The Erosion of the Envelope
Fall 2015, Campus View Apartments Re-Design. The first time this text came across us. I formed a great memory of that project and the things we discussed during that short time while reading this text. As it currently stands, Campus View has no building envelope. Many of the buildings being built new in this town do not. They have surfaces in which textures, cladding, and illusions are being slapped on without much debate or thought. This is the idea of the eroding envelope. A comprehensive building envelope has not been designed on the buildings we see being built today, rather a palette of materials on surfaces have been put together. This lack of thorough thinking and intent comes from many reasons. The root of the problem starts with the client itself, the developer. Developers have been taking advantage of the brand that Clemson has right now and pouncing on every opportunity they see. The end game is not a social construct or even the technological advancement of architecture. The end game is simply money. Building shallow architecture across the city that plays a role only in the way it situates itself with the town. Here the political arena of non-experts (Architectural Review Board) come in to share their opinion based on beautiful and ugly. What materials look good on a building and what do not. We have succumbed ourselves to shallow design within the place we inhabit and that is simply because of the political arena at play. The client has their mindset, the town has their own mindset, and the architect is simply there to please (at least based on what we see right now). The political arena of developer driven architecture and architects with no backbone is eroding the envelope and giving us only surface. Just like a beautiful woman with no brain, it's pretty to look at it now, but difficult to deal with in the long run.
Beautiful, isn't it?
The problem as you say is money. Most building projects can not afford to create "real" building envelopes and they mostly try to conform to a certain look. I agree with you in that it is a shallow way of building, but how do you justify the cost of a skin if the building was simply built to be sold?
ReplyDeleteAlso, the definition of building envelope is ambiguous. How do we classify that Campus View has no envelope? Isn't an envelope simply a plane that separates the inside and outside? It may not be a great envelope in terms of function and performance, but it is keeping the rain off and insulating the building from the outside.
I like what you say about how that facade is a type of erosion. It kills both the space directly around it and I can imagine that the space directly inside of it not being that great at all. This is what I think is the most detrimental aspect of it, it is built simply with an idea of separation and does not look to create "in-between" spaces (as Franco calls it) for the building. All opportunities to create a threshold with any sense of depth are lost.