Vertigo

Eindhoven
X

In the new premises of the Faculty of Architectural Engineering, the concrete skeleton of the building is bared and then recovered with a curtain wall which balances on the extremes of massiveness and transparency. The polished glass skin is a low tech energy wall and is, for this reason, seventy percent closed. On the outside of the glass an enamelled impression of the scaffolding of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia has been made - a symbol of the unfinished project of the architect. The bare, sandblasted concrete is highly evident in the exceptionally vast interior with its generous storey height of more than five meters. The workshops lie downstairs in the tower behind horizontally composed facades and administration is placed above, around a glass roofed atrium that starts on the sixth floor and is created by sawing away sections of the floor. The offices are grouped around this yawning hole. The front extension contains a wide, shallow stairway and/or auditorium that leads to the first level – the most important level everywhere on the Technical University of Eindhoven campus.