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urban organism, as a place of socialisation. This equating of space with social space was something we found
again later among the protagonists of the Paulista School.
Vilanova Artigas adopted Albertis statement: the city like
the building, the building like the city. When, like on the
Toni Site, we open the building and bring the city into the
building or the building into the city, this interests us not
just as a typological mutation, but also in the sense of the
additional social value that this makes possible. The issue
is to create a space in which the individual can experience
him- or herself as part of a community. If you understand
interior space as social space, then in principle the concern is no longer the typological meanings of the terms
building or city, but the question whether the house
can be understood as social space in exactly the same
way as the city.
Fig. 40: Building Thoroughfare, from: Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, New York 1977
city. The idea is that after a concert people will bring the
outdoor space alive
D so that the building engages in a physical exchange
with ist surroundings. For much the same reason in Ordos we attempted to organise the campus in the form
of urban districts that are linked to the city surrounding
them simply because the school is so large that it will
inevitably become an urban district. In this way the school
becomes an urban infrastructure for the general public.
This principle of programmatic networking between
building, programme and the city or public outdoor space
is something we have used several times, for example in
the two Hardau Schools in Zurich.
M In this context, Herzog & de Meurons Tate Modern
was a key experience for us with regard to the monumentality, the dimensions of the interiors, and also the
public routes. In contrast to OMAs Kunsthal in Rotterdam,
where the route through the building doesnt connect anything and therefore remains more of a symbolic urban
statement, in the final phase of the Tate a public system
of routes leads through the turbine hall. This is why Olafur
Eliassons Weather Project functioned so perfectly in this
space. This reminded me of a sun-downer meeting in
Florida where people gather in the evening to watch the
sunset and drink whatever they have brought in the boots
of their cars. In Eliassons gigantic space installations, too,
people didnt behave like normal museum visitors.
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Hybrid houses:
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Fig. 53: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Gianfranco Franchini, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977
Sponge-like structures
M In this context and for many other reasons, John
Soanes Bank of England, which was unfortunately demolished, is one of our absolute favourite projects, along
with his own house in Lincolns Inn Fields in London. Both
these buildings were or are bricolages of new and existing parts, which he put together to form a new whole.
The inner density of porous layers, sequences of spaces,
precarious transitions, abrupt changes of scale, absurd
details or surprising turns is overwhelming. In the case of
sponges we often discover surprises in the interior, such
as inner faades, strange relationships between functions
or objets trouvs that are morphologically completely foreign. The small bath house in the Rehabilitation Clinic by
Herzog & de Meuron is one example of a thing within
a thing, to quote Venturi once again. The clinic is also
wonderfully spongy and unmonumental.
D And the deep faades allow outside and inside to completely blend together. The building represents a kind of
substitute world for the patients and its important that
this world should be rich in content. The Rehabilitation
Clinic is an island that contains a whole variety of worlds
M But if you take the sponge too literally, you get lost in
a mechanism in which everything looks the same. Hertzbergers structuralist Centraal Beheer is one such building, the ordering structure is lacking. As we were so fascinated by sponge-like floor plans we started to research
sponges and we discovered that the cellular sponge
principle that we know from 19th century apartments,
for example, is, in biological terms, not entirely correct.
What we call a sponge is only the skeleton of a marine
creature, without the soft tissue. But naturally, sponges
have internal organs. Applied to architecture this means
that there is the structure and, embedded in it, the organs
that service this structure. In the case of Toni, the organs
are clearly the circulation spaces such as the cascade, the
great hall, the ramp and so forth.
D In the Toni Site these service structures are in the interior. On the outside, the generic layers are organised,
the fat.
Sponge-like structures:
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Fig. 59: Herman Hertzberger, Centraal Beheer Office Building, Apeldoorn, 1968 1972
Fig. 57: EM2N, Weber Brunner, Thermal Baths, SchrunsTschagguns, competition 2006
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D On the other hand, Miesian space becomes interesting again when you combine it with iconic space, that
is, when you inscribe something very specific in flexible
space or contrast something with it. Today, the term icon
is used almost exclusively in reference to the external impact of a building. We employ the term iconic space as an
attempt to attribute a similar potential to interior space. In
the Toni Site we contrasted the indeterminate space of the
big functions with the specific circulation spaces as generators of identity, and married the two. OMAs Universal
Studios project, in which the vertical core is completely
programmed and thus forms a counterweight to the indeterminate large space of the offices, is an interesting
example of this. Or the Trs Grande Bibliothque, where
the public programme is inscribed as a powerful spatial
volume in a cube with stacked flexible floor areas. Here
space really becomes iconic and its not understood as
a sculpture with an outward effect but as (empty) space.
The principle of mixing the specific with the generic leads
to a certain liberation in designing, as you focus energy
on certain points. In a building not every corner and area
has to be perfect. It can happen that things begin to brew
and bubble somewhere or other and at that point things
become very concrete and specific. And these focuses
survive the period during which other, less determinate
places in the building change. A building like this can be
appropriated.
Fig. 64: OMA Rem Koolhaas, Universal Studio Headquarters, Los Angeles, 1996
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M Aldo Rossi believed in the idea of continuity of typologies, according to which programmes change far faster
than building types. For instance the basilica type has survived for centuries, even though the function for which it
is used has changed dramatically: from a Roman market
and court basilica to an early Christian church, to use as a
hospital for a period, and to the current interpretation of
this type as an educational institution, for example. Ultimately, the reason these typologies can adopt such very
different functions is because they can be read in a variety
of ways in terms of both scale and spatial configuration. In
his own architecture, above all his late work, Rossi often
doesnt have this multiple legibility. Here we find the approach taken by Venturi more interesting; he called for the
wiggle room instead of gloves.
Fig. 68: Drawing the glove and the mitten, in: Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and
Systems, Cambridge 2004
D Essentially, the dispute between the representatives
of an absolute architecture and a relational one revolves
around the question which form of architecture is better equipped to survive all the changes that occur over
the course of time. Is it the architecture that attempts to
respond to all concrete, programmatic and contemporary
aesthetic demands with tailor-made forms? Or is it the
one that is less compliant, that partly refuses short-term
demands in order to create forms and structures that are
inherently strong and are, in fact, more accommodating
thanks to the different ways in which they can be read?
Despite how interesting and up-to-date Scharouns ideas
about teaching and school practice were in the post-war
years, they are probably outdated today. In such cases
Deep surfaces
D Essentially, external and internal forces always work
on all projects simultaneously and attempt to form the
project morphologically, structurally and in terms of construction. The faade is an interface that mediates in both
directions. Koolhaas describes in Delirious New York how
the skyscrapers faades emancipate themselves from
their programmatic content, and he uses the medical term
lobotomy to describe this process. There are certainly
parallels here to Rossis hypothesis of the permanence of
form. Ultimately, this is not far removed from classical or
mannerist faades in which the interior often has little to
do with the exterior. Instead of using the faade to depict
the function or construction of the building in the sense
of the functionalist creed that form follows function, we
often attempt to grant the faade an architectural independence, so that it can mediate between the building
and the city. (13)
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M It is clear that the faade is also important in determining the visibility of a building. In the Community Centre
Aussersihl, for example, we wanted the building to vanish in the park as much as possible. And at all costs we
wanted to avoid the image of a box in a park with cleanly
placed openings, as this would have seemed as if a little house had hopped into the park from a row of other
houses. Instead we strived for a paradoxical building that
acts like an icon and yet wishes to remain invisible. We
attempted to achieve this with a membrane faade, in
the first design (which wasnt carried out) using the concept of a camouflage created by a mirror and the glass
envelope, in the building that was eventually carried with
a faade of multiple layers that blurs the distinction between outside and inside.
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Fig. 74: Diener & Diener Architekten, Vogesen School Building, Basel, 1993 / 94
Transformations
M The theme of ambivalence is one that occupies us intensively in our reconstruction projects. In our context,
where in fact the city has been completed, as an architect
you have to develop an approach to the question of how to
handle the existing fabric. This has always been the case.
St Peters in Rome, the Uffizi in Florence, in fact most of
the well-known buildings of architecture history were all
constantly adapted and expanded. The Doges Palace was
one huge conversion everything pieced together, but
never in a didactic, conservationist way. Or Diocletians
Palace in Split, for example, where over the course of centuries the antique Roman palace complex was appropriated by users, infiltrated and converted. The dialectical
separation between new and old doesnt interest us. But
we find the question of how old and new can become a
new whole very exciting.
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the programme on the one side corresponds with an absurd over-stretching of the programme on the other. This
double portion of craziness adds up to quality. As a result
of her decision tomove the circulation for the sports halls
into a tower of its own, the vertical buildings read like
converted industrial silos.
Fig. 77: EM2N, Theater 11, Zurich, the freed fly tower of
the earlier building
M With the Congress Centre Thun the situation was different. There we wanted to have nothing to do with the
mediocre 1980s building. Quite honestly, we wanted to
demolish it, but the money for this wasnt available. In this
project, we chose the method of formal separation, so as
to distance ourselves from the existing building.
D Naturally, this separation is purely architectural, in functional terms the old and the new buildings are connected
to form an organism like in Asplunds Court Building in
Gteborg. From outside you see that dialectically it is
made up of several individual buildings. But in the floor
plans you feel this far less. It is interesting to imagine how
Asplund developed the project over a period of more than
a decade. The different stages of the plans are almost
like textbooks that show possible ways of dealing with
the existing substance, from a complete enveloping and
blending to the dialectic coexistence of old and new with
a subtle tension between classical and modern.
M This oscillating between opposites fascinates us. You
can distinguish the different building parts from each
other while at the same time reading them as an overall
space. In this context, Lina B Bardis Fbrica da Pompia
in So Paulo is absolutely brilliant. For a long time, I didnt
realise that the tower is a new building. You have to imagine what a crazy undertaking this was for her. On the one
hand there is the expansiveness of this industrial site with
the halls, which normally would be demolished. But she
left everything standing and, because that meant there
was too little room for the sports halls, she stacked them
on top of each other. This absurd hyper-concentration of
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D It is the oscillating between contrasts like archaictraditional and modern that produces excitement and
tension, which neither of these principles could ever do
alone. Only modern is just as boring as only traditional.
M We design buildings that are clearly modern. We use
modern materials and create modern moods, but we often design quasi premodern rooms in our buildings. The
Flumserberg Holiday Home for example is contemporary
in terms of its materialization concrete on the ground
floor, OSB on the first floor and at the very top the biggest
windows we could get. But the spaces are more rustic,
and its this difference that makes the house interesting.
D When you stand in front of an old building that still has
a certain strength you begin to ponder. We visit buildings
that have survived centuries and look, sometimes enviously, back at the time when one could erect a building
out of a single material. Thats no longer possible today,
for technical reasons we stick layers together, in order
to solve problems energy here, fire safety regulations
there. We sometimes ask ourselves what circumstances
are required today for a building to develop a permanent
presence.
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