MUNCH MUSEUM AND STENERSEN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS | Oslo, Norway | REX

MUNCH MUSEUM AND STENERSEN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Oslo, Norway
CLIENT: HAV Eiendom, Oslo Kommune
PROGRAM Art museum housing the Munch and Stenersen Collections, self-produced and travelling exhibitions
AREA: 16,585 m² (178,520 sf)
BUDGET NA
STATUS: Limited competition, second prize, 2009
ARCHITECT: REX
KEY PERSONNEL: Lee Altman, Haviland Argo, Gabrielle Brainard, Keith Burns, Alex Diez, Jeffrey Franklin, Javier Haddad, David Menicovich, Joshua Prince-Ramus, Jacob Reidel

CONSULTANTS: Lord, Magnusson Klemencic, Transsolar

Oslo recently celebrated the opening of its world-acclaimed Opera House, an important step in the city’s commitment to developing Bjørvika and to unifying Oslo’s eastern and western centers. With four more significant projects under development within the district—Oslo Central Station, the Barcode, the Deichman Axis, and the Munch Area—Oslo must be wary of overwhelming Bjørvika with too many strong visual landmarks. Such a constellation would undermine the Opera’s iconographic power, and dilute the identity of the city as a whole.

To best complement the Opera, the Munch Museum should forge a new kind of iconography—one based on innovative building performance, not signature form—to command a significant place within Oslo’s mental landscape. Where the Opera is strong, the "Yin Yang" proposal for the new Munch Museum is strategic, establishing itself as a worthy counterpart by radically addressing two cardinal challenges facing contemporary museum design.....visit REX

YONGSAN EXPERIMENT Seoul, Korea By REX

CLIENT: Dream Hub Project Financial Investment Co., Ltd.
PROGRAM: Cultural node—including art center, arts magnet school, broadcasting studio, congress center, museum, and performing arts theater —within a 2.2 million m² (23.6 million sf) master plan designed by SOM and Field Operations, on the waterfront of the Han River
AREA: 59,800 m² (642,000 sf)
STATUS: Competition, 2008
ARCHITECT: REX
KEY PERSONNEL: Jeffrey Franklin, Javier Haddad, David Menicovich,
Joshua Prince-Ramus, Eugenia Zimmermann
CONSULTANTS: Buro Happold


SOM and Field Operations’ Master Plan for the Yongsan Economic Zone proposes a centralized, cultural node that complements the draw and mass of SOM’s Yongsan Landmark Tower. By balancing the Landmark Tower on one side with cultural programs on the other, the matrix of office and residential buildings is energized between commercial and cultural poles. REX was tasked with designing all the cultural venues, and in only two weeks.
As individual elements—including an art center, an arts magnet school, a broadcasting studio, a congress center, a museum, and a performing arts theater—the cultural programs are too small to generate critical mass; a field of cultural “confetti” hardly constitutes a node.
REX’s response therefore combines the cultural projects into a powerful, synergistic element: a Tower of Culture.
It would be inappropriate for a single architect to design every cultural institution for an urban development of 2.2 million m² (23.6 million sf). Design beyond a certain scale thrives on—if not outright demands—multiple authorship and expertise. The single-authored alternative all too often yields oppressive homogeneity.

REX therefore determined the Tower of Culture’s concept, infrastructure, and overarching iconography, but in the interests of genuine multiple-authorship, required each cultural component to be designed by other architects. Of the cultural programs, REX “designed” the arts magnet school and congress center to provide the backbone for the Tower itself. Elevators, fire stairs, and MEP risers form the Tower of Culture’s three structural cores. A “waterfall” of structural plates forms the auditoria of the arts magnet school and the congress center, while also serving as a spiral of slow, meandering circulation.
The remaining programs form barnacles to be designed by other architects... To respect the intellectual property rights of other architects, REX used several of its own designs as barnacle placeholders—namely, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, the Vakko Headquarters, and the Seattle Central Library.
The Tower of Culture’s infrastructure and overarching iconography is maintained—as is the cultural node’s critical mass—regardless of what cultural programs (or their architects) are ultimately chosen.....visit REX