The Office for Metropolitan Architecture has revealed the final design for a Science Centre and Aquarium for the Hamburg Hafencity complex...
Click above image to enlarge
The building of 23,000 m2 will comprise of a Science Centre, aquarium, theatre, offices, laboratories and commercial and retail facilities and is located at the eastern edge of Hafencity, Hamburg's ambitious harbor redevelopment.
The Science Centre is constructed of ten modular blocks that connect to form a ring shaped building. This concept allows for maximum flexibility for exhibitions. Visitors will start their visit at the so called "base station"� just under the top of the building, cross over through the exhibition halls and descend in the modular blocks through the various exhibited scientific subjects, such as "the beginning of life"� or "everything flows"�. Approx. 8,500 m2 of the building is located underground with a large part of this space being taken up by the aquarium, providing a zoological tour from Hamburg to the Red Sea.
With terraces on various levels of the building the Science Centre allows panoramic views of Hamburg city centre as well as to the West and East sides of the Magdeburg harbor.
By providing rentable office and laboratory spaces the building will act as a hub for various scientific institutions in Hamburg. Cultural Senator of Hamburg Prof. Dr. Karin von Welck explained that: "The new Science Center will be established as an interdisciplinary meeting place for HafenCity Hamburg, an innovative space for art, culture and science."
As a Science Centre the building leads by example addressing the issue of sustainability not only in its flexible approach to programming and function but also by incorporating the latest environmental technologies.
Speaking at the project launch yesterday Rem Koolhaas said "this building is supposed to reflect Hamburg's serious ambitions for the development of the former port area". OMA's Science Centre is the latest in a series of buildings commissioned by Hamburg Hafencity GmbH as part of a large scale regeneration programme of the area, which stretches some 155 hectares between city centre and the river Elbe. The design is a further development of the winning scheme designed by OMA in 2004.
The project is lead by OMA Partners Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon with Marc Paulin as project architect. Previous collaborations included the design of the new headquarter for NM Rothschild & Sons in London and the redevelopment of Mercati Generali in Rome. Koolhaas and Van Loon completed together Porto's Casa da Musica and the new Netherlands Embassy in Berlin.
21 Comments
i don't get it. 'reveal' the design via this text? no drawings or images?
i added a link and some images
More images coming from OMA...
I think this reveals that OMA is as formulaic as Gehry. How many more different ways can one pile up boxes????
hey! there's something to that, go!
ever been to gehry's office?
before the fancy shapes go on, the piles of program boxes look remarkably like this.
yeah i used to work there.
cool, thanks...i looked on their site earlier and couldn't find any images, so i was confused.
i'd really like to get a better sense of this in context...reserving judgement in the meantime.
am I the only one that remembers this one?
http://www.euroscraper.com/
similar in more than a few ways I can see, but very neat that something like this will get built. I would love to walk in and around that building... I will second the context comment.
Going warped/vertical and anti-icon, icon again, i see.
Kind of reminds me a little of a scheme by NL architects ''Return to the Fold'' TM
Melbourne, Australie, Concours, 1997
http://www.archilab.org/public/2000/catalog/nlarch/nlarchen.htm#
this is clearly the beginning of a scheme to spell out O M A with large buildings.
the beginning? i'm sure, from some angles, cctv looks like an 'M'.
AP > tee hee hee! I think you might be right. Where will the A show up? Perhaps they'll plop it in New York, right over REX's office, just to spite them.
I don't really know what to say about it. Does it move? Do tricks? It's interesting but at the moment it has no texture, no quality of light, no openings, no connection to the landscape. I'm saving my oohs and aahs for when it actually impresses me.
Steven, that's why Rem is such a master, most of us when trying to spell our names in skyscrapers would have stupidly began with the fist letter, but the ever-avant-garde Koolhaas starts in the middle, avoiding suspicion for years.
maybe the A has already been done, too, but we just haven't noticed.
maybe if the 'hyper-building' had been built, it would have been the A.
it looks scary...
isn't this the project that is conceptually a blurby geode cut in half, one part standing the other laying down?
if so then i like this iteration much more than the swurvy curvy version.
stacking boxes is not in itself not an un-creative approach. it is at least honest, which i can appreciate. love this much more than anything by asymptote or greg lynn...just cuz this doesn't need any of the verbiage to explain the concept with. looking forward to seeing how it works on the ground...
this is garbage. awful architecture.
Actually, they're already done:
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/3779/omalt6.jpg
as my boss would say: "waterproofing nightmare."
the hole as the whole.
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