http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzog_%26_de_Meuron
"A building is a building. It cannot be read like a book; it doesn't have any credits, subtitles or labels like picture in a gallery. In that sense, we are absolutely anti-representational. The strength of our buildings is the immediate, visceral impact they have on a visitor."
- Jacques Herzog
"Among their completed buildings, the Ricola cough lozenge factory and storage building in Mulhouse, France stands out for its unique printed translucent walls that provide the work areas with a pleasant filtered light. A railway utility building in Basel, Switzerland called Signal Box has an exterior cladding of copper strips that are twisted at certain places to admit daylight. A library for the Technical University in Eberswalde, Germany has 17 horizontal bands of iconographic images silk screen printed on glass and on concrete. An apartment building on Schötzenmattstrasse in Basel has a fully glazed street facade that is covered by a moveable curtain of perforated latticework. It is impossible to list here all of their noteworthy building projects."
"While these unusual construction solutions are certainly not the only reason for Herzog and de Meuron being selected as the 2001 Laureates", Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, "One is hard put to think of any architects in history that have addressed the integument of architecture with greater imagination and virtuosity"."
- Pritzker Prize Award Announcement
"[The work of Herzog and de Meuron is] among the very few architects whose work can be interpreted as an effort to regain architecture's original grounds. A search for primariness, for direct contact with the constructive essence of architecture, characterizes their work and differentiates it from that of others of their generation, with whom they diverge in their emphasis on originality."
- Rafael Moneo, AV monograph on Herzog and de Meuron, 1996
It is from this information that I've gathered and siphoned through. That there is no similarities between the pieces of architecture that they have designed and constructed. Each piece of architecture being unique and different to the one designed before it. As Herzog said himself, the strengths in their building lies in the immediate, visceral impact they have on a visitor. Others have commented on their imagination, originality, and virtuosity. All this is reflected in their work.
Three buildings that I have a particular interest to is the VitraHaus, 11 11 Lincoln Road and 40 Bond Street.
The concept of the VitraHaus connects two themes that appear repeatedly in the oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron - the archetypal house and the idea of stacked volumes. The showrooms are reminiscent of familiar settings usually found within residential pieces of architecture. The individual 'houses' have general characteristics which are tied with display spaces. These houses are conceived as abstract elements. With a few exceptions, only the gable ends are glazed, and the structural volumes seem to have been shaped with an extrusion press. These individual houses are stacked to a total of five stories high and cantilevered up to 15 meters in some places, the twelve houses, whose floor slabs intersevt the underlying gables, create a three-dimensional assemblage - a pile of houses which at first glance resembles an almost chaotic appearance.
11 11 Lincoln Road is a piece of architecture envisioned by Robert Wennett. It represents the collaboration of architects, artists and designers to create a unique shopping, dining, residential and parking experience for Miami. This building is constructed of concrete and glass, Jacques Herzog describes this building as pure Miami Beach - "all muscle without cloth". Each level of the sculptural parking facility is filled with natural light, creating successively striking vistas of the city. At the base, the retail spaces offer unobstructed access to a newly transformed public space. This building encompasses 40000 square feet.
Floor plan - http://www.1111lincolnroad.com/Floor%20Plan.pdf
40 Bond Street is a reinterpretation of New York's downtown loft through Herzog & de Meuron's own avant-guard prism. With glass curtain walls now everywhere, Herzog and de Meuron have smartly avoided giving us another office-park-like matrix of hard-edged panels. Instead they have looked to the cast iron facade for inspiration and come up with a form that wraps the structure almost like protective cladding. These curved glass pieces (manufactured in Barcelona) not only pay a sly homage to downtown loft buildings, but they soften the overall effect of the modern geometry. It will be interesting to see how light plays off these glass spandrels.
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