Plan Drawings of Casino Furniture
This Is Not a 22-Carat Styrofoam Casino
Project
What happened to the compulsive and prolific design experimentation of casinos?
Later a century of impulsive production of new architectural and spatial models, newer casinos have go more highly-seasoned, entertaining, and accessible—but also more banal. Emotional experience has taken over spatial complication: compages has been reduced to massive sheds embellished through superficial makeup, articulated envelopes, themed settings, and exotic atmospheres.
The studio aimed to stimulate the investigation of the casino type and challenge quondam and new models that seem to take evolved in the absence of critical typological alternatives. The ambition was not to elicit elementary scenographic or programmatic responses, but rather to advise a coherent and robust architectural solution.
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Introduction
From the Latin "casa," the word casino originally meant "little house" referred to a small state villa or a luxurious pavilion built for pleasure, typically on the grounds of large palaces and noble private residences.
The first public casino, Il Ridotto—from the Italian "ridurre," significant "to shut off," or "to make private," hinting at illegal and privately-owned gambling clubs—dates back to 1683. With its loftier stakes and formal wearing apparel code, Il Ridotto initiated a ritual of masking and camouflage, that later would be transferred from casino's players to North American gambling rooms' architectures and interiors.
The subsequent European casinos expressed an architectural monumentality. Imposing volumes, enriched in its chiliad interiors with frescoes, marbles, and golden—like the Casino de Monte Carlo—were one time once more the manifestation of richness and exclusivity.
A different attitude characterized the evolution of North American casinos. As Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown observed in Las Vegas, the casino concealed its immediate nature of gambling nether a constantly reinvented facade.
The architecture of the casino could exist considered an index of the American culture from the 1940s to the present, reflecting and sometimes anticipating tendencies and obsessions of the American dream. We could approximate different phases measuring a long trajectory from the motel-casino type with a western-manner setting (1940s) to the Pop City age (1958-1969)—where thousands of neon tubing dominating the surface created "virtual volumes",— the entertainment megastore and the Disneyfication (1985-1995) until today's Starchitecture and Mega-casino clusters (1995-present).
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Studio Description
In a casino, nothing is predetermined or certain, except the fourth dimension of an instant: a place where everything is decided past luck, fate, or chance. Students had to blueprint an architecture where spaces are organized and set clearly while, at the aforementioned time, allowing uncertain and exceptional circumstances to happen.
Because casino complexes are often an assemblage of different programs, the project combined the gambling building with a parking structure, a small hotel, and a puddle to implement the relation of the project with the exterior.
The report and close-reading of precedents—casinos, parking structures, and other projects—helped the understanding of big urban interiors. Combining the grandeur of the past European models with the more than controversial examples of the present served as an inspiration for reconfiguring and generating new schemes with stronger architectural value.
Drawings, models making, diagrams, and collages accept been essential tools for the studio. Particular emphasis was put on the vertical department, crucial for the definition and design of large interior spaces, and articulation of the overall project.
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Presented here are a selection of 10 references which were pivotal to the initial work of analysis and research adult by the students.
Interview
What led yous to explore and challenge the casino typology?
The tertiary-year undergraduate cadre studio at UIC in the spring semester typically focuses on a large interior projection. The programmatic richness of the casino — that spans from indoor landscapes and endless playgrounds to public facilities and infrastructural networks — offered the opportunity to explore the interior as a continuous bogus environs, able to swallow up reality in a whole multi-sensorial feel. Far beyond the blackness gaming room or the glaring facades described by Venturi and Scott Brown in the 60s, the architecture of the casino reproduces impudent caricatures of the world, diluting time and spaces, odours and views, rituals and events: pure spectacle. The beauty of the casino lies precisely in its ambiguity. Its hybrid nature as an aggregation of different programs, functions, technologies, environments, sensorial and concrete experiences, defies any traditional typology.
Thus, the ambition of the studio was to understand the architecture of casinos — whose design is generally ruled by profit, market strategies, and air-conditioning, rather than past distinct spatial qualities — by reinterpreting its historical development and ultimately formulating a series of controversial buildings, culling to the existing models.
What informed the selection of references chosen? How did they chart the evolution of this typology through fourth dimension and across cultures?
As mentioned above, the casino is a "circuitous" fabricated of many other buildings. Its overall shape derives from an assemblage of different organs and limbs more or less integrated within the aforementioned body: a system including parking lots, hotels, galleries, convention centres, wedding chapels, restaurants, bars, cafes, concert and dancing halls, theatres, shops, indoor and outdoor pools, spas, fitness centres, and a multitude of other attractions, besides the gambling areas.
Concerning the development of the casino, we primarily looked at western casinos built from the 1940′ until today, the majority of which from Las Vegas. Nosotros included few exceptions as the Marina Bay in Singapore; a casino designed past Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil; the Casino di Campione by Mario Botta in Italy; and two European 18th-century case-studies: the Casino of Monte Carlo and the Kurhaus of Baden-Baden.
Although the availability of the cloth influenced the option of instance-studies, in the commencement part of the studio, nosotros attempted to retrace the rapid typological and programmatic evolution of the casino over the past two centuries. The almost pure class of the first casinos — mostly monumental buildings with symbolic domes that manifested the opulence and architectural decorations in the interior and on the exterior — was of a sudden converted into formlessness volumes and heavily decorated exterior surfaces. Compages has been progressively neglected, in favour of simpler and bigger containers, wherein fabulous attractions and exotic experiences are fostered by anything but architectural expressions.
Considering the programmatic variety of the casino, the selection of references also included a serial of parking garages and renown multifunctional buildings. In particular, we analysed numerous parking garages for the genericness of their structural frame — useful for a multiplicity of programs to co-exist — and for their different systems of circulation with ramps, stairs, sloping floors, alternated levels, automated platforms, etc. — through which students could formulate their proposals. Juxtaposing the banal logic of their plans to the complication of their sections, the analysis of the parking lots helped students understand how the insertion of simple elements like ramps or stairs can change the regular alternation of stacking levels in the section, creating unexpected spatial conditions and different interior perceptions.
How instrumental was the vertical section as a means to analyse and dissect these structures and their programmatic distribution?
The vertical section is the essential pattern tool to mensurate and articulate both empty and solids parts in a building: a strategy to balance and command the void. A section besides rules the relationship between within and exterior, betwixt the built interior space and the surrounding landscape.
It seems a tendency among the younger generation of students that the section has go an obsolete design tool. Students generally begin the artistic process with the development of 3-dimensional digital models, from which to excerpt plans and sections, once the volume is resolved. It is for this reason, merely most chiefly, to contrast and discover alternatives to the flatness and the banal box-like department of the contemporary casinos, that we stressed the importance of this drawing; almost as a provocation.
In the projects, students explored the vertical organisations and proposed tower-like casinos, a mural of alternated platforms, a series of contained floating objects, to list a few.
What informed the diverse programs the students had to work with?
In a casino, nothing is predetermined or certain, except the time of an instant: a place where everything is decided by luck, fate, chance and invisible rituals. We wanted the students to think of an architecture where spaces are organised and set clearly while, at the same time, allowing for uncertain and infrequent circumstances to happen. This purpose was perhaps easier to achieve with a more complex program.
The project started with the conceptualisation of an idea for a large interior space, without any specific function or site. This idea was later applied to the pattern of the primary gaming surface area. The rest of the program has been assigned later, and in different steps, and included: a gaming area (the most substantial component), a small hotel with 50 rooms, a parking construction for 100 cars and a pool; all functions that are typically role of the casino complexes. The purpose of the boosted program was to reinforce the initial architectural concept of the projection, inviting the students to focus on the load-bearing construction and the articulation of different spaces within either a single mass or different volumes.
To what extent is this XL calibration sustainable nowadays?
For their economical, political and territorial bear on, free energy and soil consumption, ethical and moral bug, these extra-big structures are indeed problematic in terms of sustainability. Although we also questioned the efficacy of the XL casino — we asked for a relatively small project of about 15.500 square meters — I gauge that in the case of casinos the question is not really nearly the calibration.
Peradventure the fascinating attribute of such architectures is to be entirely accessible yet totally under surveillance, public even so entirely private, supposedly free yet fully controlled: they are sort of paradoxical cities where abuse and reprobation is the norm. Thus, the studio offered the possibility to challenge idealistic visions of the metropolis by looking at one of its most perverse expressions.
What is the relevance and function of the casino today?
Casinos today are so vast that could be defined as interiorised cities non dissimilarly from arcades, malls, airports, fairs and gathering centres or large infrastructural hubs: architectures able to reproduce within themselves vast urban phenomena. Understanding the internal logic and the complexity that someone can experience in these buildings tin assist us in understanding the metropolitan condition and investigating strategies of intervention: how to circulate within its infrastructure, how to either aggregate or separate specific programs together, how to induce people to swallow slyly, besides as how to redesign a public sphere inside these environments.
Through the paradoxical paradigm of the casino, we can besides embrace the commonage space. They replace the role of public spaces. About anyone can and volition access a casino and have, at the same time, an individual and collective feel, sharing the same rituals within a vicious bike of gambling, drinking and partying in a 24-hours entertainment automobile. They represent the contemporary social condenser.
What could experimentation at an architectural level bring to the evolution and revisitation of this typology?
The compulsive production of newer casinos, mainly based on the creation of emotional experiences, has produced highly-seasoned and accessible machines by at the same time removing any proper spatial quality to their compages.
Thinking and experiment through architecture hateful to create tangible physical spatial experiences. Differently from the superficial and scenographic settings, that everybody perceives in the same way, architecture can generate existent, unlike, engaging, and private experiences.
The evolution could happen at dissimilar architectural scale: from the design of the carpet and the furniture — reimagining gambling tables, chairs, stools — to the apparatus that ascertain the interiors, to the building itself. If technology has produced ephemeral experiences that could exist applied and transferred in any prefabricated container, architecture instead will create a unique environment.
Source: https://www.koozarch.com/interviews/this-is-not-a-22-carat-styrofoam-casino/
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