Luis Etchegorry
Welcome...there`s a threshold to cross
In an infrastructural building-landscape organisation research and testing facilities for hydrogen fuel is combined with a tourist centre. The proposal draws on the unique landscape qualities of Iceland and combines this with the two major strategic development areas for the Icelandic economy: tourism and clean energy technology. The architecture presents a subtle oscillation between artificial landscape formations and building structures. It creates a total campus environment for working, inhabitation and visiting that extends the condition of a threshold into a prolonged spatial and temporal condition. The proposed campus organisation attracts visitors and tourists by presenting sensual and artificial landscape formations and programmes for entertaining and informing the visitor about green technology and cutting edge developments in clean fuel applications and consumption.
The urban landscape fuses the city of Reykjavik with its dramatic, natural surroundings – including the coastline. It comprises a testing track for hydrogen-powered vehicles that can be used by the public. Tourists, business people and researchers meet and mix. Young and old partake in the formation of the future. The project is based on extensive and in-depth research on moving frontlines, flow-conditions and, so-called, bundled phenomena. Such phenomena are based on the synergies and frictions between different, linearly organised streams of matter, energy, people and information. By articulating nodal coincidences of these different flows, specific spatial, programmatic and structural conditions are formed. The results are spaces in which the ambient and social qualities fluctuate like the tide and encounters are as exciting as they are unpredictable.