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Postcard from Lisle, Illinois | |
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Mercedes-Benz Building | |
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Nouvel's Torre Agbar | |
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Faculty of Music | |
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Nouvel's Torre Agbar The fritted louvers contribute to the energy performance of the building in two ways. They provide partial shade to the building's surface, and they create a ventilation space that allows heat to rise and escape before reaching the thermal envelope behind. The varying angles at which the louvers are affixed, and the varying degrees of frit intensity contribute texture and change to this extraordinary surface. At night, the show continues as 4,500 multicolored lights wash the surface. Observers feel as though they're watching through hi-tech goggles that reveal the ebb and flow of an obscure force. Pixelated Interior An apparently random pattern of some 4,000 red-rimmed windows punctuates the flow of color. The building's sunny side shows fewer windows and more heavily fritted louvers, while its north face opens to the light. Inside, these punched windows create lighting effects reminiscent of the Notre Dame du Haut chapel at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier. The lighting effects are enriched by multicolored cabinets which line the entire interior surface of the building. Designed and executed by Tecno, an award-winning interior architecture and furniture firm, these luminous boxes translate the brilliance of the exterior surface into an equally brilliant interior surface. Meticulously executed, the cabinets bring depth, color, and shimmer to the interior, completing Nouvel's thought, and making the building's surface a double-sided whole. The innovative surface sheaths an equally innovative structure of reinforced-concrete load-bearing walls. These taper from a thickness of 19 inches (48 centimeters) around the base, to just under 12 inches (30 centimeters) around the upper stories. Together with the asymmetrically-placed elevator core, the walls support column-free floor spans, typically 10,800 square feet (1000 square meters) in area. The free flow of interior space, without fixed circulation corridors, provides maximum flexibility and promotes the free flow of connections among occupants. The oval floor plan maximizes occupants' proximity to windows. In feel, the inside space is surprisingly reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard. And yet, in a departure from mid-20th century modernity or even current highrise practice, the massive load-bearing walls are almost medieval in their reference. Place in the City "It is not the slender, nervous verticality of the spires and bell towers that often punctuate horizontal cities," continues Nouvel. "Instead, it is a fluid mass that has perforated the ground — a geyser under a permanent calculated pressure." The blunt solidity of the 466-foot (142-meter) Torre Agbar makes a startling counterpoint to the Sagrada Familia cathedral by Antonio Gaudí. Visually, it is nearly impossible to imagine how the two arrived on the same planet. Conceptually coherent and exquisitely executed, the Torre Agbar succeeds first as art. If it were completely uninhabitable, its sensuous form and surface, its provocative relation to context, its wit, and its scale would make the building an object to contemplate. But as architecture, it goes further: it innovates in form, structure, and enclosure, each innovation raising fresh possibilities for the highrise typology. Of additional interest is the tower's significance as human habitat. Rather than wait for the commercial core to creep toward the more decrepit parts of the city, perhaps knocking over a few historic neighborhoods on the way, Barcelona's planners have identified the Placa de las Glories as the starting point for a new commercial district. This building is the flagship of a new settlement. From the ground level, it is a ship uncertain of its welcome in the hardscape of the Placa de las Glories. Its seamless form and mysterious surface appear impenetrable, as if fearful that this new land may prove inhospitable or that reinforcements may be slow to arrive. Though finely textured, the building expresses little of its inner life. Only the floor level bands suggest that the scale of its occupants may be similar to that of the intrepid sightseers around its base, cameras ready, hoping for something to happen, for a visitor to emerge. In holding itself aloof from its setting, in offering little in the way of connection or self-revelation, the building suggests an indifference, which may be taken as arrogance, toward its environment. It might be anywhere. Yet, though for now we are left to wonder what type of habitat the building will spawn, we have reason to hope. Seen from afar, with palm trees waving in the foreground and pedestrians strolling at ease, the building's surface creates an illusion of scale, as though many tiny occupants have painted their little domain and adjusted their louvers to twinkle in the sun. The shift and glide of the building's cool blues appear refreshing, even precious. The water metaphor succeeds. Torre Agbar radiates impressions of scale and water that are only illusions, yet perhaps their beauty signals that the intentions of this strange arrival, and the commercial colony it intends to found, may turn out to be kind. >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Katharine Logan designs and writes to further a more meaningful and sustainable built environment.
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