UN Studio cross-fertilizes a three-leaf-clover
plan with a double-helix circulation for the Mercedes-benz museum in Stuttgart.
Frank Lloyd Wright probably would have given
his porkpie hat to get the commission to design the Mercedes-Benz Museum in
Stuttgart—if he had lived so long. And he might have been impressed (even if
grudgingly so) to see how a young Dutch firm, UN Studio, evolved a stunning
spiral-ramped, reinforced-concrete building for the auto company.
Granted,
Wright generated his own historic concrete-ramp structure for displaying art
with his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan in 1959. There he realized a
spiral-ramp parti he had also developed for cars—in the form of parking
structures dating back to 1924–25. But Wright’s only chance to adapt that parti
for the display of automobiles came with his 1955 Jaguar showroom at 430 Park
Avenue in New York City. Now, belonging to Mercedes-Benz, it contains only a
smidgen of his original idea.
Going beyond Wright, the nine-story Mercedes
museum—designed by Ben van Berkel, an architect, working with his partner,
Caroline Bos, trained as an art historian, and their Amsterdam-based office—is
composed of two spiraling ramps in the form of a double helix that mimics DNA’s
genetic strands. With clear spans of 100 feet that can display high-tonnage
trucks and cars, the wide ramps loop, incline, merge, and meld as
interchangeable surfaces, so that floors become walls, and walls become
ceilings.
Many technical developments have emerged in
the years between Wright’s experiments and the competition-winning scheme for
the newly opened Mercedes-Benz Museum. These advances enabled the UN Studio
team, which included both engineer Werner Sobek and a computer consultant on
geometry, Arnold Walz, to develop a 270,000-square-foot, reinforced-concrete
structure far more complex than the Guggenheim, and seven times larger.
In Germany, the Mercedes
museum occupies a 37,674-square- foot site in an automotive enclave called
Mercedes–Benz World near the parent company DaimlerChrysler’s
Stuttgart-Untertürkheim plant. Next door is the new Mercedes-Benz Center, a
square, three-story building pierced by skylights, where the sleek, elegant
cars are sold. A 330-foot-long passage under a concrete podium, lined with
shops and a restaurant, links the center to the museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment