Skilful cornering: unusually for its type, this speculative office block in Nuremberg connects with both its site and the life of the city.

Commissioned to design a new corporate building, the nineteenth- or early twentieth-century architect would expect to receive a detailed brief listing the required places within it and an idea of their appropriate hierarchical disposition. From this process could arise an architectural identity which would be further embellished with some suitable symbolic decoration and signage.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Nowadays, by contrast, the commission comes from a developer and future users appear on the scene too late to be involved. Architects must therefore plan according to a naive and empty brief, mindful that others will later fit out interiors and apply corporate identities. With one of the traditional generators of architecture--working from the inside out--essentially denied, the creative effort must be switched to working from the outside in, creating an identity for the building with the external form. You can impose a Centrepoint or a Gherkin, but it is also possible to interrogate the site, which is how Szyszkowitz-Kowalski won this competition in Nuremberg.

The site lies north of the city centre just within the northern ringroad on Bayreutherstrasse, the north-east radial arm of the city's original spider's web pattern. It overlooks a road junction just at the point where the predominantly five-storey city fabric gives way to the green lung of the Stadtpark. This contrast between dense urban junction and leafy rural park provoked a head and tail treatment. The head end of the building had to occupy the busy road junction with a semicircular island defined by the curving street 'Am Stadtpark'.

In turning the building to meet this street, Szyszkowitz-Kowalski found an initial inspiration for the 45 degree angle that recurs throughout the plan. It is repeated in the pedestrian passage that links the busy south-facing corner through to the park, setting up a natural diagonal line towards the park's centre. On the open corner where this route begins is a south-facing pool of public pavement, a natural pressure point of activity and meeting which funnels into the passage towards the park. As well as providing the new public route, the gap provides the entrance for the whole upper part of the new building via a lobby and glazed lifts set like towers which stand within the through-passage. A building which is all about corners gains a powerful corner entrance.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The 45 degree angle occurs a third time in the triangular balconies of the tail end, which cantilever and project over the park. Linked with this repeated switch to 45 degrees is the presentation of both ends as twins: twin towers on the corner, twin triangular balconies in the tail. The doubling-up of towers makes for a memorable corner and nods towards the triple spires of the church down the street. Twin-ness in the tail allows the linear wings to be divided by another streetlike passage making a second park connection. Looking at the floor plans, the whole arrangement has meant that the access and servicing treatment could be remarkably economical as well as assuring that no floor plates are too deep. Difficult acute angles are for the most part nicely solved, and indentations in the perimeter relieve the office floors from becoming too large or repetitive. The range of views out and across for occupants is increased, enough daylight is admitted, and sites are suggested for partitions between tenancies. Shops are predicted for the ground floor, professional consulting rooms and offices for the upper ones.

In a predominantly five-storey area the building reaches seven, but the top floor is set back and the upper floors stepped to allow a kind of cascade towards the park. The first floor gains piano nobile status with added ceiling height, which must have cost more but adds a necessary sense of hierarchy. The composition is most radically controlled by jettying out the top three floors and giving them a horizontal emphasis through linear windows, horizontal glass cladding and projecting sun screens while lower floors have vertical windows and conventional dropping blinds. The horizontal cladding and strip windows appear in another guise in the tail of the building, stepping up like a staircase away from the towers, so that one can almost imagine the white vertical building having been overwhelmed by a horizontal green one. The horizontal upper floors certainly succeed in capping vertical movement and stand in for the roof, which is in reality flat and invisible from the street.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The effect is better in photographs than in the rather stolid grey elevation drawings, but it is interestingly anticipated in Karla Kowalski's colourful initial sketches, which reveal the design intentions without prefiguring the final details. The plan seems to have started more irregular, but shows even in primitive form the intention of sliding the upper floors off the lower ones. At a more advanced stage there was a clear intention to build a kind of glass tower in the centre of the plan to celebrate the vertical connections. This appears in an elevation as a reddish body rising pyramid-like between the building's two ends. Finally this gesture was reduced to the glazed towers of the lift shafts, which are dramatic enough in their own way.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Clearly these were the original driving ideas that have inevitably been weakened in the process of realising such a commercial project, but enough have survived to give the building a unique identity and to tie it definitively to its site and city.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]