Ignacio Fernández Torres

advisor

http://www.us.es/acerca/directorio/ppdi/personal_8463

Spain

Prof. Architect ETSA Sevilla and TU Wien, partner of ftca architectos & asociados and ftca s.r… more

REANIMACE P?ÍSTAVU PODOLÍ. Project Author: Matouš Koudelka.

No object is entirely apart from its surroundings and therefore cannot be represented convincingly as a thing in itself; also the presence of our own individuality causes it to
appear differently than it would to others. . . . There is no value in trying to imitate exactly.
Photographs will serve you best of all, if that is your aim. We should not imitate when our
intention is to create—to improvise. Louis I. Kahn, “The Value and Aim In Sketching,” 1931.

From this quote of Master architect Louis I. Kahn, we can conclude that for us, as architects, will be much more efficient in our production to build an own personal language that allow us to express things precisely and promote our own ideas with our own graphic construction of the world.

This great proposal for improving the Podolí port facilities in Prague, has achieved an accurate level of precision on designing a program of uses that would for sure activate and improve the quality of the area, and the interaction with the city and inhabitants.

There is a very respectful procedure in the intervention, that assume pre-existing elements with quite a nice balance between conservation and transformation. The proposal has been taken with very appropriate sense of scale and with a very reasonable ambition according to the real possibilities of a small city marina.

There is an intelligent approach and understanding of the how the architecture can negotiate waterfront lines as a topography that can minor the scale impact and arrange better configuration for circulations.
Construction is define by standard technologies where concrete and wooden façade allow to compromise the new elements of the proposal with existing buildings.

However, this topography and necessity of digging for the new architecture makes less appropriate that the parking of vehicles will be taking a space that should probably be part of pedestrian’s areas. The role of the car is too important in the outer spaces and there is a lack of possibilities of interaction, promenade and panorama due to this. Underground service parking would be more efficient and a better organization of the access by vehicles will definitively improve the proposal.

Variability of window geometries look aswell slightly out of control and the disposition of levels of the roofs seem to be in contrary direction, as the construction should be lowering the height in the direction of the water line.

The quote of Louis I. Kahn, also aware us about the need of a drawing that we have under control in order to express architecture and the concepts we deal with accuracy. On this matter, the excessive use of non post-produce rendering doesn’t help the proposal to express clearly. We can not accept as architects that the definition made by a rendering machine of a car or a boat, is much higher than the definition of the architecture we are proposing. The clever use of a right amount of color, contrast, saturation of images and the amount of detail according to the definition fo our architecture is a basic approach that we have to deal with until the end of the submission.

As Marshall McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message, and non-depurated images will always devaluate our intentions. Following some contemporary exemplar cases like Caruso-St.John, Sergison Bates, RCR, or even older examples like John Hejduk, Rafael Moneo or Jorn Utzon among others thinking about people that has work with platforms in water fronts can be helpful in this sense.

Regards,
Arch.Prof. Ignacio Fernández Torres,
E.T.S.A. Sevilla, ESP.
www.ftca.es