Wolfsburg science Center competition

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

project: an invited competition for a science center, museum and cafe

location: Wolfsburg, Germany

client: City of Wolfsburg

date of competition: winter 1999

building area: 120,000 square feet

BIG SCIENCE LIKE BIG ARCHITECTUREBig Science Like Big Architecture, at first involves rigorous research, informed experimentation, large portions of play, chance, intuition, patience and talent…all of which serve to inspire discoveries that in turn… require rigorous research, informed experimentation, large portions of play, chance, intuition, patience and talent…all of which serve to inspire functional applications that…at last clearly demonstrate great wisdom, intelligence, courage, skill, an innate sense of scale and proportion and above all an extraordinary imagination.

To make an architecture that is of the subject of science, to be built in a place made historic on the foundation of a modern industrial fantasy, demands a synthesis of mythic proportions. For inspiration to do so we have been asked to look at arguably two of the most heroic figures in architecture of our time. Two architects who, through their work, seek to synthesize the differences between man and nature, time and space.

The architectures of Alvar Aalto and Hans Sharoun are derived from the organic merging of function and experience. The spaces they make employ visual and physical phenomenon in the transformation of the normative nature and limits of interiority into a seamless engagement with the exterior world. While at once, ironically, the forms they create strike distinct, if not idiosyncratic, figures on the landscape and against the sky.

Aalto insisted that in design it was necessary "to combine experimental work with the mentality of play, and vice-versa." For him, form was "... a mystery which eludes definition but makes man feel good in a way quite unlike mere social aid."For Sharoun, he believes "…in everything (even in nothing as long as it is original), otherwise we would have to vegetate in the labyrinths of a botanical science of ideas."It is our hope that our design for the Science Center Wolfsburg is Big architecture Like Big Science, that it combines experimental work with the mentality of play, that its form eludes definition but inspires belief, that its experience, like education, is enduring.

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