The architectural object interrogates and questions the passer-by, but also the location of the architecture and its history, which summons up Biaggio Rossetti, Domenico Fontana and Giulio Romano in its materiality, the prominent relief, to the way ashlar inherited from the mannerism and from the Italian Baroque.
The concrete wrapping of a deep dull black, its
plasticity, its opacity, its minerality, its thickness are also questions / answers to a parochial, post-modern context, and to the formal and chromatic hypertrophy attached to it.
The assumption of this aesthetic and technical risk that reintroduces the issue of pattern and figure, seen in the ornament, is also an archaic “way” to affirm the public nature of the building and the aesthetic and ethical
implications of its creators.
The project rethinks the inertia of the heavy walls, opaque and mineral, archaic almost antic.
In other words, just the opposite of the exterior glued petrochemical insulation, smooth and unsustainable, of the new buildings around it.
The pyramids of concrete create a kinetic, graphic and original entity, the static architectural object, black and
massive, is transformed into sensitive dynamics
seen as sensuous due to the four sides that capture light in reflection.
Emotion, feeling, will these be in the heart of the question of ornament? If absent, from the
picturesque (vulgar and popular), from Adolf Loos (The American of Vienna), from Robert Venturi (the “bad” trip of LA) and Aldo Rossi of the shameless Berlin events ? Wiel Arets in the University library of Utrecht, Farshid Moussavi in the John Lewis of Leicester and some others have previously addressed this dangerous issue with verve.
Here, the constructive and thermal dimension of prefabricated structural wall decoration also revindicates the autonomy of the object with its context, the complicity with its design and the universality of the decorative dimension that dresses and inhabits the cities.
The fluidity of the device of composition that concludes the city block by means of a curve, the cavities and the grand opening in loggia takes a form of lust like the Grande Odalisques of Ingres; rotated, but still open to the views. Because the project is wrapped with care and ease around an interior courtyard that governs and multiplies the coordination of the pedagogical use of the cultural and social tool,
it amplifies the opened perspectives and the play of light and color by means of a compact and effective configuration.
The unique architectural writing, as well as the strong presence of a motive, invites material curiosity about the thickness, about the doctrine of exterior insulation, and the incestuous relationship of the structure with the ornamental expression in the history of the discipline.
The black diamond of Strasbourg is simple yet
sophisticated, technical but archaic, hard but soft, black but light, subtle but vulgar and elegant.
A domesticated rockery, a new sobriety?
