Rotterdam | Towers | KCAP’s

[lllARKlll]

KCAP’s towers are on the edge

16 October 2009

By Hans van der Heijden

KCAP’s Red Apple and White Emperor towers bring a subversive slant to the Rotterdam waterfront

While the harbour city of the imagination is an exciting metropolis with a lively waterfront, such cities frequently prove, in reality, to be introspective places. This certainly is true of Rotterdam, a city where a band of dykes and quay structures have precluded any possibility of building on the edge of the River Maas.
After the city’s bombing in the second world war, urban planners created “a window to the river” by demolishing what was left of Willem Dudok’s famous wholesale store De Bijenkorf. This, although not by the water itself, provided a view from the city towards a vista occupied by cranes and funnels. The city’s spatial divorce from its very raison d’être, the harbour, did nothing to help it establish an independent urban identity. Rotterdam’s topography is as flat as everywhere else in Holland so while it is easy to balk at the glib gesturalism of so many of the buildings recently constructed in the city centre, it is not hard to see how they have been shaped by the fundamental absence of a cohesive architectural culture.
The trauma of the bombing in 1940 has contributed to this sense. According to the German architect Hans Kollhoff, the difference between Berlin and Rotterdam is Amsterdam. The presence of a precious medieval Unesco world heritage site a short distance away has persuaded Rotterdammers to accept a condition of perpetual innovation and change. Unlike Berlin, Rotterdam has yet to seriously reflect on its architectural past. No attempt has been made to address the city’s fractured urban culture. In short, anything goes.
Recently, a number of tall building have been constructed in the city centre, providing Rotterdam with the skyline that it has always lacked while allowing privileged residents to finally enjoy the spectacle of the harbour landscape beyond. In this sense, these blocks are the real “windows to the river”.



Credit: Rob t’Hart

The White Emperor sits within the Laurens district.

Within this situation KCAP Architects & Planners has designed two towers. At a complicated spot, somewhat apart from the main shopping streets, the so-called White Emperor rises from the heart of the rapidly renewing Laurens District.
The building stacks a diverse range of functions on top of each other. Reading from the bottom upwards we find: a three-storey basement parking garage; shops, restaurants and two entrance lobbies at ground level; three floors of offices; a full storey of bike storage and plant space; and finally 18 storeys of rental apartments.
The tower’s highly plastic form has been conceived in response to the surrounding buildings. It has a tripartite appearance: a single-storey glass plinth, a middle stage that corresponds to the height of the adjacent housing and a quirkily modelled top that occupies a smaller footprint than the lower parts.
The plan of the upper levels, while manipulated into an irregular form, is highly efficient: essentially a double loaded corridor type. However, the site’s triangular shape has enforced an arrangement where four dwellings are located on one side of the corridor and two on the other — a configuration that makes it possible to introduce daylight to the single-loaded part of the corridor. The four apartments ranged along one side of the corridor are in turn divided into two pairings by the introduction of a wedge-like void, which extends up the full height of the building’s upper stage, further contributing to the irregularity of the form.



Credit: Rob t’Hart

The White Emperor stacks a diverse range of functions on top of each other.

KCAP’s first design studies envisaged much of the building being faced in horizontal and vertical ribbons of alternating closed and transparent materials. The vision offered was that of a capriciously shaped car radiator grille, the lack of architectural reference presenting a problematic level of abstraction.
These drawings seemed to convey an architectural sensibility that was strongly led by the fascinations that are all too common to post-Koolhaas Dutch modernism. In developing the building’s skin, however, KCAP has travelled in unexpected directions. The practice partner and architect in charge, Han van den Born, explains that the logistic constraints of the inner-city site played a decisive role in establishing the building’s constructional language. Internal concrete walls and floors were cast on site with tunnel forms while the facades were assembled from precast concrete sandwich panels that incorporated pre-installed thermal insulation and windows. High speed of construction was therefore made possible with minimal need for on-site storage.
These building methods prove defining in aesthetic terms: it is unavoidable that the size of the concrete panels remains visible and the load-bearing concrete walls presuppose a punched facade. KCAP’s original proposal of alternating ribbons contradicted the construction logic. In the scheme that was eventually built the horizontal and vertical ribbons seem to grow out of the concrete panels, becoming — along with the rough texture of the planes between the windows — secondary decorative motifs. The dimensions of the panels establishes the facades’ underlying grid. And yet, while their module is apparent, the visual impact of the joints between them is suppressed by the relief of the ribbons. The concrete is brightly white which adds to the play of shadow and light.
The resulting treatment of square openings, cruciform window frames, lintels and rough decorative facade planes reminds one of the early modernist commercial work of Auguste Perret and most of all of those bright buildings with punched facades, articulated by a poignant working of relief, that feature prominently among the work of the Chicago School. Significantly however, despite the familiarity of the sources that it has employed, KCAP has gone to great lengths to disrupt the readings of weight and solidity with which that imagery is freighted.



Credit: Rob Hoekstra

KCAP established a relationship to the tower’s floor area and height.

The practical demand to work with concrete panels induced a reconsideration of the original radiator grille aesthetics. KCAP’s other tower estate, the Red Apple, probably demonstrates how the White Emperor would have looked had that original proposal been implemented. This project is larger in scale. Not only is the tower itself much higher, but there is also a range of lower and medium scale buildings at its foot. The different buildings all have distinct typological properties and their own facade articulations. However, the language of vertical and horizontal ribbons unifies the ensemble of independent volumes.
There was quite a specific reason to break this scheme down into a collection of smaller buildings. KCAP is also the masterplanner of the wider area, the Wijnhaven district, and one of its objectives has been to respect the small grain of post-war office buildings retained on the site. KCAP uses an open-ended strategy to achieve this. While there is no insistence on a prescribed final image, the architect has laid down a single, blunt rule which determines the shape of all development: the higher a tower, the smaller its footprint can be.
KCAP’s ensemble of smaller buildings refers to the particularities of the immediate context, approximating the scale of the neighbouring volumes and offering a distant reference to the architectural cliché of the strip window in post-war office architecture. The ribbons from which the facades are composed are made of red anodised aluminum panels which vary in colour, profile and depth. Their width reduces towards the top of the tower in an irregular way, while those that enfold the lower blocks are spaced with equal freedom. It is as if a hesitant hand sketch of a very harsh building — a toddler’s drawing of a SOM skyscraper perhaps — had been found on the construction site and directly translated into built form.
In both of KCAP’s tower buildings, the facade is literally and figuratively disconnected from the tunnel-form concrete. The relationship between the facade and the load-bearing structure to which it is applied is significantly different from that struck by the elevations of the Chicago School buildings and the steel frames that they enclosed. In Chicago, verticality was strongly suggested, the facades offering a vivid reflection of the transport of loads to the foundation.



Credit: Rob t’Hart

The building’s volumes respond to the scale of their neighbours.

KCAP views the facade as a totally autonomous design problem. The way the cladding of both schemes is expressed denies any idea of stacking while even the differentiation of load-bearing and non-load bearing walls that is intrinsic to tunnel-form construction is suppressed. In vain, the eye searches for traditional tectonic logic or perfection.
The use of historic imagery in the White Emperor reinforces its urban properties. At first glance, the building seems to merge seamlessly with its surroundings. Through its programme, its volumetric articulation and its worldly appearance, it presents an urban gesture that resonates with a received image of metropolitan architecture. But a closer look reveals that the White Emperor is just as obstreperous a building as the Red Apple and that both are at odds with the populist consumerism that has characterised much recent development in Rotterdam.
KCAP plays strictly architectural games that are as idiosyncratic as they are confusing. Both designs deal with the particularities of the Rotterdam context behind the quays and dykes. The White Emperor refers to an imaginary context: familiar, but not local. The Red Apple sets up a context for itself and relies on the conditions of the urban masterplan that KCAP has provided.



Credit: Rob t’Hart

The lower building of the Red Apple is configured around a courtyard.

Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3150991&newstype=A&sectioncode=428#ixzz0UZ0UTBIB

Fonte: Bdonline