URBAN CONSTRUCTS
Office workers sitting amid the 56 steel tube columns surrounding the entrance of CapitaGreen in the CBD may not realise that they are surrounded by Olafur Eliasson’s
Above Below Beneath Above, a 2014 artwork especially created for Toyo Ito’s Market Street Tower. The columns, akin to aerial tree roots, aim to provide an organic transition from the street to the foyer, picking up on the building’s ecological concept. “It proposes a soft border between building and city, built environment and nature,” Eliasson says. At night, the sixteen “crystals” hung from some of these columns produce atmospheric lighting while casting complex shadows.
In recent years, Eliasson’s practice has increasingly become involved with architectural projects, so much so that in 2014, he founded Studio Other Spaces with his long-time collaborator, architect Sebastian Behmann. Fjordenhus (Fjord House) in Vejle, Denmark, the first building they entirely designed, opened earlier this year. Rising out of the water, it is formed by four intersecting cylinders with rounded negative volumes carved from its facades of custom-glazed brick to create a statement of complex curved, circular and elliptical forms, and parabolic arches.
“Fundamental to the concept of Fjordenhus is the notion that there is no one ideal position from which to view the building. As you move around and through the structure, your perception of space changes continuously, constantly defined and redefined by your movement. It is the time it takes you to pass into or through the building that defines your experience of space,” he wrote.
“Fjordenhus has been an exciting opportunity for us to bring years of research in diverse fields – urban space, light conditions, nature, physical movement, how we use our senses – together in one project that truly melds artistic and architectural vision.”