Juergen Mayer H.

A design _ architecture

Shooting starchitect

Above JĂźrgen Mayer and his urban mobility installation, recipient of the Audi Urban Future Award Left and opposite page The Metropol Parasol in Seville

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ŠPaul Clemence

By Robert Landon

Jürgen Mayer is envisioning the city of 2030

while a re-imagined colonnade – in this case made up of triangular hatchings – recalls the stability and strength of bridge girders.

However, a second glance quickly undermines this narrative of order and solidity. The half-cocked columns may create beguiling shapes that suggest a rational pattern – perhaps some complex mathematical equation. And yet not a single trapezoid seems to repeat itself. Instead, those serious-looking “girders” are a source not so much of reason and order as a kind of radiant whimsy.

At 42, Jürgen Mayer is, by the standards of his profession, a bit of a wunderkind.

Architects usually come to prominence relatively late in their lives. From napkin sketch to ribbon cutting, a career-making project can take a decade or more.

Meanwhile, clients naturally prefer proven talent when sinking many millions into highAs you move inside the student center, you find profile ventures. yourself amid a bright forest of diagonals and Mayer is the exception to the rule. The Berlin- trapezoids that multiply both unpredictably based architect is already winning the kind of and with amatory glee. The sum of the parts commissions that crown a career: innovative feels organic in both senses: a single, totalizing concept that nevertheless allows for the university buildings; a revolutionary city hall; and, most ambitious of all, the Metropol accident of nature. In fact, the building marks Parasol – a major new construction redefining the boundary between the urbanized campus and an adjacent expanse of woods. the medieval fabric of old Seville.

It’s no coincidence that Mayer has an abiding obsession with data protection patterns: the “meaningless” series of lines and shapes that serve to conceal “real” data – for example, the printing on the inside of a blank envelope that helps hide private information inside.

“This kind of visual noise is, I believe, one of the earliest forms of data management,” says Mayer, “and these patterns have become a source for many of my art installations as well as in our design process.”

Not coincidently, there is “visual noise” even in the name of Mayer’s firm: J. Mayer H. We can assume that the “J” stands for Jürgen, Mayer’s first name. But the “H” is more enigmatic. When asked what it stands for, Mayer replies impishly that “it depends on the time of day you are asking me.”

In the same way, Mayer deliberately avoids a clear annunciation of what his buildings mean. In fact he builds inscrutability into the That said, the building’s shapes never become very DNA of his designs.

Mayer caught the world’s attention a few years back with Mensa Karlsruhe, a university a simple metaphor for trunks and branches.

“We believe that architecture should work as Instead, Mayer strives always for suggestive student center in Germany that features a thousand clever variations of Mayer’s favorite ambiguity, patterns that never quite coalesce an activator to move people from a passive mode of expectation to an involved level of shape: the trapezoid. At first glance, his Mensa into a formula, puzzles that can be puzzled participation and attention,” he explains. over but never definitively solved.

Karlsruhe appears obediently rectangular, A 233

A design _ architecture

Speaking of attention, Mayer is now about to get plenty, with his most ambitious project to date, Seville’s Metropol Parasol.

Set in the heart of old Seville, this multidimensional public space is made up of a series of mushrooming curves that seem to grow wild amid the rectilinear façades of the surrounding neighborhood.

The site was long occupied by a covered market, though in recent years it served as a car park. Then in the ‘90s, Roman ruins were discovered on the site. In response to this fertile, richly layered setting, Mayer has created a burgeoning structure whose organic shapes encompass an archeological museum, a farmers’ market, an elevated plaza with bars and restaurants and a futuristic walkway proffering views of Seville’s pre-modern rooftops.

Having made his incision into Seville’s medieval fabric, Mayer has now gone on to conceive an entirely new kind of a postInternet city. His efforts have garnered him the Audi Urban Future Award, awarded to the architect who best analyzes the city of 2030 in the context of questions of mobility.

Not surprisingly, Mayer imagines a city entirely reconfigured around the notion of data transmission. Cars, for example, drive themselves, thanks to satellite monitoring.

As a result, vehicles are transformed into sensorial experience machines – mini-media rooms – while streets and other public spaces are freed from car-related paraphernalia, from traffic lights to median strips.

The Mensa Karlsruhe university student center in Germany

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It remains to be seen whether the cities of 2030 will conform to Mayer’s vision. But if his career continues at its current trajectory, his work will have made a deep imprint on our urban fabric.

©Paul Clemence

“Once you empty the city of these objects, it gives space back to the city, the buildings and the people,” says Mayer.