Xing Wang and Matthijs La Roi won first prize in a competition to design a brand profiling building beside the A4 motorway in Leiderdorp. The competition was open to both students and professional design agencies.
Spatial developers Bohemen had organised the competition A View 4 You, in which participants were required to design a building which, besides having architectural appeal, could profile a brand. Thirty designs and concepts for the imaginary building, at a narrow site beside the A4 motorway, were entered by students and professional architectural firms.
Xing Wang and Matthijs La Roi, both, won with an open construction made of 3D curved wooden rafters, with a double membrane in between, like a skin. This double skin aids climate control and its elegant shape, in combination with colour projections, creates surprising effects in the dark.
“Walking through this building, visitors could imagine they had become part of an adventure, like ‘Jonah in the Whale’. Both the interior and the exterior of the building have a cathedral-like appeal and could bring the Leiden region a completely new kind of world fame,” the jury report says about Frozen Motion.