Architecture + Water celebrates the extraordinary design possibilities elicited in the coupling of these apparently contradictory entities. Architecture is understood as fixed and stable, while water is seen as fluid and dynamic; their combination, however, poses both possibilities and constraints from which imaginative design solutions can emerge.
The five projects presented in this exhibition negotiate this tension as the source of architectural invention. Rather than relegating water to an aesthetic feature, these projects directly engage water as a critical component in the design. They engage water in its multiple forms, as a functional, physical, and transformative medium.
The projects range in scale, site, and program; their selection spans three continents. Individually, they address a diverse set of aquatic conditions (oceans, lakes, rivers, and marshlands) as well as constructed contexts (urban, suburban, and rural). In each case, the relationship between structure and water is integral; uncoupling them would be impossible. Here water is a surface and a volume; a skin and a space; ephemeral and massive; transparent and opaque; a barrier and a medium; a dynamic material that is paradoxically the register of ultimate stability- the level line.
In Blur Building, by Diller + Scofidio, water is a mutable element, shifting states and responding to external conditions. In the Yokohama International Port Terminal, by Foreign Office Architects, water is an urban limit and a conduit of movement. For the Quattro Villa, by MVRDV, water becomes an inhabitable surface. With Brackfriars Station, by Alsop Architecture, water serves as a place of transition in transportation infrastructure. And in the Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant, by Steven Holl Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, water links natural and artificial life-sustaining systems.
In each project, and in the range of historic precedents included in the exhibition, architecture’s potential is transformed by the programmatic, perceptual, and physical effects of water.
