architect

Murphy/Jahn—Helmut

Jahn, Rainer Schildknecht, Philip

Castillo, Stephen Kern, Steven Cook,

Charles Bostick, Joachim Schuessler,

Jan Müller-Gauf, Ingo Jannek, Isabell

Klunker, Dan Cubric, Carl D’Silva,

Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido, Colleen

Caulliez, Michaela Fuchs, John

Manaves, Nabil Mekdaschi, Patricia

Siesler, Frank Weingardt, Mark

Verwoerdt, Dieter Zabel

A wedge-shaped swath outside the city center, but prominently located next to a ring road and near a freeway, became available when Munich officials held a redevelopment competition in 1999. Officials intended the office-building development to signal a new life for a district full of warehouses that have gradually emptied. Eventually, a row of office buildings should fill in behind the Highlight Munich Business Towers, separated by a landscaped zone from future housing development.

Planners sought two discrete slabs on this conspicuous location in order to avoid an overbearing mass. The developer, Bürozentrum Parkstadt München-Schwabing, did too, but for a different reason: It wanted construction to be phased so that the offices could be brought onto the market gradually. In spite of a local glut of space, 50 percent of the Highlight Towers are now rented.

The pair of thin, offset parallelogram towers (one 33 floors, the other 27) seem to present the unwrinkled, expressionless face reminiscent of Modernist buildings the world over. But the effect is sculpturally dynamic as the sharply angled roofs and the thin slabs of the towers appear to slip by each other as the viewer moves around them on the ring road or the autobahn.

The effect is especially dramatic at night, with the shifting towers outlined by strings of blue lights and lit from within the external stair and elevator shafts by narrow red and green stripes. Design partner Helmut Jahn placed the towers in the middle of the site to avoid the noise and pollution produced by the ring road. A six-story office block on the south side doubles as a sound barrier, with the freight elevator and the stairwells shielding workers from traffic noise. A seven-story, four-star designer hotel, the Innside, wraps the towers on the north. The two bridges (one of them two-level) that link the towers are the project’s bravura gesture. Jahn, collaborating with his favorite structural engineer, Werner Sobek, pared them to a minimum: two long beams that support glass-panel floors, walls, and roof. The idea is that as many as eight bridges can be clipped on and off as desired, permitting floors in both towers to be combined in contiguous floors of about 26,700

square feet. The scheme offers enormous leasing flexibility.Up close, the towers are undeniably light on their feet. Murphy/Jahn claims that the steel structure has one of the highest slimness ratios in the world, 1 to 10. The buildings’ small footprint liberated two thirds of the site for a landscape by Peter Walker, which opens the site visually to nearby park space. Above a 750-car, three-level garage, Walker united the site by drawing large concentric circles of black and white stone that run from the courtyards into the lobby. German codes demand natural ventilation and offices with windows that open, along with strict limits on energy use. In the past, Jahn and other designers have met these requirements with costly double curtain walls separated by an insulating airspace. At the Highlight Towers, Jahn and Sobek trimmed the extra cost by designing a single-layer facade of large, triple-glazed, fixed-glass panels, alternating them with tall, narrow ventilating panels.

Not just technically innovative, the project has become an urban landmark honed to a simplicity that keeps it sophisticated.

I had not expected the towers to be so magnetic in person. They draw your gaze from different vantagesbecause of the intriguing way their relationship to each other changes. With the project’s inward focus and hidden entrances, it is not pedestrian friendly at street level now, in spite of the open space. That should change if the towers help to draw new development, animating the street. In their prominent and convenient location, the Highlight Towers also are waking up Munich, whose citizens liken their city to Sleeping Beauty’s castle submerged in slumber.

architect
Frank O. Gehry

Immediately behind the Brandenburg Gate lies Pariser Platz (AR January 1999), the great urban piazza that terminates the triumphal axis of Unter den Linden. Before the War, it was the grandest square in Berlin, site of the American and French embassies, the Adlon Hotel, the Akademie der Künste and blocks of luxurious flats and offices. After the War and the Wall, it was laid waste and became part of Berlin’s deadly no-man’s land. Since German reunification it has been rebuilt in an attempt to emulate the spirit of its grand urban past, with new embassies, hotels, and office blocks slotted back into the original street pattern. The rules of reconstruction, which stipulate constraints such as eaves heights, proportions and materials (obligatory stone cladding), do not allow much scope for formal experiment. The result is that Pariser Platz’s new occupants resemble a collection of rather bland, expensively dressed guests mingling politely at an upmarket cocktail party. The introduction of Frank Gehry into the mix might in theory be calculated to induce an element of raciness and unpredictability, but he too has been obliged to conform to the dress code. Being Gehry however, he has still managed to spring a few surprises. The genesis of the project dates back to 1995, when Gehry’s competition entry for Berlin’s historic Museum Island was under consideration. At that time, the DG Bank invited him and six others to produce a proposal for the bank’s new Berlin headquarters. The brief included financial offices, apartments and semi-autonomous conference spaces that could be hired out to corporate clients. Gehry did not prevail in the museum competition, but his design for the DG Bank won unanimous approval. The site lies on the south side of the square, in the middle of Pariser Platz’s evolving urban jigsaw. The rectangular block is hemmed in on its long sides by Behnisch’s new Akademie der Künste and Moore Ruble Yudell’s American Embassy, with the short ends overlooking Pariser Platz and Behrenstrasse. The organization of the new building is a logical response to the constraints of site and brief. A necklace of office spaces extends around three sides of the perimeter, enclosing a huge atrium space (of which more later). The residential annexe, which has its own separate entrance, is placed on the fourth side overlooking Behrenstrasse and a site that will eventually house the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Flats range in size from studios to larger maisonettes and are separated from the offices by an elliptical void enclosed by a swirling, shimmering glass wall suspended from the roof that cascades down to a pool below. Two glazed lifts glide up and down through the void like air bubbles.Gehry has clearly taken the Pariser Platz dress code to heart; both bank and apartment facades are models of sobriety and severity. The apartment block is marginally less austere, stepping back as it rises over 10 storeys with faceted bay windows like concertinas animating the wall plane. But the main bank facade overlooking Pariser Platz is an utterly plain, utterly stripped down composition of creamy buff limestone (to match the Brandenburg Gate) and glass. Openings are punched into the stone to create deeply recessed windows that slide back at the touch of a button to reveal terraces enclosed by blade-like glass balustrades. Clad in 4 inch thick stone, the bank facade is almost as shocking in its solid, rationalist monumentality as Gehry’s signature sinuousness and its extreme weight and abstraction only serve to show up the flimsiness of the surrounding pastiche. Ironically, in Berlin’s traumatized cityscape, such solidity also embodies a reassuring sense of permanence and institutional stability, doubtless important concerns for Gehry’s banker clients. (‘The bank guys loved it’, he observed, ‘although it cost them a lot of money to do it’.) Sadly, most Berliners will never see beyond this massive stone wall to the real drama and spatial pyrotechnics within. Radically upturning his expressive gestural vocabulary and relocating it to the interior, Gehry has had to pour his design into the cavity of the perimeter block. Here, Californian ad-hocism meets the European masterplan. The inside is scooped out to form an immense atrium – allegedly one of the largest in the world – enclosed by a delicate steel and glass lattice, improbably morphed and warped to form a barrel-vaulted roof canopy that curves in two directions. Within the atrium is a freestanding structure like a giant horse’s head rearing and writhing through the space. Encased in a thin skin of stainless steel, this extraordinary object contains a conference chamber. The inner surface is lined with strips of red oak (finely perforated for acoustic reasons), so being inside the chamber is like being cocooned inside a contorted ship’s hull. The regimented orthogonality of the exterior extends to the perimeter offices, which are edged by a series of arcades lined with redoak veneer. From these vantage points, the squirming biological specimen of the conference chamber can be fully appreciated. Beneath the shell of the chamber is a basement level containing a lecture theatre, along with the bank’s cafeteria and a large foyer; these can be combined to create a meetings.

Another warped glass canopy, smaller cousin to the main roof, encloses these spaces allowing light to percolate down to the lower levels. (During the course of site excavations Albert Speer’s bunker was discovered, but no trace of it now remains.) As with Gehry’s other projects, the translation of initial ideas to built form is achieved through a design and construction process that combines sophisticated computer software programs with a craft approach to building. Initial generative sketches, which defy conventional logic and geometry, must be painstakingly interpreted as a precise system of co-ordinates and known structural and material properties. Gehry develops his ideas slowly, from rough drawings through an exhaustive series of handmade models. Using the Catia program to represent complex three-dimensional objects, these crude wood and cardboard mock-ups are scanned into the computer and digitally translated back into working models and drawings. Employed as an instrument of translation rather than generative device, the computer enables the representation and manipulation of that which cannot otherwise be drawn. In this case, unusually, the exterior presented no such challenges, but the glass roofs and conference chamber proved tests of design and manufacturing ingenuity. The triangulated space frame of the roof is made up of solid stainless steel rods that form six pointed stars screwed into nodal connectors. The complex geometry of the roof meant that the rods meet at different angles, so to match them precisely, the nodal connectors were cut from 70mm-thick stainless steel plate by computer-controlled milling machines. The frame is infilled by 1500 triangular glazing panels bedded on neoprene gaskets. The conference chamber is clad in a 2mm skin of brushed stainless steel plates (basic dimensions 2m x 4m) stretched and fashioned by skilled boatbuilders to accommodate the conflation of complex, bulbous forms. Superficially, this might well appear a conservative building, but clearly it is anything but. In the extreme and startling contrast between its outer and inner life, it resembles some kind of weird rock or geode that, split open, reveals a spectacular mineral formation. It is tempting to see the entire exercise as a metaphor for Berlin – beneath the haughty Prussian exterior lies decadence and debauchery – but after all it is only a bank and the morphological conspicuousness of the conference spaces is perhaps as much to do with commercial viability as being vehicles of architectural imagination. Yet in the decorous context of Pariser Platz, it is definitely one of the more unorthodox and welcome guests.

architect
Tadao Ando

The Japanese are mad for museums, erecting elaborate structures to celebrate sand, sunsets, bridges (this last a playful recreation of Palladio’s unrealized design for the Rialto in Venice) and just about everything else that can be put within four walls. Tadao Ando has made a specialty of this building type, designing museums for children,literature, wood, daylight, and two for prehistoric tombs, as well as a succession of art museums – most recently in Fort Worth, Texas. In each, he strives to find an appropriate expression of the theme, developing architectural metaphors from an austere vocabulary of concrete planes and rotundas, ramps and stairs. In the best of these, there is a harmonious match of container and contents; in others, the processional routes and soaring volumes upstage the exhibits and exhaust less athletic visitors. The Sayamaike Historical Museum in Ando’s home city of Osaka is an impressive monument that conveys the power of water and the challenge it presents to engineers who want to tame it. It is located beside an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century. Over the centuries, monks and feudal retainers applied their skills to enlarging the earthen dam and installing wood or stone conduits to carry water to neighbouring fields. Relics of this early engineering were excavated when the shore of the lake was recently heightened and landscaped to serve as a flood control basin. A 15.4m high slice through the old dam was painstakingly cut away, dried out, and reassembled to show how layers were added and sluices threaded through by a succession of builders.

To house this earthwork, Ando has erected a multi-level bastion that rises like a castle beside the pond, shutting out its banal suburban neighbours. A switchback ramp scales a battered wall of rough granite blocks and you wonder if defenders will appear on the ramparts above and drive you off with rocks and boiling oil. You emerge into a

bare concrete piazza and look for an entry to a windowless slab that could be the castle keep. The monolith is enigmatic and seemingly impenetrable, its cross-bracing expressed in bands of white on grey stone. Steps in a corner of the piazza lead down to a court in which you are suddenly overwhelmed by water cascading down the walls, splashing over a recessed walkway, and throwing off a fine mist – as though you had scaled a dam and found yourself in its sluiceway, wondering if the force of the torrent might carry you away. It’s one of Ando’s most compelling theatrical coups, but he diminishes its impact by extending the underwater passage into a rotunda, from where another ramp leads to the mid-level entrance in the side of the slab. Within the museum, the brute power of the masonry and tumbling water is dissipated. Though the earth dam may be historically important, it’s not much to look at and it is dwarfed by the hall that rises far above, even when you are descending the ramp that leads past it to the display area below. Archaeologists may appreciate the fragments of primitive plumbing that are stretched out through another hall and wrapped around the rotunda, but students of architecture are more likely to ignore the displays and gaze admiringly at this monumental sculpture by a master of light, space, and meticulously poured concrete. As such, it’s magnificent, but it drew only a couple of visitors on a recent Sunday afternoon. Nor does the lake lure you to its sterile banks, for the abundant wildlife it may once have contained now survives only as a video (maddeningly

repeated in the lobby) in which two insufferably cute infants fly in on a leaf and chatter excitedly about the birds and flowers as music tinkles over this fantasy of nature preserved.

architect
Toyo Ito

Sendai is a provincial capital, about 300km north of Tokyo, which was levelled in the Second World War and rebuilt on a spacious grid plan. In 1995, a new mayor decided that this prosperous modern city needed a more appropriate civic symbol than the ruins of its seventeenthcentury castle, and invited Arata Isozaki to chair an expert jury to choose a dynamic design for a new arts centre. Toyo Ito won that competition with a concept that was as audaciousas the Pompidou Centre, though smaller and less assertive. Where Rogers and Piano flexed their muscles on the exterior, creating a heroic monument to the Machine Age, Ito proposed a transparent block whose supports would be wrapped in glass and dematerialized. Seven steel floor decks were stacked on 13 hollow columns composed of welded steel tubes. Schematically, it was an updated version of traditional Japanese post and beam construction with movable divisions and permeable boundaries. Metaphors inspired the structure. Ito thought of the enclosed space as liquid, likened the columns to strands of seaweed drifting through an aquarium, and created sketches of ethereal delicacy. Like the temporary structures that launched his practice, and his computer-synthesized electrographic display in the 1991 Visions of Japan exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (AR November 1991), the Mediathèque was intended to express the fluid dynamics of the modern city in which light and movement are layered atop its physical structure and vibrate around vortexes of energy. For Ito, this was to be a bridge between real and conceptual, a physical embodiment of the electronic labyrinth which many now inhabit – especially the young in Japan. Two contradictions emerged at the outset. The programme developed to fit into Ito’s container fell far short of his vision. Sendai is a conservative city, and librarians anxious to accommodate a growing book collection and local artists seeking display space for academic paintings had no enthusiasm for open plans or virtual reality. Disagreement began the day after the competition winner was announced. The columns had to be beefed up to meet Japan’s tough seismic code, and the challenge for structural engineer Mutsuro Sasakiwas to retain the poetry while satisfying practical necessities. Against all odds, much of Ito’s concept has survived six years of impassioned debate, and the need for a structure (partly fabricated and welded by shipbuilders) that is more like an ocean liner than an aquarium. From the broad boulevard to the south, it appears as a shimmering rectangle of glass, etched with dots and dashes that animate the double-glazed skin and reduce glare, extending beyond the floor planes. Inside, a forest of canted white tubes (recalling the branches of the zelkova trees that run down the middle of the street), extends through the roof to support a gridded canopy. At night, the south facade disappears. Only the skeletal structure is visible, animated by a blaze of ceiling lights and tiny accents of colour from furnishings set close to the glass. Though little of the building’s activity is apparent above the ground floor, varied ceiling heights and the alternation of transparent, translucent and opaque surfaces on the other three sides of the block hint at its diversity of content. The Mediathèque combats the blandness and visual pollution of a Japanese city (a pachinko parlour formerly occupied the site) by staying cool and enigmatic. Even the graphics, stencilled onto the glass, are reticent. The spacious foyer, shop, and café that wrap around an enclosed gallery and service areas in the north-west quadrant reveal the essence of the plan. Four symmetrically-placed corner columns of 240mm diameter tubing carry much of the load and provide the necessary seismic bracing. Nine columns of 160mm diameter tubes are scattered in between; five are straight and contain lifts, the rest are crooked and carry ducts. The hollow columns pull down light from above, and most are clad in glass, adding a further layer of gauzy reflections to those in the polished marble floor and dematerializing the exposed structure. A shiny red plastic reception desk sinuously wraps around one column like a seductive swirl of lipstick, and similar extruded forms in yellow and white anchor the bar and bookshop. To understand the building’s section, take a lift to the top floor. From the glass cab you can see how floor planes have been sliced through, revealing the structural sandwich of steel plates topped with concrete. On a non-stop ascent, the ride gives a fleeting glimpse of each distinctive floor succeeding the next, as though snorkelling up the side of a coral reef. Here, Ito’s metaphor of the interior as a fluid medium comes vividly to life. As in the ocean, the colours, the patterns of activity, and intensity of light change with the level.

Ito selected three designers to put their stamp on different floors. Kazuyo Sejima’s first floor information department and children’s library is a monochromatic composition of white lino tiles, suspended metal channels and a silver studded black side wall. Sejima, who formerly worked for Ito, designed whimsical grey foam benches that resemble clover leaves, and screened the children’s area and staff offices in undulating gauze drapes. Circular reading tables and magazine racks flow around these permeable enclosures. The lofty second-floor library by K. T. Architecture has a more conventional layout: regimented rows of bookstacks to the rear, linear tables in front, and study carrels in a mezzanine gallery. Suspended uplights provide even, diffused illumination off the suspended white ceiling.

Changing exhibitions are presented on the next two levels with their wood-strip floors, demountable white screens, and sculptural seating in vivid colours by Karim Rashid, who also designed the plastic seating in the ground-floor café. It is here that you begin to sense the wasted potential of space that would challenge a creative curator to exploit the play of structure and void. Occasional exhibitions may introduce locals to novel ideas, but, as a new arrival that is still gradually winning acceptance, the Mediathèque has to move cautiously. It is too big, and took too large a bite out of the municipal budget (around £75 million) to ignore its major constituency. The top floor offers the best marriage of container and content. Ross Lovegrove has designed what he calls ‘a garden of knowledge’ to house the media library. Biomorphic lime-green plastic chairs, tables and tape racks are deployed like exotic plants on a lime carpet, and video monitors are screened by tensile pods. These occupy the perimeter; at the centre, an undulating glass wall encloses a small theatre, meeting room and offices. Fluorescent tubes are set at angles on a white suspended ceiling, and the sense of detachment from the workaday world is enhanced by glimpses into neighbouring offices where salarymen toil away late into the night, like a Japanese version of Alphaville, where everyone seems to be sealed off in brightly lit capsules. For Japan, the Mediathèque is extraordinarily informal, with young friendly staff, and it has become a popular local resource; yet the atmosphere is as decorous as a scholars’ library. Director Emieko Okuyuma observes: ‘When we first announced this project, opponents thought it would be a dangerous monster. In fact, people have responded to the welcoming atmosphere and bright colours. Attendance is larger and younger than we anticipated’. Given time, Ito’s original vision may yet be fully realized.

architect
Wilkinson Eyre

Floral Street is a tall narrow thoroughfare in London’s Covent Garden in which the massive white neo-renaissance bulk of the Royal Opera House suddenly obtrudes into a smallscale streetscape of pubs and little shops. Most people do not look up as they hurry down the street or loaf along window shopping. But the few who do, glimpse a magical phenomenon: a crystal that twists and shimmers across the street against the sky. This is the new bridge between the Royal Ballet School and the Opera House, created so that dancers can go from the practice rooms in the school to the Opera House without having to rush across the road in the rain. The twisted geometry is necessary because the school level from which the structure sets out is higher than the opening in the huge blind wall of the Opera House, and it is a small distance to the east. The Opera House is a Grade I-listed historic building which the architects were bound to change as little as possible, so one of E.M.Barry’s blank attic windows became the point of entry. The ballet school to the north is a much less distinguished building, recently constructed under one of the new forms of government procurement that more or less guarantees mediocrity, but internal planning necessitated only one location for the spring point of the bridge on that side. The spring points meant the bridge had to be gently ramped and skewed away from the orthogonal. A simple long glass box would not do, so Jim Eyre evolved a proposal that involved creating a tube out of square portal frames that are rotated, ensuring that at each end the bridge is level and square to the façade it addresses. Each frame is rotated by three degrees in relation to its neighbour and is slightly different in height. Glazing is held between each pair of frames. As a result of pursuing these simple rules, a wonderfully complex object has been created. Both from inside and out, the object alters with every movement you make. Structurally, the essential proposition is simple: a welded and bolted aluminium box beam spans simply from one building to the other; its section changes according to stresses and the geometry of the frames. At the Opera House end, the beam has a sliding bearing to allow for thermal movement and, as a result, loads at that end always bear vertically down on Barry’s wall. The aluminium portals are supported on the primary beam and have oak slats on each side of their webs so that the glazing can be fixed with the necessary degree of stiffness. As much prefabrication as possible was used to minimise disruption to the street, and to reduce working at high level. The beam with the portals erected and the central part glazed was rapidly set in place by crane, after which the final glazing panels were fitted and the abutments finished. Glazing is both transparent and translucent. Translucency is used to prevent overlooking the terrace of the neighbouring house to the west, and to give people on the bridge a degree of privacy as they go over the road. Contrast between transparent and translucent adds to the visual complexity of the object, Internally from some angles, the walls appear almost opaque, as the frames crowd together in perspective and seem mostly to be made of oak. Move a few feet further and the wall suddenly becomes full of light, or transparent (with the aluminium frames exposed full on), offering dramatic views up and down Floral Street. Externally, the bridge alters in a similar way from semi-opaque to transparent as your angle of view changes. In the last century, most of the incidental additions to London’s streets have been coarse and clumsy: here at last is an addition that shows how contemporary technology and architectural invention can rival the elegance and dignity of anything the Victorians did – and be much lighter too.

architect
Bellemo & Cat

Seen from afar, this extraordinary holiday house looks like a Zeppelin crash-landed in the Australian bush. Clinging to a precipitous slope, the curved capsule seems improbably fragile, like a giant insect cocoon lodged among the trees. Designed by the Melbournebased architect/artist partnership of Michael Bellemo and Cat MacLeod for their own recreational use, the house is a surreal presence in the thickly wooded coastal landscape of south-west Victoria. Holiday homes abound in this area, but the blimp house is a highly personal, poetic and practical response to the challenges of terrain and environment. The steep, isolated site is prone to landslip and the climate is often cold and windy. Clad in a ribbed skin of gull-grey steel shingles, the house cocoon is wedged precariously into the hillside, its aerodynamic form calculated to minimise wind resistance. Six spindly legs of galvanised steel support its bulk, so it appears to hover weightlessly above the steeply sloping ground. A gangplank at one end connects it with a small barbecue area and a winding approach track. Within the bulbous metal carapace, a plywood-lined box houses the main living and dining spaces which face south towards a ridge of hills and the oceanbeyond. Here, the long side of the cocoon has been squared off and glazed to create a huge vitrine and cantilevered terrace,maximising light and views.Inside, the spaces dovetail together with the economic precision of a small boat or caravan. The main bedroom is tucked into the cocoon’s snout forming a snug sleeping burrow, perforated by narrow skylights. Bunk beds for children and a bathroom lined with translucent green resin, are slotted in next door. The kitchen runs along the long north side of the main living and dining space. The pine plywood lining has been coated with limewash, to prevent it turning orange. Though its orientation means that sun from the north is largely cut off by the trees, the house is warmed by an open fireplace and is highly insulated. The lightweight monocoque structure is a hybrid of techniques appropriated from boat building and aircraft engineering. The internal rigid rectangular box was built first and plywood ribs added to generate the basic cocoon shape. Green hardwood battens were then attached to the ribs, forming fixing points for the narrow steel shingles. Like a woven basket, the meshing together of the various elements – ribs, battens and shingles – creates a strong, stable, composite structure. Details were often resolved on-site, so the whole construction has a rustic, makeshift air. Though undoubtedly a challenge to design and build, the outcome is a delight – an antipodean primitive hut for the twenty-first century.

architect
Alvaro Siza De Vieira

Alvaro Siza de Vieira’s latest building is Oporto’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Built in the grounds of the Quinta de Serralves (a q u i n t a is a country house surrounded by its grounds), the museum is completely separate from the grand pink 1930s villa which served for some years as the exhibition building. The architects were keen to connect harmoniously with the rest of the garden, and to reduce the considerable bulk of the new building, so that it relates tothe three main areas of the estate: formal gardens, woods and the still farmed meadows – ‘While at the same time asserting its autonomy’, which Siza believes essential. The site was chosen to spare mature trees, and the building takes its roughly northsouth alignment from the paths of the old vegetable garden (which has been moved to another part of the estate). As usual with much of Siza’s latest work, the exterior is modestly and finely honed, with precisewhite cubical forms on a stone plinth: a similar strategy, abstracted from tradition, to the one he adopted in the church at Marcode Canaves (AR August 1998, p60). Though the site falls some 9m from north to south along the length of the building, the museum has one essential roof-line, so the building is a good deal higher at the southern end, where it bifurcates to offer a green court to the sun and the rest of the park. Hence, overall planning strategy is very clear: entrance is at the top of the site (near where people come in from the road), and gallery spaces are downhill. The 290 seat auditorium is between the museum proper and the northern edge of the estate, so that it is easily available to audiences when the galleries are closed. It is connected to the galleries underground. A gravelled entrance court is formed between auditorium and entrance front of main building.
You enter on foot from the estate’s northern corner (unless you are a member of staff or a special guest who can drive down to the two-storey underground car park). As is often the case with Siza, approach and entrance, though by no means obscure, are somewhat oblique. You walk down the long shady west wall from the entrance court,past the auditorium, to arrive at a porch which receives you into the corner of the main building. From here, you are drawn crabwise by a great splash of luminance to the focal space, the top-lit central atrium. Here, the essentially symmetrical nature of the main parti begins to reveal itself, but there is a certain coyness about the nature ofthe plan. For instance, the upper (cafeteria and general purpose) floor is reached by a symmetrical stair which starts in the middle of the south wall of the atrium and takes you by one dog-leg or the other to the gallery which surrounds the space. But the west dog-leg is masked as you come in by a wall, so your attention is focused on the left-hand stair, and on the unconnected flight which goes straight down into the library foyer. Approach to the main galleries (on the same level as the entrance) is through a large portal between the stairs. Some of these moves recall Siza’s Galician Museum of Contemporary Art (AR October 1994, p 68) where the relatively constricted and modest entrance was in a corner of the building and the plan was organized round a generous and luminous central space. In Oporto, the site was less constricting than at Santiago de Compostela, so the building was able to have a more relaxed and almost Classical layout. But it is difficult to believe that Siza is not slightly embarrassed by a formality which grows perfectly naturally out of a desire to open windows in some of the galleries to light brought in by the grassfloored southern court. Yet he is sometimes prepared to imply symmetry, even where it need not exist: for instance he signals the separate entrance to the long thin bookshop on the entrance front with a bay. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to introduce inflections from the main axis, for instance by twisting escape stairs, or by making angled hoods over gallery windows. In the larger galleries, the inverted table-top lighting device invented at Santiago de Compostela is adopted, but with refinements of section. Essentially, light is modified by striking down from a central lay-light onto a white plane which hovers below general ceiling level so luminance is reflected to the top of the walls and back to the ceiling, making for gentle indirect daylighting throughout the cool space. Siza is not a believer in totally restrained galleries. He argues that ‘Designing galleries for contemporary art requires the deliberate making of spaces which are open to different activities, especially to temporary exhibits. This does not mean ... that the autonomy ofthe architecture is compromised. The space itself should be open, but not neutral; a space with character, providing the possibility of balance between the things exposed and the space itself’. He admits tobeing influenced by the Casa de Serralves, the old pink house in the middle of the estate where, in its time as a museum, exhibits interacted with the varied domestic spaces in unexpected and mutually enriching ways. Hence the great variety of spaces in his new building. There are differences in size; in height and floor level; differences between galleries in e n f i l a d e or arranged as separate volumes; differences between galleries that can have views and ones with imperforate walls. Yet, for all the variety, there are no clumsy moments (even if circulation is a bit tortuous at times). There are only about a dozen galleries in the building (depending on how you count), but they offer curator and visitor a great wealth of opportunities for interpretation – and inspiration.

architect
Herzog & De Meuron

Like a modern Medici with matching accessories, Miuccia Prada and her eponymous fashion house have become synonymous with a shrewdly intrepid approach to architectural patronage. Since 1999, Prada has embarked on a programme of new store designs and brand expansion

through a select stellar cabal of the avantgarde (Rem Koolhaas, Kazuyo Sejima, and Herzog & de Meuron). Though the worlds of architecture and fashion have a fertile and often colourful reciprocity, this goes beyond the periodic tasteful fit-out into a more serious (and big budget) exploration of the radical that aims to reinvent the simple act of clothes shopping into a singular experience – consumerism as culture or religion and shops as carefully choreographed environments or temples. (Perhaps not so different from the Medicis after all.)

The first so-called ‘Epicentre’ store designed by Koolhaas was unveiled on New York’s Broadway in 2000; three years on, fashionistas and architecture pilgrims have a new reference point on their global compasses with the completion of the biggest Prada flagship store to date in Tokyo,
designed by Herzog & de Meuron. At a cost of £52 million, budget, it seems, is no object, despite falls in company profits (down from £36 million in 2001 to £19 million last year, though the Asian market is still apparently buoyant). The Swiss partnership has also been charged with converting a piano factory for the house’s New York head office and designing a new production centre in Tuscany. Such creative interaction represents an intriguing shift in the cultural landscape of architecture. Whereas a generation ago architects’ imaginations were exercised by helicopters and yachting wire, now it is high fashion and modern art. Prada Tokyo is in Harajuku, an area famous for both its couture and street fashion, manifest by the parades of exotically attired young Japanese who cruise up and down the broad main drag of Otomosando, which, with its trees and cafés, is Tokyo’s closest approximation to a Parisian boulevard. At its east end it tapers and morphs into the city’s Bond Street, an elegant ghetto of deluxe flagships clinging staidly together, like first class passengers in the Titanic’s lifeboats, for succour against the blare and dislocation of modern Tokyo. In a city with virtually no public space in the European sense (land is far too precious a commodity to remain empty), Herzog & de Meuron’s first move is a

bold and urbanistically generous one, stacking up the shop and office accommodation into stumpy five-sided block to create a small piazza at its base. The piazza is enclosed by an angular wall covered in soft green moss that will gradually flourish, a reminder of the slow beauty of organic life in the midst of artifice. Hemmed in on all sides by low-rise buildings, the forecourt
provides a breathing space for meeting, socializing and window shopping. It also makes the tower more of a distinguishable object in its own right, like a chunky bubblewrapped bauble on a tray.