SUPERHUMAN ENTICEMENT
Thesis at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Studio Greg Lynn 2009
Superhuman Enticement' is a new showroom, manufacturing and therapy building catering to clients of advanced prosthetic and Biomechatronic devices. Unlike traditional prosthetics, Biomechatronic engineering integrates living tissue with synthetic components to produce seamless and often superhuman performance. This recent generation of innovative and extremely beautiful prosthetics has radically transformed the popular perception of artificial limbs, which are now seen as desirable objects of fashion and identity rather than inelegant replacements attempting to mask the loss of the natural body part.
The project creates an architectural identity for the evolutionary, futuristic lifestyle of the contemporary amputee; a lifestyle celebrating a mysterious synthesis of organic body and technology. Similarly enigmatic effects are created through the fusion of landscape, highly articulated volumes and a luminous, gravity defying roof. Synthesizing the aesthetics of humanoid robot design and a wooded forest, the project animates the smooth, clean and continuous surfaces of the building volumes with a constantly changing light and shadow patterns produced by a space frame roof structure. This highly designed ambiance fully fuses and transforms the therapy, factory and showroom building typologies into a continuously shifting field of sophisticated, highly-differentiated architectural moments. These moments produce effects that echo the recent startling advances Biomechatronics.
The design of the project 'Superhuman Enticement' demonstrates how this paradigm change can be exploited for both generalization and specification of therapy and factory building typologies as well as formal beauty. Achieving an enigmatic effect by the juxtaposition of the roof and the volumes the spacial diversity and the contrast of the smooth white clean continuous surface of the volumes and the rigid spaceframe structure of the roof.
Text by Julia Koerner 2009
AWARDS I PUBLICATION I EXHIBITION
07/2010 selected for the ARCHIPRIX INTERNATIONAL 2011 HunterDouglas Award, MIT Camebridge, US
09/2010 VISUAL CATALOG: Greg Lynn's Studio at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Springer
06/2009 Thesis Merit Scolarship, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
06/2009 THE ESSENCE, annual Exhibitions of dieAngewandte at MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna