The Architecture of Jürgen Mayer H

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Jürgen Mayer Alex Laljak

David Franck

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Tell me a bit about the graphic sensibility of your buildings, your unique use of geometry. I'm thinking of the Hasselt courthouse, the Karlsruhe dining hall, the Home.Haus orphanage in Hamburg: How much do those forms have to do with nature intersecting technology?

One strategy we discuss during the design process is the ambiguity of meaning. A project has more presence and impact if there's some doubt about it, something quite bold yet difficult to describe and hard to grasp. We like to offer more than one potential reading per project, to allow for individual appropriation, but the relationship between nature and technology is always an underlying topic. Depending on the building site, this might surface in interactive technologies like the pitter-patterns—the computer-generated rain—at the Stadt.Haus, or the semi-forest/semi-building skeleton at Karlsruhe.

It wasn't so long ago that if you were a German architect, every project you'd ever build was most likely in Germany, and Spanish architects would only ever work in Spain. It's unprecedented for young architects like you to have work in progress from Poland to Spain.

Working across the new Europe is creating a lot of opportunities. Even in terms of just materials, local conventions can be challenged, local traditions adapted. For example, our parasols for the Metropol Parasol plaza project in Seville are polyurethane-coated wood, which is based on a technique we developed for the Karlsruhe dining hall. Wood is not a common building material in Spain, but it can be a high-tech, highly compressed layered product now, and this construction knowledge can be shared across countries. For the Seville plaza, we considered concrete, steel, and so forth, but wood performed best with regards to climate, prefabrication, costs, production, transportation, and sustainability. The Spaniards had to kind of learn and open up, and understand why technologies like this make sense to import.

Some architects argue now that Spain, by becoming such an open country, an EU member, has begun to lose its identity and distinct architecture.

Well, there are also Spanish architects building in Germany and elsewhere, reaching out. And Spain is so productive and lively right now. It's a hotbed of new ideas, with so much interesting new architecture going on, mainly by Spanish architects like Enric Ruiz-Geli. The liveliness in the architectural world there spreads out rather than being threatened by a foreign invasion.

Can you give us a construction update on Metropol Parasol, which I think is one of the more exciting projects on the peninsula today?

The foundations in the archaeological site are finished, and the steel structure, two concrete cores, and the restaurant's steel platform are up. We are starting the wood structure this spring and it should be done by the middle of 2009. You can already get a good feeling there for the scale and height. Construction started much faster than a similar site in Germany would have gotten going, but it's a little behind schedule. There were unexpected archaeological discoveries in the Roman ruins, and some interesting logistics in terms of the city. Seville is a very religious place, and certain processions, holidays, and rituals have to be considered during the construction process. We sometimes have to remove construction-site fences for a week, to allow processions to pass, or finish certain parts just before elections so the work can be celebrated as a photo-op achievement for politicians.

You've taught for the past few years at Columbia, but now stopped for a bit to catch up and take care of your practice. Does being busy make it difficult to produce the kind of architecture you'd like to?

Not really. Of course, we need moments for stepping back, looking at what we've produced, before moving ahead. We're full with ideas and experiments now. The 15 people in the office are a fascinating group, the intelligence lies in the chemistry of the team.

Would you call yourself a good manager?

Maybe. I try to leave everybody enough freedom to be responsible and bring in their ideas. And if being a good manager means not having a structure that's too dominating, then maybe yes. But I'm not trained as a manager, so someone else has to judge.

Some firms seem to handle growth extremely well, while others are absolutely incapable of growing—the scale of their work can't be easily transformed. How do you see your work changing as your scale expands and you create multiples?

A big difference I'm seeing as we move from furniture and installations toward larger buildings is a shift from thinking about material-to-form to thinking about structure-to-material. With furniture we usually start with or discover a certain material that then asks for a certain application, a certain kind of transformation into an object. With buildings, we're interested in an atmospheric, all-over result, and during the process from design to construction we test various materials and structural solutions. We might have to invent new ways to build. For Metropol Parasol, we had no specific idea in advance what the material would be, and only a vague idea of the structural system. With the engineers and construction company, we developed the structure further and further—and tested different materials—long after we won the competition. The spectrum of projects and scales in our office now gives us a luxurious moment to speculate on the potential of architecture in our culture and push the limits of the discipline.

Provided by I.D. Magazine—The International Design Magazine