SANAA – Inspired by a hole in a facade?

Preston Scott Cohen is a Boston based designer and the Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

He is the winner of the Herta and Paul Amir Competition  ( 2004 )  to design a new building for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art  and  the winner of the competition to built  the Taiyuan Museum of Art .

 Preston Scott Cohen Architect

 Goodman-house

 Pine Plains, NY , USA  2001-2004

SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) is an architectural firm based in Tokyo. It was founded in 1995 by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. In 2010, Sejima and Nishizawa were awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

SANAA Architects

Zollverein School of Management & Design

Essen ,Germany 2003-2006 

The Zollverein School of Management & Design, inaugurated on July 31, 2006, is the first new building on the historical coal-mining Zollverein site; declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001. 

SANAA on the Zollverein School:

1.“Our aim was to achieve transparency in the concrete structure.”
2.“We have made many big openings in the facades to create different daylight situations inside the building. The position of the windows are defined by the interior programs. By varying the ceiling heights each floor has a very different atmosphere.”

Preston Scott Cohen on the Goodman House:

A curtain wall with irregularity distributed windows wraps the peripheral steel frame. It is if nostalgia caused the emergence of a modernist paradigm of construction more fitting to a commercial building than to a house.

Is this another example of “Conscious Inspiration”?