Compiled on sites such as BoredPanda and Reddit, lists of ‘Evil Buildings’ tend to feature structures that feel sterile to non-architects, photographed in dramatic lighting or surrounded in fog. Projects by Zaha Hadid Architects, Frank Gehry and Ole Scheeren are among those represented. But what exactly makes these buildings feel evil?
This phenomenon represents an age-old quandary in architecture: how to make laypersons feel more comfortable with architectural styles they may be uncomfortable with. This issue is most commonly seen in the differences in public and architect opinions on Brutalist buildings, which even publicly elected officials have decried as “”aesthetically worthless” and “ugly.”
Check out BoredPanda’s list of ‘Evil Buildings’ here.
Is it possible for a building to be ‘evil’, or is it simply a product of photography? How should architects react to the way their buildings are perceived?
From the architect. Completed this fall, the 125,000 square foot, 8,125-seat Grandstand Stadium is an innovative, lightweight structure that anchors the southwest corner of the United States Tennis Association’s (USTA) National Tennis Center in New York City. Since 2010, ROSSETTI and the USTA have collaborated on redesigning the 46-acre campus for the future of tennis, and expect to complete the final phase for the 2018 US Open.
Diagram
Relocated from the crowded northeast corner of the campus, the new Grandstand Stadium nestles into the natural setting of Flushing Meadows Corona Park; the trees along the campus edge inspire its unique exterior skin pattern that metaphorically evokes the illusion of peering through the foliage of leaves.
Teflon-coated fiberglass membrane, or polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)”) fabric, the hexadecagon (16-sided) facade is composed of 486 panels, over 26,000 square feet, that were designed using Computational Solver software. The complex geometry of the panels is synthesized while taking advantage of the material play on opacity and translucency, offering glimpses into and out of the stadium.
From the ground, fans are drawn into the Grandstand Stadium from multiple staircases alongside the structure. Along the upper walkway, visitors enjoy expansive views of the campus and park, including the new Allée, which connects to the historic World’s Fair Unisphere. Its strategic design allows people to move freely along the perimeter of the stadium while staying underneath the translucent canopy overhead.
Walkway Level Plan
The fan experience includes a lower bowl recessed into the earth, to maintain scalability, which creates the ultimate tennis experience that highlights the player-fan relationship. New concessions, a picnic area and plazas surround the Grandstand Stadium and provide fans with a comfortable, laid-back atmosphere as an alternative to the hustle and bustle of the rest of the campus.
Villa Muurame is a private home located in Jyväskylä, Finland. Completed in 2014, it was designed by Marco Casagrande. Villa Muurame by Marco Casagrande: “Villa Muurame is a wooden 3-story single-family home by Lake Jyväsjärvi in Jyväskylä, Finland. The spatial elements of the house (approx. 3m (9.8ft) wide, 7.8 (25.6) long and 3.1 (10) high) were pre-fabricated during the winter in the Muurametalot housing factory in Karunki, Finnish Lapland and..
From the architect. This project is a store renovation for the furniture brand “Lost and Found” located in Guozijian Street, a historic district in Beijing. As nowadays, more and more people tends to live alone, the concept of a traditional family gradually disintegrated, and the city’s public space is becoming another “home” for people. Under such contexts, the renovation intends to bring the sense of “home” into the store, and to introduce a new vision for the future commercial space that connects people with urban public space.
By adding an alc, the traditional single-storey siheyuan building is transformed to a loK while most of the original wooden structure were retained. The indoor garden in the centre of the building divides the whole space into four independent areas living room, dining room, bedroom and a study. Since all the rooms open up to indoor courtyard, each space benefits from the sunlight that coming through the large skylight above and gets a view of the indoor garden.
Natural materials are used in all areas such as terrazzo floor, diatom mud wall paint, and wooden furniture. The rough texture and the plain look bring a warm and friendly feeling to people, waking up people’s initial memories and senses of home and family.
Architects In Charge: Alice Yeung, Thomas Wan, Tuesday Li
Area: 11150.0 m2
Project Year: 2015
Photographs: Courtesy of ArchSD
Courtesy of ArchSD
From the architect. A school is a community: a micro-society, a mini city within a city. It is an oasis yet has a direct relationship with the city at large. Our idea is simple; the spatial concept for the Kai Tak Primary School is to bring the students and teachers together with the playground and other spaces and activities, to encourage interactions. Breaking away from the typical densely built 8-storey school building in Hong Kong with the ball court on the ground, this school adopts a low-rise 4-storey design, with the basketball court raised on the first floor, sited in the middle of the school campus, creating a focus, pulling together spaces and activities.
Courtesy of ArchSD
Axonometric
Courtesy of ArchSD
From the school entrance plaza, students follow a staircase route to encounter the covered playground, central ball court and library roof garden, creating a sense of discovery of spaces, to stimulate the passion for self-discovery. This staircase path connects the three major open spaces of the school, setting the orientation of the campus.
Courtesy of ArchSD
The old tradition of Hong Kong’s walled village is re-interpreted in the design of the school. In similar way as a village’s ancestral hall, houses, square and lanes would be strategically laid out within the village wall. Within the wall of the School campus, the assembly hall which reads as the town hall of the school complex, the library and the classrooms are arranged in different blocks around the central ball court, with link bridges, courtyards, street and colonnades, shaping the school as a micro polis, conceived as a whole by using major urban design elements of a city. Courtyards, streetscapes and overlooking terraces bring closer the different spaces and activities, encouraging interactions.
Courtesy of ArchSD
Gardens and roof gardens are arranged on different levels throughout the campus to provide green scenery for the interiors and attract communications between the indoor and the open spaces. Gardens and vertical greening together with fair-faced concrete, metal and timber screens compose a variety of spatial experiences to be discovered, to stimulate learning. The selection of materials and generous use of greening also create an oasis in the city.
Courtesy of ArchSD
Product Description.Metal screen of weaved mild steel plates was used as window screen of the classroom block close to the main entrance of the school. Mild steel, along with other natural materials such as fair-faced concrete, timber and vertical greening, creates a variety of spatial experiences to be discovered. The language of the weaved screen was inspired by the Chinese traditional screen, a common element for windows and partitions in traditional houses of walled-villages in Hong Kong. By incorporating screens that mediate the outdoor and indoor environments, the design re-interprets the tradition in a contemporary way.
Set on the edge of a national park, the Burrawong House has undergone a transformation that establishes compelling links between the dwelling and its bushland surrounds, providing opportunities for serenity and retreat. Bijl Architecture was engaged by the owners from the very conception of the project, assisting with identifying an ideal site that captured both tranquillity and suburban amenity.
Through careful manipulation, alteration and augmentation of the original 1970s brick dwelling, the scheme interacts with its bush surroundings in an interplay of light and shadow. The simple form of the original 1970s dwelling required specific formal responses, with the new additions designed to nestle under and into the existing building form.
Key design elements such as large picture windows, clerestories, raking ceilings and internal/external spatial flows have been leveraged so as to compete with the shading of the extensive foliage and deal with the difficult bush fire zoning. Utilising this design approach, an equilibrium of spaces come together, making the house work vertically as well as horizontally.
Floor Plan
A series of careful insertions – under the house to create a music studio, at the side of the house to create a magnificent lap pool that juts into the bush – translates into a multiplicity of soft or transitional spaces for escape and relaxation. The result is a house that bows to the bush, that makes the most of its original, modest form by offering a flexible family home focused on quiet beauty.
Product Description.As the property is in the highest level bushfire planning zone, any new external materials needed to consider not only the aesthetic and form of the original 1970s brick dwelling, but also the ability to withstand stressful bushfire conditions. We also considered how any additions to the existing dwelling would best blend with the highly textured and coloured brickwork as well as the dense bushland surrounds. Thinking about these various parameters, we decided to preserve the original long line of the existing dwelling by placing a ‘pop-out’ addition on the street façade, accommodating a modest extension to the ground floor plane. This addition is clad in Terracade panels, made by Austral Bricks – the terracotta panels comply with the bushfire requirements and allow an efficient wall thickness to be achieved. The panels allow the new addition to make a contemporary reference to the brick ‘units’ of the existing dwelling, while contributing to a slick rectilinear aesthetic. Overall, the box form and its clean, grid-like surface complements the existing building fabric whilst making its own statement as the new street-facing element.
From the architect. The scenery is the backwoods of Alagoas, Brazil, a place so atypical of great beauty and simplicity. It helped us understand that the kickoff should be to enhance local culture by using regional techniques on the design and construction of a home and its interior. The result is a cozy, clear and light environment.
Thermal comfort was a priority in the project. We created cross ventilation and holes in the roof so that the hot air could be exhausted, while the cold air was coming in. Translucent roofing tiles and perforated bricks also helped to bring ventilation and natural light to the house interior, almost absent previously.
First Floor Plan
Neutral colored furniture highlighted local craft objects. Works of art from natives as well as the reuse of typical objects in the interior design were some of the actions that nurtured the design.
Kitchen has a special treatment in the house, since there is a cook in the family that helps many community institutions. The dining room is integrated to the kitchen in a way that this space is shared intensely by the family. At the rooms, studying was the focus.
At the facade, we decided to use mostly white paint so as to talk with the light colours of the local architecture, while the green, the blue and the vegetation in strategic places give life to the project.
Yesterday, the UK Government announced plans for 3 new garden towns and 14 new “garden villages” across England, expanding a plan that already includes 7 previously announced garden towns. Explaining the concept of the garden villages, the Department for Communities and Local Government described settlements of 1,500 to 10,000 homes, saying that together the 14 locations have the potential to deliver 48,000 new houses. In order to expedite the creation of these new settlements, the government has set aside a fund of £6 million (US$7.4 million), which housebuilders will be permitted to use in order to accelerate development at the sites.
However, the architectural community in the UK has mocked the proposals and the government’s use of language, highlighting what appears to be a poor understanding of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities concept. Many have also pointed out that the plans are relatively meager in a country that, by many estimates, is falling hundreds of thousands of new homes short of the number needed every year.
@GavinBarwellMP We had New Towns. Then Ecotowns, didn't work. Garden Cities, ditto. Now Garden Towns & Villages. What next? #ebenezerhoward
Speaking with ArchDaily, Charles Holland—co-founder of Ordinary Architecture and a former member of FAT—said: “I think the idea of new villages is a very interesting and important one which I have been researching at the University of Brighton. As part of an answer to the current housing crisis, I think new villages offer a plausible model that could reflect changing work patterns and the role of digital culture. This could facilitate a sort of reverse modernity or rural futurism—a migration from urban to rural.”
However, regarding the UK government’s announcement, Holland was less positive: “As for the ‘garden’ bit, well that seems like a lazy, unthreatening way to evoke places like Letchworth minus the radical model of communal land ownership that was an essential part of Ebeneezer Howard’s original vision.”
The garden prefix will not gussy up the same inadequate housing policy, served up in smaller and more lukewarm portions every year
Others were also pointed out how the original socialist intentions of the Garden City movement were at odds with the government’s plans, with writer Gillian Darley referring to an article from 2012 which criticized a previous misuse of the term by the government:
From the architect. JATA is a company with more than 50 years of experience in the manufacture and marketing of household appliances. With its original headquarters already obsolete, it was decided to build new, larger facilities, which would cover the current requirements of the company and the market. These requirements were mainly a large logistical area and spaces destined to activities of manipulation, recovery, production lines, laboratory, etc. On the other hand a properly administrative area.
With this distribution of the program and under operating guidelines studied by Jata throughout its history, the project was born with two volumes of pure lines and an industrialized construction based on prefabricated concrete elements, as a reference to the company and its production in series, which allowed to reduce the execution time. The largest volume houses the logistics program meanwhile the smaller one embraces the rest of the areas.
The logistic warehouse has 14.6 m of maximum height, 100 m of width and 120 m of length. It is a building with a closed facade of concrete panels placed horizontally, prefabricated structure of concrete sconces of big lights to achieve an interior space as clear as possible, naturally illuminated thanks to skylights and exutorios in deck. The offices, of smaller size and greater complexity, is defined by a facade with prefabricated elements of vertical concrete from floor to deck, with an orientation S-SO that allows to take advantage of the natural light for the whole day, achieving a uniform natural illumination throughout the building, and allowing the best possible views of the open landscape and the Moncayo peak. Light is present everywhere and transparency is intended in all spaces, creating connections between different working areas and achieving greater efficiency and better working conditions within the company.
First Floor Plan
Despite all difficulties, the program has been developed to achieve a project with an architectural value associated to the company, a design that corresponds to the innovative but, at the same time, traditional character of Jata Appliances.
This quality of the building based on repetition, austerity and functionality generates a rigorous piece that is necessary to disrupt in order to mark the access to the interior. Therefore, the entrance to the office building fractures a corner of the main parallelepiped, creating an atrium of double height and broken shape that contrasts with the austerity of the totality.
It is a 14 story, 15,000 m2 mixed use building: commercial on the lower floor, offices for the next four floors and residential units on the next nine floors.
Diagram
The building is located at an important intersection within the city where urban elements converge, such as a new metro stop, an important government building, a commercial shopping center and the most emblematic park of the city. Being the first new construction in this zone and highly visible, the building attempts to combine the many existing and new diverse elements through movements that bring new shadow lines reflections and points of view.
In the search for spatial wealth elements of the facade were eliminated, this is achieved by a design concept that removes strategic corners of the building. Where double and triple height spaces are generated. Where panoramic visual connections to the entire city, manage to activate these exterior areas traditionally dead, and replacing them with different social programs.
These new exterior areas at the top of the building take advantage of the park’s visual and excellent equatorial climate that prevails throughout the year. Deep perimeter balconies around the building help to reduce solar gain in the interior spaces allowing for the use of larger portions of glass in the façade, without sacrificing passive climate controlled spaces.
Section
The building contains a large roof garden that makes a visual connection with the surrounding Andes Mountains while creating usable green space for the building’s residents.
The façade of the building uses a material process known as GFRC (glass fiber reinforced concrete). Molds were made in close collaboration with the architect’s digital model and the fabricators work shop to provide accurate and a well coordinated process. The concrete material in then sprayed onto the molds to create the final product.
The design and the construction process of the building utilizes a repeatable patterning system to reduce the overall amount of molds used in creating the dynamic building facade. Advantages of this material are efficiency of installation, as panels are fabricated up to 4 meters by 2 meters tall. Molds are also able to be reused, reducing the material used and fabrication time. Also designed and built into the installation process is a system of adjustable metallic connections allowing the complex forms to align with ease. The final product is a continuous dynamic façade system.
The coordination between the Leppanen + Anker Architects, the developer and builder, Uribe & Schwarzkopf, was vital for the development of the GAIA building, resulting in a new landmark for the city, a new architectural and constructive reference, which is incorporated enriching urban life and local architecture, in the Ecuadorian capital.
Sig Nordal 