Water on the 82nd floor (Aqua)
The 82-story "Aqua" designed for Chicago by the architectural firm led by female architect Jenny Gump was recently completed, which is the tallest building designed by the firm led by female architect so far. This wavy building brings a new way of skyscraper design.
Aqua-a brand-new 82-story apartment building stands in the center of Chicago. Like all other skyscrapers in the world, it is made of hard materials-steel bars, cement and a lot of glass. But architect Jeanne Gang made it look soft and smooth.
A few days ago, this skyscraper named "Water" attracted the attention of the whole world. Jenny Gump received architectural training at the University of Illinois, the University of Zurich and Harvard University. After graduation, she worked in Koolhaas' company. She set up her own studio in Chicago 1997. The first project that her studio took over was 1 100-seat theater.
Water balcony
Skyscrapers are no longer the patent of male architects.
The bottom of the "water" is a traditional rectangular glass plate, but its four walls are surrounded by a curved balcony. From bottom to top, each balcony is different, resulting in a changing effect. The arc-shaped ripples on the facade of a building are just like the ripples on the surface of a building when the wind blows. In fact, this huge and solid building seems to fluctuate with the soft melody.
Gan has never designed skyscrapers since 1997 opened an architectural firm. A few years ago, she was invited by the construction developer Tam Berg to design this project.
This project in Chicago has attracted the attention of the whole world, because this skyscraper named "Water" is the tallest building designed by a female architect in the world. At a recent press conference under the beekman Building in Manhattan,
Frank Gehry, an architect, proudly said: "Viagra is useless!" It is a cliche to associate skyscrapers with symbols of male gender identity. However, there are really few high-level design works by well-known female architects (Zaha Hadid is currently building skyscrapers in five cities around the world, but none of them have been completed). Gan's works let us get rid of the stereotype that only men are associated with skyscrapers in the past. On the other hand, even if height and gender issues are put aside, such architectural works are still remarkable. Balcony is the design focus of "water"
The success of "water" is not only because Gan created a brand-new, smart and low-cost method, which turned ordinary glass apartment buildings into exciting works of art, but more importantly, the balcony treatment as its architectural feature also has the function of adjusting the environment: in summer, these hanging balconies provide shading for apartment rooms.
At the same time, they can also protect buildings from wind speed, which is the most important challenge of skyscraper engineering. The undulating building surface formed by the balcony hinders the raging strong wind in Chicago, and it is difficult for the airflow to find a clear path, so it is consumed and diverted when passing through the building surface, so there is no need to set up an "adjusting damper" (a mass weighing hundreds of tons is suspended in the building to tune the vibration generated by the building and make it stable). Using curved surfaces to reduce the influence of wind speed also gives Gan an additional benefit, that is, she can set a balcony outside each floor. Usually, balconies are not set on the 60th and 70th floors of apartment buildings, because the wind is too strong there. When you first see the whirlpool surface of "water"-its neighbors are all square houses-you may think of the "drop-shaped" buildings that have been very popular in the past few years.
Their arcs are usually designed by computer programming. But Gan integrated aesthetics and engineering into the classic model of modern architecture in Chicago. Although "water" conveys a powerful visual shock, it is not the kind of building that makes people feel "conceited". In today's era of coexistence of various architectural forms-even sometimes, the best architectural form does not have to be based on such logic, just because architects think it looks good. Although the appearance of "water" is so unique, it does not show its style wantonly. In this sense, Jenny Gump is very different from Zaha Hadid, the most famous female architect today. Hadid's architectural appearance is gorgeous, giving the impression that female architects pay more attention to romantic shape design than to solving practical problems. Gan's works prove that this is actually a prejudice. (Zhu)
Instead of solving practical problems. Gan's works prove that this is actually a prejudice. (Zhu)