Grevas Education Centre
Project Category: Competitions (not realized)
Centre for Laboratory Medicine
Secondary School Building Im Isengrind
Rösslimatt Site B+C
Urban Space, Main Railway Station Zurich
Maison du Livre et Parking du Château
School for Stone Sculptors St.Gallen
The building tracts of the stone sculptor and mason’s school are situated on the flat part of the site such that they divide the parcel into an entrance area towards the driveway and into a service court towards the south. The steep portion of the parcel remains untouched.
The geological characteristics of the site and the necessity of pile foundations generate the skeleton construction technique for the building structure. The load-bearing construction consists of solid masonry columns or brick masonry infill, respectively. Thanks to the additional air cells of the brick masonry and the corresponding solidity of the columns, both the columns and the masonry infills reach the specified insulation value without requiring any additional insulation material. The ceilings of the school tract are made of pre-fabricated clay-hulled beam elements.
On the interior, the brick columns are finely stuccoed or limewashed. The flooring of the school tract is made with red clay or ceramic tiles, respectively. Thus, they are also made of fired material, though left untreated in contrast to the masonry. The masonry is stuccoed on the outside.
The architecture as well as the choice of materials for the stone sculptor and mason's school are consciously kept straightforward. The actual "richness" of the building will be formed by the works of the sculptor and stone mason apprentices. Student work should not just be displayed in the workyard or decorate a wall from time to time. Rather, it should become an integral part of the architecture of the school. Every year one or two "window openings" could be clad with stone jambs made by the students. The jambs would be fabricated from various types of stone. Their surfaces would be bush hammered, droved or abraded, and have text or be in half-relief. The architecture determines here only the size of the masonry opening and a maximum stone thickness with regard to the size of the finished window opening. The stonework should be mounted by the students themselves.
The windowsills made of weather-resistant, impregnated Bakelite plywood are consequently just temporary. They fulfill their purpose until the moment when they are replaced, piece by piece and year by year, by stone jambs and sills from the "production" of the trade school.
With regard to the use of stone jambs and stuccoed masonry, the stone sculptor and mason's school makes reference to the classical schoolhouse architecture of the region. The skeleton construction and the formation of the sawtooth skylights refer, in addition, to the industrial character of the school.
Library Extension Winterthur
The historical building from the architects Rittmeyer & Furrer from 1914 houses the three institutions of library, natural science collection and art museum. After a temporary addition for museum functions could be constructed with private means, an expansion for library usage is to take place, as well.
The project attempts to change as little as possible the historical building in its external appearance as well as in its interior. Thus, the façades are not affected and the existing exterior court, which serves to provide light and air, will not be transformed into an air-conditioned interior space. The main part of the library expansion—the new lending room, the new reading room and the study library—are found on those parts of the parcel not covered by the existing building.
The addition, which must make do with three leftover areas around and in the existing building, finds its own identity and ordering principle by virtue of the way in which it presents itself outwardly as an underground building with skylight volumes. With these elements, the new building is able to enter not just into a usage-based relationship, but more so into a precise architectonic relationship with the historical building. The composition of the intersecting, longitudinal stone volumes of the Rittmeyer & Furrer building is expanded and complemented by the translucent, glass skylight volumes of the new building.
During the day, the skylight volumes appear as large, white-glowing, glass volumes, while appearing as powerful, glowing lanterns at night.
The skylight volumes are developed out of the column/level structure of the sunken building volumes and grow towards the light as pure skeleton structures. In the interior of the building, they form those rooms that are foreseen for intense, individual work and for the public: the reading and periodicals room, the study rooms and the lending and entrance area in the courtyard.
The project follows the ideal type of a library space: large, extra-high rooms with skylights, in which people spend time in the anonymous collective, while yet alone in singular concentration upon the object of their study. The structure of the load-bearing construction forms a delicate space division for the virtual separation of the visitors.
Attention is called to the three institutions by means of a large-format sign made with metal letters that is placed as a powerful piece of inlay work into the flooring of the forecourt and into the roofing surface of the new building, respectively. The large, inlaid typography, over which one walks and upon which one stands, refers through and beyond its signage function to the "deeper meaning" of the ground under the visitor's feet.
The common entrance to the three institutions through the portico is left unchanged, allowing the wonderful staircase from Rittmeyer & Furrer to be left almost entirely intact. A new staircase descending to the new main floor of the library supplements the existing main staircase that connects the three institutions today.
Reinsurance Company Training Center
The layout of the new building complex and its relationship to the existing villa was specifically derived from the existing landscape architecture: an interplay of the formal “French” garden, which is located immediately next to the mansion and forms the middle of the complex, so to speak, and an “English” garden area that forms the transition to the open landscape.
Respecting the harmony between the villa and the geometric garden, the new volumes are freely placed in the “English” part of the park by volumetrically mirroring the designed garden-topography of the gardens, as it were.
The main building volume with the forum and conference rooms is set upon the artificial hill, providing an open view into the park and out beyond the treetops to the lake. The tract of guestrooms is oriented as a single-loaded structure towards the south and the landscape.
The space between the forum and the tract of guestrooms forms the entrance hall. From here one proceeds to a wide stairway along the tract of rooms down to the "French" garden, and continues from there along the garden wall to the dining rooms and meeting rooms of the villa.
One characteristic of the insurance business, redundancy, is reflected in the constructive scheme of the building. The construction of the heated spaces consists of two concrete, self-supporting walls with an insulated cavity in between. The unheated spaces are built with only one wall layer. Steel columns permit relatively large openings. They can be understood as a kind of "solid steel reinforcement" lay bare. Furthermore—like sunglasses—exterior, lightly-tinted, single-glazed sliding windows to the south, west and east form the primary sun shading in front of the interior, insulated sliding windows with clear glass. In the window cavity there is space for the additional, controllable sun and glare protection. Here the sandwich-window principle helps to protect the sun shading system from the wind.
The colored tint of the outer sun-shade glazing generates a slight coloration of the interior spaces. The various colors of the glazing produce a delicate polychromatic effect with the light in the entrance hall.
Kolumba Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne
The project searches for a built synthesis between the past—the church destroyed in the war, the existing—the small chapel, and the future—the Diocesan Museum. The St. Kolumba church ruin is to be “built upon” and the “Maria in den Trümmern” Chapel from Gottfried Böhm is to be integrated within a new, larger building volume. Largely following the wall planes of the last church, the museum building will restore the volumetry of the St. Kolumba Church in a newly interpreted form. This way of thinking adopts the centuries-old tradition of changing, complementing and enlarging the church buildings “from within”, while retaining the location, the consecrated place.
While the ruin is stabilized and protected, it remains nonetheless recognizable. Analogous to the preservative nature of completing the window openings with masonry, the remains of the church façades will be built up to protect the open wall parapets threatened by erosion and the open historical excavation site.
The uppermost museum level, which almost completely covers the ruin, allows a space to be created over the site—an "interior" exterior space. It is a space whose walls and roof are full of holes—like its floor.
The museum building can thus become a protective roof and a protective envelope for the remains of the destroyed church, while housing, preserving and protecting ecclesiastical objects of art on the inside, anew. The museum becomes a connecting link between objects of art and a consecrated place—as housing for one and a "shield" for the other.
The small chapel is tied into the new volume as an autonomous building—like a stone in its setting. The museum opens up with a great court over the chapel, so that its main part, the octagon, stands under the open sky.
The museum is constructed primarily with two materials: concrete to bear the loads and black bricks to clad, enclose and protect. The primary structural elements in concrete—the space-defining pillars paired with structural wall slabs—densify in the uppermost floor into a spatial lattice of wall slabs, floors and ceilings.
The new supplementary masonry on the perimeter church walls and the skylight roof level, which is porous and unheated as well, consist of dark bricks laid offset to produce open gaps. This same brick, laid without gaps, however, forms the outer layer of the structural concrete walls, as well. The layers of masonry on the façades, with their varying degrees of porosity, allude to the closed, interior spaces lying behind them or the open outdoor spaces—reminding one with this attribute of the perforated construction of Cologne's Dome.
The museum spaces possess a skylight, a sidelight, or both, at times. The walls are made of unfinished concrete or can be painted—white, in color or with a gold tone like one of the works of art—the wall painting of Jannis Kounellis.
