Wednesday 12 September 2012

Nieto Sobejano - Moritzburg Museum extension

 
Modern architecture conveys the image of the architect as the lone designer who has complete control over the final outcome. However, this image is inconsistent when working on a building designed by someone else - just as there would be little sympathy for an artist who alters another's art. This could explain why modernism, with its tabula rasa mentality, viewed historic buildings as isolated monuments and/or simply replaced them. Conversely, some of the most significant projects completed recently have been refurbishments and additions to older buildings which exhibit a dialogue with the past. To do this successfully, the changes that have occurred over time must be confronted. In their work with existing buildings, Nieto and Sobejano have suggested that buildings may possess the genesis of their own alteration so that we just need to uncover their intrinsic codes and translate these into how to extend, disguise, enwrap, subdivide.
"Refurbishing or adapting an existing building is perhaps nothing more than decoding the original designer's hidden intentions, being able to read a building like a palimpsest, as the sum of various coexisting texts upon which the traces of an earlier inscription - at times barely decipherable - are perceptible."[1]


[1] Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano. "Reading the Existing Fabric." Detail (English Ed.), no. 1 (Jan-Feb 2010): 6.
 
 





 

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