ARCH+ features 11: FAR and Georg Vrachliotis
The recently completed temporary home of the Goethe Institute in Santiago de Chile was presented by Marc Frohn of the FAR architectural bureau. Georg Vrachliotis reflects on the project from the architectural history perspective in relation to the work of Fritz Haller.
An earthquake in Chile caused serious damage to the building housing the Goethe Institute. During the rebuilding work, a temporary solution had to be found. The impressive temporary building project has been a resounding success. Using comparatively modest resources, the design concept devised by the FAR architectural bureau has turned the unfinished floor of a high-rise office building into a highly flexible and adaptable space. FAR has deliberately cast aside traditionally held expectations of a prestigious national institution to create functionally flexible, open and transparent thresholds, many structural elements of which will be reused again in the finished institute building once the refurbishment is complete.
Marc Frohn on the subject of the threshold: "Although the threshold does define a boundary, at the same it always offers a targeted way of crossing it. This results in a complexity of connections, including the visual, the acoustic and the climatic. What intrigues us in all our projects is finding different ways of approaching this complexity. In the temporary Goethe Institute, the acoustic curtain allows users to define their own thresholds."
Georg Vrachliotis reflects on the project from the architectural history perspective in relation to the work of Fritz Haller. Vrachliotis is Acting Professor of Architectural Theory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), formerly the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Karlsruhe, where Fritz Haller also lectured from 1977 until the beginning of the nineties.
All pictures courtesy of: David von Becker
© 2020 S. Siedle & Söhne OHG
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