At Louisville, Museum Plaza Taking Shape
Louisville, Kentucky, USA is most probably not a city that's on the radar of many
people. The city of roughly 700.000 inhabitants located at the Ohio River is hardly
known outside the US. This might change though, at least for people who are interested
in architecture, since the city is the site for what is probably one of the most
polarizing current architectural projects, “Museum Plaza”.
Originally planned as a new art museum and art center, it became soon clear that
a fairly large selection of other uses for the building would be needed in order
to come up with the running costs of the complex. In the end, it was decided to
build a mixed use 62-story skyscraper including luxury condos, offices and a hotel
besides the main art space. Since the contraints of the building site were very
difficult, the New Yorker architectural office REX
(led by Joshua Prince-Ramus, who was once a partner of Rem Koolhas at OMA)
had to turn usual architecture standards upside down, in the truest sense of the
word.
REX's project website shows an (at first sight) somewhat ugly and non-proportional
building. It takes some time and explanation to get behind the idea of this building
and see why it's special and what makes up the actual concept. And that concept
is explained by Joshua Prince-Ramus at TED TALKS, the video of which can be seen
at the company's
website. Prince-Ramus talks about three different projects, Musum Plaza is
the last one, about two thirds into the video. The solution of lifting the public
parts of the building way up into the air becomes clear as he talks about the
constraints and circumstances of the project. From this perspective, the clumsy
building seems to fulfill its intention and will also provide a new architectural
landmark that will probably give a boost Louisville's reputation (at least, I
would like to see that monstrous building in person).
The video and presentation finishes with an animation about Museum Plaza that
is very well worth seeing, even if you're not interested in the architecture itself.
The way the video was filmed and the way it seamlessly combines shaky hand-camera
filming with rendered and animation sequences is breathtaking. If you don't want
to load that whole video to see this, you could also see the video at YouTube,
albeit with a much worse quality.
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