20 January 2007

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The architectonic form of water


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Does any other element around us cause us to reflect on life as frequently as water does – that primordial amniotic fluid, the originating liquid in which the first organic creatures took shape?
Architecture has always used water as part of its creative process.
Often, for example, as a decorative factor or to complete an urban environment, it carries out the important function of creating a sense of continuity between human artifice and nature.  Paradoxically however, this shapeless, odourless, colourless substance, which apparently offers little or no stimulation to the senses, is more and more often becoming the source of inspiration for new and daring forms, for a vital fluidity of line, for movements that have no place in traditional architectonic volumes.

And two recent projects, spurred on by the propitious  availability of abundant funding and the desire to create the sort of totemic spaces suitable for an event as important as the Olympic Games, bear keen witness to the attraction of this most elusive, mysterious and fascinating of materials.

In both cases, the architecture seems to turn a questioning eye  towards the final role of the building; then, having identified its target, it elaborates and adapts its performance to create a work that in the end stands as a symbol of the very function for which it is destined.
In this way, two structures created to host Olympic-level competitions for the much-loved and highly popular discipline of swimming have become a means of using form and material to pay homage to the aqueous element that the sport takes place in.

The final touches are being put to WATERCUBE, National Swimming Centre, designed by Australian studio PTW Architects, for the upcoming Beijing Olympics in 2008. Built near Herzog & de Meuron’s NESTstadium, the centre will accommodate around 17,000 spectators on a surface area of 70,000 square metres.
Within the square and regular forms so symbolically important for Chinese culture, this beautiful structure reproduces the perfect architectonic diagram naturally formed by humble soap bubbles.
The intrinsic geometric stability of the bubbles maintains a perfect equilibrium of surface tension: connecting planes slope at a constant angle and the bubbles tend to fill up the spaces between them, and this stability has been translated into an architectonic form which is also perfectly suited to the antiseismic requirements of the location. The work is completed by colours, the transparency of the materials (“Efte”, the light-weight double membrane of the surface exterior) and special lighting effects and projections that turn this sports arena into a true monument to water. Environmental impact has also been taken into consideration and both the pool heating and interior central heating are provided by solar power absorbed by the building’s systems.

London’s Olympic Aquatic Center, designed by famous international architect Zaha Hadid, the only woman to win the Pritzker Prize, is another structure that takes its inspiration from shapes that water assumes under the pressure of physical forces.
Hadid, whose creations often make use of fluid lines and liquid volumes, was chosen by the London Olympic Committee to produce an aquatic complex whose construction will take place independently of London’s preparations for the 2012 Olympics as part of a combination of works to upgrade the Stratford area in the east of the capital.
The design includes two Olympic pools and a series of structures where all the various kinds of water sport can take place, with a capacity of 20,000 spectators. The most striking detail of the work however is certainly the curving line of the roof, designed to mimic the movement of a wave caused by a body diving into water.

Perfectly adapted to both its purpose  and to the countryside around it, the Aquatic centre, its longitudinal development parallel to the Lea River valley, seems to figure in the  panorama as a cascade of waves, just waiting to be cleaved by the clean-sculpted forms of the competing athletes.