http://challenge.visualessence.nl/C2063922860/E1390031752/
and also under his portfolio: http://www.manuelherz.com/ under projects.
Instructive is also the use of the blurry legal conditions, in order to add the "illegal" piece on top of what essentially was a gate.
Here is the text description below by Manuel Herz:
ILLEGAL ARCHITECTURE
Legal / Illegal Architecture
...
Located on that main street, Goltsteinstraße, in the middle of the area
affected by that development plan is a site currently occupied by a storage
space and facing the street with a large entrance gate, considered
a historical landmark. Once the storage space is torn down, the site is
supposed to be developed. The investor who owns the site is a small-scale
real-estate developer who, having studied and worked for a few years
in the field mathematics, and is now building and selling appartments to
make a living, had previously acquired the site in a combinatory deal with
a different site close by. That other project, located just around the corner,
had already been processed, the building built and all appartments
been sold. The site on Goltsteinstraße though, proved to be far more difficult.
Having received a design proposal and a quote for the projected
cost from a large general contractor, he could easily calculate that with
the very average design proposal and the expected turnover through the
sales, a debit would generated, as the 250sqm flatspace multiplied with
the average saleprice would be below the construction cost plus property
value. In other words, the site was commercially not viable.
Only one possibility remained, as much as the investor was very critical
about it: Architecture. If the developer would, as he calculated, invest a
certain percentage of surplus in „interesting architecture“, he could possibly
receive a overproportional increase in the salesprice and therefore
finish off the project without a deficit. This decision, arising purely from
a cost-benefit calculation, without any emotional commitment, resulted in
the best prerequisite of the project. The second one being the fact that
the investor specifically said that he did not want to be an architect and
had no interest in acting like one. Therefore the tasks were devided and
the work could commence.
The Design
The 5.50m wide and 25m deep site, in combination with all norms, rules,
fire regulations, building laws, the municipal development plan and the
rules of „construction near landmark buildings“ result in a very clearly
defined and non-ambiguous volume. Form follows Law! This starting position
forms the first volume of the building: a transparent (as transparent as
the law, as Kafka once said) and orthogonal volume, that out of respect,
or for safety reasons, steps back from history by one meter, and thereby
reacts to the municipal building line set in the development plan. In the
back part of the site, as a full construction covering the whole site is obviously
not allowed according to the development plan, a stepping down
of the volume is created by terraces on each level. It is the proper volume
of the building, which is formulated according to all laws and binds itself
to the rules. The „legal“ volume.
The second volume of the building is formed through different measures.
It is the defiant volume. How many rules can be disregarded in a place
dominated and strangled by rules. First of all, the volume as a whole is
not allowed to exist at all, as its complete floor area exceeds the maximum
area permitted in the development plan. Hence, the volume in itself
is illegal. Being a non-orthogonal, free-formed body, it is mainly opaque
and traces a path from streetlevel through the gate, moving up the floors,
piercing through them, and facing with its main mass at the upper levels
back down upon the street, thereby realising a loop around that gate,
the historical monument. Its windows, goggle-eyed, look into the sky, onto
the terraces and down on the street. Every single surface of its faceted
volume throws a „shadow-area“ onto one of the neighboring sites, something
forbidden by german planning law, and in most cases the official
formulas for calculating their sizes cannot be applied onto the shape of
that volume. The fire-regulations are disregarded and the main mass of
the volume encroaches the street again, crossing the municipal building
line. Not a single exteriour wall is standing perpendicular upright and
the differentiation between wall, roof and floor, the main categories of
building elements in architecture, is disolved. It is covered with a bright
red polyurethan coating which allows for a “construction without details”
and forms a continuous skin over all surfaces of the building. Being disrespectful
to the german building code and the laws and regulations of
that site in particular, it is the „illegal“ volume. Both combined, they form
the building.
Architecture in Bayenthal
What does this architecture want in Bayenthal. The building is an expression
and reacts to the urban condition of that part of Cologne. Having
always been the toy of the real-estate investors and speculators, the building
introduces a foreign body into the urban fabric, which is very receptible
for that. The building moves right up to the limits of the site, or rather,
exceeds them, in its ratio of massing, in its measurements, in its complexity
and its materiality. It overloads or strains the site, and is in a certain way
ruthless to it. Maybe it is one of these architectural interventions which are
not in the interest of the suburb. Maybe it has a self-sufficiency. But in all
these examinations, it expresses the economic situation, the constellation
of laws and rules to form, and the sociocultural condition of the suburb
in a built form. As foreign as the building might seem in the context of
the area, as more it acts upon the history, the state of the urban fabric,
and attempts to formulate an enrichment out of this immediate context.
And attempts of course, as Bayenthal is used to, to view the context as
its capital.
Architect: Manuel Herz
Project Team: Emmanuelle Raoul, Sven Röttger
Site Supervision: Martin Schäfer
Structural Engineers: Ove Arup
Technical Services: Frank Rapita
Client: TURRIS Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG
Floor Area: approx. 400 sqm
Projectvolume: approx. 800.000,- €
completed in summer 2003
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