A developer was planning an office building on a site in Cologne, Germany. The only parameter given was to increase floor space to far above the square footage other architects had managed in previous attempts under the heavy zoning constraints for that specific site. Based on the given task we started to investigate the generative potential of what we considered to be our context as architects, the legal framework and the enormous economic pressures.
By integrating a specialist lawyer into our design team we were able to rigorously generate form out of the very legal context within which we were embedded. By playing out two very simple and deterministic key laws (setback and full story vs. roof story), one against the other, a very complex and intriguing alpine-like form emerges that overcomes the “cause-and-effect logic” so predominant in much of architectural form making. Interesting questions surfaced along the way: What is the architect´s role in the process of making in such a project? Shouldn´t it be possible to program the process via software instead of working on it “manually”?
b&k+brandlhuber&co + Marc Frohn