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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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