TYPOLOGY: Educational
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Frankfurt
YEAR: 2022
CLIENT: City of Frankfurt
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing
The latest BOLLES+WILSON kindergarten is now, after a protracted incubation open for its 60 mini-customers.
It is beside a fire station and behind suburban villas in Frankfurt’s Bergen Enkheim district.
The `coat of many colours´ façade is wood, sustainable, a signal for the building’s `passive house´ status. Colourful sun awnings animate the south façade where the six group rooms open to the playground or to the first floor balcony (where stairs connect down to playground). Sliding white sunscreens on the East and West façades also give night time security for open windows.
The flat roof is planted for rainwater retention and for insect habitat.
The compact volume and upper level multi purpose room are consequence of the limited site and a ground level change 2,20m.
The interior circulation gallery is animated by an optimistic green/yellow wall with giant foot/hand prints. A thematicising of scale is endemic to a building whose customers are only 90 centimeters tall.
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2000
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
A building that inserts a new square in the plan of the City, in a zone of transition from monumental 19thcentury administration buildings to smaller scale row houses with no major urban frontage, but bisected by a public right of way (commuter bicycle route). The “U”-form of the new building frames a ramped square, scales change in stages. The bicycles punch a grand portal through the office facade. Cellular offices open through a glass facade supported on a frame of laminated timber giving the conventional offices a lightness and transparence.
The principle which animates this convention bound site and program is that of carefully detailing and choreographing everyday necessities – entrance, office layout, meeting rooms. The whole adds up to a clear and precise urban insert, sculptural in its form both object and container.
TYPOLOGY: Office / Laboratory / Conference
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Munster
YEAR: 1993
GFA: 16.000 sqm
CLIENT: Technologiehof Münster GmbH
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
The university zone of Mnster (like most of what we still call cities) is a mixture of isolated large buildings, open space and fragments of small scale, residential patterns. Rather than attempting to stitch together buildings in a coherent or unifying pattern, the Technologiehof accepts its autonomy and in doing so legitimizes the voids between as today’s characteristic urban condition.
The three discrete objects of the Technologiehof also mark an end to the city. To the north are green fields, to the south (bridge side) is the semi-urban campus. Within their precise form the façades are a consequence of this double direction.
Three precise rectilinear forms (unambiguous autonomous objects) are a consequence of the construction system: standardised precast columns, beams, wall and floor panels. The expression of technology is limited to the shiny aluminium skin.
Small, highly serviced, commercially rented laboratories (bio-sensoric research, environment and telecommunications research) flank a middle building with offices and conference facilities. Triangular tapering winter gardens at third floor level provide relief from the absorbing rigour of the working spaces.
TYPOLOGY: Educational
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY Münster
YEAR: 2013
COMPETITION: 2009, 1st Prize
PHOTOS: © Markus Hauschild, Christian Richters
HISTORICAL PHOTO: © S. Ahlbrand-Dornseif, R.Wakonigg
A church becomes a kindergarten.
Not heritage listed, already condemned, the St. Sebastian church built in 1962 and deconsecrated in 2008 has been revitalized with the most lively and positive function, i.e. with children.
The elegant elliptical form of the nave physically anchors its surrounding neighborhood. Two levels of kindergarten group rooms are housed within, the roofs of these become an all-weather play deck. Grass green impact-protection flooring and street lights give the play decks the ambience of an outdoor space.
A grid of 50 x 50 cm unglazed openings, the only originally glazed light source in the church, provide constant, natural ventilation. Cold in winter, comfortably temperate in summer, but always dry, this magical inside/outside space is flooded with light.
Adjacent to the kindergarten nave, a new street facing extension houses the main entrance, kitchen, offices, technical rooms and one multipurpose room. This is available for neighborhood events.
TYPOLOGY: Cultural
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Korça
YEAR: 2016
CLIENT: Municipality of Korçë
COLLABORATOR: Dea Studio
AWARDS: Nomination, The Plan Award 2017
Nomination, Aga Khan Award for Architecture
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing
The building for the Korça Icon Museum was originally a structure of columns and floor slabs (Maison Domino) abandoned when communism collapsed in Albania.
The Albanian office DEA Studio were comissioned to design facades and BOLLES+WILSON were then asked by the municipality of Korça to design and develop an interior exhibition design and sequence for the 300 Orthodox icons.
The heavy walls on the exterior with their small windows were intended to give an appropriate medieval reading.
The small windows from the inside did give an appropriate mysterious atmosphere but in terms of viewing Icons they were too bright and needed some interior masking to avoid too much contrast between a small area of bright outside light and the surrounding.
As the museum neared completion the albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama visited, and thinking the facades were too prison-like asked BOLLES+WILSON to extend their interior language to the entrance facade. Black painted plaster was added framing and respecting the DEA window composition. BOLLES+WILSON also added ‚Barnett Newman colours‘ to the existing communist fountain.
EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION
The given three levels subdivide well into Basement Archive with ground level laboritories/administration. The Exhibition spaces belong on the entrance level and the 1st floor – here the interior concept proposes a specific circulation route for visitors and an absolute division between public spaces and ‘back-of- house’. This is necessary for reasons of security (the public must not have the possibility to enter rooms where Icons are being worked on).
The floor between entrance level and 1st floor has been removed over the entire left hand exhibition room. This allows a new stair facilitating a simple and spectacular visitors circulation route. The new stair gives panorama views of a 9.5 metre high golden wall – for this wall the Petersburg hanging system was chosen – a close packing of Icons, a tapestry of images covering the entire wall, impressing visitors with the size of the Korça collection.
A SEQUENCE OF ROOMS
The interior concept develops zones of strong individual character defined by colour: gold on the left, black matt and gloss black in the central ‘Black Labyrinth‘ zone and Red for the Iconastas (Altar screen) on the right. The Sequential Rooms are carefully choreographed for the most dramatic effect:
(a) Entrance Lobby – an abstract collage of shelves for merchandising, postcards, posters, local handcrafts and even small Icons painted by Korça artists (a new local industry) are displayed and sold.
(b) The Gold Room – a two floor high gold screen (one that also wraps the sidewalls and
tames natural light from slit windows). The screen is packed with Icons. Visitors promenade freely and then step up to the stair landing where an information handrail tells them what they are looking at.
(c) The White Balcony – overlooking the Gold Room – has a heavy Black handrail and a white (conventional museum) rear wall for a row of small Icons. These lead to an opening on the right.
(d) The Black Labyrinth – the central zone of the museum is particularly dark and mysterious with individually lit Icons floating in the penumbra. Walls are painted in a collage of matt and gloss black and grey to enhance the collage effect. Side alcoves with lower ceilings and wooden floors bring individually hung Icons intimately close to viewers.
(e) The Red Salon – from the Black Labyrinth visitors emerge into a sensual space where all surfaces are red. The central zone is defined by a 10cm high platform on which stands the iconastas (Altar screen).
(f) The final exhibition room is white with an illuminated ceiling – an ethereal space. The room displays the two most valuable icons from the 14h century.