architecture, lighting, mondo arc, published article

Tadao Ando

By Robert Such. Published in mondo arc.

The Minamidera Art House Project guide, standing at the entrance to the rectangular wooden building that houses James Turrell’s lighting installation, politely instructs each visitor to keep a hand on the wall when inside the building. It’s not clear why we need to do this, but it soon makes sense – it’s pitch black inside. Only after a few minutes do my eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and a faint rectangular light starts to appear out of the gloom. It’s some distance away across the dark interior, but it’s hard to tell how far…

Designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the Minamidera Art House Project building that houses Turrell’s lightwork stands on the island of Naoshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Naoshima is one of a number of islands on which stand museums, art spaces and outdoor artworks.
Admired by Ando, the American light artist James Turrell is one of many architects and artists that have influenced the way that Ando has worked with light throughout his life. Ando has joined forces with Turrell on projects numerous times, and Turrell’s work continues to be an inspiration. Turrell also has lightworks in the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima – a museum also designed by Ando.

“It is particularly important,” said the 1995 Pritzker Prize winning Ando, “to take steps forward when building a museum for contemporary art. Artists are very courageous. They are stepping forward all of the time. Architects must do the same.

“We must share the fear of challenging the unseen world. We are all humans, and we can be courageous, but we cannot escape fear when taking risks. As long as you dare to step forward, and have some experience, you are not likely to fail.”

As for architects that inspired him, it was Le Corbusier that had a strong influence on Ando’s early career. He first became aware of the Swiss-French architect’s work while perusing the bookshelves in an old bookshop in his hometown of Osaka.

“I first laid my eyes on a portfolio of Le Corbusier in the art section of that bookstore,” Ando explains. “Immediately, I felt in my bones – this is it.” At that time he was, he says, “very passionate about life, but my destiny was yet to be defined.” It was a life-changing turning point for the 20-year-old would-be architect who was then working part-time at an architecture firm.
The Le Corbusier book was too expensive to buy straight away though, so Ando saved up and was able to buy it about a month later. Then he read it “page by page, every night until I grew tired of it”, he says.

“Even though my knowledge was not extensive enough to understand the intricacies of modernism, the contents of the book were utterly fascinating. Each page was beautifully laid out with close-up and wide-angle architectural photographs in addition to attractive plans and sketches.”
Wanting to be able to design in this way, he “traced Le Corbusier’s floor plans over and over again”.

Born and raised in Osaka in a traditional residential neighbourhood, Ando’s home was a small terraced house. He describes it as “a dark place with little light and small windows”.

“In the dim interior, I appreciated what little light we received. I would often fill my cupped hands with light coming into my room. Since then, this is the type of architecture I’ve wanted to build: architecture that values light and reminds me of the same feelings I experienced as a child.

“Nature in the form of light, water, and sky restores architecture from a metaphysical to an earthly plane and gives life to space. A concern for the relationship between architecture and nature inevitably leads to a concern for the temporal context of architecture. I want to emphasise the sense of time and to create compositions in which a feeling of transience or the passing of time is a part of the spatial experience.”

Another book that had a profound influence on the young Ando was a thin, but influential book called In Praise of Shadows by the well-known Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. The book details Tanizaki’s thoughts on light and shadows in various aspects of Japanese culture. “The balance of light and shadow is always difficult. Without shadow, one cannot fully appreciate light,” says Ando.

Inside another of Ando’s well-known works, the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church in Ibaraki, just outside Osaka, light and shadow also play a key role in a visitor’s experiential appreciation of the building interior. More commonly known as the Church of the Light, the building’s most striking feature is a cruciform opening, cut out in the concrete, in the wall facing the congregation.

It is also a project that Ando returned to time and again to try and convince the client to remove the glass that was installed to keep out the rain and wind. When Ando first designed the Church of the Light in 1989, he proposed that the cross be open to the elements in order “to introduce pure and natural light into the space,” he says. The client refused to remove the glass.

Ando eventually gave up, so he did the next best thing: make a life-size replica of the church, for an exhibition. In his version there was no glass, just as he wanted it to be. “In comparison to the original church, the experience of light had significantly intensified,” he says.
When Ando thinks of great uses of light in architecture, it is monasteries that come to mind, such as the Thoronet Abbey and the Notre-Dame de Sénanque Abbey in France. “The light found inside these religious buildings create space and carry life.

“When I first entered Abbaye du Thoronet, I encountered a feeling of great power. In the profound silence of the place, I became aware of the light transcending the severity of religious precepts. In order to appreciate the beauty of light and the spaces it illuminates, darkness is absolutely necessary.”

Necessary, yes; yet in the Minamidera Art House Project, where there is no light at all at first, the complete darkness in the building is unnerving. But the mystery and the eventual surprise revelation make Turrell’s light artwork, and the islands in the Seto Inland Sea generally, well worth visiting – just like the architectural works of Japan’s most famous architect, whose thoughtfully designed and beautifully made works can be found all over Japan and in many other locations around the world, and who believes that although shadows are necessary, “light is pivotal for the livelihood of humankind”.

architecture, lanscape architecture, Lanscape Architecture Magazine, published article

Monika Gora’s Glass Bubble

By Robert Such. Published in Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Standing in the courtyard of a retirement home for the elderly in the Swedish city of Malmö, Monika Gora’s 35-foot-high (10.5 meters) Glass Bubble provides a warm and fragrant private garden for the elderly residents.

Inside the glasshouse, residents can sit around and chat under the luxuriant foliage growing beneath the curved, glass roof, enjoying the fragrances of plants such as Citrus, Camellia and Magnolia.

Unlike the Mediterranean conditions inside the bubble, the cooler Swedish climate outside supports a variety of plants: Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), Heather (Calluna vulgaris), Sheep Fescue (Festuca ovina), Eastern Teaberry, or American Wintergreen, (Gaultheria procumbens) and other hardies grow in raised peat-and-sand flowerbeds. Gora chose plants that could withstand the wet and cold of winter, and the salt winds rushing in off the Öresund. The Öresund strait connects the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and separates Demark from Sweden.  

Interior and exterior low dry stone walls, as well as the flagstones in the courtyard and the Glass Bubble, are made from a gray, rust-flecked, Norwegian slate.

The bubble itself is made of flat, half-inch-thick (16 mm) laminated glass panels, supported by a stainless steel armature, designed in association with two engineering firms.

Beating off two other landscape architecture practices in the garden design competition, Gora asked engineering firm Buro Happold to design a build-able structure from her sketches and a plastic model. Happold, however, came up with a “complicated mathematical solution,” says Gora. The building wasn’t transparent enough, so she approached Dutch engineering firm Octatube Space Structures. Theirs was an “elegant solution,” she says.

Although single-glazed, which Gora estimates will push average winter running costs up by 30 to 40 percent, the alternative double-glazed design solution proposed by Octatube was “more clumsy,” says Gora. The clients also preferred the single-glazed version. To obtain maximum transparency, the engineers used extra white glass.

“The function of the glass is like a membrane,” she says. “The inside becomes a bubble filled with warmth and life. Full of light and space, protected and quiet.”

This is not Gora’s first bubble-like work. Over the years, she has created a number of rounded structures, such as a glowing, 33-foot-high (10 meters), zeppelin-shaped inflatable in Vienna (1995), the Shining Sculptures (1997) gallery installation, and the 40-foot-high (12 meters) A Drop of Light inflatable in Stockholm (1998).

Aside from satisfying her clients’ practical requirements, Gora’s interest lies in stimulating public debate about the relationship between culture and nature, and about current social, political and environmental issues, through landscaping and exhibiting artworks.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Gora moved to Sweden with her parents in the late Sixties. After completing her studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in 1983, she set up her own company in 1989.

Other recently completed works include six 12-foot-high (3.5 meters) onion-shaped light sculptures bordering a highway on the outskirts of Malmö. Current projects include a hilly landscaped park, using soil from city construction works. Both this project and a children’s play area in Stockholm’s historic Kungsträdgården (King’s Garden) are due to open next summer. For the kids in the Kungsträdgården, Gora has designed light sculptures, a rose garden and a bridge in a playground. While she designed the play area to fit into the historic local context, she points out that it will be “an exciting place for kids.” As with the Glass Bubble and the courtyard garden, it will no doubt set people talking about the nature of place and appropriate landscape responses to making good outdoor space in an urban setting.

architecture, published article, World Architecture

So Tschumi

By Robert Such. Published in World Architecture.

Between Paris and Disneyland, on a growing university campus, stands Bernard Tschumi’s Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. His trademark industrial aesthetic – which found such popularity at the Parc de la Villette in Paris – is here enhanced with ideas of fragmentation and his insistence that a building be built as a closed system.

The security guard trips the alarm, then shuts the door behind me. I’m in. Inside Bernard Tschumi’s £8m Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. The Franco-Swiss architect’s building stands isolated on a stretch of road near Cité Descartes, a 1980s suburban new town between Paris and the satellite, Disneyland, east of the capital.

A 15-minute approach on foot from the station passes Dominique Perrault’s outstanding edifice for engineering, technology and management higher education (Group ESIEE): an arc chopped out of the shallow concrete facade slopes away from the road and a traffic roundabout, made of concentric waves of cracked basalt around a sculpture representing the earth’s axis.

Further down the road is Chaix and Morel’s less impressive Ecole National des Ponts et Chaussées (the National Civil Engineering School). At the time of visiting, only the giant restaurant complex opposite and the University of Marne-la-Vallée had been built, which constituted 30 per cent of a developing campus. It is a lonely place, but Tschumi points out, “it doesn’t have critical mass yet, but will when everything is built”.

On first sight his design appears more open than the neighbouring monoliths, with different elevations, and is surrounded by tracts of land, fringed by woodland. So what role did context play? After all, Tschumi had immense freedom of expression here, without straying outside the brief.

“The building is really done from the inside out, as with almost all of them I do. I start from the inside and then it starts through the making of that very large space [which] becomes the focus of all activities,” he explains. This very large space – or ‘forum’ – sits 3.5 metres above ground, to accommodate the car park beneath, and is topped by a glass and steel sawtooth roof, the glazed rake facing north to avoid a greenhouse effect.

Eventually, for this is only phase one, users will enter via an existing south side flight of steps, which presently take visitors up to a temporary glass wall. Remembering that work is only half complete is essential in order to make sense of some of the otherwise strange external and internal logic.

Readily discernible, however, is that the facilities for administration and research, and the media library, are distanced from the nuts and bolts of teaching by the enormous forum, which serves as exhibition space, cafeteria and reception. For Tschumi, this 25 x 90 metre area is ‘unprogrammed’, as it can be appropriated for whatever use the clients has in mind. (At the time of construction the clients were the ministry of culture, which was managing French architectural education – it tends to jump back and forth between the ministry of culture and the ministry of education – and the public authorities of Marne-la-Vallée.)

Dominating the void is a box-like envelope on eight pilotis, which houses two lecture theatres – one 90-seat and one 130-seat – divided by a moveable partition. The top terrace of beech parquet is again ‘unprogrammed’.

Seams dividing up the expanded stainless steel skin do not reflect internal distribution, but resulted from the fact that it was preferable to go with, instead of against, the wave-shaped pattern when cutting, thus putting technical considerations at the heart of its design. “I never work with aesthetic reasons [except
when choosing the type of wood],” Tschumi points out.

Galleries of galvanised steel grillwork surround the forum on three sides, the cool tones counterpointed by the warm glow of perforated beech wood panelling. Seminar and jury/pin-up rooms alternate with the workshops, which extend over two levels; the main deck, mezzanine and central column all in the same ubiquitous light-coloured concrete.

In terms of textures and materials, Tschumi included transparent and translucent glass – frosted and smooth, channelled or plain – and-smooth plaster renderings. Chairs, lighting and all-beech furniture were conceived by him. Metals are milled, polished, or lacquered. Diamond-patterned, lacquered, folded steel wraps completely around the four-storey volume on the south-west corner, going indoors and outdoors, playing with notions of autonomy and inclusion.

Long, inclined stairways link the different levels. That their orientation seems wrong with respect to the present access only adds to the feeling of a poorly assembled puzzle – but only if we forget that it is awaiting completion – which continues on the outside where the dialogue between elements is disjointed. “It’s never a closed system…You never contain it. You always leave gaps, interstices. It’s never about synthesis. It’s always about certain fractures. So that the fractures are generally all intentional. It’s not like Norman Foster who will always try to close the system. I always try to leave it open,” he says.

As the architect known for the bright red follies in Parc de la Villette (1985) in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, which as an industrial landscape of activity breaks from the parks of relaxation of the 18th and 19th century, Tschumi has once again returned to industry and dynamism. “I don’t mind industrial. I’ve always liked industrial,” he says. “Our project starts from the following thesis: there are building-generators of events. They are often condensers of the city; as much through their programmes as through their spatial potential they accelerate a cultural or social transformation that is already in progress.”

Tschumi’s plans for phase two of the building include a glassed in open-air chamber that will give access to sub-level one. People will be able to congregate here out of the wind, in relative silence, and beneath the sky. Also on the drawing board is a 400-seat auditorium and material experimentation laboratory.

And how does Bernard Tschumi feel about the building’s influence on the next generation of young architects? “Winston Churchill said that we form buildings and buildings form us… I studied in an amazing Neo-Classical [one], unbelievably beautiful, by Gottfried Semper [1803-79] and I don’t know if it had any effect on me, except that the spaces were astonishing – but it was Neo-Classical…which is the furthest away from what I do,” he concludes.

architecture, Frame Magazine, hotel design, interior design, published article

Hi Hotel

By Robert Such. Published in Frame Magazine.

The 38-room Hi Hotel in Nice may occupy a narrow spatial footprint, but its cultural reach is far wider, thanks to two hotel entrepreneurs, a young French designer and staff who are knowledgeable about the contemporary arts, architecture, design and music. It is also a place where notions of four-star luxury and comfort are given a contemporary twist.

Painted a pearly white, the shutterless building has undergone a radical change since its days as a boarding house. The fun begins as soon as you walk through the purple-tinted glass door on avenue des Fleurs. Purple, which signifies something “quite spiritual and high class,” says the designer Matali Crasset, is the dominant colour of the hotel. Flanking the ramp that leads up to the front desk are two low concrete walls, which have the shapes of speakers moulded into their surfaces. This is the first indication that music has a central role in the day-to-day life of the hotel. Music, provided by F Communications, the French electronic music label, plays all day and all night, and the bar area is a venue for DJ nights. Caressing the concrete is like stroking silky smooth chocolate, and it leaves a trace of dust on your fingertips. Visitors turn right into the lobby, passing through a cylindrical arrangement of colourful screen prints on unwoven fabric. Further inside, the colours include raspberry red, pistachio green, vanilla white and yellow chartreuse. A mezzanine, stacked with books donated by museums, galleries and publishers, overlooks the double-height bar and dining area. At the far end is the so-called nacelle (hot-air balloon basket). Made of birch plywood, it surrounds you in a light, protective embrace. The furniture is also in birch, with upholstery in skai artificial leather.

For the owners, Philippe Chapelet and Patrick Elouarghi, the Hi Hotel is quite different from their first joint business venture, a three-star hotel and restaurant in Brittany. They won top-notch guide-book acclaim for that, but when the weather and the clientele began to get them down, they decided to head for the French Riviera. “We worked in a château,” says Chapelet, “where it’s ‘Bonjour Madame’, and we made small talk at the table…you play a role…Life’s too short for false relationships that are a pain in the arse.” They considered places like Cannes and Monaco, but Nice seemed like the right choice. It was both working class and bourgeois (it also has a tacky and seedy side), it had a famous name and it had great weather. Travelling in other countries made them rethink what a businessman or a lone traveller required. So, they rejected the need for an enormous wardrobe and a chest of drawers and instead decided to include a goldfish (or red fish in French), as a room companion. The name Hi Hotel evolved from that idea of having a poisson rouge. On the Internet, they read that the red mark on the Japanese Koi Carp was called the Hi. As well as being the widely known one-syllable greeting, Chapelet points out that they want the hotel to attract international clients – thus, hôtel international (international hotel). It also represents hôtel interactive: Windows XP- and broadband-equipped laptops are available 24/7.

Once they had acquired the building and some firm ideas about its contents and service, Chapelet and Elouarghi scouted around for a designer at the Paris, Milan and New York design fairs. “They all proposed what we see everywhere in the design world – a little 1970s. We didn’t want fashion,” says Chapelet. So when the world-class French chef Alain Ducasse suggested looking at designers who had worked under Philippe Starck – they liked Starck – they checked out the petits enfants de Starck (Starck’s little children). Matali Crasset struck them as “very different,” says the Paris-born Chapelet.

Crasset graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure de création industrielle in 1991, which was followed by a one-year stint under the Italian designer Denis Santachiara and five years under Starck. While working with the latter she was the art director for Thomson Multimedia, before becoming the head of the Tim Thom design centre. Since then she has worked in many areas, such as graphics, exhibitions and furniture design. Her interiors include the refurbishment of the offices of Paris-based advertising agency Red Cell and a house near Lake Annecy, France, in 2001.

When Chapelet and Elouarghi saw Crasset’s work, they telephoned to arrange a meeting at her Paris office.

“The brief,” says Crasset, “was very, very flexible… We had a good understanding…From the start, it was looked at from this point of view: change things and throw out hotel typology.” Nine room types were developed. This wide range underlines the fact that “there is not one way to live; there are lots of possibilities,” says Crasset.

Monospace was the first room to take shape. It is divided into three areas, each one using different colours and materials: an invigorating red-coloured sleeping area; a cool white, lounge area with a light wood finish; and a refreshing blue-coloured bathroom with resin floor. The room is not large, but that is not important, says Crasset. ”When you think about comfort, most of the time it’s the [depth] of the foam. In fact, for me, it’s the opposite. Comfort is the structure which allows you to move and to have much more liberty…It’s more about mobility. It’s more about freedom to move…this is contemporary comfort.” As regards her thoughts on ‘luxury’, Crasset’s thinking runs along the same lines. “Luxury is not a matter of materials or cost, it’s more about the idea of space.”

Not every rooms’ spatial layout has been reorganised so radically. White & White, which to look at could be a massage parlour or clinic, has a bed that resembles a table and bath that looks like a bed. Digital has a pixilated decor and Technocorner is dedicated to video and music. Up-until-three-O’clock-in-the-morning brainstorming sessions between Crasset, Chapelet and Elouarghi gradually squeezed out the idea for the ninth room, Strate. Another concept, which was based on a giant wave made of resin, called In/Out, would have been the last one, but it was abandoned. “It was a good idea,” says Chapelet, “[but] it wasn’t strong enough. We wanted to go further.” Going further got them a room in which the glass shower and toilet cubicles each stand on a metal-framed platform, which if considered as a stage, makes a daily activity into a small performance. The stratified colour scheme on the walls signposts different activities and uses of space at various levels – white at the base points to storage, so there is a safe on the floor, and blue at the top stands for dreaming.

The crossover between private and public space in a hotel already exists; Strate breaks down the barriers even further. If there are two of you in the room, there is little privacy. It also makes entering the shower a pleasurable experience for the observer and the subject.

Objects in Matali Crasset’s world are multi-purpose. A poof can be a table. A small padded table can be a footstool. A table top can be a shelf that slots into the wall. Crasset’s work also contains elements of playfulness, or in French ludique. “Ludique means to play, to experiment,” says Crasset. She hopes that Hi Hotel visitors will use the objects they find there as children do with objects everywhere – using them not for one specific purpose but as something to stimulate the imagination and action.

architecture, published article, The New York Times

With Plants Sprouting From Walls, it’s the Chia Pet of Buildings

By Robert Such. Published in The New York Times.

A new apartment building in Montpellier, in the south of France, is designed to sprout vegetation from its walls. ”I want to see buildings that speak about landscape, sensation and feelings,” said Edouard Francois, the architect. When he proposed his design for Chateau Le Lez in 1998, he had to overcome objections from authorities who worried that the experimental building would need extra maintenance. The building’s exterior walls are crushed volcanic rock that will sustain cacti and figs. Half of the apartments are rentals (from $330 to $1,100), half owner-occupied. Many have open-topped wood cabins on stilts from which to contemplate the nearby river Lez. One-bedroom apartments sold for about $55,000, three bedrooms for about $250,000, all before completion last year.

architecture, Domus, published article

Rule breakers

By Robert Such. Published in Domus.

Life, energy and movement are some of the meanings for UnSangDong, the name chosen by Jang and Chang Hoon Shin for their studio in Seoul. Text Robert Such “We want to pursue arch itecture that is free from outdated thoughts, traditional or conservative rules,” says Unsangdong’s (Usd) Seoul-based founder and joint principal Yoon Gyoo Jang.

The name UnSangDong embraces several meanings – life, energy, movement and substance over surface. Headed by principals Jang and Chang Hoon Shin, the firm has spent the past few years designing buildings that have gained the architects international recognition and awards.

In a country where clients and construction companies regularly take over the execution and subsequent modification of buildings – much to the annoyance of the architects – USD has managed in most cases to complete work that closely resembles the original design.

Notable works include Kring (KumHo Culture Complex) in Seoul and the glass, wood and steel office building of publishers Life & Power Press in Paju Book City, a complex of publishing-related companies some 30 kilometres northwest of the capital.

Whereas the Life & Power Press building’s floor and ceiling topography is clearly expressed externally, both Kring’s design concept and its name are closely linked to promoting the client’s brand identity.

Completed in 2008, Kring still houses the show apartments – as well as the exhibition, meeting, performance and theatre spaces – built for the KumHo construction firm.

The building’s name combines K from KumHo and ring, hence Kring. Resembling Van Gogh’s silvery starry sky, the circular pattern on Kring’s facade recalls the pattern used on an earlier unbuilt company head office. “The circles on the facade of the Hyunjin Evervill building do not exist by themselves,” says Shin. “We believed that it was more than patterns. We coordinated inner space and outer surface to connect them closely. Our aim was to form a link between urban icon and brand identity of the company,” he says.

Buildings next up for completion are the Seongdong Culture & Art Centre and a new multifaceted envelope for an existing gallery in a residential neighbourhood. The gallery’s new skin exemplifies an interest in making “urban sculpture”, says Jang, “and exploring new structures, materials and the use of space”. On the outside, it brings to mind USD’s Gallery 303. The Seongdong centre, on the other hand, is just one of a number of green projects the firm has worked on over the years, such as the competitionwinning design for the Youngsan- House at Hansei University.

USD is, however, “more interested in ecoarchitecture, not just landscape”, says Shin. It’s clear that “modern architecture tended to consume lots of energy and destroy nature”, he says, adding that in his view “the analysis of environment and energy would appear to play a key role when it comes to design in the future”.

Along with their interest in eco-architecture, Jang and Shin also work to “translate and mirror the current trend of culture”, says Shin. Contemporary trends investigated include the use of public and private space in the city, explored through group studies and exhibitions carried out at Jang’s own Jung Mi So art gallery. Out of this and other research, USD continues to design structurally lightweight buildings, based on abstract geometry, to mesh landscaped

and multipurpose areas, and to design buildings that reflect social trends in a country undergoing rapid change.

architecture, published article, The Architectural Review

Light box

By Robert Such. Published in The Architectural Review.

Apparently just a gleaming metal box, Dominique Perrault’s new mediatheque contains some intriguing surprises. Located in Venissieux, a southern suburb of Lyons, the project forms a key part of the local mayor’s urban revitalization scheme. The suburb is currently dominated by the Minguettes tower-block housing estate on a hilltop to the west of the mediatheque site. To the north is Venissieux’s Hotel de Ville, which dates from the mid 1970s.

One of four designs presented to a jury in 1997, Perrault’s building makes no obvious reference to its surroundings. External walls are double-glazed, with folded and perforated aluminium panels set between the glass, facing both outwards and inwards. From a distance, the inward-turning panels resemble depressed keys on a piano keyboard. The facade is divided horizontally into three layers, each one distinguishable as a row (or three rows, in the case of the top tier) of 1 .8m wide aluminium-framed modules. On an overcast day, the bluish-green external skin reveals only the ghostly outlines of furniture and people within.

This particular use of perforated panels has its origins in another of Perrault’s buildings, a factory built for the fabric manufacturer Aplix, near Nantes. During a site inspection Perrault noticed some unusual lighting effects generated by acoustic panelling- a serendipitous observation from which the Venissieux project has benefited. The building’s massive, metallic appearance also conveys a necessary robustness, as it is near the tough Minguettes area. Windows on the north and south-facing sides of the library’s three upper floors are screened by Venetian blinds, giving librarians greater control over the amount of light entering their offices.

The entrance is marked by the word ‘mediatheque’ printed in playful outsized letters on the sliding doors. From inside, the Venissieux townscape becomes a Pointillist backdrop – Paul Signac rather than Georges Seurat. Yet when viewed from deeper inside the building, a very different impression is created, like looking through a layer of ice on a window pane. Tiny holes equipped with filters set along the base of the walls help to minimize any distortion of the glass that could result from abrupt changes in air temperature.

The internal organization emphasizes the interaction of light and materials. A 3m wide space, delimited by the facade and shelving units in oukame (Gabon mahogany), runs around the edge of the ground floor. In plan it resembles the margin around the text on a page. This internal street allows people to enter the central maze of shelves, racks and study areas from several points. It also parallels the 3.9m wide footpath that wraps around the outside of the building.

In keeping with Perrault’s rigorous rules of alignment, no piece of furniture is higher than 2.25m, which corresponds to the height of the lowest set of modules on the facade. Everything is equally aligned with the 16 slab-like concrete columns that support the 6.2m high ceiling. Furniture in shades of warm brown contrasts with the ubiquitous cool greys of the aluminium panels, computer terminals, rubber flooring, concrete columns, trusses and exposed ceiling ducts and wiring. Perforated and galvanized steel panels, confined to one part of the ceiling between east and west entrances, play a double role: the bundles of wire- and-tube spaghetti below the three-storey administration and storage block were considered so dense and unruly that Perrault had them hidden. The panelling also signposts the function of the long east-west oriented space below, which contains the loans and returns counters and lavatories.

Unlike the other shortlisted designs, which segregated the different readerships – adult, adolescent and child – by placing them on different floors, Perrault’s proposal keeps them on one level. The two older age groups share the south wing, with children’s spaces occupying the north wing. Separating these two volumes are a 50-seat auditorium (only 2.1m wide), a security surveillance office and a lift to the three floors above and basement loading bay below.

Offset from the centre of the building is a three-storey structure that deliberately breaks the formal symmetry to give the mediatheque its distinctive inverted-T shape. The angled north frontage further increases the asymmetry. Behind this skewed facade is a triangular space for children’s activities–playing with toys, chatting with friends and taking part in group storytelling, all conducted under the watchful gaze of their parents. Cars flash past outside, pedestrians walk by, oblivious to the animation inside. At dusk, as the setting sun strikes the north end, the aluminium panels assume yet another unexpected appearance.

Inside, they gleam, as if a thousand spiders had spun their threads into a radiant golden fabric. After dark, the one-way mirror effect is reversed, and the mediatheque becomes a glowing lantern in the spring night.

architecture, Domus, published article

Bending the street

By Robert Such. Published in Domus.

Ever since 1975, when Christian de Portzamparc designed Les Hautes Formes in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, France’s social housing agencies have been working to overcome the negative legacy of the barrack-like blocks that had previously characterised too much French public housing. But individual associations, like OPAC and RIVP, have developed their own approaches. For example, OPAC’s Paris housing schemes, under the influence of their architect of choice, Antoine Grumbach, have for many years attempted to blend unobtrusively with their surroundings, employing traditional rather than riskier architecture. OPAC is changing, however. Portzamparc’s protégé Frédéric Borel, who is best known for his exuberant and colourful work, begins building for OPAC later this year. RIVP, on the other hand, has for many years been more adventurous, as demonstrated by Portzamparc’s Les Hautes Formes. After Portzamparc, RIVP went on to commission Borel, and then Herzog & de Meuron.

Borel’s 1989 development on the boulevard de Belleville in the bustling 20th arrondissement, is comprised of three imposing buildings that contrast sharply with their bland setting. Bold and expressive, Borel’s approach is sharply different from Grumbach’s, who aims “not to create objects totally disconnected from the environment” but rather “a building or public space which seems in coherence with the place”.
Herzog & de Meuron, with their design for RIVP, seem to have bridged the gap between the two approaches by preserving the urban fabric, while at the same time making challenging and engaging architecture that departs radically from its surroundings. Sitting on a Y shaped plot in the 14th arrondissement, its three separate blocks fit tightly into an existing context of large-scale Parisian urban terraces. At its heart is a thoughtfully conceived courtyard, concealed from the street behind a pair of visually ambiguous façades.

One’s first encounter is with two independent dark grey metal façades. Sandwiched as they are between more conventional Parisian housing, they resemble, from a distance, Herzog and de Meuron’s Schützenmattstrasse building (1992-1993) in Basel. However, differences reveal themselves on closer inspection. The amount of light entering the apartments is controlled by adjusting individual aluminium shutters, fabricated from a corrugated grille based on the form of a curtain. When the building’s occupants push them open, they cantilever out over the pavement. In a closed position, they endow the scheme with a self-contained quality that has disturbed the more traditionally minded neighbourhood residents. Although disgruntled members of the Monts 14 conservation group have petitioned the mayor of Paris to have the shutters on the street fronts painted a lighter colour, a straw poll of local opinion taken recently in the area suggested that this was a minority view.

On rue Jonquoy the frontage is a simple, rather static, upright rectangle, but just around the corner on rue des Suisses it is a clearly different situation. The façade is bent to break the monotony of the row. Consequently the element of folding that is animated by the tenants becomes a dynamic and spatial mediator between the fixed, small-scale folding of the grille and the larger-scale distortion of the surface.
In terms of the individual apartments, one has been allocated to each floor on rue Jonquoy, while on rue des Suisses, one flat out of five slices through the entire depth of the building. After the unwelcoming darkness of the metal street frontages, a surprise awaits those entering the courtyard through a passageway — painted green and overlaid with glass panelling along one wall to produce deep liquid reflections of the passer-by — that pierces the block. The focal point here is a long, low-rise box, a close relation of Herzog and de Meuron’s Apartment Building along a Party Wall (1987-1988) in Basel, overlooked by repeated twin metal façades and a backdrop of exposed brickwork in a raw, behind-the-scenes context. Brick and metal serve as hard-edged foils to the natural vibrancy of the wooden loggia and balconies: larch decking, rolling pine shutters and oak parquet. In addition, the smooth serpentine curve of the shutters, canted slightly, contrasts with the angularity of the metalwork. The natural materials successfully impart a sense of warmth to the space, which is enlivened by a mix of climbing narrow and broad-leaved plants and ornamental trees. Two detached houses in fair-faced grey concrete abut the flanking brick wall along the southwestern perimeter. Their simple cubic forms and pitched roofs relate to a gabled building on the northeastern border that predates Herzog and de Meuron’s intervention.

During daylight hours, the fine aluminium latticework shimmers as it interacts with the reflections on the floor-to-ceiling glazing behind it. Later, as a silvery dusk settles over the area, lustrous tones in the silver birch and concrete complement each other in the dimming light. And as apartments light up, glowing oranges and yellows filter through the grille, which assumes the aspect of a delicate fabric, and allows the eye to probe the domestic tableaux. It is a striking discovery.

The complex also looks and feels good in the rain. In the case of the two-storey houses, water rolls off the roofs and streaks the smooth concrete walls. For a few moments, the courtyard becomes an open-air exhibition of impromptu action paintings.

architecture, Blueprint, published article

Nouvel approaches

By Robert Such. Published in Blueprint.

Paris has many presidential ‘grand projets’ – including the Musée d’Orsay, the Opéra Bastille and the arch at La Défense – and now work has begun on a new one. President Jacques Chirac’s ‘grand projet’ is also the first museum of the 21st century to be commissioned for Paris and will be designed by top French architect Jean Nouvel. The Musée des Arts et Civilisations du quai Branly, or Musée des Arts Premiers (Museum of the Early Arts) will become an important landmark to fill a vacant 2.5 hectare site near the Eiffel Tower, which is just a short walk away.

Not only did he carry off the Paris prize, but Nouvel has also won the chance to build the extension to the Reina Sophia contemporary art museum in Madrid.

Nouvel’s design for Madrid fought off some top-class talent. Dominique Perrault, Juan Navarro and Zaha Hadid were among those who put forward plans for the triangular plot.

He described the work as a natural and gentle intervention in the shadow of the museum itself. It will consist of a pierced, floating ‘wing’ above a series of terraces and three pavilions for galleries, a library, an auditorium, a restaurant and offices. ‘‘I chose to build a small quartier beneath the wing,” explained Nouvel. “Each represents a different function, so creating a place that is both open and closed.’’

Nouvel’s dream for the French capital, however, focuses on the fact that he feels the museum should be “a place of welcome, respect and expression of civilisation’’.

Under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Ministry of Education, Research and Technology, the ethnology laboratory of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) and the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts will merge into a collection of 270,000 artefacts on a prime tourist spot near to the Eiffel Tower, gouging a 168 million-euro hole (around £106 million/$164 million) in the state purse in the process and should finally be completed in 2004.

In the new museum, artefacts from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas will be exhibited throughout four levels. The central section, which is perched on piles with a sinuous ramp leading up from the garden, will hold the inevitable rooftop restaurant. Works in the bookend-type blocks at the western and eastern ends, as well the sub-level reserves department, will all be on display.

A screen-printed glass wall will run parallel to the Seine and the busy, bank-side expressway. It is a curved and longer version than the one at the Fondation Cartier on boulevard Raspail and will link up the Haussmann-type frontages on either side. It will also separate the noisy road from a quiet area planted with Magnolias, Oaks, Rose trees and other greenery that will change with the rhythm of the seasons. Nouvel is collaborating with well-known landscape gardener Gilles Clément on the park. Sculptures in the shadows will also share a role in the formation of the 40 m thick vegetal façade.

Randomly arranged pilotis of various thicknesses and materials will blend so closely with the tree trunks that the terrain will appear to be empty. Nouvel imagines that the wooden grille and sunshades, all fitted with photoelectric cells, will be just distinguishable through the foliage, thus evoking a sense of mystery.

‘‘The garden is an opportunity for drama and has an architecturally fundamental role,” said Nouvel. “The idea was to consider that the museum and garden were inseparable. The objects have a special force. They’re not merely works made to be put in a museum or to be looked at, and are not aesthetic or decorative.

“Most of these objects are sacred in the true sense of the word and are intimately tied to people’s beliefs, their gods and their ancestors,” he added. “There are bones and objects that still have meaning for the living.’’

At night, small bouquets of LEDs, which will sprout from the tops of long thin rods, will glow in the shrubbery. Designed by the artist Yann Kersalé, they will resemble outsized electric snowdrops. As the temperature drops, their white light will turn bluish. As the temperature rises, they will become redder. Whatever the temperature, they will cast a shifting glow on the underside of what Nouvel terms the main ‘‘primitive shelter’’ or tree house.

Another development is that while he used glass in the Cartier building to reflect the changing images of the outside world, this time he wishes to use large, untinted panes to create an invisible façade.

‘‘I don’t want anyone who is inside to be aware of the limit between the outside and the inside. While there is also superposition and succession…it’s not a confused, mixed-up modern presentation of these objects,” Nouvel explains. “It should provide one which corresponds with our epoch. Visitors will find computers, images, interactivity…but not in conflict with the works.’’

Of the 14 high-profile finalists — which included Peter Eisenman and Felice Fanuele, Renzo Piano, and Foster and Partners — in the Musée du quai Branly competition, the most interesting were MVRDV/Périphériques. They were concerned with the power of the media, and according to Nouvel, theirs was a daring vision. The Franco-Dutch scheme was composed of 12 towers enclosed by a skin, or information-based hoarding. ‘‘Everything is carried by the message and the image, and the objects are only objects — just a pretext to hold a great debate, which is based on the image and conditions of these countries that will be on show,’’ said Nouvel.

‘‘My projects are the limit of my imagination,” he said. “The problem for an architect is to go to the limit of feasibility, to touch it, but not to go over the edge, otherwise the project is finished. One must be sure that it can be built.” Nouvel’s unrealised Tour sans Fins (Endless Tower) for La Défense and his winning plan for the Stade de France that never saw the French side lift the World Cup testify to architecture’s uncertainty. Now, however, Nouvel has another two chances to test both his limits and to make history.

architecture, Architectural Record, art, published article

Altering form and sound with movement

By Robert Such. Published in Architectural Record.

Despite its name, Son-O-House is not a house but a permanent public artwork that is both a pavilion and sound installation. Located on the outskirts of Son en Breugel in the Netherlands, it represents the second joint venture by NOX Architects and Dutch composer and media artist Edwin van der Heide. NOX, headed by Lars Spuybroek, first collaborated with Van der Heide on the FreshH2O eXPO pavilion on the island of Neeltje Jans, the Netherlands, in 1996-7.

“I wanted sound that makes people move,” says Van der Heide, who also wanted to move sounds from one part of the building to another, and then record the subsequent movement of people. Physical human movement was also the starting point for the pavilion’s architecture, whose curves are derived from the human body in motion. Spuybroek and his office analyzed the movements of the limbs, joints and extremities of people as they walked around a house, and formed a conceptual model, where paper strips codified the complex array of bodily movements in the house. Three types of cut were developed.

As Spuybroek explains, “When a hip movement,’ for example, “was accompanied by a joint movement, like the flexing of an elbow or knee, the strip of paper was cut down the middle. We then mapped additional foot or hand movements by another cut.” When connected, the flimsy paper strips could support each other. The paper model was digitized and the final arabesque structure made from plasma-cut stainless-steel ribs and expanded steel mesh. The various orientations and the mosaic of stainless-steel panels result in a camouflaged appearance and produce a visual experience that changes with lighting conditions and the visitor’s viewpoint.

Visitors to the 3,229-square-foot interactive Son-O-House must not only stoop to enter some areas of the building, they must also watch out for the uneven concrete floor. As they walk through the space, 24 infrared sensors pick up and record their movements; this statistical information is stored in a database. In the process, 20 speakers distribute shifting acoustic frequencies to create a slowly evolving soundscape. 

People in turn respond to these sounds, some of which are dissonant and repellent, by either moving away from or advancing toward them.

Slight phase differences between sound waves from nearby speakers can produce quieter and louder spots again, in response to the visitors’ movements. Because of the system that Van der Heide has developed, over time effective sounds are retained and sounds that don’t cause movement are eliminated. As a result, people leave behind an acoustic trace of their presence in the building, and returning visitors will share a different acoustic experience. With this unusual structure, architecture and sound join together to offer visitors different aural and kinesthetic experiences. In their second collaboration, Spuybroek and Van der Heide have dramatically explored the relationship between time, place, and the perception of sound and architecture.