Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Design: Tennis Court

The tennis court always seemed to stick out in the brief as a big issue, potentially compromising the intimate scale imagined for the building.
The idea is to introduce heaps of extra poles for the fence, instead of the standard 8 or so, and dot them around the perimeter in clusters to put the tennis court in a dialogue with the surrounding forest, as in Aalto's staircase in the Villa Mairea. The idea for the fencing is to make it out of standard cyclone mesh, but of different guages collaged together to read like camoflage, the same technique Gehry used to generate the text (which has since been removed) on the Santa Monica Place shopping centre carpark in L.A.
Images: Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea staircase, 1937 & Frank Gehry, Santa Monica Place shopping centre carpark, 1980

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