024: Excerpt, a look at FOA's Yokohama Port Terminal....

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"Our proposal for the project start by declaring the site as an open public space and proposes to have the roof of the building as an open plaza, continuous with the surface of Yamashita Park as well as Akaranega Park.
The project is then generated from a circulation diagram that aspires to eliminate the linear structure characteristic of piers, and the directionality of the circulation."

"We wanted to make a pier where you can walk in on a certain path and walk out on a different path. We developed this looped diagram, in which we were chaining all the parts of the program. Then we assigned to every line of the diagram a surface. We were interested in playing with the ground."

"We started with certain principles and later combined and changed them. The changes are never visual or aesthetic; they are always technical or practical. We do not believe in the origin or in the end of a project. We believe in the medium of the process. We are totally opportunistic. The end is determined only by external forces, like deadlines of the contractors or the client."
FOA

So, outside...




Inside..

The program.

I'm amazed by this building as I read about it....the quoted paragraphs, I think, relates to the project we are doing now...pedestrians and the urban environment are essential driving forces here. The art of picking up people from the street, sending them through another path, returning them through another, presenting the city differently, then spiting them out through the front door to mingle with the city lights....

One of the focuses of FOA's Yokohama Port Terminal is allowing the locals to walk out onto the extremities of the pier and to "look back at their city." (I read this in Architectural Review, while doing homework.)

...It's one thing I want to achieve with my movie theatre...as movie-goers ride the escalators to their destinations, I want them to look outside and see the city lights passing them by...

"A poor man's New York..." as Doug says, our professor, when commenting on Houston's night-time skyline...