Over the last few years, the way Americans move around has changed remarkably, especially among young people. Previously the automobile was people’s preferred, if not the only, option. Now they are choosing to walk, bike, or use public transport according to recent studies.
This difference in preferred transportation methods has generated many benefits not only for residents but also for cities, in both economic and social terms.
A study conducted in 2014 by Smart Growth America, dedicated to improving communities, in conjunction with the George Washington University School of Business and the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, of 30 metropolitan areas were classified according to how walkable they are and how this influences their commercial development, talent attraction, or the educational level of people who are in those places and the economic performance of the sector.
The study found the three most pedestrian cities to be Washington DC (1st), New York (2nd) and Boston (3rd), while on the opposite end of the spectrum were Tampa (28th), Phoenix (29th) and Orlando (30th).
However, aside from each city’s position on the list, the investigation was able to obtain other data that until now had not been related to walkability. For example, that walkable cities have a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 38% higher than those which are not and which in turn attracts people with a higher educational level, becoming more socially equitable.
This same study was carried out again this year and its results have just been published. This time the first part is based on the fact that “for the first time in 60 years, walkable urban places (WalkUPs) in all 30 of the largest metropolitan areas are gaining market share over their drivable sub-urban competition.”
Within the 30 metropolitan areas, 619 WalkUPs were evaluated, but represent, on average, 1% of the entire surface of a city. The population of the 30 zones represents 46% of the population of the United States, equivalent to 145 of 314 million inhabitants and at the same time generates 54% of the national GDP.
In each of these 30 places, they calculated the percentage of areas in the WalkUPs that are made up of businesses, offices and rental properties to compare it with the area they occupy in the metropolitan area. According to this methodology, the results for this year show that New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle are the most walkable.
But how does this relate to the economic performance of the area and the educational level of those who pass through there? As stated in the study, these indicators are linked “in some way.”
Land use and economy wise, research showed that walkable urban development appears to revitalize downtown areas and urbanize the suburbs, however, the greatest benefits are found in the former.
On the other hand, the more walkable areas are socially more equitable because they have low transportation costs and greater access to job offers that compensate for higher housing costs.
“Originality is dead” is not an uncommon phrase to hear in our modern, information packed era of Big Data and easy access to source material. If you take a look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the use of the word “originality” appears to have waned; it is now roughly as common as it was at in 1800, with its peak use occurring just before 1900. So what was going on around that peak time? In 1893, the first moving pictures were played; in 1989, the first escalator was installed; in 1899, aspirin was invented; and 1901 saw the first wireless transmission sent from England to Canada. [1]
At that time, the development of various forms of technology was allowing and encouraging people to explore and fulfill ideas that could only have been dreamed of in the past. But without this injection of new tools, it’s difficult to compete with 200,000 years of new ideas; so to help you do so, here are seven aspects of our modern world that make it difficult to come up with original ideas, and ways you can combat them.
1. The Social Sharing Effect
With the constant media feed that now occupies our multiple screens, it’s pretty much impossible not to see the same things your coworkers or classmates see; and equally impossible not to subconsciously incorporate someone else’s idea into your own. The problem is that if everyone does this, it becomes hard to avoid similarities between projects and presentations.
Taking the extra effort to look for sources that are relevant but not fed on en masse could not only potentially open your eyes to something completely unexpected, but will also work to separate your ideas from the crowd. True originality may be an impossible phenomenon, but this is nothing to be ashamed of. We take previous ideas and experiences, learn from them, and make them better by combining them with something new. You just have to learn to look for original sources.
New technology that is evolving at an exceptional rate can be intimidating – many of the things you learn will soon be outdated. Yet it’s important for some to take the challenge to step out of his or her comfort zone and into this sometimes-ungraspable field of new architectural technology.
Using the new techniques that are constantly popping up, and more importantly, combining these new techniques with age-old tools, is a way to explore largely uncovered ground. Before the Industrial Revolution for example, architecture had remained largely unchanged for years. Then came the age of steel and mass production, and from it emerged the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline. Of course now building high is no longer a novelty; originality only lasts for so long.
Staying within one’s home country throughout one’s education and maybe even professional life, can be a very comfortable, safe option to take. The effect that this has on your originality, though, is less than comforting; fortunately, exchange between cultures is becoming a more common design approach around the world, allowing us to learn from one another.
The essence of this is exemplified in projects such as this one by Ingvartsen Architects. Combining ideas and problem solving from a wide breadth of experiences can give birth to design solutions that would have been impossible in the past with less efficient transportation and communication systems. Taking advantage of the resources we have for a wide cultural and geographical understanding can help to fight the generic glass buildings that make up “Notopia.”
Despite the specific contextual parameters that come with encoding and programming building design, architecture created in this way has somehow managed to all blend into a single idea of what parametric buildings can be. The originality that catapulted Zaha Hadid Architects, among others, to fame, is perhaps losing its futuristic appeal to the point of being overdone.
Mixing up methods and materials used for different steps in a design process could add a breath of fresh air; instead of using technology to come up with form and sticking to the use of traditional materials, try form finding with old building techniques and experiment with the material components.
“Kill your darlings” is something every person along the architecture journey has heard before. It’s hard not to get attached to a design you’ve been working over in your mind, practically lived in and convinced yourself is the best way to go. Unfortunately, innovation rarely comes out of that one great idea. Many of the most successful people in history have had many failures along the way before succeeding. Thomas Edison for example, invented the light bulb, the phonograph and the carbon transmitter needed for telephones within 5 years; what’s less talked about are the over 100 patents he filed for now-forgotten inventions. [2]
Generating more ideas will statistically give you a higher chance for getting it just right. The struggle between quality and quantity, especially when pressed by time and money, is possibly one of the biggest barriers stopping architects from achieving originality. One possible way to try to overcome this is to, for example, take part in competitions on a regular basis. This will allow for a large quantity of ideas to be generated, slowly building up experience that can be used as a resource to come up with original designs in the future.
Specialization in modern society is another factor playing against originality. In the past there were “Renaissance Men” like Leonardo da Vinci, who essentially knew a lot about a lot, in part because there was less information to acquire but also because up until recently, it was ordinary to fully follow an idea through into production. In other words, one didn’t require very much external knowledge to come up with something new and unique. In current times, specialization has ensured that for every new creation, there are multiple industries with different sets of relevant knowledge.
So what do you do? Study until the age of 75, covering a degree in architecture, engineering, ecology and design? Alternatively you could extend your social circle to include people who are already knowledgeable in these fields; people who feel the same way about construction and design as you do, such that idea generation and communication is as unrestricted as possible. Finding a good team can lead you a long way.
Our modern image-based culture has turned the process of architectural design into one of the creation of beautiful objects. The danger of this is that architects can work towards creating that beautiful object instead of prioritizing the requirements of the design itself, resulting in a very open-ended design process. Let’s not forget that restrictions foster creativity – so create restrictions for yourself.
Writing down a set of values that you hold as an architect, a set of values that your buildings should achieve, can force you to uphold requirements in decision-making situations that your architecture must comply with. Creating something that is so closely tied to your values as an architect and a human being will undoubtedly help you work towards creating something as individual as yourself.
A glass box extension allows light to the interior of the property and provides views over the adjacent park from the ground floor living spaces. Shaded from the sun by the orientation of the existing house, this new frameless glazed element takes advantage of the unique view from this end of terrace property.
The project includes a basement excavation to the existing cellar and an acoustically isolated music room. At ground floor level the bespoke joinery features window seats and opaque windows to effectively bring the light provided into the centre of the property.
The joinery featured in the kitchen / dining area was designed to benefit from the volume of light allowed into the living spaces. A restrained palette of ceramic tiles, spray lacquered mdf and dark stained oak were used to create a practical space with clean lines, but also a space with depth and warmth. A darker ceramic tile from the same family as the light grey floor tile was used to finish the kitchen splashback and storage recesses, while all of the recesses were clad with dark oak to accentuate the depth. Both the enlarged window seat and opaque window to the basement are also lined with dark oak, their frames hidden within the joinery in a similar vein to the structural steel supporting the larger glass box.
Even in Manhattan—a sea of skyscrapers—the Empire State Building towers over its neighbours. Since its completion in 1931 it has been one of the most iconic architectural landmarks in the United States, standing as the tallest structure in the world until the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were constructed in Downtown Manhattan four decades later. Its construction in the early years of the Great Depression, employing thousands of workers and requiring vast material resources, was driven by more than commercial interest: the Empire State Building was to be a monument to the audacity of the United States of America, “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground.”[1]
The rapid and unchecked development of Manhattan was a matter of serious concern in the early years of the 20th Century. The construction of the Equitable Life Building in 1915, while by no means the starting point of the debate, provided a clear example of what could happen to New York City should building height and form continue unregulated: the Equitable Life Building, which occupied an entire city block in Lower Manhattan, rose forty stories high without any setback from the sidewalk. Fears of New York streets forever cut off from sunlight by man-made canyons of skyscrapers spurred the passing of the 1916 Zoning Regulation, a landmark document which required setbacks for buildings passing heights specified by their location in the city.[2] These regulations would lead to the characteristic stepped forms for which New York skyscrapers—and Art Deco skyscrapers around the world—would come to be known.[3]
Skyscrapers typically rose for one of two purposes: to serve as showcase headquarters for companies, or else as speculative projects by real estate developers.[4] The Empire State Building was the latter, a scheme concocted by former New York City governor Alfred E. Smith in collaboration with his finance partner John Jakob Raskob. Less than a month before the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Smith and Raskob called together a meeting of the city’s wealthy financiers to discuss their solution to the impending financial disaster: an office tower of unprecedented height. According to Raskob, the massive undertaking would both inspire the American people and help stabilize an economy that was about to fall to pieces. By the meeting’s end, Smith and Raskob managed to raise the funds to purchase the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which would be cleared away to make room for their visionary tower.[5]
Image via Wikimedia (Public Domain). ImageLaying of the tower's foundations
Only twenty months passed from the start of concept design in September of 1929 and the building’s opening in May of 1931. Those twenty months were a flurry of constant activity: once the designs were drafted, an army of 3,500 workers tore down the Waldorf-Astoria and assembled the Empire State Building at an astonishing rate. At the peak of activity, the tower rose just over one story in a day – a rate of construction which, while still impressive by today’s standards, was unheard of in the 1930s.[6]
The material costs of the Empire State Building were every bit as high as those of labor. 210 foundation columns were sunk into the sturdy granite bedrock of Manhattan – a measure necessary to support the 365,000 tons of skyscraper above. 50,000 steel beams were then assembled and clad with glass, brick, and limestone to form a tower 1,250 feet (380 meters) tall. In spite of this, the building was not only completed on time, but a full 45 days ahead of schedule and $5 million (€4,556,016) under budget.[7]
Image via Wikimedia (Public Domain). ImageUnder construction
Its speculative purpose required that the Empire State Building provide as much rentable office space as could be built. The setbacks mandated by the 1916 Zoning Regulation, while still expressed in the new tower’s form, were countered by the fact that the lot on which the building was situated was roughly twice that of most of the surrounding structures; therefore, architect William Lamb was able to design a primary tower shaft with ample space for both offices and elevators, a dilemma less satisfiably resolved in the previous tallest building in the world, the Chrysler Building of 1929.[8]
Given that the Chrysler Building had only held the title of “world’s tallest building” for approximately a year before conceding to the Empire State Building, it is perhaps inevitable that the two skyscrapers would be subjected to endless comparison. In pure metrics, the latter is the greater building: it is 204 feet (62 meters) taller, and its 2 million square feet (186,000 square meters) of office space was more than double that of the former.[9,10] However, debate over which tower is the more aesthetically accomplished is not so easily settled.
Image via Wikimedia (Public Domain). ImageUnder construction
The Empire State Building, despite its Art Deco styling, is significantly more austere in appearance than the more ostentatious Chrysler Building. Devoid of the sunburst windows and Moderne gargoyles that adorn the older tower, the Empire State Building is strikingly subdued. It is not entirely without ornament, however: a pair of sculpted concrete eagles flank the entrance, and shining aluminum extensions reminiscent of wings taper up toward the pinnacle of the tower.[11] The exuberance of the Chrysler Building’s metal crown, when contrasted with the quiet dignity of the Empire State Building, can be seen as the changing attitudes of a country before and after the onset of the Great Depression – and it falls to the observer to decide which, if either, is the more appealing.
Despite the optimism with which Smith and Raskob had originally proposed the project, and despite the rapture with which New York had watched its newest landmark grow toward the sky, the Empire State Building could not escape the realities of the deepening Depression. Initially, the building’s owners could not find more than a few tenants to occupy their tower, which soon received an unflattering nickname: the “Empty State Building.”[12]
History would come to vindicate the new skyscraper. Those who did not deride the building upon its completion showered it with acclaim, most notably declaring the Empire State Building the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World.’[13] Its introduction into the Manhattan skyline would represent the end of the city’s competition for the tallest building until the World Trade Center finally dethroned it in 1972. The building itself also became a profitable venture in its own right, hosting over 15,000 workers and countless more visitors hoping to see the city from the observation deck on the 86th floor.[14]
Although the Empire State Building has long since lost its status as the world’s tallest building, it has never quite lost the adoration which it engendered in 1931. Just as Smith and Raskob envisioned, it has become an enduring monument to democratic—and more specifically American—perseverance and achievement. Even as skyscrapers continue to grow taller, eclipsing the record once set by the Empire State Building, its particular impact on New York and the idea of the skyscraper as a whole will likely remain. Joe Carbonelli, who worked as a water boy at the construction site during his youth, put it best: “Although there are now numerous buildings that are even taller, this one has remained a symbol for New York and America, and for courage and adventure.”[15]
References [1] Kingwell, Mark. Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. p5. [2] Dunlap, David W. “Zoning Arrived 100 Years Ago. It Changed New York City Forever.” The New York Times, July 25, 2016. [access]. [3] Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon, 1996. p219-225. [4] Tauranac, John. The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark. New York: Scribner, 1995. p38. [5] Kingwell, p1-5. [6] Willis, Carol, and Donald Friedman. Building the Empire State. New York: W.W. Norton in Association with the Skyscraper Museum, 1998. p11-12. [7] Cowan, Henry J., and Trevor Howells. A Guide to the World’s Greatest Buildings: Masterpieces of Architecture & Engineering. San Francisco, 2000: Fog City Press. p112-113. [8] Willis, p17-18. [9] Cowan and Howells, p111-112. [10] Willis, p14. [11] Bayer, Patricia. Art Deco Architecture: Design, Decoration, and Detail from the Twenties and Thirties. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992. p92. [12] Cowan and Howells, p113. [13] Tauranac, p19. [14] Cowan and Howells, p113. [15] Kingwell, p12.
Location: 350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10118, United States
Architect In Charge: William F. Lamb
Area: 2248355.0 ft2
Project Year: 1931
Photographs: Wikimedia user robertpaulyoung (licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0), Wikimedia user David Corby (licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0), Wikimedia user Smithfl (licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Clients: Federal Republic of Germany, represented by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety, represented by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (Project Manager Gunter Machens) and Association German School Madrid
Project Management: Bureau Veritas Construction Services (Project Director Christian Gerlach)
Architects / General Planning: Armand Grüntuch, Prof. Almut Grüntuch-Ernst
Project Directors: Erik Behrends, Florian Fels, Olaf Menk, Arno Löbbecke, Jens Schoppe
Project Team: Benjamin Bühs, Ana Acosta Lebsanft, Irene Arranz Astasio, Rafael Ayuso Siart, Cristina Baixauli Garcia, Mar Ballesteros, Tina Balzereit, Anna Berger, Johannes Blechschmidt, Matthias Cremer, Benjamin Figueroa Henseler, Jost von Fritschen, María García Méndez, Joana García Puyuelo, Isabell Gruchot, Julia Naomi Henning, Kristina Herresthal, Götz Hinrichsen, Mónica Hinrichsen, Laura Jeschke, Rebeca Juárez, Johannes Klose, Markus Lassan, Itziar León Soriano, Danko Linder, Sarah Manz, Elena Martínez del Pozo, Vera Martinez, Annika Müller, Andreas Nemetz, María Isabel Ortega Acero, Ana Pascual Posada, Jaime Promewongse, Dominik Queck, Lisa Schäfer, Karsten Schuch, Borja Solórzano, Kerstin Thomsen, Pablo Claudio Wegmann, Henning Wiethaus, Víctor Wolff Casado, Anna Wolska
Structural Engineering: GTB-Berlin Gesellschaft für Technik am Bau mbH, Berlin
Checking Engineer For Structural Analysis: Prof. Dr. sc. Mike Schlaich, Berlin
Building Services : Müller-BBM GmbH, Berlin
Energy Technology: Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH, Stuttgart
Energy Concept Competition: Prof. Dr. Klaus Daniels / HL-Technik, Munich
Fire Protection: hhpberlin, Berlin
Fire Protection / Building Services: Úrculo Ingenieros, Madrid
Open Space Planning: Lützow 7 Garten- und Landschaftsarchitekten, Berlin
Lightning Design: Lichtvision, Berlin
Geotechnical Engineering: GuD Consult GmbH, Berlin
The new building in northern Madrid replaces its predecessor building in the city centre. With its special educational program and evening theatre performances and concerts, the German School Madrid is an important site for cultural exchange.
In this large complex, the school’s diverse areas of use are legible as clearly defined units. The individual buildings – the kindergarten, the primary school and the secondary school – each frame an inner courtyard. All patios open up to the surrounding landscape and a vista of the snow-covered mountains.
Reflecting both the requirements of the architectural brief and the topography of the site, the buildings develop differentiated spatial situations, yet all components unite into an organic ensemble with strong sculptural presence. The common areas – the “foyer courtyards”, the cafeteria, a concert hall/ auditorium with 750 seats and the sports hall – connect the individual school buildings.
All children meet in the foyer courtyards before dispersing in their individual school buildings. Here the sculptural strength of the polygonal skylights creates a captivating play of light, providing the pupils with valuable shade.
School buildings play a key role in conveying both building culture and sustainability. A return to traditional simplicity, while demonstrating innovative technological sophistication influences the design approach, it’s construction and building services. The implementation of ancient wisdom, such as natural cooling through a subterranean thermal maze, will ensure the building’s sustainable operation.
A school is more than a matrix of classrooms; it is the centre of the students’ living environment and shape their understanding of both the built and natural worlds as well as their sociocultural experience. The spatial compositions and visual connections within the school promote a sense of group identification and intercultural exchange in order to carry on the tradition and success of the German School.
Wiggly house is a single-family residential building located in a difficult context 50km away from Milan in Italy, characterized by multi-storey buildings that surround it.
Because of this promiscuity, the house tries to protect itself reducing the openings toward the outside as much as possible, compensating with big or smaller patios, both closed and open, that give light to the inner spaces in a more suitable way.
The covering reaffirms this principle. Canadian gray granite covers the entire building to symbolize this idea of protection with the exception of the walls where the volume is subtracted by the grey-plaster made patios.
the pitch of the roof folds restless in search of the zenithal light in an almost gestural attitude, generating three light stacks in the living room,in the kitchen and in the “meditation room” at the end.
The pitches of the roof alternate, “wiggling” the sequence of the lines of the roof section.
Section
So in the inner spaces the value of the light is emphasised. From the typological point of view, the project investigates new combinations depending on the change in the family structure and the use of contemporary living spaces that seems to be radically changed in recent years.
The Italian architect Cesare Cattaneo assumed in “the house for the Christian family” a growth hypothesis of the building organism; the new paradigms on which the evolution of the families of our times are assumed call for a deep reflection on the status of the new housing models.
Floor Plan
What is proposed is an ability to survive to subsequent configurations, at least for some key spaces of the house, but also an organism with a spatial structure that is able to grow in the future.
So the project is not completely saturated by the volume allowed for the lot, occupying it in the manner of a matrix, which leaves voids in the plan and arranges the rooms along a North-South axis, waiting to be completed and added in the future.
Product Description.The covering affirms the principle to protect the house from the sorroundings . Canadian gray granite covers the entire building to symbolize this idea of protection with the exception of the walls where the volume is subtracted by the grey-plaster made patios.
It is a residential area near the prefectural capital location, but blessed with nature with scattered fields and water ponds. Among them, facing the lake, surrounded by rich greenery, it is a perfect location that seems to come out as a movie or a fairy tale. The so-called painting architecture is a site with power that can be drawn any number of times.
Although I would like to open wide towards the lake surface, I hit nearly in the west, especially concerning the influence of the western sun in the summer. The opening was designed to be a space that can fully capture the privileged site environment while limiting as much as possible.
1F was a piloti, the main living space was concentrated on 2F, and an opening was made so as to make one round around the 2F part of the building. By doing this, it is easy to hide the eyes of the usual and easy to see the view, giving floating feeling and omission to the building, it is a slightly larger building, but the sense of pressure is extinguished and harmonized with the surrounding environment.
The interior, especially the living, uses the wall arrangement, the reflection of the glass of a wall or a wall-mounted TV, and because the reflection of the light of the lake surface is swaying on the ceiling through the opening, it is designed to take light from all directions We devised it.
In the ancient world, traditional death masks were believed to strengthen and protect the soul of the dead as they progressed to the afterlife. It was this mythical notion of transition from death to new life that inspired Vespers, a collection of death masks from Neri Oxman and her team at MIT’sMediated Matter Group.
Courtesy of MIT Media Lab
Death masks were traditionally made of a single plaster modeled to the deceased’s facial features. Created as part of Stratasys’s New Ancient collection debuting in the London Design Museum this November, Vespers’ 3D-printed masks are built using spatial mapping algorithms that generate colored internal strands enveloped by transparent curved volumes. Rather than memorializing the dead, these masks are designed with an emphasis on cultural heritage, reimagining the potential utility through high-end technologies such as high-resolution material modeling, multi-material 3D printing, and synthetic biology.
Courtesy of MIT Media Lab
Vespers consists of three series of five masks each. The first series, Lazarus, combines a model of the wearer’s visage with an enclosure to contain their last breath. The material composition is designated by the air flow and distribution of this breath. The design is data-driven, digitally generated, and additively manufactured; the design team thus wanted to express the contemporary technological spirit in their version of these ancient artifacts.
Ziya Imren Architects has released its plans for Re-Naturing the Kizilirmak in Turkey, a new eight-kilometer-long urban design project around the Kizilirmak River. As the longest inland river in Turkey, the Kizilirmak, also known as the Red River, “has been regarded as a hard edge to the city due to access and safety concerns.” After recent municipal advancements, many areas around the river have been opened to a design competition with the goal of integrating the riverfront into the existing city fabric.
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
In an effort to stray from the typical dichotomy of nature and city, the project focuses on the integration of nature in three parts, borrowed from the writings of John Dixon Hunt—unchanged nature, nature changed by human intervention, and designed landscape. Thus, by overlapping these typologies of nature, the connection between the river and the city can be better facilitated, creating “a permeable interface” between the two landscapes.
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
The project additionally features the integration of culture, specifically the culture of the City of Sivas, which borders the river, via a “path of culture,” which will connect the city center and riverfront. This path will include a high-speed rail system, intended to not only connect nature and the city but also to connect Sivas to other cities in order to facilitate growth.
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
Courtesy of Ziya Imren Architects
Natural wetlands will be preserved within the project, and are expected to likewise preserve important landscape and biodiversity. “Our basic principle is minimizing the amount of intervention to nature and maximizing the socio-cultural contribution which will bring the presence of water into the daily living of the city dwellers,” said the architects. Thereby, water is intended to become a main focal point of the city, as well as a place to host new programmings, such as urban agriculture of varying scales and social centers for sport, entertainment, rest, and more.
From the architect. The consecration of the church ended the odyssey of the Leipzig parish community that has lasted over seventy years. Its permanent return to the centre of the city is manifested in the construction of the new Trinitatis church.
The new parish church is develop out of the organism of the surrounding city. It obtains its presence through its high church hall, church tower and inviting openness of the parish courtyard. In a prominent location across from the New Town Hall the Trinitatis church define a site that respectfully integrates into its surroundings and forms a clearly distinguishable edge along the city centre ring. The structure is now being put up with the ‚pouring‘ of the triangular plot of land and the concreting of the poles of the church hall and church tower on opposite sides. The parish courtyard was cut into the area between the two highpoints to create a new central meeting location. The silhouette of the new church marks the beginning of the further development of the underused neighbouring urban area.
The Trinitatis church is primarily characterised by light, space and material. With its interior height of over 14 metres, the church hall enables a transcendent spatial experience that is further intensified by the large skylight located in 22 metres high. Daylight of varying intensity falls from this along the rear wall of the altar in the church hall and defines the atmosphere of the hall. Another important element is the large ground-level church window (by artist Falk Haberkorn) that produces communication between the community and the city as if through an interactive store window. It opens and delimits the church hall at the same time while serving as a targeted opening as an interface between the world of the profane and the realm of the sacred.
Floor plan
The church hall is situated crosswise and creates sufficient room for the arrangement of the community in an open surrounding area whose optical and scenographic centre is the chancel. Partitions separating the community were eliminated, additionally opening the chancel as a multidimensional space usable for various forms of liturgy. Merely a gentle slope surrounds the chancel and permitting optimal visual perspectives. Across from the large cross on the rear wall of the altar (by artists Jorge Pardo) is a second cross carved into the large wall area above the gallery as a negative imprint that opens the church hall to the light of the setting sun in the west. The gallery offers room for the organ, the choir and additional pews to be set up here.
Product description. Facade made of Rochlitz porphyry. By using Rochlitz porphyry is continuing a tradition of construction of the city of Leipzig, such as with the Old Town Hall, and of the region, such as with the Benedictine Priory of the Holy Cross in Wechselburg. The horizontal layering of the various heights firmly anchors the building with the plot of land and allows it to symbolically grow out of the ground. The projections and recesses in the layering convey the rich
Sig Nordal 