MAKING SPACE.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Architect, industrial designer and graphic artist Emilio Ambasz

Argentine designer Emilio Ambasz melds elegant structures with organic elements of the environment

The idea of integrating elements of nature with architecture is an old one, but few have taken it as far as has Argentine designer and planner Emilio Ambasz. Yes, Babylon's fabled hanging gardens and Machu Picchu's mythic terraces represent ancient structures married to nature. The principle of the atrium also introduced plant life into the inner core of Roman dwellings just as town squares, parks, and greenbelts today furnish patches of grass and trees within our urban settings. But as the millennium approaches, with millions of people still moving into already congested cities and nature sadly losing what little ground remains, Ambasz believes a problem of crisis proportions exists, which must be met with an aggressive use of imagination. In his designs for buildings and solutions to urban planning he has proposed covering or filling structures with natural elements or even making some of them out of plant life itself. Forcefully he has advocated that all buildings have major natural components. He argues that only by giving space back to nature, only by reconciling work and living space requirements with our need for open areas of greenery, can we as a species prosper.

A project recently completed on the Japanese island of Kyushu, the Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall, serves as a good example of Ambasz's philosophy at work. The port city was in need of a facility that could contain exhibition halls, a two-thousand-seat theater, a conference center, office and retail space, and a large parking garage. The proposed building site, an area adjacent to Tenjin Central Park, was the last large undeveloped plot in the financial district, thus the challenge was to provide more than one million square feet of multipurpose space yet somehow preserve the natural setting. With typical daring, Ambasz fulfilled these seemingly unreconcilable requirements by constructing fifteen planted terraces--reinforced concrete steps, each one story high--upon which the adjoining parkland could extend and beneath which the required floor space could be created. For the front of the building he designed an elegant facade with a formal entrance appropriate for an address on the most prestigious street of the city. For the backside he specified hearty trees and bushes native to the region be planted adjacent to a waterfall. As an added bonus he envisioned the topmost level as an observation platform from which visitors could view the Bay of Fukuoka beyond.

Another ambitious project, the Mycal Cultural and Athletic Center (also realized in Japan before the recent economic downturn), had as its goal preservation of landscape while creating nearly a half-million square feet of space for meeting halls, sports and health facilities, training centers, hotel accommodations, and underground parking. The proposed site, part of Shin-Sanda, a new town near Kobe, was hilly terrain overlooking a reservoir and golf course. The property belonged to a department store chain intent on building a recreation facility for its employees. Ambasz persuaded his clients that a narrow L-shaped structure hard against a rise in the landscape would have the least impact on the natural setting because its roof would coincide with the crest of the hill. He likened the design "as two hands touching at the wrists, as if these hands were both shielding and cherishing the earth." On the side away from the hill he specified an undulating, inclined plane of glass (structurally flexible to yield to the shock waves of frequent earthquakes), in the manner of a greenhouse, to provide sunlight for interior gardens of bamboo and maple trees planted next to restaurants and other social spaces. As a further concession to nature, he persuaded project sponsors to cover the entire interior facade with planter boxes, thus creating a cascade of flowers and green plants visible from outside and within.

Had Ambasz grown up on the Argentine pampa or the selva of the Chaco he might have taken nature for granted, but during the forties and fifties he spent his formative years in Buenos Aires, where open spaces fast were disappearing. "My only connection with nature was my room, which was on the street and looked out on a tree. At night I would stay out and look at that tree and ponder how the moon played on it, and how it changed with the seasons."

Ambasz was an only child, solitary by nature, and so the tree became something of a friend. "I developed a profound love of trees," he continues. "Today I approve of the enlightened campaign in Buenos Aires whereby every tree on the sidewalk becomes the ward of neighbors, who receive from the city a manual on how to care for it and instructions to call a certain office if the health of the tree deteriorates. I applaud anything that preserves nature. Forty years ago throughout Argentina we had something called the Ley Tortorelli [named for Lucas Tortorelli, a minister of agriculture]. The law, which required that four saplings be planted for every tree...