On the southern side ..., urban shelves are not an option because their front would be exposed to the north. Here another question became central: Should the borderline between water and land be fixed or blurred? Do we need hard or soft edges, slopes or steps, platforms or caves, basins or islands? We decided that we need them all. The Bengali form of the ghatserves as the motivic cell from which a landscape of discovery starts. The southern side will be a piece of playful and communicative landscape-architecture; it will be a new, unprecedented ghatscape.
And this exuberant ghatscape finds its echo in the ground floor of the lakeside shelves. Here water enters the ground floor, plays around the columns, enters caves, the little waves licking the steps of the platforms. In between the columns of the west-wing the ghatscapeeven literally gets repeated in smaller scale, becoming a playground for the younger ones and inspiring them to cross the lake and discover space on their own. The dramatic culmination of this trialogue of water, land and space however is the cave in the apex of the triangle: a 15 m high waterfall—directly inspired by one of the collages mentioned before—dominates a mysterious space, nevertheless also having the mundane task of a sound-barrier between the noisy and the quiet wing and even sending its roar to the street. Altogether these structures turn the lake into a theatrical setting: the ghatscape becoming the audience, the lake the stage and the shelves the backdrop. They form a public space as intense in its interiority as the ones conceived by the Romans.
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- Ethics needs esthetics: Beyond the architecture of good intentions, Monday, May 20, 2019 - 12:00