What's with all the angles?

 

        During much of the class on Tuesday I kept trying to make sense of this building. From the exterior it is absolutely incredible. The view from each terrace brings new life to the project and each individual unit within this massive scale housing project is breathtaking. The building scales itself depending on what side of the campus the user is on. On the old historic side the building steps back as it goes up to not imped on the sunlight and so that the structure remains dense but doesn't tower over the existing buildings.  Jean Renaudie designed this project, during the midst of the brutalism movement and I cant help but to wonder if this had some effect on his design language. Again, like I stated earlier from the outside this building is incredible. However, my qualm comes when one enters the spaces and then has to deal with the unusable areas that are formed by these triangular pieces of the terrace. If the triangles were only in the terrace shape I feel like the users of the space would be able to really utilize every nook and cranny of their space. 

    I believe that part of my bias is a product of my training, being taught that things must be orthogonal at all times goes against the base fundamentals that I was taught. however, that is not to say that it is wrong and i thoroughly appreciate and see the merit behind the design after further studying it. The design is incredibly interesting and I got a lot out of the back and forth that David and I had as we spoke throughout the class.