Marrakech 1: Doors
Marrakech (Photographer: Marieken Oostrom) (click-2-enlarge)
In Marrakech buildings don’t have a façade. They come without one. The buildings in the old city, the medina, I mean. Sure, the bending paths through the city that are lined with walls. But these walls can’t really be called facades. One often can’t tell where one building ends and another one starts. There are walls and even more walls that are all finished in pretty much the same way. And all these walls are in same state of disarray. The only thing that punctuates and thereby defines the walls are doors. Doors that lead to an architecture you couldn’t have imagined from the street. This is the miracle of Marrakesh.
Volcano, by Piano
Renzo Piano - Volcano Buono, Napels (Copyright Moreno Maggi RPBW) (click-2-enlarge)
Like a chameleon, architecture can mimic any natural landscape it sits on. From a Swiss alp, to the British cliffs, to a nearby glacier, to Mexican basalt rock, to a volcano – such as the Renzo Piano Building Workshop has designed for the periphery of Naples. It’s as real estate agents say: context is everything. Whereas iconography usually means a shrinking or blowing-up of an image to fit the scale of the architecture, this enormous building (a shopping mall) has actually the size of a small volcano. This ‘crater’ has a diameter of 150 m, the ‘volcano’ itself is 320 m wide. It is 1:1 iconography.
“The crater is a contemporary take on a Greek marketplace, a void as a place for events, meetings, dialogue and the gathering of people”, Renzo Piano says about his design. But what about the negative connotations of volcano’s? Entire Italian cities have been burdened under a layer of lava – just think of Pompeii. Iceland in its past has for decades been largely uninhabitable after a serious volcanic eruption. Should we seriously celebrate the image of the volcano?