would clad this so that speaks of where it is. So I spent some time in the city and someone from my office went on a 6 week research tour, travelling around Thailand looking at temples, shingles and Thai craftsmanship to give us a greater visual library of iconography that we could draw on to create the cladding.
extending that moment of threshold where you don’t have to enter the museum - you can go in and pick up a coffee and hang out. It will be a curated space as if it were a gallery, and it gives you time to understand where you are in relation to the other parts of the V&A. It sets up this idea that’s so important in the 21st century - the role of the museum going beyond the confines of the building. We are a different kind of society and community now and that was the rationale for making it a courtyard with a very particular characteristic like an outdoor room.
The EDP Foundation Arts and Technology Centre in Lisbon is a very different type of public space. How did Lisbon’s cultural heritage influence
your design for it? It was very much a response to the site which is on the river that runs into the sea, facing due south with exquisite light for most of the year. The waterfront in Lisbon has been incredibly neglected for centuries because it was very much a working port and there were railway tracks that cut off the river from the old city. So this project became about conceptually linking back the old city to the river front. We have done that in a way that is driven by the conditions of the site, overlapping light and water and seeing how the reflection of the sun on water bounces on the facade and then bounces deep into the gallery below the ground level where you will see the reflection of water itself. It has an interesting economic
overlap in that it is a public building funded with private money and
this idea became a metaphor for the building itself by the way it overlaps - the roof forms the canopy and shade over the river front and then we allow people to walk under and through the building and more importantly over the building.
Nearby there is a bridge from the
old city with a road which is more like a motorway. It could have been a big problem, but by crossing on the elevated bridge you can enter from the roof level of this building. On the roof in the summer months there will be a programme of events and activities. It will have step seating using the traditional marble cobbles or calcada so you can sit on the roof in a reverse amphitheatre and look back at the city as a backdrop to the big movie screen. This creates a visual conceptual link between the old city and the new building.
In Bangkok your design for a hotel and shopping mall creates a different type of space. How did you incorporate Thai culture into this prestigious project?
When we got the commission for Central Embassy in Bangkok, I was very conscious that I didn’t know Asia and had never built there on any kind of scale. It is on a very prominent site on the gardens of what used to be the British Embassy, the most expensive piece of real estate that had ever changed hands in the city so it was very important that our work was rooted in the place of Bangkok. We had learned from doing Selfridges in Birmingham that there was a huge amount of facade that by default would have to be opaque and we had to work out how we
112 GLOBAL OPPORTUNITY 2014 | ISSUE 01
I realised early on that the socio- economic conditions of Bangkok are a complete reverse of Europe and North America - their technology is extremely expensive and labour is very cheap. So the cladding became a series of aluminum shingles. As the labour required for the shingles was very cheap and because it is a very simple system it became very affordable. Bangkok is a very dynamic, noisy frustrating place yet there is a Buddhist culture and we had to work out how to capture this. So we designed the shingles folded so that half the shingle reflects the sky and half reflects the chaos of the city back to itself. The form of the building is very
typical conundrum, tower and plinth. The tower couldn’t be very tall because of building codes and sightlines, so we looked at a looped geometry which is a way of merging the plinth and the tower. In Bangkok shopping is a national pastime and thus you could merge the two programmes of hotel and tower. The iconography of it speaks I hope of where it comes from but also about modernity.
Why do you think London has become such a sought-after location for
international architects? There is a huge wealth of talent in the UK. My office in the last 10 years has become a mini-United Nations, probably because we are such a multicultural society and because London is such an exciting city and it attracts talent. It is incredibly important to have this multi-cultural office because such international experience in every level feeds into what we create.
GO
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ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN
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AMANDA LEVETE
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