Hidro plane
-firefighting academy-
-firefighting academy-
MO1- architecture of peace
2018
prof. Ivan Rašković; ass. Miloš Kostić.
HYDRO-PLANE Kovin Military Airport - a stroke in the fields - offers the potential to become a place, the centre of the Vojvodina landscape. How does one design in accordance with the void representing the flat horizon and the infinite sea of sunflowers? Does one skip the design of architecture placed in landscape and approach the method of landscape design as a means of placing algorithms into which architecture is inserted? Architecture is landscape. Landscape offers an experimental platform for separation from known typologies and attempts to blur the boundary between the object / complex and its environment. In accordance with the topography, a spatial concept is formed, which affirms it and becomes part of the whole. The project of the fire academy was designed as an architecture of peace, with the possibility of quick conversion into the sphere of a defensive mechanism, the architecture of war - because "the best habitat is the one that survives despite all conditions."
Keywords • war • peace • landscape • defragmentation • algorithm • place •
site - the dipositon of pumps
hydro • prefix in words with the meaning of water.
(air) plane • eng. flat, surface • eng. plane, aircraft - the word game refers to a meeting point of an aircraft and falt as one of the most important motives in the project
The military airport near Kovin is hidden in a countless number of fields. The entire airport is reduced to a concrete stroke 2000 meters long that cuts spatial sequences of the landscape. From a human perspective, the strip disappears behind the horizon and seems infinite, without beginning, without ending; and endless it is because it imaginatively continues to the heavens. In order for the landscape not to grow just into a house in the environment it is treated algorithmically with the intention of creating a single tamed topography.
3D setion
The concept is formed as a reaction to the runway that survived despite different weather conditions and neglect – the idea is to keep the airport function and add new content in coherence with the original programme. Due to the frequent fires in the region, as well as frequent droughts, both natural disasters that damage the landscape, the military airport Kovin becomes a firefighting academy / command, with the possibility of extinguishing fire from air via airplanes. The airport has an exceptional potential for this thanks to the proximity of the river Danube and a large amount of groundwater. The complex is made up of a series of facilities that serve as a boarding school, the water runway and the accompanying system of water pumps that supply the previously mentioned runway. Together they build a defragmented image - a landscape that saves other landscapes.
technical drawing of the hidro pump
The architecture of landscape is dematerialized in the immediate environment. By decomposing the edges of the complex the real boundary is blurred and an imaginary limit is created which can be expanded by using the algorithm as needed. The imaginary grid distributes mechanical pumps for extraction of water based on the chess board principle - full / empty. Probes hooked on balloons, secured by a thin flexible system of pins inspired by the skeleton of swamp birds and the mechanics of an umbrella, form rows of flexible structures resistant to strong plane winds. In this way, the kinetic landscape imitates reed that grows on the rim of ponds and is swept under the influence of air movement - a typical melancholic sleepy Vojvodina landscape. Depending on whether the space is assigned to more functions than just the production of water, it can be a place of gathering and programmed (physical) recreation, and a passageway or an unknown place of exploration, rest or autoreflection - (psychical) recreation for the students of the academy. In the infinity of the repetitive elements of the water supply system, each user can find his own private geography. The architectural fabric is strongly focused on the nature and logical extension of the existing function.
a view of the hidrolandscape
programme and morphology
hilozoik • greek ( hýlē - matter, zoé - life)
The direction of the existing runway determined the direction of the new runway. The parallel placement of two strips defy the direction of fields surrounding them and emphasize that the runways are a consequence of the human hand. The two tracks are nourishing each other, they support each other, but never touch - each retains its persistence and character. The newly made water runway loses it’s rigor with the increase of it’s distance from the existing one, thereby starting a defragmented sequence in the imaginary grid. Placed alongside the coast are boarding schools - that connotate submarines or carcasses of planes. Such ambient and relationship to water should result in a certain tension as a means by which users are kept ready for rapid response in emergency situations. The vicinity of the runway and planes below the facilities placed in a row convert into a terminal. The objects then transfigure into a series of water pumps that are gradually reduced and scaled as the distance from the runway increases. Strictness turns into arbitrariness. The interspace is converted into various types of practice and leisure time spaces. The emphasis is on relocating activities in nature and sojourning in the landscape. The complex is also part of the landscape, but it is also an island whose border has been blurred.
section of the academy
The entire water pump system represents a landscape within a landscape, mechanical in the natural. How can one naturalize an artificial landscape? How can he make it seem alive? The attribution of lively and psychological characteristics to the entire nature, that is, the notion that the whole matter is pervaded by life, has been created in the period of ancient Greek philosophers such as Thales, Anaximenes and Heraclitus. There is a difference between the possession of the mind (hilopsychism) and the possession of life (hilosoism), but pumps that move according to a particular algorithm like a flower that closes and opens or sinks into a winter dream depending on the part of the day or day of the year create a impression of meta-order, a divine order, one that can only be found in nature. Balloons that increase and decrease their volume by pumping water - simulate breathing. Three layers - runways, the terminal (academy facilities) and the extraction system together make up a system that functions only if each part works separately. The newly designed complex is a mimesis of the natural environment in the function of technological achievements.
atmosphere
A neverending plane and in it a stroke that determines the place – the firefighting academy of the military airport Kovin. The spatial concept is created in relation to nature – architecture does not project the landscape, but the landscape projects the architecture. The programme is conditioned by the runway – the axis mundi. Schulz says the vertical in itself has something supernatural, but the horizontal certainly does not have it - because it represents the concrete world of man's actions. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the imaginary grid extends to the horizon and offers the possibility of infinite expansion of the artificial landscape. In relation to the spatial manifest, visible layers are shown through matter; the immaterial experience is manifested through a spatial concept - "the process by which a spatial conception transposes into the emotional sphere." Architecture of War or Architecture of Peace? Actually, there is only architecture - and war and peace are the conditions through which it arises, passes and dies. In contrast to the infinite ancient plane, these states are short-lived events that offer a place for shelter, education, rest and recreation to one generation.
