City Library Helmond
TYPOLOGY: Cultural
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
CITY: Helmond
YEAR: 2010
COMPETITION: 2006, First Prize
GFA: 5.630 sqm
CKIENT: City of Helmond
COLLABORATOR: Vrencken Hoen Architecten
AWARD: Fritz Hoeger Preis 2014, Winner Special Mention
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
Like most Dutch cities Helmond is busy reinventing itself. The new City Library, which officially opens in October 2010, is the first component of a comprehensive new inner city shopping zone (masterplan: Prof. Joan Busquets). Directly adjacent to the new library are the 1970’s Tree Houses and Theatre by Piet Blom. Here the new library facade is moulded and sloped in dialogue with its dramatic neighbour. A between space, a block internal café terrace, a comfortable and dramatic extension of the existing enclosed Theatre Square is the result of this spatial symbiosis.
The outer, street-facing facade is the representative face and entrance of the new library. Upper level projections mark the extremities, brackets (ears) carrying large-format ‘Bibliotheek’ letters. A horizontal facade articulation differentiates ground level shops from glazed and setback first floor (Children’s Library) and the brick surface of the upper office level.
A careful detailing and material choice for external surfaces provides a ‘tactility’ fitting to the historic Helmond city centre. Rough dark brown and unusually horizontal bricks (Hilversum format 50 x 290 mm) on upper levels have open vertical joints and a beige horizontal mortar joint, stressing the layered grain of the brickwork. In contrast the base is in a flat beige brick (in 3 different heights – 50, 100, 140 mm). These are not laid in mortar, but glued together – resulting in a stone-like solidity and homogeneity.
The internal spaces of the library are developed as an unfolding spatial sequence. Much of the ground floor is given over to retail. Entry is from both sides – via a generous double height entrance hall to the street side and via the more intimate café and event corner facing the Theatre Court. The upward sequence is announced by a grand stair, which arrives at a first floor exhibition deck and the ‘piano nobile’ of the library. Here information stations, bookshelves and children / teenager zones are arranged around a central media Hot Spot: precisely circular, a Chinese-red sandwich. The Hot Spot offers the digital latest. The route continues upward concluding in the light-filled upper level with a long working bench integrated in the long ‘tree house-facing’ window.
BOLLES+WILSON’s commission also included furniture and lighting elements, the choreographing of atmosphere and character. Lanterns in the foyer, a newspaper reading table, a striped and upholstered café bench seat with Scandinavian lighting, information counters and a group study room with fragments of a 1950’s mural mounted on the wall, are among the long list of localised detail. The philosophy is one of multiplicity, a user-friendly comfort already much appreciated by librarians and reading Helmonders.
Polychromink / Coin Tower Tirana
TYPOLOGY: Office, shopping, gastronomy
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Tirana
YEAR: 2008
ARCHITECTS: BOLLES+WILSON with Studio Comi
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON, © Ernest Ferizi
What is now known as the COIN Tower originally had the working title Polychromic Tower during planning. It was completed in 2008, in the final years of then-mayor Edi Rama’s façade-coloring program, which aimed to give a new face to the grey, post-communist city. BOLLES+WILSON were asked by the mayor to find an acceptable façade design for the already-under-construction tower. It was built without a crane, with concrete carried up on the workers’ backs. It features a Coat of Many Colours of sun louvers wrapping its somewhat irregular silhouette – unfortunately, only half of these arrived from the Turkish supplier. As the first post-communist tower, it soon became Tirana’s hub of luxury shopping.
Napoli Bagnoli
TYPOLOGY: Competition / Area development / Masterplan
COUNTRY: Italy
CITY: Naples
YEAR: 2020
COMPETITION: Closed competition
COLLABORATORS: OTTAVIANI ASSOCIATI, GREENCURE landscape & healing gardens, Gianluca Peluffo&Partners Architettura srl, Nicola Gallinaro
The proposal is based on two complementary strategic choices: the interpretation of the park as a green flow, made up of a great variety of landscapes within which there are clearings that welcome the various episodes of industrial archeology, and the redesign of the seafront in continuity up to the island of Nisida, making it possible to expand the space for the beach and the Porto Turistico.
Landscaping Hotel NY
TYPOLOGY: Landscape
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
CITY: Rotterdam – Kop van Zuid
YEAR: 2006
CLIENT: City of Rotterdam (dS+U), Hotel New York partner
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
The former embarkation point for emigration to the New World – a ‘Holland/America’ theme. Two landscapes (intimate Dutch gardens and a prairie-like American event- space) are divided by a conceptual border. Large scale text (like a Steinberg drawing) is inlayed in the pavement. To date the Dutch side including the Hotel Terrace, Maaskant Pavilion, vent Funnels, playground and intimate Dutch gardens is complete. despite regular dockings of American warships the narrative landscape on the American side of the Dutch-Amerika border remains unexecuted.
WLV Office Building
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 1995
COMPETITION: 1992, First prize
GFA: 7.200 sqm
CLIENT: WLV
AWARDS: German Architecture Award 1996, commendation
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
The reflective surface of the ‘dark green glazed’ brick animates a monolithic self-focusing form. An ambiguous surface alternating between the brilliance of the sky or the depths of black shadow. Mass is also the subject, a single building block in the urban fabric. A block further animated by the vectorial trajectory of the adjacent railway which instigates a façade curve and lean. A relatively simple slippage whose justification lies not in its formal but its tectonic resolution. Each brick course slips out one cm from the one supporting it. For the train traveller the WLV building is an event of a few seconds, its deflection perhaps only the effect of speed, its roof perhaps only temporarily hovering.
The three floors and 7.000 sqm of offices house a branch of local government that deals with the administration of psychiatric services. Shops on the ground and rooftop canteen-restaurant complete the sandwich. A specified planning module of 1.625 m results in a deep precast concrete fin on each axis, visible structure in unpainted concrete defining a window zone for heating, cable canals and glare blinds. From inside window frames disappear behind fins, to the south sun screens extend the internal ceiling line beyond the window. Systematised cellular offices are animated by contextual deflexions in the overall plan form, resulting in serpentine office strips, floating service islands, the ‘elastic plan’. Not high but low-tech is here and in the entire building thematizing, the simple, the well made, the long lasting.
