Sleeping beauty

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(...)Artificial landscape

There is one further crucial component to the facade build-up: stretching all the way from the rooftop balustrades to a circular hollow section fixed just above the ground is a series of cables on which climbing plants have been established.
In time, the plants should completely engulf the building, rendering the reading of it as a piece of artificial landscape that much more compelling. The angle of the cables is far from consistent, and the arrangement becomes particularly elaborate where it has to negotiate the external ramps that track along the west elevation. The cranking in plan means that views through the cables are repeatedly overlaid in one’s field of vision, creating a crosshatch effect of fantastic complexity.
In this respect, the scheme recalls the investigations of elaborately layered facades that preoccupied the Smithsons in the 1970s, the unbuilt Lucas headquarters of 1975 being the most developed example. A further refinement has been introduced by planting different species along different lengths of the facade. We will have to wait a couple of years to see, but the building should eventually resemble a kind of patchwork mountain emerging out of the low planting of the nursery.
This is perhaps a building that marks a retreat from the quasi-scientific methodology from which the Yokohama design emerged. Certainly, it is far less obviously the product of a process of number crunching. The project remains, however, avowedly at odds with conventional notions of “signature architecture”. Refusing to provide any immediately apprehensible image, it nonetheless offers a fantastically captivating environment both for the building’s users and the wider public.
The fascination now lies with the question of what bearing this project will have on FOA’s future work. A number of recent projects such as the bamboo-clad social housing it has just completed in Madrid have also been concerned with incorporating organic matter into their architectural language. Indeed, partner Zaera Polo acknowledges he is keen to investigate La Rioja’s cable technology in future work. It is not hard to see the attraction: his practice has made another extraordinary building and one that it may take several years to digest. (...)

Fonte: bdonline