Construction Log June: Springs in Summer

Back from Shenyang and a major site meeting for our Springs Hotel. Our biggest construction site reaches already L7. 16 more floor to go. Our local architect is CSCEC, China State Construction. The hotel will feature two 70 x 30 meter ballrooms, stacked on top of each other. As usual, the changes made on the construction site forces us to change design at times. But it is an adventure.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Jorge Benetirez, Matteo Biasiolo, Celine Clivaz, Agnieszka Drankowska, Isabella Ducoli, Eugenio Fontan, Sevan Spiess,  Jorge Gil Suarez, Satoshi Yamada, Yue Zhang

© 2014, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

New Publications

Middle of the year and our projects approach in several publications in China. Two new books have been published by artpower (www.artpower.com.cn), a major book publisher from Shenzhen: 'Innovative High Rise Buildings' features our award winning entry to the VNTA Headquarter. 'Inside/Outside Office Design IV' features our project SZXC.

© 2014, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Happy New Year of the Horse

We wish all our friends, colleagues and clients a happy New Year of the Horse. With our hotel in Shenyang wrapping up the design stage, we are looking forward to the tender and construction phase. New projects as well as potential opportunities just came in before the New Year break and we are looking forward to an exciting year of new designs and built work.

VIP Club @ SZXC

We recently have been commissioned to design an extension to our office project in Shenzhen SZXC in form of a VIP Club with Wine Bar and Tea area. The project will go into construction early next year. 

The project is sought to be a meeting place for clients beyond the office atmosphere, a more casual lounge for the after business meetings. The project will complete the program of the office as an holistic operational environment - even beyond the working hours.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Isabella Ducoli, Eugenio Fontan, Jorge Gil Suarez, Satoshi Yamada

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Construction Log SYH

We love construction sites! Last time we went to site, the basement was excavated and the pile heads done. Two months later we are seeing the ground floor covered, just before winter will halt construction.

The project is our winning entry for a 90,000 sqm luxury hotel in Shenyang, featuring the one of the larges free spanning ballrooms in China. We are part of a larger consortium (larger means also larger problems, not necessarily better solutions), responsible for the partial design of the architecture, all facades as well as all interiors. The bumpy road gets rewarded by such site visits where you see beside the massive construction problems also the immense large scale of the project - and our ideas becoming real. 

The first picture is the overview of the entire ground, second picture is taken inside the main hotel core. And the third picture is taken from the drop off looking into the lobby area.

If nothing goes wrong, the superstructure will be up to the top floor (25 floors) by middle of next year. The facade should be finished before the end of 2014. And opening will be in 2015.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Jorge Benetirez, Matteo Biasiolo, Celine Clivaz, Agnieszka Drankowska, Isabella Ducoli, Eugenio Fontan, Sevan Spiess,  Jorge Gil Suarez, Satoshi Yamada, Yue Zhang

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Deep Blue: Top 9 Outdoor Swimming Pools

After the sad closure of the Victoria Park outdoor swimming pool, which we have written about in our last post, we decided to look for our most favorable outdoor pools. Please find below our top 9 in random order:

Alvaro Siza, Leca

Beautiful seafront pool that makes use of the natural topographical formation. Rocks are embedded into the pool design. On different platforms, you have a stunning view over the Atlantic Ocean. The pool is fed by seawater only. Some pools are so close to the shore that they are a natural wave pool.

Peter Zumtor, Vals

Serene and Zen, the minimal design enhances the peace and tranquility of the pool. Similar to Siza, natural elements and materials play a vital role to the pool and its atmosphere. 

Pichler+Traubman, Private Pool
Although the pool is very small, it features with the singular operation of a sliced and folded plane a huge variety of functions. From water slide to beach slope to underground elements. The pool picks up the language of the landscape as a topographical change.

MVRDV, Sloterpark

Never built, the pool design makes use of the quality of the section of a pool and makes it the generator for the entire building.

Moshe Saftie, Marina Bay Sands Sky Park
The proportions of the entire development went very off compared to the commission proposal. Yet, being located above Singapore, the pool is a fine example of what spectacular sight an endless pool can allow for. It is clearly one of the most interesting sightseeing tower experiences, I ever had.

Plot, Copenhagen Harbour Bath

Fed by seawater, the pool is framing the nature through topographical transformation of the wooden deck. The pool is built into the river and has a strong presence of the city around it. The beauty of the pool lies in the multi functionality of the wooden deck, which can server as a sunning deck as well as a springboard.

Paschke+Milhonic, Zollverein Essen

Built into the centre of the world heritage site at the Zollverein Essen, the pool was planned as an art installation to re inhabit the Zollverein. The contrast to the surrounding creates surreal and magical moments.

Eco Pool

One of the most beautiful swimming experiences I had beyond ocean and lake, was in an eco pool. Spatially very interesting as it blends the garden pond with the functional pool. The importance is that the ratio between heavy planted shallow water (for cleaning and filtering) and the pool itself is at balance. It also takes time to create an equilibrium to the pool. But after that, water quality is unbeatable.

Pamukkale

Pamukkale in Turkey is not man made. It is a natural formation of ponds and puddles. Maybe the most imaginative and design oriented swimming experience - if only it would have been invented by man.

All images have been downloaded from the internet, we do not claim authorship over those images.

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Tribute to Victoria Park Swimming Pool

Summer is coming to an end. So is the life of the Victoria Park Outdoor Swimming Pool. It closed its gates yesterday at 10 pm for the last time.

Being a passionate swimmer myself, I am deeply saddened by the closure of this wonderful urban experience. For the past few years I have spent my daily morning swim in that pool. The best moments were at the beginning of the outdoor swimming season when water was freezing cold and only me and 10 lifeguards were around in the chilling morning sun. My children learned swimming in the pool. I was with them from the time of their first clumsy approaches in the water to the moment they glide naturally through the deep blue.

Nights at the pool where startling. The pool lied at the edge of Victoria Park, surrounded by the city that formed a formidable background to the scene. The moment the sun set, buildings began to sparkle. First as a reflection of the setting sun, then as a powerful skyline of artificial lights. Whoever knows Hong Kong, knows the seduction of its skyline at night: the fascination of the behemoth of urban invention and innovation.

And in the middle of the city was this giant pool (during hot summers a rather overheated jacuzzi) from where you could enjoy the beauty of the skyline. It always was a magical and surreal moment, floating in the water and watch the city passing by, day as night alike.

To me, the swimming pool and the already demolished Kai Tak airport were some of the few formidable metropolitan sights of Hong Kong. They were proofs of the intense effects and collisions of a hyper dense city. But they also demonstrated that you could be at peace within this moloch of a city; it showed that the collision and confrontation can create urban poetry at its best.

Opened in 1957, the pool has been one of the oldest outdoor pools of Hong Kong, one of the few with a 5m diving pool and a 50 m lap pool with a 10 m dive board. It also features a grand stand for public viewing and a restaurant with pool view. The beauty of the pool lies in its design of the boundaries to the surrounding park. The park landscape was seamlessly translating into the water landscape. Changing rooms were placed under the grand stand to reduce the architectural impact of the pool.

To my dissatisfaction, the newly constructed indoor pool next door is a large scale architectural mass, with no relation to the context. The design has not benefitted from the subtleness of the outdoor pool, nor from the function of a park as an urban open area for the public. An alien like, disproportionate podium block was designed, which rather resembles a shopping mall than a public swimming pool for leisure and enjoyment. It is understood that an indoor pool is a building, an outdoor pool is a landscape: However a six story disproportionate glass blob which seals off its interior from the surrounding park is a rather cynical answer towards a positive transformation of the city.

It is a shame as the city of Hong Kong missed the chance (again) to encourage excellency for its public buildings. Instead, they apply commercial and economic logic to their civic construction as well and neglect the social, spatial and historical components that have made Hong Kong what it is in the first place.

Luckily swimming requires a certain functionality. So I will find myself at peace with the new venue as long as it features a clean 50 m pool and enough space to swim.

However there must be a reason that the pool was one of the most beloved leisure venues of the citizens. During my last swim at 10 pm, there were a lot of people inside the pool. Most enjoyed the last opportunity to dive in a 5 m deep 50 m olympic size pool. In fact the bottom at 5 m was the most crowded as there will be no pool anymore of this depth. There was a large crowd at the stand, taking pictures of the great view, chatting with the lifeguards and silently but happily and enjoying the scene. Most likely some of them contemplated wether the new pool will be as enriching to the city as the old one.

When we left the pool as one of the last, we left with the certainty that Hong Kong has sacrificed another urban jewel of its glorious past to the genericness of the commercial world.

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Spatial or Social Preservation? - West Wing, Hong Kong

Preservation is a delicate issue in a city like Hong Kong, which is reinventing itself in a rather frequent cycle, creating radical paradigm shifts every 20-30 years. In that process of restructuring the city, the West Wing and Government Hill came under threat of demolition: A colonial, governmental cluster, built over the period of British rule over Hong Kong. With the Hong Kong Advisory Board closing this latest outrage of the public on this process of destruction and reinvention by granting the Grade I status of a monument, an uneasy silence fell over the debate on what to do with that premise in the future.

I always liked that building as it one of the few buildings in the city that embraces the fact that it sits on a steep slope (most of them tend to ignore the topography and just create a new flat ground). The West Wing is offering multiple levels of entries and acts as a sectional device at the foot of the mountain that becomes the Peak. On the points of interface between mountain and building, there were a few public anchor points, that are specifically highlighted architectural and volumetric: A retaining wall that extends into the ground lobby and a cantilevered box in the middle of the building, that acted as a canteen and event space. It is not necessarily a mind blowing building, but a modest proposal for a modern post war architecture.

Most importantly however is the fact, that the building hits Queen's Road Central at its front end, the most central of all Hong Kong roads, forming the spine of the CBD of the city. Its back end leads into an extensive green zone that contains the zoo, Hong Kong Park and eventually leads towards the Peak and its nature reserves around. The urbanism is fascinating around the building. City on one, nature on the other side. The West Wing is the wedge between the two. Unfortunately it is a hostile one as it is programmatically detached from both.

As usual in the debate about preservation in Hong Kong, it is not the architectural value that makes the building worth it, but the social condition it created and are now considered part of the collective memory. In case of the West Wing it was the public consultation counter (the first of its kind in a governmental building) and the cantilevered box that was hosting parties for young people once in a while. It made the building a very public space in the eyes of the people. It nearly introduced participative opportunities for the community. I guess this memory is growing stronger every day especially as the current government lacks the will to offer participation for the public. Neither is it willing to create opportunities for young people or emerging entrepreneurship.

When we were approached to do a proposal for the West Wing, we were wondering how we can enhance social conditions spatially. And how can we then make those spatial potentials social again. We wanted to transform the building, yet preserve its functional status as a public incubator inside a governmental compound.

Our proposal was a most simple one: We introduced an escalator that connects the lower urban fabric with the mid-level of the building that contains the cantilevered box as well as an upper plaza. Connecting the public spaces inside and outside the building by an external circulatory system manifests the social and public value of the building and allows to open the building for more civic functions (in fact as it used to be).

Unfortunately the building will be given back to the government and the legislative counsel which will make it highly unlikely to be open to public ever again. Being a security fortress now, the building will finally be a very hostile one to the urban fabric. The question remains if a demolition of the building would have not been more beneficial in the end as it would have introduced commercial spaces as well as civic functions to the site. Even more unfortunate at this point is that the initiative which was fighting for the remain of the West Wing is silent since the building is preserved. And this although the West Wing is even more demolished and stripped of its social function at this point.

Although spatial preservation is guaranteed, the building lacks its socially relevant dimension by converting it to a state of privateness and disclosure.

In regards to the debate whether or not West Wing deserves a Grade I Preservation status, our Louise Low has presented an article to the public to the debate in April:

 A Modest Proposal

A casual urban wanderer through the verdant hillside along Battery Path, behind the HSBC tower, may look up and wonder about the curious building perched at the top - its facade has not been usurped by giant billboards, display merchandise do not crowd its windows, its structure is unadorned by LED lights. In the midst of the shimmering edifices driven by commercial and economic impulses, it silently advertises itself as a concrete anomaly in the vortex of heavy traffic, a fort against the flux of alluring goods and money.

The staid West Wing, together with the Central and East Wing, is part of the conglomerate of former Central Government Offices (CGO) in an area marked as “Government Hill.” 

Plotted at a fengshui-blessed axis to the Government House and the Court of Final Appeal, it housed the body of the Civil Service workhorse tasked with the straight forward mandate of safeguarding the interests of Hong Kong and its people. The psyche geography of the triumvirate as guardian is etched in the undulating topography of Government Hill.

Built in the 1950s, the CGO’s abandonment of the florid, conservative neo-classical colonial tradition and embrace of post-war Modernism paved the way for Hong Kong's first steps towards an image of the City as reflected by the "International Style" movement, harbinger of new social and political ideals. The symbols of state power and class structure gave way to a more global and egalitarian aesthetic.

Spartan minimalism and structural exposure spoke of an honesty, integrity and openness, of a more idealistic era when "government" seemed closer to the ordinary lives of people as mirrored in its modest, streamlined architecture.

Meticulous documentation in defense of its essence can be found in a sensitive publication by CUHK, “The Greatest Form has No Shape” and on the website “http://www.governmenthill.org/”, with embedded videos of significant emotional impact - an interview with the former Director of public Works, Michael Wright, describing the assiduous search for iron-free granite from Diamond Hill, as well as a silent film of the construction crew, both men and women, hewing stoically, shaping the land’s destiny with the same tenacity and fierce determination of those used to “eating bitter” - scornful of obstacles, unfazed under the blistering heat of mid-summer.

These will likely be all that is left of the history and collective societal memory embodied in these structures should current government plans to sell and redevelop the much coveted site forge ahead.

While the announcement of intent tiptoes nervously around talk of more profit accruing to government coffers, the debate hinges on the relative “lack of architectural merits” of the buildings. Some find them “ugly.”

Indeed, they are “ugly” among the diamond-cut designer towers in Central the way a well-worn white cotton shirt is “ugly” next to highly embellished, lavish designer fashion.

Grim, austere, dour, astringent, stern, stark...a monastery whose architecture conveyed the clarity of purpose, that of chaste, dedicated service.

The aesthetic of simplicity and humility is understandably anathema to the current vogue for flashier architecture. It evokes a nostalgia of a different Hong Kong society. It offers a provocative contrast, and a rebuke to excesses. 

As night follows day, the pendulum inevitably swings. 

The economy of the past decade, inebriated on free-flowing liquidity and bubbly real estate, sprouted fantastical, mega-budget, iconoclastic architecture of an irrational exuberance in important cities all over the world. The precipitous fall of the ill-fated $1.2billion Millennium Dome of London and the Experience Music Project of Seattle from feted trophies to mocked effigies come to mind. 

As bubbles burst and the hangover sets in, have our eyes made the necessary, timely adjustment in the cold light of day to judge with dry lucidity an architecture from a more sober age while under the lingering influence of the taste for intoxicating monumental follies?

From the perspective of preservation, does aesthetics even matter? Styles emerge from the history of a society, and the imperative of history is to record and narrate past truths, to capture their meaning for the unfolding present and future.

Buildings are not preserved based on market worth, maintenance costs or beauty but on the merits of their social meaning, singularity, urban memory and historic relevance.

Examples of preserved modernity include Tel Aviv’s “White City” which was awarded Unesco World Heritage status in 2003. In recognition of the need, the World Monument Fund launched “Modernism at Risk”, an advocacy and conservation program for Modern buildings in 2006. (see http://www.wmf.org/advocacy/modernism)

It is no surprise, then, that a government which now prides itself on its business acumen should offer up more bargains. After all, Hong Kong is the proverbial shopper’s paradise, the erasure of its history and a lobotomized memory is but a small price to pay for fattened public coffers. 

As what’s good for big business is good for Hong Kong, an unlimited Plot Ratio and GFA should be offered to the highest bidding developers who may jointly build, market and sell as much as they may possibly wring out of the site. Whom but the most endowed, wealthy and powerful elite in Hong Kong deserve the right to move into Government Hill? 

Finally, this symbolic demolition of the last frontier between the public and the private will no doubt be an event as celebrated in Hong Kong as the Fall of the Berlin Wall. To maximize proceeds, the government could auction the buildings piece by piece on eBay to serial sentimentalists or enterprising opportunists who flip them for even greater gains. It is not that the remnants of these buildings and what they once represent should not be consigned to the dustheap of history, but why should every last stone not be parlayed into payoff?

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Matteo Biasiolo, Celine Clivaz, Jorge Gil Suarez, Sevan Spiess

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments