paläon

The PALÄON pushes itself out of the slightly hilly topography and cuts into the forested meadows. The volume of the three-story building and the paths emanating from it form lines of sight that divide the landscape into vectors. A second winding path system forms synapses that connect to the surroundings. The building is a camouflage – a hyperrealistic abstraction of the landscape. The metallic skin of the PALÄON mirrors the meadows and forests that surround it as well as the movements of the clouds in the sky passing by. Through its archaic form, the research and experience center becomes one with its surroundings. Sharp, large- formatted cuts into the building façade offer wide-reaching and fascinating views to the place where the spears were discovered, the pit of the brown coal mine, the nearby forest, and the Przewalski horses grazing in the meadows. The expressive openings cut into the building like spears in the skin of the horses and reflect this dynamic in the form language. The abstract cuts into the building also formally react to the neighboring traces of opencut mining. The resulting expressive architecture mediates between manmade and natural landscape and forms an emblem for the place.