Similarly, the San Gimignano project in Lichtenberg, Berlin, gravitates around the transformation of two existing towers – a silo and a circulation tower used in the past as central production sites for a large graphite factory. The only remnants of a larger industrial complex, these towers remained abandoned due to high demolition costs. Brandlhuber+ takes advantage of the existing situation to preserve their industrial character: one of the two towers serves as a workshop for different industries such as 1:1 prototyping of architectural units; the other tower works as a warehouse – an unheated storage space up 22m high. The silo tower only contains two floors: the ground floor and the first floor at 31.63m. By focusing attention only on those floors, the need for extensive technical equipment (ventilation and exit doors) shrinks and additional costs are avoided. Brandlhuber+ restored all original apertures of the tower and left them open, turning the interior into a semi- outdoor space. Overall, Brandlhuber+ reduced their intervention to the minimum: an additional floor in one of the towers as well as an external staircase to provide access. In using the framework of existing buildings and regulations as point of departure, Brandlhuber+ investigate new forms of interaction between public and private in contemporary cities; their projects explore radical forms of living and working via site-specific, acupunctural interventions in the urban fabric.
© Erica Overmeer https://bplus.xyz/projects/0154-san-gimignano-lichtenberg
Brandlhuber+, San Gimignano Lichtenberg. 2012-ongoing
Different in formal expression but equally compelling, is the dialogue with the existing built environment which characterises the work of several architecture firms based in Barcelona. One of those is HArquitectes. The Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214, designed in 2017, is in fact based on the transformation of a 1928 working class cooperative building. The project develops across the definition of an interior urban void – an atrium that allows for the encounter between the old decayed structures and the new intervention. The role of this urban void is to celebrate the heterogeneity of the separate parts constituting the building and, at the same time, to ideally bridge past and future. The atrium is the moment where differences juxtapose and interact: the patina of the existing walls and the new polycarbonate roofs coexist in the same environment. In the progression of the spaces designed as well as in the overall process of mending, an overlap of textures, patterns, and colors take place. One may say therefore that the whole project is an example of assemblage as it is compact and finite in its multiplicity; all its different layers morph into a visual and functional unity.
Adrià Goula, http://www.harquitectes.com
HARQUITECTES, Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214 . Barcelona, 2017
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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