Month: March 2010

In one day in spring 2010 Ilona and I went to see the TGV station of Santiago Calatrava in Liège and the Centre Pompidou dependance in Metz. Although at first sight applying similar technologies, the contrast between the two buildings could not be more dramatic. Both buildings have cost a fortune, but were both buildings worth it? A Belgium architect has declared that Calatrava is a bank robber, since the building of the TGV station turned out to be overly expensive. Now I have been there, I see that it must have been expensive, but I think it is worth it, since it represents in all its pores an image of clarity and consistency. I expect that the building is fit for a long life and an that it will be respected as an inspiring intervention in the otherwise decaying city fabric of Liege. No doubt that Liege will benefit from it in the long run. The structure itself is a convincing example of the integration of design and structure, of visual lightness and structural performance, a structure that encourages an elevated stroll. The design is undoubtedly following a functional logic, a structure featuring a large free span of the roof and a delicate dimensioning and detailing of the shops and the cafe´s in the underpass, where the public can literally feel the structure and the materials from very close. Being there makes you feel being part of a documentary movie, as if one is an active player negotiating with the movements of the trains, monitoring the come and go of the cars to and from the parking garage. The flow of people and the feature lines of the design are merged in beauty. One can not but physically feel the real time motion interlaced with the frozen dynamics.

Seen from a distance a recent Gehry building may look like a sculpture. But when approaching that Gehry building, any Gehry building, from the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the Stata Center in Boston, the building becomes uncomfortably more and more traditional. Finally when entering the building via the entrance there is not much special about it. You enter through a regular mass produced facade, through regular doors, built up with regular profiles, be it in the deconstructivist way brutally cut off at varying angles. Decon as usual, nothing nonstandard about it. I appreciate Gehry Technologies [GT] for their great Digital Project [DP] software, but even Jim Glymph of GT told me back in 1998 that he was admiring the awesome achievements concerning the design and execution of the Saltwater Pavilion at Neeltje Jans. DP was created to rebuild Gehry´s wrinkled and distorted silver paper models into something manageable and buildable. When the starting point of a design concept remains rooted in old concepts, the realized building will communicate in the first place the outdated concept and not the new technology, there will always be an inconvenient friction between the designer´s concept and the contractor´s execution. When there is not established a direct link between BIM and CNC the execution can be done, but it will not be consistent, it will cost an unproportionally large sum of money and is hence a threat for the truly nonstandard designers who seriously strive for the unbroken link from their generative design concept using parametric modeling in the earliest design phases to a proper CNC manufacturing procedure.