workbook/  Holland Ave. Condominiums,Ottawa 06/22/2001
 
 
 
 
 
 
Preliminary Design, Lowrise Alternative ... for Maniplex Developments

 
 

Holland/Wellington Street Pentagonal Condominium  Apartments, Hintonburg, Ottawa,  Sept., 2000

Referencing with a stretch, Thomas Jeferson's Rotunda at the University of Virginia

Notwithstanding esoteric references, the pentagon was chosen as the geometric form which could best pay a buffering homage to the buffeting Kichissippi winds and establish the particularly important orientations to the Hintonburg skylines.

The fundamental elements of the apartment building (the public circulation core, the personal services core, the living spaces, and the balcony) are here clearly defined as  experiential events in a composition that articulates the four emotive states of common contemporary urban living-- eating, social indulgence, working and sleeping .  Here they are juxtaposed as functions or spheres of influence radially emminating invisible boundaries that co-partition the pentagonal geometry.  Vesical areas of union between these amplitudes of behavioural influence, and the interstitial space between their close space packing delineate liminal conditions where form possibilities can occur in the otherwise generally vacuous floor plate. 

Architecture is predicated by the inspirational discourse over the function and symbolic significance of "wall"; the nature and purpose of exterior and interior wall, and the interplay between the two (( the exterior wall as that strong , imposing, protective, and enduring delimitor of a  human-scaled microcosmic space within the all-containing and impartial macrocosm; the interior wall as that soft, containing, supportive backdrop to human behavioral exigencies), (the exterior wall as creator of the personal, the interior wall as profiler of the former's character)) the compressive and the tensional, the constrictive and expansive become artistic vehicles particularizing form.

Slender pentagonal towers each house one apartment per floor; each floor affording the ego-figure access to just its own apartment. 





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