2 Harbour Buildings
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2006
GFA No. 14: 6.400 sqm
GFA No. 16: 5.000 sqm
CLIENT: LVM Versicherungen, Julia B. Bolles-Wilson, Peter Wilson
PHOTOS: © Rainer Mader, Christian Richters
Like its big brothers in Rotterdam, Hamburg, London or Genoa, Münsters canal harbour (released from servitude) is in the process of becoming – but what – a new urban quartier, bar and café mile, victim of city-event culture or melancholic post-industrial hangout for artists and architects.
No. 14 and No. 16 like their warehouse predecessors are ambivalent as to exactly what goods or activities they host. Deep (22 m) loft plans facilitate a multitude of layouts. Facades on the other hand are specific, material and character giving.
No. 14, a sharply sculptured orange end building turns out on close inspection to be a stack of bricks close-packed in North-South direction (heads to harbour and street, sides to the end walls), an overt tactility eclipsed by flush mounted sun blinds. Seen from afar the overall volume has photoshop-like graphic quality, a designed lack of depth.
A ballet of sun-louvers also animates the South harbour-facing and predominately glass facade of No. 16. A stepped curtain creating (on sunny days) an intermediate zone between inside and out. Without the obligation of transparency (harbour panorama) or sun protection (North) the street facade of No. 16 conjures a tapestry of muted anodised colour, generous glass squares and 3D projections.
Morse code: The attentive viewer will also discover a 3 cm high ‘dot-dash’ inscription on the lower verge of each balcony, the work of the Dutch artist Milou van Ham. Old Barge Captains and ‘persevering school classes’ will decipher the text:
good day! you are (now) reading a building (2005- ) by BOLLES+WILSON (1980- ). you are (now) reading an artwork (2005- ) by milou van ham (1964- ). you are (now) reading morse-code (1837-2000) by samuel morse (1791-1872). you are (now) in the harbour (1898-2005- ) of muenster (793- ). end
BP Lingen Administrative and Service Centre
TYPOLOGY: Office / Laboratory
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Lingen
YEAR: 2019
CLIENT: BP Europe Lingen
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing
On September 20th 2019 the new BP Lingen ‘Lighthouse Project’ officially opened. Such a fast track project with six months planning and one year construction time required focussed and co-ordinated teamwork from architects and contractors (Hofschröer/Mainka, Lingen).
The new building at a safe distance from the refinery (technicians cycle back and forth) is nestled in a pine forrest and houses administration, laboratories, workshops and a BP fire station (with training tower).
The BOLLES+WILSON design manifests BP’s ‘One Team’ philosophy. Open plan offices on three levels surround a spectacular light filled atrium. Animated by ‘team oriented break-out spaces’, this communicative heart of the complex is crowned by a pyramid of triangular pneumatic pillows. An illuminated lighthouse that hovers above treetops, in dialogue with the nearby refinery.
Vertical sun louvers across the office and fire station facade echo BP logo colours as does the colourful and dynamic interior landscape.
Polychromink / Coin Tower Tirana
TYPOLOGY: Office, shopping, gastronomy
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Tirana
YEAR: 2008
ARCHITECTS: BOLLES+WILSON with Studio Comi
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON, © Ernest Ferizi
What is now known as the COIN Tower originally had the working title Polychromic Tower during planning. It was completed in 2008, in the final years of then-mayor Edi Rama’s façade-coloring program, which aimed to give a new face to the grey, post-communist city. BOLLES+WILSON were asked by the mayor to find an acceptable façade design for the already-under-construction tower. It was built without a crane, with concrete carried up on the workers’ backs. It features a Coat of Many Colours of sun louvers wrapping its somewhat irregular silhouette – unfortunately, only half of these arrived from the Turkish supplier. As the first post-communist tower, it soon became Tirana’s hub of luxury shopping.
U Boat Hall
TYPOLOGY: Retail
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Hannover
YEAR: 2012
CLIENT: RS Möbelhandelsgesellschaft mbH
PHOTOS: © Olaf Mahlstedt
LOCKED IN SERVITUDE THE DRAMA OF A BUILDING’S MAKING REMAINS HIDDEN: (Louis Kahn)
There is today an enormous potential in the re-scripting of grand industrial spaces, survivors from an epoch that had less trouble expressing itself and its mechanical or technical potency than our current mean and exploitative ‘global shopping-centre-culture’.
One thinks of São Paulo’s Fábrica da Pompéia by Lina Bo Bardi, London’s Tate Bankside, or the Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen, Germany.
This was our first reaction as our client drove his black Porsche into the rusting cathedral of Hannover’s ‘U-boat Hall’. Was it a panic reaction at the end of WW II to build a submarine production space so far from the North Sea? The structure of the hall had in fact been originally designed for a U-boat production site of a naval dockyard in Wilhelmshaven. As it turned out the enigmatically named ‘U-boat Hall’ was only finished in 1944 and was thus not used for armament production.
Now sliced like salami the ‘Industrial Heritage Structure’ is to house various commercial outlets – a mega Bicycle Emporium where racing bikes can be tested in the shop or this landscape of coloured furniture.
This is in fact two shops; RS (wholesome wood) and Yellow (sub-designer). BOLLES+WILSON have already realized their flagship store in Münster and the HQ Building, a rooftop lake above a ‘big box’ two-floor warehouse/distribution centre.
For the ‘U-boat Hall’ the rent was based on the square meters of the hall’s floor. The architectural question was how to maximize this floor area with a selling landscape and a back of house warehouse for customers to pick up their new sofa / table / lamp.
The magnificent scale of rusting columns, elevated crane track and skylight box, resist the invasion of domestic equipment, relegating it to the status of ‘a carpet of coloured pixels’ spread across the selling decks.
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.
