16.7.2014 – Issue 13 - Water – Hotz Anna, Steinemann Ramias, Obiol Cecilia , Sauter Florian – Videos, Studio

Marina and Thermal Bath

by Josep Lluis Mateo, Anna Hotz, Cecilia Obiol, Florian Sauter & Ramias Steinemann

Palafitic

Gino de Giorgi: On wet or marshy land, architecture is always inserted with care, with the greatest precaution. These sites are unstable, and building needs to be light, resting like a centipede, on many legs. These structures, employing friction, are stilt constructions.
Here, small pieces of wood are assembled to form a line, with many legs at variable distances. The section allows functional and spatial complexity. Despite its modest tectonics, the project nonetheless intervenes in and dialogues decidedly with the cosmos, with the high, grandiose landscape of the mountains that the building relates. And with the water, the mud and the ice, that, rising beside them, the building celebrates.

Surrealism

Lucas Bucher: When faced with nature, architecture frequently works with two classic paradigms: mimesis or abstraction.
That is, the attempt to adapt (fusion at the limit) or the need to manifest the differences between the natural and the invented.
There is also a third way, one that is difficult for architecture to tread, but which is present in other artistic disciplines: surrealist irony.
It is a proposal of unexpected union, meta-rational and delirious, of opposites.
In our case, faced with the inhabitable frozen lake with its extreme freezing temperatures, the project is constructed as a boiling hot water tank, where the building generates its own misty microclimate in direct relation with the ice.
Here, more than a form, the project is an event.

Bunkers

Mario Bundi, Lorenz Bachmann: The conditions of water are, then, liquidity, movement and absence of form.
Architecture can react to this by highlighting its essentially contrasting qualities: heaviness, hardness, stability, immobility. The bunker as a contemporary archetype makes its appearance.
Faced with the trembling silver surface of the water, the space stabilizes, encloses and contains it in a concrete cage to prevent it escaping.
Only light can relate with it. Sometimes, the designer throws opens the prison with great openings that paradoxically reinforce the internal protected and ultimately domestic condition of the liquid.