Completed in 2009 in Zürich, Switzerland. In order to preserve the spaciousness of the site, all the rooms inside the building were reduced to the lowest common denominator and stacked atop...

Completed in 2018 in Lyon, France. Images by Maxime Delvaux. The office building is a generic space. It is characterized by a grid of columns and slabs to ensure total flexibility. This structure is stripped...

La búsqueda de un espacio de oficinas que inspire la creatividad y las formas alternativas de pensar es un verdadero reto en esta era de la arquitectura homogeneizada y con presupuestos de diseño subjetivos. Un proyecto en curso en Zhengzhou, la mayor ciudad de la provincia de Henan, en el centro de China, se desarrolla para impugnar esa suposición. El arquitecto suizo Christian Kerez, de Zürich, cuyos brillantes trabajos incluyen el Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein en Vaduz, junto a Morger & Degelo y el proyecto para el Museo de Arte Moderno de Varsovia, así como la fabulosa y estructuralmente audaz escuela Leutschenbach en Zürich, está trabajando actualmente en Zhengzhou en una torre de oficinas de treinta plantas insertada en un masterplan de Kisho Kurokawa que se coloca a la espalda de los convenios y la sabiduría preconcebida del desarrollo del bloque torre moderno en favor de algo drásticamente diferente dentro y por fuera. Masterplan de Kurokawa en Zhengzhou El proyecto plantea una estructura que se aligera en función de la altura para adaptarse a la variación de solicitaciones, a diferencia de la mayor parte de proyectos de este tipo, con plantas idénticas pese a estar sometidas a esfuerzos radicalmente diferentes. De nuevo la concepción estructural cobra vital importancia en la obra de Kerez. Cuando se le preguntó acerca de los procesos de pensamiento que subyacen en este proyecto, Kerez comenta: "lo que me interesa no es el diseño en el sentido de crear una forma o definición de materiales, detalles o colores, estoy mucho más interesado en el cambio de los elementos más básicos que hay en la arquitectura. ¿Qué es una columna? ¿Qué es una losa? ¿Cómo están conectados? Es la atención sobre el código genético del edificio en lugar de la estética del edificio o la cirugía plástica. No es la piel sino los huesos el objetivo de la diseño". Todos estos son conceptos que rara vez se dan en el pensamiento de los desarrolladores comerciales a pesar del hecho de que son los espacios que determinan el esqueleto de un edificio las zonas de contacto directo con las personas que pasan la mitad de su vida trabajando en su interior. El diseño interno de los espacios de trabajo debe ser de igual importancia que cualquier fachada de lujo, ya que es espacios interiores innovadores y reflexivos donde los trabajadores se pueden estimular. La innovación repercute directamente en los que la usan y en el crecimiento económico de la ciudad en que se desarrolla. Un primer proyecto, con cientos de tirantes en su perímetro, tuvo que sufrir drásticas modificaciones para adaptarse a la normativa de incendios de la región, convirtiéndose en un edificio soportado por pares de pilares aleatoriamente inclinados. Frecuencia de la estructura en la fachada a tres alturas diferentes en el edificio. La primera versión de la torre se caracterizaba por su transparencia; como los núcleos de comunicación vertical no son estructurales pueden ser de vidrio. Además, al liberar el centro de cada planta se puede crear un patio en los niveles altos y un atrio en el acceso. La torre se organiza en cuatro partes, cada una con su propia estructura adaptada a las cargas a las que se somete. No solo varía la cantidad de pilares sino también la inclinación y dispersión de los cables pretensados que rigidizan el edificio en su perímetro. En la segunda propuesta las distintas inclinaciones y direcciones de los planos formados por tubos de acero rellenos de hormigón, estabilizan el conjunto y generan una variedad espacial en las diferentes plantas al tiempo que reducen la masa del edificio en más de un 70%.

Image 11 of 15 from gallery of Pavilion for the Kingdom of Bahrain Expo 2020 Dubai / Christian Kerez. Photograph by Maxime Delvaux

At the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, architect Christian Kerez has built an inhabitable structure inside Switzerland’s Biennale pavilion that seems like a cloud from the outside and a cave from the…

Built by Christian Kerez in Zurich, Switzerland with date 2003. Images by Walter Mair. The solid, loadbearing wall slices give shape and form to the open structure without subdividing it. The lighting and...

Image 14 of 23 from gallery of Museum for Contemporary Art / Christian Kerez. Diagrams

Si possono ridurre gli elementi dell’architettura fino a trovare un’entità che li racchiuda tutti? House with one wall risponde al quesito

christian kerez has created an ephemeral ambience with a dynamic cloud-like structure placed at the center of the room.

Christian Kerez - House Müller ( house with a missing column ), Zürich 2014. Scans via , photos © Mikael Olsson , Hisa...

House with a Missing Column / Christian Kerez

blog sobre arquitectura y arte contemporáneo | seguimiento diario de la actualidad española y mundial.

Christian Kerez | Oberrealta Chapel, 1993.

Image 11 of 12 from gallery of House with One Wall / Christian Kerez. Diagram 1

Christian Kerez - House with one wall, Zurich 2007. Potentially the most posted building here, but nice to see images with it furnished. Scans via, photos © Hisao Suzuki.

FRANKFURT. There are less than two weeks left to see what I think might be the most marvelous and wonderful exhibit that I've seen in several years: The Architectural Model: Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. This fantastic show closes on 16 September. Visually describing a building evinces the possibility of another building One measure of how outstanding this show is would be to report that I left a Mediterranean beach a day early in mid-August, flew to Germany and spent the night, and the show was worth missing out on another day in the ocean and the substantial extra expense of making a dedicated trip to Frankfurt. A mid-century German children's toy of a bank block. A delightful series of peep-holes offered views into built and unbuilt worlds Another demonstration of the show's merits is to show here three-dozen or so images from the exhibit, which takes up three floors of the German Architectural Museum with a plethora of astonishing, inspiring, and simply gorgeous architectural models, from children's toys to presentation models, iterative study models to vast recreations of ancient monuments, rare proposals of never-built masterpieces, peep-hole views into far-off rooms and staggeringly detailed, person-sized skyscrapers. Conrad Roland's drawing for an exhibition hall with floating levels, 1964 Conrad Roland's Spiralhochhaus, which incredibly was conceived in 1963. Still mesmerizing: the original model for Frei Otto's Medizinsche Fakultät Ulm, 1965. Wolfgang Rathke's German Pavilion for the Worlds Fair in Montreal, 1964-65, mode of pink straws. The ground floor snaps entering visitors to attention with a room-full of rare masterpieces, many of them brilliant visions which never were, interspersed with tabletops stuffed with mass and volume studies of foam and wood and preliminary designs whose forms are as adventurous and ingenious as their choice of materials such as the drinking-straw dome of the Montreal Pavilion proposal. These early-stage demonstrations continue of the top floor, such as the number of studies for Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re: Headquarters in Zürich, which reached its climax in a refrigerator-sized wooden assemblage of floors, beams, ramps, and stairs. Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re Headquarters in Zürich. These are just some of the hundreds of items that the exhibit has collected together, some from its own vaults, some rare gems borrowed from the archives of old masters. Together, these might roughly fall into three categories: those places which exist in the world (models of real buildings, but which give license to show an alternate reality both in terms of scale with view but also material and transparency); ancient places which exist no more, and so those models which are the best representation of what was once real; and those places which have never existed: whose closest realities are the models themselves. Highlights include the tabletop hypermetabolist landscape of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air to the smaller but equally wondrous proposal by Emilio Ambasz for the Center for Applied Computer Research, an unrealized Digital-Aztec precinct on the outskirts of Mexico City. Detail of the table-size model of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air, 1962 One of the more striking models in the whole exhibit: Emilio Ambasz's design for the Center for Applied Computer Research, Mexico City,1974-75 James Stirling's Churchill College proposal, Apr-May 1959 While these never-to-be environments, found on both the ground floor and the top, would alone make for a noteworthy exhibit, the second floor is particularly awesome: At model-railroad scales (most 1:200), the visitor can play bird, or god, hovering over the humungous dioramas of ancient, medieval, and modern landscapes, many of which turned to dust centuries before the helicopter. The room opens with the quintessential rotorcraft view: a frenetic five-block slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with taxis at the foot of the Pan Am Building and bending around Grand Central Station. This bustle contacts with the eerie serenity of the other scenes nearby. In the whole exhibit there might be nothing so incredible a visual experience as standing alone above these landscapes of the never-more. Of all these, the lone model of the Crystal Palace presented the most jaw-dropping surprise. Even at the scale of an insect, the enormity of its enclosure is arresting, its relentless frame disappearing into the scene's dark far edge, as if it emerged from the blackness of lost history for the brief instant of this installation. The Royal Crescent at Bath next door is similarly isolated yet, given its history, less forlorn. The other dioramas of even older times, stretching back all the way to Mycenae and Rome, Egypt and Sumeria, are not at all melancholy, but delightful and breathtaking. These might be more common in history or anthropology museums, if not toy emporiums, and certainly not in galleries of architecture, which is precisely one of the main reasons which its so refreshing to have the heart of the exhibit given over to such "popular" and non-academic displays. The Royal Crescent, Bath. A busy day in central Pompeii The acropolis at Mycenae Temple of the Pharaohs, Dêr El Bahari, Egypt. Bruchfeldstraße Housing Development, Frankfurt-Niederrad, 1926-27 The Baroque town of Arolsen, North Hesse as it appeared in 1719 An unfortunate moment of sorts occurs as the visitor returns to the stairwell: the last diorama shows an Orinocoan settlement, a ring-clearing in the forest constructed by the indigenous Yanoama culture, one of the few moments of non-Indo-European architecture in the whole exhibit. Having seen these mono-structural villages in anthropological texts, I can attest to their impressive monumentality imbued with spiritual reasoning, which juxtaposes quite well with the square of Pompeii nearby and the Valley of Egypt across the room. Yet the accompanying wall panel merely assigns the Yanoama the word, "primitive" which is at best a thoughtless translation, and at worst a very unenlightened classification system for a German institution to be using to categorize various peoples of the world. The more ignominious connotations of this moment are ameliorated by the floor above, which give over ample space to the importance of models in Hitler's Reich, with photos, texts, and objects from the office of Albert Speer, and the like. The village center, a clearing the rainforest, ringed by dwellings, signature construction of the Yanoama, and how these "Indians" are described on the wall label. A placard explaining the fascist plan for Munich, 1939. While there is plenty of text for student or professional visitors, cueing into process, explanations of formal evolution, struggling with formal idea to execution, the constraints of construction, material, and reality, these aspects can become a bit heavy and technical, especially for those viewers who associate foam and plywood with late nights in the studio. With such a large exhibit, the great number of items to view is itself overwhelming. The exhibit might be most enjoyable in the unfamiliar moments of a micro-vista or a lilliputian skyline, understanding its translation to scale and contemplating the possibilities it suggests. These are sensations of another world. A stunning series of small foam creations. One particularly large display on the second floor is Foster and Partners' presentation model of the Commerzbank, one of hometown Frankfurt's most well-known skyscrapers. From this Vogelperspective, the tower still soars above the tops of heads, but the vantage point allows a view into the diminutive courtyard created by the successive arrangement of buildings of various heights and vintages, all dwarfed by the massive bank, which seems to have carved out a space in the air. It is a simple matter of a 15-minute walk from the museum, crossing the Main on foot to see this architectural moment in person. While the model's white foam pieces come alive in brick, stone and glass in the sunlight, the dynamic might of the tower's mass against the block and older offices is somehow lessened from the street. Yet this arrangement of masses is more familiar now. Having looked down, it is better understood. For a moment, you flew above it, and could hold a tower in your hand. But you are no longer flying. The imaginary helicopter has landed back on earth, in reality.