Leo’s Gate Coworking und Coliving
TYPOLOGY: Office / Residential
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2020
GFA: 8.140 sqm
CLIENT: Leos Gate GmbH & Co. KG – New work and -living
STATUS: In progress
Leo’s Gate is the fourth building block on the site of the former ice rink in Münster. It marks the entrance to the Science Quarter from Steinfurter Strasse. The mixed use with catering units on the ground floor, flexible Coworking Spaces and Coliving Modules on the upper floors is multifunctional.
Different wooden constructions are planned depending on use and requirements. Floor-to-ceiling timber trusses with light ribbed ceiling slabs are used in the cantilevered Coworking areas. The 45 residential units are delivered as completely prefabricated and furnished wooden modules and are stacked over four floors.
All facade elements are designed in a uniform shade of red, which blends in with the entire ensemble of the historical Leonardo campus and the new brick buildings in the area.
IT Campus Lingen
TYPOLOGY: Masterplan
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Lingen
YEAR: 2022
~13 ha17 PLOTS (incl. the moated castle):
- Building footprint: ~12.500 sqm
- Plot sizes: 3.500–5.000 sqm
CLIENT: Stadt Lingen (Ems)
A business park in an apple orchard – the North German city of Lingen has the ambition to lay out this attractive work environment with a minimal of sealed surfaces, cars disappear underground below buildings or below landscaped terraces.
Meadows facilitate birds and insects, site drainage and rainwater retention pools generate natural sports and `break-out´ spaces from office pavilions made of wood and recycled brick.
The BOLLES+WILSON 2022 Masterplan was commissioned by the Lingen Planning Office and is currently in the making.
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.
Dieze Training Centre
TYPOLOGY: Educational
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Castrop-Rauxel
YEAR: 1996
COMPETITION: 1994, First Prize
GFA: 3.000 sqm
CLIENT: GEWO, Castrop-Rauxel
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
A branch of the Open University Hagen and a Women’s Retraining Centre – shared conference and seminar facilities. Anchor box plus geometric extensions. The alien conference element cantilevers acrobatically. Strict plan geometries evolve a three dimensional language of interlocking materials.
BAZAAR GATE
CITY: Tirana
CLIENT: The Bregu Group
YEAR: 2024 – 2028
LOCAL FACILITATING OFFICE: X-PLAN
A 23 floor residential tower crowned by 5 floors of golden penthouses. It stands between Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square and the revitalized Bazaar. A back seat to the Prime Minister promoted cluster of mega statements that will line up next to the gold façade of BOLLES+WILSON’s 2025 Intercontinental Hotel. We have sketched our golden cones against the pink matrix of Tirana’s jumbled DNA, punctuated by two more BOLLES+WILSON planned projects – The Lets Twist Again Tower and in the background the Vasarely Tower. We are grateful to Edi Rama for pumping Bazaar Gate’s original 15 floors to the 28 floors now under construction.
ORIGINAL 15 FLOOR
BAZAAR GATE CONCEPT
FAÇADE EVELOUTION
First came a Bamboo leaf printed pattern. Then in a workshop two façade proposals by X-Plan our Albanian collaborators were mathematically synthesized to produce the window/loggia matrix.
FROM THE SHOPPING COURT
CONCEPT B+W
RENDERINGS X-PLAN
PENTHOUSE REFINEMENT
As with all BOLLES+WILSON projects the penthouses were fine-tuned in an iterative exchange between sketched ambiences/compositions and the exactitude of digital co-ordination/technical requirements. The final, somewhat Chinese, sketch dissolves the golden crown in a nirvana of cloud.
