A narrative essay on the Spectacle Brick project: Can the granularity of a single building create a strategic shift in the urban landscape? The site of this solitary element occupies a position where urban and neighbourhood scales coexist simultaneously. The aspiration here was to establish a neutral structure at the urban scale alongside an intelligible expression at the local scale, using a pattern that could operate simultaneously in proportion to the distance and scale of both neighbourhood and city.
The project's story began with the design of the central office for a brick manufacturing plant, based on an existing structural frame. The design objective became finding a method to redefine the city's resolution through the tools available to the brick factory.
The redefinition of the building's dualities begins from the city: complexity and simplicity, changeability or permanence, extroversion or introversion, looking outward and looking inward, closed or open -- all these dualities can be defined simultaneously rather than fixed in a binary decision of zero or one. Thus the project sought to avoid placing its decisions between dualities at any fixed point, instead constantly shifting from two opposing concepts into a spectrum-like state.
In response to the questions posed by the project, a cellular entity was created that differed structurally from its predecessors. This entity was called the Spectacle Brick: it incorporated a transparent element within itself while simultaneously fulfilling the roles of masonry, finishing, and insulation. No longer rigid, it could see the city from within itself, yet this role alone was insufficient.
It was no longer merely a wall but also a window. No longer merely a skin but an organiser of interior space from the outside in. It never maintained a fixed behaviour within the building -- it could open and close. It admitted natural light in a mysterious manner that placed the reading of space in a state of suspension. At times it also provided the space's artificial illumination. It caused the building to be introverted at one moment and extroverted at another.
Permeability is the Spectacle Brick's favoured term, for by penetrating from outside to inside and defining the interior spatial subdivision -- while accommodating green space within its penetrated sections -- it has managed to redefine the boundary between interior and exterior. Through its semi-transparent nature and the notion of permeability, it continually seeks to reconcile the relationship between inside and outside.
The Spectacle Brick has enabled the project, rather than choosing black or white among its various dualities, to form a broader spectrum of grey in which the meanings of elements shift. Dualities such as single skin becoming double skin, exterior wall becoming interior wall, introverted quality by day becoming extroverted quality by night, rigid wall and semi-transparent screen -- the intermingling of these dualities creates a suspension of choice upon which the Spectacle Brick itself steadfastly insists.