Dear staff,
Fabricate is the official student newsletter at the Melbourne School of Design. You are receiving this email as a current student or staff member of the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning.
The image above is of Druzhba Sanatorium in Crimea.
It looks like a huge planetary gearset from the sky but when it was built in 1985 Turkish spies thought it was another dangerous military object built to support the Cold War effort. Druzhba was designed by a Russian architect, Igor Vasilievsky with the help of Nodar Kancheli. Kancheli is more of a mathematician than a building engineer and that’s why he’s come up with some really amazing structures.
The structure of Druzhba was a challenge. After a careful ground inspection three huge concrete towers were planted in the shoreline. This part of the world has a very solid cliff on the shoreline, so the building is actually very safe.
Two enormous concrete cylinders (76 metres in diameter) were then seated on ledges protruding from the towers. The upper two floors laid out in three additional roundhouses are sitting on top of the upper cylinder. So in effect the whole 6-storey mammoth is propped by only three ledges.
With Druzhba, however, the towers aren’t there for support only – they are hollow with lifts and a stair-case inside each. What this achieves is a very convenient access to the room.
Our thoughts are with all citizens of Ukraine and we hope issues are resolved there without the need for conflict.
Read on for all the latest MSD news.
