Maison du Savoir Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg Baumschlager Eberle

摘要

The name "La Maison du Savoir"-the House of Knowledge-has a nice sort of 18th-century ring to it, like one of those communal buildings from the Utopian imagination of French Revolutionary-era architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. But where Ledoux might have made his into a temple of pure rationality, shaped as a sphere or pyramid, the Swiss office of Austrian firm Baumschlager Eberle has made an emblem of a very different age: a slab tower rising from a long vertical base, pierced by a ground-floor opening, and wrapped in a deep, double-gridded cladding. It is, in other words, a concentrated image of modernity, with box-like facade patterning that evokes midcentury classics like I.M. Pei, faia's Kips Bay Towers and a Soviet Bloc-like shaft-and-base approach to form-making. Where those buildings are best known for their use of raw concrete, however, the Maison du Savoir is decked out entirely in steel, a nod to the former mill facility that occupied the site of what is now the University of Luxembourg. As firm principal Dietmar Eberle, hon. faia, puts it, "I always believe a building should relate to the site where it is placed."