Content area
Full Text
Photograph: The shimmering, corrugated, steel-clad concert hall and a rectilinear exhibition wing of aluminum and glass partially enclose an outdoor exposition area. The lightweight truss roof of the concert hall is suspended by cables from three masts, while the exhibition hall's roof is an arched truss system.
PETER MAUSS/ESTO (OPPOSITE AND ABOVE)
Photograph: With the Rouen concert hall, Bernard Tschumi devised a scheme using a torus (a solid ring of circular or elliptical section) that is then broken (opposite). Where the two segments overlap, he inserted a glazed entrance (below).
ROBERT CESAR/ARCHIPRESS (OVERLEAF)
On the road to Rouen you do not expect to see a curved, gleaming object perched among Normandy's pastures like a giant UFO that just landed. Especially if you are en route to visit the famous Gothic cathedral Monet painted so often. All of a sudden, on a rather nondescript 70-acre site at the outskirts of the provincial port of Rouen, northwest of Paris, rises the Zenith Concert Hall and Exhibition Complex. The contrast with its context only serves to dramatize the lustrousness and futuristic quality of this totemic symbol to contemporary culture.
In true European custom, the design for the concert hall resulted from an invited architectural competition sponsored by the regional government. The winner was Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect who is the dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Historic Preservation, and whose offices in New York and Paris saw the project through design and an intense 13-month construction process. The materials are basic--primarily poured-in-place and precast concrete, plus corrugated steel cladding. And they are straightforwardly, or shall we say, plainly, put together. ``There are no self-indulgent details a la Carlo Scarpa,'' Tschumi says almost defiantly. Yet the quasi-circular hall and its rectilinear exhibition wing are executed with a level of craft and a clarity of form that make them striking. The gestalt is...