From the architect. Technology giant Barco officially moves into its new Kortrijk campus. The new headquarters, ‘The Circle’, is the crowning jewel. The circular, transparent icon takes centre stage on the campus, with the goal of connecting the Barco employees and visitors with each other. Jean-Michel Jaspers, CEO at Jaspers-Eyers: “The building just is really dynamic, and gives Barco the appearance it deserves.”
Barco needed a centralised infrastructure because the distance between the sites in Kortrijk and Kuurne was getting to be too much for the employees. This centralising structure has been located next to the existing corporate buildings in Kortrijk, close to the E17. The new campus’s crowning jewel is ‘The Circle’, Barco’s new headquarters. With a diameter of 75 metres and a height of 25 metres, this monumental building can be seen from far and wide.
‘The Circle’ will house offices, research and development spaces, demonstration spaces, an auditorium and a company restaurant. The building’s main purpose is to serve as a space for Barco’s employees and visitors to interact. This was achieved through the centralised layout of the site, in which corridors link the building with The Lab (a research lab), The Pulse (an additional office building), and The Engine (an expansion of the existing production units).
“The interior design also contributes to the social function,” explains John Eyers, CEO at Jaspers-Eyers. “The unique rounded shapes and the internal connections ensure that employees bump into each other more often and create an active ambiance. The oval-shaped ‘meeting decks’ stand out, appearing to float in the space. Passerelles to the fixed cores of the building balance the structure and ensure a constant level of activity.”
‘The Circle’ gets the maximum amount of daylight and transparency thanks to the completely glass façade. The clear glass contrasts beautifully with the inset ramp, that adds relief and depth to the building. Three horizontal rows of coffering run along the other sides to provide protection from the sun. In addition to this, the extensive cooling system provides pleasant temperatures within the glass circle.
The outer parts of the inner volumes are finished with a taut banner, which creates a sleek, even surface with lovely curves. “In the future, Barco will be able to project images on these surfaces using its own technology. This is how the company wants to turn the new building into the standard-bearer for its own high-tech products,” says Bruno Poelman, project leader at Jaspers-Eyers.
A team of architects in Chicago has proposed a house made of 3D-printed plastic and carbon-fibre panels wrapped around glazed walls (+ slideshow). (more…)
Swedish firm White Arkitekter has won a competition to design a cultural centre and hotel in Skellefteå, Sweden, with its proposal for the “tallest wooden building in the Nordic countries” (+ slideshow). (more…)
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
OMA’s long-awaited conversion of the 16th century Fondaco dei Tedeschi as a department store is finally complete in Venice. The project was commissioned by Edizione S.r.l., the Benetton family’s holding company, in 2009, and will bring comprehensive changes to one of the city’s largest and most recognizable buildings. The Fondaco was first begun in 1228 and is located at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, across from the fish market. With many past lives, it was first used as a trading post for German merchants, later as a customs house under Napoleon, and in the twentieth century, as a post office under Mussolini. Despite numerous and radical structural changes, the building was listed as a ‘Monument’ in 1987, restricting further alterations.
Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi, location next to the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal. Image Courtesy of OMA
The project’s renovation scheme, lead by Rem Koolhaas, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, and Silvia Sandor, is comprised of a finite number of interventions and vertical distribution devices. The augmentations including a new steel and glass floor over the building’s central pavilion, new entrances, and a wooden terrace on the building’s roof, among other smaller changes. According to the architects, “both subtle and ambitious, [the design] continues the Fondaco’s tradition of vitality and adaptation, its preservation [being] yet another chapter of the building’s illustrious and multi-layered history. It avoids nostalgic reconstructions of the past and it demystifies the ‘sacred’ image of a historical building.”
Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi, ground floor circulation diagram. Image Courtesy of OMA
OMA has been on a streak of widely praised preservation projects and interventions, including the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Garage Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, or the old Commonwealth Institute being at the center of Holland Green, and the new home of London’s Design Museum. To further discuss preservation tactics and how they specifically applied at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, what follows is a brief interview with Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli.
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
Vladimir Gintoff (VG): For a building that was supposedly barred from changes after 1987, and with the photographs showing what appear to be some major interior renovations, I’m wondering if you could explain the procedure to implement the alterations? Are all of OMA’s interventions things that can be removed and undone?
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (IPL): Any preservation project implies long negotiations with local authorities and the accumulation of extensive knowledge about the architecture artifact. It is inevitably the outcome of a complex process of dialogue and compromise, that unfolds on the slippery territory of interpretation of preservation norms.
In Venice we faced the challenge of transforming a former 16th century German trading warehouse (which became an 18th century customs office, then a 1930s post office) into a contemporary department store. Almost entirely reconstructed with modern concrete technology during the fascist regime, il Fondaco dei Tedeschi is in fact a historical palimpsest of modern substance, its preservation spanning five centuries of construction techniques.
Regardless of the history of its adaptations and the objective lack of authenticity of its structure, its legal status of “monument” placed it under a severe regime of preservation, forbidding almost any change. Dealing with it meant facing this paradox. Dealing with this paradox meant engaging in an intense dialogue with the city, proving at every stage the actual modernity of the building and the coherence of our intervention.
After years of creative negotiation with local authorities, national heritage institutions and local citizens, the project has now materialized. It is based on a finite number of permanent interventions and vertical distribution devices culminating in a new roof terrace. Each intervention is conceived as a brutal excavation through the existing mass, liberating new perspectives and unveiling the real substance of the building to its visitors. With an almost forensic attitude, each new component serves as a way to show the stratification of materials and construction techniques. The preservation of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi is the history of its change.
VG: Quoting from Svetlana Boym in the press materials – “nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” – does OMA see this project as being nostalgic? Personally it seems the opposite, both in the material choices and the idea of continuing to intervene on a historic building, it appears intent on future perspectives as an antithesis to stagnation.
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
IPL: The project is the opposite of nostalgic. It actually resists the idea of nostalgia as described by Svetlana Boym in two complementary ways: by introducing clear modern inserts through the building and by using the same inserts to unveil the history of brutal transformations of the Fondaco – an accumulation of construction techniques from different épochs, typical of many historical buildings in Venice, proving that our fascination with the past is a relatively recent cultural deviation.
Our intervention in Venice relates to the architecture tradition of a dynamic relationship with history, that in Italy had its peaks of expression in the ‘70s with the works of Ignazio Gardella, Franco Albini, Carlo Scarpa and others.
VG: In projects like the Fondaco dei Tedesch and others that preserve existing structures, could you explain how OMA’s views on preservation have been shaped? When elements of past functions coexist with present programmatic mandates, are users expected to consider these heterogenous narratives in their engagement with the space, or are historic facets preserved out of necessity and convenience?
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
IPL: At the Venice Architectural Biennale of 2010, our office presented a body of work focused on our persistent preoccupation with preservation and with the past. The exhibition was symbolically named Cronocaos and in general it showed the implications in the current cultural moment of a nostalgic surrender to the past as opposed to a proactive relationship to history. For our practice such implications are potentially devastating: a growing resistance in accepting change and modernization as an inevitable evolution; philological restorations focused on a literal reconstruction of the past; preemptive norms forcing new projects to look like old ones, generating an undefined soup of past and present “authenticities.”
In different ways and in different contexts our recent projects are a response to this tendency: in each the presence of the past is part of a larger spatial and historical narrative, while maintaining a functional role. At the Garage Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, for the transformation of a modern generic building, we adopted a process more similar to the preservation of decay than actual restoration, by encapsulating a modern concrete ruin – intentionally left bruised and exposed – within a new technical façade; in Milan the curatorial needs of contemporary art foundation were the reason for the addition of 3 new architectures to the already rich repertoire of existing spaces; together old and new work as a continuous sequence of indoor/outdoor spaces, where old and new meet dynamically, hanging in balance but never really colliding; in Venice the entire building works as device to read through the history of transformations of the building – and more in general of the entire city – demystifying the sacrality of the historical monument.
VG: In what one might call an architectural addendum, do you see materials as playing the key roles in the aforementioned projects as well as Fondaco, and if so, how were the materials chosen?
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
IPL: Materials always play a crucial role. The combination of new, old or restored surfaces generates different associations and meanings, contributing in different ways to the main ideas of each project and more in general to the notion of “historical layering.” In Moscow the new façade – a translucent layer of polycarbonate panels containing new technical arteries – acts as a veil around the concrete ruin; in Milan where old and new meet dynamically in a continuous sequence, identities of spaces and interventions are clearly defined by the contrast of materials, a collage of preservation techniques and forms of expression, ranging from generic grey plaster, to experimental aluminum foam, from a thin layer of gold coating to white concrete; in Venice the array of tectonic conditions and materials – scraped walls, diverse degrees of oxidized brass, restored ancient stones, exposed concrete, old/new marble patterns, new steel construction etc.. – serve as forensic evidences of the complex history of transformations of the building, from the XVI to its latest evolution.
VG: Calling these preservation projects “a radical shift from the egocentric and iconic to the invisible and contextual” does OMA believe that cities that have long-established identities should only have interventions of subtlety, or is this just another phase in the office’s development that could shift based on outside factors, economic, social, etc.?
Courtesy of OMA, Photograph by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti
IPL: Differently to new construction, preservation implies another mind-frame: one probably less concerned with form and design but more with history, program, systems, materials, technology, etc. There is no dogmatic answer to this question though. Preservation is one of the many domains to operate as an architect, and cities – both historical or more contemporary – need different degrees and types of interventions to generate rich and complex urban environments.
OMA’s interest in preservation is in any case not recent. Cronocaos at the Venice Biennale of 2010 featured 27 OMA projects never “presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history.” Spanning across more than 30 years of practice, they showed OMA’s latent yet undeclared interest in preservation, highlighting 27 architectural concepts of how OMA dealt with the existing, in different historical, cultural and environmental contexts around the world.
Preservation has been an intrinsic part of our office since the beginning of its history: from the 1979 project for the Dutch Parliament Extension, to the most recent completions.
Partners: Rem Koolhaas, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli Project Architects: Francesco Moncada, Silvia Sandor
Concept
Associate: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
Team: Marco De Battista, Andrew Chau, Paul Feeney, Alice Grégoire, Ricardo Guedes, Andreas Kofler, Kayoko Ota, Pietro Pagliaro, Miriam Roure Parera, Carlos Pena, Ciprian Rasoiu, Agustín Pérez Torres
Design Development
Project Architects: Francesco Moncada, Silvia Sandor
Team: Giacomo Ardesio, Paul Feeney, Alice Grégoire, Ricardo Guedes, Giulio Margheri, Pietro Pagliaro, Cecilia del Pozo, Ciprian Rasoiu, Jan de Ruyver, Miguel Taborda
Construction
Project Architect: Silvia Sandor
Team: Aleksandar Joksimovic, Leonardos Katsaros, Francesco Moncada, Federico Pompignoli
Collaborators
Preservation Architect: TA Architettura S.r.l.
Structural Engineer: Tecnobrevetti S.r.l.
MEP Engineer: Politecnica Ingegneria e Architettura
Safety and Coordination Plan: Antonio Girello
Fire Safety Advisor: Sicurtecno
Cost Consultant Dd Phase: GAD
Contractor: SACAIM S.p.A.
Lighting: Viabizzuno
Photography: Delfino Sisto Legnani, Marco Cappelletti (Courtesy of OMA)
From the architect. Our clients wanted a four-bedroom house with large public spaces that would open onto a constrained suburban site near downtown Raleigh. The existing site was long north to south and sloped down to the street on the north side.
Diagram
A stream bisected the site near the street, and the associated floodplain precluded construction on the front half of the property.
A dramatic slope at the rear of the site prevented locating the house far back on the property. Our response to these constraints was a compact, two-story “L” that creates an private outdoor space between the house and the hillside.
The 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by BIG, has today been unveiled at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London. The design consists of an “unzipped wall” in which a straight line of tubular fiberglass bricks at the top of the wall is split into two undulating sides, housing the program of the pavilion. For the first time, the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion is also accompanied by four “summerhouses” designed by Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan. The Pavilion and summerhouses will open to the public later this week, on June 10th, and will be in place until October 9th. Read on to find out more about all five designs.
BIG’s Pavilion is created from pultruded fiberglass “bricks,” which let in light and views to the interior of the pavilion through each wall. The floors and furniture are constructed of wood which, along with the translucent fiberglass, provide “every surface with a warm glow and linear texture.” From the inside, the offsets of each individual brick creates an interesting play of light and shadow which is visible from within.
Explaining his design for the pavilion, Bjarke Ingels says: “This simple manipulation of the archetypal space-defining garden wall creates a presence in the Park that changes as you move around it and as you move through it. The North-South elevation of the Pavilion is a perfect rectangle. The East-West elevation is an undulating sculptural silhouette. Towards the East-West, the Pavilion is completely opaque and material. Towards the North-South, it is entirely transparent and practically immaterial. As a result, presence becomes absence, orthogonal becomes curvilinear, structure becomes gesture, and box becomes blob.”
Kunlé Adeyemi’s interpretation of the summerhouse brief, which asked architects to take inspiration from the nearby 18th century Queen Caroline’s Temple, inverted the classical-style pavilion to turn its plan into an elevation. Assembled from sandstone blocks, just as in the original pavilion, the structure creates a comfortable place for people to sit in an unexpected way.
Barkow Leibinger’s summerhouse takes inspiration not only from Queen Caroline’s Temple, but also from a now-demolished second summerhouse, which once sat on top of an artificial hill nearby. Using a rotating mechanism, this pavilion was able to provide 360-degree views of the park, and in response Barkow Leibinger have created a “summerhouse in-the-round,” with undulating bands of plywood coiling together to provide views out to the park on all sides.
Yona Friedman’s design for the summerhouse builds on his famous proposal for La Ville Spatiale, a conceptual design that he proposed in the 1950s and has worked on throughout his career. The 30 1.8-meter cubes, made with 16 millimeter thick steel tubes, recall the modular design of La Ville Spatiale in which people would have been encouraged to construct their own dwellings within the framework of a monumental megastructure. In the case of the summerhouse, these cubes instead support polycarbonate panels upon which exhibits can be mounted – making the design “essentially a movable museum and exhibition.”
In the design process for his summerhouse, Asif Khan analysed the sun path around Queen Caroline’s Temple and realized that in the original design, the building was oriented to face the sunset on Queen Caroline’s birthday. This effect would have been amplified by the sun’s reflection off of the Serpentine lake – but that effect was destroyed by the construction of the bridge constructed over the lake in 1826. As such, Khan’s summerhouse includes polished metal plates, surrounded by timber staves which “unpeel” to create entrances.
Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery has selected OMA to expand and refurbish the historic museum and its campus. The project team is being lead by OMA New York’s Principal, Shohei Shigematsu, who will spend the next year in partnership with the museum and in consultation with the community on how to renew and revitalize the august institution. Known as AK360, the building will be OMA’s first art museum project in the United States, and the Albright-Knox’s first expansion in more than a half-century. According to the museum, the project’s name is a reflection on this being the institution’s third expansion in its 154-year history, in addition, it establishes an embrace of public feedback and the acknowledges the condition of being encircled by parkland.
The $80 million project – the largest ever undertaken by a cultural organization in Western New York – will expand the sixth-oldest public museum in the United States and one of the oldest anywhere dedicated to the art of our time. The museum’s existing buildings include a 1905 Beaux-Arts marble structure designed by Edward B. Green, and a space for social events and exhibitions designed in 1962 by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM; both are situated in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park.
Courtesy of OMA
“We are thrilled to be part of this project, which will be important for many reasons including the convergence of historically significant architecture in Buffalo,” says Shohei Shigematsu. “[It will foster] a more intimate dialogue with the Olmsted landscape setting, answering the need for new exhibition space to display the Albright-Knox’s renowned collection, and positioning the museum to take a leading role in the city’s broader resurgence.”
The AK360 plan will add facilities for special exhibitions, create gallery space for twice the number of collection works previously on view, and will deliver updates throughout the museum’s campus, including more space for education, dining, and social activities, along with a more harmonious relationship to Delaware Park. In the words of the museum: “Realizing the expansion…will enable the Albright-Knox to operate more efficiently, provide enhanced service to the community, and anchor a vibrant cultural district in Western New York.”
“Our selection process sought creative approaches to the challenges of expanding and refurbishing the Albright-Knox,” said the museum’s Board President, Tom Hyde. “At the top of our list, we were looking for genuine sensitivity to our historic buildings and Olmsted campus, which anchor the increasingly vibrant Elmwood Avenue Cultural District. OMA/Shohei Shigematsu have demonstrated their creative approaches to building in complex sites, most recently at the Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec, which also connects parkland and urban landscape.”
AK360 was first envisioned in 2014, with the museum’s Board of Directors acknowledging the need for facility upgrades, more gallery space, and public program enhancements. The next phase of the project’s development will begin in September.
Architects Kunlé Adeyemi, Asif Khan, Yona Friedman and Barkow Leibinger have each unveiled a Summer House at London’s Serpentine Gallery, taking inspiration from a Neoclassical temple nearby (+ slideshow). (more…)
Every year the Serpentine Gallery commissions an Architect to design a pavilion which will sit on its lawn, greeting the hundreds of thousands of people who will visit over the summer months. Temporary pavilions like this are an important chance for architects to test new ideas, and to communicate to the public what architecture is and could be.
Unless you’re in London, you may not get the opportunity to visit the pavilion physically, but thanks to the web we can take you there virtually.
You can interact with any of the virtual scenes below by hitting the 3D button. If you have a Google Cardboard or similar VR device, a small VR button will pop show up when you open the model on mobile.
Above: the parametric version of the pavilion model. Click “full screen” in the bottom right to play with the rules of BIG’s Serpentine Pavilion.
Temporary pavilions are a window to the world of architecture
Courtesy of Archilogic
This year’s Serpentine pavilion, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, is a complex sculptural form that can be constructed using simple geometric rules. In detail, the repeated brick geometry embodies the playful spirit of Lego and Minecraft. As a whole, the structure fits together with the calculation and precision of an algorithm.
We modeled the pavilion using web technologies, following simple rules; starting with a brick, reusing the brick to create a wall, “unzipping” the wall so that its base follows a curve. Building a model by defining rules allows us to change the components of the wall, the height of the bricks, and the shape of the curve, in the end generating a new unique Serpentine pavilion without tediously remodeling everything. Modeling this way is powerful; with a few changes we can explore the infinite possibilities of the wall system.
Courtesy of Archilogic
Click above to experiment with different wall models.
Because we’re doing everything in the browser, we can share these explorations in a public virtual space for anyone with a recent device and an internet connection. Being able to share 3D experiences this way, without installation of new software or file downloads, makes web browsers extremely powerful tools for architectural communication.
We encourage you to design the most beautiful wall the Serpentine has ever seen. but be aware; with great power comes great responsibility.
Courtesy of Archilogic
Click above for a non-parametric version of the serpentine model with a virtual tour.
