Cologne 3: Kranhäuser
Kranhäuser, Cologne (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij) (click-2-enlarge)
Just outside the city center of Cologne, a small island is being redeveloped. It is an enormously interesting site where beautiful old warehouses are being converted and new buildings are being built. Sure, in the past decennia centrally located harbor areas have been redeveloped all across Europe. But Cologne has achieved to still add a new feature to the classic receipt: Kranhäuser.
Cranehouses, translated in English. A name that points to the supposed iconography of the buildings: the harbor cranes that once stood here. I keep finding that fascinating, as it means the architecture points back to the history of the site, while at the same time projecting a new condition into the future. It is like the triglyphs in the architecture of the Greek temples: made in stone, but referring to the wooden beam that punctuated the façade at the time these structures were still built in wood.
The iconography reminds me of the Shipping and Transport College in Rotterdam, designed by Neutelings Riedijk. There though, the iconography of the crane is merely contextual (not historical) and a ‘Duckian’ representation of the program. What the ‘cranehouses’ and college have in common, is that the iconography is pretty hard - if not impossible - to recognize if you wouldn’t know it. In Cologne some of the old cranes are still standing on the quay. They look very different.
Cologne 2: Kolumba
Peter Zumthor - Kolumba, Cologne (Photographer: Michiel van Raaij) (click-2-enlarge)
The architectural highlight of Cologne is definitely the Kolumba Museum, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Despite its architectural splendor, the building has a very modest place in the city center. The design is simply integrated in the building mass of a generic perimeter block. It’s like a key performer that is standing in the background.
The tension of being both ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ reappears in the architecture of the façade. Like its neighbors, the building is strictly aligned to the street. But unlike its neighbors, the interior floors aren’t articulated in the façade. Instead, all sense of scale is distorted. There are a couple of enormous windows up at the… first or second floor. A little lower, slim horizontal lines define perforated surfaces. What does the distance between these lines represent? Does it tell us anything?