With Thom Mayne's Cahill Center already under way, we're now eagerly awaiting the ground breaking (scheduled December 2007) of the Walter & Leonore Annenberg Center for Information Science and Technology on the campus of Caltech. Last week, Archinect noted that the architectural firm REX has updated its site, which gave us a chance to see some of the high quality renderings of the proposed Annenberg building. (REX is the firm resulting from Joshua Prince-Ramus' split with Rem Koolhaas' OMA.) The building appears to take two forms, the quiet outer shell and the inner insanity, illustrated in a helpful wolf in sheep's clothing graphic. For those of you that read archispeak, there's a more detailed elaboration of this concept after the jump.
The Sheep attempts to resolve the seemingly contradictory ambitions of proximity and flexibility in research buildings by providing uniformly high-quality office space that can be reconfigured by a single construction trade. Cloaked by the Sheep’s simplicity is a more expressive and collaborative “Wolf” that promotes intra-building and intra-IST interaction, both intentional and serendipitous.
· Annenberg Center [REX]