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Libeskind: William Tozer,
‘The Graduate,’
Monument, issue 62 (August/September 2004):
22–24.
[Copyright image removed. Refer print version in UCL library.]
‘I think it’s important to use architecture in all contexts’, remarks Daniel Libeskind,
comparing
his recently completed Graduate Centre for London Metropolitan University with his schemes
for the Jewish Museum and Ground Zero. ‘You have to be interested in a whole range of
experiences … [and] this is a very modest project’, he says of the building that now nestles into
the chaotic streetscape of fast food vendors and small retailers in north London’s Holloway
Road. Libeskind’s design is part of an ambitious building programme initiated by the university,
which should soon also include projects by Rick Mather and Zaha Hadid.
The London Met Graduate Centre is a small project that can perhaps be most usefully
understood as part of a body of work, rather than as an autonomous piece of design. The formal
language of the building is typical of Libeskind’s architecture and is the outcome of his unique
but often-repeated design methodology, which centres on poetic drawing. Libeskind’s drawings
usually take the form of a mass of lines connecting points of significance on or around the site
of a scheme. The selection from these drawings of figures from which to make plan form and
elevational decisions, and their application, is an intuitive act that reconciles the diagrams with
the pragmatic issues of the project. The process produces fragmented, linear (or sometimes
curvilinear) geometries with complicated intersections, and consequently his buildings are
complex spatial and visual compositions. The graduate centre arrives at forms and spaces of
this nature, from starting points of the Orion constellation, and from view lines up and down
Holloway Road.
As in his other schemes, the link between built form and design methodology is very clear in the
Graduate Centre. Called into question, however, is Libeskind’s belief in the ability of his
architecture to absorb meaning through this process. In his designs for the Jewish Museum and
Ground Zero, the notion of a link between the abstract pattern-making methodology and the
investment in the built form of meaning drawn from the inspiration for this process, seems
somewhat tenuous and generic. Moreover, using another permutation of this design strategy for
the London Metropolitan University building, while maintaining that no weighty significance
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Herzog and de Meuron: William Tozer, ‘Outside the Box,’
Monument, issue 64
(December/January 2004/2005): 58–62.
[Copyright image removed. Refer print version in UCL library.]
Herzog and de Meuron leapt to widespread notoriety in the mid nineteen nineties with the
realisation of their designs for the Goetz Collection Gallery in Munich and the copper-clad Basel
Signal Box. While it is commonplace within the profession for architects to come to prominence
only after many years of practice, the freshness of these projects belied the fact that this ‘new’
practice had already been producing work for two decades. Another decade on, and the work of
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron is still at the forefront of architectural discussion. The
practice shares this unusual persistence of prominence with Rem Koolhaas and OMA, and
together the two practices have come to almost define the profession in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. The latest project
by Herzog and de Meuron, the Barcelona Forum
building, provides an insight into the current, but seemingly ever-changing, direction of the
Swiss practice.
The Barcelona Forum is a cultural festival organised with the intention of showcasing ideas for
the future development of the city. The development is located at the point where the coastline
of Barcelona is intersected by the Avenida Diagonal, a major boulevard that crosses the city.
The regeneration plans aim to build upon the character of the old city and the structure provided
by Cerda’s nineteenth-century rationalisation. Cleverly, the same buildings that exhibit these
plans will soon form key parts of the infrastructure facilitating the regeneration itself. Herzog and
de Meuron’s building sits alongside projects by other major architects, including Foreign Office
Architects, and frames the main entrance to the site. The building contains exhibition spaces, an
auditorium, a chapel, a bar and kiosk, and an outdoor market space.
In terms of form, Herzog and de Meuron’s projects can be broadly divided into those that exhibit
a geometry born of a relationship to established building morphologies, and those whose
geometry possesses the qualities of abstract sculpture. The division is by no means clear-cut,
but falls broadly along the lines of private (housing and offices et cetera) and public (the likes of
museums and retail) respectively. The dark blue, incised, monolithic form of the Barcelona
Forum building falls squarely into the second category. The triangular footprint of the building
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