Works of Bolles+Wilson

A red splash above the harbor. This is the image of the new Luxor Theater for an observer who, having left behind the city center — rebuilt in the fifties after the devastation of the aerial bombardment of World War II — takes the road to south Rotterdam.

Or for an observer coming from the opposite direction, from the highway, who drops down toward the city center and arrives at the Ben van Berkel bridge, which like a hinge between the two parts of the city — along with the somewhat underwhelming Dutch Telecom tower (a work of Renzo Piano) and its opaque volumes (a pure manifestation of the cubic order of office space), the platforms of the station — and now, despite the difficult site conditions, this red and orange volume with its emphatic and distinctly placed contours has emerged, fashioned from wooden panels that enclose multiple structures, including a theater.

This form is not unfamiliar among the works of Bolles and Wilson. In a house in Tokyo, which they designed in 1993 for Suzuki, once again we encounter a splash and a dot — a black dot placed in front of the building. The house has an irregular and indeterminate form with rounded corners and two supports propping it up from below… but this black dot is a “Ninja,”¹ meaning something that has no particular shape, yet is at the same time distinct.

We consider the black splash to be the specter of a passing Ninja. The reality is that various interpretations can be made of the splash. One of them relates to a collection of images that appears to have been made from an unknown material, or in a more traditional way one might interpret it thus: “a drop of liquid or blots of color.” Bolles and Wilson think in this way.

One can imagine them flying over cities and the territories of Europe (and Japan) with bottles containing colored solutions, dropping droplets of color here and there, or in the process of descending and spattering blots onto a facade, a wall — this strategy of Bolles and Wilson, which may appear accidental but on the contrary is entirely deliberate: marking certain points, emphasizing them, and adding a touch of color or that black element to it. The splash underscores the exceptional character of this gesture — that is, the creation of a new focus of attention in the periphery of Munster. The splashes, these focal points, are new joints of the pre-existing urban structure, like the case of Rotterdam — specters that reveal the duplicity and hidden dimension like the case of Tokyo, an unexpected presence, yet at the same time a cautious one. There is nothing disturbing in it. No sense of discomfort, distance, or separation. On the contrary, the splash of Luxor, through its positioning in the city, has filled the shapeless spaces with its clarity and definition in such a way that it immediately appears to have a necessary, and therefore indelible, existence — a magical world from the black and white of Kansas to the realm of colors, we move forward.

Now the red splash of the Luxor Theater can be better understood: color and form proceed only so far as to emphasize its “slight” protrusion in its surrounding context and its belonging to another — though by no means an alien — world, and they place keys to a new world at our disposal, so that we may move in a space like the magical urban world of Oz² — from the black and white of Kansas to the realm of colors.

Among the antecedents of Bolles and Wilson’s splashes in their works from the eighties — seen also in their ship-form works — although the metaphor of a ship that has accidentally run aground on a sandbank, one whose helmsman is unaware of its existence, is no longer employed — an image they used in the Paris Opera competition — these projects provided the ground for research into a new definition of buildings free from the constraints of conservative conventions, without falling into the trap of the futuristic excesses of the seventies. “Buildings in ship form”³ was the title of the guide to the early works of Peter Wilson, belonging to a period when he was still at the Architectural Association in London and was trying to revive the spaces of the past industrial world.

These designs, with their measured prominence within an ordinary urban fabric, draw our attention to the presence or emergence of a different world too, where traditional expectations no longer have a place. Like the case of the Documenta exhibition hall in Kassel (1989), they proposed an object-force that derived from a form entirely its own. An object that could simultaneously redefine the landscape, and by playing a role — for instance, defining a pathway, creating a connection, or clarifying a situation — become an inseparable part of it.

The image that Bolles and Wilson’s designed buildings present — including their splashes and ship-form bodies — is decidedly different from the image of moderation that the emergency conditions of the fifties imposed. Their works are covered with a different and richer, without doubt, combination of materials, in which brick and plaster are not the only materials used, and metal is also employed. Even the color of the brick is no longer the conventional one, as in the case of the WLV office building (1997) on Warendorfer Strasse, which has taken on darker tones tending toward black.

The use of these materials emphasizes the configuration of the building, which is composed of different parts. Each of these pieces, in order to better play the role of accentuating elements, cohesive elements, or separating elements in the urban game, takes on different characteristics depending on the circumstances. An example of this is the roof of the Munster Municipal Library, whose two metal wings project toward the roadway, traverse the length of the building, and create a new and inventive urban route parallel to the historic Church of St. Lambertus.

Another example is the ZKW–WVK office building (1997) on Zumsandestrasse. On one side, the new building connects to the old buildings of the street, while on the other side, due to following the metal roof of the computer center, it takes on the form of one of the adjacent row houses and reinforces it, and in this way becomes integrated with the other side of the street as well. In the middle, between these two arms, a new urban space has been created — an open space at the end of a transverse passage that leads to another area behind and beyond this complex. As in the case of the library, it is this new cut, this new public space, upon which the order of the design is based. Just like the Bernhardstrasse apartments, it is the manner of connection between the main street and the local street that determines the design’s positioning.

The WLV office building’s goal has also not been merely the indulgence of transforming the standard plan of office buildings into what they call a “spring-shaped plan” — for the purpose of creating richer and less monotonous interior spaces — but additionally, it has aimed at the configuration of a dull and lifeless street like Warendorfer, aided by an unusual change of direction. And the brick wall of the WLV building, which after enduring the sharp angle imposed by the presence of the elevated railway bed, has bent inward — this too has clearly been considered.

These movements, these deflected bodies, these cuts and these new spaces, which are proposed at any given time, contribute to the correction and manipulation of a scene that is already to some extent defined, and also to the realization of urban-spatial potentials that have until now remained unexpressed and unknown.

In a place like the Brink shopping center in Hengelo, where urban quality is either largely absent or consists only of a few elements devoid of any particular meaning, the situation is entirely different: an office building from the fifties, behind several houses, a railway station, and not much farther away, a large square — an area not very clearly defined, all within a space of several hundred meters.

In this case, the only way — even before redefining and reconstructing the fabric — was to reproduce the urban activities that, instead of being concentrated within the city, had been transferred outside the historic city. Hence, housing, parking, an arcade, and street shops were brought back from their suburban exile into the city center. In this way, these components of the dispersed and sprawling city’s culture were collected, refined, polished, and assembled. The arcade roof was given a slight slope so that… and a signal tower was erected in the middle of the square. These are the only obvious signs of formal change that have been reviewed and examined, because it was preferred that the reconstruction be integrated with the existing fabric — for example, by repeating the fire escape bridge of one of the existing office buildings.

At the same time, while most of the measures draw from the city’s conventions, several signs emphasize new roles in the recreated urban spaces. Likewise, the large-scale reproduction of the map of the city of Haarlem by Bolles and Wilson on the facade of the Rax cinema center underscores the urban ambition at the level of this very structure, which took shape under conditions of sprawling urban development and has now been reconstructed as an integrated city.

Before being brought back into the city, these buildings had been sited in a complex manner in that new landscape that Bolles and Wilson had called “Eurolandschaft” — European landscape. In Spain as in Italy, and in Germany as in the Netherlands, it is a landscape through which we pass: a world made of motorways, industrial areas, residential complexes, new technology parks, and shopping centers — all built beyond the conventional boundaries of the city, presenting itself as a new display of the city and new ways of our life.

In this heterogeneous and formless territory, buildings with special identities can create a new rationale for configuration. Therefore, they are no longer splashes, dots, joints, deflections of paths, or masses, but rather inventive markers for the configuration of the new context.

The Technology Research Center — Hof, which was erected in 1993 outside the boundaries of the historic city of Munster, beside a busy street and not far from a residential neighborhood, near the university campus, endeavors to create a new structure and a new skyline within the existing context of the city: the horizontal line of a pedestrian bridge whose building masses stand against it and whose entirety, with an industrial-style finish, takes on a metallic appearance.

But the role of these volumes is most evident in the Volksbank headquarters in Borken: not just their role as joints, but as the first points installed to undertake the definition of a territory still undefined. The reason for the rising and falling of the volumes and their shaping with hard and resistant materials — mainly metal and brick — can be understood from this. That complexity which, in the designs for the Munster center, was present in the surrounding urban scene, is now found within. Also in Borken, the bank has been cut and divided, and with a minimal configuration in volume has created a path inside itself that is entirely visible from outside, and the column — in the case of the Munster designs it served merely as an urban sign — here belongs solely to the building and is an essential member of it, functioning as an inventive column that is simultaneously real and virtual.

Therefore, the first strategy is the first move toward the appropriation of territory. It is inside the building that the reconstructed urban landscape — full of qualities, encounters, give-and-takes, and surprises — comes to life.

Under the more general concept of landscape, each of these different strategies finds its own particular importance. Bolles and Wilson employ this concept to define interior spaces as well as exterior spaces. Therefore, in all these designs, the interior space is itself a landscape. After passing through the shell of the splash, or the hull of the ship, the observer beholds an urban scene. This is a space premised on movement — usually from bottom to top, toward the roof — and in this orientation it remains profoundly modern. But often this movement is aimless and imprecise: we constantly encounter changes, alternatives, diversions of path, and pausing spaces that attract or repel us.

Even in the case of a building like the Luxor Theater, which in its internal organization is entirely straightforward, the lobby turns into a field for the deployment and testing of various forces — in a considerable number of routes and stopping places from which one can observe the interior, which has an urban character, and watch the city. The staircase, the most conventional element that takes us to the upper floors of the theater, transforms into pedestrian ramps on both sides that follow the curve of the wall, which shows itself even better from the interior. Beside this ramp, there is another ramp for trucks that enter the building, go to the second floor, and reach the stage located on the first theater level — and in this way, the ground floor is made available to the city.

This same tension between city and building can be found in the Munster Library, albeit with a more refined and more configured quality, and with a more intimate and familiar spirit. The urban quality that penetrates the Volksbank in Borken also has a different manifestation — a kind of transformation of the traditional ATM space, whose size gradually grows larger and larger, until it shapes the entire interior landscape of the building.

The liberating application of the landscape concept involves not only adopting a new approach to interior space, but also utilizing the greatest existing urban capabilities, as in the case of Munster.

The application of the liberated concept of landscape leads not only to the creation of a new perspective for interventions and designs that address the landscape in the most varied scales, but also to the greatest utilization of urban potentials, as in the case of Munster.

The landscape strategy also makes it possible for a building to be seen not merely as part of the landscape, but as the landscape itself — as in the case of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe (1989), where the new center for the arts, right at the point where it meets the tracks, becomes an artificial terrain upon which pavilions are placed, presenting views of the landscape.

Above all, the landscape strategy entails operating in a field with the utmost ease and the least encumbrance — like the transformation of Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam (1997), before the construction of the Luxor Theater, or the arrangement of the area near the grounds surrounding the New York Hotel (2001).

These works demonstrate that even in small-scale interventions one can determine not only the rules but also the atmosphere of a place, with the possibility of entry of new buildings — as in the case of Munster, establishing the character of a city center by means of small signs, or in the scale of Times Square.

Therefore, the concept of landscape mandates that we not focus solely on the scale of interventions, but above all on their character, on the manner of their positioning, and consequently on the game of contrasts or similarities. Bolles and Wilson, by drawing on the collection of relationships between the set of forces that are nowadays created by the urban phenomenon and its configuration, and the heterogeneities of places — with increasing intensity — have put this to use.

Kop van Zuid in the dock area of Rotterdam is rapidly transforming into a new urban neighborhood. The new Luxor Theater is a major cultural injection, which through its strategic and striking location must breathe new life into this residential-commercial area by bringing public life to it — right along the line of the new Erasmus Bridge, facing the Maas River and the Rijn harbor behind it.

The new Luxor is a new actor on the city’s stage. It is a hinge between the office towers of the Wilhelmina Pier and the grand historic Tax Office building facing the river.

All around, a dynamic 360-degree building that simultaneously addresses all directions has been transformed into a central and focal object in a complex urban square.

Rotation around an axis, while organizing space, creates form. An internal ramp dedicated to transporting equipment to the parking area for 18-meter trucks is located right beside the stage on the first floor, leading there (the stage, by gaining height, frees up the ground floor and the surrounding paved area for public needs and solves the problem of the site’s small size). The wall-hugging form of the ramp, with its bridging and circular circulation around the symmetrical form of the stage and the background, prepares the ground for an unexpected and rich design. Behind the stage, it inclines suitably toward the street and in this way, the area for daytime activities such as preparation, rehearsal, as well as the offices, the waiting room, and the actors’ rest room are placed adjacent to the public zone of the city.

The ramp’s ceiling, by reflecting the movement of the trucks beneath it into the lobby and winding spectators from the ground-floor entrance toward the spectacular views of the lobby and the south-facing terrace overlooking Rijnhaven, creates a passageway with a distinctive architecture. The tent-like column that supports this extension…

The exterior facade is composed of red-colored fiber-cement panels with exaggerated shadow lines, and the curved wooden boards overlap one another like the planks of a wooden boat. The wooden cladding is reminiscent of the “all-wood public theater” (Omnia Publica Lignea Theatre) tradition of Vitruvius and Shakespeare. This method and facade material make possible the vertical curvature of the western facade and the gradual play of light on the horizontal curves, which resemble computer-generated displays.

The announcement tower facing the city transforms images: the faces of five actors from the Luxor archive, each at half their actual size, are stretched in exaggerated perspectives so as to be visible from the Erasmus Bridge — a kind of non-electronic virtual quality, a direct theatrical experience. Luxor also comes alive with the help of another fundamental medium —

J.P. Oud on the scale of Times Square. The Luxor typography comprises various forms of Luxor lettering — a giant light box that holds up the tall announcement tower and, in the eyes of spectators who wish to enter, itself becomes like a stage, transforming into the symbol of the entrance.

The objectives of this building are: to be alive and at the same time populist, with the help of a theatrical spatial quality; to facilitate the complex logistical preparations for programs; to give a clear and simple form to these particular theatrical functions; and then to put this new actor on display in an urban scene configured with the same precision.

The Luxor has a capacity of 1,500 people — both in the seating and in the two balconies. Everyone feels close to the stage. As if the wooden panels enclosing it and the side curtains reducing and concentrating sound have created a gigantic musical instrument — a truly intimate space. Spectators sit on the red and black church-style chairs designed by Bolles+Wilson. Above, above the spotlights, tangled cardboard clouds are reflected, suspended in the air, rising and falling, designed by the Rotterdam artist Joop van Lieshout. These provide the precisely required acoustic conditions for the loud broadcast of opera and electronic music.

The traditional symmetrical proscenium, reflecting the shared expectations of spectators and performers in the robust public culture of musicals and cabaret in the Netherlands, endures. As a result, by resorting to a kind of suspension of disbelief — which is one of the fundamental principles of theater — a palpable, extraordinary, and harmonious state has been created.

The entrance doors — a boundary that spectators wait to cross in order to continue.

The line of these spatial qualities is the interior landscape, which creates a kind of luxurious atmosphere…