rocker-lange blog

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their competition entry for the idea’s competition “Fashion Museum Omotesando” in Tokyo.

The design of a fashion museum on Tokyo’s renowned Omotesando district asks for a unique answer. While the height of the tower in a low-rise area guarantees that the building will have an iconic flavour by default, one has to express still its significance and otherness in comparison to generic towers. Conventional tower configurations lead usually to a stratified system. In order to avoid a disconnected and discrete spatial succession, this design utilizes the concept of an expandable and differentiable ribbon as a continuous organizational strategy.

The ribbon that resembles a trefoil knot ensures that the narrative of the Fashion history is told in an uninterrupted way. The ramp is providing an easy access for handicapped people by maintaining a slope of 6%. The system ramps up the entire height of the tower and provides a user interface for a continuous experience in revealing the history of the fashion industry chronologically from the 1900’s to the 2000’s.


Since the circulatory principal is the main concept behind the design, it is used furthermore to organize and articulate the façade system. This outer membrane is a direct interpretation and transformation of the interior movement inside the tower space. The design seeks to achieve a unique formal character and a unique spatial configuration by implementing cross scalar variation.

By maintaining a uniform and holistic building envelope the proposal ensures a strong iconic identity for the building and the entire urban area of Omotesando. This enhances the unique and special atmosphere of this district. The façade material is made of white enamelled metal panels with bronzed tinted glass elements that provide sufficient protection to the exhibited fashion artefacts. The façade with its porous nature offers continuous and constant 360 degree views over the city of Tokyo.


In order to provide maximum interaction with the ramping system the structure opens up an extended urban space underneath the building. The enclosed space of the museum is lifted up by 4.00 m to provide alternative relations with the urban surrounding. This way the ramp can be understood as an extension of the urban space by providing a gradual transition from exterior to interior space.

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their competition entry for Denmark’s New Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen.

The proposed scheme serves urbanistically as well as architecturally as a catalytic connector: it connects and enhances the existing buildings with which it creates the new Museum of Natural History. It creates a visual marker in the city signaling the national and international importance of the new institution. The result is an open welcoming museum complex, embedded in the beautiful landscape of the botanic garden, surrounded by the traditional – renovated – brick buildings of the Geologisk Museum and the Solvtorvskomplekset.

Embedded within the landscape the museum functions quite literally as a interlocutor between the natural- and the cultural-scape. Both the park- and the urban-scape flow in and through the building, creating public interior and exterior plazas, allowing for views onto the giant whale and dinosaur skeletons in the museum’s exhibition halls.

3 major exhibition areas traverse the new museum reflecting the different exhibition areas: Fauna, Flora, and Geology. The meandering paths traverse the exhibitions providing spectacular overviews and close insights into the museum’s collections.

A variety of different spaces are inscribed in the building’s envelope: larger and smaller exhibition zones alternate, and special media presentation spaces are also provided. On the open floors swarms of animal species can be admired while in the smaller rooms carefully elaborated analysis are on display.

Rocker-Lange Architects are releasing their proposal for the “London Bridge 800: Inhabited Bridge” competition. The proposal for a Living Bridge over the River Thames was one of the schemes of the Living Bridge Competition for the 800′s aniversery of London Bridge, London. The scheme was selected by the jury to be included in several exhibitions in London and Manchester.

The proposal seeks to readdress the typology of the terraced house in a contemporary interpretation by implementing the concept of cross scalar variation to achieve varying programmatic and formal identity and a unique spatial configuration. On the other hand the scheme provides a uniform and holistic building envelope for the entire composition on London Bridge, ensuring a strong iconic identity for the structure and the city.

The bridge provides two main promenades that are situated on the perimeter of the bridge. While the east promenade is accessible to both, vehicles and pedestrians the west promenade is only accessible to pedestrians. Intervals of cross connectivity through the commercial folded landscape are structured by the terraced housing arrangement and generate an easy movement between the two promenades.