S, M, L, XL Book:
Karlruhe is Europe's geographical center. It poses as a "typical west german city at the end of the 20th century". It's citizens serenely inhabit the baroque idyll of their reconstructed townscape. It matters little that their town has been through modernized.
The city is seemed to be developed by its own periphery. However, conceptually it's 'heat' will always remain the center.
It's train station is being extended to receive the IDZ Germany's equivalent of the French TGV.
Take a Futuristic institution - ZKM, Zentruim fur Kurst und Medientechnologie, also known as Electronic Banhaus - and place it in this context.
Projected on the perimeter of the baroque town, on a narrow strip of land on the wrong side of station and tracks, it focus on and of ramps of the Autobahn.
It's program consists of a museum of media art, a museum of contemporary art, research and production facilities from music, video and virtual reality, theater of media, lecture halls, media library.
It represents a laboratory open to the public, the elusive connection between kunst and technology.
A darwinian arena where classical and electronic media can compete with and influence each other.
The entire program is incorporated in a single container, 43m x 43m x 58m.
The container is pushed bluntly against the railway embankment, then coupled with the station circulation to form a new, two faced entry:
1.To the city; BAHNHOFMUSEUM
2.To the periphery, MUSEUMBAHNHOF
Within this container, it seen that all the program are superimposed in a single stack.
1. Studios - Music and Film
2. Laboratories - Video and Computers
3. Media Theater
4. Media Museum
5. Library
6. Lecture Halls
7. Museum of contemporary Art
8. Restaurant
9. Open Air Terrace
This sequence corresponds to a transition from production/research/display, from artifact to "natural", from private to public.
The lower part of the structure is a machine however, towards the top, it becomes more of a building.
East and West side of the core are defined by huge walls of black concrete. Between the wall space, seven Vierendeel beams, each six meter deep, creating an alteration between floors completely free of structure - to exploit this literal incarnation of the free plan one of the rooms is round and floors of inhabited structure that are "marked" by different Vierendeels, which oscillate between structural support and architectural definer, utility and aesthetic.
The deep core is surrounded by four thinner zones:
1. A public void space faces the historical city to the North; i.e. the atrium as a facade. A system of elevators, escalators, ramps, balconies climb upwards in a continuos movement from event to event. Two - thirds of the way up, this route enters the core itself to merge with the slope of the lecture hall. Its facade combines blue, red transparent and etched glass in a mask that sometimes contradicts the movement behind it.
Facing the lecture hall - it opens to the atrium - the steel millions turn to non-reflective glass to form a transparent 'eye'.
2. In the East zone, behind a screen of expanded metal, allow open-air escape from the interior. The metal wall is used as an electronic billboard. The activities leak out and are projected in real time alternating with commercial messages, railway network bulletins...e.t.c.
The screen faces a ramp that leads directly to the ZKM entrance, on the level of the trains and below it, to a new station hall. A passage runs beneath the tracks to connect North and South entries, a mixing chamber of the two publics.
In this hybrid of utilitarian and cultural program, a linear antechamber with a medieval german motif (fireplace, log beams on the ceiling) at the level of the trains represents a platform for culture. A seemingly endless elevator transports the visitors from here through a hole in the wall to the realm of the media. The theater is connected to this lobby by a 30 meter wide door that can move up and down.
3. On the South is the "robot" - An adaptation of the fly-tower of a conventional theater. A void space that runs the entire height of the building to allow stage sets, electronic devices, projectors, arts, container capsules to move up and down... or to be locked in place to create a new condition on particular floors.
Corrugated Polyester Skin is used for this facade.
4. The West zone, clad in giant glazed bricks, contains offices and individual plant rooms for each major program, to provide the most specific, direct precise servicing.
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