An architect takes the concept of a mechanized, movable structure in a colorful new direction.
The facade of the five-apartment residence in Zurich called Ballet Mécanique for its aluminum and steel shutters that open and close via switches.CreditCreditValentin Jeck
THE SWISS-FRENCH architect and urban planner Le Corbusierfamously referred to the modern house as "a machine for living." But it is unlikely that even he envisioned a place as machinelike as the Zurich apartment building recently designed by the Basel-based architect Manuel Herz.
Dubbed Ballet Mécanique, the five-unit rental structure was commissioned by Katrin Bechtler, a reclusive textile heiress who communicates with the outside world only by fax. She also owns a by-appointment gallery of avant-garde art, ChemicalMoonBaby, housed in a hulking, stripped-to-the-bare-walls 19th-century villa next door, in the elegant Seefeld neighborhood. Theoretically, she chose to build rental apartments on her adjoining property to help support her art foundation, but that may largely have been notional: The facade itself added $1 million to the cost of the project.
It is easy to see how. Instead of the traditional beige- or gray-painted stucco cladding of the local vernacular, the exterior of the three-story apartment building is covered entirely by aluminum and steel panels that open and close hydraulically, like massive petals. When closed simultaneously (each unit has its own controls), the matte metallic outer surface creates a neutral if mannered geometry that blends with the area's sober palette; when open, the panels extend from the individual 800- to 1,180-square-foot units to form balconies underfoot and canopies overhead. Their inside surfaces, anodized in 20 distinct shades of red, orange and blue, shock in understated Zurich, like riotous birds of paradise in a boxwood hedge.
The idea for the building, says Herz, known for his 2010 synagogue in Mainz, Germany, made to resemble abstracted Hebrew letters, came from a kinetic, Dadaesque Jean Tinguely sculpture in Bechtler's collection (the name alludes to "Ballet Mécanique," a 1924 post-Cubist art film by Fernand Léger). But while the architecture may have been inspired by the Swiss artist, whose work is considered distinctly un-Swiss in its joyful daffiness, translating that idea into a place where people could safely live required the sort of precise construction and elaborate engineering that is the country's specialty. "It's totally not Swiss, but it's also a building that could only be built in Switzerland," Herz says.
The shutters open to reveal their colored interiors, a stark contrast to the metal exterior.CreditValentin Jeck
MODERNIST ARCHITECTS HAVE long been intrigued by the promise of buildings that move, allowing them to push beyond the idea of their craft as tautologically earthbound. In 1931, the architect Angelo Invernizzi positioned his Art Deco Villa Girasole outside Verona on a circular track; propelled by diesel engines, it rotated with the sun. After World War II, revolving restaurants became a tourist staple. The architectural establishment, ambivalent about the trend, dismissed them as follies while accepting that they would be "the inevitable designs of the future," wrote Chad Randl in "Revolving Architecture," a 2008 book about such structures. (The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, a 105-story monument that was abandoned in 1992 in the wake of the country's economic collapse, was supposed to have five revolving restaurants.)
Advances in technology and increased concerns about energy efficiency fueled the drive to hyper-mechanize in a way that was more useful, if less entertaining, than earlier kinetic buildings. In the 1980s, Jean Nouvel built the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Parisian cultural center that features a glass wall behind which 240 photosensitive apertures open and close like camera lenses to control the sun's heat and light. In recent years, so-called smart technology has enabled wonders such as a six-story composting toilet system in Seattle's Bullitt Center and an underground thermal energy aquifer in Deloitte's the Edge, an office building in Amsterdam.
Despite Ballet Mécanique's clever architectonics, though, Herz sees the building more as a lighthearted ode to the Rube Goldberg tradition than as another milestone of eco-automation. "It's not a high-tech robot thing," he says. "It has a sense of humor."
Source : times(dot)com
