SEATTLE CENTRAL LIBRARY; OMA The 34,000 sq. m. building has the capacity to house 1.45 million books, arranged in a non-conventional manner to entice visitors and promote physical books in a digital age. The spaces created by the wrapping skin house programmatic functions in four different floating platforms. The functions and their relationship to each other dictated the design of the building, and then a steel and glass skin was used to wrap and form the spaces, thus resulting in the unusual shape of the building, and the necessity for a structural skin. The circulation flows through the different spaces that overlap each other visually, though not always on the same plane of elevation. The structural façade facilitates this by allowing a suspension of different spaces, and allowing visual permeability through the design of the structure.

source: archinet.com

source: oma.nl

source: stgb.blogspot.com

TOD’S, OMOTESANDO; TOYO ITO A building designed to house the high end Italian shoe retailer, it is distinctly a project that uses its structural façade to stand out from its surrounding retail architecture. With a limited frontage on an important retail street, the building needed to make a visual statement without relying on excessive storefront display. The entire skin of the building was used to create a visual identity. The structural concrete and glass skin in conceptual form is an abstraction of the trees that line Omotesando street. The façade serves a second purpose, being a structural element, it frees the interior spaces from the need of columns, or load bearing interior walls. The interior paces are therefore more freely designed without any additional constraints to what is already a narrow footprint to work with.

source: archrecord.construction.com

source: artisticstation.blogspot.com