Renzo Piano's
Maison Hermes Building, 2001, left, and Yashinobi Ashihara's Sony
Building, 1966, right
"It is in
Tokyo that the marriage between architecture and fashion, between space
and luxury, is truly being celebrated," the author observes and
illustrates with Toyo Ito's Tod's Building, Jun Aoki's Louis Vuitton
Building, Renso Piano's Maison Hermes building, and Yashinobi
Ashihara's Sony Building.
Murinsel, Graz, Austria, 2007, by
Vita Acconci
"In 2007," the book notes,
"an unidentified floating object was spotted in Graz. This
was the Murinsel (''island on the Mur'), landing delicately on the
river that runs through the Austrian city. Here Acconci tries
to show how an urban space might be treated as open forum, debating
chamber, and discussion platform, The Murinsel is a walkway
that is also a hybrid structure linking the two banks of the
watercourse over a pair of slender foot-bridges the shell of which
contains a metal-and-glass cafe, a theater with seating for 200, and
a children's play area. Generated by the distortion
of a double geodesic dome, the Murinsel, as liquid as the waters
beneath, is a succesful example of the osmosis between art and
architecture."
Elbe
Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg by Herzog & de Meuron, 2011
Of a major new mixed-use
project in Hamburg, Mr. Bure observed that "The Kaispeicher, a one-time
cocoa warehouse, an immense, disused brick-built ship conflating
abstraction and realism, had long closed down. What was to be
done with it? Turn it into a venue for music, housing,
several halls and leisure zones with retaurants an stores.
Herzog & de Meuron rigged it out with an elegant set
of sails built up out of crystalline shards with points soaring every
which way into the sky."
[An April 5, 2007
article on the project appear at archnewsnow.com: "Like so many cities,
Hamburg is reclaiming its long overlooked and underused industrial
waterfront on the River Elbe with the development of HafenCity,
currently the largest urban construction initiative under way in
Europe. The 380-acre redevelopment zone will be a mix of office,
retail, residential, and cultural uses. When completed sometime around
2020, the district will have increased the size of the city center by
40 percent. A total of 19.4 million square feet of new construction is
being planned, and much of it is being designed by a constellation of
international starchitects (link above has details).
"One of the
most dazzling projects - and the cultural centerpiece of HafenCity - is
about to break ground - the Elbe Philharmonic Hall (Elbphilharmonie)
designed by Basel-based Herzog & de Meuron. The design
incorporates two distinct elements: a pre-existing brick warehouse
topped by a new crystalline tent-like structure that seems to float
above the industrial base. Sited at the tip of a promontory known as
the Sandtorhafen that juts into the river harbor, the $313 million
(€241 million), 1.3 million-square-foot public-private partnership
development will include not only a new home for Hamburg’s NDR (North German Radio)
Symphony Orchestra, but also a luxury hotel, residential apartments,
conference center, wellness area, the Klingendes Museum (music museum
for children), restaurants, nightclubs, and parking.
"Anchoring
the project is Kaispeicher A (Warehouse A), a fortress-like,
635,000-square-foot “monolithic, earthy building,” as described by
Jacques Herzog, designed and constructed in the 1960s by Werner
Kallmorgen, and used for cargo storage into the 1990s. As they did at
the Tate Modern in London, Herzog & de Meuron are transforming
the trapezoidal-shaped structure to accommodate back-of-house
facilities for the concert halls, the children’s museum, public
amenities, and the parking garage.
"Perched
on top of the warehouse and matching its footprint is the new,
667,000-square-foot glass structure that will rise upward into a series
of wavelike peaks above the brick form below. The glass façade,
consisting in part of curved panels, some of them cut open, becomes a
gigantic, iridescent crystal that catches the changing reflections of
the sky, water, and city.
"Mediating
and separating the old and the new will be an expansive public space
with an undulating ceiling and outdoor terraces offering visitors and
concert-goers panoramic views of the city and the harbor from 120 feet
above the river. 'It’s a new public plaza for diverse people, not only
the elite,' Herzog explained at a recent New York press conference.
Nestled
between the residential and hotel portions of the crystal tower is the
Elbe Philharmonic Hall. It includes a 2,150-seat main concert hall and
a smaller 550-seat hall for intimate performances. Concert goers will
access the main concert hall from the plaza by a striking grand
staircase that Herzog called 'a complex, ceremonial route' to the foyer
that wraps around the hall. Like 'floating ribbons,' branches of the
staircase will lead into the main concert hall."]
Ewha
Women's University in Seoul, Korea, 2008, by Dominique Perrault
The most sensational project
in the book is the Ewha Women's University in Seoul, Korea which was
built in 2008 and designed by Dominique Perrault, who was best known
for his Bibliotheque Nationale de France Francois Mitterand in Paris in
1996.
The book
provides the following commentary:
"The
black of the asphalt, the red of the track, the green of the scenery,
though them all steaks a white fault line. A fault, a slit, a
furrow that plunges down a gentle slope to a depth of 20 meters beore
climing out the other side up a broad stairway, reminding one
irresistably of Courbet's Origin of the world. Af first, our
retinal sensations cannot gauge the size of this faultline, which is
only fully appreciable once inside: giagnaitc, outsized, yet it barely
scars the earth. To each side an immense glazed wall the
ridge of whih, though perfetly orthogonal, seesm to curve in a striking
effect. The metalfitments set around this mass of glass evoke
music paper inscribed with strange, leaping scansions, while the cap
nuts screwing them down stand for the endless vibrato of an
appoggiatura. Housing 22,000 students in its 75,350 square
feet..., flights of stairs strike out inside into the space,
ballast that forestalls any latent sense of vertigo. Then
follow five floors: classrooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, crossroads,
footbridges. As night falls, the fault line is suddenly
illuminated and transforms into a gigantic comet of light and color.
A sort of proclamation of 'non-architecture' and a perfect
illustration of a strategy of concealment, Ewha Women's University is
also perhaps where geography takes its revenge on history."
Sun Tower in Seoul, Korea, 2008, by Morphosis
Deconstructivism
is represented by Massimiliano Fuksas's Paliano Gymnasium in Italy in
1985 and by Morphosis's Sun Tower in Seoul, Korea in 2008.
Paliano Gymnasium in Italy by Massimiliano Fuksas"If
the opening salvo seems to have been fired" by Fuksas," others also
favored battered walls, sloping floors and windows, off-kilter pillars
that make th ehead spin, destabilization, fragmentation and negative
polarities."