Project Description
The Asse Fire station was a winning competition entry for a regional fire station and a youth center. The site, formerly used for an asphalt production industry, is located on the outer edge of the Town Center. Beyond the ring road the landscape is open, rural. A “land-form” concept delimits the project on one edge of a much larger site and thus preserves existing landscape features and allows future expansion.
The land form is scaled appropriately to the landscape and organizes all new buildings – youth center, public square, and fire station – into one communal shape. As a singular and bounded entity, the form does not suggest sprawling growth in any direction, but rather offers a clear vision for future landscape, infrastructure, and building decisions.
A subtle bend in the landform and building denotes the principal entrance to the site. A clear solution had to be found for addressing the public functions given the multiple buildings (where is the front door?). As opposed to a strip of buildings with a parking lot to serve as the main orienting device, a public plaza between the youth center and the fire station serves as a formal front. Custom pavements, markings, road obstacles, street furniture, lighting, local trees and plant species, and a smooth topographic contour break down the scale of this large universally accessible plane.
It is within the public plaza where a fundamental ideological basis for the project is confirmed. Upon entering the plaza: the site, form, and scale akin to a “Big-Box” setting is designed to create a civic environment. The plaza acts as a town square, gathering and distributing the many building users: pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, emergency vehicles, and fire trucks. Both the fire officers and youth center have staged public events and festivals in the square.
The land-form is characteristic of ORG’s interest to address larger urban questions with singular architectural interventions.
The Fire station itself has a sober, functional, and banal appearance like commercial big box typologies. Building voids in and around the programmatic spaces reveal the buildings economical and repetitive construction logic. However, precise material joints and alignments, a subtle bend in the overall form, and different angular roof forms disrupt the notion that the building is conventional.
On the ground floor, logistics and functional requirements are highly optimized and logically organized. Within the building, a circulation corridor cuts through the programmatic spaces, extends vertically via a long continuous stairway, and follows the curve of the building. The upper levels, which house the private quarters and offices of the firemen, are four distinct volumes with each a different function (Sports, Offices, Living area, Sleeping area), and alternating roof slope with red painted laminated beams. The deeper you enter the building the more private the functions are. The four roof volumes are divided by accessible roof garden/terraces.