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Cardiff, Wales
Richard Rogers Partnership
Richard Rogers used transparency and ecological responsibility as guiding values in his design for the National Assembly for Wales
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Photo © Richard Bryant/Arcaid |
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By Catherine Slessor
For such a comparatively modest building, the new National Assembly for Wales was charged with immense political, economic, and architectural expectations. Politically, it represents the aspirations of the Welsh people, who voted for a degree of autonomy in their national affairs in a referendum in 1999. Though Wales has effectively been part of the United Kingdom for over four centuries, the modern principality sustains a strong nationalist movement, wary of what it perceives as the remote and often overbearing power of Westminster, the London-based parliament.
Economically, the new Assembly was conceived as an impetus for a broader program of urban ambition in Cardiff, which despite its status as the Welsh capital is better known as a rough-around-the-edges port city. Poised on a pierhead and surrounded by disused docklands, the building is a crucial catalyst for the redevelopment of Cardiff Bay, an area blighted by the collapse of heavy industries such as coal and shipping. Architecturally, the stakes were high with the commissioning of Richard Rogers, who prevailed in a limited competition by creating a physical and symbolic embodiment of Welsh nationhood and modern democratic government. Yet local reaction to the visions of high-profile architects has not always been favorable. During the 1990s, Zaha Hadid’s aborted proposal for the Welsh Opera House on a nearby site on Cardiff Bay proved a bitter triumph of petty provincialism over architectural invention. Doubtless mindful of Hadid’s experience, Rogers treaded carefully, but even so, costs rose from an original budget of £27 million ($49 million) to a final £67 ($121.5 million), leading to design changes and a baffling procurement saga that involved Rogers being sacked from the project and subsequently reinstated.
Compared to the overwrought Scottish Parliament [record, February 2005, page 98] by the late Catalan magus Enric Miralles and his widow Benedetta Tagliabue, the Welsh Assembly is a simpler, more legible urban proposition. Transparency and physical openness were key tenets of the building’s program and were decisively resolved in the form of a glazed pavilion set on a massive plinth clad in dark Welsh slate. Sunk into the dense, geological plinth is a subterranean debating chamber illuminated by an immense conical funnel that tapers up through the glazed pavilion to pierce a hovering roof plane. Ripping and swelling like a shaken carpet, the contoured underside of the roof is lined with thin strips of untreated red cedar. Slender steel columns support the undulating roof as it extends beyond the Miesian glass box to form a dignified and welcoming colonnade.
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our August 2006 issue.
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