develop through becoming and emergence, rather than their separation within a set of disjunctive elements.
The façade of 136 Old Street negotiates the passage of the external street topography through a glass structure whose complex planar deformations interrupt absolute transparency and produce a fractured screen of multiple reflections. The images of the street are engaged and played back to the outside in a modulated form, while light and images, but not the gaze, pass through the faade to the interior: the façade's complex structure operates as an exchanging filter between street and interior.
In the Silversmith's studio, Plasma were presented with the given space of a standard live/work shell, and asked to provide a structure within this that met the requirements of a Silversmith/Tai Chi instructor. Hence the engagement here was between a standardised building and a set of highly individualised needs and activities. Within the orthogonal shell, Plasma produced an ascending spiral form that incorporates the functions of vertical movement with a series of platforms that serve the programmatic needs - exhibition, display, practice - of the client.
While providing spaces for specific functions, the unique structure does not segregate these as discrete and isolated activities, nor does it inscribe limitations on use. Rather, a tectonic and visual dialogue unfolds between user and form that enacts a dynamic of functional integration and dispersal, a non-choreographed trajectory of work, play and possibility. Plasma have responded with a solution that engages with the complex patterns of contemporary inhabitation in an innovative and nuanced fashion.
The topographical engagements achieved here hint at larger social processes in which slippage and interplay increasingly disrupt normative divisions of work, leisure and domesticity, private space and public space. Within the given spatial conditions of the existing Mozarteum Performing Arts School, Plasma's proposal intervened in an orthogonal matrix to establish a greater degree of institutional integration while engaging the building with its urban context.
Through a process of pleating and piercing, existing pathways were expanded into an artificial public landscape at the ground floor suggesting a new confluence between citizens and institution. The existing building employed five regular volumetric bands to provide for the institution's different departments. By warping and deforming these, a level of spatial overlap and interplay was achieved and new pockets of differential space opened up.
At the same time, the modified volumes received their own unique profiles and a degree of differentiation, which would aid recognition and orientation within the institution. This subtle move would establish an institutional interdependence without abandoning spatial or departmental coherence
For the Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund Plasma proposed an assemblage that engaged the 'archetypal smooth space' of the ocean and the 'striated space par excellance' of the city, through a looped trajectory. As in the Silversmith's studio, they have addressed the programmatic requirements of the project without resorting to a topological montage of functions and zones. Instead of producing a series of functionally prescriptive and discrete spaces, a process of momentum operates along the trajectory according to a logic of 'becoming' in place of 'being'.
The trajectory, which draws and wraps the visitor's space under, over and through the fluid oceanographic space, both guides their passage through the complex assemblage and accommodates a range of functions observation, sensation, information. The continuous pleated surface of the museum functions as mediator between the contrasting topographies of sea and city through its non-Cartesian spatial dynamics.
This spatial method upsets the conventional coding of the museum visitor as a stable consumer of knowledge, information and purely visual experience. By immersing and engaging the visitor within the qualities of fluid space the experience becomes visceral and haptic, as much as cognitive.
These projects demonstrate Plasma's commitment to move beyond the still dominant modernist paradigms of functional zoning and to challenge the Cartesian coding of space and the body into a narrow instrumentalism. In place of this Plasma assemble relational flows and refuse to differentiate path from destination.
Douglas Spencer
exhibition at Suitcasearchitecture in Berlin in 2002