Renzo Piano designed this shopping mall at the foot of the Vesuvius: he called it Vulcano Buono. The design not only reflects the shape of Vesuvius, the building is also integrated into the landscape by the use of turf and grass as the ‘façade’. The shopping and business centre is located in Nola, some 30km from Naples, if you would like to visit it, although it probably looks more interesting from afar (and, thus, on photographs) than from the inside.
Boullée was a French architect (1728-1799) who did not actually manage to build anything. That is, none of his monumental designs you can see above. He did build some residential buildings in Paris of which only one (supposedly) survives: L’hôtel Alexandre at n°16 rue de la Ville l’Évêque.
Boullée was a visionary. Yet, it seems that his designs were grandiose, too megalomaniac to be built, even though he lived under Louis XV and XVI. To my knowledge, only the fascist period in Italy and Germany and the Communist rule in the USSR saw such an upsurge in monumental architecture. Only under absolutist regents, monumental architecture seems to thrive. Without having built much, Boullée was largely forgotten. Only in the 20th century he was rediscovered – although also today, he remains fairly unknown among the general public. Peter Greenaway has dedicated a film to the French architect.
In The Belly of an Architect (1987) by Peter Greenaway a fictitious American architect attempts to organize an exhibition on Boullée – on the monument for the Italian king Vittorio Emmanuele II in Rome, of all places. Quite an amusing film, but not very profound.
For an excellent (online) exhibition of Boullée’s designs, visit the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For more information on Boullée, Wikipedia in English and French (for more information).
It is unbelievable how you can create atmospheres and provoke feelings through architecture. Libeskind certainly succeeded in silencing visitors, making them feel locked up, insecure, sad. A place you must have visited to experience its full potential. The room depicted is called the ‘Holocaust Tower’.
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell shortly dwells on ‘The Power of Context’ (p. 133-168), describing how the environment can influence people’s behaviour. He gives the example of the New York metro, which was immensely crime-infested in the 1980s. To decrease criminality, the trains were cleaned and completely freed of graffiti – every day, again and again. Apparently, the strategy worked. Together with publicly rounding up and arresting fare dodgers, the clean and safe environment helped to prevent people from assaulting or robbing passengers. In architecture, the influence of the environment is highly underestimated or not considered. In my opinion, especially many famous architects design buildings from a planner’s point of view, not from the user’s. Daniel Libeskind in this case has managed to create a heavy and depressing atmosphere in his Jewish museum. It might be interesting to research how it changes people’s behaviour.
For more information on the Jewish Museum in Berlin, visit Studio Libeskind or read Daniel Libeskind’s highly inspiring autobiographical book Breaking Ground.
The photo was taken by Bitter Bredt and was published on Libeskind’s website.
emile wohlfarht 