Falkenried
TYPOLOGY: Masterplan, Residential, Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Hamburg-Eppendorf
YEAR: 2004
COMPETITION: Masterplan Competition 1999, First Prize
GFA: 34.500 sqm
CLIENT: Bayerische Hausbau GmbH, Munich
AWARDS: German Urban Planning Award 2004
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
The anatomy of redundant bus and tram workshop/sheds was co-opted as the organising template for this 1999 premiated Quartier Masterplan. An east west piazza focusses the networked block interior.
The principles of the Masterplan were: The ‘loftising’ of one workshop shed, a brick administration building which grows into penthouses and bus garage doors which envelope row-houses.
Southward from the piazza a spatial choreography of Office Slab and Housing Tower leads over a raised terrace with a second (zigzag) office facade, past a café/bar, down an Eisenstein stair to street and canal. This perspectival sequence – an opening and closing of large scale urban rooms – is homogenised by its rich and tactile material, a ‘Hamburg-solid turf-fired brick’.
Loddenheide Water Purification Plant
TYPOLOGY: Technical
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Munster
YEAR: 2021
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, © BOLLES+WILSON
40 Years of Water Research – 20 years of Water Pumping
The 2001 Loddenheide Water Filtration Plant is almost BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest building. It has for the last 20 years been cleaning and filtering road runoff before it lands in the re-absorption pond of the Loddenheide Business Park. The pond itself is a re-naturalizing success, now a bird sanctuary for countless water foul. The glazed vitrine of the pump house now stands serenely in winter snow or spring blossom. Its machines turn two Archimedes Screw Pumps, aerating the water before splashing into a circular filtration tank. The rectangular plan geometry of the first is set against the circular form of the second. A line of poplar trees, now fully grown, bisects these two fundamental geometries. For those inexperienced at reading metaphoric content into infrastructural equipment the fences surrounding the two machines come with subtext – although the supergraphic H2O on the fence mesh is not readable when approached front on, only when seen in the oblique is it there to underline the theme of ‘Water’.
The Business Park was at the outset renamed Freedom Park by the Dalai Lama, then visiting Münster. The Dalai Lama Commemoration Stone stands 120 meters away from the pumping facilities – just follow the line of poplars. It is certainly BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest work. To read its text one must walk three times around the dark green stone. We like to believe that the rainy day inauguration photo documents the Dalai Lama gleefully asking Münsters lady Mayor – ‘Is it really a BOLLES+WILSON design’.
BOLLES+WILSON water research began in 1976 with Peter Wilson’s Iconic Water House. In 2018 the watery trajectory continued with the second warehouse for RS+Yellow both with ‘Infinity Pool’ roofs.
Prison Library
TYPOLOGY: Library
COUNTRY: German
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2005
GFA: 80 sqm
CLIENT: Justizvollzugsanstalt Münster
AWARDS: Library of the Year Prize (German Library Association + the ZEIT Foundation)
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON
In 2007 the German Library Association together with the ZEIT Foundation awarded the ‚Library of the Year Prize‘ to the small but significant Prison Library in Münster (concept BOLLES+WILSON, implementation prisoners). The jury praised the exemplary, user-friendly and new interpretation of library functions and the atmosphere, an estranged relative of the nearby City Library (BOLLES+WILSON 1987–93). The single library room, jammed in the ‚armpit‘ between two Panopticon wings is simply furnished with shelves and counters in ‚optimistic‘ wood and friendly colours. Facing mirrors above and adjacent to the shelves multiply the original triangular room into a kaleidoscopic virtual hexagon. The prison in its entirety is optically reduced to a small central pavilion. Reading as transcendence or Borges‘ infinite ‚Library of Babel‘ are the unavoidable message. A leaf motive on ceiling and walls, like the new furniture, is the handwork of the prisoners themselves.
Blackburn House
TYPOLOGY: Residential
COUNTRY: UK
CITY: London
YEAR: 1987
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON
No grand statement rather a series of practical opportunities. First the restructuring of the row of rundown Mews Houses into a new white box. A large window breaks through the white façade, the view is not good, the glass is opaque, blinded.
Ground floor office, a two floor apartment housing, a collection; Barry Flanagan (hare), Scott Burton (chair), Andy Warhol (portrait), Bruce McLean (table), Ron Arad (table), Jasper Morrison (sofa). Interior details are added to this list – supporting column and cantilevered balcony in steel, a vitrine, a floating boat – seat – handrail – individual narratives in a limited range of materials.
The upper floor with its 14 m skylight-wall functions as gallery, the lower lobby as chair hall. Sitting on the central barge seat the visitor has reached the vortex of the composition hovering like the house itself, not quite part of London.
Victoria Park – Four Housing Blocks
TYPOLOGY: Masterplan + Residential
COUNTRY: Australia
CITY: Sydney
YEAR: 2001
CLIENT: Waltcorp. Ltd
PHOTOS: © Turner
The visitor’s image of Australia is of huge skies, bleaching light and wide horizons. The planning model for this new Sydney quarter involved dense urban blocks with six to nine story street fronts and towers with views to their downtown big brothers. Surprisingly photos of the first two of the four blocks satisfy both expectations. One thinks of Brasilia or the suburbs of Milan in the 1950s. This ex-industrial site has in its transitional state the appearance of landscape becoming city in one heroic eruption.
Sydney is growing rapidly, due in part to an exodus from country towns, to immigration and to a cunning ‘down-under’ financial regulation that only allows foreign investors to buy into new buildings. To meet this quantitative demand a radical systematising of the building process into a ‘house of cards’ stacking of prefabricated concrete panels and standard repetitive apartment layouts has emerged. This basic logic of the ESP Block and of the ‘FORM’ Block is subsequently enhanced by balcony variations. These are essential for climatic reasons, shade and outdoor living space. (As a substitute for the suburban back yard balconies in Australia are often equipped with gas outlets for high-rise barbecuing.) Compositional juxtapositions and articulations of balconies hung outside the repetitive and regular apartment grid also reverses the modernist dictum of outside expressing interior functions. Here the heterogeneous surface instigates variations in apartment types.
2001 Four Block Masterplan
2004 ESP Block completed,
2005 Block 301 (“FORM”) completed,
2005 Blocks 303 and 305 in planning.
