The building for the Korça Icon Museum was originally a structure of columns and floor slabs (maison domino) abandoned when communism collapsed in Albania. The Albanian office DEA Studio sh.p.k. were comissioned to design facades and BOLLES+WILSON were then asked by the municipality of Korça to design and develop an interior exhibition design for the 300 orthodox icons.
The heavy walls on the exterior with their small windows were intended to give an appropriate medieval reading. The small windows from the inside did give an appropriate mysterious atmosphere but in terms of viewing Icons they were too bright and needed some interior masking to avoid too much contrast between a small area of bright outside light and the surrounding.
Exhibition Orgaization
The given three levels subdivide well into Basement Archive with ground level laboritories/administration. The Exhibition spaces belong on the entrance level and the 1st floor – here the interior concept proposes a specific circulation route for visitors and an absolute division between public spaces and ‘back of- house’. This is necessary for reasons of security (the public must not have the possibility to enter rooms where Icons are being worked on).
The floor between entrance level and 1st floor has been removed over the entire left hand exhibition room. This allows a new stair facilitating a simple and spectacular visitors circulation route. The new stair gives panorama views of a 9.5 metre high golden wall – for this wall the Petersburg hanging system was chosen – a close packing of Icons, a tapestry of images covering the entire wall, impressing visitors with the size of the Korca collection.
A Sequence of Rooms
The interior concept develops zones of strong individual character defined by colour (gold on the left, black matt and gloss black in the central ‘Black Labyrinth‘ zone and Red for the iconastas (Altar screen)on the right. The Sequential Rooms are carefully choreographed for the most dramatic effect:
(a) Entrance Lobby – an abstract collage of shelves for merchandising, – postcards, posters, local handcrafts and even small Icons painted by Korca artists (a new local industry) are displayed and sold.
(b) The Gold Room – a two floor high gold screen (one that also wraps the sidewalls and tames natural light from slit windows). The screen is packed with Icons. Visitors promenade freely and then step up to the stair landing where an information handrail tells them what they are looking at.
(c) The White Balcony – overlooking the Gold Room, it has a heavy Black handrail and a white (conventional museum) rear wall for a row of small Icons. These lead to an opening on the right.
(d) The Black Labyrinth – the central zone of the museum is particularly dark and mysterious with individually lit Icons floating in the penumbra. Walls are painted in a collage of matt and gloss black and grey to enhance the collage effect. Side alcoves with lower ceilings and wooden floors bring individually hung Icons intimately close to viewers.
(e) The Red Salon – from the Black Labyrinth visitors emerge into a sensual space where all surfaces are red. The central zone is defined by a 10cm high platform on which stands the iconastas (Altar screen).
(f) The final exhibition room is white with an illuminated ceiling – an ethereal space. The room displays the two most valuable icons from the 14h century.
From the architect. The ZCB Bamboo Pavilion is a public event space built for the Construction Industry Council’s Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) in the summer of 2015 in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong. It is a four-storey-high long-span bending-active bamboo gridshell structure with a footprint of approximately 350m2 and a seating capacity of 200 people.
It is built from 475 large bamboo poles that are bent onsite to shape the structure and that are hand-tied together with metal wire using techniques based on Cantonese bamboo scaffolding craftsmanship. The shape is a large diagrid shell structure that is folded down into three hollow columns. These columns rest on three circular concrete footings. A tailor-made white tensile fabric is stretched over the structure and is brightly lit from inside the three legs.
The project is the outcome of the concerted efforts of the Construction Industry Council (CIC), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and different contractors. It was designed by a research team led by Prof. Kristof Crolla at CUHK’s School of Architecture. The research investigates how computational design tools can be strategically inserted into existing construction methods to allow for a more engaging and innovative architectural outcome. The ZCB Bamboo Pavilion showcases this and illustrates how the endangered craftsmanship of Bamboo Scaffolding Construction in Hong Kong can be expanded through the introduction of digital form-finding and real-time physics simulation tools.
The project’s design is based on an architecture student design internship held at the CUHK School of Architecture. The design was developed further by the research team in collaboration with structural engineers and bamboo consultants, using digital physics simulation engines, physical model making, and large-scale prototyping to derive its final form.
Bamboo is a widely available, environmentally friendly material that grows abundantly and at remarkably high speeds in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa and the Americas. It is an excellent renewable natural resource which captures CO2 and converts it into oxygen. It is strong, light and easy to process and transport. In Hong Kong bamboo mostly appears in temporary theatres, scaffolding, or structures for religious festivals. Globally it is usually applied as a surrogate for wood or steel, rather than in ways that utilise the material’s unique bending properties and strength. In contrast, the ZCB Bamboo Pavilion presents an alternative architectural application that maximise these latent material properties.
The pavilion is geometrically complex, bamboo has widely varying geometric, dimensional, and performative properties, and the scaffolding industry does not use conventional architectural drawings for its intuitive constructions. Building the project therefore challenged the boundaries of the architect’s design control. In response, new methods were developed that merged precise digital design systems with inconsistent natural resources in order to deal with these unpredictabilities.
The ZCB Bamboo Pavilion promotes innovative and ecological architectural design to the broader public and design community. It will be used to host exhibitions, performances and events that advocate low carbon living, construction, and development. By promoting sustainable, light-weight building methods for large span architecture the project seeks ways for traditional Cantonese craftsmanship to evolve for the 21st century.
Pavilion:
Bamboo:
Ties:
Fabric:
Concrete footing:
