Editorial

A new European geography

There is no shortage of reasons why Europe is (still) not united, geographically, socially, politically or economically. The continent’s borders are changeable, and its history has unfolded and developed differently in each geographical area, each country, even within some countries in each region. In spite of this, there are identifiable areas in which a European unity, transcending the EU, is emerging amidst all this diversity and contrast. One such area is architecture. Without dismissing all the local, regional and national differences in culture, conventions and traditions, and without ignoring the significant asymmetry in coverage between East and West, there is a remarkable consistency within European architecture, since the leading developments are no longer concentrated within one geographically limited area, but are instead emerging throughout the continent.

Over the last few years, for instance, Irish architecture has made a big splash, architects in Estonia have been talked about, 
a new generation has come to the fore in Portugal, Austria has been enjoying a renaissance and countries like Slovenia and Croatia have been making remarkable progress. The fact that no one specific country, region or city is currently the focus of architectural developments or media attention (which usually go hand in hand) can 
be interpreted as an underscoring of a new condition in the age of globalization, in which the classical spatial distinction between centre and periphery no longer matters very much. Architects no longer need to concentrate in or near capitals. Even when they live and work outside the traditional cultural centres, today’s architects are part of a subculture within the cosmopolitan elite of Europe, and it is precisely this that connects the most talked-about and most promising elements of this profession across national borders.

In an age of globalization in which everyone has instant access to the same information, location has become much less relevant than connections, and in present-day Europe the conditions for making connections in architecture are more favourable than they have ever been. Modern technology and all the options for mobility mean that no one has to live in a metropolis in order to maintain a cosmopolitan, metropolitan lifestyle. This affects not only the cosmopolites who are part of European architectural culture, but ultimately perhaps, the built environment as well. If a village can possess the qualities of the big city, and conversely the city can acquire a village atmosphere – if, in other words, the contrast between city and countryside, between metropolis and village is steadily losing its relevance, a new European geography might emerge. (Hans Ibelings)

Inhalt

On the Spot
News and observations
• Copied, moulded, pierced & stuck on: the spectacular hotel Fouquet's Barrière in Paris (FR) by Edouard François
• Arup's Cecil Balmond and engineer Antonio Adao de Fonseca have crossed the Montego River in Coimbra (PT) with an extremely flat-arched bridge
• Update: a new generation of Icelandic architects
• Reality check: Charles Holland of FAT reflects on the practice's Islington Square housing scheme in Manchester (UK)
• Pharmaceuticals giant Novartis is building an architecturally superior forbidden city in the heart of Basel (CH)
• Paris's 37th bridge over the River Seine by Feichtinger Architects
• and more...

Start
New projects
• The extension of the Flemish-Dutch house in Brussels (BE) by RAUW architects is a modern made-to-measure suit with just a dash of symbolism
• The design of Amra Sarancic, Edi Kaljic and Aleksandar Cigan for the addition of new programmes will bring new life to Sarajevo's Skenderija centre (BA)
• Barak architects' Cheese House in Nitra (SK)
• LPR Architects used a contextual approach for the design of Helsinki's new concert hall (FI)
• MEMAR•DUT©H architects' mosque in Rotterdam (NL)

Interview
Dorin Stefan
Bucharest-based Dorin Stefan, one of Romania's most popular architects, talks to A10's Stefan Ghenciulescu about his alternatives for easy traditionalism and comfortable neo-modernism: „I do believe that we need to revive modernism in Romanian architecture“

Ready
New buildings
• In Slubice (PL), BeL architects managed to escape the typical industrial architecture with a lustrous cylinder
• Kauffmann Theilig & Partner’s youth and children’s centre in Stuttgart (DE) promises to become home to a lively scene
• Pantelis Nicolacopoulos thinks this house in Athens (GR) could operate just as well as a public building
• Rudy Riciotti has built a temple for dancing in Aix-en-Provence (FR)
• PCA’s design for a centre for contemporary art in Kiev (UA) signals the emergence of the new creative pole in Eastern Europe
• Francesco Scardaccione has designed a school that livens up a grey area in Tirana (AL)
• In Amsterdam (NL), Meyer en Van Schooten Architecten have inserted an optimistic apartment block into one of the Netherlands’s most famous post-war housing estates
• Is the Tietgen building by Lundgaard & Tranberg a sign that the curve is the new edge in Copenhagen? (DK)
• Penezic & Rogina made use of the wide range of materials and colours in their design of a kindergarten and nursery in Zagreb (HR)
• Andrés Jaque's Tupperware House in Madrid (ES) offers an architectural and financial solution to several concerns about the residential development model in post-euro Spain
• A „light-footed elephant“: Staufer & Hasler's municipal and media building in Chur (CH)
• Project Meganom built a surprisingly modest luxury shopping village in Moscow (RU)

Section
Sculptural skins
Half a century ago, it was difficult to imagine a building without sculptures, reliefs or sculptural details and vice versa. Since then, the two disciplines have taken their own direction. Although left without sculptural ornaments, many buildings still show a strong relation to the other three-dimensional artistic discipline, but now presenting themselves as sculptures, especially by means of their facades. Whether merely decorative, the result of a striving towards a „Gesamtkunstwerk“ or precise, computer-aided calculations, sculptural skins are once again omni-present these days.

Matter
Materia's view on the latest materials
Architect Els Zijlstra is director of Materia and the creator of www.materialexplorer.com, a search engine for exploring new materials. Materia has a 500 m² Inspiration Centre in Enter (NL) and curates travelling exhibitions and building trade fairs, both of which offer visitors the opportunity to see, touch and feel various recently launched materials. Starting with this issue of A10, Els Zijlstra will bring us up to speed on the latest materials. This first article is devoted to interactivity.

Eurovision
Focusing on European countries, cities and regions
• Matthijs Bouw of Dutch practice One Architecture travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia, with four other young Dutch architects. He shares his experiences of this adventurous journey
• Budapest's new beauties: Emiel Lamers has selected 25 contemporary contributions to the Hungarian capital’s fabric
• Home/office: Marià Castelló’s house and studio in Formentera (ES)
• Profile: Czech office A69 has a fondness for hybrid concepts, creating unlikely yet convincing combinations

Out of obscurity
Buildings from the margins of modern history
Werner Bossmann and Christian Welzbacher describe the tragic fate of Nikola Dobrovic’s Generalstab in Belgrade. This modernist masterpiece from 1961 housed the administrative headquarters of the Yugoslav army, and was partly destroyed during NATO bombings in 1999

Industrial building, Slubice

BeL managed to escape the typical industrial architecture with a lustrous cylinder.

Special economic zones, of which Poland has fourteen, provide exceptional development opportunities. In return for tax relief, developers invest millions of euros in the local economy. Everybody is happy – well, not everyone. Unfortunately, in Poland as elsewhere, such zones tend to become bland and anonymous. The newly built architecture responds only to the functional needs of the companies concerned, rarely exceeding the basic building skills of the contractors, while the well-planned road network is more suitable for trucks and trailers than for human beings, who rarely venture into these zones on foot.

In one such zone near Slubice – a landscape dominated by concrete paving dictated by the turning circle of an eighteen-wheel truck – stands a new production hall designed by Cologne-based BeL architects for FRABA, a German manufacturer of electronic components for the automation industry. The architects conceived the ambitious aim of transcending typical industrial architecture and designing something exceptional. In this they have succeeded: their cylindrical building certainly stands out among the random scattering of boxy buildings, although the rooftop technical installations rather detract from the purity of the cylindrical form.

The walls of the building are covered with strips of shiny roof sheeting, an interesting alternative to the corrugated iron one usually finds on industrial facades. Large, rectangular and rather modestly detailed openings are in keeping with the size of the building while their shapes are quite unlike the traditionally narrow and evenly spaced production hall windows.

Internally, too, the building is far from trad­itional. There is no distinct function-related division of the space: both sanitary and technical spaces are located in the three small cylinders freely floating in what the architects call „a perfect, non-hierarchical, uniform, infin­ite and flexible space“. The north-facing skylights provide a uniform illumination of the white-painted interior, ensuring the proper lighting for assembling industrial electronic devices by hand. The roof construction consists of a 52-metre-diameter circular truss, in which wooden beams (much cheaper than steel) are arranged at 60 degrees. According to the designers, such a structure is more flexible and suits the changing needs of the company and its building, not to mention the fact that it is more economical than the typ­ical right-angled truss. The exterior walls are constructed of prefabricated wooden elements, covered with a stainless steel envelope that has become the building’s distinguishing feature. Perhaps this lustrous cylinder will inspire investors in other special economic zones in Poland to take a more imaginative approach to industrial architecture.

A10, So., 2007.02.04

04. Februar 2007 Lukasz Wojciechowski, Roman Rutkowski

Museum, Kiev

PCA’s design for a centre for contemporary art signals the emergence of the new creative pole in Eastern Europe.

It was a red letter day for Ukrainian contemporary art when the Pinchuk Art Center opened its doors to visitors last September. Its owner, Victor Pinchuk, one of the wealthiest Ukrainian oligarchs, has consistently promoted himself as a patron of the avant-garde during the last couple of years. Besides comprehensive exhibitions, the most important enterprise of Pinchuk’s „Contemporary Art in Ukraine“ Foundation was the formation of an art collection, which by now comprises a considerable number of works by talented Ukrainian and international artists (Sarah Morris, Olafur Eliasson, Oleg Kulik, Olexandr Gnilitsky, Carsten Holler, Arsen Savadov and many others). Pinchuk initially planned to establish a museum in the Arsenal – a huge tsarist military complex built in the 18th century. However, after the Orange Revolution he was ostracized by the new government. The competition for the reconstruction of the Arsenal, won by the Foundation, was cancelled and they had to look for another location. Finally, the Foundation bought six floors in a recently restored group of eclectic buildings near Besarabka, the old marketplace in the centre of Kiev.

The museum debuted with an exhibition of selected works from its permanent collection under the title „New Space“, a designation that reflected not only the quality of the exhibited works, but also the building’s standout interior design by French architect Philippe Chiambaretta. The main aim of Chiambaretta’s design was, understandably, maximum dissociation from the building’s artificial appearance. This was achieved by considerable alterations which allowed for the addition of one more floor behind the historical facade. The architect explains: „The rebuilt staircase leading to the Foundation space allows us to understand this intervention – the staircase landings do not match the windows – so that the old facade looks like a film set, detached from the floors themselves.“ In addition to this, the existing route between floors – via three stairs and two elevators – was abandoned. Instead, two new interior stairs were created in order to facilitate circulation. Technical equipment was hidden in a new, one-metre-thick central wall that divides the plateau in two. Electricity, air conditioning and ducting run through this spine, simplifying distribution to the exhibition halls on either side.

The sense of entering another reality is strengthened by the almost sterile purity of interior in contrast to the colourful and decorated exterior of the building. The only areas of congruence are the alcoves corresponding to the former floors. Covered by vivid wallpaper designed by Michael Lin, a Taiwanese artist who lives in Paris, they are the only spaces in the museum that hint at the external reality.

Reactions to Chiambaretta’s design vary. An Austrian architect, to whom I showed the museum as a rare example of contemporary architecture in Kiev, commented: „there is too much design“. Indeed, in the café on the seventh floor one finds a kind of Zaha Hadid space. But it would be a mistake to see specific elements of design, such as the deformed grid of the main staircase and the metal panels on the walls and window sills, as mere decoration, since they derived directly from the logic of design.

The keynote of this space is movement. The journey begins at the very entrance, where the existing balustrades of the main stair were replaced with a matrix of metal tubes, an intriguing installation rising through the entire height of the building, beyond the visitors’ gaze, thus drawing them deeper into the museum. The rooms were designed to emphasize the channelling of circulation. The floor is laid in narrow granite bands five to thirty centimetres wide, following the direction of the exhibition plan. Translucent bands of lighting along the perimeter of the ceilings emphasize the exhibition route, echoing the pattern on the floor. The ventilation grilles are disguised as per­forated metal panels displaying abstract graphics specially designed to avoid distracting viewers from the exhibition. The same graphic code is repeated on a larger scale in the interior staircase of the museum where it does not conflict with the works.

Whatever the gossip might be, the opening of Pinchuk Art Center is a very promising event for Ukraine. One can only hope that the museum will retain its image of a creative laboratory and place for communication to become not a MoMa, but rather a société anonyme of our time.

A10, So., 2007.02.04

04. Februar 2007 Kseniya Dmitrenko

Shopping village, Moscow

Project Meganom built a surprisingly modest luxury village.

Directly west of the MKAD, the outer ring of Moscow, is an area of dachas known as Roublovka. Once a gently sloping forest, its proximity to the city centre attracted the attention of some very powerful people; both Vladimir Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin built dachas here. Such people never come alone and so began an invasion: first the Kremlin top, followed in recent years by the „oligarchs“. These ostentatiously wealthy young businessmen have quickly assimilated the lesson of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one-time head of Yukos: accumulating a fortune is fine, but never oppose Kremlin politics. Most of them take this principle very literally and tend to imitate the culture of power. The architectural style of power is the Kremlin itself: classicist buildings with a touch of „Russian gingerbread“ and pompous interior decoration. Slowly, however, a different approach is emerging and one of its most successful proponents is Project Meganom.

Yury Grigoryan and Alexandra Pavlova, two of the principal partners, state that their clients are driven by their personal desire for a wide range of elements such as light, atmosphere or materials. The designers often draw their inspiration directly from Russian nature and traditions. Grigoryan fulminates against the enormous developments in the Moscow region where there is a complete lack of overall planning and vision on the part of government. A good (or rather bad) example is the above-mentioned Roublovka, where the park-like character has been sacrificed to the megalomaniac dreams of the rich and powerful. Precisely in this area, Meganom won a commission for a luxury shopping mall plus hotel and theatre.

In looking for a design concept, they found a fitting reference in the traditional Russian village. Instead of a crooked village street leading to the village church, this shopping street connects the hotel with the theatre. The street is intended to offer a complete experience, from wellness treatment through luxurious hotel to the cultural offerings of the theatre, but shopping is of course the main goal. The reference to the old village extends to the scale and materialization of the shops. The long street facades are fragmented in order to differentiate the various shops. All the facades are clad with dark red Canadian cedar. Glass bridges connect the two sides of the street, allowing it to be crossed in all weathers.

Another interesting aspect is the landscape design. Unfortunately, with most projects in Russia the landscaping is still very much neglected and the profession as a whole is underdeveloped. Meganom approached Dutch landscapers West 8. They designed a pavement of black and white granite cobbles with a very strong graphic pattern – a free interpretation of ice on the Volga. The labour must have been enormous because every, mostly curved, line was cut on site. In addition, separate islands with flowerbeds and pine trees were placed in the street, which runs parallel to Roublovka Schosse, the main road to the city. The shop window facade opens up at several places towards small squares where the car dealers are situated. Whereas the street itself is just for pedestrians these squares can be reached by car using an asphalt side road. The way the border of the road meanders between the adjacent pine trees reflects an enthusiastic attention to detail.

At the east side, the street enters the foyer of the theatre, still under construction. The theatre is a simple black box surrounded by a screen of vertical wooden lamellas that vary in orientation and shape, giving rise to intriguing changes in perception as one moves around the theatre. The hall is suited to a wide range of performance arts, from chamber music to free fighting, though it will be mainly used for presentations of the latest luxury goods and for fashion shows. After all, the ambition of the whole development is very simple: getting rich by entertaining the rich.

A10, So., 2007.02.04

04. Februar 2007 Barry van Waveren

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