Münster City Library
TYPOLOGY: Cultural
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 1993
COMPETITION: 1987, First Prize
CLIENT: City of Münster
COLLABORATOR: Harms & Partner (in realization phase)
AWARDS: Mies van der Rohe Award 1995, Nomination
German Architecture Award 1995, Commendation
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, Julia Cawley (update 2010)
The Münster Library was BOLLES+WILSON’s first major public commission. After more than ten years it remains near the top of Germany’s ‘library-user-ranking-list’. A verification not only of functionality but also of the attention to detail, to spatial multiplicity and to the ambience and atmosphere within.
The complexities of the overall building form are derived from internal organisation and from a careful re-constitution of the fragmented context. A new pedestrian street on the axis of the nearby Lamberti Church divides the not inconsiderable mass of the Library. This fissure in the library volume is closed with folded screens (copper outside, acoustically absorbing perforated wood panels within).
A transparent entrance zone (café, newspaper salon) leads via an information supermarket to the main information desk on the connecting bridge. This in turn is adjacent to book stacks in the ship-like outer volume. The atmosphere is quiet, studious. Books line the outer curved wall, a dramatic stair leads down through a 22 m void to the basement media library, which connects in turn to the courtyard facing children’s library and back up to the entrance zone. Up to four thousand users enter the Münster Library on one day.
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Münster City Library – Update 2010
With a newly painted facade and new automatic check out and 24-hour return automat the Münster City Library in its 18th year remains near the top of the German public library ranking list.
Moebelum
TYPOLOGY: Retail
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Munich
YEAR: 2016
GFA EXISTING: 4.047 sqm
GFA NEW: 755 sqm
CLIENT: Möbelum Zentral GmbH
PHOTOS: © Florian Holzherr
Möbelum furniture outlet – a new facade for an existing industrial building/furniture showroom.
The stacked cassettes of the display facade integrate existing office windows.
RS+Yellow Furniture
TYPOLOGY: Retail
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2003
GFA: 7.700 sqm
CLIENT: Rainer Scholze
AWARDS: Award for Exemplary Corporate Architecture in NRW 2004
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
‘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.
Napoli Bagnoli
TYPOLOGY: Competition / Area development / Masterplan
COUNTRY: Italy
CITY: Naples
YEAR: 2020
COMPETITION: Closed competition
COLLABORATORS: OTTAVIANI ASSOCIATI, GREENCURE landscape & healing gardens, Gianluca Peluffo&Partners Architettura srl, Nicola Gallinaro
The proposal is based on two complementary strategic choices: the interpretation of the park as a green flow, made up of a great variety of landscapes within which there are clearings that welcome the various episodes of industrial archeology, and the redesign of the seafront in continuity up to the island of Nisida, making it possible to expand the space for the beach and the Porto Turistico.
Wohn und Stadtbau Housing Association Headquarters
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2004
COMPETITION: 2001, First prize
CLIENT: Wohn und Stadtbau GmbH
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
Entering the city from the north, a straight road, at the apex of its perspectival triangle a silhouette of cathedral and other church towers. Progressing into this picture, slightly downhill the view is gradually obscured, the outer traffic ring crossed.
The next 500 m rise, not a dramatic topography but enough to awaken expectation – ‘up there I will be in the city’. Buildings on the right enclose and to some extent counteract the latent drama of this ascent, this arrival. The left is undergoing a transformation, a re-configuring, a chance for a modulated roofline to enhance topographic character.
This is the intention of the sculpted silhouette of the new offices of the ‘Wohn+Stadtbau’ Housing Association. Its crest location is critical. The structured plaster façades of both volumes do not just echo but enhance site topography and the drama of entrance.
Entering the building involves a counter and smaller scale spatial sequence. The building front steps back from the heavily trafficked street to a transparent foyer. The ground floor facilitates intensive visitor traffic, waiting spaces extend into the internal court and playground.
