Us & them

Frankly, the difference is so great that one wonders whether we inhabit the same world. No one talks about designing a sustainable building in Berlin because it is so ingrained in the culture.

Canadian architect of Berlin’s Canadian embassy, quoted in a piece about design/construction practice & regulatory environment for commercial and other large-scale building in the leading Euro countries and in North America.

 

4 thoughts on “Us & them”

  1. Interesting article, a shame the final building is so ugly. It looks like an out of town retail warehouse. Yuk!

  2. Not sure if you mean the building in the article photo or the CA embassy bldg. in Berlin. (It isn’t clear to me what that glass-walled bldg. in the article photo is. Would need to re-read a little closely to figure out, it looks like.)

    The Berlin embassy certainly doesn’t seem very appealing, at least in the distance façade shots that come up in Google image search. At the KPMB site there’s this gallery — to show off some of the more interesting angles, I gather. But I can’t say any of it speaks strongly to me.

  3. I assume the building in the article is the Solar Office at Doxford International Business Park, near Sunderland. So, it’s not the building I took it for at first, but it is an example of a low-energy building.

  4. That was my take too — but I looked up Ingenhoven Architects, the name under the photo, to see if that might clarify. It turns out that this is their Lufthansa HQ at Frankfurt. Not even mentioned in the article. Who knows what that’s all about.

    Well, setting that aside. — I don’t know that I find this building ugly, exactly. Don’t know that I find it all that interesting either, though. I think of so much glass as a problem as readily as a source of appealing formal possibilities. Would be interesting to have some good street-level views nearer the building.

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