stealth museum
DESCRIPTION
Master project 2010 TU BerlinTRANSCRIPT
stealth museum
Ian Olliv ier Thibaut Pierron
A rchipelago A rchitectureGuest-Prof. Mark Lee
Master Project 2010 tu Berlin
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In a series of essays, O. M. Ungers, H. Kollhoff, R. Koolhaas and A. Ovaska suggest a new interpretation of Berlin’s urban space after its partial destruction : Berlin as a green archipelago. Berlin is then described as a collection of selected “places of reason” scatered on a green grid. They are fragments of architecture, History, culture, places of plurality and confrontation in vast garden of the city.
These statements set the base for further urban renewal strategies ; and it is these statements that we chose to inject and transcribe into the process of our architectural production.
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Our new building implements itself parallel to the preexisting factory. Its massing is clear and simple.
We chose here to transcribe Ungers’ vision of “Berlin as a green archipelago” into the scale of the architectural object. The hybrid program (housing and exhibition spaces) allowed us to literally transpose the urban grid and architectural fragments into a single building. In order to concretize this process, we decided to use the lodgings as a structural grid : the garden in which the exhibition spaces will be scattered as architectural fragments.
The art galleries are hidden, bathed in the mass of lodgings as a Stealth Museum. Each exhibition space is given singularity through the nature of its zenithal lighting. They create a plotted route through the building by means of successive compression and dilatation. The route ends in a tunnel leading to the preexisting factory.
The building is schizophrenic. It houses a spatial and programmatic duality.
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From the outside the visitor can not be aware of this dichotomy. The building presents itself as a banal housing block. Once having crossed the threshold of the stealth museum, one is confronted with this reality : the two systems are independent, autonomous.
They do not interact visually but exert pressure on one another. It is an invisible confrontation between the banal and the exceptional.
WEST ELEVATION - NEW BUILDING
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While working on the first building, we wished only to transcribe at the scale of a single architectural object Ungers’ postulate about Berlin as an Archipelago. Nevertheless, now unfolding the museum route into this second part, which is the preexisting factory, we decided to adopt a different strategy.
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In this building, a grid has already been established by the structure, the posts and the beams. After having set the base of the work of Ungers, we now follow one of their strategies : the implementation of a new typology on an existing grid.
As a reference to the preexisting state of Berlin after partial destruction, we keep the ground floor clear and disperse architectural fragments : an auditorium, staircases, a restaurant...
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On the next floors, we tend to crystallize into one building, one image or cliché, the different phases of Ungers’ strategy for the renewal of Berlin’s urbanity. Our work is organized in three phases :
We first systematically fill the grid with lodgings, as Berlin’s dense urban tissue was before destruction.Then, we recreate the conditions of an in-between, by suppressing some of the apartments. What results are cavities, blind walls between tightly gathered apartments.Finally, these “in-betweens” will be able to be requalified threw the introduction of a new typology, the exhibition rooms.
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The result of this dual use of the building is expressed on the façade. While the lodgings respect the building’s structural grid and façade composition, the “empty” spaces or gaps of the art galleries tend to react as foreign bodies. The façade sheltering these spaces is frozen, windows are blocked, the moldings become nothing more than an elegant industrial wallpaper. New wider openings pop out freely in order to accommodate this new typology.
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Going from one gap to an other through catwalks, the visitor crosses the factory and loops all the way back to the entrance of the first building.