PLACE RECTEUR DUBUISSON

Campus de l'Université de Liège au Sart Tilman

Collaboration with Atelier d'Architecture du Sart-Tilman, february 1979

The Sart-Tilman campus is located in a wooded zone around a steep valley. The organization is U-shaped above the ravine. The rectorate and the human sciences faculties stand at the South extremity, and it was proposed that they would be grouped around a place that would live as a kind of agora. This place, 9600m2 wide, is actually a slab above a one-level parking lot.
My proposal was to treat this place as a metaphor of scientific knowledge. A personal inclination made me think of it more specifically as an aristotelician model. The drawings are four moments of the connecting ideas and real :

Le réel est ici le terrain préexistant;
La place y découpe un carré;
La forme est une synthèse géométrique du terrain préexistant : une surface dont les courbes de niveau sont des sinusoïdes cubiques alignées sur trois directrices paraboliques.
La forme est modifiée pour l'aération.

Actually stade 4 was not executed. The place took the pure mathematical form of stade 3.

The design of the mathematical shape of the slab was interesting. The first drawings were made wth sinusoidal curves. Engineer René Greisch suggested to carry the Y-values to the square. We tried a serie of exponents : 1, 1,5, 2 :








Finally the exponent 1,5 was adopted.

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