Something that is next to nothing
Mark Treharne

“A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.” (1)1. Peter Brook ‘The Empty Space’ 1968

In the absence of a brief, a proposition? An idea in search of a somewhere in the city. Metropolitan emptiness has long been reduced to an economic quantum.

The predatory city abhors a vacuum, seeking to diminish all voids with construction. With development economically predisposed to density, empty space is compelled to coexist. In a realm where lacunae are rare and fissures to be filled, Śūnyatā remains a conceptual state.

So how to sustain a place for ‘something’ and ‘anything’, while also making it available? Free movement as an absolute anthropological imperative? “Something” and “anything”in themselves are never enough. Random spaces necessitate opportune strategies. Obliquity ventured by all concerned. Intuition willingly gifted in return for the possibilities of becoming. “We are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.” (2)2. Antonin Artaud ‘The Theatre and its Double’ 1938

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness. Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form. Yet technology and technique incline to diminution and with a simple gesture we can enlarge awareness by the most fractional means. Just as the slenderest frame can underscore a view, a view without a frame requires no mediation to perceive.

As Lewerentz understood, directness and discretion can be two aspects of the same thing.

In the basement of the Lisson Gallery in 1973, rare eyewitnesses observed the artist Michael Asher’s strategic sensitivity: “All the way round, a thin but palpable incision had been made in the base of the walls, so that they appeared slightly detached from the floor. It would sound inviting if I said the walls thereby seemed to float or hover above the floor, but the effect was not as dramatic as that. Rather did it dislodge, in a hair’s-breadth and not at all irrevocable way, the function of the walls, implying that their presence need not prevent us from imagining the floor extending beyond into the space outside the room.” (3)3. Richard Cork ‘Everything Seemed Possible: Collected Essays’ Page 92, Yale University Press 2003

The shadowed interval is tendered as an opening to understanding, not a stylistic motif or shameless parody. Likewise, dance and architecture are mutually defined by each other’s limits. Physical form remains a circumstantial impediment to physical liberty. Hope lies somewhere between scenography to crush all prospects and choreography to obliterate all form. Architecture must seek its own disappearance if life and impulse are to manifest unimpeded. Defended within spaces together and alone, mutually shaped by the disposition of body, mind and form. Poised somewhere between the transparent and the opaque with reflections determined to disrupt and yet reveal coherence.

Behaving Merce like McGregor like Mies “cancelling symmetry at precisely the point where affirmation was demanded”. (4)4. Robin Evans ‘Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries’ AA Files 19 1990 reproduced in ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’, MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts 1997.

Perhaps inside a space without corners, where all surfaces are rendered as if continuous, both architecture and body wait to be revealed. All exits open to the future and pathways unprescribed. Something that is next to nothing.

Villa NHV
Diogo Matos

In May 2012, we at PanoramAH! were consulted to budget for the window frames for the project of an architectural firm in Geneva, DLA. This involved a house with three floors, located in Vandoeuvres, in the vicinity of Geneva. The back of the house was delimited by a stand of trees, and given its iconic presence in the plot, the desire was to keep it visible from all of the land’s ground level.

The first floor, underground, contains the more technical functions of the house. The third, a box, placed on Piloti supports, which floats over the land, houses the bedrooms. Between these two floors, on the ground level, is a space as open to the outside as possible, to allow for maximum visual permeability between the house’s reception area facing the street and the back part, which contains the house’s common spaces.

Thus, the ground level is sought to be made visually open to the outside, closed only by a glass membrane that is as invisible as possible. The technical solution would have to necessarily involve minimalist window frames, at the risk of compromising the concept of the project itself. This unique feature was obviously a constraint that we are used to dealing with. The great difficulty of the project was the large dimensions of the triple pane glass panels, which reached areas of 13 m². The PH38 system that we had in 2012 allowed us to only reach dimensions of around 6 to 7 m² of triple pane glass panel. This limit was due to the maximum glass thickness of 38 mm allowed by the system.

This dimensional barrier had already led to the loss of several projects between 2011 and 2012, and it was imperative to confront the technical requirements of Villa NHV, not as a problem, but as an opportunity to develop a new product, basing it on a model project.

The architectural team was informed of our intention to participate in the project, and the constraints resulting from executing it with a prototype product. The challenge was accepted by all the parties involved and the development process that would give origin to the PH54 series three months later was initiated.

More than a transition product or a timely solution for a specific project, the PH54 would become our most awarded minimalist system: Red dot design award 2014 “best of the best”; Architects Darling 2014 “gold for best product innovation”, and others. The certification of PanoramAH! in 2014 under the Minergie module, assigned to windows with high energy efficiency, further represented the achievement of a new technological level. The 54 series is today used in 90% of projects executed in Swiss territory.

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Absence of display
Hans Ibelings

Suffice it to say that this is a freestanding volume containing three apartments and a communal roof terrace overlooking the Atlantic, above a commercial space on the ground floor and an underground car park.

The three units consist of west-facing living spaces with an ocean view, and bedrooms facing the small street to the east of the building. In between are the kitchens, the stairs and the elevator. An alley leads to the main entrance of the apartments; at the other side, a ramp gives access to the parking in the basement. The north and south elevations are mainly closed, while the east elevation is partially open, with deeply recessed windows to ensure privacy and to allow for small balconies. The west elevation is glazed, behind the same concrete grid as on the opposite side, offering a vertical framing of the horizontality of the oceanic panorama.

The upper storeys are set back, to scale the volume in its context. Similarly, the form is calibrated to be parallel to the street and the neighbouring building, without in any way reducing the verisimilitude of complete rectangularity.

This architecture intentionally lacks an interesting form, and comes almost without colour. There is no flaunting of exquisite materials, no suggestion of design virtuosity. The effect of this deliberate absence of display is paradoxical in a setting of fairly ordinary buildings. Surrounded by architectural unpretentiousness, this project stands out as supernormal, to adopt the powerful term of Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison. And exactly because of its supernormality, it manages to unveil the everyday charm of its neighbours, which suddenly appear to have an inconspicuous quality that otherwise may have gone unnoticed. This quality would most certainly have been eclipsed by any architecture that ostentatiously aimed at being exceptional. Conversely, this building can fully articulate its supernormality only because its surroundings are normal.

What is true for the exterior applies equally to the interior. The organization of the programme for each unit has a similar self-evidence as the external appearance. Neither interior nor exterior are conventional or standard, yet they both have a seemingly inescapable logic associated with the customary. This architecture not only suggests that nothing could be added or taken away without diminishing its beauty or logic; this also implies that these two categories overlap here. The beauty resides in the logic.

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