Hero Shot serves as THE image of the project. It could be a photo shot of the constructed project or the key rendering of the final design. In a nutshell, it is THAT picture which says a thousand words.
Detail moment on the other hand can be many things: that invisible moment in architecture made visible via human body, the moment of concentration when the tell-the-tale detail reveals the construction of an edifice (Marco Frascari), or the heterotopian space contained in the larger scheme of project.
Together, Hero Shot and Detail Moment communicate the design intention and strategies of an architect.
Project 1: Peter Eisenman, House II. Cardboard Architecture 1969 -70, Hardwick, Vermont, USA. You can read more here (official) and here (as a piece of real estate).
Hero Shot
Detail Moment
The Hero Shot, a book cover design based on House II, confined House II into a square in two parts: it and its ghost. Square is part of the "corporeal" of Architecture: perfect geometry in the Real (site, program, organisation of plan, form); and the 9-square exercise of Humanist architecture since Palladio (West) & Sinan (East): centrality, circulation, front facade, backyard and sides. Once the "concept" cardboard house is constructed onto the site, it becomes a "real" house accommodating the demands of everyday family life. However, the imposed square over the iconic image of the house in snowy New England winter has turned this "secularised" House back to its "conceptual" realm. A perfect example of Architecture: it is simultaneously a solution to a set of programmatic demands, and an autonomous exercise of architectural ideas.
The Detail Moment: how does human "dwell" - occupy spaces - has everything to do with the comfort, convention and scale of human body. Regardless the abstract layered spaces via ambiguous play of columns (ornamental) and wall (load-bearing) in Eisenman's design, for life to take place in an avant-garde house, one relies on the everyday, ready-made and mass-consumed objects. Adolf Loos stated, as early as 1897, that, in order to know about designing chairs, it was more important to know something about sitting position rather than everything about the orders of Greek columns.
Project 2: Zaha Hadid, the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Arts.
Competition winning project, Cincinnati USA, 1997 - 2003. Here (architect's site) and here (more drawings).
Hero Shot
Detail Moment
The Hero Shot, a collage of the Walnut St front view (at the corner of West 6th St) and the cross section through the main gallery volumes that are held together by a circulatory 'void', conveys Hadid's winning theme: a loose corner. The exhibition spaces are neither horizontal nor vertical but a series of unique space-time coordinates captured by defined spaces of art: white cubes. The Art Centre is at once an urban artefact of fleeting corner (external objecthood) and introverted floating spaces of artistic attention and experiences (internal places).
The Detail Moment is an image showing the turn to the 'collective' circulation spaces of a visitor after intense art viewing: the contrast between the absorption of art and the distraction of "street-like-space". For a tight, elongated rectangular corner lot, Hadid combines the necessary vertical circulation with in-between spaces of flaneur, contemplation and occasionally urban event.
Project 3: Steven Holl, School of Art and Art History, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA, 2006. More info here and video.
Hero Shot
Detail Moment
The Hero Shot has created an 'image' for the School of Art and Art History: forward into future, un-attached to ground yet self-reflective. It connotes the zeitgeist of Art and Art History. Steven Holl has brought "frontality" to a cluster of buildings that are impossible to take in with one glance caused by the chaotic condition of the given surrounding. If we examine the given site, it can be described as a kind of 'drossacpe': left-over land of roadway and topography. It is a difficult site to begin with. By sticking a long rectangular bar into the pool of water, an abandoned quarry pool to be exact, the peripheral edge of the campus becomes directional. The cluster of the main buildings forms a 'side' to the second stage of the Visual Arts Building.
The Detail Moment: the staircase is cladded in cor-ten metal plates, an 'uncanny' fragment - a limb - accentuated at the threshold. But wait, there is another one outside of the window, a ghost image...The circulation space - a staircase - is oversized or dramatised but it is not monumental. The figural staircase is the 'social condenser' in an otherwise introverted place.
Project 4: Weiss and Manfredi, Brooklyn Botanical Garden Visitor Centre, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 2004 - 2012. More info here (architects' site), here (more drawings), and here (better writing and a short video showing the green roof).
Hero Shot:
Detail Moment:
The Hero Shot captures the power of one constructed linear artefact sitting at the 'forest edge' that forms the gateway between Nature and man-made city. It is a canopy of urban scale that gathers instead of separating. In this project, landscape and urbanism intertwines into continuous architecture alluding to in-land version of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
The Detail Moment shows the 'earth-form' of a large multi-purpose room: sunken from one side but totally open towards the opposite side. The slender structural metal frames mingle with the skinny vertical timber wall finishes. They soar gently to meet the leaf-shape roof. This social space is protected, full of light, and open to its own event terrace bordered by the exquisite Japanese Garden.
Project 5: Johnston Marklee, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, Texas, USA, 2012-2018. Here (architects's website), here (more drawings), here (better report), and here (a beautiful walk-through).
Hero Shot:
Detail Moment:
The Hero Shot expresses first and foremost the scale of the Drawing Institute in a automobile dominated landscape of Texas. To pronounce the existence of a place in this context, Culture must partner with Nature. The straight and forceful roof line is not only paying homage to the 'roof machine' of Renzo Piano's Menil Collection across the street(see images below);
but further more, it creates a 'trans-versal' of Piano's light-filtering-machine under the thin roof line: a series of folded ceiling planes bouncing light around.
The Detail Moment: a bench is crowned by a light-catching folded pocket with an ambiguous horizontal line of light drawn in-between them. The image connotes a sense of intimacy between the spectator and the drawing: the sitting down position to draw and the 'light-catcher' for close reading of the drawn.
Project 4: Weiss and Manfredi, Brooklyn Botanical Garden Visitor Centre, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 2004 - 2012. More info here (architects' site), here (more drawings), and here (better writing and a short video showing the green roof).
Hero Shot:
Detail Moment:
The Hero Shot captures the power of one constructed linear artefact sitting at the 'forest edge' that forms the gateway between Nature and man-made city. It is a canopy of urban scale that gathers instead of separating. In this project, landscape and urbanism intertwines into continuous architecture alluding to in-land version of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
The Detail Moment shows the 'earth-form' of a large multi-purpose room: sunken from one side but totally open towards the opposite side. The slender structural metal frames mingle with the skinny vertical timber wall finishes. They soar gently to meet the leaf-shape roof. This social space is protected, full of light, and open to its own event terrace bordered by the exquisite Japanese Garden.
Hero Shot:
Detail Moment:
The Hero Shot expresses first and foremost the scale of the Drawing Institute in a automobile dominated landscape of Texas. To pronounce the existence of a place in this context, Culture must partner with Nature. The straight and forceful roof line is not only paying homage to the 'roof machine' of Renzo Piano's Menil Collection across the street(see images below);
but further more, it creates a 'trans-versal' of Piano's light-filtering-machine under the thin roof line: a series of folded ceiling planes bouncing light around.
The Detail Moment: a bench is crowned by a light-catching folded pocket with an ambiguous horizontal line of light drawn in-between them. The image connotes a sense of intimacy between the spectator and the drawing: the sitting down position to draw and the 'light-catcher' for close reading of the drawn.
