Editorial

Small town Europe

Most architects and critics have more affinity with big cities than with the countryside. The inappropriate urban entries for village locations in the latest Europan competition are only one illustration of this contention. The motto of architectural insiders seems to be, ëthe bigger the city, the better and more beautiful it isí. Another indicator is terminology: any reasonably big city or even an amalgamation of two or more medium-sized cities, is all too readily dubbed a metropolis while the same linguistic inflation quickly promotes what used to be called a metropolis to the status of megacity or metacity.
One consequence of the almost obsessive affinity with the big city is a tendency to detect urbanity everywhere, even where there is no city to be found. This was borne in upon me when I read Citt‡ di latta (1997) in which Italian architect Paolo Desideri described how, on his weekly journey from Rome to Pescara, driving across one of the least populated areas of Italy, he noticed that there were always some evidence of habitation. This led him to conclude that the contemporary city is everywhere. Similar perceptions of the unending city can be found all over Europe: the Randstad in the Netherlands, the Flemish ënebular cityí, the double city of Vienna-Bratislava, Actarís interpretation of Catalonia as Hypercity, the west coast of Portugal as linear city and so on. In USE (Uncertain State of Europe), Stefano Boeriís Multiplicity has extended this way of seeing to the entire continent: Europe as a city that never ends.
The idea of Europe as one big urban region reflects a way of looking at things that bears all the hallmarks of professional tunnel vision, comparable to that of the economist who sees rational transactions in every aspect of daily life. The reality is that although 75% of Europeans live in urban areas, the continent makes a very poor showing in global metropolitan tables. In Arjan van Susterenís 2005 Metropolitan World Atlas, only 20 of the 101 metropolises featured are European and that includes three artificial constructions ñ Antwerp-Brussels, Randstad Holland and Rhine-Ruhr ñ as well as a number of cities that are not usually regarded as metropolises, such as Oslo, Le Havre and Genoa. The only European cities to make it into Van Susterenís fifty biggest cities are London (no. 11), Moscow (18), Rhine-Ruhr (19), Paris (23), Istanbul (24), Randstad (38) and St Petersburg (50).
However much professionals would like to see Europe as a region of metropolitan allure, the reality is that the European territory consists for the most part of cities that from a global perspective are medium-sized or small. While that is no reason for architects and critics to quell their fascination with the dynamism of mega- and metacities like Sao Paolo, New York and Tokyo, it does suggest that it is time they recognized that the specific European condition needs to be looked at and managed in a different way. (Hans Ibelings)

Inhalt

On the spot
News and observations
• PÉRIPHERIQUES' refreshingly low-tech circulation building for the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (FR)
• Sir Norman Foster lands in Russia with plans for New Holland island in St Petersburg and Rossiya Tower in Moscow (RU)
• Update: four young Hungarian practices
• In Lyon (FR), Patrick Bouchain and Loïc Julienne have built a dance centre in the form of a gigantic shed for controversial choreographer Maguy Marin
• Reality check: Jürgen Mayer H.'s refectory building in Karlsruhe (DE)
• Interview with Tanja Rajic of Expeditio, an organization that aims at raising public awareness of a better quality living environment Europe's youngest nation Montenegro
• The spectacular Zollverein School of Management & Design in Essen (DE) by Japanese architects SANAA is the first completed building on Zeche Zollverein, a former mining area
• and more...

Start
New projects
• British car manufacturer Vauxhall invited Moxon Architects to envision a service station of the future
• In Tyrol (AT), Johannes Wiesflecker has developed the first business park to combine living and working
• Sergey Skuratov Architects redefine Moscovian luxury with the design of an apartment building in Moscow (RU)
• With a utopian proposal, Sarah M. Miebach and Rico M. Oberholzer are among the winners in a student competition to redevelop a vast industrial complex in Vockerode (DE)
• „Hysteric ballroom“ by bube architects is the most audacious winner of the „Simplicity“ competition held in Almere (NL)
• KHR arkitekter's serpentine shaped centre for health education in Copenhagen (DK) returns as much quality space to the Danish capital as it will occupy

Interview
Secretly beautiful
Veronique Boone and Lars Kwakkenbos interview Christian Kieckens, a Flemish architect whose work ranges beyond mere architecture. As the driving force behind Stichting Architectuurmuseum, he casts a critical eye over the Flemish architectural scene

Ready
New buildings
• PPAG's weekend house in Zurndorf (AT) is distinguished by its elephant skin
• In their design for a school in Pederobba (IT), C+S Associati use multiple colours to good effect
• With an apartment building in Tallinn (EE), 3+1 architects prove that the suburban dream can be realized downtown
• Alexandros Livadas' Supreme Court in Nicosia (CY) exemplifies a new period of modernization in Cypriot architecture
• Pedro Gadanho and Nuno Grande give their personal view of their collaborative design of a weekend retreat in Carreço (PT)
• MTM Arquitectos have built an extension to the School of Pharmacy in Madrid (ES)
• Terry Pawson turns a defunct Magistrates Court in London (GB) into a distinctive office complex
• The more one looks, the more Knapkiewicz & Fickert's coach terminal in Baden-Rütihof (CH) becomes an intriguing adventure
• Mestura arquitectes' police station in Barcelona (ES) plays with the standard connotations of such a programme
• Geninasca Delefortrie architects' private house in Chabrey (CH)
• Marjan Zupanc has turned the brief for a shopping centre in Celje (SI) into real architecture
• With one of his first realizations, Chris Briffa has reconciled a new housing type with a block of typical maltese townhouses in Mosta (MT)

Eurovision
Focusing on European countries, cities and regions
• Southern Italy has generated a determined group of architects who know not only how to work as an architect, but also how to interpret the situations in which they work, assuming a strategic role
• Claes Caldenby, editor of the Swedish architectural review Arkitektur for almost 30 years, responds to Claes Sörstedt's article on „arrogantly modest“ Sweden in A10 #6 and explains the merits of being boring
• Twenty reasons to visit Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's unofficial architectural capital, formerly known as Gorky
• Office: Elliott Wood Partnership's suburban office on a tight plot in London (GB)
• Profile: Arup Associates

Out of obscurity
Buildings from the margins of modern history
A new section focusing on buildings in the margins of modern architectural history. First up, one of the editor's favorites: Koen van der Gaast's railway station in Tilburg (NL) of 1965

Coach terminal, Baden-Rütihof

The more one looks, the more Knapkiewicz & Fickertís structure becomes an intriguing adventure.

The task was relatively banal: the construction of a departure hall for touring coaches. The Twerenbold firm is one of the biggest coach companies in Switzerland. Its specialty is European tours lasting several days. The existing 1980s terminal needed to be redesigned and expanded. A symmetrical three-storey building with a tall facade now stands in front of the 75-metre-long old hall, like a locomotive in front of a train. The design by architects Kaschka Knapkiewicz and Axel Fickert extends the hall at its far end, literally and figuratively unfolding the terminal out of the existing fabric and raising it. The new roof creates a fresh new emphasis. The direction of the train is reversed and the old locomotive turned into an unobtrusive tender.

The experience of travellers with tour reservations begins with the typically early-morning departure: the tourists drive their cars into the two parking levels underneath the terminal, take the stairway or lift up to the 320 m≤ waiting area and gaze into the impressive space of the new terminal and the old hall beyond while sipping a cup of coffee. The terminal, which is trapezoid in plan and around 33 to 56 metres along the sides, has space for two coaches one behind the other and six side by side. A folded roof spans both coach and passenger areas. Its irregularly shaped, steel-ribbed underside is clad with green PVC sheeting printed with a map of Europe. On the outside the roof is clad with green-and-yellow striped corrugated plastic. The shape of the semi-transparent folded section conforms to the conditions of the space under it: the angular ground plan allows the coaches to pull into the station without manoeuvring as they swing out of their old hall into the new and from there back out into the street. The roof elevates this procedure into a gesture: the highest point of the entry side is diagonally opposite that of the exit side.

The details reveal the architectsí pleasure in disrupting clarity and generating contradictions. For instance, the otherwise concealed steel construction is exposed on the side faces. On each side, an exposed beam up to three metres high joins the main support at its far end at an acute angle that resists bending. At the point where beam and support converge, the inner roof cladding continues on the side end wall. But grey sheeting, not the corrugated sheeting of the roof, covers its outer side. The masonry in this wall supports not only the roof but also part of the floor above the underground car park. The car park entrance thus becomes a cleft in the terrain instead of a hole.

The other end of the roof rests on two sloping concrete supports in the waiting area. With a length of over 60 metres, the longest roof beam extends diagonally across the space and requires the additional support of cables underneath, this being the only part of the structure that protrudes from the green covering. The architects talk about ëpragmatic solutionsí and are prepared to accept the untidy junctions occasioned by the complicated geometry of the structural steelwork: ëThe space is more important than some corner or other.

Pragmatic or not, it is exactly the ëpoorí details of the structure that the architects use to generate atmosphere in their design. For example, they attach the sheeting with visible cords, like sails, to plain steel pipes. Elsewhere they are deliberately more elaborate. Delicate neon tubes trace the undersides of the main beams, and handmade cement tiles from Morocco domesticate the wall of the waiting area, providing a buffer against the almost overwhelming spaciousness of the terminal. The coach terminal brings the whole wide world into provincial Switzerland.

A10, Mi., 2006.09.13

13. September 2006 Axel Simon


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Busterminal Twerenbold

Weekend retreat, Carreço

Pedro Gadanho and Nuno Grande give their personal view of the house they designed together.

Pedro Gadanho:
Architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça once stated that orange was the new black. Perhaps it is now the new white? At least, orange certainly confounds the myth of white as an equivalent of abstraction. But is orange less abstract? Painters would say no. Colour symbolists would say otherwise. Perhaps. Yet – apart from uncannily contextual reasons – orange is, after all, just as provocative and sexy a way to stress and mediate and promote what is not so obvious in contemporary production.

Think. What may, ultimately, no longer be so obvious to architectural „analphabets“? The emotional force of the cantilever, the ironic memoirs of French film auteurs, the twisting of reality/landscape to fit the artificial architectural frame, the impact of the pure gaze, the expression of viscerality. Gibberish, in fact. Aesthetic pleasure in reverse. Or maybe not. After all else has become aestheticized, aesthetic pleasure certainly has to come with a twist. Maybe that pleasure is the anarchic pleasure of subverting rules – which only those who master the rules can truly achieve. (Of course, I only mean those glorified engineers known as „architects“ as opposed to „builders“, but if an erudite example is required just remember that column that doesn’t reach the ground under Siza’s Bonjour Tristesse in Berlin.)

If you produce the unnameable, then you get away with crime. If your cantilever – or your concept – doesn’t fit the categories that legislation finds appropriate, then maybe you can just get away with it. And subversion saves your project from being just another object deformed and amalgamated by convention. Legal and otherwise. The latest Pritzker Prize winner, Paulo Mendes, would say that you have to create problems in order to solve them. Welcome problems.’

Nuno Grande:
‘For a long time, our Orange House seemed quite strange to a lot of people. Strange to us, as brandnew architects coming (or running) from the respectable and purist Porto Architectural School. Strange to the patient owner who wanted a beach house and got an urban one; strange to the local fishermen whose ancient lighthouse was partially hidden by the new rectangular volume. Strange to the unpleasant neighbour who, from the other side of the street, kept a suspicious surveillance, facing the gaze of the „monster’s“ only eye. Strange to the brave structural engineer who prayed that the almost eightmetre balcony cantilever would not collapse. Strange to the friendly visitors who could never agree on why they liked that loud orange colour so much! And yet, what was so strange became familiar after all.

Now finished, the house is orange on the outside but quiet when you see it from the inside – like an „inverted egg“, a kind of perversion of the normal building process: white concrete inside, coloured plaster outside.

The proud structural engineer is now using the long balcony as a case study for his civil engineering university course. The besieged neighbour has lost his „battle“ and hasn’t been seen since (swallowed by the monster perhaps?). The fishermen are already used to the strange shapes created by the illuminated voids of the house at night. The owner convinced his wife to move from the big city and stay for longer weekends. And we? Well, we are now living in different cities but we are both teaching at the still respectable (but hopefully less purist) Porto Architectural School. Times, like colours and people, keep changing.’

A10, Mi., 2006.09.13

13. September 2006 Nuno Grande, Pedro Gadanho


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Orange House

Apartment building, Tallinn

3+1 architects prove that the suburban dream can be realized downtown, too.

During the last decade, housing construction in Estonia has continued more or less along the same lines – long live suburbia and our own little houses with their own little gardens! Previously, centralized Soviet building practices had kept the capital city compact, but in the 1990s, Tallinn discovered the joys – and the consequences – of suburban sprawl.

The city hasn’t had much to offer to counter this trend. Compared with the suburbs, the city centre offers few new places to live that are attractive and of high quality. Their predictable design and floor plans reveal a rather limited target clientele. However, this is starting to change. While in the suburbs people value the complete newness of the surroundings, in the city the old timber-built districts are enjoying a revival. These areas, right next to the centre, and a hundred or more years old, were not demolished in the post-war period of modernization. They are characterized by a dense urban structure, green backyards (where even today some people grow vegetables) and small, two to three storey buildings. Kadriorg is the oldest and the least well preserved, having been infiltrated by modern town houses and apartments even before the Second World War. If any Tallinn district could be said to be home to the bourgeoisie, it would be Kadriorg.

Koidula Street is especially diverse in composition. The building line is as variable as the chronology of the houses it contains, which range from the end of the 19th century through to the present day. The emphatic modernity of this new building by 3+1 architects is the result of a critical analysis of the area. Due to the chaotic streetscape, the goal was not so much an attempt to „fit in“, but a reinterpretation of the traditional use of materials and principal elements that define the quality of the neighbourhood.

The building consists of two parts: a building with six apartments dating from the late 19th-century historicist period, joined to a new three-storey building, which projects into the yard – one of the building’s most valuable assets. All the terraces and glass-walled stairwells of the new section look onto this private garden, designed by Berlin-based atelier le balto, with its inviting timber walkway, homely trees (apple and birch) and various plants. After many public commissions and international art projects, this is le balto’s first private commission. They compare the view of the garden from the windows to a picture, in which the walkway acts as a frame.

The building is innovative for its typological variety. Each of the ten apartments has a different floor plan and there are several duplexes. The building’s facades display a similar differentiation. The glazed stairwells visible behind the facade on the garden side, leading to two apartments on each floor, boldly cut through the private sphere. This elevation, with its large windows and terraces screened with larch wood, conveys a sense of openness. The street facade, clad with Aluzinc, creates a more closed impression and echoes the folds of the roof forms. With its two large windows, this side of the building cleverly imitates a villa-like scale.

The new building is connected to the neighbouring historical house via a modern passageway which, when viewed from the garden, actually forms the rear wall of the large terraces belonging to the corner apartments. Being quite a narrow building, it adopts a clear principle – the kitchens and wet rooms (most of the apartments have their own sauna) are pushed further back, along the blank wall. Living rooms and bedrooms look onto the garden. Behind a large window facing the street, spiral stairs lead to the bedroom on the upper level which has a floor-to-ceiling window.

This project offers the qualities of a detached house, such as privacy and spatial variety, just a five minute tram ride from the city centre. Its urban occupants can enjoy a morning coffee on a sunny terrace while their children play in the garden: a common scene in suburbia but not so common among contemporary urban housing projects in Tallinn that mainly aim for Existenzminimum and maximum profit.

A10, Mi., 2006.09.13

13. September 2006 Triin Ojario


verknüpfte Bauwerke
Koidula Street Apartment Building

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