Editorial
A threefold response
That part of building production generally understood as architecture has undisputedly strong roots in European culture and has also been exported to, imposed on, and emulated in other parts of the world. It may be a long time since Europe played a leading role on the world political stage, but in the field of architecture it is still at the epicentre of developments.
There are various possible explanations for why architecture occupies such a prominent place in Europe. The first is, on the face of it, tautologous: architecture is such a vital presence in Europe because it has a long tradition here. Yet it would be wrong to underestimate the significance of the fact that in Europe architecture is neither a novelty nor a foreign import. Which in turn raises the question of why European architecture has been able to build up such a strong tradition. The answer to this is at least threefold: it is related to the nature of European society, to the level of prosperity, and to the extent of urbanization.
To begin with the last, Europe has long been a continent of towns and cities – the natural biotope of architecture. This is not to deny the existence of architecture in rural and village settings, but the urban environment is unquestionably where it all began.
Architecture is also related to prosperity. And that’s not just because of the availability of money for building projects (there are more than enough examples of poverty-stricken countries in which huge amounts of money are spent on prestige projects). Architecture flourishes when the general level of prosperity is such that people are able to indulge their interest in architectural quality. Although Europe has never been free of poverty, the continent has long been one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Architecture is a luxury that a large part of Europe has been able to afford since the nineteenth century.
After the Enlightenment and the rapid urbanization brought about by industrialization, architecture’s focus changed dramatically and that, too, was more evident in Europe than elsewhere. Traditionally bound up with the monuments of state and church, after 1800 and the rise of the middle class, European architecture experienced a shift to the construction of buildings with a civic connotation, to structures that give form and expression to society, that facilitate community life – from market halls to libraries, from schools to apartment blocks. Notwithstanding all the shortcomings of such a rigid simplification, one can discern here a transition from architecture as an expression of the state to architecture as an expression of society, and from that moment the principle so pithily expressed by Winston Churchill in 1943 applies: „We shape our buildings, and afterwards they shape us“. Hans Ibelings
Inhalt
On the spot
News and observations
• The building boom in Madrid (ES) is reaching a climax with the imminent completion of a high-rise quartet
• Starchitects descend on Ireland
• High-rises are the talk of the town in flat Copenhagen (DK)
• Reality check: architect Tarla Macgabhann comments on the finished Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny (IE)
• Update: the new Dutch
• „Urban zig-zag“: a piece of high quality contemporary urban „furniture“ in Tirana (AL)
• Russia has once again embraced the practice of holding design competitions, but now not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg
• and more...
Start
New projects
• JDS Architects’ ski jump in Oslo (NO) is extending a tradition... to the sky!
• A Hungarian-Japanese team has won the competition to rehouse Hungary’s ministries in Budapest (HU)
• A crematorium in Schiedam (NL) is Asymptote’s second opportunity to build in the Netherlands
• Rudy Ricciotti returns to simple gestures with his „giant nest“ in Paris (FR)
• Erik Nobel’s design for a broadcasting building in Tallinn (EE) is tasteful, but a missed opportunity for innovation
Interview
Oleg Drozdov
In Ukraine, where people pay millions to spend their lives in „historical fakes“, a European-oriented architect like Oleg Drozdov is seen as an exotic exception. Working at an urban scale in several of the biggest Ukrainian cities, he produces positive changes in physical surroundings as well as in professional circles. Kseniya Dmitrenko investigates the intellectual background of Drozdov’s work.
Ready
New buildings
• Denton Corker Marshall’s Civil Justice Centre in Manchester (UK) confirms the re-orientation of the city
• Kalle Vellevoog reinterpreted Pärnu’s (EE) famous white Funk in his design for a holiday apartment building
• A wave-like roof announces Alberto Nicolau’s new swimming pool in Valdemoros (ES)
• In a park in Grafenegg (AT), the next ENTERprise have designed a stage for music festivals and general lingering
• Suburban abstractionism – Johannes Norlander’s first Swedish building, located in Stockholm
• For a house extension in Oelde (DE), Matthias R. Schmalohr finds a new „archaic“ form of expression for ecological architecture in the pueblos of New Mexico
• If Marks Barfield have been worried about being typecast by the London Eye, then their Lightbox Gallery in Woking (UK) will probably do the trick
• Hin Tan designed Tirana’s new Mother Teresa International Airport -the first building of modern, transparent Albania
• In Vienna (AT), Adolf Krischanitz and friends have created paradigms in concrete
Section
Wood
Wood is the oldest building material known to architecture and one of the materials provided by nature itself. Wood can be easily worked by human hands into just about all the parts one needs to build a house: the structural frame, the façade and roof cladding, the doors and windows, the furniture, ornaments, down to most of the tools.
Materia
Materia's view on the latest materials
The science of biomimicry looks at how fascinating designs and processes found in nature might be applied to other fields. How, for example, the behaviour of red algae might be used to prevent bacteria from attaching themselves to a surface. Nature-based solutions to technical problems are being sought all over Europe.
Eurovision
Focusing on European countries, cities and regions
• Maximum Security City: finding solutions that strengthen the city
• 25 recent buildings worth visiting in Istanbul (TR), the city that spans two continents and has a population of over ten million people
• Home: Jorge Mestre’s hillside house in Alella (ES)
Out of Obscurity
Buildings from the margins of modern history
In the 1960s and 1970s, many German medium-sized towns that had profited from the „economical miracle“ were building town hall towers. Some are still standing, but none of them exudes the charm of the 1970s with as much freshness and elegance as Offenbach am Main’s town hall (1968-1971), designed by Maier, Graf & Speidel. Christian Welzbacher takes a look at this triangular tower block with a glassed-over hall.
Residential building, Pärnu
Kalle Vellevoog reinterpreted Pärnu’s famous white Funk in his design for a holiday apartment building.
The seaside town of Pärnu is Estonia’s Riviera – dubbed the „summer capital“, it boasts a beautiful sandy beach, many restaurants and entertainment venues, spas and holiday retreats. Wild parties, around-the-clock nightlife in summer, everything one associates with the sunnier side of life. Architecturally, Pärnu is associated more than any other town with a white functionalist style. Right here on the beach stand some of the finest works of 1930s architecture – a seaside café and a grand beach hotel – inspired by technological progress and strict modernism. In addition, there are numerous similar villas and hotels throughout the town. Supelfunktsionalism – „swim-Funk“, if you will – has become Pärnu’s architectural trademark, and the everyday life of these buildings is strictly monitored by the heritage conservation authorities. Any architect who designs for this area has to come to grips with the legacies, one way or another.
Kalle Vellevoog, the architect of the apartment building on Seedri tänav 4, had no problem with the context as he is a staunch adherent of white Funk – meticulous, rigorous, detail-oriented. „Neo-funk is a timeless architectural style that will have more architectural value – whether in 10 or 50 years’ time – than any building with plywood siding tacked over it, which will have lost its lustre in five years, become faded and start deteriorating,“ Vellevoog remarked in an interview. „Eighty years of modern architecture is a long enough period to prove that Le Corbusier’s early villas still seem fresh, even today.“
In terms of its typology, the new building goes to the heart of the modern resort town apartment market: there is a doorman on the ground floor and most of the flats are rented out by their owners. It consequently has a very anonymous and transient residential population, and only comes to life in season (Pärnu is not half as popular in winter). So the programme has a certain anonymity and different parameters from a traditional residential building. The architectural space that has been created here is fairly strict and imposes clear contours. The V-shaped building has gallery access along glassed-in corridors that overlook an interior courtyard. The strict plan means that the apartments all face one side – either the sea or the street. The standard apartment is 50 to 60 square metres with one bedroom and a kitchenette. And, typically for a holiday area, all of them come with balconies.
The Seedri apartment building is a stylish place for a mobile population of modern holiday makers, a well-designed and smoothly operating machine whose coolness and sobriety are reinforced by the materials used: glass, concrete, steel. A solitary tree planted in the middle of the gravel-covered courtyard serves as an oblique reference to the luxuriance of the surrounding greenery – this outdoor area has not been designed as a place for lingering, but rather for observing the apartment building itself. Taken together, the glazed galleries and the central courtyard turn the Seedri hotel into a monitoring and controlling apparatus, yet those retiring into their own rooms have their own private view, full amenities and the knowledge that a holiday in Pärnu always involves modernist spaces.A10, Fr., 2007.12.07
07. Dezember 2007 Triin Ojari
verknüpfte Bauwerke
Residential Building
Passenger terminal, Rinas
Hin Tan designed Tirana’s new Mother Teresa International Airport.
In Tirana they know all about urban transformations. The Albanian capital has undergone more than one enforced facelift over the past century. The only reminder of Tirana’s Ottoman origins is the mosque on Skenderberg Square. In the 1930s, Italian architects filled the city with neo-fascist palaces lining broad boulevards. After the Second World War there were communist mega projects, including a concrete Palace of Culture and a glass pyramid in honour of dictator Enver Hoxha. And while Tirana has acquired a few tower blocks since the advent of capitalism, the glorified provincial town has never been a metropolis.
Mayor Edi Rama is trying, with his „Return to identity“ programme, to give the city back to its citizens after a century of megalomaniac projects. His most important decision was to have the grey concrete facades painted in bright colours. Public resources are limited in a bankrupt nation which is also deeply divided politically. In 2006 a flyover literally bit the dust in a political battle between the mayor of Tirana and President Sali Berisha. It appears that for the first time in this country’s history it will be the market and not the politicians that will determine how Tirana will look in the coming years.
The new passenger terminal at the Mother Teresa International Airport in Rinas is a portent of things to come – at least, that was the message conveyed by politicians and entrepreneurs in their speeches at the opening last March. If true, we can rest easy. For a change, the building by Malaysian architect Hin Tan does not attempt to impress with dizzying dimensions or Balkan braggadocio.
Nor does the new terminal look like a political prestige object.
All of which does not prevent people from reading more into this design of a central hall dominated by a huge, raked glazed front. While not all that unusual for an airport, in a country that has been hermetically closed off from the outside world for fifty years, it automatically has wider implications. Mother Teresa Airport is the first building of the modern, transparent Albania. As unthreatening and peace-loving as the eponymous Nobel Prize-winning nun.
The terminal can handle one-and-a-half million travellers a year, but the international consortium that has been running the airport since 2005 expects to carry out the first expansion in 2009. Right now it is processing almost one million passengers and Hochtief Airport GmbH thinks passenger numbers will treble in the coming years. The terminal seems to have anticipated this. The visible girders and pipes and the exposed ceiling elements give the new terminal a feeling of temporality, functionality and a work in progress. The café and the souvenir and tax free shops could fairly easily be relocated inside the hall which can be taken in at a glance.
The terminal’s appearance is defined by a long narrow awning shaped like an aircraft wing. Pillars as slender as guy ropes seem to hold it in place. The architect makes more such subtle jokes, for example in the passport control area, where a layer of girders above and beside the electronic gates gives passengers the feeling of walking into a cage.
The terminal designed by Tan, who worked for Santiago Calatrava on the design of the new Bilbao airport, could stand in any European city. Nonetheless, Tan sees clear local elements in his arrivals hall. For example, what he calls his „arrivals piazza“ features locally quarried stone and is intended to give foreign visitors an immediate sense of „Albanian hospitality“. This is easier to achieve in such a small airport, of course, than in the likes of Frankfurt Airport which handles fifty times as many passengers. But Mother Teresa Airport does indeed have something pleasantly well-balanced. Hin Tan hopes that returning Albanians will feel immediately at home. The real question is whether they will recognize their homeland.A10, Fr., 2007.12.07
07. Dezember 2007 Werner Bossmann
verknüpfte Bauwerke
Tirana International Airport
House extension, Oelde
Matthias R. Schmalohr finds a new „archaic“ form of expression for ecological architecture in the pueblos of New Mexico.
Many neighbours are appalled by the strange, bunker-like appearance of this home extension: bare, rust-red concrete all round, oddly placed window openings, no detailing. From the outside it’s like a model built to full scale. If all buildings were this basic, all those home maintenance suppliers would be doomed to ruin: no more need to clean out the gutters, paint the exterior, or anxiously check that the house is well sealed. There’s not a conventional joint to be seen.
Over 50 years after the completion of the Aachen cooperative building society’s Type E12 housing estate home, still in a near-original state of preservation, Matthias R Schmalohr
sought a contrast that would emphasize the distinctiveness of the two building masses – the existing house and the new extension – linked by a glass corridor. On one side cosy confinement and romantically small spaces, on the other large openings, long vistas and double-height voids in a living space of only 95 square metres. All that was necessary to win over the head of the local urban planning department, was a preliminary, below-gable design. Until now, one-storey extensions with a 45-degree roof had been customary here.
Although something almost fort-like assures its domestic intimacy, this house is liberating in the sense of Modernism’s old motto of „liberated living“. Does it also live up to the images of classic Modernism? Minimalism predominates indoors, with limited materials and colours and concealed technical installations. A floor-to-ceiling sliding door facing the terrace and entrance platform provides views of the south-facing garden and the carport with storage room – also newly built. The light for the dining area, which is protected from overlooking, comes from the large east window of the library gallery. The master bedroom is nothing but a bed-length sleeping cabin as is the toilet, built into the oak closet.
There’s no detailing or decoration indoors either: the smooth surfaces of walls and furniture meet in a shadow gap. On Architecture Day there were 120 curious visitors and Deutsche Welle’s television team filmed for over two hours. Experimental architecture by young architects is not all that common in Germany, but even in a small Westphalian town with picturesque gables and a population of 20,000, it finds an audience.
In contrast to the modernist interior, the external impression is rather more archaic. The formal idiom spontaneously recalls the adobe architecture of the New Mexico pueblos, an archetype of ecological architecture. The Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung was deeply impressed by his visit to Taos Pueblo where he was told that Indians think with the heart, not with the head. The highest aim of their ecological world view is to be in harmony with all of life, rather than striving for a house that will impress the neighbours. Despite all the debates on architectural culture, this is an idea that is not widespread in Germany.
Once you understand the pueblo analogy that has informed the house in Oelde, you can start to see it as a new formal idiom in green design: an indestructible natural material (concrete), no squandering of materials for detailing, flexible use of space in the basement and the old attic, densification of land use (this is a three-generation household), and low energy needs. Thanks to the solar collector panels added to the old house and improved thermal insulation of its gabled roof, the existing furnace in the old house now heats both parts of the building without any increase in energy consumption. Even the reddish colouring of the concrete is natural – inorganic iron oxide. At the same time this colour is a fitting match for the russet tiles of the gabled roofs in the surrounding area while it also makes a covert reference to importance of the metal-working industry in the region.A10, Fr., 2007.12.07
07. Dezember 2007 Klaus-Dieter Weiss
verknüpfte Bauwerke
Wohnhauserweiterung
