Visitor Center for the Twyfelfontein Rock Art Museum (front view)
Waterless Building Another important commission for Maritz is the Visitor Center for the Twyfelfontein Rock Art Museum, a facility meant to protect and make accessible ancient stone paintings. She explains: "In the dry northwest of Namibia, famed for its variety of rock landscapes, the challenge was not to obtrude and compete with the but to design in such a way that [the structure] would become one with the landscape." This empathy with the surrounding landscape was expressed in part through material choices. The iron content of the local sandstone gives it a rusty red color, so the design team selected modified steel drums as a roofing material, making "a building that will rust away very slowly" in the extremely arid climate. The roof cladding was made of 40-gallon (150-liter) steel drums cut vertically into quarters and lapped like clay roof tiles. The paint was sanded lightly to begin the rusting process. The tops and bottoms of the drums were used to form screening walls. The undulating roof form emulates the weathered stone hills nearby; from a distance, a visitor might not realize the distinction. The curved steel frame was manufactured on site by a "farmer-builder who made a jig on his pick-up and bent every curve by hand." Because water would have to be trucked in, the design team made the decision that the construction process would be "waterless" and not use materials such as mortar or concrete. Gabion walls consisting of dry stack stone stabilized by a casing of chain-link mesh — also hand made on site — formed the heavier structural elements and foundations. Because no concrete was used, the building is completely "reversible" and removable.
Size: 5200px × 3454px
Photo credit: © Miguel Cuenca / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: alternative, architecture, art, basket, building, center, desert, drums, dry, ecological, ecology, gabion, maritz, museum, namibia, nina, recycled, removable, reversible, rock, roof, steel, sustainability, toilet, twyfelfontein, undulating, vents, visitor, walls
