Word: glassful
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...usually think of buildings as things made of concrete, glass and steel, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron would like to remind you that buildings are also made of shadows, glimmerings, textures and smells. This is, after all, probably the only architectural team ever to have formulated its own perfume. Called Rotterdam--O.K., these guys have no future in retail--it was produced in a tiny edition of just 1,000 bottles to accompany a museum show of their work in that Dutch city last year. Herzog, the more talkative of the pair, is quick to explain that...
...whiff of genius. This is a building to rank with the best to appear in the U.S. in the past few years, one to give Frank Gehry ideas. A sparkling enigma, it simultaneously cuts a sharp figure and demurely withdraws behind a camouflaged surface. Behind its blunt façade, glass-walled wedges of garden emerge inside. Herzog likes to compare it all to Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo, with her cool surface and her plunging secrets...
...example, they imprinted images by German photographer Thomas Ruff. But what really interests them is not applied decoration but the challenge of finding ways to make the structure and the surface design one. That was the old dream of architectural Modernism, which settled for lines of steel and glass up and down the front of a building. Herzog and de Meuron are always looking for something more complicated. For their first U.S. commission, a winery in Yountville, Calif., they constructed walls from chunks of basalt ranging in size from baseballs to boulders. But instead of being mortared together, the rocks...
...turbine hall preserved as a massive art-display space. By that time, from their home base in Basel, they were conquering the world. The past few years have seen the completion in Tokyo of a much discussed Prada store, with its honeycomb steel surfaces set with bulging lenses of glass; a major addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn.; and a soccer stadium in Munich. Their relatively small firm has also snagged one of the biggest architectural commissions of the decade, the 2008 Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which will be an undulating nest wrapped in an irregular ribbonwork...
...exact same dimensions, “like a shallow grave.†Finally, he filled the totem with the soil that had been scooped out. The result is “this weird, bizarrely black obelisk in the middle of the woods,†whose glass reflects its surroundings...