30.10.2024

The hanging gardens of Lima

Building design

Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell from Grafton Architects are the architects of the moment: Next year they will curate the Architecture Biennale in Venice and an impressive university building has just been completed in Lima. We spoke to Shelley McNamara about the project.

Baumeister: How did you get the job?

Shelley McNamara: Through a competition. Utec, the client, had commissioned Frederick Copper Llosa, an important architect from Lima, to organize a competition. Llosa then wrote to many architects and invited them to take part. He also invited us because he had seen one of our buildings, the Università Bocconi in Milan. The shortlist comprised around 65 architects, around 50 of whom were from Peru. With our competition entry, we were one of the last five to be invited for an interview. The other four were Peruvian firms. Yvonne Farrell, who runs the office with me, took part in the interview in Lima, so we won.

B: How did you prepare for the competition? Did you visit the building site in Lima beforehand?

S M: No, we didn’t, but there is an architect working in our office who has spent a long time in Peru and knows Lima pretty well. She brought the city to life for us with her descriptions. We also analyzed Lima in the usual way for us – in other words, we took a close look at the climate, the culture and the surroundings. Of course, it wasn’t possible to learn everything about Lima in the little time you have for a competition, but we gathered as much information as possible in order to make an appropriate proposal.

B: What kind of building is it?

S M: It’s a university building for engineers, especially mining engineers. Utec, the client, is a private, non-profit university. The student body consists of self-pay students and scholarship holders. We were really impressed by the tender documents. What impressed us most was that the client wanted to bring culture and engineering together: The building is a combination of laboratories, classrooms and a library, but also includes a theater, a cinema and exhibition halls. It was important to the university management to give the arts a place in the building. Creative courses in various artistic disciplines are therefore also offered alongside the science courses.

B: What kind of district is the building in?

S M: The university is located on the border of two very different districts. To the north of the campus is Miraflores, a rather affluent district with many new restaurants, hotels and chic stores. On the southern side is the very beautiful old and quiet residential district of Barranco. But the design of the building is also inspired by one of Lima’s two green valleys, which connect the city with the Pacific Ocean 40 meters below. There is an imposing cliff: at the top is the city, and at the bottom a highway runs parallel to the beach. The building is located in one of the green valleys, a side arm that connects the city to the sea. The different geographical conditions are very dramatic in their contrasts: the contrast between the noisy city highway and the barranco on the one hand, and the relationship between the cliffs and the sea and the cliffs and the city on the other.

B: What is the architectural concept of the building?

S M: The building is 300 meters long and will be constructed in three sections. The first section, which has already been completed, is 120 meters long. It is a very extensive task, because this is not an existing university moving into a new building, but a completely new university is being built – with a new study concept, new curricula, everything there is new. The building site is long and narrow and has the shape of a boomerang. It quickly became clear to us that access from the city highway was not possible and that access would have to be from Barranco instead. We gave the side of the building facing the city and the highway a public and striking face. As this north side is noisy due to the heavy traffic, the access zones are mainly located here, while the classrooms face the quieter residential buildings of Barranco.

B: The building is very tall. How does the building interact with the small-scale development of Barranco?

S M: The larger laboratories and lecture theaters are all on the first floor. As you go up to the higher floors, the rooms get smaller and smaller. This allowed us to design the building as a cascade of gardens and terraces that connect to the smaller scale of the residential neighborhood and provide different views of Barranco.

B: To what extent is the building designed as a public space?

S M: The public character of the building is emphasized on the one hand by its location in a site that is visible and accessible from many sides, and on the other hand by the fact that the outdoor space is part of the circulation areas. With the exception of the façade facing the highway, which has no glazed openings, the building is visible from the outside. The climate is very mild, which is why almost all areas of the building function as outdoor space. The breeze blowing inland from the ocean is very pleasant – it is never too hot or too cold. The only real indoor spaces are the seminar rooms. We think it is particularly successful that the students can walk to the classrooms via galleries and bridges and are thus constantly in contact with the city: You hear the city, you see the city, you always know where you are.

B: What architectural influences were there?

S M: For many years, we studied the work of South American architects very intensively, especially Lina Bo Bardi and Paulo Mendes da Rocha. I don’t think we would have taken part in this competition if we hadn’t developed an almost emotional affinity with these works.

B: Are there also influences from Peru itself, for example the terraced landscapes in the Andes and Machu Picchu?

S M: Yes, absolutely. We deliberately wanted to create a connection. We also found that there is a parallel between the location of Machu Picchu and the location of our university building. Namely in the way Machu Picchu reacts to the inhospitable environment of the Andes. We also had to establish a relationship with an almost hostile environment due to the location of the site next to the urban highway. That’s why we designed the stepped terraces. We wanted the users to find a place of retreat within the vertical infrastructure of the building.

B: Have you visited the landscapes in the Andes?

S M: Yes, we have been there. Incidentally, there is also a historic landscape in Ireland that is reminiscent of Machu Picchu. We presented this landscape at the Venice Biennale in 2012. It’s a monastic settlement in the middle of the Atlantic.

Photos: Iwan Baan

25.12.2024

Exhibitions

For a differentiated approach to the portfolio

Building design

General

Architects usually try to create finished houses, i.e. coherent works of architectural art for eternity. But does this claim stand up to reality? Should that even be the claim? Inspired by references from architectural history, art and anthropology, the young Stuttgart-based studio Kaiser Shen has developed various theses and tested them on the basis of its own projects. From […]

21.11.2024

Tens of millions for the unloved barn

Building design

General

The Museum der Moderne will be expensive. Very expensive. But what is scandalous is not that the budget was approved. But how it was approved. Here is the opinion of architecture critic Falk Jaeger.

Herzog & de Meuron’s Museum der Moderne has been criticized from all sides for years: it is far too expensive, the design is not appealing and the visual axis between the National Gallery and the Philharmonie is being obstructed. Now the budget committee of the German Bundestag has approved the cost plan for the project. How can it be that politicians are ignoring all the facts and public objections and approving the exorbitant cost plan for a new museum, while the other buildings of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation have long been in need of renovation?

Visualizations: Herzog & de Meuron

Rarely has a public building project in Germany provoked so much headwind as the Museum der Moderne. A shitstorm, you could almost say, if the contributions to the discussion were not of a serious nature. “The most expensive crusty bread in the world”, was the headline in the FAZ, referring to a metaphor used by jury chairman Arno Lederer. “This barn is a scandal” was the headline of another FAZ article, a scathing all-round attack that scandalized the location, architecture, size, environmental aspects and costs in equal measure.

Some points of criticism even overshoot the mark. The castigation of the sacrilegious proposal to block the line of sight from Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie to Scharoun’s Philharmonie (nicely illustrated by Stefan Braunfels in another polemic) is an all too superficial, silly stop-the-thief argument. Of course, a new building in this location would interrupt the view, but Scharoun had already planned it that way in terms of urban development, and Mies had to assume this in his planning.

Why would the view be so indispensable? If you want to see the Philharmonie, you can just step outside the door. In the beginning, when the Tiergarten was still free of trees due to the war, you could even see the Brandenburg Gate from the Neue Nationalgalerie, so what the heck.

The Tagesspiegel described the situation as “eyes closed and through”, and was right: the budget committee of the German Bundestag approved another hefty gulp from the taxpayers’ purse for the Museum der Moderne, thereby imposing a voluntary commitment for future increases in building costs from 364.2 million to a forecast 450 million euros. It certainly won’t stay at that, it’s more likely to be 600 million. But then the project will be under construction and there will be no turning back.

Dependence on private donors

The real scandal is how the Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters (CDU), has pushed through her personal “Grand Projet” against the most diverse reservations in the backrooms of politics. The political caste is making up its own mind about the project. Facts, pragmatic considerations and public opinion play no role. Perhaps the highly controversial architecture of the Museum der Moderne (“barn”, “ALDI discount store” etc.) would not have been a sufficient reason for a rejection, after all it was the result of a competition with a prominent jury. However, the urban planning problems, the reduction in the floor plan with the consequence of the expensive, difficult-to-calculate lowering into the extremely problematic Berlin building ground, should have given the housekeepers food for thought.

It is also annoying to see the submissive dependence on some private donors who had threatened to move their collections elsewhere. This is due to the fact that the foundation can hardly organize its own major projects, internationally attractive exhibitions, and is dependent on partners who are willing to pay.

Too many building sites

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is constantly being “gifted” new, magnificent museums by the federal government, which then have to be used and maintained. However, there are already decades of renovation backlogs at the existing houses. In addition, there is inadequate funding for qualified specialist staff and a pitiful acquisition budget of 1.6 million for all museums. None of this fits together.

The Foundation should finally be consolidating. Instead, the Humboldt Forum in the palace replica is to be brought back on track in 2020, the general renovations of the Pergamon Museum, the New National Gallery and Scharoun’s State Library are devouring huge sums of money and so on…

It’s no wonder that Berlin looks longingly at the popular major exhibition events in Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York. We want to play in that league too, we want to have something like that here again.