Legal / Illegal

How many rules can be disregarded in a place dominated and strangled by rules? The volume as a whole is not allowed to exist at all in the first place, as its complete floor area exceeds the maximum area permitted in the development plan. Hence, the volume in itself is illegal. Being a non-orthogonal, free-formed body, it is mainly opaque and traces a path from streetlevel through the gate, moving up the floors, piercing through them, and facing with its main mass at the upper levels back down upon the street, thereby realising a loop around that gate, the historical monument. Its windows, goggle-eyed, look into the sky, onto the terraces and down on the street. Every single surface of its faceted volume throws a „shadow-area“ onto one of the neighboring sites, something forbidden by german planning law. The fire-regulations are partially disregarded and the main mass of the volume crosses the municipal building line. The differentiation between wall, roof and floor, the main categories of building elements in architecture,  is disolved. It is covered with a bright red polyurethan coating which forms a continuous skin over all surfaces. Being disrespectful to the german building code and the  laws and regulations of that site in particular, it is the „illegal“ volume. Both combined, they form the building.

Can a Planning Application be part of the Design Concept?

After 18 months of processing time, the planning application was finally accepted without objections. It thereby exceeded the official maximum processing time for planning applications sixfold. Instead of approaching the planning department with a way of hiding the irregularities, all rule breaks were explicitly laid open from the very start. Even the project’s title ‘Legal / Illegal’ adorned the various forms and plans for the planning application. The means of dealing with the authorities, their means (and limits) of reacting, therefore became an integral part of the concept and the design scheme.

Architecture in Bayenthal

What does this architecture want in Bayenthal. The building is an expression and reacts to the urban condition of that part of Cologne. Having always been the toy of the real-estate investors and speculators, the building introduces a foreign body into the urban fabric, which is very receptible for that. The building moves right up to the limits of the site, or rather, exceeds them, in its ratio of massing, in its measurements, in its complexity and its materiality. It overloads or strains the site, and is in a certain way ruthless to it. Maybe it is one of these architectural interventions which are not in the interest of the suburb. Maybe it has a self-sufficiency. But in all these examinations, it expresses the economic situation, the constellation of laws and rules to form, and the sociocultural condition of the suburb in a built form. As foreign as the building might seem in the context of the area, as more it acts upon the history, the state of the urban fabric, and attempts to formulate an enrichment out of this immediate context. And attempts of course, as Bayenthal is used to, to view the context as its capital.