Fuksas in Bucharest (V)

Architect Massimiliano Fuksas as SHARE SPECIAL GUEST will give a conference in Bucharest, on the 27th of March 2018 within SHARE – the International Architecture and Engineering Forum.
Until then we introduce – exclusively by igloo media – one question and one project per week. This is the fifth episode.
We hope to generate a meaningful profile of Arch. Fuksas’ architectural work and conviction.

Q & A

igloo: What you will hope the most for 2050?

Massimiliano Fuksas: The focus of my interest has always been the human being. I’d like to design an entire city. A city where there were very few cars. Where people could meet. So, making millions people live together, democracy becomes the most important thing that architecture must deal with. Today architects must give society something more than the solution of functions; something more than the aesthetic pleasure, too. The most important thing that architecture must do, after having guaranteed functions, is to give emotions. I believe that an architect has the duty to be active and critical in his society. My dream is that everyone can have stimuli, passions and feelings. In a place we could call “global peace village”.

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PROJECT

Tbilisi Public Service Hall, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2010-2012

The Tbilisi Public Service Hall is situated in the central area of the city and it overlooks the Kura river.

The building is made up of 7 volumes that contain offices (each volume is made up of 4 floors located on different levels). These volumes are placed around a „central public square”, which is the core of the project,  where there is the front office services. Offices are connected to each other by internal footbridges that stretches on different levels.

Volumes and the central public space are towered above by 11 big „petals” that are independent both formally and structurally from the rest of the building. Three of those big petals covers the central space. The petals, different for their geometry and dimension, reaches almost 35 meters and they are supported by a structure of steel pillars with a tree shape, visible, as well as the petals, externally and internally from the building.

Among the petals, that are at different levels, are the glass facades. The main characteristic of these facades is that these have been released completely from the structure of the petals, allowing relative movements between the facade and the spatial network structure of coverage. This decision was taken to prevent that any movement of the cover, mainly due to oscillations for snow loads, wind or thermal expansion, can lead to the crisis of the glass.

The Tbilisi Public Service Hall includes: the National Bank of Georgia, the Minister of Energy, the Civil and National Registry.

See here the first, the second, the third and the fourth parts.