Exhibition: 18 November 2010 - 20 January 2011
Opening: Thursday, 18 November 2010, 6.30 p.m.
Location: Aedes Am Pfefferberg, Christinenstraße 18-19, 10119 Berlin
Opening hours: Tu-Fr 11 a.m. - 6.30 p.m., Sa-Su 1 until 5 p.m.
Walter Niedermayr, "Bildraum S 240/2010". Photo © Courtesy Gallery Nordenhake Berlin / Stockholm
This exhibition features the Pritzker Prize award winning Japanese architects
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, located in Tokyo. Kazuyo Sejima, who
has also been the Director of the 12th International Architecture Biennale in
Venice this year, together with Ryue Nishizawa, follow in their projects common
ideas. One is the transition between interior and exterior space. Their
architecture is often characterized by a transparency that questions boundaries
between interior and exterior. Another one is the building program, the result
of a diagrammatic architecture, for which they have gained international
recognition.
One large work by the Italian artist Walter Niedermayr from Bolzano will be
shown in the exhibition. Niedermayr's artwork produces a new perspective on
SANAA's buildings and stimulates the ongoing artistic dialogue between them.
The exhibition gives an insight to SANAA's work, the subtle interplay of
light and materials and the relation between the organization of the program,
the way people use it, and the materialization; the architectural form.
Aedes has already presented this extraordinary office with the exhibition
"SANAA - recent projects" ten years ago in Berlin. Now, this winter, the
following projects will be on display:
Rolex Learning Center, EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), Schwitzerland. Photo: Hisaro Suzuki
Rolex Learning Center, EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne),
Switzerland: SANAA's most recent building in Europe, an extension to the
Technical Faculty, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The Learning Center
is a multi-program facility housing a library, language center, offices, café,
restaurant, and hall. Located centrally on the site, people can gather with ease
in this one-room space. The roof and floor undulate gently with patios of
different sizes and shapes located throughout. The main entrance can be
approached from all four sides by walking under the slab. Visitors then stroll
up the gentle curves, or walk past the patios to access various aspects of the
program. From the slightly elevated areas, visitors can enjoy views of the
existing campus, Lake Léman, and the Alps. Changes in height, as well as large
and small patios create many different atmospheres. During large events, the
multipurpose hall seating can be extended up the slope, one can quietly read a
book from the library on a hill with a nice view, or drink coffee in a large
patio. They aimed to create a place where activities are gently separated but at
the same time naturally blending into one another to create a unified space.
Louvre-Lens, France: By breaking up the volume into smaller pieces, the
office avoided blocking the site and reduced the scale of this large program.
The size and the curving has been adopted from the dimension and arrangement an
old railway system that remained on the periphery of the site. A central volume
of glass introduces a void in between the building volumes thus further opening
up the site, visually and physically. This delicate glass box serves as a foyer
and a large public space in the city. It is visually transparent, opens up to
multiple directions, and is possible to cross without being a museum visitor.
SANAA considered rectilinear volumes too stark to comply with the idea of
extreme affinity to this site and unleashed free form can be oppressive to
museum interiors. Therefore considering the scale of the long stretched
curvature of the site, very calm curves were proposed. These curves twist the
volume along the nature, gently distort the interior experience, and carefully
interact with the art. To fuse nature and building, a highly reflective polished
and anodized aluminum façade clad the volumes, rendering blurred reflections of
the surroundings, changing with the scenery, the weather and the position of the
visitor. The circulation system is at parts falling out of the building volumes,
and visitors are finding themselves in glass tunnels snaking through the field,
wandering in a place between nature and its reflected imagery - in between real
and unreal.
HyundaiCard Concert Hall, Korea: Located in Seoul on a hilly site with a
vertical interval of approximately 15m, this complex building has a program
consisting of concert hall, restaurants, a café and bookshop. The layered floors
undulate gently and are open to the city. The entrance hall and foyer are
located on the first floor, café and bookshop on the second, and restaurant with
an entire view of the old city on the top floor. Although the lower core of the
building contains the acoustically designed main music hall the open nature of
the building enables upper levels to indulge in multipurpose spaces. It is an
architecture in which the entire space can become one large music hall.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, Great Britain: The Pavilion is made of
floating aluminum, drifting freely between the trees like smoke. The reflective
canopy undulates across the site, expanding the park and sky. Its appearance
changes according to the weather, allowing it to melt into the surroundings. It
works as a field of activity with no walls, allowing views to extend
uninterrupted across the park and encouraging access from all sides. The organic
shape of the pavilion creates areas of varying character. The line of the roof
is drawn around an event space, cafe, music area and rest space. It is a
sheltered extension of the park where people can read, relax, and enjoy summer
days. The 26 mm aluminum roof rests lightly on the columns, 50 mm in diameter,
distributed randomly through the park. Curved acrylic partitions provide
transparent shelter, creating comfortable environments for evening events and
gently distorting the view of the park.
Torre Neruda, Mexico: The project is a 25-story office building and serves
companies with rentable office floors ranging from 1000 to 500 square meters.
The three smallest floor plates at the top are reserved for one-floor
residential units, a private club and/or special offices. There are one-meter
setbacks on different sides as the building rises. This creates four unique
facades animated by terraces at every floor. As the relationship between core,
envelope, and terrace changes, so too does the character of the office space. On
a cloudy day, the building is a monolithic shape such that the small setbacks
fold into a whole shape, appearing like a mountain in the distance. In the sun,
the light reflects off of the setbacks bringing depth to the volume. The simple
steel structure follows the shape of the building. The columns jump on each
floor according to the system of setbacks. At the ground level the structure on
the four facades begins with a 3 m pitch that wraps the building shifting to a 2
m pitch at the corner of the first set back then loosing one column creating a
four meter pitch at the second shift. The ground floor has a bank, a restaurant,
and a café. This leaves approximately two thirds of the site for green areas.
Inujima Art-House Project, Japan: Inujima is a tiny island in the Seto Inland
Sea, home to 50 families. The Art-House project is about turning this
depopulated hamlet into a "museum" by renovating existing houses and adding new
structures to be used as exhibition spaces. The island is covered with gentle
slopes full of rich natural vegetation. Each Art-House and the exhibited art has
been designed to blend in with its surrounding, sometimes with old wooden
structures being reused while others are newly constructed using acrylic,
aluminum, or local stone. But when the Art-Houses are viewed collectively, a new
landscape emerges. Four models of this project will be shown in the exhibition.
Teshima Art Museum, Japan: is located on Teshima Island in the Seto Inland
Sea. It faces the ocean from a magnificent hillside covered by rice terraces.
The architectural design was composed of free curves, echoing the shape of a
water drop. The idea was that the curved drop-like form would create a powerful
architectural space in harmony with the undulating landforms around it. A thin
concrete shell slab reaches as high as sixty meters, creating a large, organic
interior space. By making the ceiling lower than that of many shell structures,
the architecture appears to be part of the external landscape, like a hill or a
slope. Inside, it has a space that stretches low and horizontal. There are large
apertures on the surface of the shell to let in light, rain, and fresh air. The
architecture aims to create a dynamic space that is both closed for the work of
art and the environment and open at the same time. The goal is to generate a
fusion of the environment, art, and architecture that also work together as a
single entity.
Garden and House, Japan: This is a home office planned in a highly condensed
area near Tokyo Station. The residents are two women in the editorial business
who wish to work and live in this historical environment. The impression was
that it involved a program that is halfway between different usages like an
office, a residence or a dormitory. The site is an extremely small rectangle of
8×4 m. Around are gigantic buildings over 30 m high standing with no set back:
the site was virtually at the bottom of a valley. Suspecting that a building
with regular frame walls would narrow the interior space as the frame thickness
is subtracted from the site's already narrow width, a possibility to create a
building with no walls had to be found. The final choice of structure consisted
of a vertical layer of horizontal slabs, with each floor level having no walls.
A garden and a room come in pair as they are distributed on each floor. Every
room, whether living room, private room, or bathroom, has a garden of its own,
so that the residents may go outside to feel the breeze and enjoy an open
environment in daily life. The entirety is a wall less, transparent building,
designed to provide an environment with maximum sunlight despite the dark site
conditions and the best comfort and delight in life in this exceptional location
in the heart of Tokyo.
Speakers at the opening will be:
Dr. h. c. Kristin Feireiss, Aedes Berlin,
Dr. Harald Sommerer, CEO Zumtobel Group, Dornbirn
Prof. Koji Ueda, Director, The Japan Foundation
Martha Thorne, Executive Director, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, Chicago
An Aedes catalogue will be published (€ 10.-)
Concurrently, there will be an exhibition of the results of the Zumtobel
Group Award 2010 in the Studio of the Aedes Architekturforum am Pfefferberg. On
view will be prize-winning and nominated projects for the Zumtobel Group Award
for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment 2010, which is endowed
with altogether €140,000.
Further Information:
Aedes Am Pfefferberg
Christinenstraße 18-19
10119 Berlin • Germany
Tel.: +49 (0)30 282 70 15
Fax: +49 (0)30 283 914 66
eMail: aedes@baunetz.de
web: www.aedes-arc.de
german version