Behind the Manhattan Facade: Towards a re-assessment of energy performance of the atrium space of the seattle public library building

Location: Seattle, US

Year: 2023

Co-authors: Yue Cao, Yilun Jiang

With Joana Soares Gonçalves, and Anna Font Vacas at the Diploma Environmenal and Technical Studies (ETS): Singular Artefacts

Awarded Environmental and Technical Studies High Pass

In the heroic period of Modernism, architects dreamt of the International Style,  simple, pure, sun-giving architecture. In the middle of the last century, in the relics and remnants of the foregoers’ positive avant-gardes, architects and theoreticians propose the well-tempered interior as the universally applicable form of built environment and standard of comfort.  The year 1989 has perhaps marked the era of neoliberalism in the post-Communist world, that one of capitalism which deregulates at all levels of market economy, that one which produces, as its primary effect in the built environment, not grands projets so much as Junkspace, the lifeless proliferation of the dull, uninteresting, featureless “well-tempered” interior  of desire, fetish, and ecstasy: a world-interior of capital.  With building materials and building components becoming increasingly modular, universally applicable, predigitised, prefabricated, standardised, and globally available, such ubiquity is pyrrhic: now that we all (strive to) live in air-conditioned tiny little interiors, nobody could remember experiences and environments without them. The international standardisation of indoor comfort standards is perhaps one of the best achievements in the field of climatic control ever since, and what is also viably true is that it has become the most remarkably taunting failure, a farce,  a beautifully-crafted vandalism and has also engendered chains of environmental issues and crisis. The psychedelic, illusory capitalism of today has clearly become a fait accompli, powered by the continuous, spectacular landscape of the almost immaterialised, artificially climatised building interiors.

“Masterpiece has become a definitive sanction, a semantic space that saves the object from criticism, leaves its qualities unproven, its performance untested, its motives unquestioned.”  (Koolhaas)

This project challenges a “masterpiece” – the Seattle Library Building by Koolhaas. It analyses the performance of an as-found artefact inside the library atrium and, through a series of variations and simulations, demonstrates that the as-found condition successfully delivers a well-tempered interior space as a civic building. However, in order to challenge the idea of a well-tempered, homogeneous interior, this project blasts out several singular, discrete, and anomaly points from the homogeneous field of comfort and boredom. It investigates the space 3-dimensionally and transcends the restrictions of current means of simulation based on a 2D meshed plane. The proposed design intervention reacts to the spatial distribution of the singular/anomaly points and encases a threshold zone of activities.