An architect I admire describes the discipline as “a negotiation between different desires." The hardest part of it, I think, is to honor both the dreams in one’s head and the realities of construction. Well-known architects who can perform this trick include Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, who build museums and fire stations and soccer stadiums that are also shimmering, magical things. These are buildings forged in the flames of creativity and bent purposefully to program. But there’s something to be said for architects who just take a vision and run with it, however impractical, improbable and expensive its execution is. Alvernia Studios outside of Krakow, Poland, where Radiohead guitarist and composer Johnny Greenwood is recording new symphonic work, is one of those buildings.
Although there’s no architect of record, we know the studio was built by businessman Stanisław Tyczyński in the style of H. R. Giger, the Swiss visionary who designed the effects and sets for the Alien movies. It is, essentially, an array of huge metal half-domes linked by raised tubular glass walkways. The studio interiors look just like those of the Alien spaceship, encrusted with eery futuristic, biomorphic, Gothic embellishments. It’s all especially impressive because these are film and sound stages; they don’t need have to have any kind of identity of all. A bunch of big cinder block sheds would have done the trick, but someone (the client, most likely) dreamt this up and made it so. It’s an entirely uncompromised architecture.