Lecture 6
The town hall of Marl, in which the Skulpturenmuseum can be found, was built in the 1950's by the Dutch architects Van Den Broek en Bakema. They won a competition that was held to commission the building of a new centre with City offices, museum, shopping centre and housing, on an open terrain between two city districts. The buildings are witness to attempts to achieve a new spatiality, coupled with new possibilities in construction. The office towers consist of a fixed centre, for lifts and stairs, on which the floors hand, as it were, connected to each other by cables. This construction was tried out on a building of the same size, but with only one storey. Beneath this story is an open free space. During construction this trial storey functioned as work space for the architects, and for the past 25 years has been a children's library. Because this small building, hidden in the foliage behind the large towers, immediately drew my attention, (as a child of the larger buildings), I used as the point of departure for my proposal, the sound of children, texts from children's books and the spatial qualities of that building. Realisation. At 12 a clock the sound of 60 children, reading aloud from books chosen by themselves, comes from the opened windows of the upper space. Spread over the open lower space are 60 small chairs. Every minute two children are brought down from upstairs, they choose a place and continue reading aloud from their texts. Slowly the voices from above becomes less and the sound below comes stronger, until after 30 minutes and exploding balloon gives the signal to stop.
year | 1994 |
brief description | a cloud of childrens voices in the historical architecture of Marl, Germany |