Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-American architect behind the internationally-acclaimed Studio Libeskind, has just completed a new building for Durham University in England. The building, located beside the Department of Physics, was designed with Libeskind's signature angular style as a set of stacked and interlocking blocks.
The new Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics that Libeskind designed will provide the university's Institute for Computational Cosmology, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, and Centre for Advanced Instrumentation with office space and a venue for holding events. The private workspaces, a total of 80 offices, are distributed around the building's perimeter and are illuminated by natural light shining through windows with frosted glazing.
In the middle of the building, there is a multi-storey communal space illuminated by a giant central skylight. The ground floor of the building houses a 100-seat seminar room, while the next floor houses breakout rooms for teleconferencing and an events space for Durham University's students and staff. The next floor houses additional office space and also provides access to the building's roof terrace, Dezeen reported.
When designing the building, Libeskind emphasized sustainability and eco-friendliness, which can be seen in many of the architectural choices, from the choice of Scottish larch wood as the building's cladding material to the installation of solar panels and a ground source heat pump. The interior of the building combines exposed concrete columns with warm-toned woodwork.
As the son of Jewish holocaust survivors from Poland, the American-born Libeskind is best known for his work on memorial buildings such as the Jewish Museum Berlin, which first gained him international recognition, and holocaust museums in Ottawa and Ohio. He has also worked on many other museums, such as the Imperial War Museum North in the U.K., an art museum in Lithuania, and a museum of Kurdish culture in Iraq.
His architectural style is visually dynamic and is characterized by fragmentation, distortion, and gravity-defying angularity, Architectural Digest reported. One of his upcoming projects is a pyramid-shaped skyscraper in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, watch Daniel Libeskind Documentary:
