A un lado Koolhaas, la nueva camada ya llegó

La arquitectura del siglo XXI por fin está llegando, y viene de la mano de dos jóvenes holandeses que han diseñado el Instituto Holandés de Sonido y Visión, en Hilversum, un suburbio de Amsterdam. La reseña la hace el New York Times. Copio:

"Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk stand out from the usual Koolhaas clones. Still relatively unknown in the United States, their firm has steadily built a reputation in Europe for bold designs that draw on everything from primitive temples to comic-book illustration and the decorative ephemera of Andy Warhol. They also have something as rare in architectural circles as raw talent: a sense of humor...

The effect is mesmerizing. The images are only barely discernible from certain angles, as if the building were imprinted with the faint traces of shared memories. But the exterior facades are also a sly critique of contemporary culture. The blur of images conveys the daily bombardment from the Internet, television, movies and newspapers, yet here they seem frozen in time, as if temporarily tamed.

Inside the building that tranquillity gives way to a comic-book version of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” with strict divisions between various worlds. Visitors enter via an internal bridge that crosses over an underground atrium. From here, a vast hall conceived on the scale of a piazza leads to a cafeteria overlooking the calm surface of a reflecting pool. On one side of the hall looms the ziggurat form of the museum; on the other, a wall of glass-enclosed offices. Here the spectral glow of the interior of the cast-glass skin evokes the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral..."