Rules · Use · Façades · Structure
Move ducts, pipes, lifts and escalators out of the building’s core onto its exterior, colour-code them, and let them become the architecture, leaving the interior free and making the plant easy to reach and replace.
Banham argued that services had become the largest part of a building’s cost and life, yet architects hid them. At the Centre Pompidou (1971–77) Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers turned the building inside out: on the street façade the air-conditioning ducts are painted blue, water pipes green, electrical conduits yellow and lifts and circulation red; on the piazza façade an escalator in a glass tube climbs diagonally across the front. Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building in London (1978–86) hangs its lavatories, stairs and lifts in stainless-steel towers outside the office floors.
Frame a sphere by subdividing the triangular faces of an icosahedron and projecting the points onto the sphere; the triangulated net of short struts spreads loads through the whole surface and encloses the greatest volume for the least material.
full sphere of frequency ν: 30ν² struts, 20ν² triangles, 10ν² + 2 hubs
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
Span the whole depth of the building with the structure so that each floor is a single open plate, adaptable to uses that cannot be foreseen.
Pompidou: 48 m clear span between column lines, 13 bays of 12.8 m
Hang the outer wall from the edges of the floor slabs as a continuous skin of glass and metal, independent of the frame behind it, and express its grid of mullions.
skin = vision glass + spandrel panel per floor, on a module of ≈ 1.5 m
Place industry and other large work places in their own zone, served by road and rail, near the housing but separated from it by a belt of green.
Plan the permanent things (the structure, the service routes, the roads) as a lasting framework, and treat the enclosures plugged into it as a kit of standard parts, each renewed at its own rate.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Put the services outside, and show them”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/services-outside. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.