I revisited a project out of analogue times in Rhino:.
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The assignment of the project consisted in designing a jazz club as an autonomous building. Since such a thing did and still does not exist as an established archetype, it made for a start with a very white sheet of paper.
We were given a strict “space allocation plan”(“Raumprogramm”) and a concrete building site, which again in itself did provide a lot of freedom - basically proverbially in “a greenfield situation” (“auf der grünen Wiese”?): in a small urban park on the side of a river without any direct built neighbourhood, literally “on a green meadow”, just surrounded by randomly distributed trees. Only the front facade visible from the street in a bit of a remoteness, the building site itself being set back from it by approximately 50 meters.
The next prominently present building to this site just diagonally across the adjacent bridge of the aforementioned street being a 1926 “brick expressionist” building, the first high rise of the city of Hanover in northern Germany, housing a cinema, called “Capitol”, in its basement.
side view of the jazz club
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Our initial design arranged all the different functions docking to a circular concert hall: already all the different parts meeting and coming together like musicians in jam session, but still not very specific in its appearance as a whole as well as not very strong in the relations between the individual parts - see the cardboard model in the upper left corner.
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We subsequently worked on strengthening the “interdigitation” of the spaces and volumes as well as the character of them individually. The concert hall for example got multiple direct connections across a hallway to the different practice rooms of the different musicians with the idea of them being able to come together at any time for a jam session, not only for a concert with an audience.
We opened the circular concert hall forming a tangent entry situation for an audience. And we gave the room an asymmetric focus point around the stage.
The individual practice rooms in turn got their own volume each and were not all proportioned the same, representing each - different facilities for different musicians, playing different instruments.
All of this leading to a spiral form with its own rhythm, viewed from the outside as well as from the inside of the concert hall.
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My plan in 2025 was to rebuild the project for the first time in CAD as a pleasant exercise of a project that would not be suited overly well to widespread standard architecture CAD apps that are thinking more orthogonal and following the logic of floors and building elements rather than being free in geometry and volume… a project suited to an app like Rhino noticeably better.
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While at it I - while I left the outside untouched - I could not resist clearing out some elements in the foyer:
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Back than we had not elaborated the foyer as a space, e.g. with en interiour model, but just in plan.
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Here Rhino 3D came into its own. It was great fun to, for the first time, work on the interior spaces in a three dimensional form.
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and not at last in the concert hall:
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The concert hall was at the heart of the design with its “jam session musicians entrances” and its layout with the asymmetric focus on the stage and not at last the tangent entrance situation for the audience - those elements formed the nucleus of the syntax of the whole building, but yet again we had not elaborated the hall with any 3D tool other then our imagination after 2d hand drawn sketches and plans. This would have been something for a succeeding planing phase and in retrospect we did provide a space with more potential then I expected.
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While at play and in need for some furniture to equip the concert hall and give it a human scale, I pulled a chair from the ashes of this french Cafe:
And went on an impromptu tangent with it, transforming its design into a table and a bar stool and table for the bar stool.
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See more in the video linked above. See more Rhino in the video.
Regards from the past,
farbbunt
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