KWT
June 13th, 2011, 02:59 AM
Project: Four Films Printing Factory
Location: Sabhan, Kuwait
Architects: Naji Moujaes.
Team: Ziad Jamaleddine, Makram el Kadi, Karie Titus.
The site for the new printing press factory is a 40 m x 50 m corner plot, located in the Sabhan Industrial Area of Kuwait City.
The factory’s envelope is a white concrete shell with blank street facades to the south and west, except for the punch-in SE corner office window and the recessed SW corner entry door which insulate the building interiors from the harsh heat gain and the direct sunlight. With the rear north and side east facades aligned with adjacent buildings, the challenge was to reclaim the fifth facade (the roof), typically cluttered with mechanical equipment, as a source of daylight. To achieve this, the rear and side facades are setback, simultaneously corresponding with the building built-up area regulations, to stack the mechanical and electrical equipment vertically along these facades. The roof, a saw-tooth profile with north-oriented light monitors, washes the offices on the top floor and the post-press on the ground floor with north daylight, an optimal day lighting condition.
Tectonically, the design starts from an initial saw-tooth roof profile, creating a generic factory building box that transforms to mediate between internal programmatic needs and external situational conditions: pulled-up to grant an entry access, pushed-in to provide a mechanical yard, pressed-down to reconcile with the service access, and punched-in to give a peek at the management’s corner office. A series of triangulated planes faces, fan out from each other, and coincide to mitigate the external tectonic transformations with the internal orthogonal structural grid system.
Vertical Factory
Instead of a one-floor plant layout with a linear production flow, the site limitations force a stacking of floor plates, each of which has an in-out circulation loop tied to the material elevator core when it comes to the process of in-progress products. The stock room and press floor are located in the basement, the post-press floor on the ground floor, and the pre-press with management and design on the first floor. A production department is tucked in the basement mezzanine, sandwiched between the press and the post-press. A briefing corner stepped room and an open stair flight snake a shortcut connection between management and production, revealing the bottom-up management internal policy.
Location: Sabhan, Kuwait
Architects: Naji Moujaes.
Team: Ziad Jamaleddine, Makram el Kadi, Karie Titus.
The site for the new printing press factory is a 40 m x 50 m corner plot, located in the Sabhan Industrial Area of Kuwait City.
The factory’s envelope is a white concrete shell with blank street facades to the south and west, except for the punch-in SE corner office window and the recessed SW corner entry door which insulate the building interiors from the harsh heat gain and the direct sunlight. With the rear north and side east facades aligned with adjacent buildings, the challenge was to reclaim the fifth facade (the roof), typically cluttered with mechanical equipment, as a source of daylight. To achieve this, the rear and side facades are setback, simultaneously corresponding with the building built-up area regulations, to stack the mechanical and electrical equipment vertically along these facades. The roof, a saw-tooth profile with north-oriented light monitors, washes the offices on the top floor and the post-press on the ground floor with north daylight, an optimal day lighting condition.
Tectonically, the design starts from an initial saw-tooth roof profile, creating a generic factory building box that transforms to mediate between internal programmatic needs and external situational conditions: pulled-up to grant an entry access, pushed-in to provide a mechanical yard, pressed-down to reconcile with the service access, and punched-in to give a peek at the management’s corner office. A series of triangulated planes faces, fan out from each other, and coincide to mitigate the external tectonic transformations with the internal orthogonal structural grid system.
Vertical Factory
Instead of a one-floor plant layout with a linear production flow, the site limitations force a stacking of floor plates, each of which has an in-out circulation loop tied to the material elevator core when it comes to the process of in-progress products. The stock room and press floor are located in the basement, the post-press floor on the ground floor, and the pre-press with management and design on the first floor. A production department is tucked in the basement mezzanine, sandwiched between the press and the post-press. A briefing corner stepped room and an open stair flight snake a shortcut connection between management and production, revealing the bottom-up management internal policy.