David Chipperfield, his "war of the floor" and the "museum of horrors"
07/04/2015.
[MIL] Italy
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
David Chipperfield has renounced his Città delle Culture museum and gallery complex in Milan after a "pathetic dispute" over the quality of flooring material used.
Outside vision.City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
Outside vision.City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
Outside vision.City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
Lantern or Main building. City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
Façade. City of Culture by David Chipperfield Architects. Photograph © Oskar Da Riz.
David Chipperfield.
The British architect David Chipperfield has accused Milan officials of ignoring his design and said that 'the laying of stone of poor quality' at Milan's new Museum of Culture transformed the building into 'a museum of horrors'
The architect David Chipperfield is at the centre of an extraordinary row over Milan’s new €60m (£44m) Museum of Culture, a building he has designed and now disowned after accusing officials of skimping on flooring materials.
The resulting “floor war” – as locals have dubbed the stand off – has led the British architect, famous for the Neues Museum in Berlin and China’s Liangzhu Culture Museum, to demand that his name be removed from the project. — independent.co.uk
The Città delle Culture (City of Culture) complex occupies a converted steel factory in Milan's Tortona district. It is expected to open on 26 April, coinciding with the 2015 World Expo that opens the following week.
Reports of the "war of the floor" surfaced in the Italian press last month, when culture minister Filippo Del Corno told L'Espresso magazine that Chipperfield had been difficult to work with. Chipperfield, whose firm has offices in Milan, Berlin and Shanghai as well as London, told a press conference that “the laying of stone of poor quality” had transformed the building into “a museum of horrors,” and that it amounted to “a pathetic end to 15 years of work”, according to a report by UK newspaper the Independent.
"The explicit lie saying that I had demanded the floor to be taken up forces me to expose the rather miserable story behind such a simple problem, and explain our exhaustive attempts to solve this problem," Chipperfield said.
"I must point out that this dispute has been running for nearly 18 months, at no point did we resort to any strategy other than trying to resolve the physical mistakes made to the building," he added. "It is sad that the public administration has spent so much time avoiding responsibility and so little time solving the problem."
The city council has defended the project, insisting that budget decisions were all based on "common sense". It claims that Chipperfield's firm approved the material before it was installed, and also alleged the architect has accepted over £2 million in fees.
"It cost €60 million, of which €3.6 million went to Chipperfield for his design and project management," the council said in a statement. "These are sums of money appropriate for a public institution and right for the importance of the project, but it was necessary to make choices based on common sense and in the interests of the taxpayers."
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David Chipperfield
David Chipperfield was born in London in 1953 and studied architecture at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London before working at the practices of Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.
In 1985 he founded David Chipperfield Architects, which today has over 300 staff at its offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai.
David Chipperfield has taught and held conferences in Europe and the United States and has received honorary degrees from the universities of Kingston and Kent.
He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA). In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2010 he received a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany. In 2011 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and in 2013 the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, while in 2021 he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in recognition of a lifetime’s work.
In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
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