Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus The Bearable Lightness of Architec ture
The Asklepios 8 building cannot be overlooked. It is prominently placed at the western end of the Dreirosen Bridge, signalling the overture to the Novartis Campus as seen from the city. Dominant and at the same time filigree and transparent, the building by Herzog & de Meuron is a striking beacon on the shores of the Rhine. On the one hand, it inspires thoughts about the history and urban development of Basel and on the other, about the emergence of the Novartis Campus on the north-western fringe of the city. Basel as a Point of Reference
On taking a look at the involvement of the architects with the city of Basel, it becomes apparent that the city is an important focal point within their vast international practice. Both architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, were born in Basel and after completing their studies at the ETH Zurich, they founded their practice in a courtyard building at St. Alban-Vorstadt. They have long done detailed, in-depth studies of the history and topography of the city and have always been interested in the riverscape of the Rhine, which left its mark on Basel even before Celtic and Roman settlement. It has been a seminal element in the development of the city since the Middle Ages, Baroque times, classicism and neoclassicism. Herzog & de Meuron’s study ‘Eine Stadt im Werden? ’ (‘A Nascent City? ’, 1991/92), written almost 25 years ago in collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, examines the salient features of the city’s location on a river, its surroundings and its exchange with neighbours just over the border in Alsace and Southern Baden. They note that, in post-war city planning, the city and its surroundings at the bend in the Rhine had shifted away from the shoreline as if the river were territory to be avoided. Today, trinational government planners are giving intense attention to cross-border questions of density along the shores of the Rhine and on the islands. A sklepios 8 on the Novar tis C ampus
In the specific case of the Novartis Campus Basel, the architects had to accommodate their project to the master plan designed over 10 years ago by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani to develop the former factory premises of the late 19th century. Lampugnani took a traditional approach to the area, retaining the so-called Fabrikstrasse as the main artery and basically following the specifications of the right-angled Roman grid. The eaves height of the buildings, including those near the shoreline, was to be restricted to 23 metres. In addition, the use of the acronym WSJ, meaning ‘Werk St. Johann’, to identify the buildings was replaced by the conventional use of numbers and street names that reference people who had been important players in the history of pharmacology, such as Asclepius, the Greek God of Healing. The architects proposed to double the specified height for their building on the Rhine to form two superimposed structures, the lower one containing six storeys and the upper one seven, connected in the middle by a slenderer section, a waist, containing a three-storey core. Although tall, the building does not make a weighty or heavy impression; on the contrary, it is of an elegance that creates an almost disconcerting impression of lightness and transparency. This has been achieved by means of a clever device. Unlike most buildings on the campus, the façades do not consist of glass and loadbearing metal profiles, characteristic of classical high-rise buildings such as Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1949–1951) or his New York Seagram Building (1954 –1958), but rather out of a ‘confusion’ of supports behind which the glass seems to disappear. The untold delicate supports on slightly cantilevered ceiling panels satisfy the structural requirements. The engineering is so slender and thinned down that three supports are required instead of one. The multitude of supports, seemingly arbitrarily arranged next to and behind each other, reinforce the unsettling impression of lightness. Although these components are not perceived as structured at first sight, they still satisfy the specifications. Thus arrayed, the loadbearing elements also provide protection against rain and sun. The glass façade lies or rather stands
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