Up to the nines
Ten years after our first assignment- the conversion of a small photo shop in Schilde in 1999- we're asked again for a big photo shop along a commercial strip. A former discotheque along an approach road full of trade.
Retail shops and their mutual competition for consumer attention.
The existing hall is stripped and expanded with offices, warehouse and a new entrance. All the new program stored in an extra strip, in a new big facade.
How to decorate this shed?
Is the new front able to tell us something about what's behind it?
Is a building capable of explaining anything anyway?
The decorated shed and the duck finally together?
Isn't a camera mostly called a Kodak?
Right above the false ceiling of the existing hall we find beautiful GLR beams.
We use all kinds of tricks in photography: depth of field, photo frames and soft focus, perspective and light.Positive-negative.The entire facade is advertising. Just like that. And without high-tech.
Vertical wooden planks on horizontal steel cladding create a Moiré-effect that appeals to the passer-by.
The forecourt is part of the design and generates an accelerated perspective in combination with the entrance lane. Ram raid posts and lighting cables in corporate colors and an old-fashioned scissor fence as fragile protection.
On the ocher concrete floor a strange piece of furniture, with odd angles, in contrast with all the slick technology.
"When modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament."
Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., and Izenour, S. Learning from Las Vegas. the MIT Press, Cambridge, 1972.
