The City of Ocean and Surf by Steven Holl

By admin On December 17th, 2011 | Posted in Architecture News

Steven Holl successfully presents the meaning of “Cite De L’Ocean et Du Surf”. Means “The City of Ocean and Surf” in English, This Building is comprised of a museum building, exhibition areas, and a plaza, within a larger master plan near the ocean. The project designed is in collaboration with Solange Fabião, and located in Biarritz-France. The project was started in 2005 and completed in 2011. here’s some words about Cite De L’Ocean et Du Surf.

“The Cité (de l’Océan et du Surf) is already called only and justly that-Cité-in anticipation of its future role in becoming an identifiable piece or fragment which is more than a building that aims at continuing lines of public space, and, therefore, becomes a zone which can simultaneously reflect and engage Biarritz. At the heart of these transformations are changes in the relative functions and exchanges between programmatic and cultural characters and the realms of aesthetics that explore these new activities and eminently public connections. The architecture team was particularly interested in having an extended landscape design surrounding the building, which could extend and provide more potential for these linkages to evolve. These new relationships emerge as a reformation of that larger character that we know as the city-the reflection on its future role as an exchange center, and the ways in which there might be particular topologies that redefine the connections between the larger environment, institutions and citizens. It is for this reason that, at the Cité, the embracing wave design-which analogically suggests the continuation of folding topologies of the ocean further away-embodies important beginning movements not for its independent figuration, but for its attempt to exercise that continuity as a matter of fact.” – Huffington Post, Carla Leitao, August 11, 2011.

“While big urban development projects have become a larger and larger part of Holl’s practice, he’s best known for inventive cultural buildings, such as the Cite de l’Ocean et du Surf, in Biarritz, France, opening in early 2011. … the design revolves around a central plaza that Holl describes as ‘open to sky and sea, the horizon in the distance.’ It proves he’s still capable of simple, poetic gestures.” – Departures.

“From one West Coast to another, Steven Holl, who tells of having surfed on the Pacific beaches from Oregon to California, has taken on the Atlantic coast with his first building in France, more precisely in Biarritz. On June 25, the Cité de l’Océan et du Surf celebrates its inauguration. The New York-based architect designed the building with Solange Fabião and in cooperation with French architects Leibar & Seigneurin. Modest in size, the building boasts great spatial richness. With two thirds of it underground, it derives from the concept “under the sky/under the sea.” As such, it plays on the concave outside curve to make its rood a public plaza. The ceiling of the exhibition areas is convex, reminiscent of the nearby sea and its waves. The metaphor is drawn out in this complex volume of finished raw white concrete, from which two glass blocks emerge, calling to mind the two large rocks that stand at a short distance. Surrounded by transparent or opalescent glass, these protrusions give off the milky light of paper lanterns. The relationship between the building and the sea is further strengthened in its continuation with the large lawns creating a promenade taking visitors up to the edge of the waves, the real waves that is.” – Architecture D’Aujord’Hui, June 2011.

The views from another angle of the building