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Woven in Worb: Gottfried Semper's odd theories about textiles and building are imaginatively reinterpreted in stainless steel

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004

The famously efficient and elegant Swiss railway system is continually being renewed, and regularly holds competitions to ensure that the design quality of new buildings remains high. Smarch, a firm set up by Beat Mathys and Ursula Stucheli, working with engineers Conzett, Bronzini, Gartmann, were winners of the one for a new station in Worb, a little town near Bern. The brief called for a train shed that can accommodate two trains, some 80 parking places for commuter cars and a lot of bicycles.

Because the site is very tight and irregular, Smarch decided to place the cars above tracks and platforms, and to cover the whole with a shallow-pitched lightweight steel and timber roof. The slightly curved site boundaries called for a supple wall that could smooth and respond to irregularities, so Mathys and Stucheli came up with a remarkable proposal. Instead of choosing a dull and stolid cladding of timber or brick, they decided to interpret Gottfried Semper's Bekleidungstheorie in modern materials. In the middle of the nineteenth century. Semper came up with the wacky idea (based on no real evidence) that archetypal patterns of wallcovering are derived originally from woven textiles, which civilization had evolved before timber-framed or masonry structures. This allowed Semper to evolve more and more elaborate ornament on his own buildings, because he claimed that the patterns he favoured were given the sanction of the ancients (coincidentally Semper taught for many years at Mathys and Stucheli's architectural school in Zurich in the second half of the century).

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At Worb, polished stainless-steel strips form the textile. Tension gives the thin strips their form and causes them to retain their locations on the cylindrical concrete columns that support parking slab and roof. A strip a day was tightened into position round each whole row of columns. In alternate spaces between columns, the two sides of each steel ribbon are clamped together to increase the rigidity of the whole, and to provide constantly changing reflections. To achieve the reflective effects the architects wanted, columns were spaced 3m apart (closer than strict structural efficiency requires), but results justify the small diseconomy. The walls change constantly in reflectivity and colour with your position and that of the sun, varying from glowingly opaque to almost transparent. They allow the large building to slide into the town centre with minimum fuss, while at the same time celebrating the experiences of movement and change offered by travel. Semper has been abstracted and rationalized in ways he could never have imagined; the building is the first adaptation of his ideas for 100 years. J. P.

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