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Northern Stardesign by Daniel Libeskind
photos by Jan Bitter
and London Metropolitan University
text by Mark Fletcher
Daniel Libeskind's latest project is a centre for graduate students for the Metropolitan University on a busy main road in north London. The result is at once new and contemporary, as you would expect from Libeskind, and at the same time remarkably harmonious with the surrounding landscape. As the architect expresses it, ?it was designed to be a burst of energy on an otherwise very real street of London?.
His challenge was to design and build a civic building on a tough road in a constrained site within a modest budget of ?3 million. And yet it had to be something exciting and imaginative that created spaces that fuse internal and external space. He took Orion, the northern constellation, as his inspiration.
A guiding light and a unique icon for the university and its students, the building is made up of three intersecting volumes clad in reflective steel panels: one connects with the existing university building behind, one gestures towards the nearby underground station and a more regular form connects with the road itself. It has the architect?s signature windows -geometric cuts that provide accentuated natural light- and avoids refined and decadent materials,
more: www.internimagazine.it/s013001000... (150)
May 15, 2004 | Viewed 17,617 time(s)
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