DEUTCH LANDING 05/27/08

Words :: Will Jones // Images :: Emanuel Raab, 3deluxe, Florian Kresse

Square in shape and yet looking as if it was poured into the landscape, the Leonardo Glass Cube evokes contrasting reactions on multiple levels. Utterly alien in form, compared to a conventional building and yet instantly recognisable; angular and pristine but at the same time tactile and curvaceous; an indefinable and exciting structure that turns out to be a conference suite for a German manufacturer!

Yes, the Leonardo Cube is an exhibition pavilion and conference rooms for decorative glass maker Glaskoch. Set within the grounds of the company’s base in Bad Driburg, central Germany, the building sits within a landscape of verdant lawns, criss-crossed by white pathways that seem to have flowed or grown forth from the structure. The effect is intense: the cube is unique, an exquisitely organic folly in a country renowned for its regimented predictability.
But this departure from the Germanic norm is less surprising when you consider that Glaskoch regularly commissions product designs from names including Karim Rashid, Ron Arad and that Post Modernist joker-in-the-pack architect Michael Graves. With these and other star names designing under Glaskoch’s Leonardo brand, the company is well used to the unexpected. However, its decision to commission a young practice with no previous built works to design new conferencing facilities was brave.
3deluxe is a German design firm that combines architecture, interior design, graphics and landscape architecture into what it calls a ‘complex aesthetic entity’. Hiding behind this anonymous veil of a name, the practice states that, “the primary focus of the cube and other work is on the sensory effects that the object has on people interacting with it – both on their aesthetic and their tactile or acoustic sensibilities.”
The result of this manifesto is borne out in the creation of the Leonardo Glass Cube. At almost 13,000 sqft in size the building has two floors – an open-plan ground floor with spaces for meetings and presentations and a lower exhibition hall. However, all is not that simply defined. While building is square in plan, its four walls and roof presenting a geometric container, internally the structure takes the 2D form of the pathways and morphs into a three dimensional organic environment that is dominated by curved form and fibrous-like structures that 3deluxe call the ‘Genetics’.

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