Victoria Park – Four Housing Blocks
TYPOLOGY: Masterplan + Residential
COUNTRY: Australia
CITY: Sydney
YEAR: 2001
CLIENT: Waltcorp. Ltd
PHOTOS: © Turner
The visitor’s image of Australia is of huge skies, bleaching light and wide horizons. The planning model for this new Sydney quarter involved dense urban blocks with six to nine story street fronts and towers with views to their downtown big brothers. Surprisingly photos of the first two of the four blocks satisfy both expectations. One thinks of Brasilia or the suburbs of Milan in the 1950s. This ex-industrial site has in its transitional state the appearance of landscape becoming city in one heroic eruption.
Sydney is growing rapidly, due in part to an exodus from country towns, to immigration and to a cunning ‘down-under’ financial regulation that only allows foreign investors to buy into new buildings. To meet this quantitative demand a radical systematising of the building process into a ‘house of cards’ stacking of prefabricated concrete panels and standard repetitive apartment layouts has emerged. This basic logic of the ESP Block and of the ‘FORM’ Block is subsequently enhanced by balcony variations. These are essential for climatic reasons, shade and outdoor living space. (As a substitute for the suburban back yard balconies in Australia are often equipped with gas outlets for high-rise barbecuing.) Compositional juxtapositions and articulations of balconies hung outside the repetitive and regular apartment grid also reverses the modernist dictum of outside expressing interior functions. Here the heterogeneous surface instigates variations in apartment types.
2001 Four Block Masterplan
2004 ESP Block completed,
2005 Block 301 (“FORM”) completed,
2005 Blocks 303 and 305 in planning.
Housing at St. Sebastian
TYPOLOGY: Residential
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2016
COMPETITION: 2009, 1st prize
GFA: 8.180 sqm
CLIENT: Wohn + Stadtbau GmbH
AWARDS: “Exemplary publicly funded residential projects” – North Rhine-Westphalia Regional Prize for Architecture,
Housing and Urban Development 2017
BDA Münster-Münsterland award for best buildings 2017,
honorable mention
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing, BOLLES+WILSON
In 2009 BOLLES+WILSON won the 1st prize for housing and a kindergarten on the site of the 1960ies St Sebastian Church. It was expected that the emblematic oval form of the church be demolished. Instead the kindergarten colonized the nave. It was opened in 2013 – a much published reuse with interior green weather protected play decks.
2015 phase 2 was complete, a peripheral frame of housing protecting the kindergarten from a noisy street and giving a precise edge to the adjacent park.
Market realities are clearly visible in the differentiation of the social (subsidized) housing with its bright white and pink plaster facade to Hammer Str. and the owner-occupied flats with their noble dark brick facade facing the mature trees in the park.
One corner tree is explicitly embraced by the projecting white sheet of the street facade.
Only kitchen and bathroom windows are allowed to receive traffic noise; living rooms and balconies turn inwards to the quiet green space surrounding the kindergarten.
Unexpected colour animates the lift and stair tower and the setback roof apartments. This polychrome trope also animates the skyline of the park elevation. Here big white frames give a grand order, a vertical hierarchy. But ultimately it is the grandeur of the existing trees that claim the status of leading actors in the spatial choreography.
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
City Hall Willich
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Willich
YEAR: 2003
COMPETITION: 2001, First prize
GFA: 2.630 sqm
CLIENT: Stadt Willich
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, © BOLLES+WILSON
The entrance to Schlosspark Neersen is framed by the parallel sides of the Schloss / City Hall and the new building for the City Hall technical Departments.
With its wide span-cantilevered canopy and transparent facade the new addition presents its functions like a building scale vitrine.
The enclosing back wall is in a discrete and modest industrial brick, in keeping with the suburban surrounds and at the same time a reference to the nearby Mies van der Rohe Haus Lange and Haus Esters.
Shkodra Football Stadium
TYPOLOGY: Sport
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Shkodra
YEAR: 2017
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing, BOLLES+WILSON
The 2017 football stadium in the northern Albanian city of Shkodra was a fast-track project – Albania had to host the ritual skirmish with Serbia. To marshal Riotous Serbian fans corral-like platforms were built – each restrains 500 fans within the heavy steel perimeter rail. These raked platforms were as naked concrete an illustration of Louis Kahn’s statement (that a buildings sculptural essence is only visible while under construction or as a ruin). The colours of the Shkodra team are a manly pink and light blue. Finished the pink reverse side of the stadium corrals offer a dramatic backdrop for informal urban life. The new main stadium with V.I.P. deck + press box is lit from up lights reflecting on white circles (see sketch). Existing stadiums were upgraded with a wind animated screen.
