Dominique Perrault To Design Sofia’s New City Center
French architect Dominique Perrault Architecture wins the international competition to design the new city center of Bulgaria’s capital Sofia.
The city center will be built in the next ten years and will house various state institutions. The center will be located along Sofia’s main boulevard ‘Tsarigradsko Shosse’. The vision of Bulgarian prime minister Sergei Stanishev and his brother – architect Georgii Stanishev – is to gather ministries and state agencies in the new ‘Sofia city’, relocated from the current center of Sofia.
The St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia’s historic center is one of the largest Eastern Orthodox churches in the world. In the background: the Gallery of Foreign Arts, the National Library and Sofia University in the background (Photo: Boby Dimitrov).
Perrault was selected among six companies, finalists in the contest, all of them world architectural design leaders, including Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, and Massimiliano Fuksas. Two Bulgarian firms also participated in the final stages of the contest.
The contract with Perrault will be signed in the next two months, and the French architect will then select his Bulgarian partners. The financing of the project, however, is still ambiguous and will include external financing from individuals and public-private partnerships.
The projects which took part in the final round will be exhibited in the halls of the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia.
Images via: www.skyscrapercity.com.
So how come this is supposed to be beautiful? What is the difference of this project from Mladost 1,2,3,4 Lulin 1,2,3? How come this grid is humane rather than self expressing?
These photos don’t provide us with understanding of the concept of the project, again like many other projects nowadays- they show us nicely made pictures on a particular software but there is a serious lack of information why it actually is suitable for its context, or is it considered to be sustainable enough, or is there something new introduced regarding efficient materials or is there something unique that would make people love this place. Seriously, on the official site of Dominique there are only 3 drawings showing what the concept is like. I am not criticizing the design, I simply can’t do this as it’s not shown.