Hasta La Ideas

Austrian design studio LAAC Architekten and Stiefel Kramer Architecture have completed this public plaza in Innsbruck, Austria, with an undulating concrete surface.

Completed in collaboration with Christopher Grüner, The Landhausplatz square retains the site’s four monuments with the addition of new trees, benches, lighting, a fountain and drinking fountains.

The huge concrete slabs swell upwards to frame these elements, with textured surfaces giving way to a smooth polished surface.

Water is allowed to drain away through the gaps between the slabs and is absorbed on site.

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Photography is by Günter Richard Wett.

Here are some more details from the architects:

New Design for Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz
(Landhausplatz) in Innsbruck, Tyrol, 2011

Project Description

Goal of the intervention at Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz (Landhausplatz) was to create a contemporary urban public space that negotiates between the various contradictory conditions and constraints of the site and establishes a stage for a new mélange of urban activities characterised by a wide range of diversity. The realised project consists of a 9.000 square meter concrete floor sculpture.

Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz was the largest but neglected public square in the centre of the city of Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria. The site nevertheless kept a symbolic significance with the four memorials positioned there. A subterranean garage was built in 1985.

Before the transformation took place, the square’s atmosphere and spatial appearance was dominated by the facing facade of the Tyrolean provincial governmental building from the period of National Socialism, and by a large scale memorial that looks like a fascist monument – which in fact and in spite of its visual appearance is a freedom monument that shall commemorate the resistance against, and the liberation from National Socialism. The intervention aims to compensate for existing misconceptions and to reinforce the monument’s historical significance. The new topography of the square offers a contemporary and transformative base for the memorials and makes them accessible – physically and regarding a new perception.

The new topography sets a landscape-like counterpart to the surrounding. But it turns into an urban sculpture through its city context, its finish in concrete and trough its function. Accessibility and the layout of paths result from the modulation of the surface which deals with spatial constraints, functional requirements and with morphological considerations.

Pedestrians and users as well as the memorials in their role as protagonists on this new city stage allow for an operative public and open forum between main station and old town. The bright surface of the square functions as a three-dimensional projection field on which the protagonists together with the trees cause a high-contrast dynamic play of light and shadow during daytime. In front of this background the seasons are staged powerfully. Indirect light reflected from the floor sculpture directs the scenery at nighttimes.

In the northern part of the square, the spacious flat area in front of the Landhaus is conceived as a generous multi-purpose event space providing the according infrastructure. A large scale fountain activates the expanded field and provides cooling-down in summertime.

South of the liberation monument the topography features a variety of spatial situations for manifold utilisations. The texture of the concrete surface varies according the type of geometrical configuration. Beneath many trees the floor continuously merges into seat accommodations with a terrazzo-like polished finish.

The sculpture group of one of the monuments is integrated into the basin of a new fountain where water runs down steps cut into a slope. The shoal fountain and the water games in front of the Landhaus provide playground for children and cool down the climate in summer locally. There are drinking fountains in different heights for children and adults.

The surface of the square is realised in modulated slabs out of in-situ concrete, joined by bolts that deal with shearing forces. Infrastructural elements for the organisation of events which can take place anywhere on the square are integrated in the construction of slab-fields of max. 100 square meter. Drainage of the whole square including the fountains is located completely at the open joints between the individual fields so that there is no drainage pit visible on the whole site. An innovative buffer system allows that – despite of the existence of a subterranean garage – all the appearing surface water drains away within the property.

Architects:
LAAC Architects/stiefel kramer architecture
in cooperation with Christopher Grüner

LAAC Architects – Innsbruck
stiefel kramer architecture – Vienna/Zurich
Christopher Grüner – Innsbruck

See also:

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Miami Beach by West 8	Grand Canal Square by Martha Schwartz Partners	CDSea by Bruce Munro

We left off in Part 1 with a discussion of cities in comic books that shone best at night. The darkness, sometimes shamelessly, often represented fear or decay. In this post, we will explore comic book metropolises that represent pure imagination.

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is about the lives of ordinary individuals in an extraordinary world filled with superheroes. The city itself is a bubbling metropolis of glistening skyscrapers, but the light still manages to penetrate all the way to the street level. This is the idealized city, the New York that is in our imaginations, whether or not it exists in reality.

Astro City

On a different note, Brandon Graham’s King City is about making the extraordinary somewhat mundane. Magic cats, Sasquatches, and ninjas in a phantasmagorical city where all this craziness is just kind of accepted as the norm. Graham’s line work is light and fluffy with buildings that seem to disappear into the page. Here, the lack of darkness is about the wonders that exist on the adventure that is, simply, life.

King City

(more…)

Research Projects From left, ARO’s R-House in Syracuse, New York; five principles for Greenwich South; and Princeton University School of Architecture addition. (Photos: Richard Barnes, Architecture Research Office, Paul Warchol)

Our National Design Awards reactions round-up rolls on with the winners in the architecture design category: New York-based Architecture Research Office (ARO). Led by Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinsky, and Kim Yao (the pensive trio pictured at right in a photo by Lajos Geenen), the 18-year-old firm has worked with cultural institutions, government agencies, and the likes of Prada and Princeton (so far this year, ARO has racked up commissions from three more leading architectural schools: the Harvard GSD, Cornell, and the University of Michigan). Also among the firm’s current projects is working with Judd Foundation to transform 101 Spring Street, the five-story cast-iron building that Donald Judd used as a home and studio, into a museum. “It’s the inflection point between Judd’s art and architecture,” said Yarinsky of the Soho landmark during a talk last month at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Architecture Research Office very much deserves the National Design Award,” says architecture and design writer Marc Kristal, a member of the ARO-led project team that developed a planning study for the Greenwich South district of lower Manhattan. “As the firm’s name suggests, they have consistently used research, particularly into materials and methods of making, to invest all of their projects with a high level of originality, innovation, and imagination.” It was this quality that led Kristal to feature one of the firm’s residential projects in his 2010 book, Re:Crafted (Monacelli). “Their work displays a degree of craftsmanship—the presence of the hand—that is unusual in contemporary architecture, especially as it involves such unlikely tools as CNC laser cutters and unexpected materials like MDF, resin, and paper,” he tells us, pointing to a consistent refinement of style that emphasizes light, space, surface, construction, flow, and the presence of nature. “ARO is by any standards a young office, yet its accomplishments are prodigious and exceptional,” says Kristal. “And their best work, I am sure, is yet to come.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Despite a few months of quiet from the negative press that seemed to hang heavy over RMJM, one of the world’s largest architecture firms, doesn’t seem quite ready to dissipate completely. The issues began being reported back in November of last year, when the firm found itself battling stories about their resident starchitect, Will Alsop, not landing any jobs for them, along with news of layoffs, and staff and principals leaving the company both voluntarily and in high numbers. That was followed by news of its American arm filing suit against it over unpaid bills and several more departures wherein the staffer wouldn’t just get up and leave, but would fire off a company-wide email voicing their complaints against the company before heading out the door. Though the injection of an £8 million bail-out from the personal coffers of the company’s CEO, Peter Morrison, seemed to appease the bad press for a little while, those upset former employees still sound like they’re more than happy to talk. This weekend, David Pringle, the head of RMJM’s Middle East and Asia branches, and one of the 80 employees who walked out in one fell swoop, spoke to the Scotsman, spilling the beans on both the turmoil and the dire situation the company seemed to be in. Chief among his complaints were, first, that RMJM short-lived leader, former banker Fred Goodwin, was “deeply unpopular” and that he was ruthless when it came to financing, so much so that it led to Pringle’s second complaint: that he felt forced to make a £200,000 loan out of his own pocket to help pay salaries for the offices, since the company didn’t ever seem to be handing them out (something that still seems to be plaguing RMJM, despite the bail-out). On the positive side, in a separate story filed by the Scotsman, Pringle has landed a job with the firm founded by those other former RMJM walk-outs, 10 Design (the company now reportedly comprises of at least half ex-RMJM’ers). What’s more, the company has just landed its first major commission, a massive retail complex in southern China.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Spanish architect José María Sánchez García has created a public square with a raised viewing platform, surrounding a Roman temple in Mérida, Spain.

The two-storey concrete platform is roughly the same height as the adjacent Temple of Diana and has an exterior balcony that allows visitors to walk around three quarters of it’s perimeter.

The square has an earth surface, as it would have done when it was used as a Roman forum.

Photography is by Roland Halbe.

More architecture photographed by Roland Halbe on Dezeen »

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The following details are from the architects:

Roman Temple of Diana Surroundings and Perimetral Building

The project retrieves the environment of the Temple of Diana in Merida, which was the forum or the city center in Roman times.

The challenge of acting in a place with such historical and archaeological relevance has meant to work with the existing trace since the beginning, so that the finished work would recover this space from Roman times through modern language.

This situation has led to conceive the architectural design not as something closed or completely defined before starting to run.

On the contrary, we worked in a more flexible way, defining the rules and guidelines on how to act in this place, that is to say, the syntax of the project itself, in order to absorb all the irregularities and changes due to the archaeological findings, without losing the initial concept of the proposal.

All this has been developed during five years that, with the archaeological works, the project definition and execution of the construction overlapping in time.

The project is solved with a perimeter piece L-shaped, with its own syntax, sewing its edge with the city and creating a large square around the temple.

This “L” is the union of the platform or high walk (which at the same level of the podium liberates the archaeological level at ground floor, allowing visitors to have a new relationship with the temple) and the structural wall (which puts in Temple value by framing and abstracting it from adjacent buildings).

Between the perimeter L piece and the city, a volume in the form of hanging boxes occupy interstitial spaces accommodating commercial and cultural uses.

Thus, the project, rather than a building is a raised platform, a floating structure capable of generating a new layer of city full of program.

To recover the Roman trace on ground floor, the perimeter structure is placed on the edge of the site, away from the temple, thus giving the largest possible surface to the public square.

The original sacred area is recovered, respecting the Roman archaeological features that are part of the sacred space: the temple, two side ponds, the crypto-portico and the Roman wall, which are now incorporated into the plaza.

The platform stands at about the same height of the podium of the temple to allow visitors to watch it as they were inside, while projecting a shadow over the square.

This way the temple environment gets geometrised, making the understanding of the space clear and not interrupted by the particularities of the back part of the existing buildings.

At the rear part, a volume system, flexible to changes in the perimeter, will occupy the interstitial spaces, shaping light patios that rhythmically fragment the platform’s shadow. It defines a new order of light and shade in the square by the patios between the boxes.

The materialisation of the elements that build the new spaces has been studied by a contemporary interpretation of the materials that were part of the Roman space. The whole square will have an earth finishing, as it was originally.

The piece in L is defined as an artificial stone, made of lime and aggregates characteristic of the place with the granite-like color of the podium of the Temple. We don’t talk about concrete as such, but a warmer artificial stone made using materials found in the surroundings.

Credits and Data

Project title: Perimetral building and Temple of Diana environments. Mérida, Spain
Location: Romero Leal and Santa Catalina street, Mérida, Spain
Construction: November 2009 – February 2011
Total floor area: 2158,19m2
Budget: 5.000.847,90 €

Architect: José María Sánchez García
Team: Enrique García-Margallo Solo de Zaldivar, Rafael Fernández Caparros, Maribel Torres Gómez, Laura Rojo Valdivielso, Francisco Sánchez García, José García-Margallo, Marta Cabezón López, Mafalda Ambrósio, Carmen Leticia Huerta, Marilo Sánchez García, Julia Ternström
Structural engineer: CDE Ingenieros, Gogaite S.L
Services engineer: ARO consultores
Technical architect: Ángel García Blázquez, Fernando Benito Fernández Cabello
Client: Consorcio Ciudad Monumental Histórico-Artístico y Arqueológica de Mérida, Consejería de Cultura – Junta de Extremadura
Building firm: UTE Templo de Diana (Procondal – Copcisa)

Click above for larger image

See also:

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Las Arenas by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners	El Claustro Cultural Center by Eneseis Arquitectura	City Walls of Logroño by Pesquera Ulargui Arquitectos