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Pagei218/219 Alvaro Sira Factory for Vitra

Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1992-94 Located across the Street from a factory building designed by Nicholas Grimshaw (with a bridge link visible to the left), and next to Zaha Hadid's Vitra Fire Station, Siza's long, undifferentiated brick facade seems rather too austere, o r perhaps excessively modest for an architect who won the 1992 Pritzker Pnze. That satd, the 11,600 m^ł factory buildmg seems to function well for its mtended purpose. which is already a daim to success that many contemporary buildings cannot make.

design budgets, Schneider + Schumacher's Info Box in Berlin is almost a diametrical opposite. A temporary exhibition building designed to inform residents about the massive construction projects under way in Berlin, the Info Box would appear to be a prototypical architecture for the age of uncertainty. It is only in recent years that talented architects have turned their attention in any serious way to the prob-lems posed by ephemeral structures. This may be due to a lack of demand, or to the egos of some architects who still try to build "for eternity." Naturally there have been consistent efforts throughout the twentieth century to grapple with the eon-cept of non-permanent architeaure, through inflatable buildings or the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller for example. Universal exhibitions have been a constant source of ideas for ephemeral architeaure, to the extent that some "temporary" structures such as the Tour Eiffel in Paris have become much morę

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