Blue Sky Materials
Hybrid Cafe: We’ve designed this West Liberty Avenue hybrid cafe/environmental material sales business to accommodate its multiple uses. When it will be complete, the store will reflect the lofty ideals and aspirations of the owners, Lisa and Frank Ray.
Fisher ARCHitecture designed both the interior and exterior architecture of the project, along with the company logo.
Read More >“Coupling: The Emergence of Hybrid Programs”
Combining different program elements together is always a challenge: Per the writer Eric Baldwin in an article on what he calls, “architectural coupling”, “Programming lies at the heart of architecture. While modernity brought new definitions to the familiar term — from computer coding to radio broadcasts — programming as a spatial practice remains essential to design. Explored by Praxis almost a decade ago, programming is more than a list of spaces organized by ambiguous bubble diagrams. Approached as a critical design activity, programming has the power to encourage understanding and reveal latent relationships between people and space. As our world becomes better-connected, we are witnessing the emergence of spatial “hybrids.”
As a result of cultural diffusion and a desire to create novel experiences, architects now often promote the joining and juxtaposing of program elements. Today, architects loft residences above commercial spaces, they merge airports with shopping malls, and they trade library stacks for cafes and media rooms.
“As Bernard Tschumi once said, program is never neutral. Continuously redefined through practice, programming organizes activities and processes by efficiency, code and purpose. Tschumi also believed in three primary relationships between program and form: reciprocity (each coincides or directs the other), indifference (form accommodates any program) and conflict (program and form clash). Though architects have aggregated different spaces throughout history, reciprocity often took precedence over intentionally indifferent or conflicted programming. Pragmatic or communal needs dictated spatial arrangement, hierarchy and order.”
