Portfolio Design

Your portfolio should record your ideas, the processes and the result of your work as a designer. It can also contain other information, such as your professional work in an architectural office, to creative work in related artistic disciplines, your built work if you have construction experience, and written work if it is very important.

The portfolio should have different shape regarding to the purpose it serves.

Your portfolio is not just your passport, but also the document through which how you understand architecture. It is your chance to clarify and share what you believe and aspire to, and to present new ideas, techniques, observations and experiences, mainly to others but sometimes just to yourself.

There is no longer a single type or format of portfolio that will fit all contexts. You need to decide depends on the destination or design culture.

PATIO VILLA, NETHERLANDS

ROTTERDAM, 1988

A private residence


In a parody of the classical Dutch section of houses in the slope of a dike, this house was projected on the raised embankment of a highway that was never built. On the north, the road and the entrance level are one level below the main site. The garden and the main area of the house - on the higher level - are defined on the south by a canal.
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On the main floor of the house - more or less a square - a patio is placed in such a way that it generates, in combination with a free-standing wall, the living spaces of the house: a living area to the south, a dining zone to the north. The wall defines two "rooms" - a bedroom and a study - connected by a secret corridor that also gives access to the bathroom.

The garden elevation consists of four different kinds of glass - armoured, clear, etched and green, that create transparencies, obstructions and intensifications.

The (metal) east wall of the patio is a kitchen, the north and south wall are mobile, and the patio floor is made of glass planks that give daylight to the gymnasium below.

MIAMI PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

USA, MIAMI, 1994

A performing arts centre that combines the two unique programs of a concert hall and an opera house

In physics, the notion of critical mass indicates the point whereby accumulating mass, an object passes from one condition into another, more dynamic one. To conceive of the two components of the Dade County Performing Arts Center (opera and concert hall) each in their own individual site, would be to waste a unique historical opportunity for Miami to create a new, exciting whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Not only would the separation itself cause many programmatic redundancies - in space mechanical plant, vertical transport, access demands - but by combining the two programs in a single building we introduce a number of important efficiencies, enormously extend its potential uses, and create a much more unique and memorable structure that makes a stronger statement about Miami’s present and future cultural potential. Hide
The building was sited on the Sears site. East-west through its center runs a high-rise technical zone that incorporates the Opera stagetower and the reverberation chamber of the concert Hall.

To reinforce the existing urban tissue those parts of the Building most active in the daytime are concentrated in the north in a profile that carefully mediates between the existing and the new. Black Box and Studio establish a direct relationship with 14th street. On the Biscayne Boulevard corner, the Burdines Building preserves a flavour of history. It is used for educational programs, functions and can also act as an entrance to the Concert Hall.

Faceted like jewels - one dark, the other light - the two auditoriums are directed to the south for maximum visibility from the sea, the highway and downtown.

So far the consultants have elaborated designs that guarantee acoustic and technical perfection, but the Opera and the Concert Hall are public buildings: it is our task to provide a setting that makes the experience of visiting an event. In the Paris Opéra, (the most successful precedent), the space reserved for foyer, lobby and grand staircase - the space for public display - exceeds that of the auditorium itself; in Miami, by joining the public areas reserved for the two individual auditoriums, we create a 3-dimensional "mixing chamber”, between them that will be an experience in itself. Negotiating the level differences playfully like the Guggenheim Museum, this continuous in-between-building organizes the two flows, but also turns the sum of visitors in a larger civic collective.

The bigger scale of the combined building not only eliminates waste - one system of elevators/escalators serves the two halls, one system of catering. It also creates diverse surfaces that are not mere dependencies of the two halls, but that can be used as "rooms” for more and more diverse functions such as fundraising, banqueting, etc. Below the auditoriums, our concept generates large scale spaces on street level for other cultural uses, to activate Biscayne Boulevard.

Urbanism
The siting of the building and the organization of the program aim to respect and reinforce the fragile urban context. By consolidating the two elements in a single block, we give a maximum impulse to the vigour of 14th street, reinforcing a vital connection to Overtown.

TATE MODERN

UK, LONDON, 1994

conversion of a powerstation into a museum for modern art


The building offers space, but it is not suitable for art, it offers shelter, but it leaks and has to be repaired, it offers a location, but that is also problematic; it offers a beginning, a presence, which could be hard to organize working within contemporary parameters.
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The British attitude towards the 'great' gesture, poised delicately between aversion and incompetence... The building, an object (abject) lesson in symmetry, will be the only museum in the world marooned on a mud bank, twice every 24 hours. It may need drastic strategies of dissociation; a Turneresque blur of brick from which strategies of dissociation will have to rescue / recuperate it.

The Tower, strangely invisible in spite of its height, can be partly dismantled, liberated from its substance / mass, as could other sections of the building. In the City, the skeletal will be more noticeable than bulk.

A strategy whereby new additions will influence the building seems doomed to be overly demonstrative; circulation-driven, high-tech spiderwebs, to be plausible.

Perhaps an entirely interior site. The grounds have a potential for development: the park now is almost more visible and susceptible for programmatic implantation...

Danger: 66,000 volts

It is significant that an institution about to enter an electric power station on the wrong site of a notoriously divisive river and needing an architect to help mastermind such a radical two-way transformation, to be financed so far with a virtual budget, is confidently casting on these still theoretical architects at the expense of a collection which as yet resembles, in its eccentricity and incompleteness, not so much a mosaic but an eccentric bubble diagram of the past century's artistic achievement.

One of those hated bubble diagrams that is supposedly the architect's lodestone... We would be tempted to treat the complex as a single site of which a large part is open-air, one indoors, one section occupied by a nasty tenant that emits noticeable vibrations at 100Hz. On the east side, demolitions could leave plausible entry conditions. It is also certain that architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have contributed to this transformation. Therefore, involved but mistrusted for their contributions, the architects just substitute paintings for the word architecture, and a sense of how "incorrect" and brutal the line is. Maybe the best way would be to pretend it has one of Maleviches Architecton's invaded program...

MAISON À BORDEAUX

FRANCE, BORDEAUX, 1998

Private residence overlooking the City of Bordeaux


The Maison à Bordeaux is a private residence of three floors on a cape-like hill overlooking Bordeaux. The lower level is a series of caverns carved out from the hill, designed for the most intimate life of the family; the ground floor on garden level is a glass room – half inside, half outside – for living; and the upper floor is divided into a children's and a parents' area. The heart of the house is a 3x3.5m elevator platform that moves freely between the three floors, becoming part of the living space or kitchen or transforming itself into an intimate office space, and granting access to books, artwork, and the wine cellar.

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A couple lived in a very old, beautiful house in Bordeaux. They wanted a new house, maybe a very simple house. They were looking at different architects. Then the husband had a car accident. He almost died, but he survived. Now he needs a wheelchair.
Two years later, the couple began to think about the house again. Now the new house could liberate the husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city had become. "Contrary to what you would expect," he told the architect, "I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world..." They bought land on a hill with panoramic views over the city.

The architect proposed a house – or actually three houses on top of each other. The man had his own 'room', or rather 'station': the elevator platform. The movement of the elevator continuously changes the achitecture of the house. A machine is its heart.

JUSSIEU - TWO LIBRARIES

FRANCE, PARIS, 1992

Winning competition entry for two libraries on the Jussieu campus in Paris


In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building.
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The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert's project.

However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building.

To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network.

These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below.

In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario.

Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.

AGADIR CONVENTION CENTRE

MOROCCO, AGADIR, 1990

A beachfront convention centre


Our project can be read as a single building 'split' in two parts, a roof and a sockle, to create a major urban 'room', a covered plaza on the beach, facing the sea. The two axes culminate on the plaza. Floating above the verandah; the hotel: a single layer of rooms, each its own view. The conference centre forms the lower part, the sockle.
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It was our challenge in this competition to find an original architectural expression for this enormous program which is compatible with the beauty of the site.

The curvilinear landscape of the dunes continues as the 'hills’ and 'valleys’ of the sockle, which accommodate the major components of the program: auditorium, etc.

As in a mirror image, the same kind of relief appears on the roof where it accommodates the royal chamber.

In this way the experience of the plaza will be determined by the similarity between above and below.

The landscape which is generated with its concave and convex domes, with the 'forest’ of columns, its shafts of light, is a modern interpretation of Islamic space - Islam after Einstein relativity - which will also be expressed by the materials: polished concrete, mosaic, tiles etc.

The parking is arranged on several levels in a U-shape around the building. The sand-filled moat offers the complex a relative degree of autonomy and privacy.

The main axis extends into the garage, gives access to the lobbies of the mayor components, then turns to emerge on the plaza to serve the royal rooms.

The floor and the ceiling of the veranda are formed by concrete 'shells’, which have been cast upon the dunes, using the sand as a natural formwork. Ribs strengthen the shells and form patterns on the interior surfaces.

The uppershell is supported by columns, which are different in height, thickness, and spacing. The lower shell and the roof are supported by vierendeel beams.

Stability is achieved by means of the connection between the two shells combined with steel bracing. 'Soft’ joints have been integrated between the columns and upper beams because of seismic considerations.

The elevation and the roof, clad with polished and unpolished local stones, give the building its rock-like appearance.