Architecture as Infrastructure - Fire station

By Conrad-Bercah - 13 May 2015
Schüco has participated in the project

“The building committee for Fire Station No. 4 requested an ordinary building, easy to maintain. [...] The white brick, the gold lettering at the top of the tower identifying Fire Station No. 4, the tower itself, and the big flagpole in the middle of the front lawn convey the civic importance of the building. This crisp, functional building creates an appropriate, ordinary yet distinctive image for the activities, social as well as rescue, associated with a community fire station. As well as strengthening the civic presence of the building, the handling of the proportions of the Fire Station gives the little building big scale in its setting-a vast, flat field along a straight highway”. Ordinary-distinctive. Small-big scale. Easy-complex. A number of contrived dichotomies are lined up, as if they were self-evident, in the above description of Fire Station No. 4, a 1968 building by Robert Venturi for Columbus, Indiana that became part of the architectural conversation when it got included in Venturi’s notorious book “Complexity and Contradictions in Architecture”.

Fire stations rarely become topics of architectural interest. Yet, 50 years later, the Fire Station in the Belgian town of Asse, designed by ORG (Organization for Permanent Modernity) promises to do just that, providing an interesting comparison and view of current architecture culture.

The architect will introduce the work: “The fire station has a solid, sober and functional appearance. The exterior is a regulated panel system of pre-cast concrete and anthracite zinc. The fire station’s construction logic maintains a certain banality characteristic of Big Box typologies, however, detailing precision shifts the underlying motive for quantity to evoking a sense of disruption from conventional building standards. In addition to material joints, alignments, and finishes, building voids in front of, beside, and in between the...