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From today's NY Times, it sounds like a wonderful project. Joe
Ansel has been directing the exhibition program, I think, and I know
that Trimpin did a large centerpiece. Sounds wonderful.
Eric Siegel
November 28, 2005
Architecture Review | Phaeno Science Center
Science Center Celebrates an Industrial Cityscape
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
WOLFSBURG, Germany - Architecture fans have been logging a lot of air
miles lately. Groupies seeking to whiff out the state of the
profession are more likely to find it in places like Seattle,
Cincinnati, Porto or Basel than in New York or Paris.
Now they can add another destination to the list: Wolfsburg. Designed
by the brash London-based architect Zaha Hadid, the city's new Phaeno
Science Center is a hypnotic work of architecture - the kind of
building that utterly transforms our vision of the future.
Ms. Hadid has never had much patience with the sentimentality that
leads some planners to seek inspiration in the 19th-century urban
model. Instead, her roots lie in the flowing freeways, modern housing
developments and industrial landscapes that define the 20th century.
The science center is the next step in that evolutionary chain.
Propped up on sleek cone-shaped columns, its sensual forms draw
strength from the energetic cityscape that surrounds it.
One could argue that Wolfsburg has been preparing for this moment for
more than half a century. Founded in 1938 by the Nazis as a factory
town called KdF-Stadt - for Kraft durch Freude, meaning "strength
through joy" - it churned out what would become known as the
Volkswagen Beetle for a newly mechanized Germany. The ominous brick
smokestacks of the city's Volkswagen factory, the largest in Europe,
still loom above the city, separated by the Mitteland Canal from rows
of bleak workers' housing.
In the late 1950's, city officials set out to spruce up Wolfsburg's
image, enlisting help from some of the world's most enlightened
architects. Alvar Aalto of Finland designed the city's marvelous
culture center, with its flowing lines, central roof terrace and
naturally lighted interiors, as well as a Lutheran church. The jagged
external forms and expressionist interiors of Hans Scharoun's theater
complex make it an architectural jewel.
Ms. Hadid's design flows directly out of Wolfsburg's history. The
center - housing physics, biology and chemistry exhibits - rises on a
site just east of the city's train station and north of a sprawl of
generic 1990's office and shopping developments. High-speed trains
ramble by on tracks to the north, with the canal and factory towers
just beyond.
Rather than turn its back on that context, the science center
embraces it. By positioning her dynamic concrete shell atop enormous
cones, Ms. Hadid allows pedestrian traffic to flow beneath the
building. A portion of the pavement ramps up to meet the bookstore
entrance; at other points the pavement sinks down to steer visitors
to an open public plaza directly under the belly of the building. A
sinuous blue strip embedded in the asphalt pavement guides
pedestrians through the plaza to a narrow bridge that crosses the
canal to the north.
Architects may see a dreamy parallel to Le Corbusier's concrete
1950's apartment-block housing in Marseille, raised up on rows of
streamlined columns. Yet Ms. Hadid's design draws as much on the
serpentine freeways of Los Angeles and postwar Europe's industrial
landscape as it does on such High Modernist precedents. Its imposing,
muscular forms celebrate the heroic large-scale urban infrastructure
of an earlier era, allowing us to see it with fresh eyes.
Lured from the surrounding street grid to the building's underbelly,
pedestrians enter what feels like a secret underground world - a
compressed pocket of energy amid the grayness of everyday life. The
cones are not merely structural supports, but house functional spaces
like the bookstore, conference room, a 250-seat theater and the
museum entrance.
Stepping into the largest cone, visitors soar up an escalator to the
science center's main exhibition floor. Here, floors warp, ceilings
are distorted and walls seem to melt away. At one juncture, the floor
curves up to shape a series of loosely defined exhibition areas.
Above, the steel framework that supports the roof swoops down at
various points to give the spaces an added sense of intimacy. At one
end of the hall, an elaborate ramp spiraling down through the
bookstore guides visitors back out into the street.
Ms. Hadid has described the layout of the exhibition space as a
sequence of exploded particles, like marbles scattered around a room.
By fostering openness, freedom and random choices, it encourages the
audience to create its own narrative. Your eye is constantly drawn
across curved surfaces and around corners to unexpected views that
lead you to make surprising connections.
Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid is rooted in the modernist belief
that enlightened design can further social progress. She was reared
in one of the first Modernist houses built in Baghdad; as a young
student, she witnessed the construction of Gio Ponti's planning
ministry, which symbolized Iraq's entry into the modern world, from
the balcony of her school. Since then, of course, she has watched
that Iraqi dream unravel.
I've always suspected that such memories are what imbue her work with
its heroic dimension. She sees modernity as a project that was left
incomplete, not as a lost cause, so her buildings set out to
resurrect a forgotten dream. The Phaeno center is the most
exhilarating expression of that vision yet - and a refreshingly
humane model for the future.
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