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Sapporo Apartment Building
1981 to 1982Ten-story apartment building, with forty-five one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, with shops and offices on the first three floors. The building, of concrete-encased steel, was to be built over an existing clinic.
The structural frame consists of twenty enormous columns ran all the way through the building from top to bottom. At the bottom they are solid and massive, visible as legs. Higher up, they are pierced; they are so large that they contain arches, and each one splits into four smaller columns, and these four columns then become the crossings where the circulation and passages of the upper floors meet.
This main structure reflects the overall spatial organization of the interior, and combined with a terracing of the buiding volume, results in a unique spatial configuration in each floor. .
Contents
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Letter focusing on the revival of the project
09/06/1983
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Report about the informal contact with Mrs. Hiroko Yoshida through Mrs. Keiko Nakano on 27-Jun-1983
04/07/1983
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Letter discussing the steps and the team members that are required for the phase two of the project and its prompt start. Attached is one page with amounts expected to be paid for initiating this phase
29/05/1983
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Agreement
01/09/1981
6-page handwritten draft of the design and construction agreement between the client Inoue Family, and the architect Christopher Alexander, including detailed costs, phases of design work, schedule of payments, etc. An attachment with payment instructions is included.
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Preliminary Structural Analysis of Apartment Building for Mrs. Keiko Inoue, Sapporo, Japan
01/03/1982
The report reviews the details of the preliminary seismic structural evaluation of the building design proposal. The computer modeling of the stuctural analysis was supported by Edward Wilson, Professor of Civil Engineering, UC Berkeley, who provided his program “Sap 81”, ...
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Project design partial notes
01/01/1981
Listing of sixteen general, initial points on various design aspects, promoting the idea of considerable differentiation from floor to floor, to obtain richness in the building.
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Project design partial notes
01/07/1981
One page with incomplete project design notes including nurses dormitory, light wells in building, and windows on third floor, with two small sketches.
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Photographs of project model
01/01/1982
Two views of the balsa-wood model of the apartment building, on a stand in the CES office in Martinez.
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Photographs of drawings
01/01/1982
Eleven images of the ten floor plans of the apartment building.
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Sapporo Apartment Building: Photographs of drawings
01/01/1982
Five photographs depicting sections and elevations of the apartment building .
SEE ALL Photographs
References
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Geometry and Fifteen Fundamental Properties
Christopher Alexander recognized the importance of the geometry of centers and for years he was looking for the common structural features among buildings, paintings, streets, carpets, doors, windows, etc. which have "life" and "wholeness". He identified fifteen structural features which ...
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Emergence of Geometric Order in Building Structure
Focusing primarily on the pure beauty of the geometric order, which comes, above all, from the building structure (columns, walls, beams, vaults and so forth), specifically from the aperiodic grids which form the abstract underpinning of the building structure.
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The Nature of Order - An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
Book Two - The Process of Creating Life
2002
“The Process of Creating Life”, the second volume of “The Nature of Order” series presents a dynamic theory of living structure. It begins with an analysis of transformations, which occur in nature, and the distinction between structure-preserving transformations, responsible for ...
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The Nature of Order - An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
Book Three - A Vision of a Living World
2005
“A Vision of a Living World”, the third volume of “The Nature of Order” series, presents, for the first time, a full spectrum of Alexander’s and CES built and unbuilt works. The book describes hundreds of buildings, plans, neighborhoods, drawings, ...