Category: New Waterscapes
Wind – and water-wheel in Owingen
Water from the roof flows through a channel to a wind – and water-wheel, where it sets the wheels in motion. The fact that rain is necessary but can be abominable often makes people feel that it never comes at precisely the right time. We feel similarly about wind, unless we are wanting […]
The climate in the Nuremberg Prisma
The whole roof area of the complex feeds directly into a water cistern. The glass building creates a pleasant atmosphere within the city centre. Waterwalls and luxuriant vegetation create a healthy atmosphere full of natural light. When architect Frank Lloyd Wright built the famous ‘Fallingwater’ house in the hilly countryside of Pennsylvania […]
Water is universal
to gravity. And this actually does occur at first. But after a very short time the thread of water changes its course: it starts to swing rhythmically to the right and left, producing a meandering trail of water that changes constantly. Rivulets, streams and rivers form these meanders, leave loops behind and reshape their banks. […]
Open space for a residential development in Ittigen, Berne
Revolutionary concepts for housing estates are a thing of the past. Outstanding examples of co-operative housing estate design, in which architecture and the planning of open space complemented each other in graceful moderation, are now listed monuments. Building firms operate on different premises from those of 100 years ago. But the desire for community, for […]
Integrated water design for ING Bank, Amsterdam
One can compare the flow of money to the flow of a river. The Dutch bank ING commissioned Foster and Partners to design their new administration building, named Vivaldi, in the new administration and services quarter ‘Zuidas’, on the southern outskirts of the historic city of Amsterdam. A blessing and a curse, Amsterdam has […]
The new town square in Gummersbac
Gummersbach is the chief town of its district, Oberberg, which it runs with creditable efficiency: the economy flourishes. The prosperity of this town of 50,000 inhabitants 50 kilometres east of Cologne has been on a solid basis from time immemorial. A small-scale, balanced mixture of industry, trade, agriculture and services has always produced – […]
Watercourse at Herne-Sodingen Academy
The Emscher Park International Building Exhibition was held between 1989 and 1999, in an area bounded by Kamen in the east and Duisburg in the west, Recklinghausen in the north and Essen in the south. It was also a ten-year celebration of structural change in Europe’s largest industrialized area. This entire region in the […]
Water features in an hotel foyer near Neuchatel
Spring water from the hillside trickles over a block of natural stone. It seeps through planted pools before flowing into the hotel foyer. Water is scarce in karstic areas. And this is also the case in Montezillon, a small town above Neuchatel in the Swiss Jura. This is where the L’Aubier hotel and […]
Town hall square, Hattersheim
basins. Herbert Dreiseitl had the basins cut to the millimetre from granite blocks, after developing and testing the movement of the water in his studio in clay and plaster models on a scale of 1:1. The slightest departure from the ideal form would mean that the water would not run as wished in its […]