After a dialogic planning process in 2013, the two competing planning teams around kister scheithauser gross (Cologne) and BOLLES+WILSON have teamed up for the next planning stage. The development of Mülheim’s harbour district is still an on-going process integrating various interests and disciplines. The masterplan for this 52 ha harbour area preserves various grand industrial spaces to create a new district with a unique character and atmosphere.

The BEIC is in the state of becoming. It already exists on the agendas of countless participating planners, librarians, expertly shepherding clients, politicians, Milanese and other future users. As the planning steadily marches through preliminare, definitivo and on to esecutivo phases, expectations multiply (optimism is contagious) and the physical character, the individuality, the unique spaces of this exceptional endeavour come ever more sharply into focus. Despite the grand scale the building conjures a certain intimacy for individual users. It invents an entirely new constellation of the ‘house of knowledge’, where digital ephemerality cohabits with our old friend the book. The emerging BEIC remains true to the concept that won the architectural competition. Within this architectural and organisational framework countless refinements have been invented (terracotta facade, the bar-chart-acoustically-absorptive interior panelling) and significant opportunities like the earthquake resistant wave-like ceilings have been identified and integrated.

Urban Concept – The site is linear, as is the remembered trajectory of the Stazione Vittoria. The BEIC’s two doors address the east (the centre of Milan, Viale Umbria) and the west (new subway exit, Viale Mugello and the new sport and recreation landscape beyond). An east-west pedestrian walkway runs not parallel to but through the BEIC – urban networking.

A 36 m high Urban Landmark – A vessel of culture and information, invitation, frame and enabler to multiple passages and trajectories. Entrance ramps fold surrounding pavements up to the +5.00 piazza, entrances and lobby. Reading arms extend out from the main volume.

Windows like that to the main elevator lobby on axis with the Via Vertoiba, tie through framed views the interior back into the urban context.

The terraces of the various departments frame a communicative forum, a landscape of knowledge. Reading salons nestled into the sidewalls of the frame or balcony edge desks offer a wide variety of working atmospheres. Warm acoustically absorptive materials provide the required library ambience.

Program – A 5 m high socle contains all functions outside the controlled library – Conference, Teaching Centre, Media Forum, Childrens Library with garden, carparks. The walkthrough Lobby gives a visual orientation to all departments galleried above. It flows into the entrance, general information and reference zones. Reading Rooms are on the north side, Users Own in the east arm, connecting to youth areas. Departments are on three upper balconies, with variable stores and connected via ramps in the reading arms – a flowing together. Workshops, offices and administration are in the 3 storey arm along the Via Monte Ortigara. 

‘A staging of shopping’. The widespan shop outlet typology usually situated on the periphery is here reconstituted as an urban facade, city near and addressing the city bound / city exiting traffic. Three stores (RS, Yellow, Brands) with an overall shop area of 5.000 m2 cluster with warehouse and delivery bays, around an internal parking piazza. An advertising tower erupts on one corner, a supersign, a new actor in the quartier’s tower landscape (Trinity Church and Fire Station Tower).

A theatrically proportioned roof frames the pedestrian/car entrance. This transition space is a constructed perspective (rejecting any ideal viewing point), a reciprocal scenographic framing of inner and outer world. The hovering roof grows out of and connects the two larger shops. Logistics are critical – 18 m long lorries cross the piazza and disappear into the building.

The exaggerated scale of the wooden window frames in RS (which sells wooden furniture) are stacked like boxes (These 35 cm wide frames sidestep a local building regulation that prohibits wooden facades on retail structures). A dialogue between contained and container that continues in the interior detailing. Both structure (prefabricated concrete) and the materiality (fibre-cement panels) of the facades respond with an economic and systemized appropriateness to the ‘outlet’ building type.

Following the disastrous explosion of a fireworks factory in Enschede NL the new district masterplan by Pi de Bruijn, required a row of modernist villas along the new Museumlaan.

The somewhat draconian masterplan also specified that only architects of international repute could build here (BOLLES+WILSON was pleased to find their Italian chum Cino Zucchi as neighbour).

The masterplan required modernist villas, flat roofs – a geometric play of volumes. The Villa vZvdG almost fell of the list by being too small – But the east facing sun shaded terrace pumped it up to an acceptable volume. The owners, a couple with a teenaged son, needed a separately accessed office and an interior that allowed for constant rehanging of their painting collection – Petersburg hanging system. The façade of fibre cement panels is green + white striped (the traditional colours of barn doors in the east of the Netherlands). Because white stripes could not run around the corner (vertical green profile) the stripes were slipped up or down at the corner – the working title of the house was “Vertical Glitch House”.