The New New Brunswick

Rutgers University has named Enríque Norten of TEN Arquitectos as the winner of a competition to design an extensive renovation of the university's New Brunswick campus. Other entries in the competition came from Peter Eisenman, Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel, and Antoine Predock. One would have thought Mayne would have been the winner considering his reputation for excelling at publicly-funded projects and working well with contractors, but the university chose Norten specifically for his willingness to realize his plans over time.

Although he's based in Mexico City, Norten is no stranger to the Mid-Atlantic coast. He teaches architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and TEN Arquitectos maintains a New York office. He's currently working on the Brooklyn Library for the Visual and Performing Arts and a master plan for Long Island City. In a certain sense, Norten brings a heliotropic sensibility to the East Coast's post-industrial landscape, but it's more accurate to speak of his work as grounded in a global media acuity.

Herbert Muschamp once compared Norten to the Weimar German architect Erich Mendelsohn, with whom Norten shares a proclivity for sweeping lines and an interest in the impact of technology on aesthetic form. In his American work Norten's specialty has been weaving a new global space into the commercial jumble of postwar suburbs, which should offer a refreshing contrast to the standard collegiate architecture of neo-classical elements cut and pasted onto a suburban office complex body. Norten's buildings on College Avenue will have flowing forms enclosing hectic activity. Using the same metaphors of light for global media as Diller+Scofidio like to do, the translucent skins of Norten's structures will mimic the experience of information in the Internet age: rushing in all at once, construing ephemeral forms. It should be interesting to see how these effects work down the street from Old Queen’s.