MATTEO MELIOLI
SANTA MONICA PIER I DESIGN FOR AN OFFSHORE DESALINATION PLAN
Sun Towers is a design work made by BLDA Architects, in collaboration with Steven Scott, designer and light artist, and XCO2 environmental expert and energy engineers. The brief was to design an offshore power plant in a quite remarkable site: the stretch of sea right in front of the Santa Monica Pier in California.
Being between land and water the site plays a strategic and vital role as the potential support of life for the entire bay. Experience tells us how energy and water are intertwined and as California faces severe water shortages in the coming years, the amount of energy required for water production and transmission is sure to increase.BLDA proposal is to create an off-shore structure, well visible from the city and links directly to Santa Monica by extending its existing pier.
The intention was to move away from the old centralized power plant of territorial proportions. Smaller,
multiple and standardised, self-sufficient power units are therefore proposed. Each cell is a highly efficient micro plant, shaped as a slender mast emerging from the sea. Each cell is fully flexible and adaptable and can easily be moved, dismantled or duplicated. The power plant can then expand or reduce in size, multiplying the site’s energy capacity over time.
The second environmental aspect taken into consideration is the sun as being the predominant renewable energy resource in this unique location. Instead of covering the sea with a horizontal canopy, we explored a vertical option, where the photo-voltaic cells are grouped upon slender vertical masts. This increases the overall surface area exposed to the sun and avoids the loss of light in the sea below due to overshadowing.
During the night, waves of light and colour, designed by light artist Steven Scott, ‘sweep across the installation, rising and falling with tide and swell’. Much like the colour programming, the timing of movement can
also abstract these natural rhythms and enter a dialogue with them and the observer.
Last thought goes to the immense visual impact that such a structure will have on observers: such obvious visibility requires the users to be allowed into the structure to fully experience its space. BLDA decided to extend the existing pier and connect it to the power plant. This link is more than a bridge between the old and new structures, it is a meaningful way to restore the lost partnership between sea and community.
Together with the environmental benefits, our design has indeed the potential to change the livelihood of the community alongside the entire bay by strengthening the connections within, as well as to lead the economic growth and future developments around the site itself.
COMPOSIZIONE 1
2010 PENCIL, INK ON PAPER, 80 x 45
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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George H. William, The Acoustics of the Chamber Music Room, in The Musical Times Vol. 72, 1931.
Barthes Roland, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang. New York, 1985.
Guerrero Jeannie, Non-conventional planar designs in the works of Nono and Tintoretto, in Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 32 , University of California, 2010.
Gorman Michael John, The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher's Geographical Project, Stanford University, 2002.
Melioli Matteo, Inhabiting Soundscape: Architecture of the Unseen World in In The Place of Sound : Architecture, Music and Acoustic, edited by Colin Ripley with Marco Polo and Arthur Wrigglesworth, Cambridge Scholar, London, 2007.
Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
Treib Marc, Space Calculated in Seconds, Princeton University, 1996.
Kandinsky Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, reprint, Kessinger, 2004.
Boulez Pierre, Il paese fertile. Paul Klee e la musica, Leonardo, Milano 1990.
Klee Paul, Esperienze esatte nel campo dell’arte (1928), in Id., Confessione creatrice e altri scritti,
NOTES
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[1] Varese defines the movement of sound as routes sonores (TREIB 188), that is acoustic waves that flow inside a structure and are generated by, for example, a sound that moves in succession from one loudspeaker to another. A ‘cinematic setereophony’ is thus created, a type of sonorous gesture which creates a connection between the passing of time and the movement of the sound inside the pavilion.Music is therefore a concept that reflects dynamism and its architectural embodiment is the fluid shape of the pavilion.
Treib, Marc, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996.
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[1] This position brings to mind the installation of the sound artist Bernhard Leitner ‘In Serpentinata’. A series of loudspeakers are positioned along a metallic structure and the sound emitted from each loudspeaker transforms the whole sculpture into a sonorous object, an object that is at the same time space and sound.
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[1] For the interview refer to the web page:
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[1] “...The designers therefore looked at achieving a reverberation time of 1.4 to 1.7 s at mid-frequencies (500-1000 Hz) with a higher reverberation at lower (bass) frequencies to provide a warm room response”. Excerpts from the Acoustic Report by Mark Howarth (by Sandy Brown Associates).
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[1] See note 1.
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[1] I am referring to the writings of Wassily Kandisky on the acousttic value of sounds (KAND 32) Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning The Spiritual in Art, English translation by Michael Sadler, Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, 2004. and those of Paul Klee on the form of sound (BOUL 37). Boulez, Pierre, Il paese fertile: Paul Klee e la musica, Edizioni Leonardo, Milan, 1990. During the 20’s and 40s Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger worked on cinematic experiments concerning the visualisation of sound which culminated in the Disney film Fantasia.
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[1]Synaesthetic description is when we talk of a typical perceptive experience related to one organ of sense in particular but use terms of reference which are usually associated with a different sensorial system, (for example saying that a colour is warm, a sound is high, a painful vision of life, and so forth). Synaesthetic language exemplifies a general characteristic of sensorial experience, that is to say that it depends in a transversal way on various modalities. In fact perceptive experience is based upon a neural ‘architecture’ which is extremely interconnected and which functions both on a uni-modal and cross-modal level at the same time.
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[1] In recent times experts have come to understand the significance of the so-called ’intermodal’ condition during the stage of a child’s cognitive development, that is the zone of our perceptive system which seems to move horizontally between different sensorial channels, connecting them, sometimes in a rather astonishing way, in spite of their apparent incompatible differences.