Architecture critic Hanno Rauterberg once maintained in German weekly “Die Zeit” that with its simple exterior and intricate interior spaces, Ben van Berkel’s Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart resembles great Baroque performance architecture. The same can be said of the MUMUTH, UN Studio’s brand new university building for musical studies and music theatre in the Austrian city of Graz. The surface might be a bit boring, but the inner space – wow! The main hall is dominated by the “Twist”, a very complex circular concrete sculpture, carrying the ceilings, taking visitors up and down. And making them dizzy.

Photos: Robert Frankl
Posted by: Architektouren Graz

A sneak preview of the building site of Odil Decq’s MACRO Museum in Rome:

It will be a fascinating building in the old Peroni Factory, which creates a new, multilevel square in a dense Roman housing area. The inauguration is scheduled for April 2010.

Posted by: arcult.it

Since the beginning of March, Frankfurt’s main shopping street ‘Zeil’ has a new hot spot: a shopping mall of no less than 77,000 square metres, called ‘MyZeil’. The Anglo-German name has caused quite a discussion, as has the architecture.

The shopping mall was designed by Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas and seems like a reminiscence to something he said at the beginning of a lecture at Darmstadt University back in the 1980s: ‘Architettura è como un orgasmo’. Translate the last word as ‘eruption’, and you get an idea of the floating glass-roof with its slides and slopes, hills and valleys, curves and holes. The interior also has an organic shape with a lot of voids in-between the 6 floors, connected by the longest escalator in Europe. On the upper floors there’s a fitness centre, a large media market and several restaurants, which should ensure that enough customers make their way up. The only thing missing is the glitter and glamour deco that’s typical for the interiors of shopping malls – perhaps because the overall shape is already expressive enough.

The shopping mall is part of the ‘Palais Quartier’, including also four high-rise towers and the reconstruction of the ‘Thurn und Taxis Palais’. This former Baroque town palace, destroyed in the Second World War, gave the name to the whole complex. The entire area used to belong to Deutsche Post, which sold it to Dutch project developer Bouwfonds/MAB. They demolished the buildings from the 1950s that covered most of the plot, but rebuilt the Baroque palace – scaled 10 % smaller than the original, so it would fit into the new complex.

The four skyscrapers in Palais Quartier are by KSP Architekten from Frankfurt, who won a competition for the design. Afterwards, Fuksas was commissioned to design the shopping mall, and his organic shapes forced KSP Architekten to change their rectangular design and put a little swing into the towers. Now they convey a slightly tipsy impression, but fit in with the Fuksas’ mall. The towers will house a hotel and, according to the original plans, the German headquarters of Dutch bank ABN Amro. But who knows about banks these days…

Posted by: A-Z Architektouren