ENVELOPE 1

The Envelope is an essential part of the schematic image of the building.

The Greek word techne reflects the quality of an object to embody and depict the method by which it has been fashioned. The paradigm for Greek architecture was sculpture so this affection for the quality of a process to be embedded in a form seemed immediately logical. Early modern architecture acquired a similar sense of “transparency” with its concern for the honest use of materials—Ruskin, Violet le Duc, Behrens. Twentieth century architecture turned this candid approach to materiality into a new formal language—Wright, le Corbusier, Kahn. Late modernists exploited the idea that architecture could use more active metaphorical references—the machine, the factory, the computer—that valorized a transparent use of materials and assemblies. The conceptual logic of techne continues to influence the way we configure aspects of our architecture, particularly the envelope.
What you see is what you get. Lou Kahn said, “Ornament is the avocation of the joint”. It is not possible, for example, to ignore the physical realities of a veneer wall. It must be jointed and the visual placement of the joints affects the compositional strategies of the façade. The material and assembly configuration of the wall system determines what your building will look like. The elevation, the wall section and the plan relationship of the constituent parts of the envelope are intimately related. We will explore these relationships with two exercises, due next week, that will raise specific issues relative to how we want the building to appear and how we want the building to be built.

Your task for our meeting next Tuesday will be to layout the basic details of the envelope of your building—a plan detail at 1 ½” = 1’-0”, a projected axonometric wall section at 1” = 1’-0”, and a partial elevation drawn at ½” = 1’-0”. The plan detail must be at a corner of the building and it must cut through some glazing. It determines the basic relationship of the glazing to the envelope material. The wall section should be cut through the roof and glazing. It should be drawn in axonometric and ‘projected’ back to show how the envelope material continues past the glazing. This determines the essential lines that make up the elevation of your building. The partial elevation should be carefully drawn to include all of the ‘lines’ of construction as they would be seen when looking at the building. Each line of the elevation should respond to a line revealed in the other two drawings.

On an 18” x 18” panel artfully compose the three drawings so they begin to tell us how the envelope of the building is configured. As these are really three aspects of the same thing the drawings should overlap and engage each other.