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Daily Dose
Monographic Images

1691 | Rem Koolhaas - Christian Kerez

OMA
Jussieu – Two Libraries, Paris, 1992

"Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. However beautiful, Albert's campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to 'inhabit' it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building. To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network. These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized' almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario."

 
Christian Kerez
Multistory parking for the Pearl Path, Bahrain, 2021
"The project consists of a very basic structure of columns and slabs. The slabs are built in the shape of one or several shells. The floor and the ceiling create a series of spaces changing from concave to convex and back again. Throughout the building, the slabs touch each other in a way that you reach one level from another in a continuous transition without the additional element of a ramp. The geometrical transformation of the slabs provides a constantly changing spatial experience when moving up or down the parking as the slabs shift from high to low, from concave to convex, and from spaces expanding to the interior to spaces expanding to the exterior of the building. The parking garage is understood as a public space within the city. The four structures in the old town of Muharraq are part of the Pearl Path Project by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Bahrain. This infrastructural project creates large open spaces within the existing dense urban fabric. Its large scale and ever-changing form add a new spatial quality to the historic city centre. Four structures in different locations follow the same spatial concept in different ways, due to their specific site conditions. The Parking is not a hideaway storage for cars but an open experience of the driveway up and down the city. The Parking creates a link from our present time with its possibilities and commodities to the restauration and preservation of National Heritage Houses."
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