Luxor theatre_rotterdam_christian richters

Luxor Theatre

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Cultural
COUNTRY: Netherlands
CITY: Rotterdam, Kop van Zuid
YEAR: 2001
COMPETITION: Competition 1996, 1st Prize
GFA: 24.000 sqm
CLIENT: City of Rotterdam
COLLABORATOR: Bureau Bouwkunde (local support office)
AWARD: Mies van der Rohe Award 2001 (Shortlist)
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, © L5, © BOLLES+WILSON

The New Luxor Theatre faces both the Maas River and Rijn Harbour – A multiple orientation, a single wrapping facade, a 360° building. An internalised ramp allows three 18 m long trucks to park directly besides the first floor stage. The ramp roof provides an architectural promenade in the foyer. The Luxor auditorium seats 1500, a giant scaled musical instrument, a surprisingly ‘intimate room’. The Luxor facilitates with an appropriated spatial theatricality the well working of complex theatre logistics.

On the 11th of May 2011 BOLLES+WILSON’S Luxor Theatre in Rotterdam celebrated its tenth anniversary with a spectacular Gala show.
The evening also marked the retirement of Luxor director Rob Wiegman – the great Rob Wiegman without whom this building, this resounding and on-going cultural event would not have happened. Tributes abounded, speeches – emotional Actors, Performers, Politicians, Rotterdamers – Architects.

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Axonometric section
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Aerial perspective
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Main façade
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Back façade
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Waterfront façade
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Aerial view
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Collage
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Interior
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Auditorium
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Auditorium detail
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Anniversary Gala
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May 2011
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Foyer
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First floor
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Second floor
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Section
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Section
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Street view at night
zkw wvk office_munster_christian richters

ZWK / WVK Office

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Office

COUNTRY: Germany

CITY: Münster

YEAR: 2000

PHOTOS: © Christian Richters

A building that inserts a new square in the plan of the City, in a zone of transition from monumental 19thcentury administration buildings to smaller scale row houses with no major urban frontage, but bisected by a public right of way (commuter bicycle route). The “U”-form of the new building frames a ramped square, scales change in stages. The bicycles punch a grand portal through the office facade. Cellular offices open through a glass facade supported on a frame of laminated timber giving the conventional offices a lightness and transparence.

The principle which animates this convention bound site and program is that of carefully detailing and choreographing everyday necessities – entrance, office layout, meeting rooms. The whole adds up to a clear and precise urban insert, sculptural in its form both object and container.

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zkw wvk office_munster_christian richters
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Siteplan
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Floor plan
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Bernhardstrasse, Münster, Christian Richters

Bernhardstrasse

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Residential

COUNTRY: Germany

CITY: Münster

YEAR: 1997

GFA: 4.950 sqm

CLIENT: LVM Versicherungen

PHOTOS: © Christian Richters

A knitting together of street lines and block interior in a modest scaled residential district. The theme is more Vitruvius’ comoditas than grand or explicit architectural narrative. Street lines, precise boundaries between public and private realms are anchored with a solid dark, oil-fired, almost industrial and implicitly north German brick plinth. In contrast the upper floors in white plaster transcend this intentional massivity through their material and geometric abstraction. The two layers dovetailed together framing private terraces and necessary setbacks.

The 26 apartments are vertically ordered. Small units suitable for elderly occupants or studio apartments with garden below, the larger first floor apartments have generous balconies while the upper two floors are organised as maisonettes. An urbane facilitating of daily life is in the interiors and layout achieved with a reduced material palette – wood, stone, plaster.

Bernhardstrasse, Münster, Christian Richters
Bernhardstrasse, Münster, Christian Richters
Bernhardstrasse, Münster, Christian Richters
Bernhardstrasse, Münster, Modell, model
Bernhardstrasse, Münster, drawing, isometrie, Zeichnung, isometry
loddenheide water purification plant_klaerwerk loddenheide_munster_christian richters

Loddenheide Water Purification Plant

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Technical

COUNTRY: Germany

CITY: Munster

YEAR: 2021

PHOTOS: © Christian Richters,  © BOLLES+WILSON

40 Years of Water Research – 20 years of Water Pumping

The 2001 Loddenheide Water Filtration Plant is almost BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest building. It has for the last 20 years been cleaning and filtering road runoff before it lands in the re-absorption pond of the Loddenheide Business Park. The pond itself is a re-naturalizing success, now a bird sanctuary for countless water foul. The glazed vitrine of the pump house now stands serenely in winter snow or spring blossom. Its machines turn two Archimedes Screw Pumps, aerating the water before splashing into a circular filtration tank. The rectangular plan geometry of the first is set against the circular form of the second. A line of poplar trees, now fully grown, bisects these two fundamental geometries. For those inexperienced at reading metaphoric content into infrastructural equipment the fences surrounding the two machines come with subtext – although the supergraphic H2O on the fence mesh is not readable when approached front on, only when seen in the oblique is it there to underline the theme of ‘Water’.

The Business Park was at the outset renamed Freedom Park by the Dalai Lama, then visiting Münster. The Dalai Lama Commemoration Stone stands 120 meters away from the pumping facilities – just follow the line of poplars. It is certainly BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest work. To read its text one must walk three times around the dark green stone. We like to believe that the rainy day inauguration photo documents the Dalai Lama gleefully asking Münsters lady Mayor – ‘Is it really a BOLLES+WILSON design’.

BOLLES+WILSON water research began in 1976 with Peter Wilson’s Iconic Water House. In 2018 the watery trajectory continued with the second warehouse for RS+Yellow both with ‘Infinity Pool’ roofs.

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Loddenheide Water Filtration Plant
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loddenheide water purification plant_klaerwerk loddenheide_munster_christian richters
H2O graphic on the fence mesh
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Model
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Construction
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Design for the Dalai Lama Commemoration Stone
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The Dalai Lama Commemoration Stone
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Rainy day inauguration with Dalai Lama and Munster's last Mayor
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loddenheide water purification plant_klaerwerk loddenheide_munster
loddenheide water purification plant_klaerwerk loddenheide_munster_christian richters
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien

Victoria Park – Four Housing Blocks

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Masterplan + Residential

COUNTRY: Australia

CITY: Sydney

YEAR: 2001

CLIENT: Waltcorp. Ltd

PHOTOS: © Turner

The visitor’s image of Australia is of huge skies, bleaching light and wide horizons. The planning model for this new Sydney quarter involved dense urban blocks with six to nine story street fronts and towers with views to their downtown big brothers. Surprisingly photos of the first two of the four blocks satisfy both expectations. One thinks of Brasilia or the suburbs of Milan in the 1950s. This ex-industrial site has in its transitional state the appearance of landscape becoming city in one heroic eruption.

Sydney is growing rapidly, due in part to an exodus from country towns, to immigration and to a cunning ‘down-under’ financial regulation that only allows foreign investors to buy into new buildings. To meet this quantitative demand a radical systematising of the building process into a ‘house of cards’ stacking of prefabricated concrete panels and standard repetitive apartment layouts has emerged. This basic logic of the ESP Block and of the ‘FORM’ Block is subsequently enhanced by balcony variations. These are essential for climatic reasons, shade and outdoor living space. (As a substitute for the suburban back yard balconies in Australia are often equipped with gas outlets for high-rise barbecuing.) Compositional juxtapositions and articulations of balconies hung outside the repetitive and regular apartment grid also reverses the modernist dictum of outside expressing interior functions. Here the heterogeneous surface instigates variations in apartment types.

2001 Four Block Masterplan

2004 ESP Block completed,

2005 Block 301 (“FORM”) completed,

2005 Blocks 303 and 305 in planning.

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Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
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Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
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Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien_Sketch_Skizze
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien
Victoria Park_Sydney_Four housing blocks_Vier Wohnbauten_Australia_Australien_Sketch_Skizze