[Image: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. Here's some eye-candy for a Tuesday evening: Arc en Ciel, a new building in Bordeaux, France—part residential, part office—by Bernard Buhler Architects, spotted via Architizer.
[Images: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. With a building as eye-catching as this one, it's quite difficult to imagine a rationale behind adding graphics to the exterior glass windows—like children's drawings, or some vague gesture toward "street art"—which looks both kitschy and unnecessary.
[Images: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. After all, the graphics-free windows look fantastic—but c'est la vie.
[Image: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. Successfully, to my mind—based entirely on a scan of some photographs on the internet—the colored exterior glass works not only to vivify the building's urban site but to bring a constantly changing series of hues, like a colored bar code, onto the interior walkways. I would love to see this place lit from within at night, a sight the available photographs don't offer.
[Images: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. Anyway, the building looks cool; that's about all I have to say. I will add, however, that I'm struck by how extraordinarily better the actual, constructed building is, compared to its rendering, seen below.
[Image: Arc en Ciel by Bernard Buhler Architects]. All the more evidence that rejecting (or embracing) a building's outward formal characteristics on the basis of renderings is not necessarily a good idea.
See many more images over at Architizer.
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