BCC. Büren Cultural Centre
Structural manipulation
Aimed to create an attraction point for the town, the new cultural centre blends with the landscape of the river Aare and, at the same time, translates the culture of the place.
Referring to the traditional wood frame constructions, which in Bueren shape both the traditional housing complexes and the beautiful existing bridge on the river Aare, the design manipulates these structural archetypes, translating them it into a new structural frame, which shapes the external membrane of the building.
The new frame, a glazed thick structural skin, while creating a continuity between tradition and contemporary, is a sort of osmotic membrane between the landscape and the inside, allowing a porous entrance system all round the building. The interaction between the structure and the natural light creates an internal space, which is always changing during the day, while allowing open views to the surrounding landscape which, itself, reflects its changing shadows, colors and smells in the inside, according to the changing of weather and seasons.
The activation of the building is also enriched by the configuration of the internal space, which is studied to be adaptable for different uses. A series of sliding panels are designed to allow the BCC to be used as a conference room, a museum, or just an open space for events related to the adjacent school activities or to larger scale cultural programs.
We believe that buildings needs to affect the users not only through program but more through the relationship they are able to create with the ecological system they are part of. In this specific place light and landscape outside and program inside are interrelated through the web-structure in corten-steel which becomes also the metaphorical relation between tradition and contemporary, bridging to the future the memory of the place.
