The Architectural Review - Sellection 2002-2005

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) ART MUSEUM , B ERNE , SWITZERLAND A RCHITECT RENZO...

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) ART MUSEUM , B ERNE , SWITZERLAND A RCHITECT RENZO PIANO

MONUMENT FOR A MINIATURIST A new museum dedicated to Paul Klee swells seductively into the Swiss landscape.

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1 The rollercoaster profile of the arched steel members forms the defining image of the new museum.

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The arcaded streets of the old town of Berne, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have acquired a counterpart in the pedestrian concourse that links the three volumes of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Renzo Piano’s latest showcase for art. An undulating steel structure emerges from three hills to the east of the city, facing over the ringroad and surrounded by ﬁelds. It’s a monument that celebrates the work of a brilliant miniaturist; a fusion of architecture and landscape, warmth and precision, structural daring and welcoming interiors. It captures the unique spirit of a native son who made his reputation in Germany, ﬂed Nazi persecution to return home for a ﬁnal burst of creativity, and is buried close by. Klee was astonishingly proliﬁc, meticulously recording the 10 000 works he created in his thirty-year career. ‘Not a day without a sketch,’ he noted in his journal, even as he neared his death in 1940. Members of the artist’s family and the Klee Foundation promised to donate their astounding hoard of 4000 paintings and drawings if Berne would provide a dedicated space to show them. The chief sponsors were Professor Maurice Müller, a surgeon who invented the artiﬁcial hip, and his wife, Martha, who selected the location and the architect, and insisted that the building be a centre for all the arts and for people of all ages. Piano has created a museum that reaches out to embrace the visitors who stream in from footpaths, city bus, and motorway. Like so many of his buildings, the Zentrum has a strong, simple diagram that belies the complexity of its design and construction. Piano shifted the site from the one that had ﬁrst been chosen to address the sunken motorway, mirroring its gentle curve in the glass facade and even in the lines of vents cut into the ﬂoors of the galleries. That gives the building a symbolic link to the contemporary world, and to the city that lies beyond, concealed within its river valley. The undulating topography of the adjoining hills inspired the proﬁle of the steel beams, which swoop and soar like a rollercoaster, rising from the earth at the rear to form a trio of imposing arches in front. Each rounded vault encloses a discrete set

of spaces that are linked at the front by a 150m long glazed concourse containing the café, ticketing, shop, and reference area. Extended opening hours encourage visitors to come early or linger in this protected piazza. A changing selection from the permanent collection is displayed in the central pavilion, with a temporary exhibition gallery below. To the north, meeting and restoration areas lead out of the concourse, with a creative workshop for children below, and a subterranean auditorium behind. The south pavilion contains the administrative ofﬁces, archives, and seminar rooms, all on the main level. The 4.2km of steel girders were cut and shaped by computercontrolled machines but then, because each section has a different conﬁguration, the 40km of seams were hand-welded. The arches are slightly inclined at different angles, braced by compression struts, and tied to the roof plate and ﬂoor slabs. In contrast to this assembly of unique parts, the concrete ﬂoors were constructed as a single structure, without settlement joints. The glass facade is divided into upper and lower sections, which are joined at the 4m roof level of the concourse, and are suspended from girders to avert stress from thermal expansion in the steel roof. The glass is shaded by exterior mesh blinds that extend automatically in response to the intensity of the light, and the high level of insulation minimizes energy consumption. All of these measures pay off in the galleries and archives, where temperature and humidity must be maintained at constant levels, even though they are seamlessly linked to the busy public concourse. The permanent collection is displayed beneath the curved vault in a 1700sqm room that is divided by suspended ﬂats into a benign labyrinth of interconnecting spaces. Each white screen hovers a couple of centimetres above the oak ﬂoor as do the peripheral walls. To achieve the low lighting level required by these sensitive works, illumination is indirect and ﬁltered. Spots cast their beams on the white-boarded ceiling vault, and this glow is diffused by suspended square scrims.

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3 A serpentine path leads up to the main entrance.

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2 The trio of topographic bumps mimics the gentle undulations of the surrounding landscape.

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4 To the rear, the vaults merge into the ground. Planting will gradually be established between the ridges to make the transition more seamless.

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5 5 The tapering profile of the vaults. 6 Detail of main facade and inclined steel arches.

site plan

cross section

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long section through north pavilion (concourse, cinema, auditorium)

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long section through middle pavilion (concourse, galleries)

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 7 Café and information area in the soaring public concourse that unites that trio of vaults and runs along the main facade.

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:750)

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north pavilion central pavilion south pavilion main entrance concourse information café servery cinema AV rooms restoration workshops permanent collection shop reference section ofﬁces and administration temporary galleries auditorium children’s workshop

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lower ground floor

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) It’s easy to see in the open geometry of the plan a reference to some of Klee’s compositions, and the skein of slender cables supporting walls, lights, and scrims evokes his spidery penmanship. Piano’s greatest feat is to give these tiny, intense works the space they need to breathe. Such a concentration of invention could easily overwhelm the viewer; here, each work seems to ﬂoat in its own white void, bathed in a cloud of soft light, achieving an emotional as well as a formal resonance. Works are grouped, not chronologically, but by afﬁnity, so that you can explore the inﬁnite variety of ways in which this master employed line, colour, ﬁgurative and abstract imagery; always enigmatic and never repetitive. Toplit stairs and a piston-operated lift that is a work of art in itself carry you down to a room of similar size that presently houses the 366 sketches Klee did in his last fertile year. Here, the works are arranged on a peripheral and inner wall that trace the rectangle deﬁned by slender structural columns. Scattered around both galleries on oak plinths are 40 hand puppets that Klee made around 1920 to amuse his family. Fabricated from the commonplace materials and crudely painted, they have a compelling talismanic quality, revealing the inner child in the artist and in all who connect with his work. That spirit carries over into the children’s museum, aptly named Creaviva for its emphasis on creative play in a succession of workshops that are open to all ages. The steeply-raked 300-seat auditorium that burrows into the ground behind is a black box lined with curved sound bafﬂes in the same orange hue as the Venetian plaster walls of the outer lobby. Regular performances of chamber music (Klee was an accomplished violinist), dance, and theatre will be interspersed with lectures and readings. All will reﬂect the versatility of the artist and his friends over four turbulent decades and their enduring legacy.

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MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa Associate architect ARB Architects, Berne Structural engineers Ove Arup & Partners, B + S Ingenieure Services engineers Ove Arup & Partners, Luco, Enerconom, Bering Photographs Paul Raftery/VIEW

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8 The curve of the arch runs through the glazed link between volumes. 9 Main gallery for the permanent Klee collection. 10 Main gallery is an airy labyrinth of suspended flat panels that subdivide the space. In places, light is diffused by horizontal scrims. 11 Part of the children’s workshop at

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ar march 04 delight done

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Photographs by Irina Kalashnikova

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TBILISI IS AN UNDISCOVERED TREASURE. EVEN IN DECAY, AND AFTER MUCH DESTRUCTION, THE GEORGIAN CAPITAL IS STILL RICH IN ARCHITECTURAL MOMENTS .

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The capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, means ‘warm’ due to its sulphur springs. It has attracted travellers and inspired artists, poets and philosophers for many centuries. The location has shaped its history and appearance. Having been inhabited since the fifth millennium BC, Georgia has been linked with civilizations of Asia Minor, the Aegean and with Greece, Egypt, the Roman and Parthian-Sassanian Empires in the Early Iron Age and the Classical period. At different times it has been occupied by Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Russians. In the Middle Ages, Georgian kings made Tbilisi the capital of one of the largest states in the Near East, a crossroads of trade routes and, as described by Marco Polo, a place ‘where they weave cloths of gold and all kinds of very fine silk stuffs’. Though Orthodox Christianity dominated, other religions and nationalities were also respected. The main Armenian-Gregorian Church in Tbilisi, St George’s Church (above) was built in 1251 by an Armenian merchant. The Persians seized it in the seventeenth century during their invasion. Burnt down in 1795 during the second Persian invasion and gradually restored during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it keeps its original form. There is a remarkable fragment of stone cross with an Arabic inscription on the north facade of the church. Destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, Tbilisi displays an incredible eclectic combination of Oriental and European styles. In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire enhanced its presence in Georgia bringing in Neo-Classical style, features of the Renaissance and Baroque and Moorish style, together with Art Nouveau and pseudo-Georgian styles which prevailed later. Tbilisi became a bourgeois city, its Opera House was ‘if not the best, one of the best in the world’ (Alexander Dumas). In the twentieth century, Soviet styles also influenced the city. The old part consists of winding streets with churches, workshops, stores, public sulphur baths, courtyards and ‘Tbilisi houses’ of two and three floors with lacy wooden balconies, terrace roofing, loggias with stained glass and external ladders of different forms and materials. Even in decay, Tbilisi hopes and welcomes. It is a great city. IRINA KALASHNIKOVA

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Robert Hewison Ruskin famously said that, ‘the teaching of art is the teaching of all things’, setting his pupils at the London Working Men’s College the task of representing, by drawing, a white sphere by shading only. It had to be done in a particularly Ruskinian way, not as an outline, but by shading, so that the shape of the sphere emerges as the paper darkens. The illustrations with this paper are selected from drawings members of the audience made during the talk. Ruskin’s commentary on this exercise was, ‘It has been objected that a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that this study of the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective; but in a sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle becomes merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outlines be true or false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself’. Ruskin was not trying to turn working men into artists. As he told them, ‘I have not been trying to teach you draw, only to see’. Clear sight, accuracy of observation of both image and word, was a mental discipline that Ruskin taught consistently, and he believed that the best

way both to instil that discipline and test the accuracy of a person’s perception was through the practice of drawing. He believed, however, that accurate perception, refined by the practice of drawing, was more than an exercise for the eye, it was also a facility for the mind. Speaking at the opening of St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1857, he told the students that, ‘Drawing enabled them to say what they could not otherwise say; and ... drawing enabled them to see what they could not otherwise see. By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline’. This remark is significant when we consider recent investigations of visual cognition, which show that the eye and the brain work dynamically together, and that vision is active engagement, not passive reception. Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at London University, argues in his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain that one ‘sees’ with the brain, not the eye, and that what he calls ‘the visual brain’ is involved in a process of comparing and sorting that amounts to understanding. Ruskin seems to have anticipated this idea when he wrote that sight was a great deal more than the passive reception of visual stimuli, it was ‘an absolutely spiritual phenomenon; accurately, and only to be so defined: and the “Let there be light” is as much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence as the ordering of vision’. For Ruskin, to achieve a clarity and nicety of vision, it was necessary to go back to the beginning and recover what he called ‘the innocence of the eye’. But, as Zeki’s studies show, people’s eyes are not innocent. Part of the activity of visualization is the sorting and comparison of remembered

From Ruskinian drawing exercises to advanced mathematics – with architecture, painting and sculpture in between – representation of ideas and objects lies at the heart of intellectual endeavour. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.

Representation

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During Robert Hewison’s talk, the audience was invited to try Ruskin’s exercise of representing a white sphere by shading, without lines. Here are some of the attempts.

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images so as to establish a constant version of the things that pass partially and fleetingly before us. What we have seen influences what we now see. What we have been taught to see shapes our vision. And as we see we also feel and think. Ruskin believed that the unconscious, or semi-conscious ideas that come as we look at things could interfere with the truth of our perception. In cultural terms, people’s eyes can be corrupted by conventions of one kind or another, most especially by the ways in which they are taught to see. That is why Ruskin stood out against not only the conventional tastes that rejected the fresh visions first of Turner and then of the Pre-Raphaelites, but all three of the principal means by which visual perception was formally shaped in the nineteenth century. First, he learned to reject the gentlemanly amateur tradition of the Picturesque, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century watercolour landscape tradition in which he had himself been trained. Second, he became the implacable enemy of the official, governmentpromoted method for training artists and designers, the so-called South Kensington system managed by the Department of Science and Art. Third, he was critical of the training of fine artists, as exemplified by what he called the ‘base system’ for teaching students in the schools of the Royal Academy, which, he said, ‘destroys the greater number of its pupils altogether; it hinders and paralyses the greatest’. His reasoning was important because it went beyond criticizing the framing of conventional Neo-Classical perception by studying from the antique. Teaching of art began with training the eye and the hand – but it had also to develop the mind. No art teaching, said Ruskin, ‘could be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on something deeper than all art’. Sight was intended to lead to insight. Ruskin did not confuse imitation with representation. He regarded the pleasure derived from imitation as the most contemptible that can be derived from art, because mere imitation is mere deception. What Ruskin wanted to get at was the truth. Truth in painting, he said, ‘signifies the faithful statement, either to the mind or the senses, of any fact of nature’. These ‘facts of nature’ could be discovered by diligent visual observation. But, ‘Imitation can only be of something material, but truth has reference to statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions, impressions and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth; a truth of impression as well as of form, of thought as well as of matter, and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two’. Further, ‘Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols which have a definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed, although such signs be themselves no image nor likeness of anything. Whatever can excite in the mind the conception of certain facts, can give ideas of truth, though it be in no degree the imitation or resemblance of those facts’. True sight leads to insight, true insight leads to revelation. This triadic structure corresponds to his theory of the imagination: first what he called the penetrative imagination saw clearly and deeply, then the associative imagination brought these perceptions towards unity, while the contemplative imagination meditated on and expressed the spiritual, symbolic truths so revealed. The whole of Ruskin’s art theory, in a sense, comes back to representing the sphere, an exercise in the first order of truth. We cannot begin to talk about representation, until there is something to represent, and if we do not know what it is that we wish to represent,

know it physically, through the co-ordination of hand and eye, and know it morally, through the openness and clarity of our vision, we will never be able to begin our journey. As Ruskin famously said, ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one’.

Christopher Le Brun When Caspar David Friedrich claimed that, ‘The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. If he sees nothing within himself he should also forgo painting what he sees before him …’, he not only captured the essence of Romanticism; he also posed a fundamental question with which art has been concerned ever since. If, as Friedrich states, perception and imagination throw up ‘truths at least as important as objective reality’, the issue is how to find ideas and techniques for representation which avoid contingency and randomness, and allow the work of art to establish significance and meaning. Representation in art achieves significance (or depth) when it relates to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by substitution. Just as in the forest, great trees depend for their size and majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works which nourishes their potential to convey meaning. George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of resonance as the ‘field of prepared echo’. With this image, he vividly conveys the working of the canon of Western art. It is the agreed given of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value, and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density, high culture is impossible. In such a field new ideas and how they speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood. An analogy in the visual arts might be to picture a loose grid, existing in three spatial dimensions and evolving over time. Within it, compositional formulae and repeated patterns in favoured dispositions come to acquire meaning. We see them superimposed comparatively in our imaginations. The differences and symmetries

Opposite, Christopher Le Brun RA, Aram Nemus Vult, 1988-89. Oil on canvas, 271 x 444cm, Astrup Fearnley, Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Right, Philip Guston, 19131980, Dial, 1956. Oil on canvas, 72 x 76in (182.88 x 193.04cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase 56.44.

create allusion and resonance. On this imaginary field, memories gather and grow by association and proximity. In Western painting, the field comes to develop separate spaces: foreground, middle distance, background. Each has its own defining archetypes of colour, character, story and form. We sense the existence of this implicit format most strongly in Poussin, Claude and the subsequent development of the Picturesque. This imaginary, and seemingly tacit agreement within pictorial culture has had such lasting potency that I think of it, certainly in relation to my own work as an artist, as virtually a death-defying given of apparently transcendental significance. In modern times it breaks to the surface in Cézanne, and then in Cubism. In rising to explicitness, however, its effect is changed fundamentally. Since the late nineteenth century, these complex features of compositional memory which dominate the pictorial, relational art of the West, have been tested. During the twentieth century, aesthetic characteristics such as formal reduction and singularity, rather than illusion and metaphor, become pre-eminent. Truth resides in the

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concrete and the objective. Simplicity is synonymous with honesty. Only the everyday (always the street and never the palace) is authentic. In the case of the first generation of American abstract painters such as Rothko and Clifford Still, a grand and brave simplicity is certainly achieved. But I would argue that their work is still (in mid century) in touch and dependent on art historical memory and references to the former model. At such close range (50 years) their aesthetic denials and adventures retain meaning. Yet the possibility for creating this web of meaning, allusion, memory and association did not of course entirely disappear in the twentieth century. The pair of exhibitions at Tate Modern on Constantin Brancusi and Donald Judd early in 2004 shows the contrast. Each finds the poetic in apparently irreconcilable worlds. Subjective compared to objective, carved to assembled, refined to raw. It is a division which runs through twentieth-century art between the associative and the putative re-presentation of reality. A powerful example of the persistence of this imaginary field in late twentieth-century art is seen in the work of the painter Philip Guston. He, like me, has felt the

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the ground to create car parking below a green belt, how ground form, roof shape and structure ease the flow of air and invite movement of people. Having a degree of familiarity with Dublin probably helped the thinking for the Millennium Spire to happen quickly. It was an intuitive idea which became architectural, sculptural, and structural. I wanted the stand at Crystal Palace to capture the essential form of the bowl Joseph Paxton created. It sweeps up to the stage, reflecting sound and air, like a leaf in the park. The urban scene is full of images that carry meaning, which may lie, for instance, in a technical effect or perhaps in memory. A small intervention may alter the balance between images and profoundly affect their meaning, and it is in sifting and synthesizing these ideas and influences, helping to understand their repercussions, that language is so powerful. As words develop into images they pick up and evolve knowledge.

Roger Penrose I write as a mathematician who finds drawing and other forms of visual representation immensely helpful. I can think of several different ways in which such visual imagery can be important in mathematical work. In the first place, there is the following major division: • Internal, ie, aids to one’s own mathematical understanding • External, ie, aids to the conveying of such understanding to others. There are many different ways to think about mathematics, and there are considerable differences among mathematicians as to which modes of thinking come most easily. I think that the main division between such modes of thinking comes with the visual/geometric, on one hand and the verbal/algebraic/calculational, on the other. On the whole, the best mathematicians are good at both modes of thinking, but my experience has been that with mathematics students, there is much more difficulty on the geometric side than on the

Four images by Ian Ritchie RA, clockwise from left, The Spire of Dublin (monument for Ireland); White City Shopping Centre; Alba di Milano; Crystal Palace Concert Platform.

compelling pull of this invisible model which suffuses Western art. Guston’s paintings with their tidal shifts towards and away from representation, show a grid-like sensual abstract painting interpenetrating figurative, illustrative pictures. Depictions and thought-touches seem to emerge from the wealth of the painter’s memory, giving them an interiority akin to the reflexiveness of literature. His paintings exist within a mature metaphysical realm for the projection of emotion and form. What I am arguing for is a more organized form of subjectivity along the lines of Caspar David Friedrich’s injunction. It is a Classical and informed subjectivity, depending on thoughtfulness and reflection, and its effect is to allow pictures to maintain their elusiveness and privacy even when their meaning is manifestly present in the public realm.

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Ian Ritchie: language to architectural calligraphy My design process always starts with an idea, and ideas can come from many sources. Some might be environmental; others are functional, social or structural, or sculptural in the case of the Jubilee Line vents, but they exist as ideas without a clear representation. The meaning and value of an idea lies in language, so I find language a fundamental tool for exploring ideas. As a student in Liverpool and spending a lot of time at the Everyman Theatre where the poet Roger McGough opened up my appreciation of language, I saw how words can investigate rather than determine an idea. This is a pre-drawing form of representation

which I develop through language. Through draughting and redraughting, words help to concentrate an idea and bring it into focus. How this happens varies. The outcome might be descriptive or abstract; sometimes it may depend on metaphor and at other times it is more literal. Once words have given a theme or idea some existence, the next challenge is to capture it visually. In the past I used models, moulding a piece of plasticene to find the form, but more often now I use Japanese or Chinese brushes – the calligraphy of the title. The idea must exist before I can paint around it, but using different techniques of representation helps to develop it. Alba di Milano, for example, originated as a beam of light. Milan’s reputation for making fine cloth suggested the idea of weaving, so it started to evolve into a cloth of light woven from fibre optics, which emit light when broken. My first painting was a black line on a white piece of paper. Using ground on copper plate, the etching reversed that, turning it into a flash of white against a black ground. For White City Shopping Centre I wanted to capture ideas about shopping that I had described in writing. I had written about how air might flow through the spaces and the roof modulate sunlight, about how there could be views and routes to parkland on either side, and how the effect might reconfigure the relationship between shopping and the city. An early ink drawing conveys those ideas, initially formed in words, with a few simple brushstrokes, showing the manipulation of

algebraic/calculational side. As for myself, I find that geometrical thinking is what comes most naturally, and I often try to convert mathematical problems into a geometrical form first before I feel happy about trying to solve them. However, I frequently find difficulties when trying to convey my understandings to other mathematicians, or students, if I use too geometrical a formulation, as they tend to be happier with algebraic/calculational types of argument. However, there is a curious paradox here. I am often asked to give lectures to non-mathematical (or mixed) audiences, and then the request usually takes the form ‘use lots of pictures, so the audience will find it easier’. This is generally good advice, and it is certainly the case that pictures rather than equations are normally much better for conveying information – even fairly technical information – to lay audiences. The puzzle is: why is it that professional mathematicians, and those aspiring to be professional mathematicians, give the impression of being more unhappy with visual types of thinking than lay members of the interested general public? Here I venture, as a solution to this puzzle, that there is a selection effect, arising from the fact that it is much harder to examine visual mathematical ability than calculational or algebraic skills. When I was in my final year as a mathematics undergraduate, I chose geometrical subjects for my specialist topics, but I believe that I fared a good deal better on the algebra papers than on the geometrical ones. The reason was that although I did not have difficulty in solving the geometrical problems, I found it to be difficult, and particularly time consuming, to express this understanding in words, as was necessary. Moreover, in mathematical arguments, an appropriate degree of rigour is always needed, for arguments to be acceptable. This is often difficult to express adequately with geometrical reasoning, even when such reasoning may, in essence, be perfectly correct. Accordingly, those who rely on geometrical types

Left, Fig 1; centre, Fig 2; right, Fig 3, The Creator Having Trouble Locating the Right Universe by Roger Penrose, mixed media 29x25cm. [email protected] -9-

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of understanding are at a disadvantage in examinations, and consequently they become under represented in the mathematical community at large. My own experience with visual imagery – and this applies within both the above categories (internal and external), though with a somewhat different balance within each – is that it can take many forms. There are, indeed, various ways in which I have found visual representations to be immensely valuable. In my own work, either as an essential aid to mathematical understanding and research, or for expositional purposes, I can distinguish at least four categories: (a) Schematic diagrams representing mathematical concepts. (b) Accurate representation of geometrical configurations. (c) A precise diagrammatic notation for algebraic calculations. (d) Cartoons, often whimsical, to illuminate key points. My notebooks are full of sketches depicting (a), the pictures frequently represent mathematical structures of higher dimension than is apparent. The configuration in Fig 1 is a drawing of mine from an article ‘Mathematics of the Impossible’,* and it illustrates a nonperiodic tiling of the plane from just two different birdlike shapes. The type of precise geometrical notation that I frequently use, in accordance with (c), is illustrated in Fig 2, from another notebook of mine. The (whimsical) cartoon of Fig 3 is one that I have used a number of times in lectures, and it illustrates the extraordinary precision with which the universe must have started up (at the Big Bang), in order to be consistent with observation and with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I feel honoured that it has been exhibited as part of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2004 under the title ‘The creator having trouble locating the right universe’. *The Artful Eye, edited by Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard, and David Rose, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p326.

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Abigail Reynolds Ruskin established a clear line between drawing and comprehension, arguing that drawing triggers looking, and looking leads to understanding. But Robert Hewison’s discussion of Ruskin suggests that he saw the entire benefit came in producing a drawing, leaving open the question of whether seeing a drawing has the same order of significance. In art, Richter points out, seeing is the decisive act, so how the artist can enable the viewer to share this central act completely becomes the vital issue. I am especially interested in how art can become a tool for thinking, and potentially elevate the viewer’s thought process over the artist’s. Art should open an avenue for active thought. Having made Mount Fear, which represents crime statistics as a mountain range, I am looking at developing further strategies for representing the abstract by sculptural and physical modelling. Among these was my work as artist in residence for the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is already a representation in at least two senses: its content represents culture through time, and its aesthetic represents authority. It is constantly changed and updated, and although it outwardly aspires only to be descriptive, mapping change in language, its aesthetic of authority confuses this by being set up as an arbiter of what is and is not correct. But in shaping the chaos of experience and imposing order, the OED has points in common with art. I approached the OED by looking at systems and structures of meaning in lexicography and art, connecting the experiences of my first degree in English and my second in Fine Art. The OED itself is

Abigail Reynolds, Exchequer 1, photo-collage 2004.

Abigail Reynolds, working drawing for The Frozen Sea, 2004.

interested in opening up discussion of the place of lexicography and dictionary-making in our culture to a wider audience, but I am especially drawn to it because, as a project, it teeters on the brink of folly. The hubris of documenting all of language, a moving target, is almost monumentally absurd, and also heroic. It can never be done. My year as Artist in Residence at the OED had many joys. The simplest of these was, when asked where my studio is, to be able to respond ‘in the Dictionary’. Of course, when I say Dictionary, I mean a department of 70 lexicographers, whereas my questioner imagines a set of 20 volumes. I mean an ongoing daily process; they think of a printed authority. Suddenly, in this gap, emerges a mental image of me, shrunk like Alice moving through a world of words. It is a really enjoyable disjunction, and one which lies at the centre of my approach to creating a visual art work that responds to the OED. I started to produce word mappings quite soon after arriving in the department. Paul Klee, when drawing, would take a line for a walk. I spend time taking words for walks. Choosing a word, I sniff around it, following cross-references and other hints in the OED. The word group grows and is shaped over time as I add and subtract semantic and etymological links, arranging and re-arranging until a satisfying form evolves. Words have a shape which can amount to a secret history of their mutated meanings over time. What I find important in this phase

of my work is the methodology of visually mapping information and the psychological and emotional dimension that comes out of it. The Frozen Sea installation began in the word check-mate. Following its semantic and etymological connections took me through the various strands of the meanings of words such as check, exchequer, chess, jeopardy, hazard, and draughts. Having mapped ‘check’ to a level that satisfied me (about forty terms), I set about the problem of materializing this map. No map can convey every detail to a reader, as the information would be overwhelming. I chose to focus only on the relations between words. To know if and how words relate, their relative ages and etymologies have to be known. As my map contained semantic links, this too would have to be recognized. I chose three rules to describe the word map in three dimensions: semantic = beside, etymological = on top of, word age = volume. For The Frozen Sea I decided to create a study, with desks, chairs, filing cabinets, a full set of the OED, blackboards and so on. Having gathered my objects, I ranked them by volume and assigned a word from the ‘check’ word map to each, based on the simple correspondence that the largest volume should represent the term longest in use, the smallest, the word that had been in use for the most fleeting moment. Having assigned objects to words I arranged them according to my three rules: objects representing words that related semantically were placed beside one another; those with an etymological connection were stacked

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horizontally. The room became a working study and simultaneously, a grid with X and Y coordinates. Richard Long maps his journeys through the landscape in stones and sticks, objects to hand. I have mapped my journey through the forest of words in anglepoise lamps and chairs, also with objects to hand. The Mexican artist Damien Ortega’s recent work Matter and Spirit places text and materiality in disjunctive conjunction. Michael Craig-Martin’s 1970s work An Oak Tree looks at the mysterious chemistry of naming and duality of matter and sign. I situate The Frozen Sea in relation to these works. To return to the experience of the viewer – the installation is activated when the viewer begins to piece together the logic behind the study. The work operates as an invitation to the viewer to think through the process of decision and doubt that has created the form. It is a detective work. This is a strategy that I employ to activate the work. The decisive process of seeing is a re-perceiving. As in a conspiracy theory, things are not what they seem. Every element of the piece has a dual meaning. The desk is indeed a place where a lexicographer has been at work, with the fetishization usual in the preserved studies of thinkers like Darwin. It is also a tool that has been used in the task of working out, and also directly represents a word in the group being mapped. The title was chosen to suggest a momentary fixing of a flow of particles. The arrangement will give way to another as another word is mapped.

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Graham Modlen, Office of Zaha Hadid Drawings by Zaha Hadid’s office are powerful representations of ideas and possibilities and when I started there I had to fathom out what they might represent. The drawings I had seen previously for the Hong Kong Peak project stimulated me to think forward, to wonder that if you could do that to Hong Kong, what were the possibilities for other cities? I soon realized that this type of drawing is a process where everything is to be re-imagined, shattered and then put back together again. It is as if we are asked to suspend belief and to turn the project round graphically and re-present it. Drawing allows different people to invent and interpret, and contribute to the process. It is a real studio system. One of Zaha’s earliest commissions was a rooftop conversion in Halkin Place in Belgravia. The drawings show the flat interior with the walls blown away and the plan drawn within a floating isometric projection. Fittings and furniture are sometimes on the floor and sometimes floating. The wall is drawn as if it were a new plane through which light shines. It has a sort of surreal air to it. But the drawings also re-imagine the home ground; certain elements become recognizable; you can make out the streets with the familiar duality of a regular edge to the street and a serrated back edge. The technique of drawing she inaugurated has become a hallmark of the office. It allows anyone in the office, whether they know London or not, to reinvent it and show us how it could be. By the time of the competition for the Grand Buildings site in the mid-1980s, the techniques for drawing had evolved into a collective effort. The project was an opportunity to reinvent or imagine an idealized version of Trafalgar Square. In the drawings the square itself might be recognizable but what lies behind it has changed. The river gets lost and there are several strange undulations. Various people in the team contributed perspectival drawings, representing their ideas or knowledge of the city but, I think, they were put together with Zaha’s steadying hand. In the office are sketch books of drawings by Zaha, which are something like diaries. They may not refer to any particular project, but they are forward thoughts and reflections on past ideas. She can present them to the studio in a way which launches everybody off, or she may say, ‘there’s a sketch I did which may ... but you will have to study it’. We tease out what might relate to the project in discussion. It may

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Zollhof, Düsseldorf, by Zaha Hadid Architects.

be the silhouette that has some significance, or perhaps one image is laid over another to fathom out the kernel of the plan. The result is multi-layered and the original thought may become indistinct. With computers and copiers we can deal with all sorts of distortions. We can twist plans, build up layers and distort distances. The introductory images of the Rome Contemporary Arts Centre were ‘reliefs’ built up from two or three layers of cut card to give depth to the ground in plan. That then feeds ideas about the roof structure and for walls which descend and create outdoor spaces. At the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome, our task was to represent the workings of the mind through an interaction of architecture, art and an understanding of neurology. Its form of three overlapping snake-like shapes resembling curving lasagne layers and forms, was described as piece of sculpture and exhibitry itself with smaller elements of sculpture and exhibits inside, something like a Russian doll. The position of the steel trusses related to circulation patterns and the dome’s shape; we tickled and pushed it with cantilevers and distortions. The idea was that people walking along ramps would come across exhibits that aimed, for example, to play with visual perception, communication and identity. One of the exhibits was a built spatial perspectival trick comprising a 4m high sculpture by Gavin Turk which distorted distances. Another was a computer program which reworked a photograph of yourself to change gender, race and age. Our drawing techniques are ways not just of representing, but finding and developing ideas. For example the ‘mid-construction’ views of Cardiff Bay Opera House were drawn on black paper, but from the use of white paint, for example, it seemed to me an idea came about the use of light. In another, earlier project from 1993, based on an exdockland site in Düsseldorf, which combined a radio station, hotel and media offices, the team made a number of exploratory works including a mixed, hybrid perspective which was as if wringing a cloth. Out of it came different views represented in one painterly composition. Representation is part of the process of thinking.

Paul Schütze When I make pieces based on architecture, I aim to document the experience of a building rather than the building itself. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals captivated me partly because the building seems to have its own internal weather systems. Each room achieves its own micro climate with distinctive temperature, humidity and tepidity. Some spaces also link with the exterior bringing an unexpected haptic transparency. Rooms register as much on the skin as the eye or the ear. There are extraordinary acoustic phenomena articulated by varieties in scale, materials and ceiling heights. I was struck by how rich an experience the building would offer to someone who could not see. While its visual impact is considerable, the architect has addressed each of the senses extravagantly. Another feature is the way its water surfaces appear as part of the compositional mass of the building and yet are occupiable as spaces. This produces an almost eerie intimacy with the materials and the structure itself. The Janta Manta series takes the remarkable structures built as astronomical observatories under the Mughal Emperor Jai Singh II. Their form determined by need, they have a minimal amount of ornament, but they make an engaging collection of sculptural forms which seem strangely contemporary despite being several hundred

Paul Schütze: From the Garden of Instruments III, 2004. Lightbox, 92 x 128.4cm. Edition of three. Copyright holder: Paul Schütze. Images courtesy of Alan Christea Gallery, London.

years old. There are three of these complexes in India and while I have seen only the one in Jaipur, I chose to model the Delhi structure familiar to me only from incomplete accounts, plans and photographic records. I was keen to make an idealized version which I think reveals more of the hubris but also the beauty of these three structures. After we had made a CAD model of the site, I attempted to deconstruct the buildings by projecting animated views onto a moving stainless-steel mesh armature and re-filming the result. Most elements in the buildings are visible, and their essence survives being pulled across a complex series of curves. I was interested to see how the basic geometry would withstand this sort of distortion of representation. It is an example of what I call ‘vertical memory’, where the essence of compressed experience survives this sort of mangling. This also relates to our own inability to recall accurately which gives rise to a poetic sensibility forced to rebuild objects and experiences in our own minds. If there is a common grammar, each small part might contain the phraseology for the whole. When I introduce sound into a work I use Dolby Surround which defines a pronounced spatial configuration. I do not want a sense of front or a formal planar way of seeing a building. I want the same flexibility in experiencing representation that we take for granted in the experience of the represented. One of the two films to which this project gave rise has a sequence

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in which I overlay blurred and distorted images. This simple act of blurring curiously introduces a level of sight which for me becomes more permanently embedded than conventional means of representation. It also shows up a particular problem with pristine architectural photographs and renderings. Their apparently inexhaustible detail drawing you closer and closer to the surface, until the photographic grain interposes itself between you and the building represented. Using a different approach to representation raises questions about the ‘habitability’ of the representation itself; that is, about how it can invite you past its own surface. I find similar problems in representation with text and while I use text extensively in my work it is often in a form which acknowledges this difficulty. I spend some time labouring over the words and have a programme which will then display them as a fine grid floating apparently within the image like a fog. While the meaning is still present, it becomes lost in the image, almost irretrievable, an obscuring tint across the surface of things. Their numerous staircases aiming at the sky in elaborate calibrations and dishes, the Janta Manta are buildings entirely determined by light, moonlight, starlight or sunlight. That is why I chose to render the structures in glass. How the building both depends on light and arose purely from light sets up all sorts of fascinating possibilities for its representation.

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Sketch for the School of the Future.

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Will Alsop I am always curious that the biggest critics of our architecture are not members of the public but other architects. In general the community responds well to our designs as we can show through visitor numbers, but something we do lies outside the academic conventions of how to make architecture. Because academics have to make their way up the university ladder there are more books on architectural methodology than even architectural history – but they do not work. No self-respecting architect would follow any of their principles. To me it does not matter where you start. Even digital media simply offer another design tool; it is quick and can be dangerous, but not completely different to the pencil or other traditional techniques. The essential starting point is to de-programme yourself, which is why we work with local communities, by handing them a pencil or a paintbrush, and at the same time a glass of wine. Where you work is an equally important part of the question of representation. In my own studio (not my office) where I work with two or three assistants, there is a bar which is sometimes used as a bar, so there is a social function to the layout. But it divides the space into a dirty and a clean side, with computers, a fridge and a sofa on one side, a large plywood wall for stapling or projecting things on the other. The dialogue this invites between clean and dirty is like the open discussions that take place in art schools: dialogue happens almost without its participants realizing. Our layout also allows us to see things and possibly to misinterpret them, which can be as important in the creative process as understanding. Here we can recognize reality but also explore its limits. We work with different scales and techniques of representation. When architects are usually responsible for the largest artefacts in the world, it seems strange that they often work at a small scale. The key is to use the whole body because that gives a relationship between human scale and the scale of what you want to do.

Continuity is important too, because all our projects are really one work. An extraordinary concept you might have at the age of 21 is as valid when you are 56; you just have more wisdom to explore that concept in other ways, but hopefully with no less vibrancy. It is important to keep up a process of discovery and invention. Often I spend time in the summer on Minorca with Bruce Maclean, not working on any particular project but doing something else. These sessions might throw up some interesting shapes, forms or ideas which could find their way into design projects. We would have to do further studies to interpret how to build them, but in reality drawing, making and realization are all aspects of the same process. Discovery is an important part of our activities. We did not impose the Ontario College of Art and Design on the community; rather it came out of the community. We extended the park to the street so people who live on it can walk straight out into the park, which is now animated by the lively people who occupy the art school. Our project ‘Not the Tate’ for Barking Reach in the Thames Gateway shows how we use various techniques of representation to explore the implications of particular starting points. At the moment, the area is not on the mental map of Londoners and most proposals for it are overly academic. Our proposal is to give a series of large wooden huts over to the London art schools – one of the city’s great secrets – and curate a landscape of activity with work in, on or around each hut, fed by plenty of food and drink and free parking. In Montreal we tried another relationship between starting point and means of representation. To engage the public we built a 40m long tube of canvas for public and students to explore what this piece of Montreal could be. As it starts to break down assumptions, the design team begins to interact with the public. In part it is an exuberant messing about with paint, but it is also a documented series of ideas. It helps me to find something outside myself; although mixed with my cultural baggage it also engenders a sense of shared ownership of the ideas. In general, we do not talk about designing buildings but about discovering what they want to be. That voyage of discovery has to be a very open process.

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product review

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[email protected] - 16 1 The new museum at night – mass touched by light.

This new art museum in St Louis is conceived as a flexible shell for experiment that reaches out to its surroundings.

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C ONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM , S T L OUIS , M ISSOURI , USA ARCHITECT A LLIED W ORKS

Meet me in St Louis, Louis, meet me at the Fair’, sang Judy Garland, and the city is celebrating the centenary of that high point in its fortunes, even as it struggles – like so many others in the Midwest – to regenerate its battered core. Progress has been made since Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch was built on the banks of the Mississippi in 1968, and the Grand Center Arts District at the edge of downtown has recently acquired two small but potent gems: Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum by Allied Works Architecture. They occupy neighbouring sites and conduct a lively dialogue across a shared courtyard dominated by a Richard Serra torqued steel sculpture. What’s remarkable is how well these two radically different buildings complement each other visually as well as in purpose. The Pulitzer, which opened two years ago, is a signature work by Ando in the finest in-situ concrete. It has the air of a spiritual retreat: refined, serene, and inward-looking; a place for solitary contemplation of twentieth-century masterworks from the Pulitzer collection, which is open by appointment two days a week. In contrast, Allied Works principal Brad Cloepfil designed the new museum as a flexible shell for experimentation in the visual arts, and programmes that reach out to the depressed neighbourhood and the general public. Concrete walls are clad in tightly woven stainless-steel mesh, and expansive windows open up views from street to courtyard. Galleries for changing exhibitions occupy a quarter of its 2500 sq m; the rest are given over to a large performance space, an education centre and café, plus upstairs offices and classrooms. The building cost only $6.5 million, substantially less than its neighbour. Thanks to the generosity of Emily Pulitzer and other patrons, the CAM has moved far beyond its modest beginnings in a downtown storefront, and it selected Allied Works from a shortlist that included Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Zumthor. It was a prescient choice, for Cloepfil has since won acclaim for prestigious

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2 The museum complex in St Louis’ depressed cityscape. Allied Works’ new building (left) joins Ando’s museum on the right. 3 Concrete walls wrapped in stainlesssteel mesh are beautifully smooth, impassive surfaces. 4 Expansive windows open up views.

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entrance lobby gallery spaces education studio performance space courtyard café loading line of Ando building administrative offices resource centre classroom

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1250)

5 The internal courtyard. 6 Detail of mesh-wrapped walls.

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first floor plan

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arts projects in New York, Dallas, and Seattle, all of which are characterized by a cool minimalism and sensitivity to aesthetic needs. As he explains: ‘In making space for contemporary art, the architecture must first serve the artist; not by attempting to render a background for the art, but by providing the artist with a specific spatial presence, an intentional vacancy that achieves meaning through the art itself.’ He also spoke of creating ‘a fusion of the city and the arts.’ Cloepfil has pushed the building out to a curved corner that gives it a distinctive prow, and has restored the original street line – in contrast to the Pulitzer, which is pulled back. The contents of the building are revealed though window walls, so that its role as an art centre is immediately apparent. Concrete walls are sandblasted to dematerialize the surface and distinguish it from Ando’s small modules. The mesh is set 100-150mm from the walls, unifying the facade and shading the office and classroom windows. It’s a concept that the architect has developed and taken further in the translucent membrane he proposes to wrap around the former Huntington Hartford Gallery in New York, a marble-clad Venetian pastiche by Edward Durrell Stone, to provide a new home for the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design. Double glass doors open onto the lobby from a setback in the

north facade, and steps lead down from this introductory space to the galleries. Cloepfil has played with space and light as though they were liquids, containing and releasing them, allowing visitors to feel they are swimming through galleries that open up to each other and to outdoor areas that are tightly enclosed by the two buildings. There are two levels of wall: 4m high sections at ground level, and a 6m high band that wraps around the upper level in serpentine fashion, tying the spaces together. The steel mesh is carried inside in places to add another layer and a contrasting texture to the white painted sheetrock on the display walls. Ceiling planes float at different levels, admitting light from clerestories and blocking direct sun. The effect is one of interlocking boxes cut away to leave only a few defining edges. Paul Ha, the new director of St Louis CAM, made his reputation at White Columns, New York’s most adventurous alternative art space. ‘It changes one’s perception of art to see it in a different setting,’ he observes, ‘and artists welcome the challenge of responding to the energy of place.’ For Cloepfil, the task was ‘to make spaces that serve the arts and artists, while allowing for a subtle emotional response from the individual. It was imperative to create a physical environment that visitors would feel comfortable returning to again and again.’ MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Allied Works, Portland, USA Photographs Hélène Binet

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7 Looking through the courtyard. 8 After the compression of the outdoor areas, galleries are tall, airy, luminous spaces. 9, 10 The building is conceived as a flexible shell for experimentation.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The young French partnership of Florence Lipsky and Pascal Rollet has a reputation for formally sparse but technically and materially inventive buildings that make the most of limited programmes and budgets. Though the pair favour the aesthetic edginess and functional economy of raw or industrial materials, they generally play it straight with modular Miesian structures and disciplined spatial arrangements. Their latest building is a science library for the University of Orleans. Founded in 1961 and now with some 5000 students, the university occupies a peripheral campus sward at some remove from the city centre, linked by a tram line that runs on a north-south axis across town. The site for the library is next to the tram line, in front of one of the four stations that serves the campus. Emerging from a boskily pastoral setting, the building is a strong, almost graphic presence in the landscape. The taut orthogonality of its form, a long, three-storey box terminated by a full-height colonnade, suggests a scientiﬁc triumph of the rational over the romantic, but it has a more quixotic side in its appropriation of materials, handling of light and approach to energy use and environmental control. The tall concrete colonnade, like a scaled down version of Foster’s Carré d’Art museum, Nîmes (AR July 1993), is a welcoming gesture that celebrates and civilises arrival, while emphasising a route to the lake. A small glass box, which also acts as an informal exhibition space, forms a decompression zone between the blare of the outside world and the

SCIENCE LESSON Veiled in a polycarbonate skin, this science library exploits site, light and materials in the quiet pursuit of passive environmental control.

1 The translucent volume of the new library emerges from its wooded campus setting. 2 A tall colonnade creates a space for social interaction.

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3 cross section 3 The colonnade marks the entrance. 4 The site lies next to a tram line linking the campus with Orleans city centre. 5 Windows puncture the translucent polycarbonate skin; glare control is provided by vertical brise soleil.

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

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colonnade entrance hall exhibition space reception reading room book box study zones ofﬁces group work spaces multimedia workshop computer room kitchen research room

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roof plan

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U NIVERSITY LIBRARY , O RLEANS , F RANCE A RCHITECT LIPSKY + ROLLET

silent inner sanctum of the reading room. Areas of clear glazing are punched apparently at random into the translucent polycarbonate skin frame and deﬁne views of the landscape from inside at study table height, so students can drift off in contemplative reveries. In operational terms, the modern university library is less concerned with the inducement of reverie and more with the efﬁcient storage and retrieval of information, in both paper and digital formats.Yet the process of information withdrawal, consultation and return continues to underpin and structure the library as a building type. Lipksy + Rollet articulate this process through a central ‘book box’, a dense core of books surrounded by more ﬂuid study zones arranged round the periphery. The main reading room is a dramatic triple-height space, overlooked and surveyed by perimeter study zones on the ﬂoor above, so users can inhabit a more intimate enclave, yet be aware of wider goings on. The monumental book box is clad in Fincof panels (more commonly employed for concrete formwork), a type of Finnish birch plywood stained with dark phenolic resin. The panels evoke the warm leather of traditional bookbinding and study armchairs but this is faux luxury. The budget necessitated an imaginatively frugal approach to materials, as manifest by the double skin of polycarbonate used to clad the building which combines good insulation levels with light diffusing qualities, so the reading room seems wrapped in a rice paper screen, with readers silhouetted against its translucent walls. South and east facades have vertical, manually operable white polycarbonate louvres to provide additional glare control. Depending on the sun angle and building users, the vertical brise soleil create a changing pattern on the facades. Though France is not as advanced as Germany in legislating for efﬁcient energy use, the need to keep capital and running costs down proved an important incentive, giving rise to an integrated system of low key, passive environmental control techniques that minimise mechanical systems. The building is naturally ventilated, with fresh air warming and rising up through the main reading room through the stack effect and expelled through vents in the roof. In winter, the main gas-ﬁred heating system of water pipes in the ground ﬂoor slab is supplemented by a network of local radiators for smaller cellular spaces. All this is achieved in an undemonstrative yet thoughtful way that chimes with the wider architectural intentions. Without succumbing entirely to the lure of scientiﬁc rationalism, Lipsky + Rollet manage to make complex things look elegantly simple and obvious. This is science with soul. C. S.

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7 6 Study zones on the perimeter. 7 The monumental book box at the heart of the library clad in plywood panels stained with phenolic resin. 8 Light diffuses softly through the polycarbonate skin while panels of clear glazing frame external views at study table height.

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Architect Lipksy + Rollet, Paris Photographs Paul Raftery/VIEW

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ar house

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Living on the edge Walter & Cohen’s house: a threshold between suburbia and the South Pacific.

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H OUSE , S YDNEY , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT W ALTERS & C OHEN

1 80m above the South Pacific … 2 … surrounded by Sydney’s suburban brick boxes … 3 … Walters & Cohen’s new house is entered through a walled courtyard. 4 Once inside, breathtaking views are revealed from within the clerestoried living room … 5 … and across the rooftop pool.

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Sydney’s Bondi Beach is, rightly, one of the world’s more famous crescents of sand, but its natural beauty is not matched by the architecture fronting it and sprawling over its cliff-top flanks. No single carbuncle but a plague of minor boils; a rash of postwar brick and clay-tile houses that owe everything to the worst of English suburbia and nothing to the might of the South Pacific Ocean. Contemporary architects are gradually making inroads with more climatically responsive houses that are replacing the tacky brick boxes. London-based Walters & Cohen has replaced one such bungalow on the very edge of the sandstone cliffs to the north with a house made up of a pair of pavilions in white render and glass that cling vertiginously 80m above the surf. Porous Sydney sandstone does not

readily last as an exposed building material in such a weather-beaten location but geo-technical surveys indicate that it provides a solid footing to the concrete structure – along this section of the cliffs at least. A walled entrance court deliberately conceals the spectacular views, which are only revealed to the casual visitor after reaching the L-shaped first-floor living area wrapped on two sides with glazing. Views outwards allow whale watching, views downwards can reveal shoals of fish 80m below, and those upwards give advance warning of any approaching electrical storms that can buffet the house. In an exercise in deferred gratification, you enter through a solid timber door set in a blade of masonry some 7.5m high and flanked by equally tall etched

glass panels 250mm wide. The double-height hall beyond is an atrium between seaward and landward pavilions of the building. Its wedge shape culminates in a deep internal lightwell fronted by a 4.5m x 2.5m frameless glass panel. Uplights are set into the polished concrete floors to avoid the need for lights within the soffit high above; none of the first floor’s ceilings are interrupted by light fixings. A flight of timber treads is cantilevered off the wall, supported by an internal edge beam of welded steel angles, some of which return vertically to form the framework for the glass balustrade. Upstairs, the panorama awaits. Concealed at entrance level on the seaward side is a suite of rooms with ocean views, two bedrooms and a woodworking

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) studio for the client. Steelframed sliding doors and windows allow uninterrupted views, even from the bathrooms that have bluestone-clad (from neighbouring Victoria) baths pushed against the glass. Handles are everywhere minimized or absent. Full-height doors at this level pivot shut to 10mm-wide aluminium returns set in the wall. This minimal detailing prescribed by Walters & Cohen and a neatnik client has been clarified and executed throughout by local practice Collins and Turner (both former Foster and Partners employees). All the timber used, including the matchstick screens of the garage and the double-height oriel above, is recycled jarrah – a tough Australian hardwood – some of it sourced from an

old wharf from the port of Fremantle in Western Australia. The oriel serves another double-height space on the landward side reached from a half-landing and incorporating a mezzanine bedspace – itself accessed by a beautifully built formed-concrete staircase. A small square window gives glimpses back west across the peninsula and Sydney Harbour to the distant Central Business District. This room, like the whole of the upper floor in both pavilions, is surmounted by a clerestory set above two steel channels backto-back to conceal perimeter lighting. The steels act as a ringbeam for each pavilion and steel uprights carry the steel roof with its deep-shading eaves. An airconditioning zone has been

created between the floors but the combination of under-floor heating for the winter months and the cooling breezes pushing over the lip of the cliff suggests that mechanical climate control will not be necessary. Although some blinds may need to be installed against strong morning light, the rest of the cantilevered upper floor, kitchen, living, dining, study and TV areas, make the most of the uninterrupted gull’s back views. Most of the glass doors open, with only a glass cliff-edge balustrade (on a curve with a setting-out point some 200m out to sea) between you and the drop, but opposite the dining area incorporation of structure into a masonry panel creates a framed view. This living area is backed by a waist-high insertion

of jarrah shelves and cupboards that runs 7m from the return of the staircase balustrade, then folds around the study zone and makes a backdrop to a sunken TV area. Here the glazing forms a frameless box reflecting the sea and the cliffs by day and the moon by night. The nose of this box, seen from the entrance courtyard, is a subtle indicator of the axis of splendour to come. ROBERT BEVAN Architect Walters & Cohen Executive architect Collins and Turner Landscape architect Barbara Schaffer Engineer Murtagh Bond Photographs Richard Glover 6 Master bedroom suite.

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paved forecourt double garage rear entrance laundry pool plant room/garden store dressing room external courtyard internal circulation area main entrance bedroom bathroom guest wc kitchen upper garden bridge link study informal living area formal living area upper deck area pool

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Above: Friday Mosque, Djenné, Mali – biggest mud building in the world and defining image of West African architecture. Foundations are more than 500 years old, though building has often been rebuilt. Right: mosque, Yebe, Mali. Stick-studded mosques of Niger delta region define the unique aesthetic of Western Sudan. Though wooden posts have practical functions – as scaffold for re-rendering, structural support, and assisting in expelling moisture from heart of the wall – the most striking impact is visual.

GLORIOUS MUD

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Building with mud is one of the oldest architectural traditions and is still practised with remarkable results in parts of West Africa, though there are fears that such skills will eventually be lost for ever. Here, James Morris presents a photographic survey of some astonishing examples of religious and domestic buildings.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Too often, when people in the West think of traditional African architecture, they perceive nothing more than a mud hut; a primitive vernacular half remembered from a Tarzan film. But why this ignorance of half a continent’s heritage? Possibly because the great dynastic civilizations of the region were already in decline when European colonizers first exposed these cultures to a wider audience. Being made of perishable mud, many older buildings have been lost, unlike the stone or brick structures of other ancient cultures. Or possibly this lack of awareness is because the buildings are just too strange, too foreign to have been easily appreciated by outsiders. Often they are more like huge monolithic sculptures or ceramic pots than architecture as we might conventionally think of it. But the surviving buildings are neither historic monuments in the classic sense, nor are they as culturally remote as they may initially appear. They share many of the qualities now valued in Western architectural thinking such as sustainability, sculptural form and community participation in their conception and making. Though part of long held traditions and ancient cultures, they are also contemporary structures, serving a current purpose. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. In the West, mud is effectively regarded as dirt, yet in rural Africa (as in so much of the world) it is the most common of building materials with which everybody has direct contact. Maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life, and there is an ongoing and active participation in their continuing existence. This is not a museum culture. Superbly formed and highly expressive, these extraordinary buildings emerge from the most basic of materials, earth and water, and in the harshest of conditions. They are vibrant works of art with their own distinct and striking aesthetic, skilfully responding to the qualities of African light and the inherent properties of mud to emphasize shadow, texture, silhouette, profile and form. During the course of a year the mud render dries, the surface is covered in a web of cracks and then it slowly starts to peel off before being re-rendered. With each re-rendering, the shape of a building is subtly altered, so

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Top: Nando Mosque, Mali. Supposedly built by a giant in one night, this highly sculptural mosque is a unique structure that borders the magical and fantastical. Middle: women’s quarters, Tangasoko, Burkina Faso. Among the Kassena people, each married woman has her own quarters in the family compound. Built by men and decorated by women, they contain living room and adjoining kitchen. On her death they are allowed to disintegrate, the land and crumbled earth to be reused by a future generation. Bottom: house of the chief of Djenné, Mali. Moroccan influenced wooden windows are a recent development. Right: Hogon House, Sanga, Mali. The most distinct architectural form of the Dogon people, the Hogon House is the home of the traditional spiritual leader.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) change and movement are ever present. The material is tactile, warm and vulnerable, demanding and receiving an engaged relationship with its users. Often people attempt to cement render the buildings, but not only does this destroy them physically, as they rot from within, but it also destroys their character. Their uniqueness is their muddiness. The future of these buildings is hard to predict. Mud is such a vulnerable material and there is an enthusiasm for building in concrete. Given the means, many would tear down their mud houses and build cement block and tin roofed replacements, common practice in those countries that can afford to do so. So what will happen when rural Africans are lifted out of their desperate poverty? Will there be an understandable rush to rid themselves of the physical manifestations of that harrowing past? It can already be seen in wealthier countries such as Ghana and Nigeria where there is virtually nothing left for future generations to repair and preserve. Not only the buildings have gone but also the skills to build them. It is a gradual process of extinction. Already the extraordinary upturned jelly mould houses of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon are gone, soon those of the Kassena and Gurensi in Ghana will disappear. The Sakho houses of the Boso in Mali are all abandoned and in ruins. It is quite possible that when west Africa emerges from below the poverty line there will be little of its built heritage remaining to be appreciated. The saving grace is probably Islam, ever expanding and building more mosques, but even then only in rural parts. In cities, the mosques funded by Wahabi Saudi funds are atrocious concrete imitations of a bastardized Middle Eastern style. In the sparsely populated Sahal plains of the Western Sudan, traditional built forms in mud are the most striking representations of human creativity and a unique part of our world culture – they should not be forgotten. JAMES MORRIS These photographs are taken from Butabu – adobe architecture of West Africa, James Morris and Suzanne Preston Blier, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.

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Top: house, Djenné, Mali. Mud rendered walls have to be resurfaced regularly. As the mud dries it cracks, forming a delicate textured surface. The gently moulded structure behind the wall is a covered staircase opening onto the flat roof. The shape will subtly alter each time it is re-rendered. Bottom: house, Djenné, Mali. The blank facade with tiny openings for windows is a traditional style for the Djenné house. Domestic activity is concentrated in the open courtyard to the rear. Right: Sanam Mosque, Niger, designed in 1998 by Abou Moussa who travelled hundreds of miles from Yaamaa to this inaccessible region in the north of the country. It was built in 45 days by the whole village and appears to be the largest and most striking recent mud building in Niger.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

reviews SET PIECES JEAN PROUVÉ COMPLETE WORKS VOLUME 3: 1944-1954 By Peter Sulzer. Basel: Birkhäuser. 2005. €118 JEAN PROUVÉ HIGHLIGHTS 1917-44 By Peter Sulzer. Basel: Birkhäuser. 2002. €48

of craft. The multi-volume set is less a quick read than for dipping and the shelf, as advice to be pondered over, especially by architects and furniture designers considering details. The Highlights in contrast is a lively taster. PETER BLUNDELL JONES

VOICES OF EXPERIENCE

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Peter Sulzer designed prefabricated concrete systems before becoming professor for construction at Stuttgart then starting a third career in participation (ARs June 1985, March 1987). His decades’ long study of Jean Prouvé, based on profound admiration for the French pioneer, reﬂects his process-led attitude. I reported earlier on the ﬁrst two Prouvé volumes (ARs May 1997, Nov 2000): now we have the third, and a shorter compilation Highlights. Not until you attempt to study an architect’s work in detail do you realise how little is published, how few drawings reproduced even in large monographs, how few people have actually seen the archives. In popular sources the same drawings tend to appear, and general histories necessarily depend on secondary sources, taking for granted earlier interpretations. Two areas of study suffer particularly: design development where there may be several versions, and technical detail where understanding involves many complex drawings. For Prouvé both are important, for this blacksmith-entrepreneur turned engineer-architect was a great innovator who explored newly developing techniques. His cheap prefabricated houses look unremarkable in exterior photos, but the story develops as you trace how they were made through a gradual progression of prototypes. Volume 3, covering 1944-54, with some of the most interesting and elegant buildings, runs to 385 pages and is packed with visuals. Presentation is rather archive like: numbered drawings and photos, detailed histories of projects, letters and interviews, even patent documents. Sulzer compiles and describes with great thoroughness, but does not attempt a new master narrative, though many implicit sub-plots emerge. We see what it means when the designer is the maker who also handles the materials. We see the specialist technician contributing to works of others, such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. We see the mistake of the generous patron who initiated paid holidays and awarded himself a meagre salary, when he let the business grow too far, so that the proﬁt-minded took over only to reduce quality to eject him. This is a timely book, for prefabrication is again on the agenda and being reinvented, sometimes in a state of amnesia. It will also inform the continuing debate on the effects of the machine and the transformation or loss

THE AFTERLIFE OF GARDENS By John Dixon Hunt. London: Reaktion Books. 2005. £25 Are designed gardens and landscapes experienced by the visitor as the designer intended? What is the difference between his/her intent and the ‘received’ experience and does it matter? Why does the designer’s view tend to prevail in narratives of gardens? What culturally determines the design and how different would the perception of a visitor from a different culture or time be (each visitor’s experience constitutes an ‘afterlife’ of the garden)? In this dense academic book, garden historian John Dixon Hunt develops his theory of ‘reception’ through literary analogy, although literary theory is obviously more limiting than the ‘reading’ of a landscape – which involves existential experiences involving all the senses – demands. He hypothesises on the above

questions through lengthy, intricate analyses of ancient historic treatises and assorted writings on gardens. Mutability reigns throughout. From the visitor’s viewpoint, after all, there is no one ﬁxed experience. To each ‘afterlife’ each individual brings his/her own time, culture, and personal history, and each period brings its own design fashion and viewpoint. For instance, Versailles is used and ‘received’ differently today than it would be in its own period. These illustrated essays, in some ways reminiscent of those of J. B. Jackson, present a probing wide-ranging discourse about the experiential components of gardens. Embracing the present and the past, extant historical gardens and those of more contemporary pivotal designers (such as Lawrence Halprin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Paolo Burgi and Bernard Lassus) become part of the conversation. Themes debated include cultural triggers, distinctiveness of place, symbolism, drama, imagination and construction of meaning, the word and the visual in the landscape, and movement – both from the viewpoint of the walker and the moving freeway vehicle. Imaginative and innovative contemporary designers’ new approaches, including issues of time, ecology and historical conservation are particularly noteworthy. ELSA LEVISEUR

Mexican Embassy, Berlin, by Teodoro González de León, completed in 2000, from his eponymous Complete Works edited by Miquel Adrià, Mexico City: Arquine + RM, 2004, £55. Known for an architecture that draws inspiration in equal parts from the tenets of Modernism and the monuments and mystique of Mexico’s pre-Columbian history, González de León’s oeuvre spans over half a century. In this hefty, well produced tome with dual English/ Spanish text and an introduction by William Curtis, his career is diligently tracked from modest early houses in

COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE

Yokohama, Japan by Riken

SKINS FOR BUILDINGS. THE ARCHITECT’S MATERIALS SAMPLE BOOK Edited by Piet Vollaard, Els Zijlstra. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. 2004. €145

Yamamoto and Field Shop, with its network of roof terraces and gardens, from Dwelling on the Roof, Andrés Martínez, Barcelona: Editorial

Responding to the growth of interest in materials as a prime site of invention in architecture, this book offers the most comprehensive introduction I have yet seen to the vast range of natural and man-made materials now available for use as building skins. No such account could ever be exhaustive – the varieties of wood and its derivatives could ﬁll a volume approaching this size – but the book’s more than 500 pages are impressive in scope, approach and, thanks to commercial sponsorship, value. The materials are organised by type. These are introduced by a short text about their history, uses, environmental qualities, and so on, and then each example is allocated a doublepage spread, featuring a full-page close-up illustration on the right, and a discussion of the material and its applications on the left. A short table documents key properties – colour, glossiness, translucence, texture, hardness, temperature, odour and acoustic opacity – and the treatment is notable for addressing sensory as well as technical aspects. Each spread is illustrated with one to three built examples of the material in use, and the majority of the chosen buildings are both conspicuously contemporary and, unlike most current trade brochures, of consistently high architectural quality. Around eight hundred buildings must be illustrated, the overwhelming majority from northern Europe. In part, no doubt, this reﬂects the knowledge of the Dutch authors, but it is salutary to reﬂect on the fact that although the book is published only in English, a mere dozen or so of the examples are British, and even fewer from the US. The range and commitment to innovation evident in the Netherlands alone could certainly not be matched here. This book can be wholeheartedly recommended as a reference for practitioners and school of architecture libraries. But I cannot help worrying that, despite the welcome discussion of tactile and other sensual qualities, its dominant message is of materials as visual ‘surface treatment’, and that as such it risks becoming yet another contribution to the reduction of architecture to a form of exterior design, to the contrivance of visual effects, not the shaping of habitable space.

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the ’40s and ’50s, to more recent projects such as the British Museum’s Mexican Galleries (AR January 1995).

Saitama University,

RICHARD WESTON

Gustavo Gili, 2005, £25. Getting up on the roof, whether to relax, survey your surroundings or escape from peril, is a time honoured human impulse and this intelligently observed book combines a historical survey of roof appropriation with contemporary responses from architects and artists such as Mathias Klotz, Kazuyo Sejima, Foreign Office Architects and Rachel Whiteread.

TEACHING BY EXAMPLE MODERN: THE MODERN MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN By Alan Powers. London: Merrell. 2005. £35 A picture in Alan Powers’ Modern: the Modern Movement in Britain captivates the ambiguities of the 1930s. Flanking the great Corbu are haughty Serge Chermayeff, rafﬁsh Wells Coates, jeune premier Jim Richards, the Hon God(frey Samuel), and Max Fry who had not yet quite mastered the Corbusian hand-jive. Photographed at the opening of the legendary MARS Group exhibition of 1938, it makes a Modernist iconostasis. We could unpick the implied theology of the Modern Movement in Britain, as Powers struggles manfully to do, or we could just see a bunch of stiff-shirted poseurs, not quite sure whether they gain more glamour from their proximity to Le Corbusier or association with social action suggested by the diagram behind. On reﬂection we should not be surprised that the decade’s most famous structure is a pool for parading penguins. That ambiguity between glamour and social action is one of Modernism’s central dilemmas, in some ways as strong now as it was in the 1930s. Powers’ raising of it is, I fear, inadvertent as the thrust of his text is descriptive. His knowledge of the ﬁeld is wide and it has the virtue of recognising what were once considered backwaters, such as Oliver Hill and Goodhart-Rendel alongside the acknowledged masters, but it is the selection

of examples that creates the interest and opportunities for personal exegesis, as they are presented from a descriptive rather than analytical viewpoint. This format of textled introduction followed by a longer run of illustrated examples, follows the format of one of the 1930s’ ﬁnest books in architecture, F. R. S. Yorke’s The Modern House. So houses by Elisabeth Benjamin, Dora Cosens and (Ms) Justin Blanco White take their bow alongside Highpoint and Isokon and a ﬁne house by cinema specialist Harry Weedon. It also resurrects examples by almost forgotten émigrés like Rudolf Frankel and Fritz Ruhemann, and factories for continental companies like Roche by the Swiss master Rudolf Salvisberg, and Bata by the Czech Vladimir Karﬁk. Like Yorke, Powers presents his selection attractively though far from comprehensively, and just as the Modern House showed that Modernism went further than Mies, Corb and Gropius, he adds real evidence to the realisation that the Pevsnerite and Richardsian screens concealed a richer, deeper and broader Modernist culture in Britain during the 1930s. But beyond presenting that evidence attractively though far from comprehensively, this book only offers a starting point for urgently needed further analysis. JEREMY MELVIN

Book reviews from The Architectural Review can now be seen on our website at www.arplus.com and the books can be ordered online, many at special discount. 95 | 9

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ASHES TO ASHES Artists and architects collaborate to create a powerful, sobering memorial in Poland.

1 The cemetery museum building sits discretely behind the boundary wall. 2 Entering through the boundary wall the axial view is framed through the burial field toward the memorial wall. 3 The inlaid cast-iron relief, the Square, marks the entrance of the burial field.

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The Belzec Cemetery continues a powerful tradition of monuments that literally build upon the horror of past events. Instead of shying away from the scale of the atrocity – be it a killing field, a battlefield, the site of a massacre or in this case the site of a former Nazi death camp – such monuments reuse often vast areas of land in an attempt to freeze history, cast in stone the scale of lost life, and to make something strangely beautiful and moving from something that derives from absolute evil. Haunting and mysterious, such places use abstract expressionism to capture negative energy and transform it into something with

new life. Avoiding conventional, religious or morbid symbolism, sculptors, fine artists, poets and architects trace lines of meaning within the landscape to plot their story through space. Here in 1942, at Belzec, south west of Tomaszów Lubelski, a former Nazi work camp was turned into a six-hectare death camp. Almost unfathomably, during the 9-month period that year from March to December, over 600 000 people were murdered; Jews from the south Polish ghettos, Bohemia and Germany together with Poles accused of aiding the Jews were among the victims. Only two people ever escaped.

Following a design competition in 1997, sculptors Andrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek and Marcin Roszczyk set about transforming the six-hectare site in collaboration with architects from DDJM. Their developed competition-winning scheme comprised three elements: the monument, a museum building, and an exhibition. The dominant form of the monument occupies most of the large rectangular site centring on an oblique crevice or path that dissects the monumental burial ground. The path cuts through the gently rising surface of the cemetery, a black ash burial field, within which mass graves are

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C EMETERY , B ELZEC , P OLAND ARCHITECT DDJM

marked as ghost-like territories with subtly differentiated grades of material (blast furnace slag mixed with cinders and barren soil). Defined at one end by the Square, a cast-iron relief set flush in the ground which marks the entrance to the burial ground, the path terminates in a monumental lighthued granite wall; a spatial sequence that engulfs visitors as they approach the wall, cutting through the burial field that rises to a dwarfing 9m height. Walking between concrete walls, cast against rough earth as shuttering and topped with buckling steel reinforcement bars, visitors disappear into the unknown in a symbolic journey that recalls the death of the thousands who were

lost without trace. Passing thresholds that draw lines between life and death, most are reduced to silence before being confronted by the imposing granite screen wall. A structure that in its relief recalls the blood spilt and the familiar patina of bullet-peppered walls. Standing opposite this wall, polished concrete niches are covered with the names of victims. Names also frame the burial field as a low wall forms a horizontal stone frieze that chronologically lists Jewish communes recalling the sequence of transports. With these powerful layers of meaning set within a muted yet dramatic reconstructed landscape, you could very easily miss the cemetery’s museum building. Set in

a low-lying 2m high structure that forms part of the southernmost boundary wall, the unadorned bunker-like structure cuts into the ground to contain, among a series of more conventional exhibition spaces, an empty and haunting reinforced-concrete Void-Hall; a space which resonates with the isolation, pain and ultimate death of millions of lost souls; and more specifically the hundreds of thousands of people who died on this very site. ROB GREGORY Artists Andrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek, Marcin Roszczyk Architect DDJM Biuro Architektoniczne: Marek Dunikowski, Piotr Czerwinski, Piotr Uherek Photographs Wojciech Krynski

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1 Shock of the new. 2 The cramped corner site. 3 Cor-ten panels are only 4mm thick. 4 The new block thrives on contrast.

THE JOY OF RUST Clad in a coarse carapace of rusted steel, this housing block is a startling urban presence.

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and parking lots to OMA’s Las Vegas Guggenheim (June 2002). Yet it never quite loses its quality of otherness, as demonstrated by its use in this recent Brussels apartment block. Here the ‘instant’ patina of age and distress still provides a bracing shock of the new and unusual amid wedding cake historicism. The building lies in Schaerbeek, to the north-east of Brussels city centre, a district populated by many Turkish immigrant families. It occupies a compact, chunky wedge that turns a corner

between Avenue de la Reine and Place Liedts. Cars and trams surge past the prow-like site which is anchored between a couple of existing muscular apartment blocks. To the spirit, if not the letter, architect Mario Garzaniti follows the familiar template of the continental walk-up tenement, though the proportions and internal arrangements are more generous and imaginative than might normally be expected. Two duplex apartments are stacked above a shop at ground level, the ﬂoors linked by a narrow

HOUSING, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM ARCHITECT MARIO GARZANITI

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Architect Mario Garzaniti, Liege Photographs Alain Janssens

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communal staircase inserted into an intermediate slot between the new and old buildings. Despite being logements sociaux, the duplexes are quite inventive spatially, making the most of the awkward, wedge-shaped plot. The top ﬂoor ﬂat even has a modish sleeping loft overlooking the living space below. But the most striking aspect of the project is the rusting metal carapace that envelops the building in a coarse caress, as if the hull of an ageing supertanker had somehow careered into the block. Yet the monolithic appearance is slightly deceptive; the Cor-ten panels are only a thin outer skin (a mere 4mm thick) riveted to stainless-steel omega proﬁles attached to the concrete walls. Flexible bands prevent the risk of galvanic coupling (where one type of metal encourages the rapid corrosion of another) that can occur when Cor-ten and stainless steel come into contact. Slight disparities in the ochre tones of the panels add a sense of patchwork variety and animation to the overall composition. Cor-ten shutters are incorporated into the facade, ﬁltering light through vertical slits in the manner of a modern mashrabiya. When closed, the shutters lie ﬂush with the panels, giving the block an unsettlingly seamless, hermetic quality. Clearly this is a building that thrives on contrast (modern Corten and traditional wedding cake) enhanced by the jolting surprise of seeing so visually and culturally challenging a material employed on such an ambitious scale. Yet it is more than just a skin, attested by the generous proportions of the apartments and the way in which light animates the interiors. The gritty boiler plating conceals a sensitive soul. C. S.

5 Facade detail. 6 Light filters through the perforated shutters. 7 Duplex apartments are quite generously proportioned. 8 Sleeping loft.

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SNOW BOUND In the high backbone of Japan, rusted steel superstrong skin resists winter loads and thermal stresses.

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The Niigata Prefecture is to the east of Japan’s big island Honshu, and runs from the sea to the high central backbone of the country. In the mountains, up to five and a half metres of winter snow can settle, literally submerging buildings and the even young trees of the magnificent, scented evergreen forests. To allow the public to interpret and investigate the natural world, the Matsunoyama Natural History Museum has been set up on the edge of the forest overlooking mountains and meadow. Takaharu & Yui Tezuka have made a building that wriggles, snake-like east-west through the landscape in a brown, almost smooth rusted steel skin. Entered from the south, the snake encloses an exhibition gallery showing natural and artificial worlds, a reception hall, administration, a lecture theatre and, as the snake’s head twists round from east to west, a posh cafeteria called ‘the culinary arts experience’. A rusted steel observation tower terminates the tail to the east, and is climbed by energetic visitors to obtain magnificent views over forests to the mountains. At key moments in the plan, notably where the snake changes direction, great transparent panels are inserted in the skin, offering marvellous views into the forests surrounding the site. The mullionless transparent expanses are so big that they cannot possibly be called windows; they are almost invisible thresholds between interior and the outside. They reinforce a feeling of heightened reality, enhanced by the strange perspective tricks of the route.

1, 2 Like a deserted industrial site or a strange animal, the museum snakes through its clearing between forest and rice field.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 3 Tadashi Kawamata’s paths and deck relate interior and nature … 4 ... as do the huge thick acrylic panels.

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ground floor (scale approx 1:450)

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In winter, the temperature difference between inside and exterior is often very great. And pressure from deep snow can be extraordinary (depending on the nature of the snow, how it fell, and how long it has settled and so on). So the ‘thermally stable’ plates of rusted steel that form the outer skin are 6mm thick, and are supported on a skeleton of steel I beams. Skin and skeleton are designed to withstand pressures of 1500kg/m2; the equally pressure resistant acrylic panels are 75mm thick. All steel elements are thoroughly insulated. Inside, there is a skin of plasterboard supported by a lightweight inner steel skeleton. This white skin is separated from the main structure by a generous cavity that acts as part of the ventilation and heating system. Warm air is injected along grilles in the polished concrete floors and stale air is extracted through slots in the plasterboard at eaves level. Heat is radiated to the interior through floor, walls and ceiling. In summer, the system can be used to circulate cooling fresh air. In winter, the museum projects through the snow with its tapering tower acting as a landmark and sign of civilization; it groans with snow stresses. People look out into the surrounding banks of snow in which a surprising amount of life flourishes below the surface. In summer, the long brown snake slips along the contours of its semiwild habitat, which is enhanced and intensified by timber paths and a deck by Tadashi Kawamata. From some points of view, the museum seems like a picturesque long-abandoned industrial building, a mine perhaps, in the middle of the countryside. Other aspects in different seasons reveal a cave, a shelter amid the snow, a lighthouse, a welcoming hut in the forest. And of course always an animal: snake or even fox. The museum’s complexity of possible readings and spatial events enhance those of the natural world it sets out to interpret.

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VERONICA PEASE Architect Tezuka Architects: Takaharu Tezuka + Yui Tezuka Associate architect Masahiro Ikeda/MIAS Project team Takaharu Tezuka, Yui Tezuka, Miyoko Fujita, Masafumi Harada, Masahiro Ikeda, Ryuya Maio, Mayumi Miura, Taro Suwa, Takahiro Nakano, Toshio Nishi, Hirofumi Ono, Tomohiro Sato, Makoto Takei, Hiroshi Tomikawa Mechanical engineer Eiji Sato, Kisakatsu Hemmi/ES Associates Landscape Shunsuke Hirose/Fudo Keisei Jimusho Photographs Katsuhisa Kida

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5 Special collection. 6 Museum is intended to interpret local ecology. 7 Snow building up. 8, 9 Cranked plan causes perspectival illusions of exploding and shrinking space.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) In a quiet backwater of ﬁelds and woods on the island of Hirvensalo in the south-west of Finland, St Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel grows from its site – a hillock surrounded by pines and spruces – embracing context and the natural environment. The chapel is not immediately apparent on approach: following the bend of the road you are suddenly confronted by the elegant copper-clad church, its volume contrasting with its surroundings. It has the appearance of an upturned ship’s hull. The design vocabulary juxtaposes copper and wood, light and shade. The chapel was ﬁnished earlier this year so the copper is new; eventually its green patina will help the church blend with the surrounding pine trees. St Henry’s is approached head on, up a gentle dogleg pedestrian ramp to the small foyer lit by natural light at the western entrance. You proceed from here through a passageway to the church proper, from darkness to light; at the far eastern end two side windows the height of the chapel throw light down onto the altar, breathtaking on a sunny day. The architect describes the main hall as the stomach of the ﬁsh, the ﬁsh being a symbol of early Christians (ﬁtting as the church is ecumenical). Gallery and chapel are one volume, with the gallery at the back, and the chapel proper in the front, with the altar terminating the axis. The benches are removed for art exhibitions and you can view the art while religious ceremonies are being conducted. The whole interior, bar the glazing around the altar, is of wood, the warm smell of which permeates the space. Seating is simple angular backless benches made of solid, edge-laminated common alder; but this elegant, pared down minimalism could prove inhospitable during long church services. The chapel’s loadbearing structure consists of tapering ribs of laminated pine

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ST HENRY ’S ECUMENICAL ART CHAPEL , T URKU , F INLAND ARCHITECT SANAKSENAHO A RCHITECTS

DIVINE LIGHT This chapel in Turku draws on a long tradition of remarkable Finnish churches in which religion, nature and light come together.

1 The wide windows at the front of the chapel light up the altar. The copper cladding will take on a green patina in time.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) two metres apart. Between these ribs is a curved interior lining of 100mm wide, untreated pine boarding. At the moment this is very light, but with time the tone will deepen to a reddish hue. The pine ribs are lit by spotlights. The ﬂoorboards are 200mm wide, 50mm thick pine planks and run parallel to the axis of the space. These have been waxed to create a clicking sound when walked on, reminiscent of the ﬂoors of old churches. The patinated altar is the last public work by academician and sculptor Kain Tapper. In the altar window an artwork by Hannu Konola ﬁlters light onto the altar wall. Matti Senaksenaho continues the distinguished legacy of the Finnish church architecture of Engel, Aalto, Sonck, Bryggman and more recently of Juha Leiviskä in his luminous churches in Myrrmäki and in Männistö (ARs June 1987 and June 1994). JULIA DAWSON

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Architect Sanaksenaho Architects, Helsinki Project architect Matti Sanaksenaho Photographs Jussi Tiainen

ST HENRY ’ S ECUMENICAL A RT C HAPEL , T URKU , F INLAND A RCHITECT SANAKSENAHO A RCHITECTS

2 The chapel, rising from its hillock, is reminiscent of an upturned hull, or, more prosaically, an upright iron. 3 Looking towards the simple altar, illuminated by natural light from side windows.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

PRECIOUS METAL A new era of bespoke systems of structure and cladding is testing metals and architectural imagination to their limits.

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Perforated copper panels enclose the new De Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron in a delicate veil. Photograph: Dennis Gilbert/VIEW.

The Machine Age was the golden age of metals. Constituting both the means and end to production, machine tools and the goods they produced during the past 150 years fundamentally changed the way we live. Consumer society, for better or worse, was nourished on a diet of metal products ranging from fridges to Fords. In architecture, the steel frame and the enormous tensile capability of steel spawned both highrise and long-span structures that radically transformed the scale and character of the built environment. The concept of doing more with less emphatically combined aesthetic ideas and industrial efﬁciency – themes made manifest, perhaps symbolically, in the structures produced in Britain that celebrated the new millennium. However, the concept of lightness is changing. As Italo Calvino observes, ‘The second industrial revolution, unlike the ﬁrst, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with “bits” in a ﬂow of information travelling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.’1 As in all areas of our lives, the processes of design, fabrication and assembly of metal structures and cladding are being dramatically altered by these weightless bits. Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) ﬁred the public imagination of an architecture for the future. However, even though its design and fabrication were made possible by software, the rationale of its construction belonged to the old world of standard rolled steel sections and modular cladding systems. The Experience Music Project (EMP) (AR October 2000), completed just three years later, albeit superﬁcially like Bilbao, was built using very different processes. It belongs to the new order of complex bespoke systems in which every structural and cladding component is unique. Further evidence of the paradigm shift is provided by Foster’s Swiss Re (AR November 2003), Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediathèque (AR October 2001) and OMA’s Seattle Library (AR August 2004) which, like Bilbao, straddle the boundary between the machine and digital ages, using standard rolled steel sections in variable structures. While in Swiss Re, the system that changes incrementally from ﬂoor to ﬂoor can be readily perceived and understood, Sendai and Seattle are preoccupied with creating the appearance of instability and replacing overarching rational systems with what Cecil Balmond calls ‘improvised connectivity’.2

Liberating cladding Considering cladding, in addition to the effect of ‘light’ digital design and fabrication processes, the move from sealed systems to the rainscreen is having a profoundly liberating inﬂuence. Instead of the literal opacity of sealed systems with their cumbersome folded seams, top hat sections and gaskets, the open jointed rainscreen with its separate waterprooﬁng membrane behind provides enormous freedoms for designers, which they are exploiting to different conceptual and practical ends. In the hands of Herzog & de Meuron – whose work has transformed the perception of many materials – metal rainscreens become delicate perforate veils. The copper bands of their early Signal Box 4 Auf dem Wolf – which both become three-dimensional and transform from sealed to perforate through rotation from vertical to horizontal – were ostensibly designed to function as a Faraday cage as well as a visual screen. More recently, the expanded aluminium mesh cladding of the extension to the Walker Art Center (AR January 1989) and the copper cladding of the De Young Museum (p46) have less to do with technical performance and more to do with appearance and perception. Both are carefully judged explorations of the balance between standard panel sizes that conform to the old economy of mass production and complex surface treatments made feasible by digital production. Although the bas relief surface patterns of both buildings initially appear random, each has an underlying system. The Walker’s distinctive wrinkled skin is created by random rotation of a single pattern created by a good old-fashioned metal stamping dye, while the De Young’s patterning – perforated and stamped – oscillates between abstraction and image, having been derived from a dot screened photograph.

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Perhaps most provocative in the rich ambivalence between palpable materiality and thin abstraction – perhaps even surface decoration – is OMA’s recent work with metals. On the one hand is their unbuilt proposal for San Francisco Prada, which – in contrast to both the Modernist separation of structure and skin and the current fascination with the multilayered rainscreen – developed a perforate and sealed stainlesssteel skin that also worked as a structural diaphragm. Instead of a kit of parts, it was monolithic; instead of repetition, it was a variable system to have been fabricated by CNC (computer numerical controlled) water jets; in place of the desire for thinness as an index of efﬁciency, it was emphatically thick. On the other hand, in the new concert hall in Porto (AR August 2005), super-thin super-scaled pixellated gold leaf crossdresses as wood grain on the plywood lining of the auditorium. In the recent work of Morphosis – notably the Caltrans Headquarters in LA and the Federal Ofﬁce Building in San Francisco ( both AR July 2005) – the metal wrapper literally takes on a life of its own. Here, the thin scrim is manipulated three-dimensionally with greater freedom than the watertight volumes it veils. Conceived as a ‘metabolic’ skin, it performs as a key component of the buildings’ environmental systems, which are designed to reduce energy consumption and advance sustainability. Thom Mayne notes, ‘In lieu of a conventional mechanical plant, the building actually “wears” the air conditioning like a jacket.’3 With another agenda, the cast bronze facade of the Museum of American Folk Art (AR February 2002), by Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates, uses the same rainscreen principle to create a surface pitted with craters and ﬁssures – unpredictable imperfections from the fabrication process that contrast markedly with the smoothness of Gehry, the controlled patterning of Herzog & de Meuron and, looking to the past, the machined precision of the Seagram Building, a bronzeclad icon just a few blocks away. MAFA’s metal cladding, although perforate, differs in signiﬁcant ways. With panels ranging from 6 to 16mm in thickness, this bronze skin is neither actually nor apparently light. It was not digitally fabricated but instead was cast at a sculptors’ foundry, aiming to reinstate the imprint of human craft – or what David Pye called the ‘workmanship of risk’ – in contemporary construction.4 These preoccupations are driven by digital design and CNC cutting, stamping and welding, with weightless bits enabling machines to create the appearance of craft, almost without human intervention on the shop ﬂoor. In contrast with the formerly arduous process of ‘tooling up’, the A. Zahner Company, which has fabricated metal cladding for both Gehry and Herzog & de Meuron, is ﬂeet-footed, moving rapidly through generations of software as they seek to handle complexity more efﬁciently. As an example, they note that each of the 3600 unique cladding panels of the EMP required an average of 250 megabytes of data and a design time of 2.5 hours. On more recent Gehry projects, this has been reduced to 30 megabytes and 15 minutes per panel.5 As always in construction, time has cost implications. With constant scrutiny aimed at streamlining process, Henry Ford’s principle of minimising labour is being energetically applied, not only on the shop ﬂoor, but also to the human content of CAD-CAM technologies themselves. This streamlining has been well suited to an economic environment in developed countries that, during the past thirty years, has seen relatively modest increases in metals prices but rapidly escalating costs for labour. Suddenly the equation is changing with the cost of steel, copper and other metals skyrocketing in response to the insatiable appetite of China’s developing economy combined with the effect of both war and weather on the price of oil. Will metals continue to provide fertile territory for the exploration of form, performance and perception, or will global economic pressures render the use of metals in architecture a luxury? ANNETTE LECUYER 1 Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage International, 1988, p8. 2 Cecil Balmond. ‘New Structure and the Informal’, Architectural Design, Sept-Oct 1997, p88. 3 A Model of Excellence – The New Federal Building, Washington DC: US General Services Administration, p26. 4 David Pye. The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp4-8. 5 Interview with William Zahner, A. Zahner Company, 2002.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The architect’s design statement reads thus: Conceived as an interior space for self-reflection, Dream House proposes a relationship between an urban tree and an interactive sensitive piece, which transforms the natural element into an introspective human refuge. The refuge emerges from the tree as an illuminated chrysalis, establishing a reflection on the relationship between man and his built and natural environment. The piece proposes new ways of occupying and imagining space. It suggests making use of nature as the main element in creating a dialogue between nature, human beings and man-made space. Such words are unlikely to have helped or hindered the Jury’s decision. There were no details of how or why it was made, or indeed how you were supposed to get into the space. Any discussion on how you might naturally be inclined to use the space, if fully pursued, may have revealed more about the Jury than would have been appropriate (swinging meaning different things to different people). Needless to say, however, there is an emerging fascination in such projects. This year a number of tree houses were submitted. The only conclusion was that this image drew the Jury’s attention; some finding it horrific – a torture chamber from where screams would never be heard – others seeing it as peaceful and tranquil. Like the structure itself, therefore, the ultimate decision was left hanging in the balance … R. G.

HANGING ABOUT Portable refuge, or portable prison? The decision is yours …

Architect ex.studio, Barcelona Project team Iván Juárez, Patricia Meneses Photograph Iván Juárez

1 Trapped or tranquil? Or simply a nice garden ornament?

HONOURABLE MENTION T REE HOUSE , H UESCA , S PAIN A RCHITECT EX . STUDIO

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HONOURABLE MENTION TAMBABOX , T AMBACOUNDA , SENEGAL A RCHITECT EX . STUDIO

BOX FRESH

The second of two projects by Barcelona-based ex.studio was possibly the most eye-catching and unusual of all the premiated submissions. This witty, humorous response to the visual richness of Senegalese culture elicited a warm glow from the judges; indeed, what’s not to like about a glorious technicolour Tambabox? The savannah region of eastern Senegal may be one of Africa’s poorest, yet it is culturally prosperous, mainly due to the preservation of indigenous crafts and customs, but also because of its geography, which encourages encounters and exchanges with ﬁve neighbouring countries, including Gambia and Mali. Tambacounda, the region’s capital, is the setting for ex.studio’s experiment in colour, light, textiles and human curiosity. Inspired by the dazzling diversity of the brightly coloured textiles employed by the Senegalese to make their distinctive boubous (kaftan-like dresses and robes), the wonderfully onomatopoeic Tambabox is a timber-framed cube clad in a patchwork of assorted clashing fabric panels. Some have tailored sleeves attached to them for that essential touch of crosscultural surrealism. The vividly coloured textiles ﬁlter and regulate the sun’s glare, so that from inside, the taut panels shimmer and pulsate with coloured light like stainedglass windows. At night, lit from inside, the fabric clad structure is transformed into a glowing polychromatic box that contrasts

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with the inky darkness of its surroundings. Shadows of visitors are projected and revealed on the kaleidoscopic backdrop. Tambabox combines architecture, sculpture, textiles and tailoring in a simple yet highly lyrical way, transforming the ordinary and the everyday into something gorgeous and extraordinary. To build and assemble the Tambabox, ex.studio worked with local carpenters and tailors, and the compact structure has an

engaging robustness that seems well suited to its context. The architects’ competition submission slightly spoils this effect by including some portentous (and doubtless lost-in-translation) observations on their African adventure (eg, ‘the textiles that delimit this architecture are murals in which the body is partly transformed becoming part of the linen cloth’), but with such seductive visuals, the judges were happily hooked. C. S.

Inspired by the richness of Senegalese textiles, this little fabric clad box seduced the Jury.

Architect ex-studio, Barcelona Project team Patricia Meneses, Iván Juárez Photographs Iván Juárez

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1 Out of the box – Tambabox in context, with visitors. 2 Brilliantly coloured fabric panels are suffused with light. 3 Tambabox in after dark mode.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

delight

HONOURABLE MENTION URBAN INSTALLATION , VANCOUVER , C ANADA ARCHITECT SATOSHI MATSUOKA & YUKI T AMURA

Entitled Balloon Caught, this ingenious urban installation by Tokyo-based architects Satoshi Matsuoka and Yuki Tamura was the outcome of an initiative to re-think and re-animate public space in Vancouver. Participants were asked to explore the spatial and urban potential of an alleyway in Gastown, the city’s oldest district, through an intervention that would allow different forms of occupation through the day. Proposals were also intended as a generator of activity, attracting the public and offering new readings of the city. From such a solemn programme comes a delightfully whimsical riposte. Translucent, glowing orbs 5m to 9m in diameter are wedged between the buildings in the alley, like runaway balloons or delicate paper lampshades. Festive and seductive, the superscale spheres heighten the spatial experience of the narrow alley. The installation is also efﬁcient, designed to be installed and dismantled in under a day. Lit from within, the inﬂatable nylon orbs change character from day to night, as the city centre site was constantly accessible and inhabited. Although only in place for three days in the summer, the urban balloons created a buzz in downtown Vancouver. The opening night party drew a crowd of 700 and subsequent events attracted a mix of designers, artists, planners, tourists, families and ﬂâneurs. Light in touch and spirit, these charming inﬂatables also gained an honourable mention from the Jury. C. S.

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Architect Satoshi Matsuoka & Yuki Tamura, Tokyo

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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The challenges of large-scale public housing still tend to confound most architects, so it was encouraging to see this assured example from young Swiss practice Pool Architekten. Compared with most of the projects shown here it represents a sizeable commission (for over 100 apartments), and demonstrates the skills of designing and building on a large scale. Jurors were impressed by the scheme’s conﬁdent execution, if perhaps not so entranced by its quintessentially Swiss rigour. Commissioned for a local housing cooperative, the development lies on the edge of Zurich, where the suburbs thin and give way to rolling countryside. The site slopes eastwards down from Leimbachstrasse to the river Sihl and forest beyond. To exploit light and views, the two blocks are placed along the west and north edges of the site deﬁning a large communal garden. Clad in a reptilian skin of greenish grey slate and partly dug into the slope, the blocks have a topographic quality that abstracts the roll and heave of the surrounding hills. Each block consists of three sub-units which are kinked slightly in plan like a derailed train. Angular roof proﬁles also break up any potential monotony, as do the generous balconies set at regular intervals into slate-clad facades. Deft internal planning juggles and organises a range of apartment types. Each sub-block contains three to four ﬂats per

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ﬂoor, arranged around a central communal stairwell. Apartments vary in size from one to four bedrooms, with living rooms strategically placed to take advantage of views. A quarter of the apartments are maisonettes, which interlink and overlap the standard ﬂats, introducing an element of spatial diversity to what could, on paper, be quite a monotonous and repetitive building type. All ﬂats have access to external space in the form of balconies (enclosed by elegantly detailed wire mesh balustrades) or roof terraces. As might be expected in this part of the world, the quality of construction and workmanship was painstaking, adding to the project’s overall sense of dignity and decency. C. S. Architects Pool Architekten, Zurich Project team Raphael Frei, Mischa Spoerri, Ana Prikic, Markus Bachmann, Sybille Besson, Hannah Dean Photographs Arazebra, Andrea Helbling

1 Generous balconies animate the stern slate-clad facades. 2 Edge of town context.

interaction of different flat types

SWISS ASSURANCE This large-scale housing complex reinvigorates a dull building type.

typical sub block plan (lower level scale approx 1:500)

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HONOURABLE MENTION HOUSING , Z URICH , SWITZERLAND ARCHITECTS POOL A RCHITEKTEN

typical sub block plan (upper level)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Generally dictated by function and with an invariable physical prominence, air trafﬁc control towers tend not to be the most lyrical of structures. This new tower at Vienna’s main Schwechat airport is an admirable exception, and its efforts at recasting a fundamentally dreary building type impressed the jurors. Around ﬁve years ago, as the airport authorities put forward plans for expansion, it became clear that a new control tower would be required to cope with increased air trafﬁc. Local partnership Zechner & Zechner won an EU-wide competition for the new building. At 109m high, the new 23-storey tower soars over the airport complex, and its prominent location near the main entrance provided an opportunity to nudge the building into more dynamic, urban landmark territory rather than just being a baldly functional stump. The tower is divided into three parts, each with a different

architectural character, so the overall outcome is a bit like the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpses (where individual artists envisage a different part of a composite body, oblivious of other efforts). The lower six storeys house staff ofﬁces in a sleek glass cube, together with facilities for controllers supervising airspace movements who do not require direct visual contact with planes. Those who do, occupy a faceted turret which has commanding views over the runways and sharply angular facades to reduce glare. The intermediate shaft is unoccupied (security restrictions prevent the space from being used commercially), but the concrete structure is wrapped in a taut membrane supported by a steel frame. The membrane shifts and twists as it rises between base and turret, giving the entire composition a sculptural quality. The membrane adds more than just visual variety, however. It also acts as a backdrop for the display

of superscale images ﬁltered through three high deﬁnition digital projectors. Backlighting is provided by lamps attached to the tower shaft and images (mainly soothing visions of skies and the natural world) can be varied through a computercontrolled system. The tower thus becomes a canvas for flights of imagination, and this unconventional take on how a large vertical surface can be creatively appropriated eventually convinced the judges, despite some reservations about the elegance of the overall form. C. S.

COMMENDED AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER , VIENNA , A USTRIA ARCHITECT ZECHNER & ZECHNER

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Architect Zechner & Zechner, Vienna Project team Martin Zechner, Bernhard Schunack Photographs Thilo Härdtlein

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Providing services for blood collection, storage and research, Prathama Blood Centre in Ahmedabad, regional capital of Gujarat, attracted the jurors’ attention as an example of a large and quite complex building in the developing world. Designed by local practice Matharoo Associates (whose Kahnian crematorium featured in the 2003 awards cycle, AR December 2003), the blood centre is conceived as a pioneering new type of health building (prathama means ‘ﬁrst’ in Sanskrit) that combines sophisticated laboratory and testing facilities with an enlightened, humanistic approach. The centre is the outcome of a competition staged by a charitable trust with the aim of recasting and restaging the act of blood donation in a more inviting public domain, so mitigating the fear and repulsion subconsciously associated with such public spiritedness. The new building can store and process 200 000 units of blood, making it the largest blood bank in India. Donations are entirely voluntary, and the centre’s on-site facilities are backed up by a ﬂeet of mobile collection units. Despite the programme’s ambitions, the budget was parsimonious ($200 per sqm, including ﬁt out and site development). Costs were kept in check by custom designing and locally fabricating internal elements such as doors, windows, modular furniture, partitions and work stations. Even so, Matharoo Associates have succeeded in making a building that has an evident decency and dignity. A four-storey glass-clad stack of laboratories intersects roughly at right angles with a hermetic concrete volume housing administration and support services. Between these clearly articulated functional elements is a more free-form atrium space, created by stretching and curving the concrete wall. Contained within this concrete skin at ground level are user-friendly enclaves for blood collection (separated from the more clinical blocks), so that people can just wander in and make a donation. To encourage a regular throughput of donors, there are none of the formalities and inhibitions of a formal hospital setting. Helping to soothe nerves, the donation suite overlooks a tranquil reﬂecting pool, while within the atrium there are views and glimpses through to the more specialised laboratory spaces, communicating a sense of the building’s gravitas and wider social purpose. C. S. Architect Matharoo Associates, Ahmedabad Photographs Courtesy of the architects

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FIRST BLOOD This blood collection centre, the largest in India, aims to demystify and humanise the process of blood donation.

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1 The slightly hermetic concrete exterior. 2 A soaring atrium unites the various volumes and functions. 3 Blood donation suite.

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HONOURABLE MENTION BLOOD CENTRE , AHMEDABAD , I NDIA ARCHITECT MATHAROO A SSOCIATES

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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DIVIDED VIEWS When is a room not a room? The Jury is still out ... T house – by Sou Fujimoto – was a highly contested choice. The house, which is essentially a single volume space, provides accommodation for a family of four and also serves as a space within which to display the owner’s private collection of contemporary art. Some Jury members thought this was a completely unworkable space to inhabit, with the building’s contorted spaces providing little ﬂexibility. Assuming that the client was party to the design process, however, raises an equally

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pertinent counter-assumption that the space is exactly what they wanted; a unique, bespoke, albeit unorthodox series of tailormade spaces. Recalling primitive housing models that arranged private areas around a central core, this home’s eight principal rooms are ordered in a radial manner. Rather than being organised around a centralised hall, however, each space is a sub-division of the single volume, with no spatial hierarchy. Held between a single uniﬁed ﬂoor and ceiling, rooms

are deﬁned by lightweight timber walls simply made from 12mm thick plywood ﬁxed to 45x45mm vertical studs. Each partition has an unﬁnished face, articulated by the exposed studs, and a smooth painted face, allowing the architects to set up an alternating arrangement of wooden or white rooms. R.G. Architect Sou Fujimoto Architects, Tokyo Project team Sou Fujimoto, Yumiko Nogiri, Koji Aoki, Hiroshi Kato Photographs 1,3, Sou Fujimoto; 2, Shinkenchiku-Sha

HONOURABLE MENTION HOUSE , M AEBASHI CITY , J APAN ARCHITECT SOU FUJIMOTO ARCHITECTS

1, 2 By modelling the spaces, this tailor-made home offers an alternative to conventional domestic planning. 3 From the street, the faceted facade begins to express the complexity of the internal arrangement.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Fit-out is a curious architectural medium. Often temporary, materially thin, and stylistically over-egged, it is the more muted and restrained interiors that usually attract recognition. It came as somewhat of a surprise, therefore, that this year’s Jury decided to give this small project, Tides Restaurant, an honourable mention. Little was known about the restaurant’s genre; even less was revealed about the spatial layout. Quite simply, it was the sheer ambition of the ceiling that intrigued the Jury.

In commercial fit-outs, ceilings often suffer great disservice as the forgotten elevation. Services coordination is easily overlooked, and materials rarely deviate from dry lining. Smoke detectors, light-fittings and sprinklers compete in misaligned unresolved grids, despite the fact that when seen through brightly-lit shop windows, free of merchandise, people and clutter, the ceiling is often the most prominent surface. Here then, the designers invested a great deal of time in the consideration of the ceiling,

providing an inverted acoustic topography that helps mediate what they considered to be an inappropriately proportioned space for a small intimate restaurant. With over 120 000 bamboo skewers (cut into three standard lengths), perhaps the only reservation was that this idea could have been taken even further. R.G. Architect LTL Architects, New York Project team Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David Lewis Photographs Michael Moran

HONOURABLE MENTION RESTAURANT , N EW Y ORK , USA A RCHITECT LTL A RCHITECTS

1 Looking from the kitchen toward the street, Tides Restaurant features a new type of suspended ceiling.

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SHIFTING TIDES The designers of this New York restaurant sought acoustic softness and spatial intimacy.

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

BALINESE BAMBOO This hotel restaurant in a Bali tourist resort explores vernacular forms and materials.

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Jakarta-based Budi Pradono is a young Indonesian architect who has worked in Australia and Japan (with Kengo Kuma) and studied at Rotterdam’s Berlage Institute. Paradoxically, this cosmopolitan trajectory has led him back to his roots, as evinced by this little restaurant in Bali which draws intelligently on vernacular forms and materials, especially bamboo. Commissioned to add a restaurant to a tourist villa and spa complex, Pradono evokes the idea of a taring or tetaring, a traditional Balinese temporary ceremonial pavilion. Arranged around a reflecting pool that meanders through the entire complex, the new restaurant has three parts. Two lightweight, permeable bamboo-clad pavilions house dining and drinking, while an elongated rammed earth volume (made of local clay) contains the entrance lobby. This heavier, more impermeable

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structure forms a buffer zone between the activity of the restaurant and the tranquillity of the neighbouring villas. Apart from bamboo’s obvious aesthetic qualities, it has several practical advantages over timber. It is lightweight, very fast growing and construction grade material available in three to ten years, compared with ten to twenty years for timber. Harvesting does not kill the bamboo plant, so there are fewer problems with soil erosion. Here, light magically filters and dapples through vertical screens of bamboo and lightweight hovering roofs. Yet this tropical idyll is also tempered by a guiding sense of refinement. C. S.

1 A lightweight, bamboo-clad pavilion hovers over a pool. 2 Bamboo walls filter light and air. 3 Elongated volume of the entrance lobby.

3 1 entrance lobby 2 reﬂecting pool 3 restaurant pavilions

Architect Budi Pradono Architects, Jakarta Photographs FX Bambang SN

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HONOURABLE MENTION RESTAURANT , B ALI , I NDONESIA A RCHITECT BUDI PRADONO A RCHITECTS

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site plan

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) C OMMENDED HOUSE , C OLIUMO PENINSULA , C HILE A RCHITECT PEZO VON E LLRICHSHAUSEN ARCHITECTS

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CLIFFTOP MONOLITH Poised on a cliff, this simple concrete house boldly confronts nature and the elements.

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Encompassing deserts and glaciers in an intoxicating, longitudinal sweep, Chile’s mad geography has been a crucible for a particular kind of Modernism informed by abstraction, climate and nature. Many of the younger generation of South American architects are reconnecting with these currents (Mathias Klotz is an obvious example) to produce strong, distinctive work that resonates with place. Such exploration is also apparent in the work of the young Chilean/Argentinian partnership of Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen who are based in the coastal city of Concepción. Commissioned by a local cultural organisation,

this dramatic cliffside house on the Coliumo Peninsula, was commended for its response to site and the strong, monolithic quality of its architecture. Some 550km south of Santiago, the Coliumo Peninsula is a breathtaking but remote rural setting populated by farmers, fishermen and the occasional summer tourist. The difficulties of transporting materials and a largely unskilled local labour force limited the scope of the project, but the architects exploit these limitations to create an architecture of great simplicity and power. Poised vertiginously on the edge of the cliff, the house is an elemental concrete cube perforated by large

square openings. Used both as a summer house and informal cultural centre, the building had to be at once domestic and monumental, apparently contradictory propositions which are skilfully resolved. Service elements such as kitchen, bathroom, storage and staircases are relegated to the perimeter, contained within a 1m wide zone that acts as thermal buffer. This frees up the rest of the house, so the living area, for instance, is a grandly scaled triple-height volume. The house steps down the site, from bedrooms at the top, through kitchen and dining at intermediate level, to the podium of the living area that directly overlooks the cliff and

sea below. The roof also acts as a terrace. Construction was extremely simple, with in-situ concrete cast by hand in untreated timber frames. Labour was provided by local farmers and fishermen who only had a small concrete mixer and four wheelbarrows at their disposal. In a spirit of inventive economy, the timber shuttering was recycled to make robust sliding panels that screen the service areas and windows when the house is not in use. Yet the engaging roughness of the construction only adds to the building’s primitive allure. C. S. Architect PvE Architects, Concepción Photographs Cristóbal Palma

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1 Cast by hand using the most basic techniques, the concrete house has a primitive allure. 2 The raw concrete cube clings precipitously to the hillside. 3, 4 The triple-height living room – spaces are at once quite grand, yet domestic.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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NORTHERN EXPOSURE In Norway’s remote north, this research centre responds to challenging conditions.

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COMMENDED RESEARCH CENTRE , SVALBARD , N ORWAY ARCHITECT JARMUND V IGSNÆS

Even by Scandinavian standards, the Svalbard archipelago is challengingly remote. Over 600km north of the Norwegian mainland, the islands’ glacier-scored landscape is frozen solid to a depth of 500m and temperatures plummet to –50 deg C in winter. The upside of this inhospitability are rich deposits of coal that attracted Russian and Swedish mining operations in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. But with the decline of the coal industry, Svalbard is now looking to encourage a more diverse economy of adventure tourism and scientiﬁc research. This centre for atmospheric and environmental research is in Spitzbergen, the largest island in the archipelago (and also the only inhabited one). Designed by Jarmund Vigsnæs, the centre was the outcome of a competition. Having previously built an HQ for the governor of Svalbard, Jarmund Vigsnæs were familiar with the archipelago’s formidable terrain and climate. Clad in a highly insulated copper skin, the centre is a humped, topographic presence in the bleak landscape. Though fashionably angular, the geometry was modelled on ﬂows of wind and snow raking across the site and helps to mitigate snow buildup over doors and windows. To prevent heat from the building melting the permafrost and causing subsidence, the centre sits on an elevated raft with a ventilated airspace underneath it. As the centre’s users will be spending a great deal of time indoors, they need to feel at ease with their surroundings. The copper skin conceals and protects a pine-lined, humanly-scaled maze of internal streets, ofﬁces and laboratories that offers spatial incident and variety. Jurors were impressed by the response to such challenging conditions and how the architecture was literally yet creatively shaped by context. C. S. 1 The new research centre is a topographic presence in Spitzbergen’s bleak landscape. 2, 3 Angular geometry prevents the build-up of snow. 4, 5, 6 Pine-lined internal spaces have incident and variety.

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Architect Shuhei Endo, Osaka

Even without the curves, Shuhei Endo continues to experiment with corrugated metal.

The work of the Shuhei Endo Architecture Institute is very familiar to the AR, and as such with some members of the Jury. While there were reservations that the angular use of proﬁled metal sheeting in this their latest work was less reﬁned than the previous pioneering continuous curves of their earlier work (ARs April 1997, December 2000), it was still felt that this project was distinctive, well executed and worthy of a commendation. Earlier Endo work exploited the strength achieved when lengths of corrugated sheeting were lapped and bent into dynamic and structurally integral ribbons; this work is slightly disappointing in that it relies on less sophisticated preformed corner components. Nevertheless, a similar spatial ambiguity drew the Jury’s attention. Space here is not deﬁned by function. Instead, it is formed as the surface folds to simultaneously deﬁne ﬂoor, wall, ceiling and roof. The continuity and reversal of the double-faced surface allows the distinction between outside and inside to blur, avoiding abrupt differentiation. Within a homogeneous townscape, openness and enclosure combine. Compared to earlier work, the result here is slightly more bulky; a symptom perhaps of the brief that required increased structural stiffness, providing internal and external decks capable of supporting the load of vehicles for sale. The solution, however, still exhibits an economy of means that is impressive, and detailed scrutiny of the construction sequence reveals just how successfully the structure has been composed to allow an otherwise ﬂimsy, thin, lightweight material to form a composite structure with adequate structural integrity. The question still remains, however, as to just how much further the Shuhei Endo Architecture Institute can continue to exploit their interest in this particular material? R. G.

STRAIGHT AND NARROW

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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COMMENDED CAR SHOWROOM , N AGOYA , AICHI PREFECTURE , J APAN ARCHITECT SHUHEI ENDO

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1,2 Within the ramshackle context of Nagoya City, the car showroom is a distinctive composition. 3,4,5 The folded planes create a variety of internal and external spaces.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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C OMMENDED PAVILION , P ERRY COUNTY , ALABAMA , USA A RCHITECT RURAL STUDIO

The evangelising premise of the Rural Studio is now well known, yet Sam Mockbee’s brilliant brainchild of extending the study and practice of architecture into a socially responsible context continues to flourish, even after his death (AR February 2002). Now under the direction of Englishman Andrew Freear, Mockbee’s mission goes on. Every quarter, groups of students from Auburn University elect to and live and work off campus in the impoverished counties of western Alabama. Working with the local Department of Human Resources, the students tackle small-scale projects that engage with the unpalatable, neglected

margins of American society. As with all Rural Studio endeavours, architectural involvement goes well beyond the abstract niceties of design into the more challenging and uncharted realms of hands-on building, and sourcing materials, as well as finance, and administration. Here, a quartet of students designed and built a new pavilion for communal activities in a neglected park in Perry County, the most impoverished county in Alabama. The park was first created in the 1930s, but was closed in 1970 and left untouched for over 30 years, slowly growing into a luscious, mysterious, forgotten landscape. Utterly simple in conception and

ARBOREAL ARBOUR

execution, the pavilion is tucked in among a lush, hardwood forest of water tupelos and cypress trees near a former picnic area. Shaped like a giant megaphone, it sits boldly in its arboreal setting. A large deck made of local cedar forms a datum for viewing, assembly and performance. The deck is raised some 18in (450mm) off the ground (to resist the regular local floods) and cranks up to create benches and a formal entrance. Set against this main datum is a smaller, more intimate enclave with a love seat. The deck is sheltered by a thin, aluminium-clad roof that soars up to 24ft (7.3m) at its highest point. From a distance, the

trunk-like columns blend with the trees, so the roof appears to hover lightly above the deck. The Cedar Pavilion has proved immensely popular, hosting communal gatherings, catfish fries and family reunions, as well as functioning as an open-air classroom for local schools and colleges. Jurors admired the clarity and economy of the architecture and how, in formidable social circumstances, it helped to renew and foster a sense of community. C. S. Architect Rural Studio, Auburn, USA Project team Jennifer Bonner, Mary Beth Maness, Nathan Orrison, Anthony Tindill Photographs Courtesy of the architect

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1 Supported by arboreal columns, the pavilion blends into the forest. 2 A megaphone-shaped roof encloses a platform. 3 The elevated platform resists periodic flooding from the nearby river.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) This housing in Trondheim, Norway’s third largest city, is an imaginative response to the vibrancy and enterprise of the local alternative lifestyle movement. Svartlamoen began life in the eighteenth century as a working-class neighbourhood near the sea front. After the Second World War, it was re-zoned for industrial use, sparking ﬁerce public protest which consigned the area to developmental limbo. By the 1980s, squatters, artists and entrepreneurs were colonising the redundant building stock and by 2001, the community had such an air of permanence and legitimacy, that the industrialisation plans were scrapped. Instead, Svartlamoen was re-zoned for residential use under the wonderfully nebulous rubric of a ‘semi-autonomous urban ecological experimental area’, which aims to crystallise and build on its original informal spirit. This project by local partnership Brendeland & Kristoffersen is the

outcome of a competition for low-rent, ecologically conscious housing. Responding to the area’s history of gentle subversiveness, it suggests new possibilities for urban living while displaying an almost Swiss fetish for materiality and formal rigour. The scheme has two separate crisply prismatic apartment blocks of two and ﬁve storeys. The smaller block houses six studio ﬂats, while the larger block has four storeys of communal ﬂats (each for ﬁve to six people occupying an entire ﬂoor) set above ground level shop units. Bedrooms are monastically compact and face north, while communal living and dining spaces overlook a south-facing courtyard. Circulation is external on a broad steel staircase that doubles as an informal terrace in summer. Timber use was part of the brief, as it is renewable, recyclable and (potentially) a local resource. Assembled on site in just 10 days, the prefabricated structure is spruce, imported from Austria. The

144mm thick exterior walls are loadbearing to provide columnfree space and internal partitions are also quite robust (96mm thick), so that furnishings or equipment can be ﬁxed directly to the walls. Reduced energy consumption was another programme requirement, so external walls have an additional layer of 200mm mineral wool gypsum boards and an outer skin of untreated Norwegian pine. Compact plans (which encourage communal living) and simple detailing make for an economical solution both in terms of capital and running costs, yet there is no loss of architectural or urban dignity. Unsentimental and functional in a way that recalls Norwegian vernacular farm buildings, the scheme resonates with Svartlamoen’s radical history. C. S.

1 Clad in Norwegian pine, housing blocks have a formal and material rigour. 2 External staircase doubles as a terrace in summer. 3 Trondheim context. 4 Interior of studio flat in twostorey block. 5 Monastic rigour of top floor bedroom in main block. 6 Communal living space in main block.

Architect Brendeland & Kristoffersen, Trondheim Photographs 1, 2, Jeroen Musch; 4, 5, 6, Johan Fowelin; 3, Geir Brendeland 5

RADICAL CHIC This imaginative new housing in Trondheim attempts to build on a radical civic spirit.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 2

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THE ARTIST WITHIN From pigsty to showroom, this little historic structure is cleverly reborn.

The wit and economy of thinking that informed this design pleased the judges; it is exempliﬁed in the punning description of what has been achieved, turning a pigsty (Saustall) into a showroom (Schaustall). The tumble-down 1780 structure had seen better times, and was partly destroyed in the Second World War. It was reassembled and added to in the intervening period. The original intention behind the commission was to refurbish the structure and upgrade it as a showroom. However, its physical condition made it difﬁcult to ﬁnance a thorough upgrade, and a replacement building of the same

size was not possible on the site, due to its proximity to a street. The generic solution, which has a long history in architectural approaches to sensitive ruins, was to place a ‘house within a house’, even if the original had been a home for pigs. But how? What should touch what? Could parts of the new structure protect the old, in the way the old walls give extra protection to the new building? The architect, for reasons of economy and logistics, placed a timber ‘house’, which copied the facade of the original building, inside the stone but without ever touching it, while the showroom

roof protects the existing structure. The arbitrariness of the windows now looks fashionable, based as it is on the functional requirements of the pigs and/or the farmer rather than a jokey translation of ordinariness. Light, colour and warmth transform the building at night; visitors can pry into the gaps between the structures and wonder how it was all done. The new internal life extends the eighteenth century into the twenty-ﬁrst. P. F.

1 The restored building – compact and crumbling, but given new life. 2 Inserting the new structure. 3 New and old elements are clearly legible.

Architect Fischer Naumann Partnerschaft, Stuttgart Project team Stefanie Naumann, Martin Naumann

PRIZEWINNER SHOWROOM , P FALZ , G ERMANY ARCHITECT FNP A RCHITEKTEN

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

INFORMAL ORDER With just three formal variables, this sinuous new settlement works with site and brief.

HIGHLY COMMENDED RESIDENTIAL CARE UNIT , HOKKAIDO , J APAN ARCHITECT SOU FUJIMOTO A RCHITECTS

This project was a popular choice, with many intricate spatial qualities and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Sea Ranch – Charles Moore’s celebrated 1960s Californian cliff-top settlement, that has since become a model of ordered informality. Beyond this association, however, this contemporary interpretation stood out as an extremely accomplished work. Through an ingenious manipulation of modular plans and elevated forms, the architect has created a settlement with its own

striking identity, embodying the landscape and place-making qualities of Sea Ranch, without merely copying it. Adopting the contemporary interest in applying a single cladding material to both walls and roof, the buildings are simply articulated in black profiled cladding, producing an overtly contemporary composition that sits comfortably on a south-westerly slope overlooking the sea in Hokkaido in the northernmost mainland of Japan. Providing accommodation for up to twenty mental health patients,

the campus consists of a sinuous cluster of buildings: 11 square units linked by 10 interstitial triangular spaces. Three roof types – flat, mono-pitch and ridge – and three storey heights further articulate each unit’s form, adding complexity to the building’s silhouette as it descends the subtle gradient of the site. The 5.4 x 5.4m units contain cellular accommodation – bedrooms, living rooms and offices – separated by triangular alcoves, entrances and circulation zones. The Jury remained less convinced about the building’s appropriateness 1 On a gently sloping hillside overlooking Hokkaido, the 11 cuboid forms create an apparently informal arrangement of buildings.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) as a dormitory for the mentally disabled; however, in response to this the architect’s description of the scheme as being ‘suitably ambiguous’ helped them settle on an equally ambiguous decision. When seeking to create a comfortable home for twenty residents, the designers wanted to create a context that, in a controlled, secure and sensitively handled way, would mimic the diversity and sense of unpredictability of city life. The form generates a wide variety of spaces, of shapes and sizes, gaps, dead-ends, nooks and crannies, creating a series of in-between places where people may be naturally inclined to find refuge. If likened to a city, this arrangement seeks to create alleyways and tiny squares on

every corner, instead of building spaces, corridors and communal areas that recall the anonymous and potentially intimidating effect of wide roads and large public squares. Domestic dimensions and city-like diversity are therefore combined into a new series of internal spaces, from where views across the coastal conurbation of Hokkaido give the residents a controlled link to their wider context. R.G.

2 The buildings’ contorted plan form gives westerly views across the city, and into more intimate external enclaves. 3 Places for casual meeting or semi-public refuge. 4 In the westernmost accommodation block, three bedrooms provide an alternative to standard rectilinear spaces.

Architect Sou Fujimoto Architects, Tokyo Project team Sou Fujimoto, Yumiko Nogiri, Koji Aoki Photographs 1, 4, Dalci Ano 2, 3 Sou Fujimoto

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The judges were immediately attracted to the apparently free-form structural mesh that produces this small gymnasium building in a town in Kumamoto Prefecture whose chief industry is forestry – the building had to make use of timber as a symbol of its area. On closer inspection there was more to this building than immediately met the eye. The structure is in fact a hybrid of glulam and steel; light gauge steel columns are placed at 1m intervals along the exterior wall, with load transferred to a

grid of 120mm x 120mm cedar members on their inside. A 2m grid of light gauge steel supports the roof, while below, a grid of cedar members is ‘sifted’ at a 45 degree angle, connected to form trusses with a 22m span. Angling the lower parts of the trusses allowed the designers to produce height where required by transferring load to trusses where a high ceiling was not needed, ie, the two rooms that accompany the gymnasium itself, which house mini-volleyball courts.

While the structure works in a simple and effective way, its design is sophisticated. Despite the apparent free-form nature of the structural timber grid, in fact each element is part of an orthogonal grid in both plan and elevation. However, only one out of every four members in the timber grid line act as trusses; the remaining 75 per cent simply span between the eight main truss lines. By contrast, the shift of the timber and steel grids results in the steel members working as a plane,

1 The building sits on a man-made hill in a mountain context.

SPACE FRAMED Sophisticated structural design informed a gymnasium building in Tomochi, Japan, symbolising its region.

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PRIZEWINNER FORESTRY HALL , T OMOCHI , J APAN A RCHITECT T AIRA NISHIZAWA ARCHITECTS

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) each stressed uniformly, and thus minimising use of material. The lower parts of the wall are in cedar, but the project is essentially a glazed box (no concrete has been used), located on a man-made hill planned to accommodate a baseball field, parking and a grass park. Of course, the site is surrounded by entirely natural mountains; the architects responded to this hybrid context with a bush-like hybrid of their own. PAUL FINCH Architect Taira Nishizawa Architects, Tokyo Structural engineer Arup Japan

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Sustrans is the UK’s leading sustainable transport charity, promoting a vision to see the world adopt methods of transport that benefit the health of individuals and the state of the environment. To date they have been extremely successful with award-winning initiatives, including the National Cycle Network, Safe Routes to School, and Bike It. In short, they are far more than a charity for weird cyclists. Commissioning artwork has also been part of their programme, bringing delight and spectacle to their expanding cycle network that in itself has restored, rejuvenated and reopened previously inaccessible parts of our landscape. The William Cookworthy Bridge, while not pure art, is one such component, providing a valuable link in Clay Trails: part of the Network that includes 15km of paths over the former China Clay works in Cornwall, linking communities and visitors, and providing car-free access to the Eden Project (AR August 2001). Designed by local architect David Sheppard, the bridge is much more than the metal object that we see. It is part of larger, integrated, sculpted landform, that makes a place within this very specific landscape. An elevated viewing platform acts as a fulcrum between land and bridge, turning the route through almost 90 degrees. The artificial embankment – formed from 10 000 tons of ‘stent’ quarry waste – ascends to the pivot point, recalling the monumental scale of earth movement and sculpting that is characteristic of this area; a place where industry has brought a very specific identity. The bridge itself appealed to the Jury due to its physical and notional straightforwardness; a quality that is evident in the architect’s description: a simply supported box girder, 25m in span, 2.5m wide and 450mm deep, with a 1.4m high parapet for horses and cyclists. It is beautifully simple, and the distinctive vertical fins, set at 100mm centres, discourage climbing toddlers, and play with the moiré effect, causing the bridge’s visual mass to change when seen in motion. It is a wonderful addition within a unique landscape, and a fitting memorial to the 300th anniversary of the man who founded Cornwall’s China Clay industry, William Cookworthy. R. G.

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SHEPPARD’S DELIGHT In the beautiful Cornish setting, Sustrans’ mission to make the landscape accessible is perfectly served by a new bridge. site plan Architect David Sheppard Architects, Devon with Sustrans Project team David Sheppard, Colin Sanderson, Simon Ballantine Photographs Joakim Borén

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HIGHLY COMMENDED BRIDGE , S T A USTELL , C ORNWALL , UK A RCHITECT DAVID S HEPPARD A RCHITECTS

1 The Corten fins produce a subtle moiré effect when seen by passing cyclists, walkers and riders. 2 The bridge provides an important link in the Sustrans 15km Clay Trails.

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section through earthwork and Bodmin Road

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) In the Gansu province of north-west China, the Po River separates the humble village of Maosi into two parts. This has a significant effect on its inhabitants, especially during floods. Crossing the river is an essential ritual of daily life, forming the route for many, including that for children between home and school. When the water rises above ankle depth, the only means of crossing it has been to build a primitive bridge from mud, straw and tree branches – exploiting the limited means available within the Loess Plateau region. Historically, each year, after the autumn harvest, the villagers

gather materials to rebuild the structure, taking on average 15 days to complete it. Despite this seasonal effort, the summer rain would always return to wash it away. At best, crossing the bridge was precarious, with the children adopting excellent acrobatic skills, balancing as they tiptoed across its narrow and uneven deck; at worst, it was lethal. A solution came when a number of academics from Hong Kong considered the problem; the end result representing a collaboration between the Chinese University in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Xi’an Jiaotong University. Earlier

this summer, project volunteers travelled to the remote village and built this new bridge by hand in just five days. Sited 1.5m above the river-bed it will be accessible 95 per cent of the year, and is easy to maintain. The 80m long bamboo deck has already survived a freak 4m flood, and an 80 year old villager recently reported that, after 20 years, he could now visit his friends on the other side. R. G. Architect Department of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong Project team Edward Ng (project leader), Rollin Collins, Paul Tsang, Lucia Cheung, Kevin Li, Chan Pui Ming, Karen Kiang Photographs Chinese University of Hong Kong

HIGHLY COMMENDED B RIDGE , M AOSI , C HINA ARCHITECT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE , C HINESE U NIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

2 1, 2 Bridge provides safe route to school, meeting point and a place for contemplation. 3 Made largely from local materials, the bridge sits comfortably in the landscape, bearing on the river bed.

BRIDGING THE GAP Hand built by volunteers, this new structure in China bridges more than a physical gap. plan

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HIGHLY COMMENDED ROLLING BRIDGE , P ADDINGTON , L ONDON DESIGNER T HOMAS HEATHERWICK STUDIO

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Good design is not just about good ideas, rolling with it, going with the creative ﬂow; it is also about good execution. Great design comes when both factors combine. Individuals who repeatedly come up with new tactics, those who try to reinvent the wheel and more often than not succeed, are at best inspirational, and at worst downright irritating. In architecture, the prize arguably goes to Herzog and de Meuron, whose recent exhibition (AR July 2005) drew an observer to publicly deride their ‘incessant inventiveness’. In the slightly left-ﬁeld world of architectural device design, the creative output of the Thomas Heatherwick Studio is equally challenging. You can almost hear the secret thoughts of their

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cross section – rolled out

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observers saying, ‘now, why didn’t I think of that?’ When asked to design a retractable bridge, Heatherwick was not content to redress existing types: swing bridge, lifting bridge, or rigid retractable. Instead he came up with something completely new. Well almost; no single idea is ever generated in isolation. The closest precedent for this probiscuslike coil is perhaps the military bridge; the type that is rolled out when existing passes have been destroyed or that is used by emergency services in times of natural disaster, to give access for aid or evacuation. Sited in London’s Paddington Basin, this bridge rolls open, by slowly and smoothly unfurling. It mutates from conventional pedestrian platform into a circular sculpture,

that sits comfortably on the canal bank when not required. The structure is pushed and pulled by a series of hydraulic rams set within triangular segments; challenging logic by pulling it open and pushing it closed. As it recoils, each of its eight segments simultaneously lifts, causing it to curl until the ends touch to form a perfect circle. The studio’s aim was to make function from movement. As such it can be stopped at any point along its journey, whether at the very start, when it looks as though it is hovering, or halfway through its opening path. Delightfully conceived, delightfully resolved, delightfully detailed, and delightfully made; don’t you just

ROLL WITH IT A new footbridge animates Paddington’s still waters.

hate it? R. G. Designer Thomas Heatherwick Studio, London

1,2,3 States of play: the bridge is stable in any position, as hydraulic rams push and pull.

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1 Site context. 2 The oratory lies at the heart of the campus. 3 The oratory cube, seen through the glazed cloister. 4 Refined geometry and raw materials give the structure an elemental power. A cast glass door heralds entry. 1

The combining of sacred and secular in a complex of buildings is a familiar architectural programme, and one that encourages a creative combination of the functional and the spiritual. In this instance, the judges were impressed by the calmness and serenity of the oratory space, with its shades of Tadao Ando, not to mention Le Corbusier, in its exploitation of concrete and varying types of light. The oratory element creates what the architect describes as the equivalent of a crescendo in music, but one which breaks from the remaining fabric of a campus which also has educational and administrative functions. Its location and height mark it out from the everyday

buildings around, while the rotation in plan is intended to signify the break between secular and sacred, and to create a void between building types which can be used for communal gatherings of varying size, or for private meditation. The threshold between the outside world and the oratory is marked by a sculptural castglass door, designed to gather and refract light, which glows brightly at the perimeter and luminously at the centre as a result of the lens-shaped plan. The architects intended to achieve a fusion of secular and metaphysical experiences through light, shadow, colour and movement, before visitors and congregation take their place inside.

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LIGHT SPIRIT Fusing the secular and metaphysical, this oratory on a campus is a modern response to the numinous.

PRIZEWINNER C HURCH COMPLEX , LOUISIANA , USA A RCHITECT T RAHAN A RCHITECTS

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Internally, the oratory is intended to evoke a sense of mystery while providing a pure space which could be described as womb-like. Each of the six sides is the same size, and has the same colour and texture, the uniformity creating a certain lack of orientation and sense of mystery. Variation and stimulation is provided by light drawn into the oratory through irregular activities cast into the walls, whose thickness varies. As the images show, the effect is to introduce brilliant light near the ceiling and softer light near the floor. Each aperture is inspired by a single episode of the paschal mystery of Christ. No costly materials have been used in the creation of this complex – board-formed

concrete, plate glass and cast glass are the key elements, creating an atmosphere the architect intended to be neither opulent nor overly austere. The judges, on balance, felt that this had successfully been achieved, and that a feeling of serenity pervaded the design, doubtless helped by the simplicity of the plan and the cloister reference in what is in part, at least, a community resource. P. F.

5 Communing with the numinous. 6 Interior has an almost Japanese asceticism. 7 Light and materials convey a sense of peace and spirituality.

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ground floor plan of oratory (scale approx 1:250)

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administration classroom religious education oratory altar pulpit presider’s chair cruciﬁx pews

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general plan of complex

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HIGHLY COMMENDED SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY CENTRE , L IJIANG , C HINA ARCHITECT LI XIAODONG DESIGN STUDIO

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With the unrivalled rate of development in China, there is a genuine concern (admittedly from foreign observers) that Chinese architects are yet to find a coherent contemporary architectural identity. Traditionally, China has had a rich architectural heritage within which even the most elementary architectural eye could identify common architectural motifs: Dougong brackets that articulate the junction between column and beam; sweeping concave roofs that create distinctive silhouettes in both urban and wild rural contexts; brightly painted timber; and perhaps most fundamentally, the systematic grouping of buildings around courtyards, where the now overused Western architectural cliché of making inside/outside space had merit, authenticity and appropriateness. As last year’s Beijing Biennale demonstrated, the most interesting home-grown talents were those who had chosen to work with, rather than against, their heritage. With this project, Li Xiaodong is very much part of this generation; a generation that while not necessarily being completely satisfied with the resolution of their own architectural language, nevertheless works rigorously to extract essence and nuance when considering how to build. The Yuhu Elementary School and Community Centre, completed last year, nestles in the foothills of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, in Lijiang, home to the 280 000 or so members of the Naxi minority nationality. Providing educational space for 160 students and community activity space for up to 1300 villagers, the complex comprises three small buildings arranged in a Z-configuration. This creates two courtyards, each set aside for separate school and community activities. Deriving significance from the Naxi

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION Li Xiaodong revisits established architectural typologies when placing this contemporary group of buildings within a sensitive UNESCO World Heritage site.

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1 From the south, the school courtyard is set beside a large maple tree.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY CENTRE , L IJIANG , C HINA A RCHITECT LI XIAODONG DESIGN STUDIO

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museum classroom exhibition area community courtyard reﬂecting pool school courtyard staffroom

ground floor (scale approx 1:500)

site plan

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tenet that sees the mountains as the backbone and water as the soul of their culture, both stone and water feature heavily; as do reinterpretations of the traditional Naxi home. One such reinvention is the articulation of the stair, which forms a focus to the community courtyard. Traditionally occupying one corner of a Naxi house, the stair frees up space to provide more flexible orthogonal rooms while celebrating the ritual of teachers making their way to the classrooms below. Effort was also made to simplify the architectural language while respecting traditional details

and techniques. The use of traditional timber-frame detailing with mortise and tenon joints, for example, is a proven safeguard against earthquake collapse, with all masonry being independently reinforced and non load-bearing. Traditional ornamentation is also reduced to basics, with curved ridgelines straightened and gable end ornament simplified to a simple lattice framework inspired by traditional grain racks. Sliding and casement windows are also abundant, bringing fresh air, light and access when required. The uniqueness of the design within a very particular context impressed the judges,

as a demonstration of how local materials, technology and spatial arrangements can be transformed into a fresh language. The challenge for this generation, however, with Li Xiaodong and many contemporaries based in cities like Beijing, will ultimately come when they are given the opportunity to raise their game, and to tackle the problems associated with large-scale urban developments. R. G. Architect Li Xiaodong Design Studio, Beijing Project team Li Xiaodong, Yeo Kang Shua, Chong Keng Hua, Stanley Lee Tse Chen Photographs Melvin H. J. Tan

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2 From within the classroom, nature and landscape remain dominant and distracting. 3,4,5 Within the community courtyard, the twisted staircase forms a focus ... a contemporary twist, in an otherwise traditional context. 6 The community courtyard, reflecting pool and Snow Mountain beyond.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED STADIUM CANOPY , HELSINKI , F INLAND A RCHITECT K2S A RCHITECTS

Originally completed in 1938, the famous Helsinki Olympic Stadium was built to attract the summer Games, which eventually came to Finland in 1952. Designed by Yrjö Lindegen and Toivo Jäntti, the building’s svelte Modernist lines evoked an era of social optimism and architectural progressiveness. Finns are keen athletes and the Olympic Stadium had the distinction of appearing on the Finnish 10 mark banknote, prior to the country adopting the euro. Since the late ’30s, the stadium has undergone various stages of modernisation which have

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improved facilities and reduced spectator numbers from 70 000 to a more manageable 40 000. The latest phase was catalysed by Helsinki’s hosting of the 2005 World Athletics Championship, the most prestigious athletics meeting outside the Olympics. Though the city saw off rival bids from Berlin, Rome and Moscow, among others, the IAAF (the sport’s governing body) insisted that the stadium should be upgraded with an extra roof to provide additional covered seating. Helsinki-based K2S Architects won a competition with a bold proposal that

reinterprets yet also respects the original Modernist ethos. The new roof extends to cover part of the grandstand on the stadium’s east side, where the bank of spectator seating is at its widest. Though a strong presence inside the stadium, the new structure is virtually imperceptible from the outside, much like the existing 1930s canopy. Supported by a row of steel columns and tied back to the original concrete structure, the new canopy cantilevers with supple grace over the grandstand. The steel roof structure is optimised by a double sinusoidal

curved section. This generates a gently undulating geometry, so that the canopy swells and tapers along its length. The curve of its underside is emphasised by a skin of thin pine strips which tempers the huge surface both visually and acoustically. Structural analysis of the aerofoil roof form was backed up by extensive wind tunnel testing using a 1:180 scale model made of aluminium and plexiglass. The judges admired the elegance and simplicity of the concept and thought it a thoroughly ﬁtting addition to a heroic landmark of Finnish Modernism. C. S.

cross section through new canopy

1 The new roof swells out over the stadium. 2 The grandstand in action.

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Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium is dignified and enhanced by a bold new grandstand roof.

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1 Architect K2S Architects, Helsinki Project team Kimmo Lintula, Niko Sirola, Mikko Summanen Photographs 1, Johan Fowelin 2, Mikko Summanen

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1 new roof 2 existing grandstand 3 tower 4 running track 5 pitch stadium plan (scale approx 1:2500)

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cross section through stadium

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HIGHLY COMMENDED RESTAURANT , B RUFE , P ORTUGAL ARCHITECTS ANTÓNIO PORTUGAL & MANUEL MARIA REIS

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restaurant level plan (scale approx 1:500)

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Graduates of Porto’s architectural school and in practice in the city since 1990, António Portugal & Manuel Maria Reis are in the vanguard of an emerging generation of Portuguese architects. Their modest, tactful work epitomises what critics and curators describe as ‘critical scarcity’, making use of limited budgets, materials and construction techniques in a way that responds imaginatively to the Portuguese condition. Their sensitive remodelling of the historic Casa da Cerca into a library and archive (AR July 2004) helped an antiquated structure

make the challenging transition from decaying relic to working public building. There is a strongly enigmatic and understated quality to their approach, epitomised by this project for a restaurant near the village of Brufe, in Portugal’s rugged far north. Utterly simple in conception and execution, the building is an almost imperceptible horizontal blip in the landscape, its long, low slung volume echoing the forms of the granite terraces on which it is poised. Much of its bulk is, in fact, excavated into the hillside, so that the roof becomes part of the

DINING TERRACE This restaurant in Portugal’s rugged north responds to and celebrates its wild setting.

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1 Embedded in hillside, roof becomes viewing plateau. 2 Rough timber cladding alludes to farm buildings. 3,4,5 The main terrace has breathtaking vistas. 6 The new restaurant is poised on granite terraces.

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long section

terrain, a grass-covered plateau edged with a minimal upstand to prevent mishaps. From this vantage point, diners descend a set of external stairs cut into the hill to another terrace that thrusts out from the box of the restaurant. Dining takes place in a large, airy room illuminated by a long slash of picture window glazing, while the cooking and serving end of things is kept well out of sight in the buried rear of the building. Rough horizontal planks of timber are employed to clad both lower terrace and box, giving it a rustic, barn-like character that echoes

the vernacular architecture of the surrounding farm buildings. The judges were intrigued by the project, whose presentation embodied the sparse, enigmatic quality of its architecture. They were especially impressed by how the building related to its setting, deferring to the landscape but celebrating it, and the way the simple materials were combined with a restrained formal language to achieve powerful effects. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architects António Portugal & Manuel Maria Reis, Porto with Paulo Freitas Photographs Luís Ferreira Alves

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terrace restaurant dining room servery kitchen external staircase roof

cross section

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H OUSING , I NNSBRUCK , A USTRIA ARCHITECT B AUMSCHLAGER & E BERLE 1 Mid-rise blocks are arranged around communal spaces. Car parking is relegated underground, freeing up the exterior for semi-formal gardens. 2 Framed by alpine peaks, the blocks have a geometric rigour and precision. Copper-clad folding shutters animate the exterior (although in reality perhaps to a more random pattern than shown here).

Housing (of both the state subsided and private sector funded kind) accounts for over a third of construction work in Austria. Regulated by planning laws and cost constraints, opportunities for innovation are limited, with the result that towns and cities tend to be dominated by dull residential developments. In this apparently reductivist area of architectural activity, Baumschlager & Eberle have applied themselves to researching and evolving a successful housing type based on a compact, doughnut-shaped plan with an inner ring of servant spaces and an outer ring of served rooms. The building envelope is usually formed from balconies and loggias, creating a semi-public layer enclosed by an external skin of folding or sliding shutters. By adapting and modifying this basic type to various conditions,

Baumschlager & Eberle have gradually developed it in terms of architectural form, constructional composition and ecological performance. The particular character of this approach is not to seek the outlandishly special, but rather to aspire to the highest standards for what is normal. The latest in this series of housing projects is for a site on the western edge of Innsbruck. Dramatically framed by alpine peaks, it extends an existing residential area. The complex contains 298 flats of varying sizes (from one to three bedrooms) divided more or less evenly between rental and ownership. Apartments are organized in six identical blocks between five and seven storeys high. Cars are relegated to a subterranean park, so freeing up the areas between the blocks for gardens and communal social spaces.

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Distinguished by formal rigour and a concern for energy use, this complex of compactly planned, mixed tenure housing blocks on the edge of Innsbruck is animated by an external skin of folding shutters.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSING, INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA ARCHITECT BAUMSCHLAGER & EBERLE 3 Lushness of the landscape tempers the formal abstraction. 4 Balconies run around the edge of each block, enclosed by the shutters and translucent glass balustrades.

cross section

longitudinal section

a solar collection panels b water tanks for heat storage c car park d ventilation outlets e heat pump & boiler f living room/ bedroom g wc/bathroom/ kitchen

cross section outlining principles of environmental control

typical upper level plan

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site plan

main entrance lightwell courtyard lift stairs flats access galleries balconies

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:300)

Pollarded lime trees mark the edges of paths and will mature to provide enclaves of shade. Each of the blocks follows the same compact arrangement of flats tightly planned around a central lightwell and service core. Each has a single communal entrance that penetrates through the block to the central space; from here you either take the lift or stairs to communal galleries on each level that lead to individual apartments. Flats are simply and economically planned with a narrow strip of kitchens and bathrooms on the lightwell side serving larger living spaces facing out to views and light. Each flat has access to a balcony that runs continuously around each floor. Inner faces of the blocks are clad in vertical strips of cherry. Folding shutters made of copper and balustrades of translucent toughened glass give protection from the elements and provide privacy. The changing concertina rhythms generated by the shutters (which will surely have a much greater degree of lyrical randomness than the regimented patterns shown here) animate the geometrically stern facades. As with Baumschlager & Eberle’s previous projects (AR January 2000), the Innsbruck housing is characterized by a thoughtful degree of energy conscious environmental control. The highly compact plan reduces the surface area to volume ratio. Walls are highly insulated and windows are triple glazed, in order to minimize heat loss. Each apartment is equipped with a compact ventilation unit with heat recovery, as well as a small heat pump for air heating and a boiler for hot water. The controlled air ventilation system provides a constant, comfortable supply of fresh air as well as

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSING, INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA ARCHITECT BAUMSCHLAGER & EBERLE 5 At the heart of each block is a lightwell. 6 Galleries give access to individual flats.

optimizing space heating and minimizing ventilation losses. It also maintains a balance of relative humidity, reducing problems of building deterioration due to pollution, humidity or mould. Around 70 per cent of the annual hot water demand is covered by a solar powered system. Solar collectors with a surface area of 140-190sqm per block heat water in storage tanks located around the perimeter of the underground car park. During the summer, domestic hot water is warmed in the solar tanks and supplied to individual flats. Any extra heating is carried out by the heat pumps. In winter, solar energy is used to preheat fresh air in the controlled ventilation system. Rainwater is collected from the roofs and used to flush the lavatories, accounting for over half the annual demand. This conflation of energy saving measures gives rise to a very low annual heating requirement, compared with more conventional housing developments, with consequent cost savings and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Combining formal precision with ecological inventiveness, Baumschlager & Eberle’s architecture shows what can be achieved even in the most unpromising of programmes.

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CLAUDIA KUGEL

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Architect Baumschlager & Eberle, Lochau, Austria Project team Carlo Baumschlager, Dietmar Eberle, Gerhard Zweier, Herwig Bachmann Structural engineers Mac Wallnöfer, Fritzer & Saurwein Environmental engineer GMI Ingenieure Landscape architect Kienast Vogt Photographs Eduard Hueber/Arch Photo

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The London Contemporary Dance School is to be found at The Place in a quiet backwater off busy Euston Road. Established in 1969 by philanthropist Robin Howard, The Place has become one of the world’s famous dance centres. Its theatre was created out of the old Drill Hall of the Artists’ Rifles, constructed in 1889 and listed by English Heritage. A landmark in the King’s Cross Partnership area, it opens onto the tiny Georgian oasis of Duke’s Road (built with

the adjoining Woburn Walk in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt as part of the Bedford Estate). Behind, and to the east of, the theatre, dressing rooms and ancillary spaces, is the dance centre, housed for most of its life in a triangular warren of buildings converted at various times into studios, classrooms and offices. Equipped with money from the National Lottery (through the Arts Council) and a grant from King’s Cross Partnership, The Place has been undergoing

much-needed improvements by Allies and Morrison. Pressure on space and facilities had become acute. The centre, open seven days a week from early morning until late in the evening, is used by great numbers of students and professional performers, and has to house around 80 staff. Work is being carried out in two phases. The first, now completed, has provided a new building to the north and east of the triangle. Entrance is through a three-storey glass fronted stair

tower, facing east and visible from a distance – particularly at night when illuminated. Glass balconies between landings act as stretching zones so from the street you see silhouetted dancers in motion, figures superimposed one above the other. This tower is the centre’s shop window, advertising its presence to the neighbourhood. Landings lead to new studios contained in a building to the north hard up against the back wall of a hotel block running

Leading the dance A new extension to a famous dance centre in the King’s Cross district of London rationalizes a rather difficult site, adds spacious new studios, and provides a shop window that establishes its presence locally.

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1 Glazed stair tower with stretching areas, gives access to studios, right. 2 Lower ground floor studios combined by folding central dividing screen away. 3 Interior skylit stair tower: landings and glass balconies are used by students for meetings and exercise. 4 Stair tower onto street. Dividing screen of metal mesh from gkd.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) along Euston Road. There are two large airy studios on each of the two levels, and another pair excavated out of the ground. Every part of this workmanlike scheme is permeated by the quiet architectural intelligence characteristic of this practice. From the beginning, the architects worked closely with their professional clients to work out proportions and details (like the specially designed studio barres, in section shaped like an inverted egg to make them easier to grasp correctly). Studio walls on the north, facing straight onto the hotel, are made of glass blocks which diffuse light while maintaining privacy; and these translucent walls are supplemented elsewhere by strategically placed windows admitting the exterior. For the dancers these studios are introverted places for

west-east long section

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entrance and stair tower new studio modernized studio theatre bar theatre entrance box office backstage dressing room changing room office

D ANCE S CHOOL , K ING ’ S C ROSS , L ONDON ARCHITECT A LLIES AND M ORRISON A RCHITECTS

second floor plan

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:950)

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isometric

lower ground floor plan

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5 Upper studio with glass block wall from Luxcrete to north, and Junckers sprung floor.

intense concentration, but any sense of claustrophobia is dissipated by the subliminal impression of light, air and reflection off sprung floors and mirrored walls. Services – ventilation and acoustic separation – are carried by the concrete structure. On the lower ground floor, it was possible to eliminate the heavy central wall and replace it with a folding screen to create one enormous space. This phase also included refurbishing and generally tidying up the existing building. Phase two consists of work to the theatre and is due for completion by this autumn. P. M. Architects Allies and Morrison Architects, London Project architects Bob Allies, Graham Morrison, Eddie Taylor, Paul Appleton, Jo Bacon, Ben Elsdon, Stuart King, Adrian Morrow, Jane Parker, Oliver Ralphs, Pauline Stockmans, Ria Summerhayes Structural engineer Price and Myers Services engineer Max Fordham & Partners Photographs Dennis Gilbert/VIEW

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 Entrance front: blank and rather forbidding with windows hidden behind thin natural oak strips. Car port for southern house penetrates from road to private gardens. 2 Entrance to upper (northern) house: axial route to private natural world. 3 Keeping as many trees as possible was one of the key aims of design. Northern house in foreground. 4 Southern house: studio seen from entrance. 5 Southern house: studio from garden. 6 Garden side of southern house.

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Oslo is one of the largest cities in the world in terms of area. It stretches from the neoClassical core far up into the surrounding hills, where suburbs and forest increasingly blend. In the worst areas, this leads to slummification of the wild, but in the best parts, the two interact, bringing humanity and nature into creative conjunction. Lund Hagem’s two attached houses at Furulund are a prime example of such a dialogue. The site is squarish, sloping from north to south, on a corner of two roads in an area where nineteenth- and twentieth-century villas are scattered lightly through the woods. The basic plan of the new houses was

generated by the twin desire to preserve the 25 best trees on the plot, and to avoid overlooking and overshadowing by existing buildings. So the L-shaped houses are arranged to open onto a double garden court which is divided by a thick (partly storage) wall which gives them a degree of privacy from each other. The garden courts face south-west, into a wooded gap between existing buildings. The houses are completely different in plan. The upper (more northerly) one is based on a corridor that runs at garden level, double and single sided, south-west from the entrance to a covered belvedere at the far

end of the garden. En route, it passes the master bedroom on the left, and the main family area which includes kitchen, dining and sitting and is dominated by a large fireplace. Next to this is a small flight of stairs which leads down to a little private study. Above is the children’s area, from where a secret stair in the chimney breast goes up to a roof terrace above the living area. The other house is fundamentally organized round the half levels of its stair. It has a car port tucked into its volume, and it is entered from the same side as the northern house. To the left is a doubleheight study, and the stairs go down to the

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T WO HOUSES , F URULUND , O SLO , N ORWAY ARCHITECT L UND H AGEM

IN NORWEGIAN WOODS It may seem odd to start an issue on group housing with a pair of houses in an Oslo suburb, but these are so responsive to landscape, that they suggest many possibilities for larger groupings of houses which could pay similar attention to nature and human response to it.

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north-south section through north house garage and south house

entrance levels

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north-south cross section through houses

entrance living/kitchen main bedroom study garage studio gallery mezzanine children childen’s common room cellar car port

lowest level (scale approx 1:370)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 7 Fireplace in living room of northern house. 8 Stair in southern house is organizing device for spatial flow. 9 Kitchen in southern house. 10 Garden side, southern house. 11, 12 Sitting area, southern house, with light washing over south wall, and window which brings trees into conversation.

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children’s level, where three sleeping cabins with sliding doors open off the communal area. They look out onto the garden court, to which each has access through the glass wall. If, instead of going down to the children’s floor, you go up, you arrive in the living area, which is the spatial tour de force of the whole affair. Tall and long, it looks north towards the garden, but gains much of its atmosphere from a continuous rooflight which pours luminance down the largely blank south wall. A wide and generous bench follows the light and turns at the south end to form the base of the fireplace which again

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dominates the sitting area. Just at the turn, a large window is suddenly cut low into the wall to look out point blank into the branches of a fine mature birch tree, which gives the space privacy from the road. A further flight up from this level is the main bedroom, slung over the car port where there is access to the mezzanine of the study. Another short stair leads to the private roof terrace over the living area. Construction is lightweight concrete block, rendered outside and in, with internal surfaces lightly dragged to give them texture. Upper floors on the entrance (east) side are clad in thin natural oak strips of varying

length and thickness; behind are small windows which get some light and glimpses of view through the slits. The effect from the road is dark and a little austere, but once the wooden entrance doors are open, the spaces are welcoming, with floors of solid oiled ash, slate and oiled concrete, ash joinery and light birch slatted ceilings. Of course, such finishes would be impossible in less expensive houses, as would all the many subtle manoevres in plan and section. But the thoughtfulness with which site and family needs have been related do repay study, and could inform housing on a considerably larger scale. P.D.

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Architect Lund Hagem Arkitekter AS, Oslo Project team Svein Lund, Karine Denizou, Arvid Pedersen, Andreas Poulsson Photographs Espen Grønli, Jiri Havran, Morten Brun, Svein Lund

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) In southern Arizona, close to the Mexican border, landscape and sky collide in an exhilarating rush of space and light. This elevated desert area is known for its awesome summer lightning storms and very clear night skies (accounting for the presence of several astronomical observatories). Within this extraordinary natural arena, Rick Joy has built a house, a tautly graphic composition of glass and planes of hoary, rusted steel that sits lightly and low on the ground, like a lizard basking on a rock.

H OUSE , A RIZONA , USA A RCHITECT R ICK J OY

His clients were a couple from Ohio who had spent their holidays in the Southwest and become seduced by its vast, primeval landscapes to the point of commissioning a retirement home. Covered with scrub, native mesquite trees and low wild grasses, the desert site slopes gently down to the south. In the distance, snow-capped mountains delicately frame the horizon. Apart from the usual living and guest spaces, the clients requested two studies, areas for entertainment and an optical

telescope platform (the husband is a former radio astronomer and the site was selected as much for its night-time view of crystal clear skies as daytime panoramas). All this had to be contained on a single floor. Joy’s response was to carve a level shelf into the hill, defined by two U-shaped retaining walls skewed towards one another. This establishes a datum for the house. The retaining walls form the ends of two shed-like volumes (the main dwelling and a smaller guest house) that gently

nudge into each other, with a linear courtyard occupying the intermediate space. From the approach road, only the glazed ends of the sheds are visible above the ground; at night these become glowing abstract forms, apparently hovering in space. A gravel-covered garden spiked with plump cacti flanks the entrance. To get in, you descend through a stair wedged in the cleft between the two retaining walls, to emerge in the tranquillity of the courtyard below. Pools of water and

TOUCHING NATURE Encased in a carapace of weathered steel, a retirement house in the spectacular splendour of the Arizona desert appears part of its raw, elemental, landscape.

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1 The gently angular peaks of the roof mimic the topography of the distant mountains. 2 Embedded in the slope, the house presents a modest profile from the approach road. 3 The shed-like volumes of the main house and its smaller guest wing enclose an intermediate courtyard. 4 Courtyard is landscaped in a very precise fashion, with cubic planters and calm pools of water. 5 A weathered carapace of rusted steel cladding envelops the house.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) mesquite trees provide cooling shade and the fragrant vegetation attracts hummingbirds and butterflies. The very precise detailing of the courtyard – concrete paving, crisply rectilinear planters and cubic volumes of water – expresses the controlled, man-made character of the house against the rawness and unpredictability of nature. At the west end of the courtyard, a swimming pool extends the vista towards the far distant horizon. The house’s organization emphasizes the connection with the exterior, as internal and external spaces meld fluidly with one other. Flanked by the

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courtyard, the main living space is a long bar with a covered porch at its far end overlooking the swimming pool. To the rear is the master bedroom and bathroom and twin studies, which face the courtyard but also overlook a smaller private patio and pool, enclosed by the retaining wall. Each window exactly focuses and frames a particular view; some windows are set flush with the steel surface, some are box-like protrusions, some unglazed cutouts. The smaller guest wing also houses a garage and a platform for an optical telescope. Joy likens the house to a geode, the coarseness of the rough steel exterior contrasting with the

refinement of the interior. Used extensively in farm buildings and structures, rusted steel is a common sight in the Arizona countryside. Because of the intensely dry climate, steel weathers quickly but does not rust through, so it was not necessary to use costly proprietary types of oxydized steel cladding. From a distance, the rough, red carapace of the house is a strong yet familiar presence, resonating with the hues of the desert. Inside, white plaster walls and black polished concrete floors impart a simple, understated elegance. Pale maple, sandblasted glass and stainless steel complete the interior

palette. Sliding glass panels heighten the connection with the exterior and assist in cross ventilation, although the dwelling is also air conditioned. Joy’s house extends the Modernist tradition of domesticating nature, yet powerfully rooted in the landscape, it is also sensitive to nuances of a remarkable place. C. S. Architect Rick Joy, Tucson, USA Project team Rick Joy, Andy Tinucci, Franz Buhler, Chelsea Grassinger Structural engineer Southwest Structural Engineers Mechanical engineer Otterbein Engineering Photography Jeff Goldberg/Esto

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cross section

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courtyard entrance living kitchen pantry bedroom study workshop garage porch pool guest house

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:400)

6 Carefully placed openings frame, focus and edit views of the vast landscape beyond. 7 Main living and dining spaces. 8 An enclosed terrace and sensuous pool terminate the west end of the main house.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) U RBAN HOUSE , T OKYO , J APAN ARCHITECT K AZUYO S EJIMA & A SSOCIATES

JAPANESE MINIATURE With extraordinary invention and ingenuity, Kazuyo Sejima fits this tiny house into the densely woven, indifferent texture of downtown Tokyo. Curiously, for all its apparent wilfulness, it draws its origins from its very tight site.

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Today more than ever the small house serves as a testing ground for architectural ideas. In few places is the ground so testing, so expensive, crowded, and prone to tremors, as central Tokyo. And in few societies are ideas and, it might be added, trends so tenaciously pursued as in contemporary Japan. Kazuyo Sejima’s Small House is easily found at the end of a short cul-desac in Tokyo’s affluent Aoyama district. It’s a miniature tower containing 77 square metres of floor area on an allowable imprint of 36 (the site measures 60 square metres in its entirety). The house is wrapped in opalescent glass and galvanized steel with a vein-like standing seam. From the lane, there are only glimpses of life through the house’s western translucent zone and occasional small transparent panels. Furthermore, the clients claim they did not want expansive views out, as the house overlooks the Sony establishment where the husband works as a product designer. A vertical pavilion almost touching its easterly neighbour, the house bulges in the middle, then tapers in towards the roof (a space-age mansard?) and down towards the entrance. There the slope inward accommodates – to the centimetre – the family’s silvergrey Honda van. To south and east, the skin is mostly opaque and hides several service hatches. It is made almost entirely of glass; however, to the back and to the west, a landlocked lot belonging to an adjacent temple provides Sejima’s clients with views of greenery and, metaphorically at least, some breathing space. The building is structured about an open steel shaft with inner spiral stairs; both are painted white. Each floor spreads from this trunk to rest on thin steel tubes slanted at varying 1 A space-age mansard? 2 Form of house is generated by rights of light regulations. 3 House becomes transparent at the back, overlooking temple grounds. 4 Constant interplay between translucency and transparency. 5 Open steel shaft core.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) angles about the perimeter. The outer skin is simply laid against this cage. Ground level entry steps are formed from a folded plane of concrete; external metal rungs provide service access to the roof above. The architect has divided the programme into four distinct elements. In a semi-basement is the parents’ room with storage recessed beneath the clerestorey fenestration and a tiny lavatory. Raised slightly above street level is the hall and guest bedroom. On the piano nobile – the broadest and tallest space – are kitchen, dining and living quarters (one shelf has an eye-catching display of recent Sony products). The house terminates in a bipartite zone with a comparatively grand bathroom and an enclosed roof

second floor plan

terrace that looks across the empty lot to the towers of Shinjuku in the middle distance. The chamfered form of the Small House results partially from neighbourhood zoning and sunlight demands: it’s a miniature cousin to Hugh Ferriss’s 1920s images of metropolitan massing. The canted sides are however determined more by Sejima’s strategy of stacking, a strategy shared by such current vanguard projects as MVRDV’s Dutch Pavilion at the Hanover EXPO (AR September 2000). In Sejima’s work, the envelope becomes fabric stretching between differently-sized slabs. The floors themselves are concrete, held between an ingeniously engineered steel cage.

In a climate prone to chilly winters and warm, rainy summers, the Small House has only a few operable windows, mostly to the east. It is expected to act as an inhabited flue, warm air rising to be expelled upstairs. Floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass are screened by thin slips of white curtain. Sejima’s independent work, and that in association with Ryue Nishizawa, is marked by ostensibly contradictory characteristics: it appears both functionalist and natural, machine-like yet so delicate as to be almost ephemeral. With the large glass panels tilting in both horizontal and vertical directions, the Small House seems less like a tree house and more like a tree itself, a weeping willow perhaps.

U RBAN HOUSE , T OKYO , J APAN ARCHITECT K AZUYO S EJIMA & A SSOCIATES

first floor plan

north section

south section

ground floor plan

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basement (scale approx 1:120)

parking entrance guest kitchen living/dining main bath enclosed terrace main bed light court

6 House terminates in bipartite zone with grand bathroom and enclosed roof terrace. 7 Fundamentally, house is an inhabited flue.

Architect Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Tokyo Project team Kazuyo Sejima, Yoshitaka Tanase, Shoko Fukuya Structural engineer Sasaki Structural Consultants Photographs Courtesy of Shinkenchiku-Sha

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RAYMUND RYAN

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Honeycomb, flies’ eyes, frog spawn, cuckoospit – choose your organic simile. Built to contain biological specimens, the biomes of the Eden Project look like giant biological specimens themselves, some kind of fungus from outer space, perhaps, fruiting weirdly in this worked out Cornish china clay-pit. The design seems to have been inspired by natural and/or science fiction images but, though some Grimshaw buildings are indeed image-inspired, in this case the impression is misleading. The inspiration was not what nature looks like but how it works, its processes and structures. The fact that the Eden Project is a ready-made set for Quatermass and the Pit has been useful in the marketing of the whole enterprise, but it was a by-product rather than the starting point of the design.

The greenhouses had to be sited in the unshaded strip at the foot of the cliffs on the north side of the pit. The first idea was for a linear, lean-to structure rather like Grimshaw’s International Terminal at Waterloo station (AR September 1993). This form posed a number of problems, however. For one thing the three-dimensional profile of the site, far more complicated than the level curve of Waterloo, meant that it was difficult to use cheap, standardized components. To make matters worse, the ground profile was constantly changing during the development of the design, because the site had not yet been taken over by the client and was still being quarried. A long-span, arched structure would have been heavy, bulky and difficult to carry down into the pit. It would also have cast unwanted

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1 The bug-eyed geodesic domes of the Humid Tropics Biome appear to engulf the grass roof of the café housed in the link building. 2 Like huge soap bubbles in the Cornish landscape, the interlinked domes have a beguiling (but deceptive) fragility.

EDEN PROJECT, CORNWALL, ENGLAND ARCHITECT NICHOLAS GRIMSHAW & PARTNERS

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Spectacularly colonizing a Cornish china clay-pit, the Eden Project is a monumental palm house for the twenty-first century, its ingeniously engineered biomes inspired by natural processes and structures.

comparative drawing showing section through the Humid Tropics Biome and Kew Palm House [email protected] - 82 -

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 3 Open ventilation panels form a jagged line along the biomes’ curved profile. 4 Café terrace and link building, with Warm Temperate Biome beyond. 5 Detail of biome roof structure, with quarry cliffs behind. The building occupies a worked-out china clay-pit. 6, 7 The smaller Warm Temperate Biome.

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shadows on the plants inside. A more promising alternative was a much lighter and more economical geodesic dome, but it had the wrong plan-form and would have been impossible to divide up into different zones. The idea of a line of smaller, intersecting geodesic domes was arrived at late in the day, but it solved all the problems at once and made the project possible. It works like this: take a row of spheres of different sizes, made like footballs out of two-dimensional hexagons and pentagons, and squash them into one another, forming perfect circles where they intersect. Then squash the whole row into the site, in the angle between the cliff and the quarry bottom. Circles become arches, and the hexagons and pentagons are removed as necessary around the perimeter to accommodate the irregular ground profile. Structural components, mainly of tubular steel joined by spherical nodes, are identical in each dome and small enough to be easily handled. These are not conventional domes in that they exhibit tensile as well as compressive structural behaviour. The outer compressive grid is linked by tetrahedrons to an inner tensile grid. The double grid is necessary because the lattice

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steel arches break the continuity of the structure. For the same reason, the domes were not self-supporting during erection but had to be assembled from a temporary scaffold so big that it has entered The Guinness Book of Records. This is a slight disappointment for techno-organicists raised on Buckminster Fuller (nature does not use scaffolding), but there is nothing heavy or awkward about the finished structure. The geodesic grid is scaled according to the size of each dome and except in the smallest dome, where it becomes rather dense, the effect is amazingly light for such enormous spans. At the junctions with the arches, the grid is adapted ad hoc, creating irregular geometrical shapes. Architecturally, this may seem a worrying inconsistency, but it is exactly what happens in nature when, for example, the hexagonal grid of veins in a dragonfly’s wing meets a leading edge or a structural spar. The largest hexagons are 11m across and therefore impossible to span with a single sheet of glass, especially since it would have to be double glazed and toughened. The lightness of the structural grid is made possible by a new high tech material –

ethyltetrafluorethylene foil (ETFE). This light, transparent, flexible film forms triplemembrane cushions which are kept inflated by a constant low pressure air supply. Because they were formed and fitted on site, the ETFE cushions could adapt easily to geometrical variations without any need for complicated scheduling or production planning. The biomes are beautiful structures because they are efficient structures – a kind of beauty common in nature but rare in architecture. Like their humbler horticultural cousins, however, they also have a rugged practicality. The branching network of flexible air-supply pipes, for example, is clipped to the structural steel members with no attempt at concealment. The heating and ventilating system simply consists of freestanding air handlers in ordinary metal boxes placed at intervals around the perimeter, poking their twin circular ducts straight through the walls of the domes. Such artless functionalism is easy to accept, though the heavy duty adjustable glass louvres associated with the ducts are perhaps a little too clumsy, their insistent linearity stubbornly at odds with the fluidity of the geodesic grid.

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longitudinal section

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Humid Tropics Biome air handling units link building/café roof lights above plant holding area 5 Warm Temperate Biome

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site access road parking coach parking disabled parking Humid Tropics Biome link building/café Warm Temperate Biome visitors’ centre

roof plan (scale approx 1:1500)

site plan

E DEN P ROJECT , C ORNWALL , E NGLAND ARCHITECT N ICHOLAS G RIMSHAW & P ARTNERS 8 Hexagonal roof structure under construction, giving some sense of the enormity of the scale.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) But once inside the enormous bubbles of the Humid Tropics Biome, such details are insignificant. A winding gravel path climbs up through what will be a dense forest (the planting is still immature) to a big, noisy waterfall. Though we can never quite imagine that this is a real rainforest, it is nevertheless a unique spatial experience, certainly more like nature than architecture. The sheer size of the enclosure, the word ‘biome’ and the very name ‘Eden Project’ all lead you to expect a complete ecosystem, or at least an approximation of one, but it soon becomes clear that this is really just a botanical garden, the Palm House at Kew writ large. There are no animals, apart from the crowds of people. The neighbouring Warm Temperate Biome is smaller and more comfortable, not just because it is relatively cool and dry, but because the structure of the domes is close enough to give it scale. It feels more human, more like

architecture, though the technology is exactly the same. In early versions of the design, the entrance to the biomes was housed in a chain of very small domes. This proved to be too fussy and expensive, but it was hard to imagine any kind of conventional building that would look comfortable between the big domes. The answer was to bury the building in the ground, reducing it to a few simple planes – a curved, grass-covered roof, a glass curtain wall and an entrance bridge leading to a first floor concourse overlooking restaurants below. Another curved, linear, earthbound building forms an artificial crest high on the opposite ledge of the pit. Visitors arrive at the back of this building from the cascade of car parks beyond, pay their entrance fees and emerge onto a terrace, cameras at the ready for their first view of the whole site. From here they make their way down to the entrance

bridge through a richly cultivated open air theatre – the ‘roofless biome’. Compared with the biomes, which express a compelling engineering logic, the ancillary structures seem rather sketchy and artificial. The arrival building (AR August 2000), for example, which houses shops, cafés and offices, is elegant and well planned but its use of materials like shingles, rammed earth (taken from the clay-pit) and gabions, seems more like a symbol of green construction than the real thing. But then the Eden Project is not an architectural expo: it is a theatre in which humankind’s relationship with the plant world is dramatized. The specimen plants are magnificent, the garden arrangements are imaginative and the scale is breathtaking. The crowds in the biomes soon forget about the delicate net arching high over their heads. They have come to look at the plants, not the greenhouses. COLIN DAVIES

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9 Filled with luxuriant vegetation, the interior of the Humid Tropics Biome is a lush expanse of greenery. 10 The delicate net of the roof gracefully encloses the planting. 11 Like a heroically-engineered set out of a science fiction film, the Eden Project is both surreal and breathtaking.

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Architect Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, London Project team Nicholas Grimshaw, Andrew Whalley, Jolyon Brewis, Vincent Chang, David Kirkland, Michael Pawlyn, Jason Ahmed, Vanessa Bartulovic, Dean Boston, Chris Brieger, Antje Bulthaup, Amanda Davis, Florian Eckardt, Alex Haw, Perry Hooper, Bill Horgan, Oliver Konrath, Angelika Kovacic, Quintin Lake, Richard Morrell, Tim Narey, Monica Niggemeyer, Killian O’Sullivan, Debra Penn, Martin Pirnie, Juan Porral-Hermida, Mustafa Salman, Tan Su Ling Structural engineer Anthony Hunt Associates Services engineer Ove Arup & Partners Landscaping Land Use Consultants Glass louvres M&V Photographs All photographs were by Peter Cook/VIEW except no 7 by Chris Gascoigne/VIEW

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[email protected] - 86 A diminutive mews house in London built in the 1970s has been enlarged, transformed with elegance and a great deal of ingenuity.

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1 Toplit dining room and table fixed to sliding door to courtyard.

Modernist mews

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M EWS HOUSE EXTENSION , S OUTH K ENSINGTON , L ONDON ARCHITECT Z IGGURAT

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) An ingenious scheme, by Ziggurat, for extending a tiny mews house in South Kensington, enlarges the vertical dimension and uses light to draw out the horizontal. The original house was built as one of a pair in the 1970s, on derelict land. Stuccoed externally to accord with its Victorian neighbours, the house was one storey high with four rooms and very little natural light. The front of the building, with bedroom, bathroom, entrance lobby and hall, was retained with some remodelling; the remainder of the building was virtually demolished. Behind the existing remnant, Ziggurat excavated and lowered

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M EWS HOUSE EXTENSION , S OUTH K ENSINGTON , L ONDON ARCHITECT Z IGGURAT

the floor level several feet, and created a double-height volume with a roof that curves away from the street, so that externally the building seems unchanged. A glass wall marks division between the house and a tiny courtyard, painted white to become an exterior room diffusing luminance back into the house. Ziggurat has cleverly established a shifting diagonal axis through the plan, from the entrance and hall on the south-west side of the building to the radiant white courtyard. The progression through the house is one from dimness to bright light, from enclosed space to its sudden dramatic expansion and colour.

south-north long section

2 Dining room, stairs to gallery bedroom and television recessed into wall under stairs. 3, 5 Dining table and sliding door to courtyard is one assembly. 4 Dining room under curved ceiling. Bedroom gallery above.

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entrance bedroom bathroom kitchen living dining study courtyard

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approaches the courtyard – and the composition, which has the clarity of an early Modernist work, is sharpened by use of colour here and there. Details are constantly intriguing: the dining table that is part of a sliding door to the courtyard, the sinuous concrete bench, like a piece of sculpture, lining and seeming part of the courtyard wall, and the rotating door to the kitchen, which simultaneously turns out to be a cupboard.

gallery plan

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ground floor plan and internal elevation (scale approx 1:100)

At the front of the new volume, the architects installed a gallery containing sleeping quarters. The bedroom is partly enclosed by a cut-out wall, painted mint green, and looks onto a double-height dining room set under the reflective curve of the new roof. Beneath the gallery is a living room and small kitchen; and fitted under the stairs to the bedroom is a curved desk forming a tiny study. To have inserted so much drama and delight into such a small space is an achievement, and the scheme has been executed with a great deal of elegance. Materials are simple – painted walls and a beech floor flowing into concrete as it

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Architect Ziggurat, London Project architects Andrei Bowbelski, James Davis with Laurence Guerrini, Areti Theofanopoulou Structural engineers Whitby Bird and Partners – Special Projects Photographs James Morris

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BANK OFFICES & FLATS, BERLIN, GERMANY ARCHITECT FRANK O. GEHRY

GEHRY’S GEODE The new DG Bank headquarters in Berlin forms part of the wider and ongoing reconstruction of Pariser Platz – but its urban sobriety hides a rich inner life, animated by the interplay of light, form and materials.

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location plan

Immediately behind the Brandenburg Gate lies Pariser Platz (AR January 1999), the great urban piazza that terminates the triumphal axis of Unter den Linden. Before the War, it was the grandest square in Berlin, site of the American and French embassies, the Adlon Hotel, the Akademie der Künste and blocks of luxurious flats and offices. After the War and the Wall, it was laid waste and became part of Berlin’s deadly no-man’s land. Since German reunification it has been rebuilt in an attempt to emulate the spirit of its grand urban past, with new embassies, hotels, and office blocks slotted back into the original street pattern. The rules of reconstruction, which stipulate constraints such as eaves heights, proportions and materials (obligatory stone cladding), do not allow much scope for formal experiment. The result is that Pariser Platz’s new occupants resemble a collection of rather bland, expensively dressed guests mingling politely at an upmarket cocktail party. The introduction of Frank Gehry into the mix might in theory be calculated to induce an element of raciness and unpredictability, but he too has been obliged to conform to the dress code. Being Gehry however, he has still managed to spring a few surprises. The genesis of the project dates back to 1995, when Gehry’s competition entry for Berlin’s historic Museum Island was under consideration. At that time, the DG Bank invited him and six others to produce a proposal for the bank’s new Berlin headquarters. The brief included financial offices, apartments and semi-autonomous conference spaces that could be hired out to corporate clients. Gehry did not prevail in the museum competition, but his design for the DG Bank won unanimous approval. The site lies on the south side of the square, in the middle of Pariser Platz’s evolving urban jigsaw. The rectangular block is hemmed in on its long sides by Behnisch’s new Akademie der Künste and Moore Ruble Yudell’s American Embassy, with the short ends overlooking Pariser Platz and Behrenstrasse. The organization of the new building is a logical response to the constraints of site and brief. A necklace of office spaces extends around three sides of the perimeter, enclosing a huge atrium space (of which more later). The residential annexe, which has its own separate entrance, is placed on the fourth side overlooking Behrenstrasse and a site that will eventually house the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Flats range in size 1 New DG Bank headquarters in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate. 2 Massive bank facade exudes an austere monumentality that conveys little sense of life within. 3 Breathtaking main atrium.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 4 Rippling concertina facade of the apartment block steps back as it rises. 5 Windows are punched deep into the bank wall. Blade-like glass balustrades enclose terraces. 6 Atrium is framed by a gridded arcade.

BANK OFFICES & FLATS, BERLIN, GERMANY ARCHITECT FRANK O. GEHRY

from studios to larger maisonettes and are separated from the offices by an elliptical void enclosed by a swirling, shimmering glass wall suspended from the roof that cascades down to a pool below. Two glazed lifts glide up and down through the void like air bubbles. Gehry has clearly taken the Pariser Platz dress code to heart; both bank and apartment facades are models of sobriety and severity. The apartment block is marginally less austere, stepping back as it rises over 10 storeys with faceted bay windows like concertinas animating the wall plane. But the main bank facade overlooking Pariser Platz is an utterly plain, utterly stripped down composition of creamy buff limestone (to match the Brandenburg Gate) and glass. Openings are punched into the stone to create deeply recessed windows that slide back at the touch of a button to reveal terraces enclosed by blade-like glass balustrades. Clad in 4 inch thick stone, the

bank facade is almost as shocking in its solid, rationalist monumentality as Gehry’s signature sinuousness and its extreme weight and abstraction only serve to show up the flimsiness of the surrounding pastiche. Ironically, in Berlin’s traumatized cityscape, such solidity also embodies a reassuring sense of permanence and institutional stability, doubtless important concerns for Gehry’s banker clients. (‘The bank guys loved it’, he observed, ‘although it cost them a lot of money to do it’.) Sadly, most Berliners will never see beyond this massive stone wall to the real drama and spatial pyrotechnics within. Radically upturning his expressive gestural vocabulary and relocating it to the interior, Gehry has had to pour his design into the cavity of the perimeter block. Here, Californian ad-hocism meets the European masterplan. The inside is scooped out to form an immense atrium – allegedly one of the largest in the world –

enclosed by a delicate steel and glass lattice, improbably morphed and warped to form a barrel-vaulted roof canopy that curves in two directions. Within the atrium is a freestanding structure like a giant horse’s head rearing and writhing through the space. Encased in a thin skin of stainless steel, this extraordinary object contains a conference chamber. The inner surface is lined with strips of red oak (finely perforated for acoustic reasons), so being inside the chamber is like being cocooned inside a contorted ship’s hull. The regimented orthogonality of the exterior extends to the perimeter offices, which are edged by a series of arcades lined with redoak veneer. From these vantage points, the squirming biological specimen of the conference chamber can be fully appreciated. Beneath the shell of the chamber is a basement level containing a lecture theatre, along with the bank’s cafeteria and a large foyer; these can be combined to create a

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B ANK OFFICES AND FLATS , B ERLIN , G ERMANY ARCHITECT F RANK O. G EHRY

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7 Offices are arranged around perimeter, overlooking a writhing horse’s head conference chamber and glass roof enclosing staff cafeteria at lower ground level. 8 Staff cafeteria, which can also be used as a banqueting and meeting space. 9 Clad in a thin skin of burnished steel, the conference chamber appears to float in the vast space. 10 Seductive play of form and materials.

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fourth floor plan

fifth floor plan

ninth floor plan

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staff cafeteria executive dining kitchen foyer lecture theatre ramp to parking below

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bank entrance bank offices conference chamber apartments entrance lift lobby apartments

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BANK OFFICES & FLATS, BERLIN, GERMANY ARCHITECT FRANK O. GEHRY

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cross section

11 Inside warped hull of conference chamber.

longitudinal section

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

first floor plan

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generous space suitable for banquets and meetings. Another warped glass canopy, smaller cousin to the main roof, encloses these spaces allowing light to percolate down to the lower levels. (During the course of site excavations Albert Speer’s bunker was discovered, but no trace of it now remains.) As with Gehry’s other projects, the translation of initial ideas to built form is achieved through a design and construction process that combines sophisticated computer software programs with a craft approach to building. Initial generative sketches, which defy conventional logic and geometry, must be painstakingly interpreted as a precise system of co-ordinates and known structural and material properties. Gehry develops his ideas slowly, from rough drawings through an exhaustive series of handmade models. Using the Catia program to represent complex three-dimensional objects, these crude wood and cardboard mock-ups are scanned into the computer and digitally translated back into working models and drawings. Employed as an instrument of translation rather than generative device, the computer enables the representation and

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manipulation of that which cannot otherwise be drawn. In this case, unusually, the exterior presented no such challenges, but the glass roofs and conference chamber proved tests of design and manufacturing ingenuity. The triangulated space frame of the roof is made up of solid stainless steel rods that form six pointed stars screwed into nodal connectors. The complex geometry of the roof meant that the rods meet at different angles, so to match them precisely, the nodal connectors were cut from 70mm-thick stainless steel plate by computer-controlled milling machines. The frame is infilled by 1500 triangular glazing panels bedded on neoprene gaskets. The conference chamber is clad in a 2mm skin of brushed stainless steel plates (basic dimensions 2m x 4m) stretched and fashioned by skilled boatbuilders to accommodate the conflation of complex, bulbous forms. Superficially, this might well appear a conservative building, but clearly it is anything but. In the extreme and startling contrast between its outer and inner life, it resembles some kind of weird rock or geode that, split open, reveals a spectacular mineral formation. It is tempting to see the entire exercise as a

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metaphor for Berlin – beneath the haughty Prussian exterior lies decadence and debauchery – but after all it is only a bank and the morphological conspicuousness of the conference spaces is perhaps as much to do with commercial viability as being vehicles of architectural imagination. Yet in the decorous context of Pariser Platz, it is definitely one of the more unorthodox and welcome guests. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect Gehry Partners, Santa Monica, USA Project team Frank O. Gehry, Randy Jefferson, Craig Webb, Marc Salette, Tensho Takemori, Laurence Tighe, Eva Sobesky, George Metzger, Jim Dayton, John Goldsmith, Jorg Ruegemer, Scott Uriu, Jeff Guga, Michael Jobes, Kirk Blaschke, Nida Chesonis, Tom Cody, Leigh Jerrard, Tadao Shimizu, Rick Smith, Bruce Shepard Associate architect Planungs AG – Neufert Mittmann Graf Structural engineers Ingenieur Büro Müller Marl Schlaich Bergermann & Partner Services engineer Brandi Ingenieure Facade consultant Planungsbüro für Ingenieurleistungen Photographs All photographs by Christian Richters apart from 1 and 5 which are by Waltraud Krase

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12 Glazed wall of conference chamber. 13 Curving steel and glass lattice of barrelvaulted roof gracefully encloses atrium. 14 Apartment block is arranged around an elliptical void.

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MUSEUM, SHIKOKU, JAPAN ARCHITECT NAITO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES

site plan: museum to left, exhibition hall to right

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Makino Museum of Plants and People is spread over the gentle slopes of Mt Godai above Kochi City on the island of Shikoku. Designed by Naito Architect & Associates, the place is dedicated to the memory of Tomitaro Makino, eminent scholar and father of Japanese botany. This inspiration, the museum’s botanical purpose, and the fact that Kochi Prefecture is an important timber-producing region, suggested wood as the main material for construction, and Naito’s manipulation of it has produced structures of extraordinary poetic power. Because of complex land ownership the museum was split into two parts: a museum with

Double curvature A museum on the island of Shikoku, Japan, hugs the contours of its mountain site and celebrates the organic through form, materials and contents.

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research facilities and an exhibition hall; with the two linked by a 170m corridor. To disturb the landscape as little as possible, both buildings are low and sinuous, their organic forms hugging the mountain contours so that they seem almost a part of the topography. Such forms present little resistance to the salt-laden winds to which the site is exposed and construction takes account of the region’s occasionally severe storms. Neither building is taller than surrounding trees. The site, an angular S-shape, stretches across the mountain from the museum on the west to the laboratory on the east. Both

1 Upper deck of main museum building with central well. Deck of local silvery cypress responds to silver roof of zinc and stainless steel. 2 Exterior of exhibition hall. 3 Exhibition room of exhibition building.

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exhibition hall plan

upper level plan of museum

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museum ground floor plan (scale approx 1:750)

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main entrance deck shop-restaurant audio-visual hall meeting room gallery studio study machine room Japanese room office laboratory library book stacks storage courtyard lecture hall

buildings, each on plan looking like a fossil, wrap round a central courtyard and are covered with continuously curving roofs. Spun round the courtyards are galleries, cafés, meeting rooms, offices and so on. The museum is equipped with a laboratory, library and studies. Enclosing the buildings with sinuous walls of reinforced concrete, hollow steel sections form ridges, eaves and columns, spanning between ridges and eaves with laminated wooden beams of Douglas fir. The roofs’ complex geometry meant that each beam is different, connected at the ridge by cast metal joints which allow for variations in angle. During design, wind-tunnel tests, simulating the effects of a severe typhoon, were carried out, exerting a pressure of over a ton per square metre on parts of the roofs and building frames adjusted accordingly. Roofs are typhoon-proof with laminated panels of zinc and stainless steel, their unique dimensions and forms achieved by computeraided design. As a further precaution against Kochi’s winds and rain, the architects devised a special guttering system between each panel. Sensually the interiors and exteriors of the buildings are distinct. Externally, the smooth silvery forms of the roofs emerge from vegetation in serpentine manner. Internally, the wonderful scale and articulations of the sweeping roof dominate. Unlike its cool external carapace, its underside is warm and red, sheathed in the inner surfaces of Kochi-grown Japanese cedar (sugi). The upper level of the main museum building extends out onto a deck where the wood changes in response to the roof covering, to local silvery Japanese cypress (hinoki). P. M. Architect Naito Architect & Associates, Tokyo Project architects Hiroshi Naito, Nobuharu Kawamura, Tetsuya Kambayashi, Daijirou Takakusa, Taku Yoshikawa Structural engineer Kunio Watanabe, Structural Design Group Photographs Kazunori Hiruta/Naito Architect & Associates

exhibition hall section

museum section

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MUSEUM, SHIKOKU, JAPAN ARCHITECT NAITO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES

4 Interiors are dominated by sweeping wooden roof.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSE, SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, NSW, AUSTRALIA ARCHITECT HARRY SEIDLER & ASSOCIATES

1 Vertiginously poised on the crest of a rocky escarpment, the house forcefully inhabits the landscape. 2 The long leg of the L-shaped plan, containing the main living, dining and kitchen spaces, points westwards over the cliff edge. 3 Curved roof planes gracefully envelop the house, like a gentle wave.

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AUSTRALIAN CLIFFHANGER Teetering on the edge of a cliff, Harry Seidler’s latest remarkable house is an assertive work in the tradition of Heroic Modernism, shaped equally by global culture and technology and local influences from site and place.

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One of the few Modernists of the postwar generation to continue working in the Heroic tradition, Harry Seidler is best known for his innovative and sometimes controversial urban high-rise structures (see for instance AR August 1991 and June 2001). At the other end of the scale, Seidler also has an outstanding record of house designs, of which this recently completed holiday house in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is the latest. He was acquainted as a student in the US with such luminaries as Gropius, Breuer,

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Albers and Niemeyer. His early career in Sydney was distinguished by carefully sited timber-framed houses, strongly influenced by Breuer’s New England work; they fitted surprisingly well with Australian building traditions. This house owes more to Niemeyer, with whom Seidler worked in Brazil, and to Seidler’s own later inclination as a mature architect towards sculpted and bold forms. It stands in direct opposition to the more modest and restrained tradition of contemporary Australian residential architecture

established by Glenn Murcutt, Philip Cox and Rex Addison, whose sophistication and foreign influences are mostly concealed by more obvious regional elements. Situated in the midst of wilderness and dramatically poised on the crest of a red sandstone escarpment overlooking a river, Seidler’s design asserts itself as a selfconsciously Modern work, shaped as much by a global culture and technology as by the rugged landscape it inhabits so forcefully. Seidler achieves this splendidly confident result through a

number of classic Modernist devices. A simple, ‘L’-shaped plan accommodates bedrooms, bathrooms and other private rooms in the shorter leg along a north-south axis at the rear, parallel with the cliff. Living, dining and kitchen are grouped in one large space in the other, longer leg pointing westwards over the cliff edge. Functional and spatial division into cellular and open plan spaces is further marked by a drop in floor level from east to west which follows the fall in the rocky plateau. The north-south axis is also picked up again by a

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longitudinal section

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4 Pool and terrace enclosed by a random rubble wall. 5 Living space is a glazed eyrie with breathtaking views. A suspended steel balcony enhances the drama.

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:300)

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swimming pool cut out of the rock to the north and by a separate garage to the south, the two being linked by a continuous sandstone retaining wall running under the house, where it forms part of the basement. A differentiation of the structure from heavy below (reinforced concrete floors, random rubble walls and fireplaces) to lightweight above (steel superstructure) helps to root the house securely into its site.

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This classic design is combined with more recent concerns with energy efficiency, the isolated house being by necessity relatively self-sufficient in power, heat and water supply, as well as waste management and bush fire sprinklers (which are fed from the swimming pool/reservoir). What turns this essentially straightforward and mostly familiar configuration into stunning spectacle, is Seidler’s

handling of the curved, overhanging lines of the white painted steel roof, which seems to float above the rest of the house and the yawning space beyond the cliff, defying gravity. Made from curved steel beams with differing radii using new industrial technologies and covered with corrugated steel roofing bent to suit – a local touch there – the sculptured roof shapes loudly proclaim an artistic intent as well as modern

technique. A suspended steel balcony thrusting its way out below the dipping roof line from the living space invites visitors (those who don’t suffer from vertigo that is) to step out into the void and reinforces the generally assertive tone of the design. Heroic Modernism is dead? Not in Seidler’s hands. CHRIS ABEL Architect Harry Seidler & Associates, Milsons Point, NSW, Australia

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HOUSE, STUTTGART, GERMANY ARCHITECT WERNER SOBEK PHOTOGRAPHS ROLAND HALBE

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As an architect, Werner Sobek is informed by his conviction that, in formulating an architecture that is truly modern, which has a radical and positive relationship with the natural environment and inhabitants, architects must make demands on the wealth of technologies, materials and techniques available, rather than having recourse to tradition. (He has never forgotten Frei Otto’s heartfelt plea, made in a speech for the Schinkel celebrations in 1977: ‘Will you please stop building the way you have been doing’). This house in Römerstrasse, designed by Sobek for himself and his family, is set on a steep hillside overlooking Stuttgart. Rising four storeys high out of light woodland, it is a pure crystalline box which at night becomes an

Crystal box 1

Houses chart the continuing, century-old romance of architecture and glass. This is an elegant, ecologically aware addition to the canon.

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illuminated beacon. In spite of appearances, it is a green building, made of recyclable components; it is free from noxious emissions and energy efficient. The sloping site presented problems, for as well as being at the edge of the hillside, it was at the end of, and some distance from, a steep narrow road. It contained a dilapidated and dangerous structure dating from the early ’20s which had to be demolished with light equipment and a great deal of manual labour. But it provided a footprint for new foundations – a concrete raft with built-in frost apron over a channel for cables and pipelines. Most of the foundation work had to be done by hand. There is no basement, so the building did not require deep excavations.

1 Lowest floor opens onto deck, but access … 2 … is by bridge to topmost level. 3 Modern glass and a sophisticated environmental control system make interior equable.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Being modular, the building could be erected quickly, (and, equally, dismantled and recycled). A steel frame stiffened by diagonal members stands on the concrete floor slab. The entire four-storey frame was assembled in four days. Floors of prefabricated wooden panels were then simply placed between beams, again without screws or bolts. Being modular, loadbearing and non-loadbearing elements are held together by easily detachable connections. There is no plaster or screed so no wet-trade waste. And no concealed installations – cabling and pipelines are contained in sheet metal ducting along walls. Instead of light switches, fittings, door or window handles, the house is activated by touchless radar sensors and voice control. The building is entirely transparent for, in addition to the suspended triple-glazed skin, there are no internal walls and space is defined by a few, strategically placed pieces of furniture. Entrance is from a

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bridge to the fourth floor and kitchen and dining room. Below, are living quarters, and below again, main bedroom, with children’s and service rooms on the lowest level. All floors are linked by the vertical stairwell. To create such a house, the architect had to devise a new way of managing energy without compromising aesthetic ideals and components, each by themselves innovatory, are worked into a coherent system. Triple glazing, with coated panels, has a k-value of 0.4. Solar radiation passing through the facade is absorbed by watercooled ceiling panels and the energy transported through a heat exchanger to a heat accumulator which helps warm the house in winter. Ceiling panels act as thermal radiators and, says Sobek, there is no need for additional heating. Bathrooms are contained in a cubic unit, two storeys high; and all operations like flushing, opening doors, water flow and temperature, are

controlled by sensors linked to a central computer. Sobek says that the house was never intended to be a universal model – after all not everyone would choose to live in what would appear to be an elegant fish bowl. But it is an experiment that works very well on many levels and which has provided the practice with the opportunity of developing ideas for the future. As an exquisite architectural essay, it is a very personal manifestation of architectural, artistic and social convictions.

third floor: cooking and dining

V. G. Architect Werner Sobek, Stuttgart Project architects Zheng Fei, Robert Brixner Structure and facade Ingo Weiss Photographs Roland Halbe Böhelmstrasse 45 70199 Stuttgart Germany Tel: 0711-607 40 73 Fax: 0711-607 41 78 Mobile: 0172-711 580 Email: [email protected] second floor: living

HOUSE, STUTTGART, GERMANY ARCHITECT WERNER SOBEK

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4 Top floor – entrance from bridge is to right of void. 5 Living floor: note bathroom, left. 6,7 House is a series of horizontal planes in space: planes radiate heat in winter and absorb it in summer. Some glass wall panes can be opened for direct ventilation.

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cross section

first floor: sleeping

long section

ground floor: workshops (scale 1:200)

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1 In Ginza, Tokyo’s prestigious shopping area, Hermès’ calm authority contrasts with more strident traditional shopping. 2 Discreet entrance. Glass blocks in the huge wall are intended to show imperfections of craftwork. 3 At night, the building radiates territory around itself, a new public space determined by event, not geometry.

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S HOP , G INZA , T OKYO , J APAN ARCHITECT R ENZO P IANO B UILDING W ORKSHOP PHOTOGRAPHS M ICHEL D ENANCÉ /A RCHIPRESS

With well-dressed bodies sleeping rough on the street outside, two days before its doors opened to the public, Hermès’ new Tokyo flagship store can clearly disregard Japan’s current economic recession, the most serious since the war. This building’s inspiration was as much cultural as commercial, an expression of the principles that have underlain Hermès products for generations – handmade craftsmanship and quality materials – and the way that these characteristics are consistent with the historic architecture of Japan. It is within this context that

Japanese lantern Tokyo’s new Hermès building is as much a cultural centre as a big shop, and it is becoming a significant moment in the city’s play. Piano’s combination of high technology and handcraft humanises large urban intervention.

Renzo Piano established his design. With a museum, gallery and cinema, this is effectively a themed public building rather than purely a commercial space. By day, the curved planes of the glass-block veil flicker and glisten and transform the chaotic streets outside into subtle shades when viewed from within. By night, the building becomes what Piano describes as ‘a magic lantern’ – a vast glowing crystal that establishes, by the light it radiates, a territory around itself – a new public space in a city that conceives of such things as places of event, rather than urban geometry. Suspended

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) from the top, the glass veil expresses mass but at the same time defies gravity – its support system being imperceptible. And, on this long, narrow site – only 12m wide – the translucent wall creates interior spaces that are both intimate and infinite. This was not easily done. The glass blocks are the largest ever made – 450mm square – cast in Italy, then hung in Tokyo in a steel frame transported from Switzerland. It is a marriage of handcraft and high-precision engineering, each block being unique – the glass poured by hand into single-sided moulds, leaving different flow-lines and imperfections – a differentiation

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that is crucial to Piano’s vision that this project be clearly the work of artisans. The large size of the blocks was determined by Piano’s wish that this be perceived as a translucent wall, not as a net of opaque horizontal and vertical joints. For the same reason, he rejected assembling the blocks within a steel-frame super grid that prevents lower blocks being crushed by those above. Instead, each block is supported individually between slender steel bars that are silvered on each side face, rendering them all but invisible, and which allow 4mm movement at every joint, in both directions, to cope with

shop atelier office exhibition plant storage

seismic disturbances. Integral to this concept is the revolutionary flexible design of the building’s long, thin structural steel frame. At 50m tall and with a main structural span of only 3.8m, the unusual slenderness of the structure results in high overturning moments during an earthquake and high levels of tension in the columns. The engineer, Ove Arup & Partners, found inspiration in the tall, thin wooden Buddhist pagodas of Japan. Records show that, in the past 1,400 years, only two have collapsed – believed to be because the columns are discontinuous from floor to

floor. In the Hermès building, the same principle was adopted, with the columns on one side of the frame being held in base joints that allow uplift and rotation simultaneously and seismic energy to be absorbed by viscoelastic dampers. This is the first building of modern times to have columns that lift off the ground in an earthquake. One particularly fascinating aspect of the interior spaces is the way that, despite the different palette of Piano and Rena Dumas – the interior designer of Hermès’ shops worldwide, including the lower five floors of the Ginza building – there is convincing consistency

between all parts, which Piano describes as the consistent ‘vibration of work done by hand’. Dumas’ spaces are elegant, discretely lit arrangements of fine wooden furniture and precious tactile materials, generously spaced to reveal the glass-block perimeter wall at all times. Piano’s upper levels are handcrafted in an entirely different tradition, with precisely detailed partition systems, minimalistic steel-frame doors, exposed light fittings and electric raceways – all rigorously controlled, and meticulously fabricated and assembled. These different, but complementary, approaches to spacemaking are

united, appropriately, by the products they display, the works of the painstaking Hermès craftsmen. TOM HENEGHAN

Architect, landscape and interiors Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure (Paris) Design team (architecture) P Vincent, L Couton, G Ducci, P Hendier, S Ishida, F La Rivière, C Kuntz, C Colson, Y Kyrkos Structure and services consultant Ove Arup & Partners Photographs Michel Denancé, Archipress, 16 rue de la Pierre Levée 75011 Paris France Tel: (1) 43 38 51 81 Fax: (1) 43 55 01 44

S HOP , G INZA , T OKYO , J APAN ARCHITECT R ENZO P IANO B UILDING W ORKSHOP PHOTOGRAPHS M ICHEL D ENANCÉ /A RCHIPRESS

sketch detail of glass-block wall (scale approx 1:15)

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cross section

shop level plan (scale approx 1:250)

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4,5 The glass veil gives Alice in Wonderland quality to spaces, in which all elements are detailed with great precision. 6 Glass blocks are the largest ever made, and are cast individually by hand (standard blocks, left). Whole glass veil is suspended, and can flex in earthquakes. 6

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 Looking from patio to living area with screen drawn back. 2 Pool in living area acts as separation between formal and more private parts of house, as well as throwing light upwards. 3 Living area: combination of Oriental and Western formality.

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H OUSE , S INGAPORE ARCHITECT SCDA A RCHITECTS

SINGAPORE SITE A tall thin house in the Singapore suburbs suggests new patterns of development which will increase density, much needed in a tightly-packed island. But it draws on Chinese tradition and abstracts from it.

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Land is at a premium in the island state of Singapore, so permitted densities have been allowed to rise in the suburbs. As a result, new individual houses can be more tightly packed together and made taller than what was allowed before. So the Teng residence, designed for a single professional man and his mother, has a parti which almost totally covers the plot, leaving only enough room for a patio at the front of the house and long thin gardens at side and back. Such little strips of open land would seem very mean in other latitudes, but at the equator, where there is vertical sun and luxuriant vegetation, they can work and be pleasant to look into, if not be in.

SCDA Architects wisely chose to elaborate on an ancient model for the basic design. The traditional Chinese shop house has a very deep plan with narrow frontages. To make it bearable, atria (in the proper sense) were often carved into the middle of the footprint to bring light and air to most of the inner rooms. At the Teng house, the stratagem is abstracted and used with finesse. Basically, it has a three-storey stack of rooms at front and back with a vertical circulation and light void in the middle. This shaft of light is irregularly linked to a long metre-wide slot between the house proper and a blank wall that rises between the house and its neighbour to the left.

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Only at ground floor level is the wall pierced, to allow views from the living room to the thin garden between the two houses. So the living room, the first space you come to after the constrained entrance from the car port, is full of light both from above (the central well) and the side (the sliver of garden between neighbour and shear wall). Luminance is increased by white walls and floor. And the almost surreal device of a long L shaped pool which reflects light upwards, and acts almost as

a barrier between formal and informal worlds. Inner areas of the house are suggested through translucent glass panels. A stair is cantilevered over the granite clad pool, drawing you up through the central well. At first floor level, the straight flight converts to a sculptural spiral, almost hovering in space, and connecting first and second floors. Honed steel and wood bridges connect front and back stacks of rooms across the void. Up at the top is one of the most moving spaces of the house: the

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ground floor (scale approx 1:250)

carport entrance landscape patio living kitchen pool

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4 Studio on top floor looks into small patio with tall elegant strands of Typha Angustifolia. 5 Upper stair is spiral object almost floating in space.

6 Bedroom can have floor to ceiling windows because louvres provide privacy screen.

studio that looks into a calm little patio where Typha Angustifolia grows against the white concrete shear wall, and looks out through a louvred screen over the more conventional houses around. Externally, the louvred first and second floors make an elegant, veiled box hovering over the virtually transparent ground level, which can open at the front to throw living room and patio into one large space, interior and exterior at the same time. Structure is largely steel,

over a concrete ground floor. The upper floors have, in effect, a double wall with the louvres shading a glass box that has movable panes so spaces can be cooled naturally as well as by air conditioning. HELMUT GRÖTZ Architects SCDA Architects, Singapore Design team Chan Soo Khian, Rene Tan Structural engineer T.H. Ng Management & Consultancy Services Services engineer GKL Associates Photographs Peter Mealin

maid bridge bed altar room void studio rooflight

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NORWEGIAN ROOTS The museum to Ivar Aasen, the man who distilled a new national language for the emerging Norwegian nation, is carved out of his native hillside in the west country.

1 Fundamentally, the building is a straight cut along the contours. The big wall of the auditorium acts as a landmark with Aasen’s signature imposed across it. 2 East (entrance) front. The main public entrance is under the canopy in the middle; cafeteria to right.

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locator plan: Aasen’s family farm is east of the new building.

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Linguistically, Norway is a curious country, with only about four and a half million inhabitants scattered thinly along its huge length. Traditionally, to the south-east and Oslo, they speak Bokmål or Riksmål, the old official language inherited from the long and muchdisliked Danish rule of the country. It is a tongue similar to Danish, except that most letters are pronounced (instead of the small proportion of them that feature in spoken language south of the Skagerrak). In the west and elsewhere in rural areas, Nynorsk (New Norwegian) tends to predominate. It was constructed by one man, Ivar Aasen, during the mid nineteenth century, the age when all small European countries under imperial rule were struggling to rediscover (or invent) roots of their particular cultures. Denmark was made to give up Norway to Sweden in 1814, but full independence was achieved (peacefully) only in 1905. Between those dates, patriotic scholars from Bosnia to Finland, Ireland to Bohemia, were studying their own folk tales. Architects, fine artists and writers were evolving the buildings, murals and poems of National Romanticism. Aasen travelled indefatigably in Norway’s west country, collating dialects of the widely separated fjord communities, and relating them to the structure of Old Norse. His Nynorsk can be quite easily understood by people who were brought up to speak Riksmål, but it is considerably different – for instance, it has three noun genders instead of only two. Whereas Ibsen wrote in virtual Danish, a distinguished literature emerged in the new language at the turn of the nineteenth century. Now, the state has decided to celebrate Aasen’s achievements with a museum built next to his family homestead at Ørsta, a remote rural commune in Møre og Romsdal on the west coast, about half-way between Bergen and Trondheim. Sverre Fehn, one of the grand old men of Norwegian architecture, who has built distinguished museums throughout his career, decided that the place should grow out of its hillside, and open to the

magnificent views south-east over the green fields of the valley towards the much darker green of the forests on burly ice-rounded mountains. He cut a long, straight slot into the slope parallel to the contours. In section, the museum has two levels, with the upper one in two heights, the taller one against the slope, from which grass rolls over its curved roof. You enter at the top level, and rapidly see the point of the different heights, for the back of the building, under the hill, is flooded with light from a generous clerestory. The front of this level is taken up with domestic-sized spaces, devoted to showing the great lexicographer’s life: his furniture, personal possessions, an account of his travels, and of course, his books, the Nynorsk grammar and dictionary. All this could have been conventional and twee: little facsimile rooms arranged in a row. But in fact, the spaces are defined by walls inflected in both plan and section, so though the spaces seem right for Aasen’s books, desk and chairs, they emphasize their nature, as a conventional orthogonal layout could not. Angling the walls in plan also creates generous broad bays between displays from which you can calmly contemplate the landscape in which Aasen grew up: the views that inspired his lifelong search for authenticity and identity. At the west end of the long route, a void opens down to the lower floor. This is the library, quite a small space, but one of the most dramatic, in which books by Nynorsk writers stretch up towards the curve at the back of the building that is flooded by light from the clerestory. The remainder of the lower level is more conventional, with a row of offices looking out over the valley, and storage against the hill. The biggest space is the auditorium, which is entered from the upper level and falls down the hill, roughly following its natural slope. Its calm timber-lined interior is made dramatic by a light chute over the stage which takes north luminance and pours it down, partly reflected from the sloping end wall. Externally, this becomes a massive inclined plane on which Aasen’s signature is

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3 West exit… 4 …like east entrance has an articulated concrete canopy. 5 Cafeteria and reception.

6,7 Walls of domestic-sized spaces are inflected to give intimacy, but avoid kitsch. 8 Double-height Nynorsk library.

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9 At Ørsta, unlike some of his other museums, Fehn was allowed to design the interior, and make display cases appropriate for their contents. 10 Auditorium, where daylight pours over stage from north-facing chute. 11 Wood panelling softens the concrete’s visual and acoustic austerity.

scribbled in steel as if on an advertisement hoarding. This is the only gratuitously ostentatious gesture in the building, and is an unusually literal move for Fehn, whose buildings have so far commented mutely and powerfully on their essence and context. The sloping wall is made of béton brut, like the rest of the building. The material is apt: it reflects on the log structures of Aasen’s family farm next door; it is almost geological in feeling, allowing the building to marry its hill; it is a modern material (well, at least twentieth century). And it allows precision as well as mass. Fehn’s handling of the delicate nuances of threshold, for instance, stand comparison with Scarpa’s. Large surfaces are quietly enlivened by the patterns of shuttering boards and by drifts of small casting flaws. Fehn has never tried to achieve the perfection of concrete to which Lasdun or Zumthor have aspired; concrete for him has a nature of its own which should be allowed to express itself. A similar robust but delicate sensitivity controls all aspects of the interiors. From desk, to book, to spectacle case, each object is shown in circumstances that unobtrusively emphasize its nature. Glass, wood and metal display cases are specially created for the smaller exhibits. These cabinets work as part of the architecture, rather than against it. Here, unlike the glacier museum at Fjaerdal (AR April 1993), Fehn was allowed to design the exhibitions as well as the building. The result is a generous, austere, modest, intricate, kindly and deeply rooted monument to Aasen, who hoped to enhance all those characteristics in his nation.

upper (entrance) level

lower level (scale approx 1:450)

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entrance foyer auditorium cafeteria reception exhibition

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library temporary exhibitions plant archive offices staff dining

HENRY MILES Architect Sverre Fehn, Oslo Project team Sverre Fehn, Henrik Hille, Ervin Strandskogen Interiors Sverre Fehn Landscape Bjørbekk and Lindheim Photographs Jaro Hollan Øvre Prinsdalsv. 55B N-1263 Oslo Norway Tel/fax: 22 61 10 86 Mobile: 909 78 612 Email: [email protected]

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A MUCH LOVED PART OF THE NEW YORK SKYLINE, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE HAS BEEN REINVIGORATED BY AN INNOVATIVE LIGHTING SCHEME THAT DRAMATICALLY ILLUMINATES ITS EXPOSED STEEL STRUCTURE .

Elegantly linking the upper reaches of Manhattan with New Jersey, the George Washington Bridge was an icon of its time, combining technological progress with formal refinement. Completed in 1931 to designs of Cass Gilbert and Swiss civil engineer Othar H. Ammann, its 3500ft span doubled the then record for suspension bridges and its dramatic open steel towers and curving cables inspired Le Corbusier to hail it as ‘the only seat of grace in the disordered city’. However, the lattice-like form was actually the serendipitous outcome of cost cutting. Ammann had originally intended that the two 604ft tall support towers be clad in granite, but the onset of the Great Depression necessitated severe cuts in the bridge’s budget, making stone unaffordable. Yet despite initial misgivings, Ammann quickly rallied to the notion of exposed steel and the armatures of the twin towers are powerful and dignified expressions of engineering design. In 1946, the original six lanes of

traffic were increased to eight and in 1962 a lower level was added. Last year 108 million vehicles crossed ‘the George’. Despite the addition in the 1960s of pole-mounted floodlights to illuminate the roadway, plans to light the entire structure never materialized. This state of affairs has recently been addressed by a new lighting scheme by Domingo Gonzalez Associates. The practice has collaborated with New York’s Port Authority on various transportation lighting projects and won an invited competition to illuminate the entire bridge. The project focuses on the twin towers, which glow radiantly from within like crystals, adding to Manhattan’s twinkling cityscape. A series of carefully positioned 1000-watt metal halide uplighters supply clear white light that evenly illuminates the steel cages. Sadly this dazzling light-show is reserved for high days and holidays, but even so, it splendidly reinvigorates and celebrates a much-loved historic structure. CATHERINE SLESSOR

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B UDDHIST TEMPLE , S AIJO , J APAN ARCHITECT T ADAO A NDO 1 Existing elements have been retained, generating a powerful tension between old and new. 2 The luminous slatted timber cage of the hondo or main hall.

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Despite his increasingly prolific output, Tadao Ando is still able to create buildings that are powerful, subtle, and moving. Komyo-ji, a new temple for the Pure Land sect of Buddhism, is one of his most impressive recent works. Located in Saijo, a seaside town on the island of Shikoku, it replaces a 250-year-old structure that was gloomy and becoming decrepit. The chief priest – a force for change – wanted a light-filled

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Tadao Ando’s poetic synthesis of materials and light finds renewed expression in this Buddhist temple complex, which reworks traditional forms with an austere intensity.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) gathering space for the community, welcoming to the young, and suitable for jazz concerts and lectures as well as worship. Site plan symmetry has been sacrificed in order to retain existing trees, stone walls, gatehouse and belltower as a memory of the old – a decision that produced a more compressed and engaging complex. The fir posts of the main hall (hondo) rise from a moat fed by natural springs, and entry is across a bridge that leads from one of three flanking blocks. These impassive structures house offices, priests’ quarters, meeting spaces and a columbarium. In signature Ando fashion, light gleams off bare polished concrete walls. The hondo is a contemporary reinterpretation of the Great Buddha style, which was brought from China and first employed in the massive south gate of the thirteenth-century Todai-ji temple in Nara. Multi-tiered brackets atop tall wood columns support a gently shelved projecting roof. The main structural support for the layers of beams is provided by four clusters of four massive posts within the hall. ‘I wanted to create a space that would return to the origins of wooden

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cross section looking east

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gatehouse belltower car park moat bridge main hall (hondo) meeting spaces/guest hall offices columbarium priests’ quarters

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:500)

architecture; a single structure made up of multiple parts, each full of tension’, says Ando. ‘It would express the image of people gathering and joining hands, supporting each other in a single community.’ At the first viewing of the model, shocked parishioners thought the sheer facades of the hondo resembled a cage, but were won over and now applaud the boldness of the design. At night, it serves as a beacon, revealing a glimpse of the ornate inner shrine, and the glowing columns and eaves are mirrored in the still water. By day, its mysteries are disclosed only after taking one of Ando’s processional routes, past the bell tower, around the moat, through the guest hall and across

3 Light-dappled corridor runs around the edge of the hall. 4 Shrine at the heart of the hondo. 5 Precisely crafted geometry of the arboreal roof vaults resembles a man-made forest.

the enclosed bridge to a narrow peripheral corridor. Light floods in from strips of glass between the outer posts and passes through massive shoji screens of frosted glass that can be swung open to make the pine-floored corridor an extension of the hundred-mat interior. Walking around and through the central space with its clustered columns, branching beams, dappled light and softness underfoot is to enter a man-made forest. It shows how temple architecture evolved from nature, and how the Japanese learned to assemble a multitude of wooden parts in lieu of organic growth. What was formerly a job for master carpenters (who shaped each element on site) is

now an assembly of pre-cut laminated fir beams, a process as pared down and precisely controlled as an automobile production line manned by robots. And yet, the austere simplicity of the spaces, the sensual appeal of the structure, and the complex geometry of the vault match the finest handcraftsmanship in warmth and serenity. As Ando declares: ‘I want to create intense yet quiet buildings and to make spaces that promote conversations with natural materials, where you can feel light, air and rain’. M. W. Architect Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka Photographs All photographs by Shigeo Ogawa except no. 1 which is by Mitsuo Matsuoka

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) M EDIATHEQUE , S ENDAI , J APAN ARCHITECT T OYO I TO

Sendai is a provincial capital, about 300km north of Tokyo, which was levelled in the Second World War and rebuilt on a spacious grid plan. In 1995, a new mayor decided that this prosperous modern city needed a more appropriate civic symbol than the ruins of its seventeenthcentury castle, and invited Arata Isozaki to chair an expert jury to choose a dynamic design for a new arts centre. Toyo Ito won that competition with a concept that was as audacious as the Pompidou Centre, though smaller and less assertive. Where Rogers and Piano flexed their muscles on the exterior, creating a heroic monument to the Machine Age, Ito proposed a transparent block whose supports would be wrapped in glass and dematerialized. Seven steel floor decks were stacked on 13 hollow columns composed of welded steel tubes. Schematically, it was an updated version of traditional Japanese post and beam construction with movable divisions and permeable boundaries. Metaphors inspired the structure. Ito thought of the enclosed space as liquid, likened the columns to strands of seaweed drifting through an aquarium, and created sketches of ethereal delicacy. Like the temporary structures that launched his practice, and his computer-synthesized electrographic display in the 1991 Visions of Japan exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (AR November 1991), the Mediathèque was intended to express the fluid dynamics of the modern city in which light and movement are layered atop its physical structure and vibrate around vortexes of energy. For Ito, this was to be a bridge between real and conceptual, a physical embodiment of the electronic labyrinth which many now inhabit – especially the young in Japan. Two contradictions emerged at the outset. The programme developed to fit into Ito’s container fell far short of his vision. Sendai is a conservative city, and librarians anxious to accommodate a growing book collection and local artists seeking display space for academic paintings had no enthusiasm for open plans or virtual reality. Disagreement began the day after the competition winner was announced. The columns had to be beefed up to meet Japan’s tough seismic code, and the challenge for structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki was to retain the poetry while satisfying practical necessities. Against all odds, much of Ito’s concept has survived six years of impassioned debate, and the need for a structure (partly fabricated and

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LAYERED MEDIA From modest origins as a cultural centre and library in a provincial town, Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediathèque celebrates and displays its different activities and inventive structure in a dramatic urban shop window.

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1 At night, Sendai’s new Mediathèque pulsates with light and colour like a giant, ethereal aquarium. 2 South facade is wrapped in a clear glass skin. Literal transparency is one means of demystifying the building and encouraging use.

3 West facade clad in a slatted screen of perforated steel floor decking. 4 The glass skin disappears in a myriad of reflections, revealing the layers of activity within. Like great fronds of seaweed, tubular column cages drift languidly through the interior.

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first floor (children’s library)

third floor (library mezzanine)

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sixth floor (media library)

entrance ramp to parking below information desk café foyer loading bay store children’s library meeting spaces main library reading areas staff room mezzanine reading room void exhibition spaces cinema media library video room fifth floor (exhibition space)

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

5 Entrance lobby on the ground floor, its luminous volume penetrated by the column cages that run through the building.

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welded by shipbuilders) that is more like an ocean liner than an aquarium. From the broad boulevard to the south, it appears as a shimmering rectangle of glass, etched with dots and dashes that animate the double-glazed skin and reduce glare, extending beyond the floor planes. Inside, a forest of canted white tubes (recalling the branches of the zelkova trees that run down the middle of the street), extends through the roof to support a gridded canopy. At night, the south facade disappears. Only the skeletal structure is visible, animated by a blaze of ceiling lights and tiny accents of colour from furnishings set close to the glass. Though little of the building’s activity is apparent above the ground floor, varied ceiling heights and the alternation of transparent, translucent and opaque surfaces on the other three sides of the block hint at its diversity of content. The Mediathèque combats the blandness and visual pollution of a Japanese city (a pachinko parlour formerly occupied the site) by staying cool and enigmatic. Even the graphics, stencilled onto the glass, are reticent. The spacious foyer, shop, and café that wrap around an enclosed gallery and service areas in the north-west quadrant reveal the essence of the

cross section

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second floor (main library)

fourth floor (exhibition space)

plan. Four symmetrically-placed corner columns of 240mm diameter tubing carry much of the load and provide the necessary seismic bracing. Nine columns of 160mm diameter tubes are scattered in between; five are straight and contain lifts, the rest are crooked and carry ducts. The hollow columns pull down light from above, and most are clad in glass, adding a further layer of gauzy reflections to those in the polished marble floor and dematerializing the exposed structure. A shiny red plastic reception desk sinuously wraps around one column like a seductive swirl of lipstick, and similar extruded forms in yellow and white anchor the bar and bookshop. To understand the building’s section, take a lift to the top floor. From the glass cab you can see how floor planes have been sliced through, revealing the structural sandwich of steel plates topped with concrete. On a non-stop ascent, the ride gives a fleeting glimpse of each distinctive floor succeeding the next, as though snorkelling up the side of a coral reef. Here, Ito’s metaphor of the interior as a fluid medium comes vividly to life. As in the ocean, the colours, the patterns of activity, and intensity of light change with the level.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Ito selected three designers to put their stamp on different floors. Kazuyo Sejima’s first floor information department and children’s library is a monochromatic composition of white lino tiles, suspended metal channels and a silver-studded black side wall. Sejima, who formerly worked for Ito, designed whimsical grey foam benches that resemble clover leaves, and screened the children’s area and staff offices in undulating gauze drapes. Circular reading tables and magazine racks flow around these permeable enclosures. The lofty second-floor library by K. T. Architecture has a more conventional layout: regimented rows of bookstacks to the rear, linear tables in front, and study carrels in a mezzanine gallery. Suspended uplights provide even, diffused illumination off the suspended white ceiling. Changing exhibitions are presented on the next two levels with their wood-strip floors, demountable white screens, and sculptural seating in vivid colours by Karim Rashid, who also designed the plastic seating in the ground-floor café. It is here that you begin to sense the wasted potential of space that would challenge a creative curator to exploit the play of structure and void. Occasional exhibitions may introduce locals to novel ideas, but, as a new arrival that is still gradually winning acceptance, the Mediathèque has to move cautiously. It is too big, and took too large a bite out of the municipal budget (around £75 million) to ignore its major constituency. The top floor offers the best marriage of container and content. Ross Lovegrove has designed what he calls ‘a garden of knowledge’ to house the media library. Biomorphic lime-green plastic chairs, tables and tape racks are deployed like exotic plants on a lime carpet, and video monitors are screened by tensile pods. These occupy the perimeter; at the centre, an undulating glass wall encloses a small theatre, meeting room and offices. Fluorescent tubes are set at angles on a white suspended ceiling, and the sense of detachment from the workaday world is enhanced by glimpses into neighbouring offices where salarymen toil away late into the night, like a Japanese version of Alphaville, where everyone seems to be sealed off in brightly lit capsules. For Japan, the Mediathèque is extraordinarily informal, with young friendly staff, and it has become a popular local resource; yet the atmosphere is as decorous as a scholars’ library. Director Emieko Okuyuma observes: ‘When we first announced this project, opponents thought it would be a dangerous monster. In fact, people have responded to the welcoming atmosphere and bright colours. Attendance is larger and younger than we anticipated’. Given time, Ito’s original vision may yet be fully realized. MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Toyo Ito & Associates, Tokyo Structural engineer Sasaki Structural Consultants Mechanical engineers Sogo Consultants, ES Associates, Ohtaki E & M Consulting Office Lighting consultants Lighting Planners Associates Photographs All photographs by Dennis Gilbert/VIEW except no. 4 which is by Nacása & Partners

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6 Main library on second floor. 7 Arboreal columns animate space. Column cages house lifts and ducts and bring light into the interior. 8 First floor children’s library, designed by Kazuyo Sejima. 9 Top floor media library, designed by Ross Lovegrove, one of the more successful marriages of content and container.

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LATTICE VAULT Continuing Shigeru Ban’s experiments with materials and structure, this timber lattice forms a delicate, luminous vault.

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Shigeru Ban’s work is permeated by a strong sense of Japanese architectural history reinterpreted in an explicitly contemporary manner. It embodies the classic Japanese tenet of elegant economy, of making the most out of very little, transforming banal materials such as paper and cardboard into structural elements. Yet to see Ban’s work as a development of an unorthodox style, or an unusually poetic sensibility to materials, would be to overlook the wider social context in which his work exists. His involvement with the earthquake-shattered community in Kobe (AR September 1996) is particularly significant in that it embraces the idea of participation. One of his most recent projects is a children’s day-care centre attached to a hospital in the far northern town of Odate. Glazed at both ends, the single-storey building is a seamless tubular volume, with free-standing partitions delineating washing and kitchen spaces. The tube is made up of tautly curved bands of laminated timber held in

compression by a series of members running lengthways along the structure. Light percolates gently through square openings between the laminated timber bands, dappling the interior so that the effect is like being in a giant wicker basket. Odate is subject to heavy snowfalls and roofs have to contend with considerable snow loads (450kg/sqm). The tube is enclosed and protected by a 45 degree pitched roof connected to the laminated timber inner layer by a spindly space frame, which helps to stiffen and stabilize the structure. The ribbed roof is made up of alternate strips of steel and translucent polycarbonate sheeting so that the light can diffuse through. Inventive in its exploitation of basic materials, this sensuous timber tunnel exemplifies Ban’s lyrical yet rigorous sensibility. C. S Architect Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo Structural engineer TIS & Partners Photographs Hiroyuki Hirai

C HILDREN ’ S DAY - CARE CENTRE , O DATE , J APAN A RCHITECT S HIGERU B AN

axonometric 1 Angular roof, designed to repel snowfalls, encloses a tubular volume fabricated from laminated timber. 2 An intermediate space frame stiffens the entire structural ensemble. 3 Luminous ‘wickerwork’ vault. Light dapples through openings in roof.

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P OULTRY FARMING SCHOOL , K OLIAGBE , K INDIA , G UINEA ARCHITECT H EIKKINEN -K OMONEN A RCHITECTS 1 2

The Kahere Poultry Farming School at Koliagbe in Guinea is the result of a most extraordinary chain of circumstances. In the early 1980s, Alpha Diallo and his uncle, the vet Bachir Diallo, decided to study poultry production abroad so that they could help to improve the diet of their native country, which is notoriously low in protein. Alpha went to Hungary and, being a superb linguist, he became enchanted with the connection between Hungarian

1 Design is intended to maximize wind cooling with through breezes. 2 Stabilized earth blocks provide thermal mass. Timber members are made with scarfed joints; wood blocks allow stiff structures to be evolved with small sections. 3 Student accommodation: tolerable climate achieved by passive means. 4 Portico of classroom is major social space. 5 Breathing ceilings help cool spaces.

and Finnish (which have little in common except underlying structures). He ended up by translating the Finnish national epic Kalevala into his native language. His activities attracted the attention of Eila Kivekäs, who after Alpha’s death in Finland in 1984 asked Bachir to return to Guinea to start a chicken farm which she funded through a foundation called Indigo. This proved so successful that its operations became inhibited by the many people who went there to learn. So

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Kivekäs proposed making a separate institution: a school of poultry farming which could serve the whole country. She asked HeikkinenKomonen, who had already worked for her on several projects in Guinea, to design the school. Based on previous experience of the culture and climate, Heikkinen-Komonen evolved a language of form and construction that, according to the technical assessor, has made the staff ‘happy and proud’. The techniques evolved by the

architects have already been adopted by people who worked on the job for other new buildings in the area. In Guinea, most new small buildings are made of badly fired bricks, and have corrugated metal roofs. They are incapable of resisting the heavy rains, and tend to intensify intense equatorial heat. HeikkinenKomonen evolved a construction method based on unfired earth blocks stabilized with a small proportion of cement, roof tiles made of cement reinforced by

local sisal fibres, and local hardwood structural timber scarfed together to achieve wider spans than would have been possible with the usual short struts. Widest spans are achieved by forming trusses with timber and imported steel wire, but as many materials as possible are from Guinean sources, and locally made. Double layers of blocks provide thermal mass. They can be left exposed, unlike the usual fired bricks that have to be faced with imported cement render if

they are to survive for a few seasons. Porous woven ceilings under the tile roofs are made of local wood laths woven in the traditional way as they often are in fences and partitions. They are able to breathe, helping to cool spaces with convection currents that are drawn from openings at the top of external walls. The technical assessor commented that the strategy might be liable to insect infestation in the rainy months. The compound is square. Its central circular space is

section through staff block and classroom

because it ‘uses a deceptively simple language … distinguished by clarity of form and appropriateness of scale. The solution is a fine example of an elegantly humble yet modern architecture that successfully crosses the boundaries of local Guinean and Nordic traditions’. Architect Heikkinen-Komonen Architects, Helsinki Project team Ville Venermo, Boubakar Barry, Abdulhaye Djiby Sow, Suleymane Saouré Photographs Sian Kennedy 2, 3, 5 Onerva Utriainen 1, 4

POULTRY ACADEMY A poultry farming school, intended to help the people of a desperately poor tropical country evolve a better diet from chickens, has been built with wisdom and care for the environment drawn from the North.

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dominated by the portico of the main classroom, a communal place in which staff and students can gather in all seasons. The portico’s tall columns are scarfed struts coupled in almost Aaltoesque fashion with blocks to increase their stiffness. As usual with Heikkinen-Komonen, a rigorous geometric discipline has been applied, with a 1.2m grid based on possible spans and functional considerations. Small windows in the residential areas are designed to avoid lintels. The jury welcomed the project

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classroom porch dormitory teachers water tower (later addition)

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interior design The London School of Economics and Political Science is an august institution founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Committed to Fabianism and social reform, they envisaged a school devoted to the teaching of and research into the social sciences. Today, LSE has more than 7000 undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world, 18 departments and more than 30 research centres. Its library is considered the largest and most important social sciences library in the world.

The campus is a collection of disparate edifices acquired over the years by the school and clustered around the main nineteenth-century building on Houghton Street, a pedestrian alleyway running north from the Aldwych. Almost since its inception, LSE has suffered from congestion – though less so now than formerly, for gradual acquisition has relieved it and plans for improving the various parts are under way. One of the earlier acquisitions was the Lionel Robbins building (previously the headquarters of W. H. Smith & Sons) which, built

in 1916, is on the north side of the campus. Taken over in 1973, it was converted for use by the library then uncomfortably housed in the main building. Now, almost thirty years later, Foster and Partners has renovated and enlarged the four-storey building, and transformed its interior. Fosters’ scheme retains the integrity of the brick and stone facades, and the basic fabric of the awkwardly shaped building (on plan made up of two dissimilar triangles joined together); only perimeter windows in a poor state of

repair have been replaced. But the interior has been transformed into an airy library full of muted light and movement, and pale colour. At a stroke, the scheme has increased space and, with imagination, taken care of circulation and servicing. Such transformation has been achieved by converting the old lightwell around which the library once revolved into an atrium, a great cylinder driven down to the basement and bringing daylight into the heart of the building. Filling out the bottom four layers of the

Light read One of the world’s greatest academic libraries has been radically transformed from a dull badly-converted commercial building by giving it a new focus full of light and air.

U NIVERSITY BUILDING , A LDWYCH , L ONDON ARCHITECT F OSTER AND P ARTNERS

1,2 New stepped spiral ramp and its associated voids bring light and sense of place to whole building. But will it distribute sound equally efficiently?

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typical floor plan

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:775)

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main entrance entrance concourse vertical circulation void (study area below) stacks study area enclosed study area

cylinder, is a stepped, helical ramp spiralling around a pair of glass lifts. The whole confection in this central part of the library – the rhythms of thin balustrading around ramp and surrounding galleries, the vertical embrace around the ramp of slender columns, the constant movement of people ascending and descending and hum of voices – has a cinematic dream-like quality. Capping the atrium is a dome, with a glazed section cut at an angle to admit north light and eliminate glare and solar gain. Design assists natural ventilation, for air drawn in through perimeter windows rises as it warms and escapes through vents in the dome’s glazing. On each floor, bookshelves leading away from the atrium define passageways to quiet study areas around the perimeter. These are separated by blocks of bookstacks. In the basement, a light-filled, doubleheight study was created by removing part of the ground floor slab. A new fifth and existing fourth floors accommodate a secluded research centre, which has its own identity: a separate entrance and lift, and distinct signage. Enveloped in north light, and uniformly painted white, the

library does provide quiet studious workplaces, though the basement study, overlooked by the open gallery at the entrance, must suffer from noise. But evidently the lesson of the Cambridge University Law Faculty (AR March 1996), where openness and hard surfaces combined with disastrously resounding effect, has been learned. Perimeter study areas are protected by noiseabsorbent shelves full of books and by the floor covering of soft grey carpet; levels become quieter as you move up the building away from the entrance and there are silent retreats enclosed by glass walls. P. M. Architect Foster and Partners, London Project architects Norman Foster, Ken Shuttleworth, Robin Partington, Andy Purvis, Lulie Fisher, Geoff Bee, Anne Fehrenbach, Sophie Coe, Gordon Seiles, Glenis Fan, Peter McLaughlin Structural engineers Adams Kara Taylor Quantity surveyors Davis Langdom & Everest M&E engineers Oscar Faber Acoustic engineering Oscar Faber Curtain walling/aluminium windows Henshaws Atrium dome roof Cowley Timberworks Ironmongery Ruddy Joinery Internal glazed screens Planet Photographs Chris Gascoigne/VIEW 1,2; Paul Ratigan/ VIEW 3; James Winspear/VIEW 4,5

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3 Book stacks surround vertical circulation atrium, and should help to attenuate sound. 4 Looking up at northlight over great ramp. 5 Looking down at basement, newly opened as reading area by cutting void in ground floor.

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section through ground floor void and atrium

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PRECIOUS PALIMPSEST Synthesizing and refining historical influences, this new chapel in Rotterdam’s Catholic cemetery forms a dignified yet poetic setting for the rituals of death.

The Catholic cemetery of St Lawrence in Rotterdam dates from the mid nineteenth century. Designed by H. J. van der Brink as a campo santo, an Italian field of the dead, the cemetery is focused around a central chapel, surrounded by radiating paths. The original neo-Gothic chapel fell victim to subsidence and was replaced in 1963 with a tepee-like structure covered in copper. This too became unstable and Francine Houben of Mecanoo was commissioned to design a chapel – the third on the site – reinforced with new foundations.

1 New chapel sits at the heart of Rotterdam’s nineteenth-century St Lawrence cemetery. 2 Taut roof plane floats lightly above sinuous embrace of external wall. 3 Horizontal strips of tin-plated copper cladding shimmer delicately like fish scales. 4 Detail of campanile, which penetrates the oversailing roof.

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Conceived as a delicate jewel case, Houben’s chapel stands on a plateau of gravel within the contours of van der Brink’s original building. Before she embarked on the design, Houben was due to make a visit to Venice and took the opportunity to explore its many churches and chapels, notably the Baroque Jesuit extravaganza of Santa Maria Assunta and Santa Maria dei Mirocoli, a fifteenth-century church resembling a reliquary casket. The impact of this historical exposure is transmuted and refined in the new chapel of St Mary of the Angels.

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cross section

With its expressive roof, golden ceiling and undulating walls, the chapel has elements of Baroque sensuality, yet the intimate interior exudes an air of contemplative calmness and sobriety. Contained within the footprint of the original neoGothic chapel, the flowing, guitar-shaped plan emphasizes the continuity of life. As Houben describes it ‘The visitor stands still and reflects and then goes on his way, as a symbol of life that goes on’. Clad in horizontal strips of tin-plated copper, the

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sleek curved wall appears to float in space, held clear of the ground and separated from the tautly folded plane of the roof by a narrow band of clerestory glazing. Inside, the wall is an intense blue, the traditional colour of the Virgin’s robe, with Requiem texts in many languages, reflecting the great cultural and social diversity of Rotterdam’s population. The golden ceiling is artificially lit from below, so it glows with a gentle lustre. Holes punched into the roof admit shafts of

daylight, an effect which is accentuated when incense is burned. Two heated timber decks indicate the places of the priest and congregation and a clock salvaged from the 1963 chapel hangs in the skeletal campanile. Fittings are elegantly austere. Oak is used for the simple benches and bier and polished concrete for the altar and pulpit. Candlesticks are made of non-treated steel. Deep in the heart of a rather gloomy nineteenth-century cemetery, the miraculous

apparition of the new chapel shines like a precious jewel. Beautifully judged and executed, it is a gorgeous palimpsest that tenderly connects humankind with the unfathomable mysteries of the numinous. C. S. Architect Mecanoo Architecten, Delft Project team Francine Houben, Francesco Veenstra, Ana Rocha, Huib de Jong, Martin Stoop, Natascha Arala Chaves, Judith Egberink, Henk Bouwer Structural engineer ABT Photographs Christian Richters

C HAPEL , R OTTERDAM , T HE N ETHERLANDS ARCHITECT M ECANOO

5 Intimate, sensuous interior. The flowing plan is intended to emphasize the continuity of life. 6 Marian blue wall enfolds the space. 1 2 3 4

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site plan

entrance priest congregation footprint of original chapel

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:250)

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interior design The Queen’s House in Greenwich was designed by Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark, wife of James I. Built between 1616 and 1635 in the hunting grounds of the Tudor palace of Placentia, it was an essay in Jones’s assured handling of Palladian style and proportion. In contrast to the rambling brick palace which, spread around three courtyards, was the haphazard enlargement of a fifteenth-century mansion, the Queen’s House was cool and Classically ordered at the edge of wilderness. Pevsner observes that the building’s chastity and bareness must have seemed as foreign to contemporary beholders, used to the entertaining elaborations of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, as Modernism was to the Edwardians.

In reality, architectural exoticism must have been tempered by familiar amusements, for the house had a fantastical surprise garden with fountains; its plan too was diverting. The building straddled the public road, between London and Dover, which divided park from palace. In doing so, it became a metaphorical bridge between the safety of the palace’s walled enclosure and the dangerous world outside (or, if you prefer, the rational link between two kinds of chaos: mathematical and physical). H-shaped on plan, the house had two parallel wings, running east-west and connected by a cross-bar at first floor level, above a vaulted basement. Anne died in 1619 before her house could be completed and building was resumed by Charles

I for Henrietta Maria, for whom the house became a garden retreat (there was never a kitchen). Her garden, with formal parterres and patterns, was designed to be viewed from above. In consequence, the basement (below the level of the road) with its handsome brick vaults and windows on to the garden, was blocked off. Finding the house too small, Henrietta Maria engaged John Webb, Jones’s successor and son-in-law, to add two more bridges to the first floor, one to the west and one to the east. The house we see today is a square block. Facades on all sides, except the south, are tripartite with a central projecting section and plain walls rising from a rusticated base and surmounted by a balustrade. On the south side, a first floor loggia

with Ionic columns overlooked the garden; on the north, a horseshoe staircase leads in Palladian manner to a terrace and a two-storey cubic hall. Inside the building, ornamented rooms are disposed in symmetrical fashion; to the east of the great hall, the interior is pierced by a circular void containing the famous Tulip Stair (the name deriving from the repeating wrought iron pattern of the balustrade). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the building was extended by addition of east and west wings linked to the centre by colonnades tracing the path of the old road. The present owner of the Queen’s House, the National Maritime Museum, has wanted to use the building as a gallery. But its curious plan and difficult

QUEEN’S HOUSE RESTORATION, GREENWICH, LONDON ARCHITECT ALLIES & MORRISON

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Fit for a queen Remodelling of part of the Queen’s House, Greenwich permits its use as a gallery and improves circulation without disturbing its seventeenth-century architecture. 74 | 1

1 North face with horseshoe staircase to terrace. 2 North face and colonnade to east wing. New public entrance with stone ramp embraced by staircase. 3 From great cubic hall, with black and white marble floor, to new staircase on west.

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staircase elevation

plan: staircase and lift shaft

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circulation, with no disabled access, made it unsuitable. Wishing to stage its millennium exhibition, The Story of Time, the museum invited Allies and Morrison to explore ways of improving access in, and circulation through, this most sensitive of monuments without upsetting English Heritage. The practice’s solution, with English Heritage agreement, was to restore the basement and transform it into a new public entrance, and in the process to reinstate Jones’s original basement door on the north. To the west of the great hall, in a space previously occupied by a contorted staircase and where the basement vault had been breached, they inserted an elegant new three-storey staircase and lift. Design of the staircase was based on the structural principle of the Tulip Stair, directly opposite on the other side of the great hall. Treads are made of precast concrete units, the load being transferred vertically from tread to tread. A steel string bolted to the face of brick shaft takes the torsion load and restrains the risers. The balustrading suggests the sumptuousness of handmade seventeenth-century filigree and the purity of Jones’s decorative ornamentation. It is made of steel strips plaited into a grid which, when wound around circular riser sections, distorts and

echoes the geometric distortions of the black and white marble floor of the great hall. A continuous bronze handrail expresses the curve of the staircase. Within the basement, the vaulted brickwork has been covered, as it would have originally been, with rough lime render and the spaces made lighter and clearer. Down here are the reception, cloakroom, shop and lavatories reached by the new public entrance on the north. Facing the river and embraced by the horseshoe staircase, Jones’s door leads to a tunnel under the terrace. The door was previously hidden at the bottom of a short flight of steps that have been replaced by a simple stone forecourt forming a shallow ramp. (Excavation revealed the original brick base of the horseshoe which turned 180 degrees so that the bottom steps faced each other.) P. M.

QUEEN’S HOUSE RESTORATION, GREENWICH, LONDON ARCHITECT ALLIES & MORRISON

Architect Allies & Morrison Architects, London Project team Bob Allies, Di Haigh Structural engineer Harris & Sutherland Services engineer Nordale Building Services Photographs Peter Cook/VIEW

4 Basement enfilade. 5 New staircase: precast concrete treads, balustrading of plaited steel strips, continuous bronze handrail.

first floor plan (scale approx 1:500)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H OUSE , I SLINGTON , L ONDON ARCHITECT S ARAH W IGGLESWORTH A RCHITECTS

Jokes in architecture are not usually good. Unless you’re Lutyens, they quickly seem to be solidified embarrassments, as many of the tattered hulks of ’80s PoMo demonstrate only too clearly. Little do you expect to find one of the wittiest new buildings in London at the end of a back-street next to a busy railway line. In time, it will be seen as one of the most gallant experiments in ecoarchitecture of our age. And yet, in a period when so many green architects seem so solemn, so really po-faced, it is light-hearted, full of double-entendres, tenderness for its dreadful sight and for its users. Stock Orchard Street was a little bit of railway land disposed of when British Railways were so scandalously sold by John Major to a pack of accountants and civil engineers who were more interested in profit than service. But a few good things were dragged from disaster. This is one. The building, at the bottom of a rather run-down Victorian terrace, looks as if it will be a longstanding series of jokes and lessons that will become more important over time.

Time is of the essence in Stock Orchard Street: the house is intended to change as it gets older; it will never be finished, as its architect owners say most heroically. You first understand its odd qualities when you come to the gate, made of willow hurdles in a galvanized steel frame. Two manufacturing cultures are united: traditional craftwork and common or garden steel jobbery. The result, though apparently difficult to achieve, because the tolerances needed by willow workers are very different from those of welders, is a precise statement about what is to follow. The whole house, constructed throughout with similar care, took 350 drawings and nearly two and a half years to make. It is an imaginative combination of what the architects call ‘the slick and the hairy’. Once past the gate, you are faced by a rather formidable front door. You are in a strange arcade of piers made of bits of recycled concrete made rectangular sense with gabions. These main supports of the building have had to have reinforced concrete sacrificial columns in their middles to comply with the fire regulations (the metal cages

would deform in intense heat), but they are more than able to support the loads by themselves. The architects point out that it is environmentally cheaper to have a lorry of broken concrete delivered to a site than to take away a load of site waste. Material from demolished buildings is abundant and cheap. On top of the gabions are springs in green boxes. They moderate the vibration set up by endless trains, and their ameliorating effect is amplified by a sandbag wall, which provides acoustic mass. The wall was inspired by a dusky wartime picture of London bolstered against the blitz in the Second World War. It is extremely funny and bizarre, with window openings framed in Australian hardwood railway sleepers found on the site. Made with bags full of sand, cement and lime, the wall is intended to decay gradually into a rippling surface of concrete left with the rough imprint of cloth, and the beautiful local wild plants like herb-Robert and Welsh poppy which will surely seed there. Over the entrance is a silver quilted wall: another sound-reducing device. Silicone faced

THE SLICK AND THE HAIRY ‘Slick and hairy’, the house made by a pair of architects on a neglected north London site, has many environmental lessons to teach – not least about the nature of wit in building and the importance of imagination.

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1 The sun side, opening itself to heat and light, with bales sexily exposed through polycarbonate. 2 Tower (which will contain library) is a landmark in a run-down inner city suburb.

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long (west-east) section

cross section through tower

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gate garden office bed official entrance

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domestic entrance conference-dining room tower library larder-kitchen court

9 STOCK ORCH ARD STREET GROU ND FLOOR PLAN

9 STOCK ORCHARD STREET FIRST FLO OR PLAN

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ground floor (scale approx 1:450)

first floor

H OUSE , I SLINGTON , L ONDON ARCHITECT S ARAH W IGGLESWORTH A RCHITECTS

3 Court carved in back of mass has pool fed by roof water. Intended to be a damp mossy grotto, similar to Soane’s courts at his museum, the space is an outdoor room, surrounded by domestic spaces. 4 The sound wall: against the noise of the trains, the architects have buttoned on a quilt, and made a massive wall of sand bags designed to decay with dignity.

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fibreglass made by a sail-maker is buttoned to the inner building with an insulating layer and inner damp-proof lining. Sarah Wigglesworth says that one day, the cloth may be unbuttoned, and a whole new and completely different kind of cladding will be applied. But that time will be long ahead, when building materials have properties that we can only dimly imagine. Sand bag and quilt enclose the office part of the plan. L-shaped, the parti is organized round a double-height dining room – a hinge which acts as both a family communal space and (during the day) a place for office meetings. Height is one of the architects’ driving concerns: the office or studio has a gallery mezzanine. There is a tower, not yet completed, which is starting to contain the library. At the top of this landmark will be a little study from where the whole of north London will be seen. Much of the domestic part of the plan is, as Wigglesworth says, ‘swaddled in straw bales’. The house is claimed to be the first modern straw building in England, using the natural and mostly ignored highly insulative material. Vertical wood ladders take roof and floor loads and the straw bales are stacked between them. A farmer in the west of England was found who was proud of the

precision of his baling and 550 bales were delivered to London at the almost unbelievably cheap price of £825. Wigglesworth says that ‘bales are quick and easy to build with’ and that the whole wall was put up in three and a half days by unskilled friends. I worry about vermin, but Wigglesworth claims that perforated metal closures at top and bottom of the cavity that separates the bales from the outer rainscreen will keep out rodents and insects. She will live with the straw and see. Rainscreen is provided by corrugated galvanized steel, which in one place is replaced by polycarbonate so that you can see ‘the straw in its golden glory’. A very delicate sensibility is here, where the juxtaposition of ‘shiny steel with rough straw’ disturbs normal architectural categories ‘uniting the slick with the hairy, the fetishized with the repressed’. The spaces of the residential part are cheerful, for the most part happily looking out over a gradually growing garden through a glass wall facing south that draws heat from the sun and, in hot summer days, moderates it with louvres. The living area is dominated by a most bizarre device; a plastered masonry beehive-shaped larder. Based on the mudbrick structures of mid Africa, the strange bulk bulges itself on you. Inside, temperature

is kept stable and cool by vents at top and bottom. Coolth as opposed to warmth of the hearth becomes the centre of existence. The architects have reversed normal perceptions, as they have in so many other senses. Less obvious is the way in which they have made two 3000 litre rainwater tanks underneath the house. One gives water to the lavatories; the other irrigates the meadow on the roof, which has wild strawberries as well as local weeds. No 9 Stock Orchard Street is the most sexy and witty building I have seen for years: fetishistic, full of very clever invention, happy with overlapping story-telling, wild yet tender, ever open to change – tower and garden, green yet industrial. We all live in houses like that in our imaginations. Wigglesworth is actually building one – with jokes that will last, and get more amusing with age. PETER DAVEY

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Architect Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, London Project team Sarah Wigglesworth, Jeremy Till, Gillian Horn, Michael Richards Structural engineer Price & Myers Acoustic consultants Paul Gillieron Acoustic Design Photographs Paul Smoothy

5 Detailing is simple but thoughtful and not too wounding. 6 Tall dining room is for conferences during day and acts as a hinge between office and domestic parts. 7 Living area, from which ladder to library tower ascends vertiginously.

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design review

B RIDGE , A UCKLAND , N EW Z EALAND ARCHITECT M ARIJKE DE G OEY

One of the challenges of using standardized geometry is how to create a variety of forms. Dutch designer Marijke de Goey shows what can be achieved in her radical design for a small pedestrian bridge over two artificial lakes at the Alan Gibbs Trust Park in Auckland, New Zealand. De Goey originally learnt how to make sculptural objects through her training as a jewellery designer. Her work includes the bridal tiara for the recent royal wedding of Dutch crown prince Alexander to Maxima Zorreguieta. Made of white gold and diamonds, the tiara is shaped like two bridges

to fit across the bride’s forehead. For the New Zealand project, the miniature is powerfully transformed into the monumental. Using 22 welded tubular steel cubes each measuring 3 x 3 x 3m to support an aluminium walkway, de Goey elaborates on the basic concept of linked cuboid forms. The walkway winds in a decidedly perilous fashion between the cubic steel skeleton, which makes the simple matter of traversing the bridge an adventure not for the fainthearted. Completing the slightly surreal tableau, the water of the lake has been coloured an intense

blue using environmentallyfriendly pigment. Engineered by Peter Boardman, the structure weighs 11 tons and was transported to site in two prefabricated sections by a Russian helicopter. (Due to adverse weather conditions the pilot was forced to land in a private field, much to the surprise of a local farmer and his cows, who proceeded to lick the structure, showing a surprising measure of bovine aesthetic appreciation.) From a background of jewellery design and fine art, de Goey has successfully orchestrated a dramatic change

Bridging disciplines Comprising a skeletal cuboid steel structure supporting a walkway, this bridge resembles a piece of jewellery in the landscape.

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of scale. Personally supervising the welding of the steel, its means of assembly and the painting process with the same care she would exercise in her own workshop, her sculptural bridge resembles jewellery adorning the landscape, in the same way that jewellery graces and enhances the human body. ALAN BROOKES 3

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1 Part of the bridge being delivered by helicopter. It was prefabricated in two sections and assembled on site. 2 Linked cubes form a striking, angular geometry. 3 De Goey’s experience of jewellery design was the basis for the transition to a larger scale. 4 Angular walkway is supported by the cuboid skeleton.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) S OLAR BUILDING , E COPARK , H ARTBERG , A USTRIA ARCHITECT K ONRAD F REY

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EXHIBITION ECO An unpretentious prototype production building in a demonstration ecology park involves ingenious technological and sustainable devices for conserving energy.

1 Building is in two linear tracts which can be used separately or together. 2 South elevation: conference room on roof is hung from exposed trusses. Fabric shades protect from overheating. 3 Glazed east wall is shaded by being recessed one bay. Building celebrates its economical and industrial origins.

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The Ecopark on the edge of the small town of Hartberg in Styria was set up as a demonstration of ecological design and construction. Built on the site of a former clay pit, it was intended to be self-sufficient, and to heal the bruising of the land without depositing debris elsewhere. The buildings – exhibition and production sites as in a normal industrial estate – were to be as unpolluting and sparing of energy as possible, in terms of both consumed and embodied energy. At the north-east end, there is a natural pond to absorb run-off water while attracting and nurturing wildlife. On an adjacent

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site Konrad Frey, a pioneer in solar architecture in Austria since the 1970s, was commissioned by the park’s organizers for a prototype production building. Its task was to act first as an exhibition pavilion and then as a factory/warehouse for solar equipment. Sited at the north end, it lies to the west of the ecological pond with a high protective bank dividing it from the highway behind. It is approached via a drive from the south which terminates in its car park. Frey accepted from the start that the main task was to provide economical general purpose spaces, and he made two 700m2

linear building tracts 16m wide and 7m high which can be used separately or together. They have contrasting characters according to position: the northern one with a fully glazed end enjoying a dramatic view of the pond while the southern has continuous low glazing towards the approach. A second brief requirement asked for offices, changing and recreation rooms which have been built within the east end of the southern tract as a two-storey block. Above them on the roof is the curved conference room with its external terrace and longer views, the one touch of real extravagance in an otherwise low-

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) cost project, and full of interesting details. Various sun-shading devices are applied to the different faces of the buildings in response to the calculated exposure. The south facade, for example, has Frey-designed stretched fabric screens over the windows, but it also serves as a testing ground for a demonstration of solar collectors and solar control devices. Since these products change, it retains a deliberately experimental and provisional look. At first sight this project might seem banal with its boxy forms and standardized elements, for it accepts the realities of industrial estates and of serial production, but the closer you look the more unusual it seems. The energy-rich steel frame expected in such

buildings is completely lacking. Instead the simple foundations support minimal concrete columns at 5m intervals, and these do not reach the roof. Instead they support timber-framed facade panels skinned in particle board, which form a continuous edge to bear the roof. Frey reveals this structural system on the north side where it breaks for windows, for he shows T-shaped glazing with visible trusses in place of the missing panels. The all-timber roof deck spanning the 16m building width follows the stressed-skin principle. Plywood box sections 600mm deep containing their own thick insulation layer were prefabricated then hoisted into place, resting on the side panels. The slightly sloping roof surfaces, topped with a membrane and a

thin soil layer to encourage plants, meet at a central gutter. Lining the ceiling is a layer of wood-wool which acts as acoustic absorbent. Unbroken by the usual beams, its surface allows heating and artificial lighting elements to be freely placed. To show the freespanning nature of the roof structure at its open end, the glazed east wall – set back a bay for solar protection – has only the minimal steel supports required for wind load. The insulated double glazing is divided in three horizontal layers, and since the vertical glazing joints were not structural and only limited by delivery sizes, Frey could play with the rhythm, taking his cue from the thematically appropriate ’50s hit song ‘O sole mio’.

Another structural curiosity is the support for the conference room on the roof. This penthouse element would have caused too much deflection in the stressed skin structure, so it is suspended from exposed trusses above, which transmit its loads back to the columns. The structural network so provided also turned into a convenient bearer for a stretched canvas awning for the terrace. Conventionally skinned in metal, the penthouse roof drains to a gutter on the north side. The long side walls are clad in timber slats, which give mechanical protection to the insulation layer beneath while allowing it to breathe. For the end walls, Frey used PVC sheet, a controversial material in

ecological terms, but used in relatively small quantity. Interestingly, this is the one element that the client has asked Frey to change because it sends the wrong signals about the park’s ecological aims. It is being replaced by a more cosy-looking and predictable fur coat of coconut netting. In the age of image and spin, the look is often more important than the reality, and in ecological matters people want to placate their consciences while continuing with their recklessly consumptive lifestyles. So it is difficult to see, in the often chaotic display of ecological projects, just what will really count and what is mere window dressing. The solar collectors on the front of Frey’s building, for example, have become an obvious symbol of ecological concern, almost a cliché. But the various sun-shading devices and the setback of the large east window are both more cheaply achieved and passively effective. These are the kinds of measures architects should surely now be adopting as a matter of course. Potentially Frey’s most important innovation, though, is the timberbased wide-span roof structure. If this were applied to every such shed in every industrial and commercial estate in Europe, an enormous energy saving would be effected.

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PETER BLUNDELL JONES Architect Konrad Frey, Graz Photographs Angelo Kaunat 4

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S OLAR BUILDING , E COPARK , H ARTBERG , A USTRIA ARCHITECT K ONRAD F REY 4,5 Simple mass-produced components are used to reduce embodied energy. 6,7 Conference room on roof supported by exposed trusses over terrace that also carry shading fabrics.

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cross section through conference room, offices and north tract

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first floor plan

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The addition, by Simon Conder Associates, of a crystalline box to one side of a large nineteenthcentury house in Canonbury, north London, transforms the ground floor confines of the old building and creates a new garden room. The client owns the two lower floors of the house which faces south onto a tree-lined street. To the west of it there is a freestanding double garage. Between house and garage there was a

gate and narrow path which led into a rough yard, rendered sunless by a tall hedge and large sycamore tree. Beyond the yard was a large mature garden, effectively screened from the street. There was little connection between the interior of the house and the grounds, for the main living room is one level up and at the front, streetside, of the building. Since the client spends much of his time in the garden,

particularly in summer, he asked SCA to design an extension giving directly onto the garden. In addition, he wanted a new utility room and entrance hall linking the new room to the existing building. The yard, which was next to the kitchen, was the obvious site. Its position, next to the kitchen, suggested easy links between a garden room, house and street, and building on it would leave the garden unscathed.

ar house E XTENSION , C ANONBURY , L ONDON ARCHITECT S IMON C ONDER A SSOCIATES

1 Passage from street mediated by series of iroko screens. 2 Garden pavilion at night; main house to left and garage to right.

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A garden pavilion uses High-Tech vocabulary to create a transparent garden room, mediating between leafy exterior and nineteenth-century house.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) SCA’s room is a sheer glass box, 3.6m wide x 7.2m long, and 3.0m high, built on a concrete slab underneath the sycamore. Initially, the architects wanted to glaze the roof, then they realized that in summer the tree would deposit an unsightly sticky glue on the surface. Instead, the roof is a composite steel and timber deck with a steel edge beam, supported on six 100 x 100mm steel columns. Flat and solid, and finished with concrete paving slabs, the roof adds a new terrace to the upper level of the house. Full-height, doubleglazed sheets brace the structure and barely divide interior from exterior.

Passage from the street, mediated by a series of three iroko screens, has been elegantly contrived to reveal the new building and garden by degrees. From the street, all you see of the new building as you approach is the first screen. It pivots to let you into a raised (iroko) deck that runs, striped with light, below a pergola to the front door. This is a replica of the first screen and leads to a low hallway with the new utility room on the left. Beyond, is the third screen which swings open to reveal the secret garden, seen through the transparent walls of the new garden room.

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3 Through full-height pivoting door to garden; full-height doubleglazed walls brace the structure. 4 From pavilion north-east to garden; furniture, austere and refined, by the practice. 5 From garden to pavilion; garage on right.

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entrance hall utility garden room garden kitchen garage

Transparency and luminance were keynotes of the room’s design. Glass walls are frameless (as are the iroko doors and ventilation panels), with the usual stops and seals being incorporated into the end of double-glazing units to reduce sightlines to a minimum. Cool north light is reflected off limestone flags paving the floor and off-white plastered walls and ceiling. PENNY MCGUIRE

axonometric

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:180)

Architect Simon Conder Associates, London Structural engineer Dewhurst Macfarlane Contractor Deefor Quality Refurbishments Photographs Chris Gascoigne/VIEW

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) E AR , NOSE AND THROAT UNIT , G RAZ R EGIONAL H OSPITAL , A USTRIA ARCHITECT E RNST G ISELBRECHT

The Regional Hospital of Graz marks an important moment in Austrian social and architectural history. Built on a low plateau to the north of Graz between 1903 and 1912, it had an unprecedented 1940 beds and was organized by a new body, the Regional Building Authority. Architecturally it consisted of a series of four storey pavilions, Classical in spirit and designed by pupils of Otto Wagner. One of these pavilions had become occupied by Graz’s internationally renowned Ear, Nose and Throat Unit, which struggled to maintain its high standards in the antiquated buildings, so a competition was held to renovate and extend the Wagnerschule pavilion. It was won by Ernst Giselbrecht. The old building’s Classical front stands on the crest of a steep slope, visible from across the valley and complete in its elegant symmetry. Obviously the extension would have to be put behind. There was also the problem that the old building was listed, yet it required repairs in its original craft technology and avoidance of major alterations. Giselbrecht therefore sought to place highly serviced treatment rooms and operating theatres in the new block, while leaving wards, offices and lecture theatres – it is a teaching hospital – in

the old. He avoided attaching the extension directly, and consequent violence to the old building’s back: instead he left a gap between the two, with glazed passages as connecting links. He did however need to add fire-stairs at the corners of the old building and he had to extend parts of the third floor facade. These additions were made in a modern vocabulary following the Wagnerian geometry. The cliff in front of the old main facade always made a lateral approach necessary, and the centre of the whole hospital complex lies to the west, so it made sense to create new entrances facing that direction, while making separate provision for emergency arrivals by ambulance to the east. Wisely, Giselbrecht made no attempt to continue the symmetry of the Wagnerian conception, though he did respect the central axis of the old building by retaining it as main public link leading to the original main stair. A second link further east at ground and first floor levels has become the main route for doctors and nurses entering the new wing. The main entrance for the whole department is now in the gap between the two buildings, and while the public turn left into the new or right into the old, doctors continue straight on across a small open court to their

own entrance behind. This court is the new heart and an important visual reference point while moving about the building, decorated with a geometric artwork in polished stone by the Czech sculptor Vaclav Fiala. In section, the new block consists of three layers: a day-patient clinic and emergency service on the ground floor, three operating theatres and associated facilities on the first, and a service floor above. To the back and north-east, the twin bed-sized lifts make a service tower, bringing the new building to a complete stop while, at the entrance end, it remains open and ambiguous, with a projecting wing-like shade to the second floor roof terrace that signifies openness and welcome. The south-west side also has a fully glazed ground floor set back behind pilotis, indicating the location of the most public interface: the day-patient clinic. The glass walls allow views out from the waiting area, and there is even a covered terrace for sitting out. Linked visually at high level by clerestoreys, consulting rooms are contained by a shiny red partition including red doors, a striking gesture in an otherwise white and neutral building. Although red might mean fire or danger, and these are rooms where grim discoveries might be made, it does

1 Wing-like shade protects roof terrace. Here, first floor louvres are open. Day-patient department behind glass wall.

CLINICAL PRECISION An extension of a distinguished ear, nose and throat hospital department is both efficient and lyrical.

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long section (east-west) through new work [email protected] - 127 -

cross section (north-south) through new and old buildings

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first floor

detail of moving louvres

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main entrance day-patients waiting court ambulance entrance audiology speech therapy teaching research operating theatres sterilization standard wards private wards staff

ground floor of both old and new buildings (scale approx 1:750) A B C D

new part existing pavilion children’s surgery helicopter landing

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2 Day-patient waiting area is linked to generous ground floor terrace. Behind is old building with new glass vertical circulation tower. 3 Automated perforated louvres prevent overheating by sun. 4 Main entrance mediating between old and new.

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seem appropriate to cheer them up in this way: all white, the whole thing would have seemed too antiseptic. Trained as a mechanical engineer, Giselbrecht is a stickler for detail and received a generous enough budget to use expensive materials – polished stone in the washrooms, for example. Every corner seems nicely made, every fitting well-integrated. Frameless glass and stove-enamelled panels make for slick elevations, and solar control is provided by a new variation on one of Giselbrecht’s favourite themes: horizontal metal louvres, this time perforated for reduced light when closed.* The high level of specialist servicing is not made too obvious, and there is seamless continuity between the technology of the architecture and that of the medical equipment – all speaks of scientific efficiency. One of the technical advances most prized by the doctors and not immediately obvious in the architecture is the provision of electronic networks to allow operations and investigations to be filmed and recorded, for work up the nose and down the throat is only just visible to the surgeon, let alone to surrounding colleagues or students. Miniature TV cameras now allow all to be seen in detail,

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and operations are routinely recorded on video tape for teaching purposes and in case of future complications. Equally, a whole lecture theatre of students can see on large screen and hear an operation take place without crossing the threshold of sterility or risking getting in the way. One slightly amusing detail is an obsessive provision of clocks, for in public life generally, they have disappeared in favour of personal watches, whose private time is now generally considered universal enough. But having hospital time displayed on every floor leaves room for no ambiguity: it spells teamwork and control in no uncertain terms. The architect told me that a leading consultant even objected to having a digital clock in the lecture room, asking for it to be replaced by one with a face: no less accurate of course, just a spatial representation, and one developed in accordance with a now outmoded technology. These things are symbols of the prevailing ethos. Shown around by one of the younger consultants, I gained a strong impression of their pride in their new building and the expression it gives to the efficiency of their organization. For the manager of hospitals too, this was the best of the bunch. An

updated version of machine-made modern, the architectural language shows the machine aesthetic fulfilled as it never could be in the 1920s. In a vulnerable and lifethreatening situation, one could feel grateful for such calm surroundings, for the reality and rigour of technical control and the latest and best equipment. Surely this is better than being palmed off with a stage-set offering a fourth-hand myth of domesticity. PETER BLUNDELL JONES Architect Ernst Giselbrecht, Graz Project team (competition) Peter Müller Project architects Kuno Kelih Johannes Eisenberger Project team Rene Traby, Andreas Ganzera, Peter Potoschnig, Sandra Gruber, Andreas Moser, Wolfgang Öhlinger, Peter Fürnschuss, Ernst Rainer, Otmar Brosch, Anton Oitzinger General planning Ingenieurbüro ZT KEG, Emmerich Friedl, Hubert Rinderer Project leader Heinz Roflmann Photographs Paul Ott * For earlier work see AR January 1994, October 1995, April 1996, April 1997. 7

5 Court with sculpture by Vaclav Fiala is new heart of complex. 6 New lecture theatre in old building. 7 Consulting rooms are in red, bringing a cheery touch … 8 … to a building that might otherwise have seemed overly clinical. 9 Looking out through perforated louvres when they are closed.

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Raw discipline Design of an apartment in a Toronto warehouse expresses the owner’s desire for a disciplined existence, and the architect’s love of sensual austerity.

A penitentiary is defined as a place for punishment, for reform, but most of all, a place to inspire discipline. When Eric Yolles (son of renowned Canadian structural engineer Morden Yolles) asked designer Johnson Chou to ‘think penitentiary’, he was concerned primarily with materials – that his apartment would contain no embellishments or gratuitous flourishes. Yolles may not have realized it at the time, but by specifying penitentiary he opened more possibilities than simply working with raw materials (often a given in contemporary loft design); he invited Chou to discipline his space – to create an environment that would inspire and order, define and clarify the way he lives. Housed in a converted warehouse in

downtown Toronto, the 185 sq m volume was a conventional strip with industrial windows at one end. Exploring the notion of surveillance implied by the demands of a prison aesthetic, Chou removed non-structural walls and divided the resulting volume with one large sandblasted glass screen. Space was layered by means of sliding partitions at times inset with sections of clear glass so that one part of the apartment is transformed while another is glimpsed. The largest of these partitions – a dramatic section of stainless steel – separates bedroom from living room; the adjoining translucent glass panel incorporates a strip of clear glass which allows you to see the sunken slate bath from the living areas. Experimenting with the act of viewing, Chou has

turned the bathroom into a stage set for self-conscious performance. Making furniture and fittings an integral part of interior design is an essential part of Chou’s philosophy; it constitutes what he calls the ‘narrative of habitation’. In this flat, the aluminium-clad bed is cantilevered from the wall so that it appears to hover in midair. Aluminium floor-to-ceiling storage cupboards span the entire length of the bedroom, holding and hiding all of Yolles’ belongings. Chou’s seamless design demands order and an ascetic way of living. He creates simplicity, but also a serenity that derives from harmonious proportions and materials. Though bare and elemental, liberal use of aluminium and

concrete lends a particular glow to the interior, one specific to the materials themselves. Subtle nuances and reflections in slate and metal are revealed by illumination, which playing off surfaces lends a sculptural, ephemeral quality to the bed and free-standing washstand, their austerity and refinement recalling Donald Judd’s sculpture. Using luminance as a theatrical element, Chou has employed halogen and fluorescent luminaires in a variety of ways to re-define space and create mood. In two sculptural gestures, recessed fluorescents cross the ceiling, and luminaires underneath low slate stairs create a subtle glow, in softer contrast to material severity. In relinquishing control of his environment to Chou, Yolles has received more than ordered,

practical living. By designing every aspect of this apartment, from the arrangement of space down to details, like a bedside command module in sandblasted glass (sliding open to access light switches, thermostat, telephone), Chou has injected hedonism to create a penitentiary that is ultimately close to theatre. CARLY BUTLER

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Architect Johnson Chou, Toronto Project team Johnson Chou, Steve Choe, Michael Lam Metal fabricators Serious Stainless Tredegar Kennedy Millwork Highgate Fine Cabinetry, Lee Custom Millwork Glass Proto-Glass Interior construction Chiltern Contracting Photographs Volker Seding

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plan (scale approx 1:150)

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1 Stainless-steel sheet separating bedroom and living room ... 2 ... slides back so the two volumes can be made one. Recessed fluorescents cross the ceiling. 3 Full-height cupboards, clad with aluminium panels; furniture designed by the practice. 4 Panel inset with 250mm strip of clear glass to reveal sunken slate bath from living room.

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HOME AND DRY A mix of uses is replacing the industrial area round the river port of Duisburg. This housing development is inspired by the waterside cities of northern Europe.

HOUSING, DUISBURG, GERMANY ARCHITECT INGENHOVEN, OVERDIEK & PARTNER

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Duisburg was once the biggest inland port in Europe. Its inner harbour was carefully carved out of the banks of the Rhine and lined with warehouses and mills. Like all nineteenth-century ports, Duisburg has collapsed economically and its trade was taken over by lorries and road transport. Küppersmühle – the last big industrial building – closed in the ’90s, it was revived by Herzog and de Meuron as an art museum (AR June 1999). The city has robustly decided to transform its industrial heart to become a complex interweave of domestic, commercial and leisure functions. A competition 1 Large court separates terraces, which face shallow canals on each side of project. 2 Carefully and reticently made in the northern European waterside tradition.

was held for Emscher Park, a derelict industrial area, which was organized by Internationales Bauausstellung. Foster and Partners won with a masterplan that has been interpreted by that practice and others. In their housing scheme, Ingenhoven Overdiek & Partner decided to reinterpret the morphology of the area between the city centre and the harbour basin. They have created roughly parallel blocks flanked by shallow canals that are actually slightly above harbour level. These take all rainwater from the development, and are planted with reeds that help

purify the water as it gently flows down towards the great river. Despite their very regular elevations, the blocks contain a wide variety of accommodation, ranging from studio units to three-bedroom family flats. All face east-west with deep loggias on their west sides and small balconies on the east. Construction is of finely finished precast concrete panels, with the recessed top storeys having steel structure and cedar cladding. Internal partitions have been varied, allowing, for instance, kitchens to open off living areas, or to be separate

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) spaces. The architects wanted to make the rooms ‘neutral’ so that they can be used for many different purposes. This sounds like a recipe for anomie. In fact, it is not. The parti locks into the existing city with a small square to the south and a generous well-planted inner court. The canals are a real gain for the whole city, with their tree-lined pedestrian paths leading down to the river. So on both sides, the flats look out over trees and each dwelling has a view of the canals. Cars are carefully controlled: under each block is an underground garage, which in section raises the entrance level a metre above path level, so the lowest floor has privacy, and the garages are ventilated.

Vertical circulation stacks divide the terraces. They serve two flats on each floor with glass lifts and really excellently made stairs that have cast stone treads cantilevered from central stringers. Each heavy, well insulated front door has a welcoming wooden seat in the internal porch. Joinery is immaculate and the concrete is either acidetched or polished. It is this fineness, the quality of obvious decency that makes the scheme a quiet, undemonstrative example of how a city can re-embrace its waterside nature, and evoke the elegant aquatic northern European urban tradition that inspires us all from Amsterdam to Stockholm.

location plan

3 Large loggias face west. 4 Stairs serve only two flats on each floor, which … 5 … have well insulated and very well made front doors. 6 Loggia side, waiting for planting.

Architect Ingenhoven Overdiek & Partner, Düsseldorf Project team Christoph Ingenhoven, Rudolf Jones, Barbara Bruder, Frank Reineke, Richard Galinski, Axel Möller Photographs H. G. Esch, Hennef

large mid-terrace flat

large top floor flat 3 4

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medium mid-terrace flat (scale approx 1:200)

maisonette (end of terrace)

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small top floor flat

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M USIC BUILDING , H ITCHIN , E NGLAND ARCHITECT P ATEL T AYLOR A RCHITECTS

The Benslow Music Trust, established in the late 1920s in the grounds of a late nineteenthcentury house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, runs residential courses for musicians. Until the addition of Patel Taylor’s beautifully resolved and crafted courtyard scheme (won in competition and built with Lottery money), accommodation was contained in an old stable block, and performances took place in a recital hall built in the 1970s. Victorian gardens spreading over the top of a hill are romantic, and musicians were – and are – encouraged to use them.

Patel Taylor’s site is to the north of the main house and stable block. To the east is an orchard, and to the west, the main entrance to the grounds. A car park runs around the north side of the site and its southern perimeter is formed by the back wall of the stables. Patel Taylor’s architecture, quiet, controlled, and infused with material poetry, deploys quite a complex vocabulary of layering, interlocking planes, and changing textures. By such means are relationships between interior and exterior, between exterior and the wider context subtly indicated and routes defined. One of the most beguiling aspects of this

HARMONIC SCALE

1 Exterior of recital hall and entrance to courtyard. 2 Glazed north-east corner. 3 Door to foyer. 4 Cloistered courtyard with practice rooms and bedrooms above; black brick and white render exterior of hall carried inside. Stelae in pool by Christine Fox.

In Hertfordshire, an extension of a music school is sensitive to its Victorian context while providing a tranquil and spiritually inspiring setting.

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practice’s work is the way order is quietly subverted by random expression and pattern. The plan of the Hitchin scheme gives an indication of how intricately it has been put together. The two-storeyed courtyard complex, that provides a rehearsal hall, four practice rooms, six bedrooms and kitchen, fits into the loose arrangement of outdoor rooms – formal stable yard, informal garden enclosures and orchard – that already existed. Lined by a glazed cloister, the new courtyard becomes, on summer days, a delightful place in which to rehearse. On the east, an old brick tower (divested of a lean-to

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) M USIC BUILDING , H ITCHIN , E NGLAND ARCHITECT P ATEL T AYLOR A RCHITECTS 5 From cloister to entrance and recital hall. 6 Recital hall with acoustic screening and stepped ceiling. Gallery top left. south courtyard elevation

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render lining

brick outer crust

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landscaping and lavender tower

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:350)

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existing building courtyard glazed cloister entrance recital hall foyer plant wc practice room void gallery kitchen bedroom canopy glazed canopy

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and once used for drying lavender), marks passage to the orchard, and a glazed canopy lightly covering a link to the stable yard flies into the courtyard at cloister level. Like a hard shell with a smooth luminous centre, the complex has a protective outer skin of textured red brickwork and precast banding which, giving way to softer white render inside the courtyard, alludes to the brick and stone dressings of the main house and to the rough warmth of a garden wall, now demolished. Since accommodation is diverse – extending from small rooms (some enlarged for disabled people) to the big volume of the recital hall – the architects felt it necessary to impose order in the form of a building grid. Externally, it is realized in the standardized brick panels that form the crust, but any hint of dullness is avoided by recessing some to create a textured surface, and by the apparently random pattern of openings that indicate different volumes inside. Another layer of

coherence derives from uniformly designed oak framing around windows and ventilators. Glazing dissolves the eastern corner, so that the interiors of a ground floor practice room and the bedroom above flow into the garden. The curving mass of the recital hall, bursting away from the orthogonal on the west, denotes its status as a public hall and signals entrance to the courtyard. Surmounted by a copper cone, the interior is illuminated by a rooflight around the cone’s edge, so that daylight spills down the walls of the asymmetrical volume, the bulge neatly embracing a grand piano or chamber orchestra. For acoustic reasons, the chamber is lined by free-form wooden screening, and the ceiling rises in random steps. Both devices diffuse sound, but the visual effect is to lend a sculptural dimension to the space. Overlooking it is a first floor gallery with wooden coping slanted to take sheets of music. An intervening knuckle – a curving foyer inside a circular staircase – links the hall to studios

and bedrooms and is, with the courtyard, one of two incidental spaces for practice. As in previous schemes by Patel Taylor, detailing is constantly intriguing (AR August 1999). Materials – York stone, black brick, white render, wooden screening – spilling from one area to another establish continuity; and oak floors have pleasing textures and patterns, consisting as they do of random strips between regular ones concealing services. Outside in the courtyard, a handsome slab of wood supported by a waterspout forms a bench over one of the two rectangular pools; and you are prevented from having accidents by quotes about music inscribed in white across glass doors. P.M Architect Patel Taylor Architects, London Project team Pankaj Patel, Andrew Taylor, Adam Penton, Tim Riley, Paul Allen Structural engineer Alan Conisbee & Associates Services engineer Arup Cardiff Photographs Martin Charles

7 Gallery with wooden balustrade for music sheets. 8 Curving foyer and door to courtyard.

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U NIVERSITY OF N EW S OUTH W ALES , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT MGT A RCHITECTS

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Quite the most dramatic part of the University of New South Wales at Kensington, Sydney is the Scientia, which houses the institution’s main ceremonial and social spaces and forms a formal focus for a rather ragged campus largely inhabited by utilitarian buildings. But the place has a mall that has largely been respected by successive generations of architects. Scientia is on the mall in the middle of the university, at a point where there is a change in level in the site, which falls here from east to west. It focuses on a dramatic timber and glass portico which acts as foyer to the public spaces on each side. At first, the whole design seems very simple: big plinth with metal boxes on top penetrated by portico, a bold, monumental, almost classical composition needed to bring order to the campus. In fact, the building is extremely carefully tailored to its location and the handling of spaces and levels is remarkably thoughtful. One of the main problems of the site was the proximity of the Civil Engineering department to the east, a remarkably uncivil ’60s complex that comes almost to the top of the bank, and is made the more unwelcoming by a brick tower almost aggressive in its dullness. To the west of the slope is Electrical Engineering, so the falling site was uncomfortably narrow. On it had to be placed the main ceremonial hall of the university, the main performance spaces and a major function room.

The performance spaces are inside the blank plinths, which are faced in sandstone as a reminiscence of the bank into which the Scientia is built. Stone courses are carefully differentiated into strata by thin strings of precast concrete that become closer together as the plinth rises until they form the balustrades of the terraces that surround the two big aluminium clad boxes that contain the ceremonial rooms. Over the north side of the plinth is the Leighton Hall, a dramatic double-height galleried space in which a folded roof (à la Festival of Britain) is supported on slender laminated Oregon pine columns that have profound entasis following the bending stresses between stainless-steel pin joints at top and bottom. Bright reds and yellows are offset by calm beech and silky oak panels; the big volume is bathed in light from clerestories. Across the mall, on top of the other plinth, is the Tyree function room, similar in many ways, but only one storey high, over the (as yet unused – and unnamed) steeply raked main music space. Across the mall, under Leighton Hall is the much less steep Ritchie theatre. It is not too difficult to arrange such big spaces above each other in a dignified way. The really clever parts of the parti are concerned with relating them ingeniously. The slopes of the volumes inside the plinth run at right angles to the natural fall of the site. This allows the spaces to be reached from bridges over the mall between the

WINGED PRESENCE One of the most important things in an educational institution is to engender a sense of place: an area of the mind we can relate to for the rest of our lives. Here is a powerful focus.

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1 Moving to the Acropolis from the mall ... 2 ... and arriving at the new academic square. 3 A combination of nautical and botanical metaphors. Main civil space hovers over steps up from mall.

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U NIVERSITY OF N EW S OUTH W ALES , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT MGT A RCHITECTS

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

upper, Tyree, level

Leighton Hall Tyree Room mall bridge over mall music auditorium new square poplar grove

principles of natural ventilation

4 Leighton Hall, main academic space of the whole university. 5 Laminated and turned jarrah is, with stainless steel, main structural element of the great glass portico. level of Leighton Hall (scale approx 1:800)

two parts of the plinth. The main bridge is about the height of the new academic square that has been made at the upper level of the site. Approaching down the mall from the west, you see the splendidly dramatic glass roof of the Scientia, supported on mastor-tree like columns beautifully made of turned and laminated jarrah. Sunlight is modified by metal louvres, and the whole floats delicately over the central gulch. Climbing the formal stairs under the bridge, you come to the new square, and the alley of poplars that will, when grown, partly mask the un-Civils building, and emphasize the mall and its relationship to the new square. At this level, coming from the west, you have to turn round to enter the Leighton, which can throw itself open on suitable days through an array of doors. Getting to the southern part of the complex at this level is more complicated, because the Civils building prevented direct access, so there is a special entrance in a return of the plinth that leads through a glass wall to the approach to the main bridge. The bridge platform then becomes a major element in the interaction of the plan. Another bank of doors to the south side of the Leighton opens onto the platform which suddenly becomes a proper volume, enclosed by glass roof and walls and faces the bar and the (as yet unused) entrances to the concert hall. Above, in the glass box, is the rigging of the university flagship (or the branches of the Grove of Academe). On one side is the calm square and poplar grove, on the other is the busy mall over which you hover. It is a truly memorable, democratic and generous academic space and deserves its rôle as the centre of the university. GEMMA HENRIKSON

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west-east section through stairs in mall

north-south section

Architect MGT Architects, Sydney Project team Richard Francis-Jones, Jeff Morehan, Romaldo Giurgola, Angelo Korsanos, Conrad Johnston, Rhiannon Morgan, Richard Thorp, Jason Trisley, Douglas Brooks, Ninotschka Titchkosky Structural and civil consultant Taylor Thomson & Whitting Landscape architect Context Landscaping Design Photographs John Gollings

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interior design LIBRARY, ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONICA, GREECE ARCHITECT ANASTASSIOS KOTSIOPOULOS, MORPHO PAPANIKOLAOU, IRENA SAKELLARIDOU

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1 The sinuous gulch, of which the curving brick wall … 2 … emerges inside. Bridge at high level (behind the louvred windows) delivers people to entrance drum.

The main campus of the Aristotle University of Thessalonica was started in the 1950s and, like many of its contemporaries, it is an ordered structure of cleanly designed concrete buildings permeated by large amounts of greenery. On the whole, it has stood up well, and (with some exceptions) additions have conformed to the intentions of the master plan. But the university continues to grow, and it is running out of sites. So when the library needed to expand, it was decided to put the extension underground. The

approach is part of an overall university strategy, by which new work will largely be underground in a series of fragments intended to restore the essentially urban character of the campus. The new part of the library is apparently entirely separate from the original 1960 building by Papaioannou & Fines which stands alone like a pavilion in a park. The landscape sweeps round to the north-east of the old building, over the roof of the new bit. New and old are separated by a sort of gulch in which the severe facade of the

Papaioannou & Fines building is faced with an almost Aaltoesque brick wall, rough faced and sensuous as a metaphor of the earth from which it is excavated. The gulch is in fact a reinforcement of the pedestrian axis across the campus, a route that connects university to city. A path breaks through the brick wall, almost at right angles to the axis. A triangular glass sail hovers over it, drawing you on into a béton brut drum, open to the sky. Down into the drum curves a stair that delivers you to the entrance level of the

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The University of Thessalonica has dug in to create an underground library that gives the comfort of the cave, while being a powerful academic machine.

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south-west/north-east section

north-west/south-east section through drum

LIBRARY, ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONICA, GREECE ARCHITECT ANASTASSIOS KOTSIOPOULOS, MORPHO PAPANIKOLAOU, IRENA SAKELLARIDOU

site plan

upper level 4

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lower (reading) level (scale approx 1:820)

3 Main reading room is double height, crossed by access bridge. 4 A Hadrianic ruin (the drum, right) is surrounded by a generous and welcoming study.

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library extension. In a sort of Alice in Wonderland progression, you go through a constricted tunnel-like entry lobby to come out facing the reception desk. Gradually, it becomes clear that on each side of the compressed entrance sequence is a majestic space, lit from the top and panelled in wood. This is the double-height reading room, the focus and raison d’être of the place. It is at once intimate and grand, with the concrete of the drum and its battered buttresses contrasting with the warm panelling, almost as if a huge and delicate study has been built round the very well preserved remains of a

mysterious Hadrianic ruin. Luminance pours in from varied sources. The biggest is the nether part of the triangular glass sail that greeted you at the entrance. Daylight is always supplemented by artificial sources. The wood walls of the great study are cut back to make small individual study spaces lined with open access shelving. Detailing is simple, and the finished result would have been elegant and fine, were it not for the clumsiness created by the contracts used in Greek public works, which give contractors far too much power over finished buildings. It will be used largely by graduate students, so

its separation from the original library, though contentious, is perhaps justified. (The two parts are linked by a lowest floor containing closed stacks.) But the force of the proposal remains. The great space is an inspiring invention, calm and appropriate for study. And multi-layered ideas are carried through into every part of the building (as far as the contract has allowed). P.D. Architects Anastassios Kotsiopoulos, Morpho Papanikolaou, Irena Sakellaridou Collaborator Alexandra Economidou Landscape Designers I. Tsalikidis, O. Kosmidou Photographs C. Louizidis

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Is the city a work of art, as distinguished urban historian Donald Olsen suggested? Jacob Burckhardt, who more or less invented the discipline of cultural history in the nineteenth century, would certainly have had no doubt. In his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy he described how even a state might become a work of art, though by art he meant something slightly different to the interpretation which has become common at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To Burckhardt, art described the product of artifice, and one of the great developments of the Renaissance was that every part of the state was subject to conscious thought and decision. Cities clearly follow a Burckhardtian definition of works of art, but are they or can they be considered as works of art in the contemporary sense? If so, when London has never been more vital as a centre of contemporary art and when artistic activity is making a significant contribution even to regeneration of areas like Hoxton, why is there so little contemporary sculpture in the public realm? Art has retreated into museums – ‘not very different from hospitals’, as Antony Gormley put it, ‘where things are looked after’ – leaving unchallenged the plethora of Victorian bronzes on their plinths as the dominant image of public statuary. With this paradox the art critic Richard Cork opened the first of the Academy Forum’s pair of discussions on ‘The City as Sculpture: from skyline to plinth’, immediately highlighting the tension between the totality of the city and the particularities of artistic practice. The two speakers, sculptors Phyllida Barlow and Antony Gormley, delved into this problematic relationship from different directions. Barlow offered an insight into the paradoxes of experiencing the city as an object and the responses sculptors might make, and Antony Gormley outlined how sculpture can serve as a unifying, almost totemic, social purpose but only when it

consciously engages with the public realm. In the second event, chaired by artist David Ward, architects Eric Parry, Ian Ritchie and Kathryn Findlay outlined their perceptions of and the sensibilities they bring to the urban realm, followed by a response from the Royal Academy’s professor of sculpture, David Mach. What emerged from the presentations and contributions from the floor, notably from sculptor Bill Woodrow and the Academy’s Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, was not so much a clear distinction between architecture and sculpture as a plurality of opinions with some analogies to readings of the modernist city. One of the hallmarks of the modern city is its fragmentation, and if architects’ initial response to modernity was to try to assert their control by seeking to unify the entire urban environment, more recently they have begun to realize that much remains immune to their influence. No single solution or approach will work; rather there is a need for a pattern of strategic alliances which evolves according to contingent circumstances. Civilization’s internal disequilibrium, Ian Ritchie cited, with reference to Stanley Diamond, is what ‘propels the system forward and gives us progress’. So if architecture as a discipline has its limitations, it follows that other disciplines, be they highway engineering, planning or sculpture, should be seen as potential components of the city. Over the two sessions the similarities and differences between architectural and sculptural practice coalesced around three essential themes. One was the ways of interpreting and treating the physical object; the second concerned attitudes to space, its organization, uses and purposes, while the third concerned alternative views of the relationship between architecture and sculpture, and the possibilities for collaboration.

THE CITY AS SCULPTURE This report by Jeremy Melvin records the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Arts Forum, which investigates concerns common to contemporary artists and architects. Held at the Royal Academy in London, the most recent forum explored the relationship between architecture and sculpture. The series is sponsored by Derwent Valley Holdings plc.

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The object Antony Gormley’s ascribing of great power to sculptural objects contrasted with Kathryn Findlay’s preference for describing Ushida Findlay’s buildings, often described by critics as sculptural, as processes. For Gormley ‘sculpture has always tried to link an imaginative object with a physical place and do it in an absolute way’. Japanese cities, Findlay suggested, where the ‘distinction between landmark and ephemera is blurred’, dissipate the power of objects into a myriad of tiny elements and experiences. Somewhere between these poles sat Eric Parry. Having suggested from the floor at the first event that architecture and sculpture come together in the ‘theatre of the city, the way the city is used’, his talk ‘Beyond the Object’ explored the relationship between history, contemporary patterns of use, and objects as links or mnemonic stimuli. For Parry, objects may not have the absolute completeness which they have for Gormley, but they are still necessary components in an experience which Findlay, at least in the Japanese city, sees as entirely dissolved within the nebulous fabric. Phyllida Barlow also proposed a fluctuating relationship between object and city, but one depending on the position of the viewer. Seeing the ‘city as an object’ from vantage points like Primrose Hill and Walthamstow Marshes, ‘conceals its most object-like qualities’. From within, the city acquires sounds and smells and assumes the character of a stage set, until this ‘choreography’ collapses, ‘the skin erupts … innards and the city itself seep out’ to reveal the anthropomorphized ‘object-like qualities’ of a human body. But sculpture has one more arrow in its quiver. A work like Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometre, ‘embedded in the earth’s surface’, leaves its length to the imagination, piercing ‘into the

bowels of the city, penetrating the skin which so precariously holds the innards within’. For Barlow it demonstrates ‘the power of sculptural objects, incomplete, unresolved physical experience, but where all senses are aroused’. In commenting that ‘architects don’t think like sculptors, we don’t see form and don’t touch materials in the same way’, Ian Ritchie may have made an obvious point, but the precise nature of these differences is important. Sculptors would probably not find significance in his monument in Dublin having ‘no detail, so the rainwater can run straight down’, as his architectural sensibilities, honed on the practicalities of waterproofing, make it to him. But they might respond to his evocative description of the monument as ‘celestial acupuncture’, motivated by wanting to ‘get to those [wonderful Irish] skies and bring the light back to the ground’. This illustrates a connection for the imagination that Gormley would recognize, although if the physical connection disappeared in the effect, it would be close to Findlay’s perception of the dissipation of object within process. Gormley identified a distinction between sculptural and architectural objects. ‘Architecture’, he claimed, ‘does not necessarily achieve art, but it can combine an understanding of human scale, the body, light and how it can penetrate form. Really great architecture is about creating wellbeing, the best decoration a building can have’. Sculpture ‘acts as a witness, holding human feeling and thought and inscribes it within geological time’. The great challenge ‘in a time of loss and deconstruction of grand narrative’ when ‘notions of freedom and democracy can no longer be embodied in one man’ – even if that man is Nelson Mandela, is to meet ‘the need for the totemic’. With its ‘primitive and atavistic qualities’, sculpture can ‘talk about the deepest fears and profound

Social tensions are visceral at the walls of Derry in Northern Ireland where Antony Gormley made this piece, ‘talking about the deepest fears and profoundest hopes’.

Kasahara Amenity Hall, by the Kathryn Findlay Laboratory with Tomoko Taguchi and Takakuni Yukawa, has rational origin in the sun’s movements. Photo: Katsuhisa Kida.

hopes’. The Angel of the North is ‘not simply a guardian angel’, but ‘crucified by the wings it bears, [it] speaks of transition’, while the pieces within the walls of Derry in Northern Ireland ‘draw energies to itself, possibly becoming the focus of reconciliation’.

Space Sculpture could not have the power Gormley assigns to it without its position within the community, precisely within public space. The superficial distinction, that architects necessarily have to deal with the urban context while sculptors can choose to avoid it, conceals much more complicated variations. David Mach has even exhibited in the unlikely location of ‘the ashtray of a Hillman Imp’. He finds galleries ‘clinical, remote and boring’ and tries to ‘work in very public spaces’, such as the interior of a train in Amsterdam or inside a brothel – ‘cries of “Yes Yes Yes Yes” really concentrate the mind’. Gormley might also deride museums as art hospitals, but when Richard Cork asked Phyllida Barlow directly whether she thought art needs ‘protection from the hurly-burly of the city’, she replied emphatically, ‘Yes’, citing as an example Hans Haake’s Standort Merry Go Round at the 1997 Munster Sculpture Exhibition. And even architects do not agree among themselves as to the nature of desirable engagement. Ian Ritchie admitted to having great difficulty in designing projects such as speculative office blocks which do not have an explicit end-user. But Eric Parry argued that as ‘80 per cent of the city is taken up with workplaces’, architects should address them on their own terms, just as George Dance designed Gower Street where ‘everyone lives differently behind similar facades’. Again these initial positions resolve into a complex and shifting interaction of views about the nature of urban space. Parry and

Gormley both suggested, in different ways, that urban spaces have latent characteristics with which sculpture and architecture should engage. For Parry these might lie in mnemonic traces of history or in the annually re-enacted Easter Parade in the Sicilian town of Enna, and can be crystallized in spaces such as the small shrines which stud Bombay’s urban fabric. Parry finds poetry in the pavement and when ‘urban artefacts become part of street performance … the idea of art in a city being monumental or permanent is defied by the amazing and imaginative uses of the city’. His monument and visitors’ centre near London Bridge Station captures this sense. At once specific and even prosaic in function as an information centre which might help visitors to envisage an almost vanished past, the inclined stone spike monument lacks an obvious programmatic function but has become part of skateboarding lore. For Bill Woodrow, commenting on his piece on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square, it was the form of the space itself, rather than the patterns of use, which bore on the possible object. Working in bronze evoked another layer of context. The material of the numerous nearby Victorian heroes, it carries an indelible historical burden irrespective of any form it might take. Parry singled out Gormley’s Fathers and Sons as a piece which ‘challenges the everyday in underground space’, bearing out Gormley’s suggestion that one role of art is ‘to confront and subvert … perhaps … to infiltrate rather than to confirm public space’. Iron: man in Birmingham and the piece within the Derry Walls demonstrate the strategy of infiltrating physical space with physical objects, in ways that change the perceptions and social attitudes which created and are reinforced by those spaces. Iron: man sinks up to his knees in the ground, but has a dialogue with Queen Victoria

Left: without prop of a plinth, Antony Gormley’s piece Iron: man sinks up to his knees in front of Birmingham’s Neo-Classical city hall. Middle: Eric Parry’s Finsbury Square office building [email protected] achieves a poetic quality within the specifics of modern urban speculative development. Right: mall shrines set into Bombay’s urban fabric are one way of crystallizing mnemonic traces. - 141 -

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who surmounts a plinth. Devised as an ‘expression about the Industrial Revolution and the material wealth of Birmingham’, it attempts to create a ‘collective image of the city’ whose physical form challenges observers to re-examine the urban fabric, what it stands for and the processes which generated it. Speaking of choreography where Parry spoke of theatre, and echoing Gormley’s view that the physical sculptural object might lead to perceptions beyond its physical limits was Phyllida Barlow. And if from the distance she saw the city as an object, close to its object-like appearance dissolved into a myriad of fragmentary images. Kathryn Findlay, in her reading of Tokyo, found a social and functional justification to this dissolution. ‘The city is a multiple of infinitesimally small, habitable spaces behind an illuminated and animated fabric’, but ‘the light you see is not like Las Vegas or Piccadilly Circus, but the dissolution of living functions across the city’. Urban life offers numerous relationships that are not especially sculptural but which can be noticed within buildings, such as the way the architect of a cosmetic company headquarters reflected the green railway embankment into the foyer, creating a ‘peaceful, calm space but with a dynamic relationship to the city’. In these circumstances, the ‘distinction between building, city and art become irrelevant’. Findlay pointed out that ‘Japanese cities, made by a far more hierarchical society [than the West] actually have a multiplicity of hand’ in their design. This is the complete antithesis to the vogue in Western urban developments for ‘masterplanning’. Architect, masterplan, axis, stop thinking, is often the sequence, claimed Ian Ritchie, ‘put things left, put things right’ and then fill up the space with water. Elizabeth Frink’s Horse and Rider at the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly shows the lack of thought, for just in front of the piece is a brass plaque reading ‘smoke outlet’; or the corporate square at Canary Wharf, where ‘sculpture is on a stone plinth exactly like the buildings’. What is left over at the pavement level,

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Pola cosmetic company HQ, Tokyo by Shoji Hayashi demonstrates Kathryn Findlay’s thesis that in Tokyo, the ‘distinction between building, city and art becomes irrelevant’.

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on this corporate model, says Ritchie, ‘is not dissimilar to the skyline; money dictates where and how we produce spaces’.

Collaborations Collaboration between architects and artists might sound a tempting way to overcome this bleak scenario, but it is not an easy panacea. Barlow wondered whether there is a conflict of interest precisely around the issue of space. Sculptors, she explained, ‘see space as a physical substance to be manipulated’ but wondered, ‘do architects see it as just a void?’ Ritchie found a different difficulty in ‘the collaboration myth … it’s like man meets woman, get married, have babies … artists need more courage’. The real difference between architecture and public sculpture, he speculated, is that the former has working lavatories. David Mach wondered why architects ‘invite me in to be some kind of act’, making ‘me want to put on a balaclava and swing in on a rope …’ Richard Cork prompted a less bleak but still problematic view of the relationship when he asked Eric Parry about the intended Richard Deacon ceramic piece entwined, like the snakes encircling Laocoon, around the stone facade of Parry’s building in Finsbury Square. ‘I’ve learnt an incredible amount about materiality thought collaboration’, responded Parry, ‘a lot of thinking about interiors stems from it’. Separating the stone and glazing into two layers in the Finsbury Square building means the outer layer of stone can achieve a precision which conveys the essence of its material, and Parry thought Deacon ‘the person for the intensity of cut stone’. Even so, with or without Deacon’s piece, the facade achieves a poetic quality specifically tuned to the modern city: the subtle variations of the stone contrast with the regular division of the glazing behind. Parry found the experience of designing a pair of studios for Antony Gormley and Tom Phillips a ‘fantastic part of my education’, though Gormley discerned another issue of contention.

The great struggle of artists in the twentieth century was to establish that art is self-determining, undermining any attempt at collaboration or indeed working in public space. It is this condition which he is trying to reverse. David Ward introduced the second session with a pair of ‘defining and influential artworks’. In Josef Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, each was planted alongside a basalt block which they eventually outgrew, and Gordon Matta Clark’s Conical Intersect was a conical aperture cut through houses before they were demolished to make way for the Pompidou Centre. The second, he suggested, was a ‘reversal of the sculptor’s sculpture, creating spaces to allow these contributions to reveal themselves’. Here, perhaps the most intensely sculptural practice might come round in full circle close to Kathryn Findlay’s position. Denying a sculptural intention in h er fl u id forms , h er w ork n on eth el es s h a s forma l a n d contemplative similarities to the Conical Intersect. Architecture and sculpture appear necessarily to have a problematic relationship, partly because both can lay claim to the production of physical objects. Left to themselves, they would probably overlap at the edges, but when both try to engage with the modern city this relationship acquires a flux and dynamism, offering potential for interaction which may conflict or reconcile. In this maelstrom of the modern world, human nature inevitably leads some people to search for easy solutions and to offset responsibility to others. Bill Woodrow asked if this urge lay behind some architects’ desire to ‘collaborate’ with artists. ‘Are collaborations too easy?’ he wondered, adding, ‘I’m beginning to sense that the role of the artist is to move away from collaboration and explore new areas. The world of architecture has realized it has problems and is looking to other people to solve them. But ultimately architects will have to solve them themselves’. In accepting and addressing these challenges, architects could prove their credentials as artists.

the possibilities of tension between near and distant experience of urban artefacts. [email protected] - 142 -

Behind all the pinpricks of light of vital night-time Tokyo are all the dispersed functions of modern living: ‘a multiple of infinitesimally small spaces behind an animated fabric’.

Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture at Mile End Park lasted no more than a few hours, yet set up

Phyllida Barlow In and out of the city The clichés about the city do have a kind of truth about them, particularly because of their use of the body as a metaphor for the city; and the body, with its bowels, heart, pulse and soul, does seem to be an effective metaphor. It imbues the city with anthropomorphic qualities, as if it were a living, sentient thing. This is an accurate description of how the city affects us: as a personality to reckon with. Such clichés evoke convincingly the exterior of the city in relationship to its interior, and this paper has a narrative developed around this relationship. The vista and the view The narrative begins with the vista: how to view the city, get a grasp of it in its entirety. Almost impossible from the ground, and from being in the city, but possible from above, like, in London, from the top of Kite Hill, Primrose Hill, Greenwich Park, or Crystal Palace. Or closer in, from Walthamstow Marshes for example. where the expansive wetlands create a distance from which the city can be viewed at the same level, low down. This is my preferred view, because it is the back view of the city, where the overtly industrial pylons, railway tracks, factories, water works and reservoirs meets the residential, but divided by this five or six mile wide strip of the Lee Valley. Being able to stand back from the city restores its three dimensionality: the greying of its edges round it, emphasize its mass, and its density, unifying it into a solidity which belies its fragmented reality, as experienced when in among it. A view of the city, getting far enough back from it, enchants and turns it into an idyll, a sublime idyll, which hides its interior. A distance subdues noise, smell, chaos, and offers instead a stillness which is timelessly compelling, something which is difficult to takes one’s eyes off, in the same way that it is difficult not to stare at an expanse of water. In contrast, the city from inside is a series of facades: like the facades of a stage set or a pack of cards. It is impossible to experience buildings as three-dimensional. And the spaces within the city open and close, like doors constantly opening and shutting: from the narrow and constricted into the open but surrounded. Getting far enough back, to be at a distance, being able to survey, to see the horizon as far away, is to be able to watch where the city as object meets its surrounding space, and where the city as pictorial emblem solidifies into a weighted down and placed thing. Choreography If standing back from the city makes it still and subdued, then being in the city reveals it as moving and noisy. You are either a participator or a bystander, an audience: the movement of the city is choreographed, and to be on the edge of that choreography is to be excluded, maybe through choice, but also for some reason, through default. Choreography relies on rules: rules of place and containment, where not complying with the rules is hazardous and anarchic. The flow of the city depends upon the collective movements in one direction or the other. The roar of the city is this movement, and is the most distinctive evidence when at a distance from the city: the all-pervading drone and muffled screech of the ceaseless traffic can be heard even when the roads and their traffic cannot be seen. The city can be heard, if not seen.

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Seepage The sounds of the city leak. The detritus of the city scatters, oozes and seeps. The choreography begins to collapse. The innards reveal themselves. The skin erupts. The edges fray with litter, and the spillage of the fumes and filth mutate the calculating control inherent to the movement of the city into unwanted growth. The movement spreads outwards into the vast hinterland of suburbia. Not only do the innards of the city seep, but the city itself seeps. Seen from the train, being carried outwards through the hinterland, the city becomes a system of back views, usually deserted, with little signs of life: industrial estates, back gardens, rows and rows of houses and buildings. But that’s a different seepage to the seepage of stuff. The stuff from within is compelling and awesome, whether it is the flood of the burst water main, or the explosions onto pavements of the thick tresses of coloured wires of telephone cables, or the cavernous excavations for deeply buried pipework. All are accompanied by the persistent sounds and smells of the workings of the city. And when the city discloses its inner workings, it reveals its frailty, because of its dependency on these visceral goings-on beneath the surface. The city as an object harbours its most object-like qualities within its hidden world. Those parts of an object which cannot be seen, but which inform what can be seen, do have an uncanny hold, and when these unseen things become visible and make their presence known, there is a kind of anarchy. Incision and entrapment The narrative ends with a destination in the city, an arrival at two works sited within cities. They are Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometre installed for the 1977 Kassel Documenta and Hans Haake’s Standort Merry Go Round, commissioned for the 1997 Munster Sculpture Exhibition. Importantly for me, they reveal a sculptural language rooted in the undisclosed, the hidden, the contained, the unfinished, the

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impossible to grasp, and the defiance and repudiation of an image and its inevitable optimum view. Hans Haake’s wooden stockade withholds the object incarcerated within it, and what is revealed about this object is its sound: within the stockade is, in fact, a fairground carousel constantly turning, accompanied by a steam organ rendition of the German national anthem, played at twice the speed. Bereft of people, who are relegated to peering in through the cracks between the wooden planks of the carousel, it becomes trapped within its own laboriousness, pathetically parodying the grandiose memorial next to which it is situated. It seems to refer to the stark realities of what becomes of a cosmetically constructed world, reciprocated by the city and its system of facades, and what happens when such facades collapse. So too with Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometre. With only its brass end revealed, like a coin embedded on the street’s surface, the kilometre’s length has to be imagined, incising into the earth’s surface with surgical precision. It pierces the bowels of the city and beyond, into the dark viscera, penetrating that all too fragile skin of the city, which holds the chaos and danger of eruptions so tightly under control. There is the thought of what happens when the kilometre length is extracted, what will ooze from the hole? What does the brass plug hold in? These two works definitely offer the power of the sculptural object through undisclosure and concealment. It preys upon our sense, giving us an incomplete, unresolved physical experience, but through which all our senses are aroused, provoking our imaginations into action, which then achieve the completion which the objects’ physical realities resist. They gazump the body metaphor for the city and its litany of bowels, hearts and souls. Instead they provide the perfect allegories for the irrational collection of experiences which conjure the dystopic chaos, the inherent viscera and the cosmetically apparent pretensions of the city, but which separation of distance magically transforms into the ultimate sculptural phenomenon.

Ian Ritchie The city as sculpture – from skyline to plinth SILENT AND STILL. I love cities for their wildness born of change and of the unknown. This is man’s constructed wilderness where mothers traditionally feared their daughters would tread. That other city – the green city that man has constructed but pretends to be natural – surrounds the brown city, and the two are connected by the grey land of mechanical communication. In Phyllida Barlow’s distant reading of the city, there are no people, there is no disturbance – or if there is, it is the noise or traced line of an aeroplane and the still red lights, or the flashing white light of aviation warning atop the taller buildings. However, the skyline is rarely still. The commercial skyline has continuously shifting patterns of light. This view has invariably seduced architects when imaging and planning utopian cities. For they too, in their minds, are distant from a future reality of the occupied city, the visceral interior that Barlow described. From the skyline, we may be able to read the economic geography of the city if not its geology, its demographic migration if not its history. This is perhaps why we take to the water, or the hill, or the skies to orientate ourselves – to get out before getting involved, or to remind ourselves who and where we are. This is why the skyline matters. However, sculptors have been excluded from participating in the creation of this external view, which still remains the domain of planners, engineers and architects. But the sculptor’s mind is used to scale, both the physical scale and the scale of intent. And it is in the silhouette of the city that both become really evident. Should architects invite the sculptor to the skyline?

hits the ground with no ceremony or rainwater catch (right). [email protected] - 143 -

Left: Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometre at the 1977 Kassel Documenta implies a pinprick into the bowels of the city, while Hans Haake’s Standort Merry-go-Round at the 1997 Munster Sculpture Park (right), withholding the object incarcerated within it, parodies the pompous monument in the background.

Ian Ritchie’s ‘essentially optimistic’ Dublin Spire reaches to Ireland’s celestial skies – and

Rooms and spaces for sculpture within the dynamic city NOISY AND MOVING. Art is for most people a luxury to be indulged after we have completed the necessities of living. This distinction between necessity and luxury is reflected in the way we spend our time. In broad terms, there is committed time and uncommitted time. The latter offers us the chance to be at leisure. But in modern consumer society, it is difficult to convince developers, highway engineers and others of the social value of places and spaces that are not recognized as an intrinsic necessity to the way of life. Design is for the most part a useful tool to enhance ‘sales’. Our firm is designing an urban environment of 17 hectares at White City in west London. Its raison d’être is shopping, which for many is now a leisure activity. As such, it has entered the world of uncommitted time where most art seems to reside. The development also includes affordable housing, offices, a library, a nature reserve, two tube stations, a railway station and a bus station. At its centre is a covered space the size of a football pitch. Our approach drew on a design programme I ran at the Technical University in Vienna which was based upon the notions of ‘a space before, a space between and a space after’. The essence of this programme dealt initially with the designer’s own memory of what constitutes space by asking them to design a space to be made. Then with the investigation of the late twentieth-century architectural space invader – advertising – and finally with an attempt to synthesize these two investigations to create a future architectural space. At White City, the ‘space before’ has two characteristics, the local physical and social memory and the preconceptions of what characterizes a ‘shopping centre’, most clearly communicated through the views of our client, Chelsfield. The ‘space between’ is that part of the design process through which we are currently travelling, the design and planning process. The media world, promotion and

Alba da Milano appears to be a shaft of light reaching to the sky: ‘when we construct commemorative monuments, we also construct space around them’.

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advertising, and its inevitable invasion of the ‘space after’ is not yet at the forefront of our minds, probably because we feel nobler than others when it comes to creating ‘space’. We know that the advertising teams and interior designers will arrive later, and we hope that our ‘architectural space’ is strong enough to keep its identity and character, and remain exciting no matter what the changing world of fashion and commerce puts into it. Memorable spaces are usually exciting, unique and of recognizable quality. They are not static. People and events move through them like light and sound. They continually change with time and the varying density of human activity within them, but they do not surrender their intrinsic and enduring qualities. Such spaces have immense potential to attract visitors. In a highly competitive marketplace, the creation of such spaces must be of value not only to the development itself, but also the locality and, in this case, London as well. So we have come full circle. Architectural space is not in conflict with the commercial world, for ultimately, a measure of its quality is that it will attract the consumer. Architecture is, at a very different scale, to be consumed and hopefully retained in the memory. It is genuinely capable of transformation which gives it spatial sustainability. When architects removed the places for sculpture on their buildings, sculpture found itself upon the city plinth, the pavement and the piazza. The piazza was designed to create space and distance to appreciate the architecture, not to create extra space for sculpture. Since most sculpture is silent and still, it became an apt companion for the piazza, an area a little ‘removed’ from rushing metal and the dynamic of the city. When not in a piazza or park, sculpture finds itself occupying quirky left over spaces, such as Elizabeth Frink’s Horse and Rider. However, new piazzas of varying scale are becoming a luxury within the city, and as the densified city emerges, they will probably be fewer and smaller. Canary Wharf’s Cabot Square is ‘filled’ with ‘urban’ water at its centre. There is no real sense of place, and the sculptures of Lynn Chadwick are edged out without relationship to the Square. Tinguely/Niki de SaintPhalle’s approach above IRCAM in Paris is both apposite and happy and contrasts with the corporate world’s approach to space and sculpture.

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Where is the plinth of the skyline? At the risk of being over-simplistic, the skyline has traditionally been the domain of power – whether secular or religious – and the expression of domination. As Andy Warhol said, ‘When I see the New York skyline, I think only of money’. It makes evident the fine line between democracy and autocracy. In London we protect views of St Paul’s dome, while Paris celebrates the Sacré Coeur on the hill of Montmartre. The Sacré Coeur exploits topography whereas London tries to ensure a tree-lined horizon to the north and south. Here, the plinth is the natural topography. The Spire of Dublin has no traditional plinth. Essentially optimistic, it is like a candle that all the darkness of the world cannot extinguish. It slips through a cast bronze disc flush with the ground without touching it – an expanding cone heading towards the centre of the

earth where its diameter roughly equates to the area of County Dublin. The Spire ‘extends’ to infinity above celestial acupuncture – playing with light through capturing the life of the sky over Dublin and allowing it to flow to the street below and to disappear into the earth along with any rainwater from its surface. The base of the Spire itself is partially polished in order to reflect the light of street life. This abstract polished surface is defined by a pattern created by the interference of a core of the rock, taken from the site below, that was ‘rolled’ across the double helix of DNA, a reference to the Irish diaspora, as is the expanding spiral of the cone itself. Out in the ‘Green city’, our designs for new pylons for Electricité de France, like grasses, also have no plinth. They too appear to come from the earth within which they are placed. Alba di Milano has a plinth in the form of its feet that counteract the cantilever forces of the arms stretching upwards at an angle. These feet are important elements in providing seats within the piazza. When we construct commemorative monuments or sculptures we also construct space around them, and this space is often the most contentious element in any proposal that manifests thought and feeling, angst and joy, fear and hope. These are emotional and atavistic qualities, but making them evident is far more difficult, especially if they are counter to the prevailing culture. Skylines are monuments as well as products of the prevailing culture. Purely because they are not in the frame of thought of those who have the power and wherewithal to create the skyline, sculptors and their sensibilities are absent from the skyline of most cities. Given the significance of skylines, they ought to make us happy, and we might think about who is best placed to achieve this, bearing in mind that it seems the only difference between public sculpture and architecture is that the latter has working lavatories.

All photographs courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts.

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STEEL ARBOUR A tautly detailed steel pergola forms the formal and spatial focus of a new Korean restaurant in downtown Los Angeles.

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Richard Lundquist trained at the AA and acquired his mastery of steel working for Morphosis in the mid-1980s and then for Michele Saee, where he was project designer on two cuttingedge clothing stores. His most ambitious project since setting up his own office in 1990 is the Chosun Galbi restaurant in Koreatown, a burgeoning immigrant community west of downtown Los Angeles. For the client it represented a big step up both in size (790 sq m) and sophistication from her other restaurant a block away, and a daring departure from the traditional red and gilt of the neighbourhood eateries. The corner site faces onto a busy commercial thoroughfare

and was occupied by a brick building that Lundquist was commissioned to remodel and extend. When it proved to be unsafe and was torn down, the architect designed a layered steel and concrete structure within the original footprint, so avoiding the need for a new permit. An almost unbroken wall of splitface concrete block wraps around the two street facades, shutting out traffic noise. Nearly everyone enters from the rear car park, and Lundquist has choreographed a succession of eating and circulation spaces that subtly blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors. You enter between 3m-high block walls past an eye-level water garden, under a muscular

steel pergola and between a pair of semi-enclosed banquet rooms to reach the bar and reception area. The main dining room opens off to the left; ahead is an intimate eating area, screened by a high-backed bamboo bench. At the front, looking north through high narrow windows, is a long room that can be subdivided by pull-down mesh blinds to create three spaces for private parties. In its fragmentation, the restaurant responds to an East Asian fondness for gatherings of family or friends, but the transparency and honed slate floor that extends through from car park to street line ties these intimate areas together. Materiality and bold sculptural forms are the design’s hallmarks.

1, 2 A shallow arched steel pergola, which has become the restaurant’s signature, encloses an outdoor dining space, blurring distinctions between outside and in.

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The pergola has become the restaurant’s signature. Rolled I-beams support four shallow interwoven arches, each comprising a pair of rolled I-beams spanned by a trellis of vertical steel slats that will be covered with bougainvillaea. The structure was fabricated off-site and delivered in 13m sections that were hoisted into place by crane. Two banquet rooms, separated by a circulation area, have arched vaults of bamboo boards interwoven like the strands of a basket within a stainless-wrapped steel frame.

Walls of the same boards are cut away at top and bottom to admit air and natural light. Built-in seats are stained and upholstered plywood on a stainless-steel frame. Aluminium-plate patio chairs have waterproof foam lining. The spacious entry area has a bamboo reception desk facing a bar and both have tops of curved aluminium plate. Tabletop barbecues are the restaurant’s speciality and stainless exhaust vents reach down over every grill, giving the main dining area a somewhat menacing air. MICHAEL WEBB

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6 Architect Richard Lundquist Architect, Glendale, USA Project team Richard Lundquist, Sookja Lee, David Takacs Structural engineer Franceschi Engineering Lighting consultant LAMF Photographs Mark Luthringer, 1, 2, 5, 6 Benny Chan, 3, 4

3 Slate, steel and bamboo boards exude aura of exquisite austerity. 4 Light dapples through the pergola’s steel slats. 5 Stainless-steel vents hovering menacingly over barbecue tables have a strong sculptural presence. 6 Private dining room enclosed by bamboo slat walls.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The Rural Studio at Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction was founded in 1992 by the late Sam Mockbee (AR February 2002), with the aim of extending the study of architecture into a socially responsible context. Every quarter, groups of students elect to and live and work off campus in impoverished parts of western Alabama. The students produce architecture that challenges convention in terms of methods, materials, and forms (AR March 2001). They inventively scavenge and incorporate discarded objects such as tyres, scrap timber, bottles and even car windows and number plates. The result is an architecture that combines vernacular archetypes with more adventurous form making, grounded by a strong sense of place.

The recently completed renovation of Newbern Baseball Club is more than a simple physical improvement. Baseball occupies a hallowed place in American culture and in Newbern, a tiny country hamlet, the baseball field acts as strong civic focus for the community. Lying to the north-east of the hamlet (Newbern consists of just six buildings), a small piece of farmland has been the site of regional baseball games for the last 100 years. Under the auspices of the Rural Studio, three fifthyear architecture students planned, designed and built a new fence, seating and other general site improvements. Part funding was provided by the Alabama Civil Justice Foundation. The main element of the refurbishment is a tall steel chain link fence that surrounds the playing area. The aim was to create a protective, permeable

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enclosure without horizontal bracing, which might impede views of the game. The outcome is a structure made up of a series of chain-link sheets moored by horizontal tensile cables. The form of the backstop (the place where the batsman stands) encourages close interaction between fans and players. Materials used are common to the area. Black tube steel was sourced from local foundries, together with telegraph poles and guy wires which were donated by a power supplier. Methods of construction are derived from several trades, such as telegraph workers, machine shop welders and farmers. The site had no electricity or water, so everything was built using hand or gas powered tools by the three students, who learned how to weld, operate heavy machinery and survey, together with basic turf maintenance and carpentry.

Typical of the Rural Studio capacity to elevate and transform everyday materials, the chain link billows and wafts lightly around the ground, like mesh sails. The unusual geometry was dictated in part by the trajectories of baseballs flying through the air. Detailing is simple and economical, yet the entire construction has a curiously lyrical quality. The renovated field has proved extremely popular with the local community, who avidly flock to it every Sunday afternoon to watch games and enjoy picnics. Mockbee was no sentimentalist; this project is rooted in reality, yet like all Rural Studio work, it somehow brilliantly transcends its unassuming surroundings. C. S.

design review B ASEBALL FIELD , N EWBERN , USA A RCHITECT R URAL S TUDIO

Project team Jay Sanders, Marnie Bettridge, James Kirkpatrick Photographs Timothy Hursley

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1 Vertical members are stayed by horizontal cables. 2 Chain link billows like mesh sails. 3 All materials are common to area, many donated by local firms.

Three students designed this scheme, taught themselves to work in metal, and made it.

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Madrid-based Luis Mansilla and his partner Emilio Tuñon began their careers in the office of Rafael Moneo and their work is strongly inflected by similar formal concerns. Neutral, toplit containers, solid, alcazar-like walls and the subtle play of light are intelligently choreographed to create a sense of depth and solidity. Critic David Cohn notes that ‘They profess a formal restraint which recalls the late Spanish master Alejandro de la Sota. As they themselves describe it: “Architecture isn’t exactly silent. It is more like a conversation in lowered voices. Ideas are present, but the true effort lies in making them invisible”.’ One of their largest and most recent projects is the new Museum of Fine Arts in Castellón. Surrounded by undistinguished mid-rise apartment blocks dating from the 1980s, the museum lies, unusually, in a residential area on the edge of town. Its collection is diverse, ranging from Roman archaeological specimens to paintings by local artists such as Francisco Ribalta and José Ribera. Incorporated into the new complex are the surviving chapel and cypress-filled cloister from a Catholic school (the Serra Espada) that originally occupied the site. These existing historic fragments have been joined by two legibly contemporary new additions. To the east of the cloister, a five-storey cubic volume, sphinx-like and inscrutable, houses the new exhibition spaces and forms the public focus of the museum. To the west, a long low bar contains restoration studios, workspaces and storerooms, marking out a more private, specialist domain. In between, the restored courtyard building mediates between the two realms, with a library, auditorium, offices, technical spaces and a long gallery for temporary exhibitions arranged around the cloister. The three volumes are linked by a plinth, creating a gradient of intimacy between the public areas to the east and the workshops on the western boundary.

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1 Impervious panels contrast with veil-like window grilles, both in recycled aluminium, showing the material at its most noble. 2 Entrance in north-east corner is through court in plinth.

TREASURE CHEST Castellón’s museum is conceived as a hermetic, almost impervious aluminium chest that guards the city’s fine collections. Inside, it allows its treasures to be eloquent.

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dissected axonometric: existing cloister in middle of composition

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Conceived as a hermetic chest guarding the city’s treasures, the new exhibition block is a sealed, impassive cube topped by rows of tall rooflights. The geometry of the rooflights gives the building a crenellated profile so it looms over its surroundings like a brooding castle battlement. The same serrated silhouette rounds off the long workshop volume on the opposite side of the cloister. This slightly daunting mood is lifted by playful superscale letters spelling out MUSEU supporting a canopy that defines one edge of the entrance parvis. (A giant photograph of the individual letters being transported on lorries barrelling along the motorway from Madrid forms one of the museum’s more surreal exhibits.) The idea of the building as a chest or case is further elaborated by its enveloping metal carapace made from panels of recycled aluminium. Two kinds of panels are used, one opaque with vertical ridges, and the other resembling a veil, with horizontal louvres that allow light to filter into the gallery spaces. The narrow borders of each panel are stamped Museu de Bellas Artes, a mark that identifies the building for which they were made, in the manner of the Roman bricks in the museum’s collection. The horizontal and vertical striations of the aluminium panels create a strong geometrical rhythm and texture, softening and breaking up the immense mass of the exterior. Seamed zinc sheeting is used to clad the opaque parts of the roof. Spread over five floors, the museum’s collection is divided into four themed sections (fine arts, craftwork, ceramics and archaeology). Rooms are linked by a series of double-height voids that cascade down diagonally through the interior. Drawn upwards from floor to floor, visitors are simultaneously confronted with three different scales and aspects of the building: individual rooms, the double-height voids and a dramatic diagonal prospect of the entire volume. A 7.3m x 6.6m grid, common to both plans and sections, ensures formal coherence. The spatial sequence is crowned by the parallel skylight bars which diffuse a soft luminance into the gallery spaces. In places, milky glass external walls give diffused views of the louvred metal skin beyond. A spirit of elegant materiality prevails (another characteristic of Moneo), with benches and display cases fashioned from modular assemblies of iroko strips and thin sheets of glass. Calm and ascetic, the interior acts as a discreet backdrop for treasures on show. Like Portia’s lead casket in The Merchant of Venice, Mansilla + Tuñon’s sober metal container conceals a radiant richness at its heart. CARLA BERTOLUCCI

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Architect Mansilla + Tuñon Arquitectos, Madrid Associate architects Santiago Hernán, J. Carlos Corona Structural engineer Alfonso G. de Gaite Mechanical engineer J. G. Associates Photographs Luis Asin

5 Ground floor reception area. 6,7 Contrasts between the majestic volumes of the promenade architecturale and the more intimate volumes of the galleries allow opportunities for display of objects of all kinds.

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Srebrenice’s new cemetery forms the first phase of a larger project for a forest graveyard which began as an open competition in 1989. The ensuing Balkans war and Slovenia’s seccession from Yugoslavia put the scheme on hold, but it has at last been completed to a design by Ales Vodopivec. The brief for this first phase involved a funerary hall with four smaller attendant chapels, and a separate ancillary building. Space for some 3000 graves has been carefully created in the surrounding forest. Comparisons with Asplund and Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery

in Stockholm (1920) are irresistible, but the project is also part of a wider tradition of restrained Modernism (Vodopivec describes it as an ‘architecture of silence’) that engages in a dialogue with nature in the manner of Kahn and Aalto and reflects concerns with ritual and memory. The two parts of the complex are aligned on a processional north-south axis. This runs from the main road to the north through the forest to link with a series of serpentine paths that meander around the grave fields on the eastern flank of the site. At its

south end, the axis terminates in a mound of trees reserved for the ashes of unidentified or unclaimed bodies, giving special and poignant prominence to the unknown dead. The first public indication of the cemetery’s presence is a flower shop set into the single-storey ancillary building on the edge of the main road. From its progress through the forest, the processional approach route eventually opens out into a clearing to reveal the main funerary hall attached to a row of family chapels. Arrival is denoted by a simple colonnaded portico

LAST RITES Deep in a Slovenian woodland, the material and the spiritual are sensitively conjoined in a tranquil haven for human leavetaking and remembrance.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) (traditionally used to mark a consecrated space), its arboreal form an abstraction of the surrounding trees. Straddling the road, the portico leads into the main chapel, an austere box glazed on three sides and enclosed by an external layer of slatted timber screens. Filtered through the screens, the wooded landscape of pine, beech, hornbeam and spruce forms a serene backdrop to the funerary rites. In the smaller yet equally ascetic family chapels, light filters through precisely cut clerestory strips so that the ceilings appear to float above the walls. Heightening the sense of seclusion and contemplation, each chapel overlooks a small internal courtyard. Chapels are linked and serviced on the east side by a long corridor, animated

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by light gently percolating through vertical incisions along one wall. Throughout the chapel complex, materials such as untreated oak, fairfaced concrete, glass and local stone are as consistently simple and reticent as the spatial organization. Vodopivec’s modest complex of buildings exhibits little that is especially surprising or exciting, yet in orchestrating a balance between the material and the spiritual, the architecture is infused with a powerful tension derived from the almost clinical geometry of the manmade set against the organic and enduring presence of nature. Bare and mute, freed of all image and illusion, architecture and landscape combine to form a sober, tranquil and utterly fitting place for the final leavetaking. CLAUDIA KUGEL

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Architect Ales Vodopivec, Ljubljana, Slovenia Project team Ales Vodopivec, Nena Gabrovec Structural engineer Anton Berce Landscape architects Dusan Ogrin, Davorin Gazvoda Photographs Miran Kambic

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ar house KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA ARCHITECT KERRY HILL ARCHITECTS

Nuanced materiality 1

The Mirzan House is located in a secluded valley, surrounded by steeply rising ground and lofty trees close to the centre of the Malaysian capital. Visitors’ cars arrive via a narrow road and pass a security checkpoint before swinging sharply into a paved motor court. Like other projects by Kerry Hill Architects, the house exhibits a clear plan. Explaining his desire for clarity, Kerry Hill has said: ‘The plan is seen as a mode of distilling elements into a clear diagram, a key to the scheme.’ So the plan of the house is an asymmetrical composition of solids, voids and planes, related to a primary axis,

Kerry Hill has established an approach to South-east Asian building that combines Modern Movement disciplines with an engagement with tropical climates.

with walls extending outwards to frame views of the valley and to embrace soft landscapes and paved courtyards. A projecting flat-roofed portico gives access to a wide covered gallery, a promenade architecturale some 60 metres in length, which runs the full length of the house from east to west and which is open along its southern flank. This linear route is the principal organizing device and one that Hill has employed successfully in earlier projects. To the south of this long gallery are three attached pavilions of varying proportions and height. The first is a double-storey

reception hall with an adjoining guest suite; the second is used for formal dining. Both are linked by flat stone bridges across a linear reflecting pool which runs parallel to the gallery. A third pavilion, housing the family, is set at a slight distance from the other accommodation and terminates the east-west axis. The children’s bedrooms, at second-storey level in this pavilion, span the master bedroom and the family room, framing a view of the pool deck beyond. The three pavilions are all one room deep, permitting cross ventilation, but also have the option of using air conditioning.

1 Fundamentally (with variations, see 3) the building has a lightweight first floor over a masonry base. 2 Motor court with entrance right. 3 The precise and climatically appropriate detailing we have come to expect from the Hill practice. (Guest suite terminates reception pavilion: shutters are openable.)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) To the north of the gallery, concealed by a timber-clad screen wall, are the servant spaces (to use Louis Kahn’s terminology), commencing with a four-car garage and an administrative office, leading to driver and domestic staff accommodation, wet and dry kitchens and food preparation spaces. These spaces can be separately accessed via a service walkway running along the north facade of the house. A singular feature of the house is the spatial separation of functions, although each activity relates to, and returns to, the dominant linear east-west axis.The house incorporates a

hierarchy of privacy, with a choreographed route from the arrival courtyard, to the air-conditioned public reception hall, to the dining pavilion and finally to the private and most secure family areas. The intention is to extend the house to the south with the addition of a guest pavilion and a tennis court. At the extreme western end of the rectangular site is a recreation court with a 25-metre swimming pool. Beyond the low boundary wall that marks the limit of the site, the forested terrain ascends abruptly making access almost impossible from the head of the valley.

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The principal rooms look into a soft-landscaped courtyard bounded by a low hedge. Eight torches, which can be dramatically lit in the evening, are arranged in an orthogonal pattern on the lawn outside the dining room. The Mirzan House continues Kerry Hill’s development of a regional modern architecture which I have discussed elsewhere in relation to the Cluny Hill House (1998) in Singapore. The language is one of abstract modernism overlaying, or overlaid by, local typologies. The first storey is predominantly

masonry while the second storey is lighter, mainly clad in timber, with projecting fenestration that simulates traditional monsoon windows, above which overhanging, low-pitched hipped roofs are covered with hardwood shingles. Together with the use of louvred timber screens and reflecting pools, they create a calm and richly nuanced materiality that is enhanced by a muted palette of colours. Simplicity is the keynote of the reductionist architectural language but it also engages directly with the tropical climate.

As Geoffrey London has perceptively noted: ‘Like an illustrious group of architects from the West – Wright, Le Corbusier, Kahn – Hill’s modernist work has been enriched by accommodating the traditions of the East.’ The result in the case of the Mirzan House is a dramatic composition that responds magnificently to a site of considerable natural beauty. ROBERT POWELL Architect Kerry Hill Architects Photographs Albert Lim

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Rufisque is a port just to the east of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Like most other cities in Africa, it is undergoing traumatic transformation with the impact of modern technology, and a surge of immigration from the countryside. In Rufisque, problems are made more extreme because the sea is eating into the place from the south, so expansion has to take place in the arid land north of the city, and a grey concrete shanty town is growing up there. Shabby suburban streets are suddenly relieved by an almost strident red building, crisply detailed and well tended. This is the women’s centre, a focus for local groups, a reception organization for rural immigrants and a powerhouse for empowering women in a traditionally male orientated culture. Saija Hollmén, Jenni Reuter and Helena Sandman submitted a proposal for the centre to the Otaniemi School of Architecture, and the project was developed with the help of the Finnish Foreign Ministry, and Finnish foundations as well as local organizations – the land was given by the city.* Sociologist Anne Rosenlew co-ordinated cultural interaction. The site is next to the usually dry wadi which runs through the bidonville and hence it was available for (careful) development. ‘A house under a baobab tree’, the centre is modelled on traditional compounds in this part of West Africa, with a strong perimeter surrounding buildings turned inwards to a communal court. The baobab is one of the few trees left in an area that is starved of wood. It shades one of the two principal entrances to the complex, a gateway that leads to the communal hall. The other public entrance is on the north-west corner of the compound. Here is an attempt to make a small public square, on to

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WOMEN’S RIGHTS Intimate knowledge of the culture and technology of Senegal has enabled young Finnish architects to create a centre intended to empower women in a society where they are normally suppressed.

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1 The hall entrance under the baobab tree, from outside ... 2 ... and in. (Stairs go up over guard’s room to viewing terrace.)

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which the centre’s shop and restaurant open. The attempt is fine – what’s needed is response from the surrounding owners of the grey buildings, who think they cannot afford to give so much as a metre of their land to the public realm. Once inside the compound, all is clear and (at the moment) Scandinavian neat. A paved court is enclosed by the orderly rhythm of the piers of the communal hall to the right and the workshops on the other side. The red buildings are massively constructed to exploit the thermal flywheel effect. They have wide overhanging roofs to provide shade and are open to allow the maximum amount of natural ventilation. Up the road is the biggest cement factory in West Africa, so the structure is an in-

situ concrete frame filled in with concrete blocks, cast and cured on site. Roofs have recycled steel rsj structures, carrying corrugated galvanized metal roofing, with reed matting ceilings so that a void is created between metal and reeds which cools the spaces by convection – a similar device was used by Finnish architects Heikkinen & Komonen when they worked on the poultry farming school at Koliagbe in Guinea (AR November 2001. At Rufisque, every effort has been made to reduce use of wood – the region’s most precious natural resource. Not only are the doors and windows made of steel, but the reinforcing bars of the insitu structure are of the recycled metal. Ventilation is often achieved by using wheel hubs from clapped-out vehicles as protective

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grilles. Bottle bottoms sometimes make windows, though these are usually just openings shielded at night by steel shutters. The craft centre is largely open between its piers to allow the poisonous gases of the dying processes to be dissipated. The rhythm of its open colonnade is echoed in that of the hall across the court. Here is dignified and noble public architecture created with few means, and a building which may have a profound effect on the society for which it has been made. ANNE ANSTRUTHER * The NGO project was carried out through the Tekniska Föreigning i Finland.

Architect Hollmén Reuter Sandman, Helsinki Photographs Juha Ilonen

7 Colonnade on north side of court. 8 Dying vats in craft centre.

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CONICAL REFLECTIONS Erickson’s Tacoma Museum of Glass celebrates manufacture and material qualities of one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

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Arthur Erickson is a master of raised urban ground. His splendid piazza in Vancouver, which gently makes green public terraces in the middle of the city to greet the court building (AR July 1980) is surely one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century urban design. His Museum of Glass at Tacoma, further down the Pacific coast in Washington State, USA, is another essay in the same vein (though smaller). And it is a new Erickson venture into museum building, recalling his legendary Vancouver museum of the culture of indigenous peoples. Unlike that building, the glass museum is downtown, locked into urban structure of railway and highway, seaside and centre. It ascends from the waterfront of the Foss Channel, one of Tacoma’s harbours, as a series of planes, some of water, which are linked by ramps and a grand stair that winds round the dramatic signpost of the place, the skewed shining cone of its big space covered by stainless-steel lizardskin tiles. The cone is tilted as an abstracted memory of the structures of the sawmill burners of the Pacific Northwest, but it also evokes the silhouette of Mt Rainier, the magic peak of this part of the coast. Erickson says that the structure would have been clad in glass, and so would much else of the mainly concrete building if ‘devalue engineering’ had not been brought to bear on the project. In the end, he decided that stainless steel could shimmer nearly as piercingly as glass. Most people approach the museum across a bridge which spans railway and motorway. This rather kitsch route is by Andersson Wise working with a local artist who has created ingenious but obvious interpretations of Pacific marine life-forms in glass. The steel and concrete bridge connects the museum’s serene upper level to the core of downtown Tacoma, and the history museum, University of

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Washington, and the future art museum. Other collaborations with artists have been more fruitful, notably the opposed repeating reflective glass planes posed over a long pool by Buster Simpson, and Howard Ben Tré’s deliciously spurting fountains. Inside, the cone’s tall and dramatic space is a hot theatrical inferno. Two furnaces melt glass, and there are five crucibles in which it is kept molten, and an equal number of annealers, in which the finished work is cooled down gently to prevent cracking. Height is needed to get rid of the heat; the furnaces blare and growl. Extremely able and witty glass artists perform in front of an audience of up to 140 people. It is all very different from the calm terraces and stairs which surround the cone, and from the galleries that are under them. These are rather low, neutral spaces but functional: appropriate in scale for the necessarily small objects that they are designed to exhibit, which are often excellently demonstrated by careful use of electric light. It is sad that Erickson, the master of voids and shafts of light, was not able to thoughtfully introduce more natural luminance: glass and transparency are just as important in moderating daylight as the electric produced variety. Surely in a museum devoted to glass production, we should have some notion of the material’s intermediary role between outside and in. The cone is the dramatic focus. It crashes down into the galleries, the cafeteria and foyer, still wearing its stainless-steel lizard armour, making you always aware of the theatre it contains. It is often assumed that Erickson is a sketcher – not too involved with the making of his ideas. But at Tacoma, detailing is thoroughly thought out: clean, simple and well made, it is a very fine example of what can be achieved within the usually crushingly efficient but dull US building industry. E. M.

GLASS MUSEUM, TACOMA, USA ARCHITECT ARTHUR ERICKSON WITH THOMAS COOK REED REINVALD ARCHITECTS

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Like a modern Medici with matching accessories, Miuccia Prada and her eponymous fashion house have become synonymous with a shrewdly intrepid approach to architectural patronage. Since 1999, Prada has embarked on a programme of new store designs and brand expansion through a select stellar cabal of the avantgarde (Rem Koolhaas, Kazuyo Sejima, and Herzog & de Meuron). Though the worlds of architecture and fashion have a fertile and

often colourful reciprocity, this goes beyond the periodic tasteful fit-out into a more serious (and big budget) exploration of the radical that aims to reinvent the simple act of clothes shopping into a singular experience – consumerism as culture or religion and shops as carefully choreographed environments or temples. (Perhaps not so different from the Medicis after all.) The first so-called ‘Epicentre’ store designed by Koolhaas was unveiled on New

York’s Broadway in 2000; three years on, fashionistas and architecture pilgrims have a new reference point on their global compasses with the completion of the biggest Prada flagship store to date in Tokyo, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. At a cost of £52 million, budget, it seems, is no object, despite falls in company profits (down from £36 million in 2001 to £19 million last year, though the Asian market is still apparently buoyant). The Swiss partnership has also been charged with converting a piano factory for the house’s New York head office and designing a new production centre in Tuscany. Such creative interaction represents an intriguing shift in the cultural landscape of architecture. Whereas a generation ago architects’ imaginations were exercised by helicopters and yachting wire, now it is high fashion and modern art. Prada Tokyo is in Harajuku, an area famous for both its couture and street fashion, manifest by the parades of exotically attired young Japanese who cruise up and down the broad main drag of Otomosando, which, with its trees and cafés, is Tokyo’s closest approximation to a Parisian boulevard. At its east end it tapers and morphs into the city’s Bond Street, an elegant ghetto of deluxe flagships clinging staidly together, like first class passengers in the Titanic’s lifeboats, for succour against the blare and dislocation of modern Tokyo. In a city with virtually no public space in the European sense (land is far too precious a commodity to remain empty), Herzog & de Meuron’s first move is a bold and urbanistically generous one, stacking up the shop and office accommodation into a stumpy five-sided block to create a small piazza at its base. The piazza is enclosed by an angular wall covered in soft green moss that will gradually flourish, a reminder of the slow beauty of organic life in the midst of artifice. Hemmed in on all sides by low-rise buildings, the forecourt provides a breathing space for meeting, socializing and window shopping. It also makes the tower more of a distinguishable object in its own right, like a chunky bubblewrapped bauble on a tray.

1 The Prada tower draws back from the edge of its site to create a small public piazza. 2 Detail of the rhomboidal grid with its glass infill panels that envelops the building like a huge net or piece of bubble wrap.

F ASHION STORE , T OKYO , J APAN ARCHITECT H ERZOG & DE M EURON OMOTESANDO SUBWAY STATION EXIT

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Wrapped in a crystalline grid, this new store in Tokyo marks the latest step in Prada’s plans for world fashion domination.

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Though it might appear capricious, the irregular geometry of the tower is in fact dictated by Tokyo’s complex zoning and planning laws that have shaped and eroded the basic six-storey block. Herzog & de Meuron’s early exploratory models resembled roughly carved pieces of ice, now evolved into a more streamlined and tautly chamfered form. This is wrapped in a rhomboidal grid, like a giant fishing net (or string vest), infilled with a mixture of flat, concave and convex panels of glass. Most are clear, some, where they enclose changing rooms, are translucent. The convex panels billow out gently through the grid like bubbles or puckered flesh (enhancing the string vest analogy). Cunningly, there is no single focal shop window; rather the entire building is a huge display case, generating faceted reflections and an array of changing, almost cinematic, views from both outside and inside. At night, light pulsates through the crystalline lattice, tantalizingly exposing floors of merchandise. Tied back to the vertical cores of the building, the tubular steel grid forms part of the structure, so that facade and structure are in effect a seamless entity. The grid acts as stiffening element, bracing the structure against seismic forces. Inside all is equally seamless. A meandering labyrinth of cool white space forms a suitably neutral canvas for the carefully orchestrated display of designer objects. At intervals, the double-

height spaces are penetrated by the diagrid structure, bleached white like dinosaur ribs. Changing rooms are enclosed by panels of electropic glass that can turn opaque at the flick of a switch. Lights and monitors wiggle provocatively on serpentine stalks adding a whiff of Barbarella campness, compounded by the puzzling and slightly perverse presence of an array of white fur rugs. And everywhere there are glimpses of the Tokyo streetscape filtered and framed by the giant net. Though Prada is undoubtedly technically sophisticated, you wonder, slightly heretically, if a mere boutique merits such a concentrated application of resources and architectural imagination. But this is the rarefied world of fashion, where normal rules have never applied. PHOEBE CHOW

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6 Inside the seamless white labyrinth. 7 At night the crystalline lattice pulsates with light. 8 Snorkel-like fittings add a camp, futuristic air. The untreated timber floor is a reprise of Tate Modern.

Architect Herzog & de Meuron, Basel Project team Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Stefan Marbach, Reto Pedrocchi, Wolfgang Hardt, Hiroshi Kikuchi, Yuko Himeno, Shinya Okuda, Daniel Pokora, Mathis Tinner, Luca Andrisani, Andreas Fries, Georg Schmid Associate architect Takenaka Corporation Structural engineers Takenaka Corporation, WGG Schnetzer Puskas Mechanical engineers Takenaka Corporation, Waldhauser Engineering Facade consultant Emmer Pfenninger Lighting consultant Arup Lighting Photographs Nacasa & Partners

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[email protected] - 164 Built like a ship, Yokohama’s new port terminal is an audacious fusion of architecture and engineering that creates a topographic landscape for public activities.

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In Japan, the economy has been mired in recession for at least a decade. Banks are sagging under the weight of bad debts, the social contract of guaranteed lifetime employment is beginning to fray, and yet construction is booming. Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, and Kevin Roche have built prestigious towers in the expansive new Shiodome office park, located on former rail yards in central Tokyo, and the huge Mori mixed-use development is nearing completion across town in Roppongi. Bridges and expressways are still heading off to remote areas, though few can afford the tolls and they are customarily deserted. Prefectural governors continue to build imposing museums, sports stadiums, and other public works in remote locations, without pausing to consider how they will be used and maintained. The juggernaut seems unstoppable. The Yokohama International Port Terminal is the latest of these grandiose gestures, and, like the Tokyo International Forum (AR November 1996), it was

1 With its gently undulating roofscape, Yokohama’s new port terminal is intended to create civic spaces for different kinds of activities, as well as accommodate cruise ships. 2 The terminal under construction on its huge finger-like pier.

probably inspired more by a craving for prestige than a recognition of need. Yokohama, a poor fishing village when Commodore Perry landed there in 1853, has become the second largest city in Japan, rivalling Tokyo as a port, and it would like to be seen as something more than an industrial appendage of the capital. It seems an unlikely destination for cruise ships, though, and the present total is only 50 to 60 a year, staying for an average of two days each. However, the authorities decided to replace the small 1960s terminal with one that can accommodate up to four ships at a time, and Foreign Office Architects won the 1995 competition with their brilliant concept of a self-supporting steel structure, built like a ship, that would integrate the flow of passengers with public gathering places into a seamless whole. As visitors to the same architects’ British Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale discovered (AR October 2002), the design is extraordinarily complex, but the product of these stacks of working drawings (many

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revised on site during construction) is one of beguiling simplicity and power. Spaces and surfaces are woven together and flow continuously from one end of the 400m long building to the other. Ramps link the different levels and blur the divisions between enclosed space, the cantilevered decks, and the undulating roof promenade. The terminal sits atop the Osanbashi pier, and is built from prefabricated sections of fire-resistant steel plates that are folded like origami and backed by stiffened girders to form an integral structure-skin and provide clear spans of up to 30m. Floorboards of ipe, a dense Brazilian hardwood, flow through walls of glass that are stabilized with glass fins. The consistent use of steel, wood, and glass ties the whole structure together. Visitors can drive into the first floor parking area or walk into the arrivals and departures hall from the top of the entry ramp. Ships dock on either side of the pier and board or disembark their passengers through walkways into the customs and immigration area that is separated from the public area by movable barriers. On either side of this secure zone, enclosed ramps arch over to Osanbashi Hall, a cavernous multi-purpose room that can also be accessed from a broad ramp leading down from the roof. It was the inspiration of the architects – Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and their team – to go beyond the original brief

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3 Clad in planks of ipe, a dense Brazilian hardwood (and the same timber used to build Coney Island pier in New York), the contours of roof resemble delicate origami folds. 4 The geometry of the surface follows the geometry of the structural system. Folded steel plates backed by stiffened girders form an integral structure skin and provide clear spans of up to 30m.

for a terminal, and develop the promenade as a major public amenity: a place where locals could stroll out into the harbour and look back at their city. Anticipating that cruise ship traffic would be insufficient to make full use of the complex, they designed it as an infrastructure that could be used for markets, expositions, and group activities of every size. Show cars can be driven into the arrivals hall, and down the ramp to Osanbashi Hall, and this broad walkway is flanked by bleachers for outdoor performances. Moussavi envisages the building serving as a huge foyer for floating attractions that might be moored here at the pier as cruise traffic allows. Foreign Office had to fight to preserve the integrity of their design while keeping it within the allocated budget. Five years elapsed between the competition and the start of construction, and when the job was put out to tender, there was a steel shortage in Tokyo that drove up the price. The architects reduced the thickness of the plates and found alternative sources in Japan and Korea. Sections were prefabricated in shipyards and brought to the site by barge – an appropriate use of local technology that strengthens the structure’s links to its site. As an economy, skylights were eliminated, but, happily, so was the client’s misguided impulse to cover up the steel with plaster. Furniture that would have made the promenade more user-friendly was also cut,

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5 The changing landscape of the roof promenade. Just under a third of the area of the roof is planted with grass and angular roof projections provide shade. 6 Promenade overlooking the main entrance and end of the traffic plaza. 7 Custom-designed stainless-steel balustrades with rhomboid mesh, like fishing nets, define the usable domain. 8 Tiered contours create open-air theatre.

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leaving only a few uncomfortable steel-pipe benches, some token canopies that fold up from the deck, and entirely too much chainlink fencing – primly shutting off the steeper contours where (horrors!), someone might stumble and fall. Lawn was added at both ends of the boardwalk to secure a grant for introducing greenery, but signs warn visitors against stepping on it. The uplighting within the three halls can be boosted with downlights as needed; however, there is less natural lighting than the architects had intended. Though customs officers work here for only a few hours a week at most, they insisted on enclosed offices, walled in translucent glass, obscuring the side windows. Former retail tenants, however tacky, were allotted similar areas along the edge of the arrivals hall, and the café, which could have been entirely transparent, was enclosed. As a result, the halls have to be artificially lit even on bright days, and the sweeping panorama of the harbour is blocked. But these are minor criticisms of a remarkable achievement. It’s a miracle that so audacious a building was completed in just over two years (by three contractors working closely together), and that solutions were found to the engineering challenges and client change orders while going only two per cent over the original budget of 23 billion yen (129 million pounds). In contrast to the Sydney Opera

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10 Ramps lead down from the terminal concourse to the car parking deck below, extending the architectural language of the roof. 11 Inside the domestic terminal. The folded plane structure is clearly legible.

Architect Foreign Office Architects, London Project team (detailed design and construction) Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Shoukan Endo, Kensuke Kishikawa, Yasuhisa Kikuchi, Izumi Kobayashi, Kenichi Matsuzawa, Tomofumi Nagayama, Xavier Ortiz, Lluis Viu Rebes, Keisuke Tamura Structural engineer Structural Design Group Services engineer P. T. Morimura & Associates Associate architect GKK Photographs Satoru Mishima

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House, which dominates its waterfront and has become an internationally recognized icon, or the Constructivist exuberance of Michael Rotondi’s Dragon Promenade in Nagasaki harbour (AR December 1998), the Port Terminal is intentionally low-profile, deferring to the floating hotels; from a distance it resembles an earthwork more than a building. The roof promenade divides at the entry and extends forward in two steep banks to embrace the approach road and draw people up to explore its folded and rounded terrain. From this sensuously modelled landscape, evoking without mimicking the roll of the ocean, the new trophy buildings that line the waterfront look like a row of Alessi tchotchkes. And the interiors have the sweep and authority that Le Corbusier recognized in the George Washington Bridge; architecture and engineering indissolubly fused.

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ar house H OUSE , C ABO S AN L UCAS , M EXICO ARCHITECT S TEVEN H ARRIS A RCHITECTS

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A cut above On a rocky site over the Pacific Ocean, a Mexican house exploits the prospect and arid beauty of the site.

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The Weiss House, by Steven Harris Architects, has been built into the rocky contours of a headland, 75m above the Pacific Ocean in Cabo San Lucas; it is the southernmost private house at the foot of the Baja Peninsula, one of the few places in the world where the desert meets the sea. The landscape is an arid one of rock and sandy windswept soils; and natural vegetation, of desert grasses and cacti, is sparse. Wishing to preserve the particular beauty of the

landscape and disturb it as little as possible, the architects divided the house into two separate wings, dispersing them to the perimeter of the site. The result is a marvellous sense of space, light and air; and an impression of experiencing the land as it is, for as well as being spread out horizontally, the structures take advantage of vertical drops. The approach to the house, looking down on roofs and with a view of the Pacific, gives some intimation of drama. From a car

port you pass between large boulders, down a stair carved out of the rock, to a ramp between two walls where a view of the sea is denied. The path through an entrance pavilion (embellished by a Bertoia sculpture) opens into a magical stony garden, a fragment of desert outcrop sprouting spiny cacti and frangipani. On the east of this internal courtyard is the (private) master bedroom; on the west, are living and dining rooms above a study, with guest accommodation fitted

1 West to swimming pool and Pacific. To right is glass living room facing south and east. 2 East across internal garden to living rooms. 3 From roof of private suite southwest across site to pavilion and living rooms. 4 Swimming pool cantilevered over sea, east to open pavilion on the main upper level with study and guest accommodation beneath.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) into the cliff below. Along the south cliff edge are an open pavilion with study and guest bedrooms beneath, and a pool, cantilevered towards the Pacific. Formally, the building’s austere geometry, suppressed section and subdued palette defer to the muscular forms and subtle hues of the terrain. Open to the limitless expanse of sea on the one hand, to fragments of desert on the other, its interior becomes a series of sensual experiences. Some rooms are cave-like; others at the cliff edge are barely enclosed by glass and seem suspended in mid-air. Light and water are elemental themes running through the design. Glass rods embedded in the east wall of the master bedroom pick up the first rays of sunlight and project large circles on the plane opposite. Underground media and exercise

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rooms, excavated out of the rock to the north, are themselves sources of light. By day illuminated by slivers cut through the ground, they cast luminance at night over the rocky surface and over the entrance path. A glass bottomed runnel, which collects water during the short and torrential rains, doubles as a skylight over a glass shower and over the guest room below. Steps of underlit stone seem to float. Structure is of reinforced concrete and high-strength laminated glass. The area is subject to hurricanes and the glass is braced by a sophisticated system of custom-made stainless steel anchor points – a measure that allows much larger expanses of glass than would otherwise be possible. Otherwise, the concrete construction is conventional and familiar to local craftsmen.

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5 Glass enclosed living quarters on west. 6 Internal garden: an enclosed fragment of natural desert. 7 Living room with transparent walls south and east over sea. 8, 9 Shafts of light illuminate passage to lowest elegantly appointed guest bedroom.

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ROMAN REVIVAL In Frascati, to the south of Rome, the seventeenth-century stables of a famous villa have been converted with great sensitivity into an archaeological museum.

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The Villa Aldobrandini and its spectacular water gardens at Frascati were constructed in 1601-11, during the Counter Reformation, by Carlo Maderno, architect of St Peter’s facade, and Giovanni Fontana. The villa, built as a summer residence for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, ‘nephew’ of Pope Clement VIII, dominates the town, and faces across the countryside to St Peter’s dome. Theatrically set against steep forest on the edge of the town, the villa is the centrepiece of an Arcadian vision of nature. The gardens, with a semi-circular water-theatre and nymphaeum are fed by an axial sequence of waterfalls, and are one of the best

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and most famous examples of early Italian Baroque landscape. The villa is still privately owned, but the suite of seventeenthcentury stable buildings next to the town square now belongs to the city. It has been transformed with great sensitivity, by Massimiliano Fuksas, into the Museo Tuscolano. The museum houses archaeological fragments of the Roman city of Tuscolo, remains of which are scattered over the Alban hills; but it also accommodates an exhibition hall and auditorium. In converting the buildings, Fuksas has impinged very lightly on the old structures, leaving the architecture to speak for itself; but his poetic response

to it, and to the superb setting, is very evident, as is his talent for enhancing inherent architectural drama. The site had two magnificent rectangular halls set end to end, in need of repair and restoration. Once this was done, and the buildings cleared of unnecessary accretions, the architect was left with an enormous double-height volume, requiring a new first floor, and a smaller vaulted one with a chamber above. As an organizing device, a new service core and lift shaft were inserted into the inner end of the main hall, forming a central cross-axis and establishing the museum’s two separate sections.

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1 Main west face. Original entrance (right) is now a window onto town hall square; new entrance (left) in adjacent building. 2 East vaulted gallery on ground floor. 3 Main gallery with new first floor and staircases.

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4 Exhibition hall on upper level; new floor, with glass balustrading, floats free of old structure. 5 Main gallery; north wall and new staircases. Archaeological exhibits in glass case on slender bronze stands. 6 Upper chamber over entrance and glass bridge to exhibition hall. New windows over town hall square.

New insertions have been made distinct from the old structure and the marks of previous occupation and wear and tear have been left as archaeological traces. Except for the occasional plane of coloured plaster and new glazing, the buildings have not been smoothed down; rather, in keeping with the nature of the exhibits, the textures of materials – rough stone, brick, flaking plaster and concrete – have been treasured. In the main gallery a large window, framing a view of the

town hall square, replaced the original main entrance; and a new entrance was created in an adjoining lodge. Within the gallery, RSJ columns and beams support a new first floor of concrete and steel. Floating short of the old perimeter walls, it accommodates an aerial flight of steel and wood stairs from ground level. Another parallel flight beneath takes you to offices on an intermediate level over the entrance. The immateriality of the inserted structures is induced by height and

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entrance main gallery exhibition case service core vaulted gallery exhibition hall auditorium

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length, and by being counterpoised against the massive masonry wall, its thickness displayed in the deep reveals of small square windows set high above the ground. Displayed on slender bronze stands designed by Massimo Mazzone, and illuminated by tiny spots of suspended light, the exhibits have been rendered equally ethereal. Arranged in a long procession, they are enclosed by transparent sheets of toughened laminated glass, 2.60m high and set straight into the polished concrete floor. This crystalline case forms a central spine down the length of the ground floor and is visible from the square outside. As an example of

exhibition design, it is irresistible. Upstairs, is the cultural centre with the well-equipped auditorium contained in the chamber over the vaulted gallery. The larger hall under high roof timbers is used for exhibitions and other cultural events. Through windows there are wide views over the Roman countryside and of the Villa Aldobrandini. Architect Massimiliano Fuksas Architetto, Rome with Doriana O. Mandrelli Project team Massimiliano Fuksas, Doriana O. Mandrelli, Lorenzo Accapezzato Artist Massimo Mazzone Photographs Giovanna Piemonti

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H ISTORICAL MUSEUM , O SAKA , J APAN ARCHITECT T ADAO A NDO

WATER AND LIGHT A new musem dedicated to the relics and techniques of ancient Japanese water engineering is a series of soaring spaces that lyrically synthesize water and light.

The Japanese are mad for museums, erecting elaborate structures to celebrate sand, sunsets, bridges (this last a playful recreation of Palladio’s unrealized design for the Rialto in Venice) and just about everything else that can be put within four walls. Tadao Ando has made a specialty of this building type, designing museums for children, literature, wood, daylight, and two for prehistoric tombs, as well as a succession of art museums – most recently in Fort Worth, Texas. In each, he strives to find an appropriate expression of the theme, developing architectural metaphors from an austere vocabulary of concrete planes and rotundas, ramps and stairs. In the best of these, there is a harmonious match of container and contents; in others, the processional routes and soaring volumes upstage the exhibits and exhaust less athletic visitors. The Sayamaike Historical Museum in Ando’s home city of Osaka is an impressive monument that conveys the power of water and the challenge it presents to engineers who want to tame it. It is located beside an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century. Over the centuries, monks and feudal retainers applied their skills to enlarging the earthen dam and installing wood or stone conduits to carry water to neighbouring fields. Relics of this early engineering were excavated when the shore of the lake was recently heightened and landscaped to serve as a flood control basin. A 15.4m high slice through the old dam was painstakingly cut away, dried out, and reassembled to show how layers were added and sluices threaded through by a succession of builders.

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1 The museum is poised on the edge of an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century. 2 Crisp cuboid volumes are reflected in the building’s internal pools. 3 Simple geometries combine with Ando’s characteristically austere palette of materials.

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4 A rotunda acts as a hinge between the two parts of the building. 5 The long central pool is framed by diaphanous, cascading walls of water, with the rotunda beyond.

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6 Visitors pass along the edge of the central pool, with its light diffusing curtain of water. 7 The soaring internal spaces were determined by the scale of the building’s contents. 8 The excavated wall of a dam housed in a triple-height exhibition hall is museum’s main archaeological relic.

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To house this earthwork, Ando has erected a multi-level bastion that rises like a castle beside the pond, shutting out its banal suburban neighbours. A switchback ramp scales a battered wall of rough granite blocks and you wonder if defenders will appear on the ramparts above and drive you off with rocks and boiling oil. You emerge into a bare concrete piazza and look for an entry to a windowless slab that could be the castle keep. The monolith is enigmatic and seemingly impenetrable, its cross-bracing expressed in bands of white on grey stone. Steps in a corner of the piazza lead down to a court in which you are suddenly overwhelmed by water cascading down the walls, splashing over a recessed walkway, and throwing off a fine mist – as though you had scaled a dam and found yourself in its sluiceway, wondering if the force of the torrent might carry you away. It’s one of Ando’s most compelling theatrical coups, but he diminishes its impact by extending the underwater passage into a rotunda, from where another ramp leads to the mid-level entrance in the side of the slab. Within the museum, the brute power of the masonry and tumbling water is dissipated. Though the earth dam may be historically important, it’s not much to look at and it is dwarfed by the hall that rises far above, even when you are descending the ramp that leads past it to the display area below. Archaeologists may appreciate the fragments of primitive plumbing that are stretched out through another hall and wrapped around the rotunda, but students of architecture are more likely to ignore the displays and gaze admiringly at this monumental sculpture by a master of light, space, and meticulously poured concrete. As such, it’s magnificent, but it drew only a couple of visitors on a recent Sunday afternoon. Nor does the lake lure you to its sterile banks, for the abundant wildlife it may once have contained now survives only as a video (maddeningly repeated in the lobby) in which two insufferably cute infants fly in on a leaf and chatter excitedly about the birds and flowers as music tinkles over this fantasy of nature preserved. MICHAEL WEBB

Architect Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka Project team Tadao Ando, Takaaki Mizutani, Kanya Sogo Structural engineer Wada Mechanical engineer Setsubi-Giken Photographs Shigeo Ogawa/Japan Architect

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Traditionally, there are not many Roman Catholics in Scandinavia. The small town of Kongsvinger, in Norway, east of Oslo and near the Swedish border, has a Catholic community of only some 200 people, made up of immigrants from Vietnam, the Philippines and Poland as well as native Norwegians. To help bring the disparate group together, a new church was necessary. Because of the size of the congregation, the building had to be simple and quite cheap: a basic ‘framework round the liturgy’ was required. The architects replied with a building

of great simplicity, in an arrangement that has become quite common in Scandinavian churches of all denominations: the church faces a roughly similar sized parish hall over an open court that separates sacred and profane areas, with everything being brought together within an overall rectangle – a compact arrangement comparable to, for instance, the church at Mortensrud built for a much bigger (and Lutheran) congregation (AR December 2002, p52). At Kongsvinger, the parts are simple and elemental – all small

abstractions of ancient types. The church itself with its wide, clerestory-lit nave flanked by narrow aisles is a miniature basilica, with the altar emphasized by a skylight, as was the focus of basilican spaces since Roman times; the confessional and the font are in tiny side niches opening off the aisles. The open courtyard, with its surrounding arcades, is clearly descended from the cloister, itself another Roman type that goes back to the atria of the houses of the rich. The parish hall is, in a sense, a negative of the cloister, with arcades surrounding a roofed

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1 Approach from south with church, left, and parish hall, right. 2 Entrance to court: sawn sandstone ashlar is outer skin of blockwork walls. 3 Church main door opening off cloister.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) space instead of one open to the sky; to me at least, the rather dark volume recalls tales of the ancient timber halls of Scandinavian legend – you almost expect a lantern as a reminder of the central smokehole. For Scandinavia, this is a relatively poor parish, and construction is economical and very simple, but there has been enough money to cover the outside of the blockwork walls in a sawn sandstone skin with flush-pointed joints and solid stone lintels over the portals to the cloister. Inside, walls are finished in tinted plaster, with no skirtings against the floors, which themselves are of polished pale concrete. All columns and main beams are 200mm square laminated pine members, while secondary roof elements, roof linings and most other woodwork are made of untreated pine, the aroma of which permeates the whole

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complex. Special pieces, like the pews, where you are literally most in touch with the building, are in oak. Everything has been thought out economically, yet with deep understanding of the sensuous properties of light and material. Sankt Clara’s church is a small, yet powerful distillation of community and the numinous. HENRY MILES Architect Hille Strandskogen, Oslo Project team Ervin Strandskogen, Henrik Hille, Anja Hole Strandskogen Interior design and landscape Hille Strandskogen

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THE TINY PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE SMALL CITY OF CALVI ON THE NORTH-WEST CORSICAN COAST IS A G E N T L E BUT MONUMENTAL DISTILLATION OF THE SPIRITS OF LITERATURE , ENQUIRY AND SCHOLARSHIP .

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Possibly the smallest public library in the world is at Place SaintCharles in Calvi, Corsica. It is certainly the smallest of the 3400 Bibliothèques Pour Tous in the whole of France. John Perrin reports that it was opened in 1966 by the Duchess Pozzo di Borgo, an American married into one of the ancient families of the island. Its octagonal plan is four metres across and it is some five metres high. The octagon, suggests Perrin, was chosen for its resonance with the baptistries of the ancient and gothic worlds. Five of its sides are fully shelved, two are half shelved with windows above and the eighth

side has the French windows of the entrance. A central octagonal librarian’s desk ensures that circulation must be rotatory, but there are usually only four or five users dreaming in the small yet tall and calm space. Perrin says that when he discovered the building, he had to keep returning to it, ‘not just for the novelty value’ but ‘because I had to experience the process of browsing the books in this tiny building that stands so thoughtfully upright…confident in its role as a provider of fact, fable and fiction to the townspeople of Calvi’. The architect is unknown.

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DESIGNER J AAKKO P ERNU

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Jaakko Pernu is a sculptor and land artist who makes remarkably intricate yet monumental constructions using wood. In Finland, blessed with a superabundance of trees, wood has assumed the status of national material, its expressive and regenerative qualities forging a powerful connection with the Finnish psyche. Pernu’s father was a boatbuilder, so since childhood he was exposed to the tactile and sensory nature of timber and gained an appreciation of its technical potential – how it could be cut, shaped and jointed. Since the late ’80s, when he completed his studies at the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts, Pernu has lived and worked in remote northern Finland, drawing inspiration from its huge boreal forests and subtle Nordic light. His favourite wood is willow, both cheap and plentiful and also 1

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constructed from 25 woven willow poles that taper gently upwards like tree trunks or organ pipes. Dried and unpeeled willow members were painstakingly meshed together to form a lacey timber cage, suspended 3m above the ground. The effect is of a compact manmade forest (albeit permanently denuded) set within a real forest. At night, the structure is dramatically illuminated, casting angular shadows through the clearing. Though rooted in a practical craft sensibility, Pernu’s inventive and intuitive explorations of wood draw deeply on folkloric associations with dreaming and enchantment to distil the material’s fundamental essence. C. S. Photographs 2, 4, 5 Jaakko Pernu; 1, Markku Siekkinen; 3, Jukke Pailos

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relatively easy to work, due to its inherent strength and suppleness. Symbolically, willow is associated with the moon, water and rebirth – it regenerates very quickly and its flowering marks the beginning of spring. Its bark also contains valuable pain relieving properties, exploited for centuries in traditional herbal medicine. In Pernu’s extraordinary constructions slender willow members are joined using the simplest of techniques – usually just nails and screws although Pernu is beginning to experiment with glues – to create lattice-like arrangements that have a curious delicacy, despite their huge scale. One of Pernu’s largest works, The Ground Beneath, was created during a six month placement at Oulu Artists’ Workshop. Set in a forest clearing, its arboreal form was inspired by the surrounding trees. A cubic frame was

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1 Pernu’s arboreally-inspired The Ground Beneath, a manmade forest set in a real one. 2 Sky is the Limit, consisting of a trio of 8m high willow columns. 3 Horn resembles surreal topiary. 4, 5 Work in progress for The Ground Beneath – slender willow members are nailed and screwed together to form intricate constructions.

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FROZEN MUSIC León’s new concert hall is an imaginative distillation of Iberian vernacular that forms not only a dignified space for music, but also enriches the urban realm.

Nestling at the foot of the Cantabrian Cordillera, León in northern Spain was an important stopping off point on the historic pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Countless pilgrims have passed through it and the old town still contains the built traces of their progress, notably the sixteenth-century monastery of San Marcos, now transformed into a luxurious parador hotel aimed at a rather different kind of traveller. Located on the edge of León’s historic core, the monastery overlooks a plaza landscaped in starkly contemporary fashion that forms a place for sitting, strolling and the evening passeggiata. The weathered yellow stone of San Marcos has been joined by a more recent and unabashedly contemporary interloper, the gridded white concrete facade of the town’s new concert hall on the south side of the plaza. Won in competition in 1994, the building was designed by the Madrid-based partnership of Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón. Despite being conspicuously of its time, it responds with calmness and sensitivity to its site and context and in the tradition of such popular, public building types is also a strong civic gesture that adds to the life of town. Mansilla + Tuñón began their careers in the office of Rafael Moneo and their work displays similar formal preoccupations that have their roots in traditional Iberian architecture tempered by a Modernist restraint. Neutral, toplit containers, solid, alcázar-like walls and the subtle play of light are intelligently choreographed to create a sense of depth and solidity. All this is underscored by material refinement and concern for how things are made and put together. The bulk of the new concert hall is essentially a blind box clad in crisp white travertine, but on the edge of the square, the box cranks round abruptly to terminate in a massive wall that addresses its neighbours, the plaza and the monastery beyond like some kind of lion’s head or three-dimensional billboard, adding a vital new piece to the existing urban composition. Alluding playfully to a musical score, the billboard wall is divided into five horizontal strips, increasing in size as they rise. The bands form a matrix for a mathematically calculated grid of deeply recessed and splayed bays each containing windows of different sizes. These capture

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1 The white sculptural facade of León’s concert hall completes an urban composition. On the left is the sixteenth-century monastery of San Marcos, now turned into a luxury hotel. 2 The billboard wall grid of recessed and splayed openings recalls traditional Iberian architecture.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 6 Main entrance in the cleft between billboard wall and blind box. 7 Pockets of light illuminate ramp leading to exhibition space at upper level.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 8 Triple-height exhibition space. 9 The soft, sepulchral gloom of the concert hall, lined with dark timber. 10 Breakout space on the ground floor behind the auditorium, overlooking an internal courtyard.

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Architect Mansilla + Tuñón, Madrid Project team Luis Moreno Mansilla, Emilio Tuñón, Andrés Regueiro, Fernando García Pino, María Linares Structural engineer Ove Arup Mechanical engineer JG Asociados Cost consultants Hernán, Corona y Asociados Acoustic consultant Higini Araw Photographs Roland Halbe

small chasms of light which cast changing reflections and pockets of intense luminosity through the spaces inside, echoing the way in which light percolates brilliantly through the thick walls of Spanish churches. In fact, in its solidity, whiteness, and geometric play of shadows, the wall is a dramatic abstraction of Iberian vernacular architecture. Superscale graphics run along the base of the facade, in a reprise of the eye-catching device employed by the architects in an earlier project at the Museum of Fine Arts in Castellón (AR June 2002). Behind the wall is an exhibition hall and foyer contained in an angled wing set at the east end of the auditorium. The public entrance penetrates the knuckle between the angled wing and the auditorium leading to a vestibule that gives access to the concert hall foyer and promenading space at ground level. From here, a long ramp winds up to a triple-height exhibition hall on the first floor. Theatrically side-lit by the billboard wall, the exhibition space extends the life of the building beyond the evening performances. Below ground is a labyrinth of technical facilities, rehearsal spaces and dressing rooms overlooking a light court, and a public café, also facing the courtyard. A discrete strip of offices runs along the south edge of the concert hall. The auditorium is divided into two parts, with 734 seats (excluding boxes) placed in front of the concert platform, and 394 seats behind it rising on a steeper rake. This arrangement provides increased flexibility – as well as for large symphony concerts, the hall can be configured for chamber music, opera and even conferences, with moveable panels modifying acoustics as required. The stage is surmounted by a fly tower expressed as a monumental crenellation on the hermetic box of the concert hall. Lined with wide strips of dark Wenge timber, the auditorium has a sepulchral, sensual quality after the lightness and asceticism of the exterior and foyer spaces. Rows of boxes resemble intimate cocoons, where patrons can see (but not necessarily be seen), adding to the ritual and intrigue of an evening out. Under the light from lines of cylindrical fittings suspended from the ceiling shell, the deep blue tones of the seats mutate into an opulent purple. If architecture is indeed frozen music, then Mansilla + Tuñón have produced a tautly executed but beautifully resonant composition, qualities not lost on a wider critical fraternity as the concert hall was shortlisted for the 2003 Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture (at the time of writing, the winner was yet to be announced). The Madrid duo will also orchestrate the next phase in León’s re-energized cultural life, having been selected to design the town’s new arts centre on an adjacent site. CARLA BERTOLUCCI

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interior design

As a leading advertising agency in America, Chiat Day’s business is creating images that subliminally stir the imagination and amuse. In registering its presence in the public mind – in Los Angeles, New York and, most recently, San Francisco – it has employed original architectural minds to design offices for its inventive and technologically sophisticated staff. The firm’s Boat, Binoculars and Trees headquarters on Main Street in Venice, California (AR May 1992), was designed by Frank Gehry (with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje von Bruge) as a roadside landmark. But the building’s impact, in a city used to such events, derived from Gehry’s skill in manipulating filmic imagery, subverting the normality of Main Street (the entrance is Oldenburg and von Bruge’s giant binoculars), and drawing on associations with Hollywood and Disneyland. Behind the playful facade were fairly conventional offices, the prevailing informality conveying the non-hierarchical character of the advertising industry. Gehry was succeeded in New York by Gaetano Pesce, who was asked to do away with lingering notions of Bürolandschaft. His exuberant design of (virtual) offices was confined to the interior of an undistinguished block in Manhattan and had a Venetian cast. Restricted by a tight budget, it was described at the time as ‘the furthest flight from the rectangle ever achieved in office design’ (AR January 1995). Pesce transformed the amorphous space into a riotous carnival of brilliant colours (used to delineate zones), surreal forms and strange conjunctions of inexpensive materials (polyesters, resin and rubber). There were no individual spaces or work-stations. Marmol Radziner’s brief in San Francisco, when designing new offices for TBWA\Chiat\Day, was that they should be different in character from the firm’s other premises. After Pesce, the firm has become more conventional –

A DVERTISING OFFICES , S AN F RANCISCO , USA ARCHITECT M ARMOL R ADZINER + A SSOCIATES

Public image Expansion of a leading advertising agency is another stage in its imaginative flight from stifling corporate design.

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1 Curving wall like a remnant of ship’s hull leads to reception. 2 Floor plate cut away to create double-height void. Project room above reception contained in wooden hull with translucent wall.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Marmol Radziner has provided corridors, right-angles and enclosures, even if they are at first obscured by impressions of shipwrecked hulls. As in New York, the budget was limited but, in San Francisco, the building was romantic; the offices occupy three floors of a historic brick warehouse at 55 Union Street on the city’s old Barbary Coast. The site, once a shipyard, is reclaimed land incorporating hulks of ships abandoned by the Forty-niners rushing inland for gold. Once famous for brothels, bars and

opium dens, the area has been taken over since the 1960s by design and technology companies, and public relations industries. The handsome warehouse was stripped back to its bones – brick walls, wooden beams, columns and ceilings – and cleaned up. Within this envelope, Marmol Radziner’s design, lit by large windows, draws on the site’s piratical history (for Chiat\Day, ‘pirate’ is a symbol for rule-breakers and innovators), and ideas of flood, receding waters and stranded timbers. As an architectural stage set, focused

around the entrance, it is less literal in execution than Gehry’s scheme in Los Angeles, but still there are resonances. The entrance to the old warehouse in a back alley was inconspicuous, designed for cargo rather than people. This has been transformed. Stepping in from the street, you find yourself among enormous curving forms, like wooden hulls, beached among and impaled by the building’s massive timbers. An undulating wall guides you to the reception desk where the floor has been cut away so that

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wooden forms, plainly hollow at the upper level, are two storeys high. At the upper level, subliminal impressions of a sub-aqueous world are reinforced by translucent, watery walls (of polycarbonate), that line structural ribs and enclose conference and project rooms. The overwhelming sensation is of light on wood: on the roughened texture of the horizontal timbers, made to pop as they are pulled into an arc round meeting rooms on the ground floor; on the smoother plywood surface of vertical forms; and on the grainy one of cork that covers reception. The light is softened, smoothed out, and made harmonious by colour and texture. Such theatrics entertain and are pleasurable, but more importantly their arrangement expresses the agency’s collaborative ethos. Cutting through the first floor establishes a vertical connection in a sturdy building with an otherwise impermeable section; and the lightness of the inserted structures dispels the weightiness of the old structure. Beyond reception are open-plan offices on two floors. Connected by lifts and staircase, the various departments are arranged in orthogonal fashion. Low enclosures, specially made in different sizes, allude to the wooden crates that once occupied the building. Beneath long lines of rice-paper lanterns, they allow views and communication across the building, and give privacy. Their sturdy functional character is echoed in the architects’ design of furniture – wooden storage units, conference tables and low sofas.

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entrance reception meeting room lift rear entrance

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communal area lift office library broadcast

PENNY MCGUIRE Architects Marmol Radziner+Associates Project team Leo Marmol, Ron Radziner, Anna Hill, John Kim, Su Kim, Brendan O’Grady Paul Benigno, Juli Brode, Patrick McHugh, Chris McCullough, Daniel Monti, Bobby Rees, Renee Wilson, Annette Wu Photographs Benny Chan/Fotoworks

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3,4 Sturdy functional meeting room furniture and workstation enclosures (recalling cargo crates) designed by practice. 5 Communal area at upper level for informal meetings outside project room.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) M ETRO STATION , V ANCOUVER , C ANADA ARCHITECT B USBY + A SSOCIATES

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In an attempt to tame its suburbs, Vancouver has set up an overhead rapid-transit system. Its stations are designed as memorable and welcoming places.

In many ways, Vancouver is the finest city in North America. It has a proper mixed-use urban centre that focuses on a park and stretches along a magnificent site between forested hills and the complex fretted geometry of the coast of the Pacific Ocean. There could be no greater urban contrast than between Vancouver and Seattle, not much more than a hundred miles away over the border to the south. The American city has scarcely any decent urban spaces and has allowed civil engineers to ruin its waterfront by running an urban motorway all along the best stretches of the shore.

But outside their centres, both cities have much in common. Low density suburbs intermingle with forests along the coast, and of course, they need transport, so highways snake into the superb landscapes, spreading pollution and carrying ever more vehicles. In association with these is the usual North American tat: malls, strips and wasteful parking lots. Vancouver is trying to counter this process by focusing development at new centres. Connecting 13 of these is the Millennium Line, a highlevel metro system that follows the busy Lougheed Highway. The Vancouver Rapid Transit Project Office was concerned to

ensure that the system should be as attractive as possible, and hired local architects to design the stations, rather than relying on civil engineers. Busby + Associates were asked to make a couple of the halts. Brentwood is the more dramatic of the two and is intended to form the centrepiece and design catalyst of Brentford Town Centre, at present an undistinguished suburban focus. The highway divides the centre in half, and one of the main purposes of the new structure is to link the two sides. At the same time, it has to get passengers to the trains, which travel over the middle of the motorway. So the

SKY STATION

1 Overhead rail tracks largely follow line of highway below, necessitating … 2 … bridge over road and under tracks that spans between two halves of suburban centre.

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sectional perspective

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architects decided to make a bridge over the road but under the rail tracks. From the bridge, lifts and stairs rise to platform level. Each platform is sheltered by a curving canopy. Roofs are made of 2in by 4in (50 x100mm) softwood members nailed together to form continuous curved timber decks that stiffen laminated ribs. These are connected to the basic concrete structure through pinjoints by giant white-painted steel shoes. Between the canopies,

above the middle of the tracks, a lattice of thin steel elements links the two sides and provides seismic stiffness. The central slot is left open, but platform sides are protected from the elements by glass walls formed of overlapping identical elements clipped together. To provide enough width for lifts and stairs to arrive at platform level in the middle of the plan, the structure expands organically and generously, making the canopies curve in two planes,

and requiring computer analysis of the cladding. The architects’ aim has been to make the building as transparent as possible to avoid visitor confusion and to act as a form of advertisement for the new travel system which, so far, has proved popular and efficient; its fast driver-less trains arrive regularly and punctually. For car drivers crawling on the polluted freeway below, the new station is a beacon of civilized living. ED ABRAHAMS

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Architect Busby + Associates, Vancouver Project team B. Billingsley, M. Bonaventura, P. Busby, S. Edwards, T. Mullock, M. Nielsen, R. Peck, A. Slawinski Structural engineer Fast & Epp Partners Photographs Nic Lehoux

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3 Ramp gradually leads down to busstop loop in mall car park. 4 Envelope round platforms swells for width of lifts, escalators and stairs. 5 White prefabricated concrete structure. 6 Steel strutting and V-shaped supports between canopies give seismic resistance.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

vıew PALACES OF SNOW AND ICE IN LAPLAND; AR’S MIPIM PRIZES AT CANNES; HELPING TO SAVE ST CATHERINE’S MONASTERY IN SINAI; JOHN PAWSON TO LECTURE FOR AR AT SPECTRUM; WINGÅRDH BUILDS FOR SWEDEN IN W ASHINGTON ; C ATHERINE C OOKE ’ S V IEW FROM M OSCOW ; L YALL ON WEB ; O LD P ARADIGM JENCKS ?

THE SNOW SHOW During lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, independent curator Lance Fung and Tuula Yrjölä from the Finnish Tourist Board came up with the idea of hosting a show celebrating ice and snow structures in Finland’s Lapland. From February to April next year, the Snow Show will see struc-

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tures of a minimum 80 per cent ice or snow, built by 30 teams from some 27 countries.1 The teams will consist of an architect and artist2 who, receiving no fee, will design experimental works using video, sound, light and traditional art media, combined with architectural construction materials and the arctic elements of snow and ice. By replacing usual, permanent materials with

Oblong Voidspace, above and far right: 9m tall ice cube designed by Steven Holl and Jene Highstein in Rovaniemi.

unusual ephemeral elements, the curators hope to ‘neutralize initial fixity of ideas’. Fifteen of these projects will be in Rovaniemi, a sleigh-ride away from Santa Claus Village and the Arctic Circle. The city was almost completely destroyed by retreating Germans in the Second World War, and in 1946 rebuilding began with Alvar Aalto laying out the town in the shape of reindeer antlers. He went on to design the town hall, library and theatre. The other 15 designs will be in the seaport city of Kemi, at the north end of the Gulf of Bothnia. Kemi is already home to the SnowCastle, a large snow structure built annually for the eighth time last winter, housing wedding chapel, ice sculptures, gallery, restaurant and hotel rooms (where you sleep on a bed of ice decked in reindeer skin). In winter, the Gulf of Bothnia is the largest field of ice in Europe. From Kemi, you can travel on the world’s only passenger icebreaker which crashes through deep solid ice, and then swim in the icy waters of the Gulf in thermal wet suits. In February there was a preview of two Snow Show designs, one in ice and the other of snow. Steven Holl and the sculptor Jene Highstein (who, unlike most of the other teams, had already worked together, at the Kiasma Museum, Helsinki) collaborated on a stunning 9m tall ice cube, Oblong Voidspace. By the riverside in Rovaniemi, an ice stairway leads you up and into the cube, which is open to the sky (framing the aurora borealis in the right conditions). It is made of 500 cubic metres of ice. The appearance changes inside and out according to the weather: in sunshine, it seems translucent and you can see figures moving inside, in the dark or in dull conditions it appears opaque. At night the cube is lit from the exterior, there are no fittings inside. Steven Holl hopes the south-facing ice wall will melt to create a hole giving a view across the river to the city. The design will either be fine tuned or changed for next year. Asymptote and Finnish painter and video artist Osmo Rauhala built the snow structure Absolute Zero in Kemi. The 30 metre inverted S-shaped structure is reminiscent of two igloos joined together, with the entrances on opposite sides at the tails of the S. Inside the igloos are videos of people ice skating on an artificial ice rink in New York’s Central Park. There are two video scenes: one of people moving away from you and the other of them coming towards you,

Absolute Zero: A Light House of Temporality – a 30m long snow structure in Kemi by Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Ann Couture) with artist Osmo Rauhala.

together making a circle. The videos are projected on a glass revolving door in the middle of the room, one in both ends of the whole sculpture. The revolving doors are, say the architects, a metaphor for urban life, ‘a turbine run by the flow of wandering people. It is a door between formal structures and the unpredictable diversity of life. It is a door that makes our inner space an outer space again and again’. The heat from the video equipment will gradually melt the interior while the sun works on the exterior. The venture is partly financed by the European Union and partly by participating cities, the project partners include the art museums of Rovaniemi and Kemi, and UNESCO. In conjunction with the Snow Show, the Department of Architecture at Oulu University and the

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Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki are organizing a competition, the winners of which, two architect/art student pairs, will create their own structures, one in Kemi and one in Rovaniemi.3 JULIA DAWSON Photographs: Manne Stenros, copyright Snow Show 1 Architects building are Anamorphosis, Tadao Ando, Asymptote, Shigeru Ban, Jung-Ho Chang, Diller + Scofidio, Fo Architects, Future Systems, Zaha Hadid, Heikkinen & Komonen, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Steven Holl, Hollmén Reuter Sandman, Arata Isozaki, Lot-Ek, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, MVRDV, Ocean North, Juhani Pallasmaa, Snøhetta, Studio Granda, UN Studio, Ten Arquitectos, Anders Wilhelmson, Williams & Tsien, Lebbeus Woods. Artists are Pawel Althamer, Robert Barry, Grönlund/Nisunen, Lothar Hempel, Jene Highstein, Ilya Kabakov, Anish Kapoor, Kaija Kiuru, Sol Lewitt, Ernesto Neto, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Osmo Rauhula, John Roloff, Eva Rothschild, Kiki Smith, Do-Ho Suh, Ricky Swallow, Rachel Whiteread, Maaria Wirkkala. 2 Most of the architects and artists have never worked with each other, which should prove interesting considering some of the egos involved. 3 Details at www.thesnowshow.net or www.arplus.com. Deadline 28.4.03.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Townsville is one of Australia’s largest military ports, strategically located to command the Coral Sea. In the tropics, well north of Brisbane, the town has a relatively rainless but nonetheless humid climate, largely shielded by mountains from tropical downpours further north and west. Just south of the town, Lavarack Barracks are the home of the Third Brigade, the army’s rapid deployment force. New approaches to soldiering, brought about partly by increased recruitment of women, and by the need to retain soldiers in a competitive labour market, have caused a need for redevelopment of the barracks, which were originally built by American military engineers during the Vietnam war in the ’60s. The main aim of the new work has been to give each inhabitant a sense of personal place, while maintaining physical notions of the group, and beyond that of the brigade as a whole. In generating the new buildings, much was learned by the architects (Bligh Voller Nield working with Troppo) from the existing structures, for instance use of steel-framed prefabricated construction, deep roof overhangs, light-coloured steel cladding, narrow plans to encourage through ventilation and generally north-south orientation to conserve energy. Main differences between new and old include giving each inhabitant at least a private room with a bathroom and an often generous balcony. Such units are formed into two- and three-storey blocks clustered round courts in which existing trees are preserved. Views to Mount Stewart to the south and to Castle Hill to the north are preserved and framed.

M ILITARY BARRACKS , T OWNSVILLE , Q UEENSLAND , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT B LIGH V OLLER N IELD WITH T ROPPO A RCHITECTS (Q LD )

OUTBACK BARRACKS An experiment in prefabrication optimizes orientation and shade to reduce artificial cooling needs.

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1 1 Blocks are clustered to increase sense of social group, and to minimize impact on bush. Laverack Barracks must be some of the few anywhere that try to engage with wild nature.

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cross section through typical court cluster

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site plan of eastern precinct (scale approx 1:1125)

M ILITARY BARRACKS , T OWNSVILLE , Q UEENSLAND , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT B LIGH V OLLER N IELD WITH T ROPPO A RCHITECTS (Q LD )

exploded axonometric showing elements

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floor plans of other rank units

2 Eastern precinct: hillside is left free of building as far as possible. 3 Extensive provision of car ports tends to suburbanize some spaces … 4 … but elsewhere, nature comes right up to buildings. 5 Court side of blocks has stairways and elaborate sunscreens.

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ground floor typical cluster (scale approx 1:150)

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M ILITARY BARRACKS , T OWNSVILLE , Q UEENSLAND , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT B LIGH V OLLER N IELD WITH T ROPPO A RCHITECTS (Q LD )

Prefabrication was an overriding preoccupation to contain costs, increase building speed by reducing wet-season delays and to provide good finishes. Most buildings on site were erected by crane with no scaffolding. Acoustic and fire separation, and a degree of thermal stability, are provided by precast concrete party floor and wall units bolted together (wall elements were formed using the tilt-up process). External walls are framed in lightweight steel with corrugated metal or plywood panels, some of which are brightly coloured to add a sense of individuality and location – for the same reason, panels are sometimes formed of natural timber. Further particularity is given by adding a variety of prefabricated galvanized steel and hardwood stairs, balustrades and sun-shading devices, all of which to some degree recall the tin and timber domestic rural architecture of tropical Queensland. More than 1000 individual units have been provided in stage two of the redevelopment. The courts formed by the living units are grouped into what the architects call three ‘precincts’, sited to maximize the cooling effects of prevailing site breezes and make the most of natural site features. Each precinct has a mess located on Robert Towns Boulevard, the main east-west axis of the whole camp. Messes are used by all ranks, but traditional differences between officers, senior NCOs and other ranks are retained, with separate entrances, eating and drinking spaces and finishes, so the apparently democratic atmosphere generated by the living and sleeping accommodation is not as all-pervasive as it seems initially. Nonetheless, the messes are much more open and approachable than many buildings of their type, just as the barrack blocks themselves are radically different from traditional eighteenth-century institutional dormitories. Within the constraints of army life, the barracks are as inventive as they are in economically and constructively dealing with the hot and humid climate. E. M.

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Architect Bligh Voller Nield with Troppo Architects (Qld) Project director Phillip Tait Design directors Shane Thompson, Phil Harris Project architects Jon Florence, Andrew Bock Project team Chris Bligh, Geoff Clark, Sonia Graham, Paul Baker, Greg James, Michael O’Brien, James Russell, Rob Vider, Sacha Cochran, Prue Langer, James Peet, Carolyn Biasi 7

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6 Other ranks’ bar in mess. 7 Mess with shaded exterior spaces opens as far as possible to surrounding landscape. 8, 10 Each pair of rooms has a balcony reached from a separate staircase. 9 On short ends of blocks, concrete wall slab is protected from elements by metal screens. 11 Outward-facing facades offer views of landscape through sun-screen system.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) In the house Rick Joy designed in a small valley in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, he used his well-tried arid-climate repertoire of materials (other essays in the genre can be seen in for instance AR November 1998 and AR July 2001). Massive rammed earth walls often 2ft (600mm) thick provide insulation and thermal capacity to combat a climate that can be both very hot during the day and pretty cold at night. In contrast, large sheets of glass allow wonderful vistas of the desert, which is allowed to come right up to the outer walls with its strangely prolific and often zoomorphically shaped flora. Car parking is carefully hidden in the bush and the house is approached through the cacti along a simple path aligned axially with the main thrust of the plan. A butterfly roof finished in rusted steel unites all elements of the house. The roof valley divides the plan into two strips, with the elements of the house

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proper to the south, and the main entrance, guest bedroom porch and terrace in the northern strip. A massive rammed earth fireplace offers hearths to porch and living area, and becomes the physical and psychological link between the two strips. Both porch and living room open to the desert slightly north of east. The massive earth walls are pierced to frame other views treasured by the owners. In the bright desert sunlight, the whole place acts as a giant internalized sundial, with light slowly moving over the polished concrete floors and the wonderfully richly textured earth walls. In these, daywork joints are revealed by changes in texture and colour but there is an overall order made by the regular horizontal striations of the boarded shuttering which turned stiff mud into regular strata. The architect’s own construction company (now highly experienced in rammed earth) was the main contractor.

H OUSE , T UCSON , USA A RCHITECT R ICK J OY

High and dry Rick Joy is perhaps set to become the Murcutt of the northern hemisphere with houses that are sharply honed to respond to hot and dry desert climates.

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1 The V within the valley: Joy’s carefully controlled geometry complements the austere shapes of the natural world.

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In contrast to the delicate textures of the heavy walls, the glass planes are a little crude. Though sheets are large, the standard aluminium frames are clumsy compared to the semihand-crafted earth. But the overall feeling of the spaces is calm and gentle. The apparently simple device of the butterfly roof affords much subtle gradation of space: for instance the areas round the fireplaces are the lowest and most intimate, while the tall south north and south windows draw the landscape into the house. As Juhani Pallasmaa has pointed out,

Joy’s houses in the northern hemisphere ‘bring to mind some of the clearheaded and poetic house designs of Glenn Murcutt in Australia’.* In this house, the poetry lies in sensitivity to nature, and in the essence of materials, making a place that evokes simultaneously the archetypes of both tent and cave. * Rick Joy, Desert Works, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2002, p16. Architect Rick Joy Architects Project team Rick Joy, Andy Tinucci Photographs Bill Timmerman

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2 Main entrance dives into the harsh desert landscape. 3 Kitchen to entrance. 4, 5 Living area with polished concrete floors and delicate, almost lacy, rammed earth walls.

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C ONCERT HALLS , R OME , I TALY ARCHITECT R ENZO P IANO B UILDING W ORKSHOP

Befitting the epithet of Eternal City, Rome has waited a long time for its new Parco della Musica. Renzo Piano’s arrestingly zoomorphic trio of scarab-shaped concert halls marks the culmination of a typically protracted Italian saga that began in 1936 with the demolition of the city’s original Art Nouveau auditorium housed inside the mausoleum of Augustus. (The Roman remains were subsequently restored as part of Mussolini’s hubristic urban remodellings.) There followed a series of aborted plans, stalled competitions and false starts as the design process became bogged down by politics, bureaucracy, finance and the challenge of inserting such a monumental structure into Rome’s dense, historic texture. By 1994, an apparently suitable site was selected on the north side of the city, where the nineteenth-century grid of Flaminio meets a disparate collection of sports and object buildings constructed for the 1960 Olympics. Originally a car park for the Palazzetto dello Sport and Flaminio Stadium (both designed by Nervi), even such a seemingly mundane Roman locale yielded up hidden treasures in the form of the foundations of a villa and oil press dating from 6BC, revealed during the course of routine groundwork. This discovery set the project back by a year as Piano reconfigured the site plan to incorporate the archaeological remains within the fan-shaped layout of the three concert halls, as well as providing a small museum to display excavated items. Other more politically motivated delays also contrived to impede progress, but it is to the credit of both Piano and his patron, Rome’s leftist mayor, Francesco Rutelli, that they succeeded in realizing such a challenging civic project. When the complex finally opened at the end of last year, it was greeted with acclaim by performers and public alike – after nearly 60 years, Rome at last had a centre for classical music that could compete with the best venues in Europe. The key to the project was Piano’s decision to dissect and reinterpret the original programme, which called for a single building housing three auditoria. Instead he proposed three separate entities grouped in a fanlike formation around the fulcrum of a central piazza with ground floor access to a common concourse and promenading staircases servicing each hall. To this trio of small, medium and large sound boxes (with capacities of 700, 1273 and 2756 respectively), Piano also added an openair amphitheatre in the piazza, capable of seating 3000, which unifies and animates the external realm. From a distance, the Parco is signposted by swelling, weighty hulks of the lead roofs evoking metaphors of tortoise shells, insect carapaces and the curiously graceful jointed armour of samurai warriors. Continuing Piano’s preoccupation with toroidal geometries (perhaps most famously realized at Kansai Airport, AR November 1994), each roof is a fragment of a torus split at its peak for improved drainage. Held in place by steel flanges and lined internally with horizontal planks of pine, the segmented lead roof casings curve out and extend down the flanks of the halls, creating interstitial space for escape stairs. Coated with a pearly protective lacquer, the massive metallic roofs appear to hover over a

1 The trio of armadillo-like roofs form a new gateway to Rome’s northern suburbs. 2 The approach to the Parco’s central piazza is lined with an arcade of shops and restaurants. 3 The concert halls overlook a piazza ringed by an open-air amphitheatre. 4 Lead-clad roofs nuzzle together like a herd of grazing pachyderms. 5 Planting will animate and temper the austerity of the piazza.

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URBAN ORCHESTRATION Formally imaginative and technically assured, Renzo Piano’s concert hall complex in Rome is also a civic place in the city’s best tradition.

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concert hall level plan (scale approx 1:2000)

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6 The remains of a Roman villa discovered during site excavations are incorporated into the complex. 7 Escape stairs sheltered by the oversailing roofs.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) swathe of newly planted greenery – parasol pines, olive trees and cork oaks – that when fully matured will form luxuriant hanging gardens, as well as a new urban park linking the Flaminio neighbourhood with the Villa Glori to the east. The Parco complex is approached by a steel and glass pergola lined with shops and restaurants that generate and accommodate daily activity. At this lower level, walls and pillars of thin red Roman brick with travertine flashings suggest ancient ruins denuded of their precious marble. From the central piazza, with its Greek amphitheatre and gardens, glass doors in slender brass frames open onto the crescent-shaped internal concourse, the necklace of circulation that yokes together the concert halls. Sandwiched between the auditoria, the fragments of the Roman villa can be surveyed from the concourse through a large vitrine. Piano’s experience of music theatres and acoustics dates back to the late 1970s when he designed the IRCAM centre for experimental music for Pierre Boulez next to the Pompidou Centre. Since then his repertoire has encompassed concert halls in Venice, Berlin, Turin (Lingotto AR November 1996) and most recently Parma (AR October 2002), all in different ways and on different scales built to serve music both technically and experientially. Here, each of the three auditoria responds to a precise musical configuration. Symphony concerts and major choral works take place in the large hall to the east; ballet and contemporary music in the intermediate central theatre; and chamber music and experimental works in the small 700 seat auditorium on the west side. With its polygonal shape and vineyard terraces of seating arrayed around a central concert platform, the large hall has conscious echoes of Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie. A sculpted ceiling of glossy cherrywood caissons, suspended from the timber roof structure like some kind of geological formation, is calculated to enhance acoustic performance. The configuration of the halls evolved initially using models with reflecting surfaces and laser beams to establish graphic representations of acoustic responses. This was followed by computer simulations and physical tests. Cherrywood was selected for the internal linings, based on research into the emission, reflection and reception of sound taking into account different music sources and environmental demands. The richly polished wood has a seductive warmth, resonance and tactility, so that the auditoria resemble the insides of musical instruments. But beyond the technical accomplishment of the halls is a wider social and urbanistic intention to make culture a living part of the city and create new civic gathering places in the manner of other great Roman outdoor rooms such as the Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Navona. Visible from the top of St Peter’s, Piano’s cluster of musical armadillos marks a bold new improvization on a familiar urban score. CATHERINE SLESSOR

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8, 9 The three halls are connected by a crescent-shaped concourse at lower level. From here, stairs lead up into the auditoria. 10 Inside medium-sized hall, intended for ballet and contemporary music. 11 The smallest of the three auditoria hosts chamber music and experimental performances. 12, 13 With its vineyard terraces of seating and caissoned ceiling, the large 2756 seat hall, designed for symphony concerts and major choral works, has clear echoes of Scharoun’s Philharmonie.

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A GARDEN FOLLY IN THE WOODS OF O NTARIO THOUGHTFULLY USES GLASS AND ELECTRICITY TO MAKE SUBTLE COMMENTS ON NATURE, AND AT THE SAME TIME PROVIDES STIMULUS TO SWIMMING.

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A turn of the century Canadian Arts and Crafts house overlooks Lake Ontario from a small bluff. Its owners wanted a swimming pool and asked designer John Thompson to create one that would relate to the forested terrain. Initial hopes of building it entirely in granite to harmonize with the landscape had to be abandoned on cost grounds in favour of slate and grey render; only a granite diving rock remains of the original intentions. But the result was gloomy, so Thompson was asked to find some way of relieving it. Working with glass artists SWON (Orest Tataryn, Alfred Engerer and Andrey Berezowsky), he evolved a translucent wall of glass: a waterfall that reflects light onto the smooth surface of the water which ends with a negative edge so that the pool seems to be a piece of lake inexplicably lofted up onto the slope. Thompson and SWON

chose to pattern the surface of the glass wall in a rhythm based on the ripples of sand made by the water of the lake. Wall elements are of glass cast against carved graphite moulds and coloured by careful admixture of additives. In all, 70 pieces in seven basic shapes make up the 3m wide, 2m high glass wall, that has a thin slit at the top from which water continuously cascades, softly chattering over the texture of the glass or splashing robustly into the pool. If you want, you can sit at the base of the wall on an underwater bench below the waterfall. At night, the wall instead of reflecting, becomes multi-dimensional with coloured neon tubes behind the glass. Integrated into the garden with native and exotic trees and shrubs and a hardwood deck, the pool and its glass wall make a magic moment in a semi-natural scene.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 Pavilions terminate to east with Y-shaped column supporting roofs’ shading projections. Left is curve of café roof.

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Tadao Ando’s new museum at Fort Worth both learns from Kahn’s great Kimbell and copes with the scale and nature of contemporary art.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Building next to an internationally recognized masterpiece is inevitably a daunting task, but to create a building of similar type to the great work is a challenge that few can rise to. Tadao Ando won the competition for the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum in 1997 (AR February 1998). It is part of the city’s cultural complex, set in a park in a low-density suburb of the city, just across the road from Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, one of the greatest gallery buildings of the last century. The big site is flat and featureless, so Ando has transformed it by dextrous tree planting (partly to mask the car park), walls against the busiest roads, lawns and a shallow pool, or rather young lake, over which the city’s downtown makes a dramatic skyline. But as Ando remarked when he got the commission, even if the site was dull ‘the Kimbell is a mountain’. Ando’s strategy for organizing the new building is partly based on the Kimbell, with calm parallel gallery spaces, lit as far as possible by daylight and opening on to nature (in the Kahn building exquisitely planted courts, but in the Ando the much larger new park). To some extent, Ando turns his back (or at least west side) on Kahn, with a dull elevation, car park and (at ground level) service spaces. Perhaps it was impossible to address the earlier building directly, and when the planting round the car park grows the juxtaposition of the two will seem more gentle. For all the similarities, there are very significant differences between the two buildings. Kahn’s galleries are reminiscent of Cistercian vaults in their awesome simplicity. Ando’s exhibition spaces are concrete boxes within glass ones. The heavy inner boxes are the main containers for the artworks, while the glass ones

provide intermediate spaces between galleries and the lake and lawns. The other major difference between Ando and Kahn is that Ando (for all the size of his site) found it necessary to put his galleries on two levels. One of the reasons for this must surely be the difference in scale between much contemporary work and the paintings in the Kimbell, which contains a fundamentally private collection of works of easel and domestic scale. Fort Worth’s Modern needed larger spaces, some of double height, to accommodate really big pieces. Ando has exploited the possibilities of his two levels of galleries with sudden surprising juxtapositions of volume and scale, but the arrangement means that lower, single-height galleries must inevitably seem slightly second class because they cannot receive daylight. Upstairs galleries are top lit as in the Kimbell, either through diffusing fabric ceilings (such as the one over the stair hall) or from clerestories, which project light onto inclined cornices and then down into the spaces. In both cases, daylight is supplemented by artificial sources, but arrangements seem rather clumsy compared to the apparently effortless combination of concrete vaults and botanically curved metal reflectors of Kahn’s building. Routes through the galleries are arranged to encourage wandering, with some openings arranged enfilade, but with occasional departures from axiality. The major public space is the double-height entrance hall which, as you go in, offers fine views over the lake, the semiprivate garden beyond and the glass boxes of the gallery spaces poking out into the water to receive the Hockney-like constantly changing dappled reflections of the water surface. To the right of the

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Fort Worth Modern Art Museum Kimbell Art Museum Modern Art Museum car park 2 Looking out from the intermediate space between glass and concrete boxes over lake to skyline of Fort Worth. 3 From north, towards entrance hall.

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4 Richard Serra’s rusty landmark from south-west. 5 The semi Neo-Classical entrance. 6, 7 Entrance hall. 8 Intermediate space between concrete gallery box (left) and glass. 9 Special oval gallery with Anselm Kiefer’s Book with Wings. 10 Ando exploits changes in scale of two-storey building.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 11 Double-height gallery to house scale of contemporary artworks. 12 First-floor gallery with clerestorey light reflected off inclined cornice. 13 The great stair, under diffusing fabric ceiling.

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entrance is the auditorium and a cafeteria that has a terrace poking out into the lake. To the left is the information desk, from which you are directed to either the entrance of the ground floor galleries, or the stairs, where you are cleverly deflected upwards by the curve of a special ground floor gallery. All this is very thoughtful, and the building is pleasant and sometimes exciting to be in, while providing unassertive spaces in the concrete boxes that never overwhelm the works on display in the first hang. But it must inevitably be compared to the Kimbell, both because of its sighting and its parti. Differences are quite profound. While the Kimbell, for all its monumental qualities, is welcoming with a generous embrace, the double height of the Ando building is partly responsible for a much more formal, almost scraped Neo-Classical entrance. The entrance hall itself, for all its fine volume and views (and its dramatic bridge, which leads staff over the volume at first floor level) is both austere and rather daunting. The insistent rhythm of glazing bars dominates perception. To me, from both inside and out, the bars seem heavy, and the proportions they describe elongated and overstretched. While not advocating planar glazing, I wonder if there couldn’t have been a less strident approach to making the glass walls, which themselves are causing some problems of insolation and glare. The relative coarseness of the glazing contrasts with the really excellent quality of the fairfaced concrete, which rivals Zumthor’s at Bregenz (AR December 1997), most unusual in the US. As in the Austrian building, the soft grey walls are an excellent backdrop to all visual art – surely the most important attribute of any gallery. Undoubtedly, Ando has made a fine museum – but on that site, it is inevitably subject to tough appraisal. ROGER MORANT

south-north section through galleries

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Architect Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Tokyo Project team Tadao Ando, Masataka Yano, Kulapat Yantrasast, Peter Arendt, Larry Burns, Rollie Childers, Nobuhiko Shoga, Jory Alexander Lighting consultant George Sexton Associates Photographs All photographs by John E. Linden apart from 1 by Mitsuo Matsuoka and 2 by Tadao Ando

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dull west elevation (facing Kimbell) in which aluminium panels are sometimes substituted for glass to reduce insolation

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) For hundreds of years, Finland was the poor relation of Sweden. From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, the Swedish empire crossed the Gulf of Bothnia, with Finland as an impoverished colony. In 1809, the country changed colonial masters and Russia ruled until the Revolution, when Finland finally managed to achieve independence. By the 1920s, Sweden again became Finland’s most important trading partner, and remaining links of language and culture were reinforced. But, though Stockholm was (and in many ways remains) the most important posting in the Finnish diplomatic service, the embassy had to work out of cramped and sometimes temporary quarters. (The Swedes meanwhile have the poshest embassy in Helsinki, a dashed great neo-Renaissance palazzo next to the town hall overlooking the harbour.) By the ’90s, Finland’s diplomatic profile in Stockholm was plainly absurd, particularly as spectacular investment in infrastructure, education and technology had enabled the former colony to match the prosperity of Sweden (which was neutral in the Second World War when Finland was ravaged by both Germans and Russians). So in 1992, the Finnish government decided to build a new bespoke embassy. The process of acquiring a suitable site and obtaining planning permission (the latter extremely time-consuming)1 meant that the building took a decade to complete. Kristian Gullichsen, in many ways the doyen of the cool Helsinki school, was chosen as architect. He believes that ‘an embassy building has a symbolic function; it must represent its country in a diplomatic way while interpreting the codes of its location. The Finnish Embassy in Stockholm does not portray Finland as a wonderland of high-tech culture. On the contrary, it attempts to communicate on the level of the collective memories of the two countries’. Finland was unable to obtain as grand a site in Stockholm as Sweden did in Helsinki. But, though quite small, the plot (previously used as a car park by the Swedish broadcasting organization, the lumpen headquarters of which is a blot on a delicate area) is by no means a bad one. On the edge of the diplomatic quarter in Östermalm, the eastern part of the central city, it overlooks the Gärdet, a fragment of the national nature reserve Djurgården, which retains the peaceful quality of tree-studded parkland similar to, for instance, Hyde Park in London. In the ’30s, the city managed to persuade the state to sell part of the reserve for development to accommodate Stockholm’s rapidly expanding population. Here were made some of the city’s first crisp white functionalist housing blocks, built as pavilions in the park at the start of Sweden’s socialist mid-century romance with Modernism. (The revolutionary Stockholm exhibition of 1930 was held in Djurgården.) Gullichsen, as he said he would, has responded to context. Indeed, seen from a distance, the new embassy could be mistaken for a large fragment of the 1930 exhibition miraculously preserved and slightly moved. But close up, the building is clearly much more substantial and tectonically satisfying than any temporary exhibition pavilion. A long white wall faces the park. It is at once a defensive plane with few

F INNISH E MBASSY , S TOCKHOLM , S WEDEN ARCHITECT G ULLICHSEN V ORMALA A RCHITECTS

WHITE CASTLE The Finnish Embassy in Stockholm represents both a modern democracy and a long interlaced history.

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1 The great white wall facing park with its three major openings. In centre, great portal to embassy court. Left of that, door to consular section. Left again is entrance to domestic court.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 2 North elevation: bulge is cloakroom. 3 Embassy court from portal.

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portal embassy court entrance reception lobby cloaks banqueting hall kitchen storage consular section houses domestic court offices library plant conference sauna suite ambassadorial suite

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south-north section through portal and banqueting hall

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openings, and one that offers the promise of welcome through a giant fullheight gated portico, beyond which can be glimpsed an inner court. Security is a major determinant of embassy design, and the wall is the building’s shield. The building presses to site edges because of the quantity of accommodation to be incorporated in a very restricted perimeter, and because Gullichsen, like most of his Finnish contemporaries, is concerned to bring daylight into the centre of his plans. The great white wall, which both protects the interior and demonstrates the variety of inner life with incisions and inflections, is a recurrent theme in Gullichsen’s work. Notable uses include the Kauniainen Parish Centre of 1985 and the Pieksämäki Civic Centre (AR March 1990). Like the Stockholm building, both include a great portico, a main public entrance that leads to the interior. The embassy court is particularly compressed, adding to the feeling that the whole complex is a highly abstracted version of a medieval castle. Small events and spatial excavations enliven the white walls of what could easily have been a dull little space. They reflect what happens in the surrounding interior volumes, and are a result of a contemporary interpretation2 of what Ruskin, praising the flexibility of medieval architecture, called ‘changefulness’: a building should alter its outward form according to what it contains.3 Changefulness in medieval buildings was of course the result of alterations over time. In modern buildings and in the wrong hands, its pursuit can lead to picturesque kitsch, but Gullichsen’s buildings always avoid that, even though they are generously sprinkled with abstracted quotations from Aalto,4 Le Corbusier and less well known masters of the Modern Movement. Once through the great portal, the public route is informal.5 A door in a glazed panel beckons visitors across the court. Then a little entrance, constrained and carefully supervised. Then you are deflected either right towards the banqueting hall or left to a foyer in which space whooshes upwards and you can see, though not reach,

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F INNISH E MBASSY , S TOCKHOLM , S WEDEN ARCHITECT G ULLICHSEN V ORMALA A RCHITECTS

galleries in which the circulation of the first and second floors is exposed. A three-storey glass block wall chastely floods the tall volume with light, and a long transparent panel gives views. The approach to the banqueting hall is completely different: before you come to the building’s big space, you pass a large curved cave lined with cherrywood that acts as cloakroom. A single-storey foyer leads to the hall, which is at first constrained in height, then generously expands upwards under a curving cherrywood ceiling that seems like the one in Aalto’s Viipuri library lecture theatre waltzing. A large carefully gridded window looks out over the park and further daylight is brought in through slits in wall and roof. The big room serves both as space for formal banquets and for conferences. So its atmosphere is ambiguous, an impression heightened by the rather institutional furniture, which has been chosen for ease of rearrangement rather than formality. Budgetry constraints have required that furniture and fittings throughout the embassy are from standard Scandinavian ranges (in the informal areas often by Aalto). Surely the banqueting hall called for special furniture. The only other large space in the embassy is the library, which few members of the public will visit. It is a warm, calm double-height galleried space that overlooks the court and through the great portal to the park. Other elements of the complex are necessarily disjunct because of the complexity of the programme, and the need for different layers of security. South of the entrance court is a domestic one, in which a couple of almost suburban dwellings look over a green that provides light to many of the offices. At second floor level are the semi-domestic sauna suite (every Finnish embassy must have one) and the ambassadorial offices, both with terraces overlooking the park. These, and the offices which make up the bulk of accommodation, are knitted together by a circulation system designed to be as unbureaucratic as possible, full of surprising voids, views and shafts of light. The Stockholm building adds to other recent Finnish embassies in Washington (AR October 1994) and Berlin (AR March 2000), neither of which had to respond to such a historically sensitive cultural context, so they did not try to provide the span of references from medieval times to Modernism. But, like them, the latest embassy is symbolic of a decent, thoughtful and generous democracy.

4 Office circulation is full of surprising voids and views. 5 Foyer of office area with tripleheight glass block wall. 6 Banqueting hall arranged for conference. For banquets, benches and chairs are arranged at right angles to this orientation and split up into tables for six.

PETER DAVEY 1 In the end, to obtain permission, a car park for other users had to be made along the west side of the site, which means that the building opens little on this side. 2 Which I am sure is unconscious. 3 In the Nature of Gothic, ch VI, vol II of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin argues that Gothic architecture is the only rational one because it changed its form according to function without suffering ‘outside symmetries and consistencies’ to interfere with real use. 4 Kristian Gullichsen’s mother Marie was Aalto’s great patron. She founded Artec to make and sell his furniture and he designed the Villa Mairea for the Gullichsen family. 5 A separate door in the white wall leads to the consular section. Architect Gullichsen Vormala Architects, Helsinki Project team Kristian Gullichsen, Jyri Haukkavaara, Olli Hakanen, Reija Toivio, Jani Wuorimaa Interior design Aulikki Jylhä Landscape architect Jyrki Sinkkilä Photographs Jussi Tiainen, 1, 2, 3, 6 Mikael Lindén, 4 Camilla Wirseen, 5

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DANCING BRIDGE An ingenious intervention into London’s ballet complex adds unexpected richness to a humdrum street.

Floral Street is a tall narrow thoroughfare in London’s Covent Garden in which the massive white neo-renaissance bulk of the Royal Opera House suddenly obtrudes into a smallscale streetscape of pubs and little shops. Most people do not look up as they hurry down the street or loaf along window shopping. But the few who do, glimpse a magical phenomenon: a crystal that twists and shimmers across the street against the sky. This is the new bridge between the Royal Ballet School and the Opera House, created so that dancers can go from the practice rooms in the school to the Opera House without having to rush across the road in the rain. The twisted geometry is necessary because the school level from which the structure sets out is higher than the opening in the huge blind wall of

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the Opera House, and it is a small distance to the east. The Opera House is a Grade I-listed historic building which the architects were bound to change as little as possible, so one of E.M.Barry’s blank attic windows became the point of entry. The ballet school to the north is a much less distinguished building, recently constructed under one of the new forms of government procurement that more or less guarantees mediocrity, but internal planning necessitated only one location for the spring point of the bridge on that side. The spring points meant the bridge had to be gently ramped and skewed away from the orthogonal. A simple long glass box would not do, so Jim Eyre evolved a proposal that involved creating a tube out of square portal frames that are rotated, ensuring that at each end the

B RIDGE , R OYAL O PERA H OUSE , L ONDON ARCHITECT W ILKINSON E YRE

bridge is level and square to the façade it addresses. Each frame is rotated by three degrees in relation to its neighbour and is slightly different in height. Glazing is held between each pair of frames. As a result of pursuing these simple rules, a wonderfully complex object has been created. Both from inside and out, the object alters with every movement you make. Structurally, the essential proposition is simple: a welded and bolted aluminium box beam spans simply from one building to the other; its section changes according to stresses and the geometry of the frames. At the Opera House end, the beam has a sliding bearing to allow for thermal movement and, as a result, loads at that end always bear vertically down on Barry’s wall. The aluminium portals are supported on the primary beam

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and have oak slats on each side of their webs so that the glazing can be fixed with the necessary degree of stiffness. As much prefabrication as possible was used to minimise disruption to the street, and to reduce working at high level. The beam with the portals erected and the central part glazed was rapidly set in place by crane, after which the final glazing panels were fitted and the abutments finished. Glazing is both transparent and translucent. Translucency is used to prevent overlooking the terrace of the neighbouring house to the west, and to give people on the bridge a degree of privacy as they go over the road. Contrast between transparent and translucent adds to the visual complexity of the object, Internally from some angles, the walls appear almost opaque, as the frames crowd together in perspective and seem mostly to

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be made of oak. Move a few feet further and the wall suddenly becomes full of light, or transparent (with the aluminium frames exposed full on), offering dramatic views up and down Floral Street. Externally, the bridge alters in a similar way from semi-opaque to transparent as your angle of view changes. In the last century, most of the incidental additions to London’s streets have been coarse and clumsy: here at last is an addition that shows how contemporary technology and architectural invention can rival the elegance and dignity of anything the Victorians did – and be much lighter too. P.D. Architect Wilkinson Eyre Design team Jim Eyre, Annette von Hagen, Martin Knight Structural engineer Flint & Neill Partnership Photographs All by Nick Wood except 4, which is by Edmund Sumner. Copyright Wilkinson Eyre

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4 Oak slats secretly bolted to webs of aluminium portal frame members hold the glass in place. 5 The bridge dances from opacity through translucency to transparency.

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FOIL TO NATURE Frank Gehry’s first building on a rural site is a model performance complex clad in swishing, sensuous steel drapery that animates its Arcadian campus setting.

The Hudson River enjoys mythical status as the boundary between New York City and the rest of the republic, as the first of the mighty American streams that the European settlers had to ford, and, most of all, for the eponymous school of nineteenth-century landscape painters. When Frank Gehry first proposed his steel-wrapped performing arts centre for a site near those sacred banks where legendary artists once sketched, it provoked an outcry and charges of desecration. Luckily, Bard College has a 540-acre campus, and was able to offer a more spacious site, equally pastoral but free from entangling associations. Named after college trustee and benefactor Richard B. Fisher, it is Gehry’s first institutional building to occupy a rural setting, and initially it’s a shock to see forms and materials more usually associated with the gritty streets of Cleveland and Los Angeles climbing a grassy slope and screened by trees. And yet the steel seems entirely at home in this landscape, changing colour through the day, mirroring shifts of light, and serving as a foil to bare branches or lush greenery. Located 90 miles north of New York City, Bard College has evolved from a nineteenth-century Episcopalian foundation into a prestigious liberal arts university. Leo Botstein, Bard’s president, who also conducts the American Symphony Orchestra, wanted a symbol of the college’s commitment to the arts that would also provide an ideal performance space for the summer music festival and for leading soloists and ensembles year-round. The original plan was to augment the existing performing arts department. When the project was relocated and the

1 From a distance, the steel carapace ripples and flows like fabric. 2 The oversailing entrance canopy acts as a generous covered porch for enjoying the surroundings.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) adjacencies were lost, the programme expanded from 6000 square metres to 10 760, incorporating large rehearsal rooms for drama and dance, and a fully equipped black-box theatre seating up to 250, in addition to the 930-seat Sosnoff Theater. Like Walt Disney Concert Hall, the complex was designed from the inside out, with the main performance space as the overriding priority. The challenge – here, as in California – was to tie together a cluster of boxy volumes and give them an appropriately theatrical expression. Disney doubles as a civic monument, that should – like the Guggenheim, or the Sydney Opera House – become a symbol of the city, and its sleek curved planes of stainless steel are folded and composed with the mastery of a vintage Balenciaga gown. Fisher aspires to greatness as a performance space, but it forms part of a college campus and its bias-cut steel is draped as loosely, and cut away as daringly as a Yohji Yamamoto dress. As you ascend the path to the main entrance, the angled plates of brushed stainless steel swirl and flow like flying skirts on a runway, concealing and revealing the concrete and plaster volumes below, flaring up to form an entry canopy and subsiding to wrap the front of house. Gehry describes this canopy as a covered porch where people can gather outdoors on a fine evening in mounting anticipation of what is to come. To the rear, the boxy volumes are exposed, in a literal expression of backstage. Diehard Modernists may object to this disconnection between skin and body, front and back, seeing it as a subversive attempt to reintroduce surface ornament on rational structures, but in the Fisher there is no deception. The carapace is as airborne and dynamic as a dancer on stage, and the supporting trusses and braces are fully revealed beneath the canopy and within the three-level lobby with its steel-framed stairs and stacked concourses. Natural light flows in from tall side windows and openings between the steel wrappers. Bard stands for freedom of expression – the opening gala was briefly interrupted by a ragtag bunch of student protestors and one nude woman bearing a sign ‘Drop Tuition Not Foil’ – and the Center captures that anarchic spirit. The Sosnoff auditorium is designed for performances of orchestral music, opera, dance, and drama. ‘Multipurpose rooms are difficult to make,’ says Gehry, and many architects and acousticians have failed to achieve a good balance between the competing demands of orchestral

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) P ERFORMING ARTS CENTRE , A NNANDALE - ON -H UDSON , N EW Y ORK , USA A RCHITECT G EHRY P ARTNERS 8 At dusk, the glazed volumes of the theatre foyers beckon enticingly. 9 Poised like a dancer, the entrance canopy seems to defy gravity. 10 Tall side windows are slashed into the muscular steel flanks. cross section through Sosnoff auditorium

composite roof level plan

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cross section through black box theatre

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) music and the spoken word. Disney Hall has only to satisfy the first of those roles, and Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician who collaborated with Gehry on both projects, made his reputation on single-purpose concert halls in his native Japan. He emerged beaming at the clarity of sound after the opening-night performance of Mahler’s grandiose Third Symphony, but the real test is yet to come. As project designer Craig Webb points out, you need a large volume and a high ceiling for symphonies, and a lower ceiling and shorter reverberation times to preserve the clarity of speech. In Sosnoff, the side walls of the hexagonal auditorium are slightly bowed, and the acid-washed concrete is overlaid with spaghetti loops of fir battens to diffuse sound. The billowing ceiling of Douglas fir rises to a peak at the centre but is pulled down at front and back. Angled side balconies at both upper levels, and a low divide within the main tier of seating, provide additional sound reflectors. A wooden acoustic shell, comprising eight side towers that are as dense and reverberant as concrete, and suspended ceiling panels that are stored in the flies, can be assembled on stage to enhance orchestral sound for audience and musicians. Lifts allow the stage to be reconfigured for different uses, and acoustic banners can be extended to dampen reverberations. The black box also has a scenery tower, a lofty volume and sophisticated lighting, and it can be reconfigured more radically, with movable seats or bleachers grouped around different types of stage. The two principal rehearsal rooms are naturally lit from windows that frame the landscape or can be blacked out when stage lighting is required. ‘We had to decide how much architecture to put into the interiors,’ says Webb. ‘It’s a size and type of theatre we haven’t done before, and we decided to make the big statements in the canopy and lobby, and keep the rooms somewhat quiet. In both theatres, the focus is on the performers and the stage.’ That concern extended to the structure itself. As Yasuhisa Toyota notes, the steel was elevated on supports above the subroofing layer and insulated with neoprene to muffle the sound of raindrops falling on the roof. Despite the frugality of the finishes, the pursuit of functional excellence and professional equipment pushed the cost of the project up to $62 million. MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Gehry Partners, Los Angeles Structural engineer DeSimone Consulting Engineer Services engineer Cosentini Associates Acoustic design Nagata Acoustics with Robert F. Mahoney & Associates Theatre design Theatre Projects Consultants Photographs Peter Aaron/Esto

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Marine curves Using the traditional materials of the surrounding neo-vernacular seaside resort, this holiday house explores memories of the German Organic and geological time.

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Ixtapa is in the state of Guerrero, some 250km up the coast from Acapulco, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Its traditional name means ‘the white sand place’, and its climate ranges from humid, with heavy tropical rains on summer nights, when temperatures can reach 32C, to relatively dry in winter, when the average temperature is 26C. Almost every day of the year enjoys cloudless sunshine during daylight hours. The resort, which has grown up over the past 30 years, has been planned with some care to

1 Entrance side, looking through the great room to pool and sea. 2, 3 The generous wall-less room resembles a cave overlooking the sea.

take advantage of the idyllic climate. It has strong urban design (or at least appearance) rules, which include insistence on using natural materials and palapa (tropical thatch),* or at least tejado (tiled) roofs. The clients for Fernando Romero’s house wanted a place for family reunions, where everyone could enjoy the amazing site and sun. Romero’s basic strategy was to make the ground floor into the general or public area, while the upper one is devoted to bedrooms for visiting family members. The tour de force is

the very large living room that looks out over the evergreen garden, beach pool and sea through a huge, unglazed opening, made possible by the climate. The curving plan creates a diagram that seems to have the pattern of a rather complicated cell seen under a microscope. The great room opens to the south under a covered terrace. To the north are the more utilitarian service rooms and the master bedroom, the latter positioned so that the place can become a flat when no visitors are staying. In three dimensions,

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) the space resembles a cave, gradually carved out from a massive boulder by the action of the sea. As the resort’s rules demand, walls are sculpted out of white rendered masonry, and there is a shallow thatched roof. The big span of the public area and the long cantilevers are, of course, generated by using an inner concrete structure that is masked by the flowing white masonry. The place is an evocative echo of the

Einstein-Türm school of organic architecture strangely translated to the tropics. CRISPIN HEWS * Traditionally, a palapa is an open-sided dwelling with a thatched roof made of dried palm leaves: or any structure that is opensided and thatched with palm leaves. Architect LCM/Fernando Romero Job architect: Alfonso Salem Design team: Fernando Romero, Juan Pablo Maza, Mark Seligson, Tatiana Bilbao, Ernesto Gadea, Jacinta Garatachia, Mauricio Rodriguez, Victor Jaime, Aaron Hernandez Structural engineer Fernando Carrillo

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 Model from north-west, with dominating tower, piazza beyond, and university/mall in background. 2 Tower is intended to be a landmark of the new centre, and can be seen for miles over surrounding suburbs.

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CENTRAL FOCUS Now near completion, this mixed-use building boldly combines three very disparate elements, shopping mall, university and office tower, to try to create an urban and social centre in the middle of sprawling suburbs.

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O FFICE TOWER , S URREY , V ANCOUVER , C ANADA ARCHITECT B ING T HOM

One of the strangest contemporary conjunctions of urban uses today is to be found in the City of Surrey, where Bing Thom has designed an office tower on top of a university, which itself is set over an existing shopping mall. Surrey is the second largest city in British Columbia, some 40 minutes’ drive from Vancouver and, though it received its city charter in 1993, it remains part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Its population of over a third of a million is growing faster than almost any other city in Canada and houses a quarter of the thriving region’s workforce – yet it provides only four per cent of its jobs. Unless you are very well-informed, you wouldn’t know any of this as you drive south from Vancouver towards the nearby US border. Surrey is seamlessly knitted to the bigger city’s suburbs, and you have to keep your eyes open to realize you are in another municipality. It is truly one of those north American destinations where, on arrival you find, as Gertrude Stein remarked (of her home-town, Oakland), that ‘there’s no there there’. The mixed-use Central City development is intended, as Thom asserts, to ‘kick-start the city centre’. He decided to build on what was already in place: a 650 000sq ft (60 400m 2) regional shopping mall (though failing), a recreation centre, excellent car access and a convenient location between the last two stations on the Skytrain line, greater Vancouver’s rapid transit system (AR April 2003). A million square feet (93 000m2) of new uses, including the university and the tower, have been added to existing functions. Thom hopes the different uses will reinforce each other, for instance, that the university will use the existing recreation centre and the mall’s cafés, restaurants and bars, so avoiding the need for separate facilities for such functions. He expects shoppers will use student parking at Christmas-time, when the mall is at its busiest, and,

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) perhaps, that the businesses in the tower will draw on university resources for research, training and recruitment. The new development is hoped to be the first phase of the new city centre. It has four major formal elements: the tower, a podium, an atrium, and what Thom calls a ‘galleria’. The complex curves around a new pedestrian piazza which forms the focus of the whole. In future, the piazza (the only proper outdoor pedestrian space in Surrey) is to grow as further phases of the complex are completed, but it is already possible to extend it at festival and ceremonial times by temporarily closing the road. A long glass and timber wall inclined, like those of airport control towers, to reduce reflections, separates piazza from atrium, so depending on your angle of observation and that of the sun, external and internal spaces flow together visually. The atrium’s entrance hall is accessed through porches that penetrate the transparent wall; each is lit in a different colour at night to emphasize the variety of uses within, but anyone can use any porch. One of the key aims of the design is to ensure that all users should use the atrium to try to achieve social interaction and notions of community. The atrium itself is a grand, multi-level space covered by a spaceframe roof that is stiffened by a dramatic king post truss made of turned fir logs held together with steel tension rods and connectors. In the space frame, struts are made of peeler cores – the thin cylinders of heartwood remaining on the lathes after their long blades peel off plywood veneers from logs. Peeler cores usually have little value, but here they are connected by specially made ductile iron nodes to make a dramatic element of the volume. Round the edges of the atrium, tree-like columns with timber branches spreading from concrete trunks provide edge support for the space frame. Wood also forms the structure of the inclined glass wall, in which the panes are hung from the roof by steel cables, with horizontal wind loads being carried by short struts back to the round composite timber

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) columns, which are tapered at each end to express bending stresses and reduce their visual impact (a very large lathe had to be specially built to make them). Extensive use of timber has two purposes: both to make the big space more touchable and approachable, and to celebrate the ethos of a technological university that should have a formative effect on British Columbia’s main industry. The other big public space opens to the left of the atrium. Toplit, the galleria is fundamentally part of the mall with its roof taken off and built up with layers of university to form a much more noble space than the drearily functional and rather dark volume there before. One of the problems of creating this part of the complex was that the shopping centre had to remain open throughout the building operations. To allow for that, and to provide enough support for the new upper floors, the new work is almost entirely carried on seven massive cruciform columns. Light pours down into the central streetlike space from a roof made of glass, laminated timber compression members, and steel cable ties with ductile iron connections. From below, the whole thing looks a bit like a fish skeleton, a form not unknown in contemporary western Canadian architecture. Ideally, the whole tall volume will act together, with the lives of the students on their open galleries and those of the shoppers below reinforcing and animating each other. The university takes up three floors, connecting tower, podium and galleria. They are given identity with a metal cladding system into which windows are punched through a mixture of panels of titanium zinc, chemically treated stainless steel and raw titanium – a mixture that is used on some of the public parts of the interior, there combined with wood, white panels and glass. As the sun moves round the building, the mixture changes: in direct sunlight, titanium panels seem to be darker than zinc ones; the reverse is true when a face is in shadow. In counterpoint, stainless-steel panels incorporate

8 Timber is used extensively in the interior to make the building approachable, and to remind of Canadian essentials. 9 Rising from the entrance hall to the atrium, with the university on upper floors. Galleria beyond. 10 Galleria at university level… 11 … and at the level of existing mall. 9

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level one (scale approx 1:2000)

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12 Boss of great atrium truss (see 14). 13 Fish skeleton trussed roof of galleria. 14 Atrium: space-frame roof is made from usually disregarded peeler cores.

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long section (south-north) through galleria

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) permanent changes in colour from red to green to blue and black, depending on the length of time each piece of metal spent in the pickling bath. On top of everything else is the office tower, with an elongated curved plan, conventional apart from the fact that the services and vertical circulation core is offset to allow daylight into the lift lobbies and lavatories. Cladding is apparently pretty straightforward curtain walling over a gridded window pattern. In fact, the wall is a little more subtle, with fritted spandrel panels in front of aluminium-foil-covered insulation. When the sun shines, the spandrels become radiant, and in the shade, they are more or less opaque white so the tower, like the podium, changes with time and weather. The wrapped effect is emphasized by twisting the glass wall at the north end of the plan to form what the architects call ‘a warped prow’ that reaches out over the street. Thom’s intention in making the tower convex is, in a sense, to make it a counterpart of the concave curve of the piazza below. But the tower’s shape is, of course, also intended to make it a landmark in the relentless low-level, lowdensity cityscape. For me, the prow’s twist is a gesture too far, though from certain angles, it does indeed draw attention to the place. Yet, though it is easy to have reservations about individual details, Central City deserves respect. It is undoubtedly a daring attempt to generate a real sense of urbanity and human focus in the spiritual desert of the amorphous North American suburb. And, unlike many attempts to create civic sense, it has been achieved largely by working within the constraints of commercial development. All architects must hope that it succeeds, for if it does, it will show that our profession has far more to offer than the role of exterior decorator to which it is so often reduced by the North American development industry. P. D.

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15 Tower’s glittering prow hovers over endless monotonous suburbs that stretch nearly to the mountains. 16 Timber is used both in natural and composite forms.

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Architects Bing Thom – Principal Michael Heeney – Executive Director Chris Doray – Design Director Francis Yan – Associate Director Project team Stefan Aepli, Eileen Keenan, Allan Alomes, Greg Leano, Sarah Bjornson, Tanya McLean, James Brown, Michael Motlagh, John Camfield, Jun Nan, Matthew Cencich, Pavlina Ryvola, Kori Chan, Robert Sandilands, Stewart Child, Patrick Schilling, Rosalyn Chung, Peter F. Smith, Clint Cuddington, Eric Stedman, Stuart Curran, Johannes Visser, Dan Du, Andrew Weyrauch, Robert Emslie, Michael Wong, Brian Gee, Matthew Woodruff, Stephanie Gerbrandt, Tony Yip, Jennifer Notte, LucianoZago, Shinobu Homma, Yong Zhang, Sharif Hossainy, Helmut Kassautzki Structural Engineers Jones Kwong Kishi, Structurecraft / Fast + Epp Electrical Engineer R A Duff Associates Mechanical Engineer Keen Engineering

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MARKET FORCES

M ARKET , V ALENCIA , S PAIN ARCHITECT B ORGOS D ANCE

This historic Art Nouveau era market in Valencia has been imaginatively restored to become part of city life once more.

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1 The monumental east arch, flanked by a quartet of ceramic flower kiosks.

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Valencia – the much-underrated third city of Spain – is full of remarkable buildings, from the medieval silk exchange with its tall twisted columns to the flamboyant food market with its green parrot weathervane, and Calatrava’s gargantuan City of Arts and Sciences. None offers greater surprise and delight than this newly restored Colon Market hall, which was designed in 1913 by Francisco Mora, a talented practitioner of Modernismo. As in St Pancras Station, ornate brick facades bracket a soaring iron and glass vault, but here the contrast

between art and engineering, decoration and functionalism is even more pronounced. To the west is a grand arch with a three-domed room inserted above the entrance, encrusted with ceramic ornament and crowned with painted tiles and the city’s coat of arms surmounted by a black bat. Green octopuses flop over the finials of the domes, which are lined with floral tilework, and this upper room, formerly an office, is now the El Alto restaurant. At the east end is a Gaudíesque arch of patterned brick with a sinuously

arched window in the upper half. Ceramic flower kiosks with flared glass canopies extend inside and out from the base. Bridging these gallimaufries of modern, medieval and Moorish is a plain, graceful iron vault, with tapered, minimally ornamented columns supporting trusses over a lofty, skylit nave, and shallow-pitched roofs sheltering open-sided aisles. Despite its Grade 1 listing and its location on a fashionable shopping street, surrounded by elegant apartment buildings of the same era, the market shut down in 1985 and continued to

deteriorate. It was saved by the popular mayor, Rita Barbera Nolla, who has done much to enhance Valencia’s architectural heritage and remembered childhood shopping expeditions to the Colon. Working through Aumsa, the city’s development agency, she initiated a programme of restoration and new construction. Three levels of subterranean parking for residents and visitors, and one for commercial activities, would provide revenue and unclog surrounding streets. The market had been built on a foundation of rubble over alluvial soil and was still settling. Pile caps were made to transfer the vertical loads to a new steel and concrete raft, and the newly excavated basement was protected from seepage by a substantial diaphragm wall. Rusted iron members were carefully removed and replaced a section at a time, while the tile and brickwork was being meticulously restored. In summer 2001, as the civic works progressed, five architectural firms – including three from Spain and Kazuyo 2 Unused since 1985, the restored market hall brings new light to Valencia’s evening cityscape. 3 Looking east through the market hall, a range of retail installations occupy a new ground floor and subterranean public realm. 4, 5 Six glass prisms with translucent Barrisol ceilings contain shops, stairs and cafés.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) of bamboo in limestone planters that double as glass-backed benches are deployed around the perimeter to provide protection from wind and conceal emergency ventilation points to the lower levels. The ironwork was repainted in its original tone of pistachio. To either side of the nave are three cubic pavilions, 7.4 x 6.4m on plan and 4m high, containing shops, escape stairs, and a pair of cafés with tables spilling out onto the plaza. They are clad in opti-white glass panels that are anchored to the slab and tied together at the top by an insulated stainless structural plate, and are lit from translucent cast glass cores and from lights concealed behind a translucent Barrisol ceiling membrane. By day, these pavilions seem as insubstantial as soap bubbles, dematerialized by the brilliant natural light; at night they glow like lanterns beneath the springy, softly illuminated vault. Lighting consultant Claude Engel installed tiny uplights on the capitals of the columns and external projectors to play on the facades. Escalators lead down from the plaza, through a central opening with a clear glass balustrade, towards an 8m-high water wall that flows into a reflecting pool

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Sejima from Japan – were invited to submit ideas for revitalizing the building. The London-based partnership of Borgos Dance were chosen for their minimalist approach, which treated the market floor as a public plaza and put most of the new construction on the level below. Etienne Borgos was familiar with Valencia, having spent several years there as project architect on Norman

Foster’s Congress Centre (AR August 1998); Simon Dance had previously worked for John Pawson on residential projects and the Cathay Pacific Lounge in the Hong Kong airport terminal (AR January 1999). To create an impressive plaza, they paved the floor with limestone and extended it beyond the side roofs to the iron and stone fence. Eight ‘green screens’

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while cooling the air and providing a soothing murmur. This lower concourse has handsomely detailed glass-fronted shops down the long sides, a restaurant at the west end, and two semicircles of stone-faced market stalls wrapped around the pile caps of the east portal. In its present, gentrified state, the Colon complements the culinary cornucopia of the municipal market – which rivals La Boqueria in Barcelona for the quality and variety of its offerings – and is a comfortable fit with its neighbours. Borgos Dance have applied the skills they honed with Foster and Pawson to create additions that are reticent and refined, giving new life to a glorious landmark. MICHAEL WEBB Architect Borgos Dance & Partners, London Associate architect Nova Ingenieria Structural and mechanical engineer Ove Arup & Partners Photographs Richard Davies 6 The original 1913 structure, designed by Francisco Mora, has been painstakingly restored to its original pistachio hue. 7 The 8m-high water wall screens the restaurant, tempers the air and creates a calm sunken oasis.

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This scheme should need little introduction. But apparently it does. While the aspirations of BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development) have been well documented1 (AR June 2001), 18 months after the first residents moved in it is time to think beyond the statistics that qualify its conception. This is, let

us not forget, a piece of radical architectural design, and deserves to be seen within a wider context as a model for future volume housing. Beyond reducing energy consumption to 10 per cent of similar suburban homes built to 1995 regulations, it is a model of place making, and of high-density

suburban urbanization. A model of architectural imagination and mixed-use integration. And above all of optimism and progress. But before this, it is perhaps equally pertinent to state what BedZED is not. It is not a high budget, highly refined show piece. It is certainly not architectural wallpaper. It is instead an exemplary working experiment: the kind of megaprototype essential to test issues concerning future housing generations. So those who criticize the eccentricity of some of its details clearly miss the point. After all, with over ten years as a key associate of Michael Hopkins and Partners, Bill Dunster graduated from one of the best schools of architectural refinement. Since leaving MHP however, he now chooses to prioritize other broader facets of architecture, of which there are many. Meeting him on the BedZED site recently, where he runs his own design studio (ZED Factory),

Dunster constantly draws parallels between BedZED and the adjacent development, the likes of which he sees as obsolete. Here he plays developers at their own game, adopting their language and their currency – that of economy. Through an integrated approach, BedZED provides the same dwelling density as the adjacent speculative development, but with a 35 per cent increase in space allowance. This in turn provides valuable revenue earning benefits in the form of additional live-work units, and community facilities such as surgery, a community hall and a bar. It also results in a vastly improved public realm, with a reduction in naked tarmac and virtually no unused (and therefore unloved) residual space. This is a principle that Dunster describes as using planning gain to facilitate carbon trading. In other words, not only does mixed use bring the social and environmental benefits of a

1 With south-facing sun spaces, BedZED’s terraces establish an alternative suburban prototype ... 2 ... a stark contrast to the lowdensity, car-dominated streetscape of the conventional existing housing. 3 Each one-bedroom loft apartment has its own entrance and sky garden, set within the site’s distinctive roofscape.

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As governments around the world struggle to provide sufficient affordable homes in cities, BedZED has much to teach architects, developers, and residents alike.

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typical cross section through loft apartment access stair and ventilation shafts (scale approx 1:200)

24 hour operation that sustains diverse communities and balances energy loads around the clock but, most significantly, the increased commercial revenue relative to the cost of the land can be offset against the necessarily front loaded costs of producing a carbon neutral development. Improved density is achieved through the resolution of Dunster’s integrated cross section. Defined by solar access criteria, a few simple ground rules dictate that all dwellings face south while workspaces face north. This in turn generates four variant terraces, the cross sections of which combine spaces from up to four self-contained units, each with their own entrance and external garden. By interlocking livework spaces with maisonettes, loft apartments and two sky gardens, the central terraces achieve a density in excess of 100 homes per ha, providing 400 rooms and 200 jobs per ha, and 26 sq m of private garden compared with 8 sq m of public space per home. A target that if replicated would reduce urban sprawl to about 25 per cent of the projected footprint over the next 100 years, resulting in all our housing needs being achievable on brown field sites. Following Tom Dyckhoff’s stirring review in the national press, Dunster’s ZED Factory has been inundated with people wanting to do a ZED (a zero energy development). With a list of over 700 people it is clear that BedZED is responding to a real need, and when sufficient clusters of people emerge other developments will be built. It is for these reasons and many more1 that it is especially disappointing that BedZED did not win the recent RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture; Britain’s premier award, that being broadcast on national television, has the potential to send a 4 While perimeter 3 bed maisonettes have more conventional front gardens and balconies ... 5 ... mews maisonettes access their sky gardens via bridges that lead from first-floor living rooms.

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message far beyond the limitations of the architectural world. While the winner, Herzog & De Meuron’s Laban Centre is truly exquisite, it is with respect just another beautiful building, highly refined in both its conception and detail, in response to a gift of a brief. But, as we are faced with an international housing crisis, we must see that BedZED is so much more than a collection of well intended green houses, and if we really want to break down the marginalization of green isues, it certainly should have won more than a specific sustainability award. So it comes down to us. If you are reading out there, here is a call to duty for Messrs Mass Housing: take next week off, and spare us the thousands of soulless houses that you could build during that time. Put down your speculative house plan pattern books and consider the genuine potential of your productivity and profitability. Invest in front end design and invest in diversity.

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H OUSING , S UTTON , E NGLAND ARCHITECT B ILL D UNSTER A RCHITECTS

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BedZED funds carbon-neutrality by integrating live work units and dwellings

Without you, little will be achieved, as you alone have the means to radically improve the landscape of our built environment. So, go to BedZED. Then wake up and help us all live the dream. ROB GREGORY 1 For further detailed analysis www.zedfactory.com BedZED (2002). BRECSU Best Practice Programme, Crown Copyright. Sustainable Urban Design – An Environmental Approach (2002). Randall Thomas, Spon Press. Architect Bill Dunster Architects, London Client The Peabody Trust Environmental consultants BioRegional Development Group M&E and building physics Ove Arup Partners Structural and civil engineer Ellis & Moore Quantity surveyor Gardiner & Theobald Photographs Dennis Gilbert/VIEW 6 Mews streets prioritize pedestrians over the car. 7 Centralized CHP plant is a prominent on-site feature. 8 75 sq m live-work units, ideal for small start up businesses.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 Wrapped in a green copper skin, the sleek new water police headquarters reflects the changes in the surrounding docklands. 2 The cantilevered structure looms over its patch.

Though Harburg is technically part of Hamburg, it is separated from the city centre by the Elbe River, two bridges and a fifteen-minute drive. Until recently, its inland harbour and canals were known only to directors of police thrillers, but now, with rising prices on the north bank and moves to increase city densities by recycling warehouses and grain silos, Harburg is rapidly and fashionably accelerating into the cabled loft age. Established in 1786 (and reputedly the oldest in the world), Hamburg’s water police must now cope with a transformed Harburg harbour. Telekom headquarters, shipping controllers, on-line service industries, media professionals and a China Tower for one of Germany’s biggest export partners are replacing fish handlers, scrap metal yards and palm oil refineries. The air is cleaner and the crime more white collar. Water police responsibilities have also expanded to encompass the land between the canals as well as 150 kilometres up river. To keep pace with those more likely to steal computer notebooks than lead piping, the river and harbour police divisions have a new headquarters equipped with state of the art technology to tackle borderless European Union crime. Located between river and harbour, behind a protective dyke and lock gates, the eye-catching new structure also signals a change in status for Harburg, as quayside walks and al fresco eating gradually

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replace nineteenth-century industry and pollution. Local firm Architekten-Contor in collaboration with SchäferAgather-Scheel won a national two-stage competition for the new headquarters with a dramatically cantilevered, copperclad structure reminiscent of El Lissitzky and Mart Stam’s 1924 unbuilt Wolkenbügel project. Traditionally associated with durability and constancy, here the vivid green pre-patinated copper is intended to make a bolder statement. Although only five floors high, the building is visible

from road, rail and water approaches. Similarly, the police have three hundred and sixty degree visibility over their patch, like eagles in an eyrie. To improve operational efficiency, three police divisions have been brought together under one roof. In-house training officers and a specialist marine technical team join conventional policemen on a daily quartet of six hour shifts. Patrol boats are moored on the river or harbour side of the building and video cameras monitor their comings and goings. As the water level is

only five metres below ground, the station has no cellar storage or parking. Internal organization is based around a central spinal corridor, with cellular offices on both sides and full width conference or sports rooms at each end. A boardwalk balcony overlooks a roof terrace and the eventually landscaped car park could double as open-day barbeque party area. Building services are generally domestic in scale, with openable windows, heating (but no air conditioning), external sun louvres and internal roller blinds.

ON THE WATERFRONT A new headquarters for the water police in Hamburg reflects both the changing nature of the city’s docklands and local crime.

R IVER AND HARBOUR POLICE STATION , H AMBURG , G ERMANY

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ARCHITECTS A RCHITEKTEN -C ONTOR , S CHÄFER -A GATHER -S CHEEL

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site plan

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) R IVER AND HARBOUR POLICE STATION , H AMBURG , G ERMANY ARCHITECTS A RCHITEKTEN -C ONTOR , S CHÄFER -A GATHER -S CHEEL

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garage cells prisoner reception public reception offices locker rooms

Rejecting institutional grey, building users instead opted for Yves Klein blue, an obvious choice for a marine location, and an effective contrast to the warm timber fittings. The fair-faced concrete lift shaft is also painted the same penetrating blue, bringing a dash of the Mediterranean to northern latitudes. Given the upmarket hotel character of finishes and furniture, it is sometimes easy to forget that the building entertains more troublesome visitors. These arrive by car through a lockable garage at the west end of the ground floor to be booked in at a no-frills reception area with lockers for personal belongings. There are four different sizes of cell, each with built-in wooden benches. In the past, the water police had little to do with land-based crime, but now when large numbers of suspects are detained, the new station is designated one of several holding points around the city. Though this project cannot be compared to more modest community buildings, it shows how an enlightened government client can use the competition system to encourage and deliver innovative architecture. Here in Hamburg, it is refreshing to see the state setting a challenging benchmark for the private sector.

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LAYLA DAWSON Architect Architekten-Contor, Schäfer-Agather-Scheel, Hamburg Structural engineer Ingenieurbüro Schulz Pre-patinated copper cladding KME Photographs Klaus Frahm/artur

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:500)

3 Patrol boats are moored nearby. 4 Detail of copper and glass facade. 5 Stairs wrap round a bold blue lift shaft. 6 Office accommodation sits above a podium of cells. 7, 8 Of necessity, the building has good views over its surroundings. 9 Typical meeting room.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H OUSE , W YE R IVER , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT B ELLEMO & C AT

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Seen from afar, this extraordinary holiday house looks like a Zeppelin crash-landed in the Australian bush. Clinging to a precipitous slope, the curved capsule seems improbably fragile, like a giant insect cocoon lodged among the trees. Designed by the Melbournebased architect/artist partnership of Michael Bellemo and Cat MacLeod for their own recreational use, the house is a surreal presence in the thickly wooded coastal landscape of south-west Victoria. Holiday homes abound in this area, but the blimp house is a highly personal, poetic and practical response to the challenges of terrain and environment. The steep, isolated site is prone to landslip and the climate is often cold and windy. Clad in a ribbed skin of gull-grey steel shingles, the house cocoon is wedged precariously into the hillside, its aerodynamic form calculated to minimise wind resistance. Six spindly legs of 1 The house irresistibly recalls a crashlanded blimp. 2 The vertiginous wooded site.

Antipodean cocoon This unusual holiday house in the Australian bush is a lyrical yet highly practical response to site and climate.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) galvanised steel support its bulk, so it appears to hover weightlessly above the steeply sloping ground. A gangplank at one end connects it with a small barbecue area and a winding approach track. Within the bulbous metal carapace, a plywood-lined box houses the main living and dining spaces which face south towards a ridge of hills and the ocean beyond. Here, the long side of the cocoon has been squared off and glazed to create a huge vitrine and cantilevered terrace, maximising light and views. Inside, the spaces dovetail together with the economic precision of a small boat or caravan. The main bedroom is tucked into the cocoon’s snout forming a snug sleeping burrow, perforated by narrow skylights. Bunk beds for children and a bathroom lined with translucent green resin, are slotted in next door. The kitchen runs along the long north side of the main living and dining space. The pine plywood lining has been coated with limewash, to prevent it turning orange. Though its orientation means that sun from

the north is largely cut off by the trees, the house is warmed by an open fireplace and is highly insulated. The lightweight monocoque structure is a hybrid of techniques appropriated from boat building and aircraft engineering. The internal rigid rectangular box was built first and plywood ribs added to generate the basic cocoon shape. Green hardwood battens were then attached to the ribs, forming fixing points for the narrow steel shingles. Like a woven basket, the meshing together of the various elements – ribs, battens and shingles – creates a strong, stable, composite structure. Details were often resolved on-site, so the whole construction has a rustic, makeshift air. Though undoubtedly a challenge to design and build, the outcome is a delight – an antipodean primitive hut for the twenty-first century. C. S.

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Architect Bellemo & Cat, Melbourne, Australia Structural engineer Peter Felicetti Photographs Mark Munro

H OUSE , W YE R IVER , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT B ELLEMO & C AT 1 entrance gangplank 2 living 3 dining 4 kitchen 5 bathroom 6 laundry/wc 7 bunk beds 8 main bedroom 9 deck

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:200)

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3 Main bedroom in the cocoon snout. 4 The curved monocoque form is clad in steel shingles. 5 Spindly legs support the house in the steep terrain. 6 Main living and dining room, a plywood-lined box-with-a-view.

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O FFICES , L ONDON ARCHITECT F OSTER AND P ARTNERS

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While Charles Jencks may state that big is boring in his theory that measures design tedium against floor areas (AR August 2002), it cannot be denied that Foster and Partners’ 30 St Mary Axe is an impressive sight. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Jencks’ proposition (which states that for every additional ten floors added to a skyscraper, the design becomes twice as tedious), as the first truly sky-scraping tower built in the City since 1979, this building cannot be accused of being a monotonous skin-deep icon. Clearly visible from far afield, most impressively perhaps from the M11 as you approach London from Cambridge, the more people you speak to, the more you realize that this is becoming one of London’s more popular landmarks. While acquiring many nicknames, being likened to a fat banker in fish nets to the slightly more fitting city attire analogy, namely an Argyle sock, Foster and Swiss Re’s environmental aspirations have been delightfully interwoven with its form (regardless of whether or not you believe the pursuit of these priorities preceded the form’s rationalization). As essentially a commercial office development, 30 St Mary 1 A new skyscape: at 180m high, 30 St Mary Axe is now a familiar sight on London’s skyline ... 2 ... with a distinctive pattern expressing spatial and environmental order within.

Wind sock The integration of structure, form and fabric creates London’s first environmentally progressive skyscraper.

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Axe is designed to be lettable on the open market. But it is unlike the norm, where architectural design effort focuses predominantly on the outermost six inches of the facade. With St Mary Axe, structure, form and fabric have been integrated, and Foster and Partners have produced one of the City’s first large-scale office buildings which genuinely has the capacity to be passively ventilated. The building’s distinctive pattern is a direct reflection of its internal organization and its environmental strategy, where six orthogonal fingers of flexible office space are punctuated by radial atria: a series of two and six storey voids that spiral around the building, increasing perimeter desk space, and bringing light and air deep within the heart of the building’s circular envelope. In cladding the tower, Fosters were able to continue their innovative relationship with German cladding contractor Schmidlin, with whom they collaborated on London’s City Hall (AR August 2002). Through parametric modelling techniques, deriving the critical co-ordinates of each panel mathematically rather than relying on traditional drawing techniques, Foster and Schmidlin demonstrate that material and component efficiency no longer rely on monotonous repetition. With emerging production line methods, where units are fabricated from palettes containing bar-coded precision cut components, it is no longer the case that incremental variations send costs through the roof. In this case, with the cladding geometry changing at every level as the floor plates increase from the 50m wide first floor to 57m on level 17, before diminishing to the 25m wide private dining room at the summit, an economic solution was reached. Within the principal diagrid established by the 36 steel columns that spiral around building (which form an independent self-bracing structure), each floor level is broken down into 72 five-degree modules. Within this subdivision,

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3 Less bulky than a rectangular building? Externally, diminishing floor plates attempt to reduce the impact of the 40-storey tower (scale approx 1:675) ... 4 ... while internally two-pack and sixpack spiralling atria break up the 500 000 sq ft of lettable office space.

O FFICES , L ONDON ARCHITECT F OSTER AND P ARTNERS

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5 Wind models by BDSP demonstrate pressure gradients around the tower’s distinctive curved form. 6, 7 With just two variant units per floor, cladding panels slot together with millimetre perfect accuracy.

the curved form, it is argued, will minimize wind loads, maintain pedestrian comfort, and assist the internal ventilation strategy

section through folded diamond cladding unit (scale approx 1:30)

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the envelope on each level is then formed by just two variant diamond-shaped units; a flat unit that spans between floor plates, and a folded unit formed by two triangular panels, which neatly incorporate a floor plenum air intake slot. Unlike County Hall, however, St Mary Axe does not have an axis, and therefore has no north/south condition to respond to. So, environmentally the building had the inherent problem of a circular plan, in that the facade could not be orientation specific if a single cladding system is wrapped around all 360 degrees. The challenge was therefore to develop a solution which while working in all orientations would maintain a uniform external appearance.

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typical office floor plan

The architect’s response was to break the facade into its component parts, allowing each environmental control component to operate at its optimum performance when and where required. Instead of a high performance glass system throughout, the workspaces are glazed using standard clear low-E units, with a responsive retractable layer of blinds and secondary glazing that could be deployed internally. Conversely, the atria breathe through a clutter-free single skin incorporating opening lights, which has a high performance solar control glass that does all of the work all of the time. While clearly there is a degree of redundancy, as the solar control glass has little benefit on the northern section of the

facade, visual continuity had to be prioritized. Clear glass within the workspaces exploits views and increases daylight levels, while the double skin forms a thermal cavity, within which, when deployed, blinds reduce glare, stop sunlight reaching the inner skin, and also assist air recirculation. While for commercial reasons the building had to offer a base condition of mechanical ventilation, with provision made for ducting routes etc, it is hoped that tenants will choose to naturally ventilate their spaces. The natural ventilation mode was a significant driver in refining the building’s form and skin, and following extensive CFD and wind-tunnel modelling it has been proved that, as the atria cut across the high and low

pressure zones created by the curved form, a pressure gradient is created that will improve cross ventilation between twopack atria, and boost the natural buoyancy of the stack effect through the six packs. As a result it is anticipated that the building could be naturally ventilated for at least 40 per cent of the year, setting the standard for other commercial developments to surpass. ROB GREGORY Architect Foster and Partners, London Structural engineers Arup Environmental engineers BDSP Partnership Mechanical and electrical engineers Hilson Moran Partnership Photographs Nigel Young Skyline view (no 1) Smoothe

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Whether conscious or not, timber’s associations with folksy domesticity tends to inhibit its use in commercial contexts. Baumschlager & Eberle were asked to design a small commercial building in the Vorarlberg village of Wolfurt and responded by employing timber as a precisely detailed

external screen that does the usual jobs of filtering light and providing privacy, but also imparts a subtle, organic warmth and texture to a basic box. Vorarlberg, on the western edge of Austria, is the country’s smallest region, and after Vienna, the most densely populated. Historically, the area has a distinct rural identity, evident in its landscape, its vernacular architecture and a strong (and continuing) tradition of building in wood. Characteristic of an emerging generation of Germanspeaking Swiss and Austrian architects, Baumschlager & Eberle’s work is distinguished by a sober tectonic spirit that also to reinterpret regional traditions and archetypes. The client wanted a building that could accommodate the

local bank at ground level, with three upper floors that could be used either as flats or as offices. The architects responded to this unedifying inexactitude by designing an utterly simple glazed rectangular box, with a stair tower pulled clear of the main volume on the north side. So far, so conventional, but the inspired move was to enclose the building in a timber screen, elevating a plain box into a tactile, mutable, sensual object. Fabricated from square sections of indigenous Austrian larch, the external skin is made up of a series of horizontally slatted sliding screens mounted on a timber sub-frame. The larch lattice filters and diffuses the light, casting shimmering shadows through the interior. It also combats glare and heat

build-up, provides privacy when required and gives the facades a degree of pleasing rather than dreary homogeneity, for the timber screen encloses the entire building, apart from the bank frontage at street level. Within the apparently uniform facade, however, the random movements of the screens generate changing, unpredictable geometries that dignify and enliven the public realm. C. K. Architect Baumschlager & Eberle, Lochau, Austria Photographs Edward Huebner

1 The glazed box is enclosed in an outer skin of slatted larch screens. 2 The sliding screens generate changing geometries. 3, 4 Detail of screens.

B ANK , W OLFURT , A USTRIA ARCHITECT B AUMSCHLAGER & E BERLE

LARCH VEILS An ordinary commercial building is given great urban presence by an external skin of slatted larch screens.

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ANDREW HOLMES’ DRAWINGS, ALL EXECUTED W I T H C O L O U R E D P E N C I L S, A R E M O R E R E A L T H A N P H O T O G R A P H S. RE C E N T L Y, H E H A S C E L E B R A T E D THE ROMANCE O F OIL AND PETROL VEHICLES.

Andrew Holmes is Britain’s leading SuperRealist artist. He is also an architect (and one of the original Richard Rogers four-person practice), a long time unit master at the Architectural Association and latterly at the University of Westminster. For three decades he has been working on, among other things (including 50 Penguin book jackets), a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student at the AA. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. If that sounds like an echo of Reyner Banham and Archigram and Cedric Price and their interest in architectural transience and mobility, that is because it is. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful. Holmes says anyway that the early Rogers connection is more relevant, ‘The truck epitomises more what those early ideas were originally about’: simple steel construction, ready-mades, ad hoc-ness, design-as-accruing. There is an obsessive quality about deciding to do exactly 100 paintings. Holmes says not really: you should look at it like ten music albums each with ten tracks. And there is something clearly obsessive and certainly astonishing about the way he executes the paintings, most of them containing reflections and shiny chrome, in Derwent coloured pencils with only the skies air-brushed in at the beginning. Holmes says disarmingly he is more comfortable working with pencil than slow-drying paint – and he works from 35mm slides which he checks out using a jeweller’s loupe because it enables him to see into the shadows better than with a print. All this could be just elaborate photographic realism. But this is SuperRealism. Holmes’ has an instinct for strangeness in apparent banality, an instinct for stunning beauty in what his gallery calls ‘the compulsive reading of transit steel architecture pumping through the urban desert’. Holmes’ site is at www.realisticpictures.co.uk. SUTHERLAND LYALL

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Above: Friday Mosque, Djenné, Mali – biggest mud building in the world and defining image of West African architecture. Foundations are more than 500 years old, though building has often been rebuilt. Right: mosque, Yebe, Mali. Stick-studded mosques of Niger delta region define the unique aesthetic of Western Sudan. Though wooden posts have practical functions – as scaffold for re-rendering, structural support, and assisting in expelling moisture from heart of the wall – the most striking impact is visual.

GLORIOUS MUD

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Building with mud is one of the oldest architectural traditions and is still practised with remarkable results in parts of West Africa, though there are fears that such skills will eventually be lost for ever. Here, James Morris presents a photographic survey of some astonishing examples of religious and domestic buildings.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Too often, when people in the West think of traditional African architecture, they perceive nothing more than a mud hut; a primitive vernacular half remembered from a Tarzan film. But why this ignorance of half a continent’s heritage? Possibly because the great dynastic civilizations of the region were already in decline when European colonizers first exposed these cultures to a wider audience. Being made of perishable mud, many older buildings have been lost, unlike the stone or brick structures of other ancient cultures. Or possibly this lack of awareness is because the buildings are just too strange, too foreign to have been easily appreciated by outsiders. Often they are more like huge monolithic sculptures or ceramic pots than architecture as we might conventionally think of it. But the surviving buildings are neither historic monuments in the classic sense, nor are they as culturally remote as they may initially appear. They share many of the qualities now valued in Western architectural thinking such as sustainability, sculptural form and community participation in their conception and making. Though part of long held traditions and ancient cultures, they are also contemporary structures, serving a current purpose. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. In the West, mud is effectively regarded as dirt, yet in rural Africa (as in so much of the world) it is the most common of building materials with which everybody has direct contact. Maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life, and there is an ongoing and active participation in their continuing existence. This is not a museum culture. Superbly formed and highly expressive, these extraordinary buildings emerge from the most basic of materials, earth and water, and in the harshest of conditions. They are vibrant works of art with their own distinct and striking aesthetic, skilfully responding to the qualities of African light and the inherent properties of mud to emphasize shadow, texture, silhouette, profile and form. During the course of a year the mud render dries, the surface is covered in a web of cracks and then it slowly starts to peel off before being re-rendered. With each re-rendering, the shape of a building is subtly altered, so

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Top: Nando Mosque, Mali. Supposedly built by a giant in one night, this highly sculptural mosque is a unique structure that borders the magical and fantastical. Middle: women’s quarters, Tangasoko, Burkina Faso. Among the Kassena people, each married woman has her own quarters in the family compound. Built by men and decorated by women, they contain living room and adjoining kitchen. On her death they are allowed to disintegrate, the land and crumbled earth to be reused by a future generation. Bottom: house of the chief of Djenné, Mali. Moroccan influenced wooden windows are a recent development. Right: Hogon House, Sanga, Mali. The most distinct architectural form of the Dogon people, the Hogon House is the home of the traditional spiritual leader.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) change and movement are ever present. The material is tactile, warm and vulnerable, demanding and receiving an engaged relationship with its users. Often people attempt to cement render the buildings, but not only does this destroy them physically, as they rot from within, but it also destroys their character. Their uniqueness is their muddiness. The future of these buildings is hard to predict. Mud is such a vulnerable material and there is an enthusiasm for building in concrete. Given the means, many would tear down their mud houses and build cement block and tin roofed replacements, common practice in those countries that can afford to do so. So what will happen when rural Africans are lifted out of their desperate poverty? Will there be an understandable rush to rid themselves of the physical manifestations of that harrowing past? It can already be seen in wealthier countries such as Ghana and Nigeria where there is virtually nothing left for future generations to repair and preserve. Not only the buildings have gone but also the skills to build them. It is a gradual process of extinction. Already the extraordinary upturned jelly mould houses of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon are gone, soon those of the Kassena and Gurensi in Ghana will disappear. The Sakho houses of the Boso in Mali are all abandoned and in ruins. It is quite possible that when west Africa emerges from below the poverty line there will be little of its built heritage remaining to be appreciated. The saving grace is probably Islam, ever expanding and building more mosques, but even then only in rural parts. In cities, the mosques funded by Wahabi Saudi funds are atrocious concrete imitations of a bastardized Middle Eastern style. In the sparsely populated Sahal plains of the Western Sudan, traditional built forms in mud are the most striking representations of human creativity and a unique part of our world culture – they should not be forgotten. JAMES MORRIS These photographs are taken from Butabu – adobe architecture of West Africa, James Morris and Suzanne Preston Blier, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.

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Top: house, Djenné, Mali. Mud rendered walls have to be resurfaced regularly. As the mud dries it cracks, forming a delicate textured surface. The gently moulded structure behind the wall is a covered staircase opening onto the flat roof. The shape will subtly alter each time it is re-rendered. Bottom: house, Djenné, Mali. The blank facade with tiny openings for windows is a traditional style for the Djenné house. Domestic activity is concentrated in the open courtyard to the rear. Right: Sanam Mosque, Niger, designed in 1998 by Abou Moussa who travelled hundreds of miles from Yaamaa to this inaccessible region in the north of the country. It was built in 45 days by the whole village and appears to be the largest and most striking recent mud building in Niger.

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[email protected] - 236 1 The new museum at night – mass touched by light.

This new art museum in St Louis is conceived as a flexible shell for experiment that reaches out to its surroundings.

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C ONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM , S T L OUIS , M ISSOURI , USA A RCHITECT A LLIED W ORKS

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C ONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM , S T L OUIS , M ISSOURI , USA ARCHITECT A LLIED W ORKS

Meet me in St Louis, Louis, meet me at the Fair’, sang Judy Garland, and the city is celebrating the centenary of that high point in its fortunes, even as it struggles – like so many others in the Midwest – to regenerate its battered core. Progress has been made since Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch was built on the banks of the Mississippi in 1968, and the Grand Center Arts District at the edge of downtown has recently acquired two small but potent gems: Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum by Allied Works Architecture. They occupy neighbouring sites and conduct a lively dialogue across a shared courtyard dominated by a Richard Serra torqued steel sculpture. What’s remarkable is how well these two radically different buildings complement each other visually as well as in purpose. The Pulitzer, which opened two years ago, is a signature work by Ando in the finest in-situ concrete. It has the air of a spiritual retreat: refined, serene, and inward-looking; a place for solitary contemplation of twentieth-century masterworks from the Pulitzer collection, which is open by appointment two days a week. In contrast, Allied Works principal Brad Cloepfil designed the new museum as a flexible shell for experimentation in the visual arts, and programmes that reach out to the depressed neighbourhood and the general public. Concrete walls are clad in tightly woven stainless-steel mesh, and expansive windows open up views from street to courtyard. Galleries for changing exhibitions occupy a quarter of its 2500 sq m; the rest are given over to a large performance space, an education centre and café, plus upstairs offices and classrooms. The building cost only $6.5 million, substantially less than its neighbour. Thanks to the generosity of Emily Pulitzer and other patrons, the CAM has moved far beyond its modest beginnings in a downtown storefront, and it selected Allied Works from a shortlist that included Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Zumthor. It was a prescient choice, for Cloepfil has since won acclaim for prestigious

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2 The museum complex in St Louis’ depressed cityscape. Allied Works’ new building (left) joins Ando’s museum on the right. 3 Concrete walls wrapped in stainlesssteel mesh are beautifully smooth, impassive surfaces. 4 Expansive windows open up views.

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5 The internal courtyard. 6 Detail of mesh-wrapped walls.

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arts projects in New York, Dallas, and Seattle, all of which are characterized by a cool minimalism and sensitivity to aesthetic needs. As he explains: ‘In making space for contemporary art, the architecture must first serve the artist; not by attempting to render a background for the art, but by providing the artist with a specific spatial presence, an intentional vacancy that achieves meaning through the art itself.’ He also spoke of creating ‘a fusion of the city and the arts.’ Cloepfil has pushed the building out to a curved corner that gives it a distinctive prow, and has restored the original street line – in contrast to the Pulitzer, which is pulled back. The contents of the building are revealed though window walls, so that its role as an art centre is immediately apparent. Concrete walls are sandblasted to dematerialize the surface and distinguish it from Ando’s small modules. The mesh is set 100-150mm from the walls, unifying the facade and shading the office and classroom windows. It’s a concept that the architect has developed and taken further in the translucent membrane he proposes to wrap around the former Huntington Hartford Gallery in New York, a marble-clad Venetian pastiche by Edward Durrell Stone, to provide a new home for the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design. Double glass doors open onto the lobby from a setback in the

north facade, and steps lead down from this introductory space to the galleries. Cloepfil has played with space and light as though they were liquids, containing and releasing them, allowing visitors to feel they are swimming through galleries that open up to each other and to outdoor areas that are tightly enclosed by the two buildings. There are two levels of wall: 4m high sections at ground level, and a 6m high band that wraps around the upper level in serpentine fashion, tying the spaces together. The steel mesh is carried inside in places to add another layer and a contrasting texture to the white painted sheetrock on the display walls. Ceiling planes float at different levels, admitting light from clerestories and blocking direct sun. The effect is one of interlocking boxes cut away to leave only a few defining edges. Paul Ha, the new director of St Louis CAM, made his reputation at White Columns, New York’s most adventurous alternative art space. ‘It changes one’s perception of art to see it in a different setting,’ he observes, ‘and artists welcome the challenge of responding to the energy of place.’ For Cloepfil, the task was ‘to make spaces that serve the arts and artists, while allowing for a subtle emotional response from the individual. It was imperative to create a physical environment that visitors would feel comfortable returning to again and again.’ MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Allied Works, Portland, USA Photographs Hélène Binet

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7 Looking through the courtyard. 8 After the compression of the outdoor areas, galleries are tall, airy, luminous spaces. 9, 10 The building is conceived as a flexible shell for experimentation.

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MEANING, MAPPING AND MAKING OF LANDSCAPE Landscape has long been a source of inspiration. RA Forum invited art historian Malcolm Andrews, author of Measuring America Andro Linklater, artists Simon Callery and Hamish Fulton, film-maker Patrick Keiller and architect Farshid Moussavi to discuss the Meaning, Mapping and Making of Landscape. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.

MALCOLM ANDREWS Origins of the term ‘landscape’ seem to lie in northern Europe: the Dutch, Belgian, German terms, Lantschap, Lantskip, Landschaft respectively. Sometimes it was used to designate land in the immediate environs of a town or city, not just natural scenery. When eventually used in terms of art, it designates the area of a religious painting that forms the setting for the central drama and its protagonists. Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1670) gives a definition that might have applied to the term through much of the early modern period: ‘Landtskip (Belg) Parergon, Paisage, or By-work, which is an expressing the Land, by Hills, Woods, Castles, valleys, Rivers, Cities &c as far as may be shewed in our Horizon. All that which in a Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or by-work. As in the Table of our Saviors passion, the picture of Christ upon the Rood (which is the proper English word for Cross) the two theeves, the blessed Virgin Mary, and St John, are the argument: But the City, Jerusalem, the Country about, the clouds, and the like, are Landskip.’ It is the outdoor setting for the principal dramatic action, and includes towns and settlements as well as countryside scenes. However, it was during the Enlightenment that Landscape became more emphatically associated with natural, non-urban scenery. Romanticism’s worship of Nature and of the Sublime in Nature, and its recoil from early industrialization and rapid urbanization pushed Landscape into remoter retreat from signs of developed civilization. We have inherited

Joel Meyerowitz, Broadway and West 46th Street, 1976.

the Romantic version of landscape. However, modern understanding of landscape often emphasizes its conceptual, cultural significance rather than the topographical or material meaning. Landscape is explored as a mental construct. ‘Landscape is Nature mediated by Culture’ is an attractively succinct definition, until one begins to ask what exactly is ‘Nature’? and question the extent to which ‘Nature’ itself is a cultural construct? Can we oppose Nature and Culture so easily as this definition suggests? Where do we draw the line between Nature and Culture to preserve the integrity of ‘Nature’? These questions suggest that ‘tastes’ in landscape act as a cultural barometer of civilization’s sense of its relationship with Nature. Images of landscape often evoke sheer pleasure, a pleasure which arises from several possible sources. It might be associations, such as memories of holidays, pastoral idylls, the peacefulness, the slower pace, or a whole imagined way of life. Equally it could be from the space, light, freedom, colour found in landscape. It might also be seen as an antidote, either to an over-controlled domestic environment, or the complexity and pressure of city living. Contrasting Joel Meyerowitz’s Broadway and West 46th Street with Claude Monet’s Meadow with Haystacks shows the latter. Meyerowitz gives an archetypal view of the contemporary city. All is oppressive foreground with lots of people but no human interaction against a bewildering array of signs, where Monet offers depth, readability at a glance and softened forms, feathery texture and gentle gradation and soft colour against

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Meyerowitz’s hard, sharp edges and austere geometry. The metropolis is the new wilderness, but constituted by almost the opposite components to those of the old natural wilderness: instead of a place almost wholly empty of humans and devoid of any artefacts, the city is a place overused by humans and consisting wholly of artefacts. As we become more urbanized and mechanized, the greater our appetite for landscapes without human presence, or signs of human presence – unless, that is, the human presence is organically sympathetic to landscape, such as shepherds, cottages, or cornfields. The relish for the Sublime – for mountain scenery, horror, mystery and the irrational – arose just at the time when the Enlightenment was celebrating triumphant discoveries of Nature’s Laws. In Romanticism the perception of our fragile mutability heightened a sense of Nature’s stable, unchanging constitution. That mindset is less and less sustainable now: Nature we know to be a dynamic, changing process, its renewability limited. So the experience of landscape is attuned to our desires and expectations, and to our cultural conditioning. Since the early modern period, landscape has become an increasingly precious aesthetic amenity. We like to consume it. We put a value on it. On 4 October 1769, while at Keswick, Thomas Gray encapsulated this point, ‘[I] saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmitt to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds’. Modern day tourists follow Gray’s line of thought. They see a grand stretch of lakes and mountains, use the camera to frame a section of the spectacle, and take the picture, supposedly ‘fixing it in all the softness of its living colours’. Then they get it developed and printed and offer it for sale, and these terms, ‘take’, ‘capture’ and ‘fix’ all belong to the language of appropriation. Landscape is a commodity. It is commodified as an aesthetic amenity as well as a piece of real estate. In View from Mount Holyoke, Thomas Cole schematically dramatizes landscape values in a diagonally divided composition. In the sunlit river valley the new farms, wrested from the wilderness, and the grid of their fields, flourish in a benign, fertile, mappable landscape. Old savage America survives in the unmappable high-country wilderness on the left, as a Romantically precious landscape of the Sublime. Both the camera’s and the real-estate surveyor’s appropriation of landscape is in contrast to some modern artistic sensibilities, for

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Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, 1836.

whom the appropriation of territory – metaphorical or otherwise – is morally and politically incorrect. Richard Long, for instance, has said, ‘I like the idea of using the land without possessing it’, and he makes this explicit when referring to his works, they ‘are made of the place, they are re-arrangements of it and in time will be reabsorbed by it’.

The artist in the landscape The history of the artist’s relationship to landscape has been one of increasing intimacy with and intervention in the motif. This is partly because we have had too much landscape art. ‘Today our sight is a little weary, burdened by the memory of a thousand images ... We no longer see Nature; we see pictures over and over again’, said Cézanne in 1902. But Turner expressed the trend towards this intimate connection when he asked, ‘What would they have? I wonder what they think the sea’s like? I wish they’d been in it’. If the goal is not just to be out in the landscape but to be swept up into the forces of nature, the corollary is, as caught in Giuseppe Penone’s, First Breath (1977), that the presence of the artist becomes fugitive and ephemeral. In 1999 he said, ‘This work is a reminder that every breath we exhale is an introduction of one body of air into another, and that, in a sense, our innermost being is identical to and cannot be separated from the world around us’. We eat, drink, and breathe landscape. The old dichotomies begin to collapse as artists emphasize their sense of symbiosis with, rather than detachment from, Nature. Sensing an interdependence with Nature, they sharpen ecological and political sensitivities. This profoundly affects the art of landscape in our day. Michael Snow said of his landscape film La Région Centrale, (1969): ‘I recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and machinery to a wild place, but I didn’t colonize it. I hardly even borrowed it’. Acknowledgements Joel Meyerowitz, Broadway and West 46th Street, New York (1976). © Joel Meyerowitz, 2003/Courtesy of Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery, New York. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs Russell Sage, 1908 (08228). Photograph © 1995 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Giuseppe Penone, ‘Primo Soffio’, 1977. Photograph 60x45cm. Claude Monet, French 1840-1926, Meadow with Haystacks near Giverny, 1885. Oil on canvas, 74 x 93.5cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Arthur Tracy Cabot, 42.541.

Giuseppe Penone, Primo Soffio, 1977.

Trench 10 (2000) from The Segsbury Project: Callery’s plasterwork, which captures the whole length of a Bronze Age ditch at Alfred’s Castle.

SIMON CALLERY Working alongside archaeologists gave Simon Callery an opportunity ‘to see how a painter of the urban landscape from London’s East End would respond to a paradigm of the English landscape’. In July 1996 in association with the photographer Andrew Watson, Callery documented a 20m x 40m trench at the chalk excavation at the Iron Age Segsbury Camp in Oxfordshire with 378 black and white images taken from a height of 2.5m. Invited back for the excavation of Alfred’s Castle in 2000, he was ‘eager to make a work that utilized the actual surface material of the excavation’. This resulted in a plasterwork, poured in 1m x 2m sections, across a 20m x 2m Bronze Age trench, that ‘captured the entire chalk surface’ rather than just taking its negative form. He discusses his work with Jeremy Melvin.

with ideas about how and why we respond to landscape (this includes the urban landscape) on a sensual level and not in depicting its visual appearance. With the trappings of representation obliterated, the paintings offer a lean and stripped down physicality defined by specific proportion, luminosity and surface quality. They are intended to provide a slowed down, drawn out and extended perceptual experience. This experience is dependent solely on a response to the material nature of the work. This way of looking, or better, this way of sensing, leads to an experience in which the viewer is no longer the passive recipient of the visual information contained in an artist’s production. The dynamic is altered and the viewer is active in an equation that is a reversal of the traditional flow between artwork and audience. The expressive end of this encounter is that the viewer, rather than the artwork or artist, becomes the subject of their perceptual process.

JM One aspect of your engagement with landscape seems to be a reverse of the traditional reasons for painting nature. Traditionally landscape painting was a way of suggesting depth and distance beyond the individual, of externalizing feelings, and of setting up hierarchies according to distance from the viewer/painter. Your work seems to draw everything to the surface as if it were mirroring these sensations back to the individual, of focusing inwards rather than outwards.

JM Another difference lies in the treatment of architecture. In Poussin or Claude, architecture has quite specific and defined roles (though often highly complex and allegorical), it is about objects set in a larger picture. In your work, architecture helps to define a way of looking: an example would be the way you use entasis on the frames of your paintings to help structure the way of looking.

SC I think the point where I begin a painting is the point where traditional landscape painting leaves off. I am interested in working

SC I do not want to depict architecture or expect it to play a role in an unfolding narrative. I want the paintings to be architectural in

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character. For example, in recent large-scale tall paintings I have used the classical Greek architectural principle of entasis – most clearly seen in the tapering in the columns of the Parthenon in Athens. The dimensions of these paintings are slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom. This is achieved by the introduction of a subtle curve that begins at 5/8ths up on the vertical height of the stretcher. The need to distort from the accurate rectangle satisfies a perceptive sense of rightness that a tall rectangular form appears smaller at the top. This encourages us to relate to the painting as a physical form and creates the possibility that an experience of the work is not exclusive to the eye but also involves the body. The intention behind applying architectural principle to contemporary painting is to tap into the highly developed way we use our senses as we navigate and negotiate the built environment on a daily basis. I identify one of the defining qualities about the way we understand architecture through a process of measuring ourselves in relation to it. This could almost be considered common sense and should be as active in the art gallery as it is on the street. JM In that sense, perhaps, it bears some comparison with archaeology, as a technique for drawing out perceptions, or for helping to define a surface. SC I want to use architectural references to elicit a response that involves all our senses and doesn’t prioritize the eye. My approach to making work from direct experience of excavation has been to concentrate on the surface material of the site. For example the 20m x 2m sculpture called ‘Trench 10’ was made by pouring plaster onto the chalk surface of an excavated Bronze Age ditch. The surface of the work is not simply the negative form of this ditch as the plaster acted to capture the chalk loose. Above all this is a work that is animated by our interaction with surface – in this case a historical surface. JM Did working with archaeologists in the landscape offer a different sense of time to working in the contemporary city?

SC One of the most striking aspects of working on an excavation was a heightened awareness of time quite unlike the urban experience. Time as an element and a constituent of place was tangible on site. This sensation was not immediate but was generated by a developing understanding of the particular characteristics of the landscape. There is also the principle of stratigraphy in excavation that defines the relationship of objects to one another in time. Objects that are found on the same horizontal plane can be considered contemporary to one another, while objects that are found at a greater vertical depth can be considered older. I began to feel that this axis of two lines was an expressive way of understanding time and could be fed into the way I use line in painting. It follows that we could grade the landscape and the city in terms of their horizontality and verticality and draw conclusions on the extent to which an emphasis on the axis influences how we respond. JM Does this sense of time seem to demand such an intimate and precise record (thinking of photography) of what you found there, in a way that the more familiar urban environment would not? SC The desire that a sense of time defines the experience of the finished work is only really possible if a perceptual route to this end is established. In the case of a work called The Segsbury Project (378 largescale black and white prints that record the surface of a 20m x 40m site at 2:1 housed in seven plan chests), the detail of the photographic prints sets up a visual encounter with an archaeological surface. In this work, detail and intimacy of the prints was necessary to bring about a questioning of the surface. Intimacy depends on sensory knowledge and the work must communicate this, whether it is the familiar urban environment or an excavation in the rural landscape. JM Given that there are differences between cities and landscapes, does architecture in cities have a compatible role with archaeology in the landscape? SC It is not unreasonable to suggest that the reasons why archaeologists are drawn to certain sites tells us as much about our current interests as it does about our distant past. We seem to visit and revisit places for the reasons the original inhabitants settled there. This reflects the extent to which the quality of place defines what kind of architecture is built and the role architecture plays in defining the quality of a place. The first excavation I was involved in was an Iron Age hill fort settlement and the second an Iron Age hill fort with the remains of a Romano-British villa at its centre. The work I made was a record of the traces of early forms of architecture and a testing ground for examining the validity of landscape as a subject for contemporary art.

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Trench 10 surface detail: plaster acquires loose chalk – interaction with historical surface.

Photographs of the installation at the Officers’ Mess, Dover Castle: John Riddy. The Segsbury Project is a collaboration between the Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Projects, English Heritage and the Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

M3 at Twyford Down, near Winchester. Photograph: © British Film Institute.

Charborough Park, Dorset. Photograph: © British Film Institute.

PATRICK KEILLER

“Middle England” which he sees as a landscape increasingly characterized by sexual repression, homophobia and the frequent advocacy of child beating. ‘At the same time, he is dimly aware that the UK is still the fifth largest trading economy in the world and that British, even English people, particularly women and the young, are probably neither as sexually unemancipated, as sadistic or as miserable as he thinks the look of the UK suggests. The film’s narrative is based on a series of journeys in which his prejudices are examined, and some of them are disposed of.’

Towards the end of 1996 I had written an essay (published as ‘Port Statistics’ in The Unknown City, Kerr and Borden eds, MIT, 2001), which began: ‘Robinson in Space, a film (35mm colour 82mins UK 1997), was photographed between March and November 1995. It documents the explorations of an unseen fictional character called Robinson, who was the protagonist of the earlier London, which was a re-imagination of its subject suggested by the Surrealist literature of Paris. Robinson in Space is a similar study of the look of present-day England in 1995, and was suggested to some extent by Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Among its subjects are many new spaces, particularly the sites where manufactured products are produced, imported and distributed. Robinson has been commissioned by ‘a well-known international advertising agency’ to undertake a study of the ‘problem’ of England. It is not stated in the film what this problem is, but there are images of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, a Rover car plant, the inward investment sites of Toyota and Samsung, a lot of ports, supermarkets, a shopping mall and other subjects which evoke the by now familiar critique of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, which sees the UK’s economic weakness as a result of the City of London’s long term [English] neglect of the [UK’s] industrial economy, particularly its manufacturing base. ‘Early in the film, its narrator quotes from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible ... ” The appearances by which the viewer is invited to judge are initially the dilapidation of public space, the extent of visible poverty, the absence of UK branded products in the shops and on the roads, and England’s cultural conservatism. Robinson’s image of the UK’s industry is based on his memories of the collapse of the early Thatcher years. He has assumed that poverty and dilapidation are the result of economic failure, and that economic failure is a result of the inability of UK industry to produce desirable consumer products. He believes, moreover, that this has something to do with the feel of

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Manchester Ship Canal at Latchford, Warrington. Photograph: © British Film Institute.

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FOREIGN OFFICE ARCHITECTS: FARSHID MOUSSAVI At the Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Foreign Office Architects proposed a new synthesis between landscape and architectural form. Instead of the old distinction between figure and ground, which often translated into artifice – architecture – and nature, or the landscape, Farshid Moussavi explained, they see the relationship as a series of networks combining social, political and geological influences. Consequently, ‘the vocabulary of landscape is replaced by a network of systems, connections and interferences’, and architecture becomes a strategy for ‘trying to negotiate a way across them’. What has driven this interaction between landscape and architecture, between nature and artifice, is Information Technology. With this new computing power, geometry, once the unyielding arbiter, can now assume far more complex and sophisticated forms which increasingly mimic nature. ‘Geometry’, explained Moussavi, ‘is now more comparable to real nature, and the distinctions between the organic and the rational are blurred.’ Yokohama introduced a ‘geometry that almost looks organic’ and brought several other consequences. Creating ‘different conditions of space, coherence and diversity within the same conception’, the free-flowing forms replace prescribed circulation routes with an urban ground, increasing density of circulation and appearing to reconfigure themselves continually along the terminal’s length. These complex geometries are ‘close to nature’, but nature manipulated to provide for human need. A waterfront park in Barcelona conveys ‘a total concept of urban landscape’. With a fall of 11m across the shorter dimension of the site, from the esplanade to the bathing area at the sea’s edge, it is too steep to negotiate in a straight line, so diagonal ramps became

generators of a new topography, based on the forms of sand dunes. ‘We worked with the dune sizes’, explained Moussavi ‘to define the ramps and to enclose two auditoria’: (outdoor arenas with flat areas and banked seating for activities like rock concerts). Other parts are less prescriptive, where the forms open up to create possibilities for varied types of habitation and activity. On the lee side, sheltered from the sea breezes, plants take root, just as in a natural dune landscape. Sand dunes, though, are extremely fragile, and this park is designed for intensive use, so the surface has to be hard. The basic element, a concrete tile, is rather larger than a grain of sand, but the shape itself has geometric properties which, when multiplied, help to generate the overall forms. As Moussavi said, ‘it meets most boundaries, but where it does not, it is not cut’, emphasizing the integrity of its geometry. A dyed concrete resin fills residual spaces. The resulting colour stripes help to orientate visitors and to define routes and zones within the park, using communication as link between topography and function. An unbuilt proposal for a ‘hortus medicus’ [medical garden] for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis in Basel also consciously blurs boundaries between natural and artificial. On an undulating surface, areas are seeded in different patterns with different parts, but the undulations are actually openings to a subterranean car park, or ‘lungs for the body of car parking’, as Moussavi puts it. Here ‘the figure of the human body’ becomes a way of combining the ancient motif of physic gardens, perhaps the earliest places for the work that Novartis now does in laboratories and factories, with the eminently modern function of car parking. Neither traditional landscape nor conventional urban form, the landscape uses complex geometry to form a new synthesis which is both historically aware and sensitive to contemporary needs.

JUNIPER A GUIDED AND SHERPA ASSISTED CLIMB TO THE SUMMIT PLATEAU OF CHO OYU AT 8175M VIA THE CLASSIC ROUTE WITHOUT SUPPLEMENTARY OXYGEN TIBET AUTUMN 2000

A GUIDED GROUP WALK TO THE SUMMIT OF ACONCAGUA AT 6959M VIA THE RELINCHOS VALLEY AND THE FALSE POLISH ROUTE, ARGENTINA 15-28 FEBRUARY 2003

HAMISH FULTON: BIODIVERSITY, WALKING IN RELATION TO EVERYTHING … It would seem there are two possibilities for so-called ‘Landscape’ art: painting, from the past, and outdoor sculpture in the present. However, the starting place of my own art is the experience of walking … and walking is not an art material. In terms of self-imposed rules this means every piece of art I make is the result of a specific walk. (From 1970 to the present I have made 238 identifiable walks, walking from one full day to 64 consecutive days. The longest distance I have walked is 2838km and the highest altitude I have climbed to is 8175m.) To outline my ideas I would like to present the following statements. Each small concentration of words implies larger issues. IRRESPECTIVE OF ITS APPEARANCE – ‘ CONTEMPORARY ART’ IS A NECESSARY ‘POLITICAL’ FORCE IN SOCIETY. WALKING CAN CHANGE THE WORLD. (CONVERT ROADS FOR CARS – INTO PATHS FOR WALKERS AND CYCLISTS?) TO BE COMMITTED TO WALKING MEANS – TO SLOW DOWN TO THE PACE OF WALKING … A WALK CAN EXIST LIKE AN INVISIBLE OBJECT IN A COMPLEX WORLD. (WALKING – CUTS A LINE THOUGH TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LIFE.) Q. WHAT KIND OF ART COULD RESULT FROM A WALK? A. ART INSTALLED ONTO THE FLATNESS OF EXISTING ARCHITECTURE. (A FILM … A WALK TEXT AS AN URBAN BILLBOARD. WALK TEXTS ETCHED INTO GLASS FOR WINDOWS. WALK TEXTS CAST IN IRON AND SUNK INTO PAVEMENTS. WALKING IS AN ‘EXPERIENCE’. CONSEQUENTLY, THE RESULTING ART COULD BE PRODUCED IN ANY MEDIUM OR SITUATION. REPEATABLE ART REQUIRING NO TRANSPORT (MUSICAL NOTATION ON THE NET) OR, NON-REPEATABLE ART REQUIRING TRANSPORTATION (CARGO JET POLLUTION) OR, REPEATED UNTRANSPORTABLE ART? (AUSTRALIAN FIRST NATION CAVE PAINTINGS.) WALKABOUT… THE STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF ART IS THAT IT’S ALL ABOUT OPINIONS. THE PRICE I PAY FOR NOT MIMICKING ‘NATURE’ IS THAT I RECORD ALL MY WALKS IN WORDS. THERE ARE NO WORDS IN ‘NATURE’.

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AN ARTWORK CANNOT RE-PRESENT THE EXPERIENCE OF A

Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama Terminal.

Unbuilt project for Novartis in Basel – physic gardens related to ‘lungs for the body of car parking’.

EVERY THING IS (MADE OF) SOMETHING – AND ALL ‘CONTEMPORARY ART’ IS URBAN. ABSENT. THE LOCATION OF THE WALK IS NOT IN THE GALLERY AND THE WALK ITSELF IS A PAST EVENT. AN OBJECT CANNOT COMPETE WITH AN EXPERIENCE. WALKING IS PRACTICAL NOT THEORETICAL. A WALK HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN – A BEGINNING AND AN END. WALKING INTO THE DISTANCE – BEYOND IMAGINATION. ONCE A WALK HAS BEEN COMPLETED, IT CANNOT BE DESTROYED. A WALK, IS AN INVISIBLE MONUMENT TO ‘TIME’ (‘LANDSCAPE’ ART SHOULD ENCOMPASS MORE THAN JUST THE HISTORY OF ART.) WHEN WALKING AND CAMPING ALONE, I ATTEMPT TO PRACTISE THE ‘WILDERNESS’ ETHIC OF LEAVE-NO-TRACE. IN THE COURSE OF PRODUCING MY ARTWORKS I USE ONLY COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE MATERIALS. IN 2003: CREATE EMPLOYMENT, BUT DESTROY A ‘WILDERNESS’? THE HUMAN ENERGY SOURCE FOR SOLVING THIS DILEMMA IS – OUR SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ‘NATURE’. THE RIGHTS OF NATURE? ON MY WALKS I DO NOT REARRANGE THE ‘LANDSCAPE’ OR ORGANIZE THE REMOVAL, SALE AND NONRETURN OF ‘FOUND-NATURAL-OBJECTS’ THEREBY TERMINATING THEIR NEIGHBOURHOOD LIFE INFLUENCED BY SUNLIGHT, WIND AND RAIN. MY ART IS A SYMBOLIC GESTURE OF RESPECT FOR NATURE. IT’S HARDER TO LEAVE THINGS ALONE THAN TO CHANGE THEM. CHANGE PERCEPTIONS – NOT THE ‘LANDSCAPE’. THE ‘LANDSCAPE’ AS LOCATION – NOT RAW MATERIALS. LIVING AND NON LIVING BEINGS. WHY SELL SEA SHELLS? BIG TRUCKS MEANS BIG BUCKS. BATTLE OF LITTLE BIGHORN 25 JUNE 1876. (TWO PEOPLE, THEREFORE TWO POINTS OF VIEW?) NAVAJOLAND EUROLAND CLUBLAND HOMELAND DISNEYLAND TIMBERLAND VOLVOLAND OBERLAND BORDERLAND SWITZERLAND WONDERLAND – LANDSCAPE SEASCAPE CLOUDSCAPE DREAMSCAPE E-SCAPE CITYSCAPE CULTURESCAPE MEDIASCAPE FINANCESCAPE WALKSCAPE MAKE A WALK – WRITE A TEXT – READ IT TO AN AUDIENCE. BODY AND VOICE. THE CHANGING SHAPES OF CLOUDS. THOUGHTS SILENCED BY BIRDSONG. EACH WALK MARKS THE FLOW OF TIME BETWEEN BIRTH AND DEATH.

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ANDRO LINKLATER Measuring America argues that America came to be what it is through the way it defined its landscape. Anyone who has flown across the US sees the world’s largest human-made construct, though its significance is almost invisible unless you know what to look for – straight lines. In California’s Great Central Valley they show up in the chequerboard arrangement of orchards; flying over the Sierras they appear in the rectangular farms deep in valley bottoms; crossing any big city, Phoenix, Arizona or Salt Lake City, or Chicago itself, they’re revealed in the graph-paper grid of streets; all across the Midwest they can be found in the great squared-off pattern of corn and soya fields. Around this framework, a particular kind of democracy and a particular kind of capitalism and a particular kind of spirit developed. These lines all derive from the US Public Land Survey which began on 30 September 1785 when Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, unrolled a 22 yard Gunter’s chain on the west bank of the Ohio river. The US needed to raise money, and the only asset that it possessed was land beyond the Appalachians. A few explorers had penetrated beyond the mountains and brought back wonderful reports of this mouth-watering land. Hutchins’ job was to measure it out and map it on a surveyor’s plat. It was a kind of magic – unmeasured it was wilderness, measured it became real estate. But he did it in a very particular way. Congress required him to lay out lines running due east-west and six miles apart, and these were to be cut at right angles by other lines running due north-south, and also six miles apart. This created a grid of squares, known as townships, each measuring 36 square miles. The townships divided into 36 onemile-square sections, which would be sold at auction. This pattern of squares was Thomas Jefferson’s idea. Squares could be easily measured, easily subdivided, easily bought and sold. Squares would put land into the hands of the people. From the start, therefore, the survey was expected not simply to raise money, but to shape a society. The surveyors’ equipment was basic: a compass through which the surveyor took a sighting on a distant mark to find due west on his compass, and a 22 yard chain to measure the distance. Once the surveyor had the direction, a team of axemen would be sent to hack out a path or vista through the trees. Finally, the foreman took the front end of the chain and marched towards the mark; when the chain was fully stretched he cried ‘Tally!’, stuck in a tally pin, and waited for the hindman to join him, gathering up the chain. So they moved across the country like caterpillars, hunching up and stretching out, through forests, over swamps, up mountains, and down ravines, but always travelling in straight lines. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of the continent had been squared off into townships, and sections. Each township section is a square mile or 640 acres, a number easily subdivided into smaller The great United States grid: not just a means of turning wilderness into real estate, but an armature for capitalist society.

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squares. It can be halved, quartered, eighthed, and sixteenthed, and still leave a whole number. And each is easily measured by a chain – a mile is 80 chains, a half-mile is 40, a quarter is 20, and to a surveyor nothing could be easier to measure – a 40-acre square was merely 20 chains by 20. Its numerical neatness ensured that 40 acres became the basic unit on which Jefferson’s great landed democracy was built. Owning a 40 was the bottom rung on the property ladder. The 10 acre square is integral to the planning of US cities – 10 chains by 10 – such as the central square of Salt Lake City, or of Philadelphia, Chicago, and others. It was an extraordinary transformation. Within a century, the land that had no shape had become property. Anyone could own it. The government sold it for $2 an acre, offering credit for those with no cash, and even after the 1862 Homesteading Act you could get 160 acres by squatting.

Winners and losers It was the survey that underpinned the legends of the frontier. It guaranteed the pioneers legal possession of their land. But it was not just an administrative exercise. In the process a society was being created around the mass distribution of property. To European visitors, accustomed to thinking of land-ownership as the key indicator of social class, this was revolutionary, and the outlook of these property-owners seemed to them astonishing. As early as 1813, the traveller John Melish remarked approvingly: ‘Every industrious citizen of the United States has the power to become a freeholder … and the land being purely his own, there is no setting limits to his prosperity. No proud tyrant can lord it over him.’ In her book The Domestic Manners of the Americans written 20 years later, Fanny Trollope took a less admiring view of the egalitarianism that came from allowing absolutely anyone to acquire land. ‘Any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son, and the consciousness of this is certainly a spur to exertion’, she observed. ‘On the other hand, it is also a spur to that coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect, which is assumed by the grossest and lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most refined.’ For the first time an entire society was being created, peacefully and legally, around a horizontal model of land distribution. However different their viewpoints, both John Melish and Fanny Trollope were testifying to the effectiveness of Jefferson’s social engineering. The losers in all this distribution of property were the native Americans. Almost every Indian war fought by the US government from the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 had its origins in the urge to prise ownership of land from the original occupants, and almost every Indian defeat was followed by a treaty in which they ceded territory to the US government. Immediately afterwards, the surveyors would arrive with their chains and compasses, and in their wake came the settlers. It required a paradigm shift to accept that land might be a commodity, have a monetary value, be used as a guarantee against which cash could be borrowed. Without it, what we recognize to be a modern way of thinking could not come into being. Nowhere did land as commodity take hold more strongly than in the US – the squares made it easy – the result was a fiercely competitive society. As the first visitors to the US recognized, the experience of owning property forged a new society that no one had seen before. Around this structure American democracy and capitalism grew.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Walking around the University of Gloucestershire’s new campus with Peter Clegg, it is immediately apparent that architects Feilden Clegg Bradley passionately believe in, and profoundly understand, the significant contribution that education brings to our lives – not only in terms of architecture and regeneration, as a group of architects who love to build, but far more holistically. Education is undoubtedly in FCBA’s blood, and while their extensive 25 year portfolio includes excellent arts, housing, and community projects, the fulfilment of the practice’s priorities is perhaps most explicit in their work for education. FCBA design as users, and when designing places where people seek education, they repeatedly draw on collective personal experiences as students, parents, and teachers. So, a practice internationally known for its pioneering innovations in environmental sustainability and energy efficiency, gives more by reflecting on an equally significant commitment to the broader issues of economic and social sustainability. For more than 12 years, the UK’s higher education sector has offered FCBA scope and opportunity to innovate, becoming a staple and producing significant buildings for Sunderland and Aston Universities, the Open University and London’s Imperial College. However, despite such individual successes, richer results seem to have come when the practice has been engaged in long-standing client relationships, such as those with King Alfred’s College in Winchester, and here in Gloucestershire; both of which have been nurtured since the early 1990s. By relying on a culture of learning and innovation, universities and colleges have historically acted as laboratories for architectural experimentation, and while commercial realities exist, academic institutions tend to prioritize long-term investment over quickfix, fast-buck incentives – as has been FCBA’s experience in Gloucestershire. Under the ambitious stewardship of the University’s Vice Chancellor Dame Janet Trotter, the University of Gloucestershire has become one of the West Country’s more committed architectural patrons, commissioning FCBA’s award-winning intervention within the gothic revival quad of Francis Close Hall Campus in 1994, Edward Cullinan’s Art Media and Design facilities at Pitville campus (AR April 1994), and most

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After years of absence, a new university campus brings access to higher education back to the city of Gloucester.

1 With its lofty atrium and generous glazed link, Feilden Clegg Bradley’s new facilities building gives Gloucester’s new campus stature and presence.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) recently with its new Sport and Exercise Sciences campus in the heart of Gloucester. On college land formerly occupied by a 1950s training college, the new campus was built to redress the uneven distribution of the county’s higher education facilities, which since 1992 had been solely within Cheltenham. In 1996, FCBA were appointed to review the potential of the site, and to co-ordinate a longterm campus strategy. As the first stage, building stock was evaluated to see if any of structures from the previous five decades of development could be re-used. But, after considering flexibility of use, options for upgrading (particularly in terms of energy conservation), organizational efficiency, site distribution, and architectural quality, FCBA somewhat reluctantly concluded that demolition was the most feasible option. A decision that may have been regrettable in terms of embodied energy, but which increased opportunities to develop a high density, centralized strategy. This, while offering scope for expansion, would create sufficient critical mass within a modest first phase to give the fledgling

campus its own identity and sense of place. So phase one, which was completed for the student intake of October 2002, included a new learning resources and teaching centre, sports science facility, and refectory, which collectively form a north-south armature that acts as the campus’ heart and spine. Parallel to this sits another north-south terrace of 180 study rooms, all with private bathrooms, which terminates in a student common room and bar. It forms a communal cluster that, when linked to the facilities building by an east-west landscaped body of water, creates an entrance threshold for the site. Organizing buildings on this axis was central to the campus’ environmental strategy, avoiding bleak north-facing study bedrooms, enabling both the learning resource centre and the sport sciences building to exploit diffuse north light (reducing dependency on artificial lighting), and optimizing the performance of the EU and DTI funded photovoltaic array recently installed onto the sport sciences building’s distinctive tick-section roof. (An installation

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2 From the south-west approach, this modest collection of buildings creates an impressive flagship campus for the University of Gloucestershire. 3 Louvres on the southerly facade eliminate direct sunlight from the principal teaching rooms. 4 With the first of five student accommodation blocks behind, the student bar and common room help create a defined campus gateway.

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

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estimated to meet 50 per cent of the sport sciences building’s demand, equivalent to 30 per cent of the precinct’s combined load.) With this in place, attention focused on the most complex environmental problem: the internal conditioning of the learning resources centre. With the dramatic increase in IT provision in education, there are now many environmental variables to consider when seeking to create stable comfort levels. Learning from experience gained on the Martial Rose Library in Winchester, FCBA again adopted a hollow core displacement ventilation strategy: a system that responds well to the most onerous conditions during winter months, when maximum occupancy levels demand high air change targets without throwing away the free heat benefit that computers and people provide. Using standardized building components, the TermoDeck system converts a humble hollow-core precast concrete floor slab into a fully integrated circuit of thermal batteries: a modular structural system that contributes to the visual order of the spaces and which

operates in a number of modes to provide seasonal environmental stability. In summer, night purging charges the ventilation circuit with coolth to temper incoming air, while exposed soffits are chilled to absorb surplus heat gains. In winter, trickle charge heating of the thermal mass warms a steady supply of fresh air, which gently heats the soffits and provides displacement ventilation through the floor. Heat recovery systems are also employed with a thermal wheel preheating incoming air, and exhaust air is discharged into the foyer to reduce uncomfortable down-draughts in the otherwise un-tempered glazed link. While budget limitations denied lavish materials, a degree of finesse has been achieved through the careful placing of finer quality materials, such as timber acoustic panelling in the atrium, and a Siza-esque limestone plinth in the foyer. The main disappointment, however, has been how security measures have denied users the permeability between the learning and teaching spaces as originally designed, resulting in the central atrium and core being isolated rather than a dynamic place of interaction. Still, this operational decision is clearly reversible. On the whole, the University is delightful to visit, and as more students move in, and when vegetation matures to soften the impact of the somewhat disappointing hard landscaping, it will undoubtedly host a thriving student community. FCBA’s most significant achievement has been an ability to create a place with just three basic moves, producing a solution credited by the RIBA for being ‘gimmick free’ and offering ‘a serious welcoming handshake for a new age HQ’. On choosing to invest in the higher education sector, FCBA have responded well to the strategic changes that have been

implemented over the last 15 years. So, if Richard Feilden’s prediction of an equivalent shift in secondary education over the next 15 years is correct, we look forward to seeing how FCBA re-apply their expertise to the UK’s new generation of City Academy schools. ‘We love designing schools,’ says Feilden, with a smile that exhibits a slightly mischievous pleasure. A pleasure and optimism that seems to imply that regardless of what decisions central government may take, FCBA will be there to get under the skin of legislation, funding and targets to help produce the best schools that money can buy. After all, designing the building is only part of the battle, and FCBA fully understand this. Regardless of the practice’s technical and theoretical competence, they have never adopted a highbrow architectural position. Instead, with sustained integrity, their investment in clients and long-term aspirations has brought them increasing popularity: a deserved reward for choosing not to engage in the architectural pageantry that tempts so many other practices away from the essence of longevity that all architects should pursue. ROB GREGORY Architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, Bath Project team Peter Clegg, Bill Gething, David Stansfield, Matt Somerville, Toby Lewis, Elena Marco Brugete Project manager Burnley Wilson Fish, John Burnley Structural engineer Whitby Bird & Partners M&E engineer WSP Photovoltaic consultant ESD Facade consultant Montresor Partnership Landscape consultant Mitchell Harris Partnership Photographs Mandy Reynolds

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U NIVERSITY CAMPUS , G LOUCESTER , E NGLAND ARCHITECT F EILDEN C LEGG B RADLEY A RCHITECTS 5 The campus’s distinctive razorback northlights support the college’s 490m 2 photovoltaic array. 6 Even during the winter months, the café’s sheltered terrace provides a welcome place of rest ... 7 ... from the physical exertion of serious play ... 8 ... and the mental stimulation of sport sciences work.

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section through lecture theatre, seminar rooms, atrium and learning resources (scale approx 1:250), see key p70

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Founded in the mid-nineteenth century as the Catholic University of Ireland, University College Dublin (UCD) was first established in the heart of Dublin overlooking St Stephen’s Green. Famous alumni include Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. During the 1960s, the university decamped to a suburban greenfield site at Belfield, to the south of the city centre. Over time the campus has evolved and expanded, adding new faculty buildings, student residences and recreational facilities. With 10 faculties, 80 departments and a student body of 22 000, UCD is now the largest university in Ireland.

One of the most recent campus additions is McCullough Mulvin’s extension to the Virus Reference Laboratory (VRL). Affiliated with the university’s Department of Medical Microbiology, the VRL provides a national diagnostic virology service for Ireland, as well as undertaking research and issuing regular publications. The new building slots into a tight site between the main VRL laboratory and Ardmore House on the upper part of the campus. Though small in scale, the project plays a significant role in consolidating the relationship between the central buildings and the surrounding landscape, and, in particular, the lake directly below it.

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Conceived both as a place of work and social interaction, the project is one of a series of new pavilions designed to support and challenge the notion of architecture in the landscape that informed UCD’s orginal development in the 1960s. More specifically, it is clearly an object building in the greenfield campus tradition, but is also concerned with connecting with its surroundings and creating a sense of place. The main public frontage is defined by a triangular, rock-studded parvis while the inner edge encloses a small garden landscaped in an artfully minimal Japanese style, creating a peaceful haven for contemplation. With its lightweight skin and simple geometry, the new building forms an expressive contrast with its more leaden brick and stoneclad campus counterparts. Facades are wrapped in a taut skin of interlocking and overlapping panels of glass and Western red cedar which project and recede from the main surface plane. The cedar will weather to a delicate silvery grey, but the light has a slightly different effect on the vertical and horizontal boards, so that the skin will eventually resemble a piece of worn fabric with subtly contrasting textures. Extended parapets give the building muscular, cubelike, proportions.

1, 2 The new extension is an object building in the landscape, starkly different from its neighbours, but it also strives to connect with its surroundings and create a sense of place. 3 Detail of Western red cedar skin.

ACADEMIC DEBATE This extension to UCD’s microbiology department is a rational cube that reworks the campus object building.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The plan is elegantly economical, with offices on the upper floor and a laboratory, canteen and meeting room at ground level, with access to the courtyard garden. In abstract, the plan resembles a simple unicellular organism, with a coloured circulation core as its nucleus. The free-standing, sky-blue core can be glimpsed as you move through the building and a canted link corridor connects the new extension with the main laboratory. The linking arm also functions as an entrance hall.

UCD’S evolving campus can, perhaps, be compared to a 40 year conversation, with new members joining in and adding to the growing dialogue. McCullough Mulvin’s modest yet intelligently judged contribution adds to the richness of this academic debate. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect McCullough Mulvin Architects, Dublin Structural engineer Thomas Garland & Partners Services engineer UCD Buildings Services Department Photographs Christian Richters

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:250)

4 The crisp cube. Horizontal and vertical cedar strips will weather in slightly different ways. 5 Internal Japanese-style garden and link to the main department (left). 6 The coloured circulation core.

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Bam’s old city before the earthquake: a veritable encyclopaedia of ancient Middle Eastern building methods: domes, vaults, squinches, fortifications made with sun-dried brick in

techniques that date back to Biblical times. The old city was largely deserted since the 1930s and so had already partly fallen into decay. Restoration work had started.

View from Bam

shaped domes decorated by intricately laid bricks formed fascinating geometric patterns. Then there were the courtyards – some small, some large, some square, some rectangular, some with arcading, some with iwan recesses. Khans, or caravanserais, provided safe haven to travelling merchants and pilgrims; their courtyards with rooms at each end had fireplaces to ward off winter cold. Bam had a historic mix of religions. I visited a nineteenth-century courtyard house built by a wealthy Jewish merchant which was being restored by the Iranian Cultural Organisation as part of a general restoration project covering the whole fortified area. Numerous historic events have been recorded in Bam connected to the Zoroastrian faith that first took root in Persia in about 600BC. There is evidence of other links to

One of the finest and most ancient mud cities in the world, Bam, in Iran’s Kerman Province, was largely demolished by an earthquake in December. Archie Walls reports on past glories and possible futures.

I waited 30 years to visit Bam. When I did, it was a dream come true – and that was in December. As the reports came through, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of loss, not only for a magnificent city but for the engaging children I had met, and friends we had made whose hospitality abounded – plump Bam dates, full of flavour, sticky syrupy cakes, sweet black tea – and in the nearby town of Mahan a mouth-watering lunch

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of local specialities spread on a floor strewn with rugs, a blazing fire in the hearth and spectacular views out to the Shah Nematollah Vali mausoleum. Life flowed so naturally that it is difficult to conceive of the horrors, the loss and bitter cold the survivors have endured since. What was so special about Bam? It is in the first rank of my Great Magical Cities of the Orient: cities such as the walled Old City of Jerusalem with the holy sites of three religions; Aleppo, with its central citadel and miles of covered markets; Damascus with its Grand Mosque; Cairo with its many Islamic monuments and the millions of people living in its narrow byways; and Sana’a with gravity-defying earthen structures and beautiful gardens. Bam had many of the characteristics common to these cities and, although smaller than most, its

uninhabited ruins offered an abandoned. mystical quality in the midst of a desert with sharp mountains on the horizon – a perfect setting for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Bam is located on top of a large archaeological mound. This, together with the architecture of its buildings, illustrates how it has developed and changed over its 2000 year old history. Far below the existing fortified circuit of walls, there is another line of mud brick walls and watchtowers that separate the city from the wide flood plain of the Poshtrud River. These walls indicate an even greater area that was once inhabited and defended. Bam provided a veritable encyclopaedia of such historic structural elements: varieties of sun-dried mud brick squinches and vaults, many with the inclined arched technique recently used by Hassan Fathy. Variously

Bam’s citadel is built on top of an immensely ancient mound in which the unexplored remains of successive civilizations are imposed on each other. Before earthquake.

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Christianity and to Judaism and, with the advent of Islam, to its communities – the Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, and no doubt Sufi. From the beginning of the sixteenth century until the eighteenth, the city flourished, being on the trade route joining the Persian Gulf to India and Pakistan. The citadel was evacuated to avoid political reprisals in the 1780s, but civilians remained in the fortified town until its decline in the midnineteenth century. Thereafter soldiers occupied it until 1931 since when the old city and citadel have lain empty. I was in Iran in December to attend the ninth International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architecture, Terra 2003 in Yazd, which lies between Tehran and Bam. When I arrived in Bam, I discovered my paper exactly described the specific structural

technique used in its historic walls and buildings – a different method of construction to that used in the modern areas of the town where there was the greatest loss of life. The background to my paper was my identification, some 25 years ago, of a particular form of wall construction used in the historic forts and towns in Oman, which I called the ‘layered technique’. A continuous render is taken up the sides and over the top of the core material of a wall, the core material being some three courses of mud bricks about forty centimetres high. Over the years, during architectural and archaeological projects I have traced this technique throughout an area stretching from south-west Iraq, through the Jordanian desert, across the Arabian peninsula to Yemen and Oman, then south to Zanzibar. Now I have found it in his-

From citadel before earthquake, with old town in foreground and , beyond, new (where there was much greater loss of life).

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Layered mud-brick construction which, claims Walls, is more resistant to earthquakes than modern cement mixtures.

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Re-plastering a layered wall in one continuous coat, or cutting it back and inserting an outer face of fired bricks, can never benefit a historic structure. So I worry for Bam when I read of ‘super-adobe’ buildings constructed of sandbags filled with a mixture of cement and mud, connected by barbed wire for reinforcement. To say that such constructions would be indistinguishable from Bam’s original buildings makes my hair stand on end. On the other hand, ‘super-adobe’ buildings could house the inhabitants of the modern city quickly and cheaply with readily available materials. I also worry that, in the old city, speed and need may tempt the cement brigade to push their products, and that earthquake strengthening measures may be introduced to the detriment of the historic fabric. So much for the above ground structures, but what about the qanat (aqueduct) systems that for millennia have criss-crossed the desert to bring water from the mountains to Bam, and other oases of the region? What happened to these wonders when the earthquake struck? Bam is the leading example of an indigenous architecture that expresses the common historical and cultural roots of ancient peoples spread over a vast region of the world well before modern geo-political boundaries were drawn. Its tragic devastation provides an opportunity for three major areas of learning: first to undertake a detailed archaeological survey of the mound; second to restore sensitively and with compatible materials the extant structures; and third to re-establish an appreciation of the common historic and cultural roots which once upon a time bound the peoples of the whole region.

toric structures in Iran, from Tehran to Bam. In the buildings I have seen, various combinations of materials have been used, from earth renders with hand formed and box-made mud bricks to harder lime-gypsum renders with stone, but the essential feature of the layering has been there. The earliest example I have come across was in Bahrain, where I found a wall with squared stones on one face backed by courses of smaller stones, enveloped by a render. This dated from 800 BC, and it can be assumed that this was preceded by hundreds of years of experiment. The advantage of this system is that if the external render is damaged –

by the elements or enemy attack – attrition is restricted to specific layers and does not spread to the layers above or below. Looking at photographs of Bam since the earthquake, I am convinced that the old city and citadel can be reconstructed and returned to their mystical splendour. I have successfully restored buildings of similar construction in Bahrain and Zanzibar by following the layers and replacing damaged renders systematically and with compatible materials. And we could add a new dimension by identifying the direction in which the builders constructed the walls, as I found in Bahrain.

Pre-earthquake court with traditional Persian iwan.

After earthquake: Walls believes that devastated citadel and city can be reconstructed.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H EADQUARTERS BUILDING , C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS , USA A RCHITECT B EHNISCH , B EHNISCH & P ARTNER

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LUMINOUS PARADIGM The Genzyme Center brings transforming imagination to US office design, adding environmental and human dimensions.

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1 Externally, the Genzyme Center conforms to a rigorous masterplan and does not seem revolutionary. 2 Glazed curtain walls have tracts of openable windows and deep cavities with various blinds and curtains.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Seen in passing, the Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts does not seem particularly revolutionary. It looks very much like another glass-clad corporate headquarters, even if its profile and massing are slightly unusual, and its cladding is strangely varied. On the edge of the city near Longfellow Bridge and Broad Canal, it forms part of a new development on an abandoned industrial site. Genzyme is one of the first of seven new buildings being built to a masterplan by Urban Strategies of Toronto that determined overall envelope and massing. Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner of Stuttgart, and of Venice, California are the architects of the Genzyme Center. Their proposal was selected in competition, yet the development of the USA’s first large environmentally aware office block was created in intimate collaboration with the developer client, Lyme Properties LLC and tenants, the Genzyme Corporation. Dan Winny of Lyme explains that, at competition stage, they did not select the Behnisch practice because the developers wanted to make a green building, but because they were attracted to ‘the quality and freshness of the European design work’. During the competition, in which the by then probable tenants Genzyme were involved on the jury, it became clear that the Behnisch proposal was what Winny calls ‘a concept for a radically different type of innovative building based on principles of responsible energy use … maximizing the environmental quality of the workplace’. In other words, the Center was to be built to principles now commonly accepted in the German-speaking lands and Scandinavia. But the Behnisch building is far more than a conventional transfer of European values across the Atlantic. Its central atrium is literally breathtaking, a joyous paean of luminous space, with which the office floors engage in terraces, balconies and platforms. The complex social life of the office is revealed as you look up, with open-plan offices (American style but involving low cubicles) mingled with private (though usually transparently walled) individual rooms, open

stairs linking particular floors to encourage formation of vertical as well as horizontal forms of local office communities. The architects’ aim is to create vertical urbanity, with public and private spaces, conference rooms, a cafeteria, and library and internal gardens to clean and oxygenate the air. It is too early yet to see whether all these measures will work, and particularly whether they will work together. But early evidence is promising. In its optimism, the space is highly reminiscent of Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer when it first opened as a brilliant and radical experiment in organizing offices that respect individuals and small groups as well as the organization. As far as possible, all workplaces receive daylight, either from the perimeter or from the atrium. On clear days, the void is filled with daylight that is transmitted down through the ceiling prism elements. A system designed by the Austrian firm Bartenbach Lichtlabor involves seven solar-tracking mirrors on the roof at the north side of the atrium that reflect light to fixed mirrors on the south side, from where the sun’s rays are deflected downwards to the pools at entrance level, whence they shimmer upwards. (The system is not dissimilar to the one used by Foster in the Hong Kong Bank, AR April 1986). On the way down, sunlight is intercepted and deflected by the multiple moving prism plates of roof-hung chandeliers. According to the angle at which sunlight hits them, the plates reflect or transmit, distributing sunshine into surrounding office spaces. The devices, with their everchanging patterns of sunlight, are one of the reasons why the space is so breathtaking when you first see it. Its luminosity is further enhanced by reflective balustrades and a lamellar wall on the south side of the atrium: the vertical lamellae are moved to change the wall’s reflectivity according to the angle of the sun and the nature of the sky. Artificial and natural lighting are related by sensor systems that slowly dim overhead lights when the atrium’s total luminosity is appropriate. All workplaces have low-energy task-lights, which both allow people to control their immediate environments and add to the feeling that the building is a congregation of individual places.

H EADQUARTERS BUILDING , C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS , USA A RCHITECT B EHNISCH , B EHNISCH & P ARTNER

3 Foyer with Behnisch trademark grand stair. Light enters from top and sides and is reflected by chandeliers and pools.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H EADQUARTERS BUILDING , C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS , USA A RCHITECT B EHNISCH , B EHNISCH & P ARTNER 4 Every effort is taken to increase daylight penetration of office areas with prismatic squares of chandeliers, ceiling reflectors and reflective balustrades.

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As well as being a great light-chute, the atrium is the central element in the building’s climate control system. It forms a huge waste-air chimney. Fresh air reaches occupied areas from ceiling grilles, or through the openable parts of the perimeter walls. Pressure differentiation drives used air to the atrium, where it ascends to be expelled at roof level. Energy for the heating and cooling system is provided by steam from a small local power station two blocks away from the site. In summer, the steam drives absorption chillers; in winter, its heat is exchanged into heating for the building. Buro Happold, who designed the climate control system, claim that there are no distribution losses in this energy system, and that its emissions are reduced by filters at the power plant. Energy-saving considerations go even as far as rainwater handling: some of it is used to supplement supplies to the cooling towers (saving city supplies) and some feeds the landscaped roof. Curtain walls wrap the perimeter (designed in conjunction with Happold’s and Bartenbach Lichtlabor). Over all 12 floors, they have openable windows that are linked to the building management system

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principles of interior climate control

that automatically opens them on cool summer nights to reduce the temperature of the building. Over 30 per cent of the external envelope is a ventilated double facade with a 4ft (1.22m) interstitial space that acts as climate buffer. In winter, the voids capture solar gains and re-radiate them to the interior. In summer, various shading devices including adjustable sun protecting blinds and coloured curtains reduce insolation. As the opening of windows and the adjustment of the blinds are controlled by individuals, the building’s appearance constantly changes in detail. This external indication that users are valued and have some control over their individual working conditions is echoed in sensitive detailed handling of interior finishes and choice of furniture. The bits you can touch are welcoming – cloth or wood, rather than plastic. Cubicle walls are capable of much flexibility, not just for management re-arrangements, but so that individuals can make their own work spaces particular. The Genzyme Center is a truly brave building. Its realization of the inspiring belief that North American offices can be made more decent to work in than the usual dreary deep indoor prairies needed great and unusual trust and vision between developer, tenant, architect and all consultants. So did the notion that an environmentally friendly building that costs more initially than its conventional equivalent will eventually provide handsome paybacks for its developers, tenants and occupants alike. It is an inspiring shift in the evolution of the office building type, more inventive and integrated than almost anything yet built, even in Europe. Every aspect of its performance should be measured, and luckily there are lots of local academics just up the road who are capable of doing the job. The Genzyme Center is almost the complete opposite of normal US office block produced by core-and-shell development, where architectural efforts are so often perforce confined to decorating exteriors. Here, an immense amount of creative energy has been poured into the interior. Externally, the building is constrained by a rather dumb masterplan. What could the Behnisch team have done with it had they been given a freer hand? P. D.

Architect Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner Project team Stefan Behnisch, Christof Jantzen, Günther Schaller, Martin Werminghausen, Maik Neumann Executive architects House & Robertson, Los Angeles: Douglas Robertson, Nick Gillock, Patricia Schneider Next Phase Studios, Boston: Richard Ames, Scott Payette Masterplanning Ken Greenberg Environmental consultancy, structural and M/E/P/engineers Buro Happold Green building consultant Natural Logic: Bill Reid Planting interior gardens Log ID Natural and artificial lighting Bartenbach Lichtlabor Workspace design DEGW: Frank Duffy Photographs Roland Halbe

5, 6 Trays and terraces of office accommodation linked by open stairs are intended to foster feelings of a community of small groups.

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GEHRY’S GREAT CONCERTO

The Disney Concert Hall has radically transformed a block of downtown Los Angeles making it a place to visit rather than drive through.

1 Downtown Los Angeles has never looked so good. Curved surfaces reflect light and sky, and lead to new vistas.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) From the first solo notes of The Star-Spangled Banner, sung by jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves in spotlight at centre stage, to the final crescendo of the entire LA Philharmonic expressing the energy and shock of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the inaugural performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall was a calibrated workout for both music and architecture. This is a hall where music in its various iterations seems remarkably at home with an audience sometimes gathered vertiginously in the round. For a building instantaneously acclaimed as a vanguard masterpiece, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is surprisingly traditional. True, its giant external petals of stainless-steel cladding are wonderful amid the isolated towers of Downtown. From afar, they glisten and reflect the sky, then taunt – like the cape of some ingenious sculptor/matador – and swoop away when viewed up-close. Thrilling to drive past, the Hall’s cladding plays a sophisticated game of concave and convex surfaces that, unlike the mostly opaque walls of the Baroque, contain reflections of light and sky and lead the eye out to newly framed aspects of adjacent buildings. Downtown Los Angeles has never looked so good. Being LA, concertgoers inevitably arrive by car, leaving the garage by a red escalator lobby topped by one of many fractured skylights. As with Hans Hollein’s concoction, and that of Stirling and Wilford in the original competition back in 1988, Gehry’s building takes advantage of its slightly raised site to play with metaphors of Greek Acropolis and German stadtkrone. (Fourth invitee Gottfried Böhm’s proposal, also stadtkrone-like, was more akin to a Wagnerian gasworks.) Surrounded by heavily trafficked streets, the orthogonal

site dips from an easterly corner – the formal and photogenic entry court – to the west, where a steel ribbon canopy signals entry to REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, a supplementary arts space accommodated within the parking structure as it rises above street level. In the 1980s, the acropolis of eclectic elements was characteristic of such playful urban works as Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (AR December 1984), Hollein’s Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach (AR December 1982), and Gehry’s own Loyola University Law School on a flat site just west of Downtown LA. Nevertheless, Gehry’s virtuosity and experimentation allowed for his inclusion, alongside a younger generation, in the New York Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition (also 1988), with its ambitions to forge a hyper-Modernist avant-garde. Seldom prone to theorizing, Gehry’s office further developed in the 1990s away from shards and violent fragmentation to a volumetric architecture of dynamic surfaces engendered (as with the Bilbao Guggenheim, AR December 1997) by evolving computer technology. Perhaps because of this long gestation period, the Walt Disney Concert Hall – in particular the auditorium and the office blocks exposed on the plinth – retains Gehry’s earlier concern with a Cubistic assemblage of objects together with an emerging ability to drape space with complexly shaped membranes. Although a large public greenhouse has been lost, auditorium massing still shifts from the axial coordinates of the urban block, setting up a tension that is partially held in check by orthogonal, stone-clad office accommodation to south and west.

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2 Organic forms poised on orthogonal masonry base that responds to urban grid. 3, 4 The gardens and paths lifted above street level offer a whole new public realm of complexity and delight.

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orchestra level +16ft (4.93m)

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C ONCERT HALL , L OS A NGELES , USA A RCHITECT G EHRY P ARTNERS 5 The great formal entrance at street level is relatively little used because most opera-goers arrive by car and park underground.

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C ONCERT HALL , L OS A NGELES , USA A RCHITECT G EHRY P ARTNERS 6 Each landing or corridor is intended to be a viewing terrace, like the ones in Scharoun’s Philharmonie.

gallery level +50ft (15.45m)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) distributed symmetrically, mostly across a raked orchestra area in front of the stage or on a pincer-shaped balcony above. Yet a significant number occupy bow-fronted stalls to either side of the stage; skinny concave balconies projecting from three levels above; or tiered terraces behind the stage that part to either side of a 6125-pipe organ. With pipes stylized by Gehry to appear like rods on the verge of fission, this organ may well be a contemporary counterpart to some Baroque monstrance or mural of ascending angels. This Baroque sensibility is not merely emotional or ‘artistic’. The building lies directly across First Street from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (completed by Welton Becket and Associates in 1964) whose convex if imperious sides set up a curvilinear momentum in the immediate context. In Gehry’s foyer areas, visitors seem naturally to navigate about the timbered hull of the auditorium, and towards natural light as it filters past sections of ceiling and the swoosh of balustrades – both plastered white to read as comparatively subsidiary elements. Columns are also theatrical, timber-clad like the auditorium, but bursting apart into gigantic stems or branches that house uplights. The organic theme continues inside where all seats are upholstered in a vividly patterned and coloured fabric, a floral abstraction that Gehry designed in tribute to the late Lillian Disney, widow of Walt Disney and donor of the initial $50 million gift to a then-hypothetical project in 1987. Surprisingly decorative or Pop, these seats must perform to the same acoustic standards whether occupied or not. Working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, the Gehry team constructed tenth-scale models of the hall to test sound performance. Above audience and performers alike, an inner ceiling droops downwards in sail-like sleeves that both help disperse sound and secrete necessary technical apparatus. The timber sheathing of the interior – stage floor, balustrades, perimeter walls, billowing soffit – contributes greatly to the remarkable intimacy of the Walt Disney auditorium. The LA Philharmonic knows it must attract a new and younger following; and Gehry’s architecture, or the building achieved by Gehry’s team, deliberately eschews the formal, hierarchical ethos of most previous buildings of the type. Behind the musicians, when they assume their orthodox semi-circular formation, light seeps in to either side of the organ and the ceiling clearly floats free of rear internal walls. During the splendid inaugural concert, as a lone trumpeter performed Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question from the centre of the uppermost terrace farthest away from conductor and orchestra, a screen or blind ascended behind to allow views out (through another crystalline window) to the blue night sky, connecting music lovers in the belly of the auditorium with the cosmos outside. This is Los Angeles, after all, the city in which dream and reality are most conspicuously mixed.

In essence, Gehry sheathes a timber box in stainless steel. Dancing about this protected auditorium, the steel peels away to create entrances and windows. It also bubbles upward to shelter two extraordinary satellite rooms: a bar with curving timber sides (a hip descendant of Aalto’s 1939 New York Pavilion?) and the dramatic Founders’ Room, where gigantic petals of plaster are sucked upwards into a vortex of glass and steel far above. In 1988, Gehry had envisaged the auditorium as a stacked stone ziggurat. Intervening years and budgets entailed the switch to metal, but the Founders’ Room – part stupa, part air sock – retains a formal independence through its unique shape and through the selection of a shinier external steel panel. The new building spills out and mutates into various intriguing shapes onto Grand Avenue, within easy strolling distance of Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. To the west, the city streets dip down to expose largely impenetrable walls, save for the REDCAT corner entrance, to the parking structure (these immediate streets function primarily as feeder arteries to the LA freeway system). Above, however, Gehry has created a whimsical public garden, terraces with eccentric planting and paving and a small, hooded amphitheatre that take advantage (like Rafael Moneo’s parvis to his cathedral a few blocks to the north, AR March 2003) of LA’s surprising topological richness. At intermission or just before a performance, the audience can happily colonize both these raised gardens and the concatenation of lift shafts, open staircases, and stacked decks threaded through the residual spaces located between auditorium and outermost shell. In principle, each landing or access corridor becomes a viewing terrace, augmenting the excitement of a special evening out. These entrails reveal Gehry’s empirical ability, or perhaps his seemingly casual Californian stance, in the resolution of complex practical and spatial issues. Nevertheless, during inauguration festivities, some first-time visitors to the Concert Hall had difficulty orientating themselves through these interstitial zones. As at Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie, this flow of circulation towards the primary performance space is deliberately a performance in itself: exposed, mobile, and interactive. Gehry’s original intention for many balconies fanning out from the stage, again kin to Scharoun’s metaphor of vineyard terraces at the Philharmonie, has been curtailed as acoustic and other realities have been integrated into his design. The auditorium, as built, is closer to the rectilinear box of Vienna’s historic Musikverein or Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. Its flanks are essentially twin flat surfaces, but surfaces with projections and perforated to allow access in many different locations. The interior is lined or draped in timber, mostly Douglas fir, evoking further allusions or similes: ambitions for the auditorium to feel like a nautical vessel and be like a musical instrument itself. The 2265 seats are

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Architect Gehry Partners, Los Angeles Principal project team Frank Gehry, James Glymph, Craig Webb, Terry Bell, David Pakshong, William Childers, David Hardie, Kristin Woehl Structural engineer John A. Martin & Associates Electrical engineer Frederick Russell Brown Mechanical engineer Levine/Seegel Associates Acoustic consultant Nagata Acoustics Lighting design L’observatoire International Landscape design Lawrence Reed Moline; Melinda Taylor Landscape Design Theatre consultants Theatre Projects Photographs John E. Linden/Arcaid except 7 and 8 by Hufton + Crow/VIEW

C ONCERT HALL , L OS A NGELES , USA A RCHITECT G EHRY P ARTNERS 7, 8 The great timber box, with its dramatic views of the sky.

RAYMUND RYAN

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) With 6000 employees worldwide, Trumpf AG is one of the great German postwar manufacturing success stories, prospering in the heavily industrialized heartland of Swabia around Stuttgart. As such, Trumpf’s management has pursued a bold architectural mission that matches the company’s leading edge reputation in laser technology and machine tools. In particular, it has cultivated a fruitful relationship with architects Barkow Leibinger, who have been involved in spearheading Trumpf’s rapid international expansion in Germany, Switzerland, the US, and latterly in Italy, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The Berlin-based partnership has been responsible for the masterplanning and design of an evolving Trumpf research and production campus. In 1999, it designed a manufacturing plant for laser technology at the company’s headquarters in StuttgartDitzingen and a year later, a Systems Technology plant was added. The new 9000m2 Distribution and Service Centre is the third phase of the expansion plan. The results have given Trumpf an increasingly recognizable architectural image, following the model of other German corporations – for instance Vitra, Rimowa (Grimshaw) or the Ernsting family (Chipperfield), which have animated their industrial sites with notable buildings. The latest addition to the Trumpf Campus presented the architects with their greatest challenge to date. The site is at an odd corner and borders directly on to a busy motorway, not an

auspicious location for a building intended to serve as a place for welcoming clients and guests. The conundrum was resolved by astute massing and subdivision of volumes. As you walk up the gentle slope, past the administrative and research buildings from the ’70s, the new building’s layered structure comes into view. The landscape is marked by generously spaced steps, with each threshold highlighted by long strips of lasercut metal plates that chronologically document the company’s meteoric rise and expansion. So even before they cross this entrance platform, visitors have subconsciously absorbed some corporate history. The lines of the steps extend into the ground floor, demarcating the three main functions of the entrance area (lobby, 200 seat auditorium and exhibition space). The resulting polygonal shapes are arranged in a strong, almost sculptural, relationship to each other. Barkow Leibinger refer metaphorically to those three ground floor volumes as ‘stones’. Interrupted only by floor to ceiling window openings, their solid grey basalt facades exude a monumental yet precisely aligned verticality. Inside, a generous longitudinal corridor connects the stones. A metal relief, cut using the most advanced Trumpf machinery, runs along the entire length of the ground floor corridor, concealing the large exhaust air ducts which service the ground floor. With its decorative yet functional spirit, this part of the building is reminiscent of a cultural institution or university. Gaps between stones are filled by a pair of reinforced-

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An attempt to make urban architecture on a very difficult and disjointed site.

WC Besprechung

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1 Glazed office block seems to float above more massive, stone-clad volumes. 2 Entrance courtyard. 3 New building addresses busy motorway, forming beacon for industrial campus beyond.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) concrete cores which stabilize the two parallel office wings above. Though taking up the same basic footprint (55 x 9m), the wings are offset against each other by 11m and vary both in height and in the number of storeys. There is a striking contrast between the light, transparent horizontal structure of the office floors and the solid verticality of the stones below. Glazed, double-skinned facades on the north and south sides screen the building as much as enhance its pervading impression of lightness. Each of the 500m2 office floors (four on the north and five on the south side), are open-plan, column-

free spaces with only a couple of meeting rooms on each floor. Splitlevel offices are connected by gracefully rising staircases. Space flows fluidly, with daylight flooding in, and natural cross ventilation utilizes the open cores as thermal stacks, with passive cooling during the summer months and heat recovery during the winter. Offices appear as calm, uncluttered spaces, but are also thoughtfully detailed and highly practical. Their economical organization arose from Barkow Leibinger’s collaboration with engineering scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute and furniture

manufacturer Vitra. Empirical and analytical studies were used to devise a special type of office furniture that greatly reduced individual filing space but added other features; for instance, a writing desk that can be pulled out. The understated colour scheme of grey furniture, green fabric screens and brown felt wall coverings adds to the elegant, workmanlike internal atmosphere. This latest building consolidates Barkow Leibinger’s relationship with Trumpf; the next phase of corporate campus development is eagerly awaited. CHRISTIAN BRENSING

Architect Barkow Leibinger Architekten, Berlin Structural engineers Conzett, Bronzoni, Gartmann; Boll & Partner Mechanical engineers Transsolar; Henne & Walter, Reutlingen Landscape consultant Gabi Kiefer Photographs Margherita Spiluttini

4 Parallel office blocks linked by stairs. 5, 7 A metal relief, cut using Trumpf machinery, animates the entrance hall on ground floor. 6 Interiors are calm, light and workmanlike. 8 Offices are a triumph of functional economy.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 The new Dutch Embassy, the latest addition to Berlin’s rapidly evolving skyline, occupies a site on the edge of the river Spree. 2 After dark, the snaking trajectory around the building is revealed.

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THE CABINET OF DR KOOLHAAS Gently subverting Berlin’s urban matrix, the new Dutch Embassy is an Expressionist labyrinth with a surprisingly informal interior realm.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) D UTCH E MBASSY , B ERLIN , G ERMANY ARCHITECT OMA

The new Dutch Embassy in Berlin is a classic Koolhaas building. It reveals traces of some of his best known works and concepts, such as the external metaphoric materialism of the Rotterdam Kunsthal and the internal structural and functional mazes of the Jussieu library in Paris. Yet compared with other current OMA mega-projects such as Seattle Library or the headquarters for Central Chinese Television, the Dutch Embassy is actually a relatively modest building. Perhaps it was the choice of site in former East Berlin, now officially known as Mitte (literally ‘middle’), that incited such a highly controlled and introspective urban and architectural solution. Contrary to expectations, the central location does not exude the hustle and bustle of nearby Potsdamer Platz. Instead, Klosterstrasse (Monastery Street) runs quietly off the busy Stralauerstrasse and ends on the quayside of the river Spree where the water flows slowly and darkly into a lock. Few tourists find their way here unless on a river cruise. Development of the prominent corner site, which had been vacant since the war, had to conform to Berlin building regulations. These were precisely defined by the city’s former chief planner Hans Stimmann and any new building had to occupy all four corners of the site. Being well versed in overcoming the inhibitions of planning laws, Koolhaas managed to avoid a preconceived standard solution. Instead of proposing the customary atrium or inner courtyard, he created a freestanding monolithic 27 x 27m cube enclosed by slim L-shaped wings, so achieving a narrow but totally open courtyard while still fulfilling the requirement to build on all four corners. Call it Dutch irony, but the urban solution is both perplexing and intriguing. In functional terms, the two spatially interlocked volumes are divided between offices located in the cube and apartments in the one-room deep L-shaped wings, along with plant rooms (the building is fully mechanically ventilated). Linked by five vertically stacked bridges, both volumes stand on a raised platform which serves as the underground car park for only 28 vehicles, despite staff numbers of 70. Underneath, a tarmac ramp leads up from the street level into the courtyard where the main entrance is located. From there a continuous 200m strip, or what

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3 Slim wings are linked to the main cube by stacked bridges. 4 Entrance to the embassy compound. 5 Inside the cantilevered volume of the conference room. 6 The adjacent wings meet the local planning requirement to build on all four corners of the site … 7 … but the main focus of attention is the cube, an impressively object building, but modest in scale when compared with other current Koolhaas projects.

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Koolhaas calls a ‘trajectory’ (in effect, a succession of staircases, ramps and corridors), snakes its way up through the building. At some points it emerges on or even through the facade (in the case of the cantilevering glass corridor above Klosterstrasse), changing direction of ascent and gradient until it reaches the restaurant and roof terrace. Floors, ceilings and walls of this architect-styled ‘stairway to heaven’ are clad in aluminium and sometimes even in plain or coloured glass. Typical of Koolhaas, there is an honest, almost brutally direct, confrontation with materials. Surfaces jump out at you, not only because of their vivid hues, but also because of their harsh and relentless objectivity. Over time, the trajectory’s cantilevered green glass ramp in will bear visible marks of wear and tear, just like the sheet aluminium on the floors and staircases. You slightly fear that the building, otherwise not so immaculately detailed and designed, might gradually begin to resemble a tatty old Dutch space station. Due to the restricted floorplate size (700 sq m), the interior is dominated by the trajectory. This often generates curious configurations as the architect and his technical consultants had to squeeze, fold and contort the available space. As Koolhaas does not deal in conventional floors and storeys, it is difficult to arrive at an accurate number of floors. (Discussing the notion of a mini high-rise, he once mentioned 20 storeys.) In reality, there are only 10 levels of varying height in this 26m-high building. Structurally, the embassy is a tour de force. Each floorplate rotates and cantilevers over the one below and no single internal column runs through the entire structure (only four walls project through from top to bottom). With its oblique corridors, passages, ramps, steps, views through coloured glass, monstrously thick rotating doors and dead ends, Koolhaas’ ingenious maze is reminiscent of the set for the iconic German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. At times, columns and heavy transfer beams appear in the most baffling positions. One particular example is the very

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8 The fashionably glum interior is dominated by the presence of the trajectory. 9 Ramps, stairs and corridors wind around the building, connecting the principal spaces. 9

CAFE PRESS

POLITICS FITNESS

CONFERENCE RECEPTION

INTERNET

ADMIN TRAFFIC

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CONFERENCE

MULTIPURPOSE HALL

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AMBASSADOR’S QUARTERS

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plan of ‘unravelled’ trajectory (scale approx 1:250)

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low ceiling in the trajectory on level five, which compels tall visitors, such as Koolhaas, to instinctively lower their heads. Because of the deliberate spatial complexity, there is little coordination between interior and exterior. Here, Koolhaas pays the price for his structural manoeuvring, as he is obliged to rely on a loadbearing double facade. Where the internal zigzagging of the trajectory feigns freedom or even anarchy, the straight steel columns that run down the full height of the building indicate a necessary and more simplistic rigour. Despite the spectacular feat of one conference room cantilevering 5m out from the facade and the trajectory’s handful of timidly projecting features, the external envelope is actually a dreaded Cartesian cage. Evidently the spectacular cost (35 million euros) and extraordinary planning and construction time (five years) could not assuage this fundamental stylistic defect. Did the regimented marching order of Berlin’s facades finally catch up with the master of the informal? Still, Koolhaas’ embassy is undoubtedly a cunning retort to dogmatic planning laws as well as being another free gift to the city of Berlin. It even frames the outlandish Alexanderplatz television tower, a symbolic relic from the era of perceived Communist superiority over the West. From the core of the embassy cube there is an unobstructed view (through a gigantic opening in the apartment wing) of the tower’s Sputnik-like top. It is a powerful (yet also possibly partly ironic) gesture of reverence from Koolhaas to a city that once upon a time publicly denounced him and his views on modern architecture.

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CHRISTIAN BRENSING

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Architect OMA, Rotterdam Structural engineers Royal Haskoning, Arup Berlin Services engineers Huygen Elwako, Arup Berlin Photographs Christian Richters

10 The staircase is articulated on the facade as a diagonal slash of glazing. 11 Green glass panels unexpectedly dematerialise the floor plane. 12 A typical office on the upper floors. 13 A meeting room adorned with contemporary art. 14 The multipurpose hall on the first floor.

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TBILISI IS AN UNDISCOVERED TREASURE. EVEN IN DECAY, AND AFTER MUCH DESTRUCTION, THE GEORGIAN CAPITAL IS STILL RICH IN ARCHITECTURAL MOMENTS .

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The capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, means ‘warm’ due to its sulphur springs. It has attracted travellers and inspired artists, poets and philosophers for many centuries. The location has shaped its history and appearance. Having been inhabited since the fifth millennium BC, Georgia has been linked with civilizations of Asia Minor, the Aegean and with Greece, Egypt, the Roman and Parthian-Sassanian Empires in the Early Iron Age and the Classical period. At different times it has been occupied by Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Russians. In the Middle Ages, Georgian kings made Tbilisi the capital of one of the largest states in the Near East, a crossroads of trade routes and, as described by Marco Polo, a place ‘where they weave cloths of gold and all kinds of very fine silk stuffs’. Though Orthodox Christianity dominated, other religions and nationalities were also respected. The main Armenian-Gregorian Church in Tbilisi, St George’s Church (above) was built in 1251 by an Armenian merchant. The Persians seized it in the seventeenth century during their invasion. Burnt down in 1795 during the second Persian invasion and gradually restored during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it keeps its original form. There is a remarkable fragment of stone cross with an Arabic inscription on the north facade of the church. Destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, Tbilisi displays an incredible eclectic combination of Oriental and European styles. In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire enhanced its presence in Georgia bringing in Neo-Classical style, features of the Renaissance and Baroque and Moorish style, together with Art Nouveau and pseudo-Georgian styles which prevailed later. Tbilisi became a bourgeois city, its Opera House was ‘if not the best, one of the best in the world’ (Alexander Dumas). In the twentieth century, Soviet styles also influenced the city. The old part consists of winding streets with churches, workshops, stores, public sulphur baths, courtyards and ‘Tbilisi houses’ of two and three floors with lacy wooden balconies, terrace roofing, loggias with stained glass and external ladders of different forms and materials. Even in decay, Tbilisi hopes and welcomes. It is a great city. IRINA KALASHNIKOVA

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With the construction of new local authority buildings all over the country, Ireland is undergoing something of a municipal renaissance. Encouragingly, rather than opt for lowest common denominator methods of commissioning and design, the Irish authorities have put the majority out to competition, thus raising architectural standards and presenting a younger generation of designers with a chance to tackle sizeable projects. Briefs emphasize openness, transparency and environmental responsibility, with reduced energy use in construction and operation. The outcome is a lively new coterie of civic buildings that confound and transcend the more familiar notions of municipal drabness. Completed at the end of last year, Bucholz McEvoy’s county hall and offices in Dooradoyle, County Limerick personifies this new Celtic wave. An earlier municipal building in Fingal (AR February 2001) represented an audacious coming of age for the Dublin-based partnership of Merrit Bucholz and Karen McEvoy, manifesting skill and style beyond their years (both not yet 40). And though this latest project is, as some critics have noted, the equivalent of that difficult second album, happily there seems to be no loss of energy or ingenuity in its conception and execution. The site was unpromising: a typical nondescript, suburban edge condition where sprawling retail development marks the boundary between town and countryside. The new building’s nearest neighbour is a huge, introverted shopping centre, but the presence of a new county library suggests an attempt to establish a decentralized node of civic functions that might extend beyond shopping. Rather than present an object marooned in a sea of parking, Bucholz McEvoy set their building 70m back from the road, taking advantage of a 2m drop in level across the site. Long earth berms conceal cars and animate the pancake flatness of the suburban topography. Over time, the banks of vegetation will mature to form a green edge along the road and connect with the open spaces to the east of the site.

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Despite being the political centre of the county, Limerick’s local authority is an eclectic and evolving organization, with nine different departments. These were originally housed in the city centre, but had no clear sense of community or civic identity. Bucholz McEvoy’s new building is a decisive riposte to bureaucratic anonymity. Glimpsed from the road, the squat terracotta tiled drum of the council chamber set against a delicate carapace of timber trusses, like the bleached skeleton of a prehistoric beast, powerfully proclaim the presence of something modern, different and self-assured. The cylinder of the council chamber forms part of a secondary three-storey block that protrudes at right angles into the bermed car park from the main five-storey body of the building. Isolating the chamber in this way restores a sense of human scale within the more

impersonal civic context. An earth ramp leads up to the main entrance, with visitors passing under the long, rectangular box of the secondary block which is propped up on slim pilotis. The feeling of compression generated by this approach is spectacularly dispelled by the generous proportions of the building’s set-piece space, a soaring, quadruple-height atrium that runs along the entire length of the main block. Overlooking this civic forum are stacked floors of open plan and cellular offices. Light percolates through the timber exoskeleton that shades the angled glass membrane on the west side of the atrium, casting a shimmering pattern of striated shadows around the tall nave-like space. Designed in collaboration with engineers RFR, the eye-catching brise-soleil ingeniously integrates structure and solar control.

1 A huge timber brise-soleil is the dramatic formal and functional signature of Limerick’s new civic offices. 2 The council chamber is contained in a terracotta tiled drum. 3 The building is set back from the road with parking concealed among a topography of earth berms, which will eventually mature into green mounds.

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Part of a programme of imaginative municipal building in Ireland, these new offices inventively address concerns of form, site and environment.

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cross section showing daytime heat gain

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location plan

4 The timber lattice is made up of trusses suspended between horizontal transfer beam and steel roof structure. 5 Office spaces overlook the long atrium. 6 Projecting light shelves on the more hermetic east elevation bring daylight into the interior. 7 Angled truss members optimize shading without moving parts.

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Structurally, it acts like a giant ribcage consisting of 25 vertically spanning timber trusses. Each 15m long truss is made up of glulam Scots pine members anchored to a vertical steel tube. Support is provided at the bottom by a horizontal transfer beam resting on sculpted concrete columns and at the top by steel members tied back to the main concrete frame. Together, the 25 trusses act as a composite structure 75m long, transferring horizontal loads from the glass facade. Vertical loads are carried by the steel roof structure. The angled members of the individual trusses help to optimize shading for both south and west sun angles without the maintenance bother of moving parts. This sophisticated pleasure in the way things are made and put together is also reflected in the gently contoured underbelly of the office floors, created using special fibreglass moulds from a boat builder. (Prototypes for these featured in the Irish entry to the last Venice Biennale, AR October 2002.) On the more hermetic east facade, the concrete slabs project

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beyond the building line to form light shelves that reflect illumination back into the heart of the building. The thermal mass of the exposed concrete soffits also plays a key part in a strategy of passive environmental control. The building is entirely naturally ventilated, with fabric, structure and skin tuned to control the internal environment. The atrium is the engine of ventilation acting as a thermal chimney, taking air from the offices and exhausting it at the top. Narrow floor plates (17m wide) are easily cross ventilated from east to west or from offices to the atrium. Vertical louvres incorporated into the east facade allow for ventilation in the damp local climate. Taking extensive soundings from the prospective occupants through questionnaires and discussion, Bucholz McEvoy evolved a set of guidelines for the formal and experiential character of the office interiors. Physical openness, which was considered essential for good staff communication and the building’s environmental strategy, was balanced against the need for visual and acoustic privacy, and the need for individuals to have a sense of control over their immediate surroundings. The outcome is far removed from the monotony of generic open-plan prairies, with soft lighting, large sycamore desks and linen-clad partitions equipped with individual glare control screens made from fabric panels on moveable arms. Against the background of an evolving workplace that must also act as totem of civic dignity and efficiency, Bucholz McEvoy’s new building succeeds in intelligently resolving concerns of form, site, construction and environmental control. The partnership’s difficult second album proved not such a stumbling block after all. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect Bucholz McEvoy Architects, Dublin Project team Merrit Bucholz, Karen McEvoy, Graham Petrie, Sabine Klingner, Rebecca Egan, Mary Louise Kelly, Jim Luke, Peter Crowley, Jana Scheibel Structural engineer Michael Punch & Partners Services engineer Buro Happold Facade engineer RFR Photographs Michael Moran

8 Light, airy interiors are simply but handsomely detailed. 9 Typical office space. 10 Council chamber is contained in the semi-detached drum. 11 The soaring nave-like atrium forms the building’s set-piece space.

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Richard Meier’s Rome church is one event originally planned to mark the celebrations of the Jubilee of AD 2000. This was initiated by the Pope in 1994 when he called for a Special Consistory to prepare for the Great Jubilee at the starting point of the third millennium involving the Catholic world as a whole. Meier’s project is the 50th church to be inaugurated in the Vatican’s Millennium Project. Each church has a community centre and they are built in various parish districts throughout Rome. The Jubilee Church commission was the result of an international competition, and the Vatican’s shortlist included Meier, Gehry, Behnisch, Calatrava, Eisenman and Ando. The award of the project to Meier was controversial from the outset, in that Meier as a Jew would be working with the foremost Catholic client – the Vatican itself. However, the relationship and the resultant complex are a triumph of this collaboration, and

entirely successful in architecture of outstanding optimism. The church, named Dio Padre Misericordioso (God our Merciful Father) by Pope John Paul II, was consecrated and inaugurated on 26 October 2003 by Cardinal Camillo Ruini in a four-hour service of celebration, music and ritual. This was attended by a huge congregation both within the church itself and externally on the church piazza. The church is in an ordinary 1970s 10-storey housing quarter at Tor Tre Teste, a suburb at some distance from the centre of the city. Taken together, church and community centre form a spectacular new focus in an otherwise low-key suburban environment, and define both a religious precinct and a heartening sense of place. Meier has said that ‘… expression of aspiration, hope and belief, as well as openness and transparency are all aspects of

the ideas behind the design of this church’. It is a wonderful gift to the whole community of more than 25 000 people. The fan-shaped site is approached directly from the east across a travertine paved entrance piazza (sagrato), which extends as a base to the church on the south and west of the precinct. The entrance is marked by several external features including a silver cross, and a campanile with exposed bells – the tower marking out both the church to the south and the community centre to the north. The generous entrance hall, defined by a travertine screen wall, is partly enclosed within by a raised organ loft. Once in the nave, the main altar is immediately visible at the west end. Although unconventional, this position is a logical result of the frontal eastern entrance. Plan-form and section are extremely clear. Three circles of equal radius create three concrete shells to the south and together with a thick spine wall to the north, the main space of the church nave is contained. In a contrasting, plain L plan around a sunken courtyard, is the community centre, on four levels. The centre is separated from the main church by a linear top-lit atrium. The plan of the church is essentially traditional with nave, altar, side chapel and confessional booths. Introduction of the three shells transforms the project and implies the Holy Trinity. Natural light is the major theme, with skylights between each shell and over the main space, creating ever changing patterns within. Meier has referred to this as ‘… a luminous spatial experience … the rays of sunlight serve as a mystic metaphor of the presence of God’. Curving in both plan and in section, the three shell wall planes are the real tour de force in the whole project. They are sweeping vertical cantilevers formed with panels of beautiful white concrete with a finish so fine that it resembles marble. Meier’s description of the engineering effort involved in erecting the shells as

1 In a nondescript suburb of Rome, the church is a glowing beacon composed of overlapping, shell-like forms. 2 Main east entrance. The concrete shells are anchored by a spine wall.

INSTRUMENT OF LIGHT Richard Meier’s long awaited church in Rome is a beautifully honed giver and receiver of light.

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meeting room courtyard community centre main (east) entrance campanile nave altar side chapel confessionals organ loft priest’s offices pastoral residence kitchen bedrooms

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3 The calm, luminous interior. The limited palette of materials (white concrete, travertine and timber) and studied absence of ornamentation enhances the air of serenity.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) ‘Herculean’, underlines the task involved in the achievement of the cantilevers. (They are prefabricated post-tensioned concrete panels.) The three shells, or arcs, form a massive instrument of light – the most monumental gesture of Meier’s whole repertoire – and embody the sacred space at the heart of the church. In contemplating the design, Meier has referred to both Le Corbusier at Ronchamp and especially to Aalto and the Church of the Three Crosses in Finland. Aalto’s church at Riola, near Bologna, came to mind in visiting the Jubilee Church. The interior space and materiality of the main nave and side-chapel are serene and beautifully crafted. The limited range of materials – travertine, white concrete and light wood – predominates and there is currently an absence of any decoration. The white concrete shells contrast with the travertine and slatted wood of the spine wall; otherwise the nave is occupied only by the simple ranges of wooden pews. The white stucco organ loft with its silver clusters of pipes, and the sculpted white altar, form counterpoints at the two ends. The altar plinths and furniture are all formed in the same travertine as the nave floor. Each element of the furniture is exemplary, and some items such as the casket for communion wafers (a gold box in the side chapel) are quite exquisite. The only concession to tradition is a nineteenthcentury cross above the main altar. At night, the whole church is a giver of light to the outer world and again the three shells, and the transparent ends of the church, give a spectacular signal of a sacred entity within the community. The community centre has its main approach from the eastern church sagrato

through the central linear atrium. Secondary entrances are provided from two courtyards. The basement holds the major meeting hall (Sale di Riunione) adjacent to the sunken courtyard. Both courts are intended for staging community events associated with the church. Upper levels include the parish priest’s offices and catechism rooms. The second floor houses the pastor’s residence and the kitchen. The residence incorporates a splendid living room with a raised ceiling and top light, and includes a brick hearth and fireplace. It has fine views of the parish: housing and the community at large. The western half of the site includes discreetly placed parking and a landscaped area, within rising walled ground, planted with olive trees. The whole of the secular precinct and the community centre is in white stucco, with the north elevation enlivened by balconies. The minimal nature of the centre is an appropriate contrast to the exuberance of the main church. Although this is Meier’s first church, the parti of the plan and section are unique within his work, and the beautiful white precast concrete walls of the shells a resounding success in the use of materials and structure. This church is truly part of the twenty-first century – a new landmark and place of pilgrimage for the faithful.

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4 Detail of organ loft. 5 Both literally and metaphorically, the church is a giver and receiver of light.

IVOR RICHARDS Architect Richard Meier & Partners, New York Structural engineers Ove Arup and Partners, Italcementi Mechanical engineers Ove Arup and Partners, Luigi Dell’Aquila Lighting consultants FMRS, Erco Photographs Edmund Sumner/VIEW

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origin of plan geometry

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1 1 Shed or studio? With its rendered facade, Gormley’s new studio is robust and maintenance-free.

QUANTUM LEAP S TUDIO , L ONDON , UK ARCHITECT D AVID C HIPPERFIELD

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David Chipperfield’s studio for sculptor Antony Gormley.

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It didn’t take Gormley and Chipperfield long to establish that a modified industrial shed would be a woefully inadequate solution for the 1994 Turner Prize-winning sculptor’s new studio. Having outgrown his gritty Peckham studio – a former laundry converted by Eric Parry in 1988 – Gormley’s need to move was more than a notch up in scale and location (building three and a half times more space within easier reach of his north London home). The need to find a site, commission an architect and collaborate on the design of a purpose-built studio reflected the fact that, like it or not, for artists like Gormley, art has increasingly become a professional practice. Servicing, deliveries, storage, stocktaking and databases are now all part of the process, as are dare I say, health

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and safety and quality control. Gormley needed a functional, maintenance-free, robust building, with more space to work, and significantly, more space to think. Understanding Gormley’s working methods, Chipperfield’s team knew that this building would be tested to destruction. With forklift trucks, welding gear and beam cranes, Gormley would work this structure hard, and unlike many clients, he impressed the architects with his intuitive understanding of forces, mass, and material. ‘What are the engineer’s safety factors?’ he would ask while scrutinizing working drawings, setting stringent performance specifications for suspension capacity, impact resistance and point loads across the entire site (including the external yard and cantilevered stair landing).

Gormley has long admired Chipperfield’s work, discovering it for himself while diligently searching through RIBA files for a suitable architect to convert his own home in 1989. Noting a strength that surpasses the ‘upyours brutalism’ of the ’60s and ’70s, and an ability to make established forms of Modernism more logical, Chipperfield’s manipulation of materials, light and form had clearly impressed him. For Gormley, therefore, whose work is fundamentally based on the human figure, aside from setting finite performance targets, the spatial demands of scale and proportion were of equal significance. As a place in which to contemplate the form of his work, the volumes had to be right. While Gormley stresses that this is a factory, not a trophy building,

location plan

2 Gormley’s principal studio space is lofty and spacious with bright, generous rooflights ... 3 ... providing space in which to work, with access to workshop and storage areas beyond.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) the design has to transcend utilitarianism, and the team were keen to engage in a philosophical exploration of a building that would be part gallery and part shed. Reconsidering industrial typologies, they investigated how to blur conceptual boundaries, and after six or seven prototype designs (including a Marfa-esque barrel-vaulted option), the repeated-bay pitched-roof scheme emerged. Mimicking the proportion of his former studio, but increasing its dimensions and replicating it seven times, Gormley was comfortable with the scale that he associates with a Georgian house. Reworking the Victorian roof typology minimizes distracting views, while providing excellent daylighting and flexible hanging space throughout. The seven bays are broken down into double- and single-height volumes centred on the principal three-bay studio. Functions are then carefully disposed, with private studios intentionally remote, separated from shared spaces by two external staircases; graceful, sculptural objects that slow you

down, enforcing pace, ritual, and contemplation. While the ground floor is given over to production – with photography studio, storage and delivery spaces, the principal studio, workshop, studio manager’s office and changing rooms – the first floor provides places for private and shared reflection, with two private studios (one each for Gormley and his wife, the painter Vicken Parsons), a resources/meeting room, an office and a generous common room. The purpose-built studio has afforded Gormley several ‘very practical luxuries’, such as staff changing rooms, and a designated plaster room where he can create his own body templates without contaminating the studio spaces beyond. The yard is also of critical importance, fully serviced to allow outside work, and having capacity for two articulated lorries. Pure in form, Chipperfield’s tectonic control is seen throughout, with seamless walls and soffits set against the exposed roof structure, while in detail, modest joinery, metal doors and bespoke ironmongery add mass to

the building, fabricated from thick plywood and reassuringly weighty 3mm gauge galvanized steel. Gormley concluded with a reflective question: would his work be affected by his new studio? Work that he has based on architectural illusions: body-asspace and space-as-mass. Perhaps, he speculates, Chipperfield’s articulation of volume has influenced his emerging work with variable block sculptures. But, certainly on a practical level, improved daylighting has facilitated more intricate work, and the luxury of space has allowed him to experiment with mock-ups, such as that produced for his latest work ‘Clearing’ – a wild metallic tumbleweed formed by a 10km length of square section aluminium, currently tracing a sinuous trajectory in London’s White Cube Gallery. ROB GREGORY Architects David Chipperfield Architects: Kevin Carmody, David Chipperfield, Paul Crosby, Andy Groarke, Victoria Jessen-Pike, Kaori Ohsugi Photographs All photographs by Richard Bryant/Arcaid apart from 4 and 5 which are by Pete Moss

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4 Transfuser suspended beneath rooflight. 5 Gormley’s workshop, with views through to principal studio beyond. 6 View from office, through principal studio, to Gormley’s study beyond. 7 Resources/meeting room. 8 Vicken Parson’s studio. 9 View from studio office with common room beyond.

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Living on the edge Walter & Cohen’s house: a threshold between suburbia and the South Pacific.

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H OUSE , S YDNEY , A USTRALIA ARCHITECT W ALTERS & C OHEN

1 80m above the South Pacific … 2 … surrounded by Sydney’s suburban brick boxes … 3 … Walters & Cohen’s new house is entered through a walled courtyard. 4 Once inside, breathtaking views are revealed from within the clerestoried living room … 5 … and across the rooftop pool.

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Sydney’s Bondi Beach is, rightly, one of the world’s more famous crescents of sand, but its natural beauty is not matched by the architecture fronting it and sprawling over its cliff-top flanks. No single carbuncle but a plague of minor boils; a rash of postwar brick and clay-tile houses that owe everything to the worst of English suburbia and nothing to the might of the South Pacific Ocean. Contemporary architects are gradually making inroads with more climatically responsive houses that are replacing the tacky brick boxes. London-based Walters & Cohen has replaced one such bungalow on the very edge of the sandstone cliffs to the north with a house made up of a pair of pavilions in white render and glass that cling vertiginously 80m above the surf. Porous Sydney sandstone does not

readily last as an exposed building material in such a weather-beaten location but geo-technical surveys indicate that it provides a solid footing to the concrete structure – along this section of the cliffs at least. A walled entrance court deliberately conceals the spectacular views, which are only revealed to the casual visitor after reaching the L-shaped first-floor living area wrapped on two sides with glazing. Views outwards allow whale watching, views downwards can reveal shoals of fish 80m below, and those upwards give advance warning of any approaching electrical storms that can buffet the house. In an exercise in deferred gratification, you enter through a solid timber door set in a blade of masonry some 7.5m high and flanked by equally tall etched

glass panels 250mm wide. The double-height hall beyond is an atrium between seaward and landward pavilions of the building. Its wedge shape culminates in a deep internal lightwell fronted by a 4.5m x 2.5m frameless glass panel. Uplights are set into the polished concrete floors to avoid the need for lights within the soffit high above; none of the first floor’s ceilings are interrupted by light fixings. A flight of timber treads is cantilevered off the wall, supported by an internal edge beam of welded steel angles, some of which return vertically to form the framework for the glass balustrade. Upstairs, the panorama awaits. Concealed at entrance level on the seaward side is a suite of rooms with ocean views, two bedrooms and a woodworking

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) studio for the client. Steelframed sliding doors and windows allow uninterrupted views, even from the bathrooms that have bluestone-clad (from neighbouring Victoria) baths pushed against the glass. Handles are everywhere minimized or absent. Full-height doors at this level pivot shut to 10mm-wide aluminium returns set in the wall. This minimal detailing prescribed by Walters & Cohen and a neatnik client has been clarified and executed throughout by local practice Collins and Turner (both former Foster and Partners employees). All the timber used, including the matchstick screens of the garage and the double-height oriel above, is recycled jarrah – a tough Australian hardwood – some of it sourced from an

old wharf from the port of Fremantle in Western Australia. The oriel serves another double-height space on the landward side reached from a half-landing and incorporating a mezzanine bedspace – itself accessed by a beautifully built formed-concrete staircase. A small square window gives glimpses back west across the peninsula and Sydney Harbour to the distant Central Business District. This room, like the whole of the upper floor in both pavilions, is surmounted by a clerestory set above two steel channels backto-back to conceal perimeter lighting. The steels act as a ringbeam for each pavilion and steel uprights carry the steel roof with its deep-shading eaves. An airconditioning zone has been

created between the floors but the combination of under-floor heating for the winter months and the cooling breezes pushing over the lip of the cliff suggests that mechanical climate control will not be necessary. Although some blinds may need to be installed against strong morning light, the rest of the cantilevered upper floor, kitchen, living, dining, study and TV areas, make the most of the uninterrupted gull’s back views. Most of the glass doors open, with only a glass cliff-edge balustrade (on a curve with a setting-out point some 200m out to sea) between you and the drop, but opposite the dining area incorporation of structure into a masonry panel creates a framed view. This living area is backed by a waist-high insertion

of jarrah shelves and cupboards that runs 7m from the return of the staircase balustrade, then folds around the study zone and makes a backdrop to a sunken TV area. Here the glazing forms a frameless box reflecting the sea and the cliffs by day and the moon by night. The nose of this box, seen from the entrance courtyard, is a subtle indicator of the axis of splendour to come. ROBERT BEVAN Architect Walters & Cohen Executive architect Collins and Turner Landscape architect Barbara Schaffer Engineer Murtagh Bond Photographs Richard Glover 6 Master bedroom suite.

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In the last few years, Shuhei Endo’s experiments with galvanized corrugated steel have become world-renowned. He realized that the very cheap material, commonly used only in industrial and agricultural buildings, could have many more applications when its stiffness is increased by bending and curving it at right angles to the corrugations. Buildings like the bicycle sheds at Sakai railway station (AR April 1997) and the little building in the park in Hyogo Prefecture (AR October 1998) resulted, showing how corrugated A TELIER AND HOUSE , B IWA CHO , S HIGA P REFECTURE , J APAN A RCHITECT S HUHEI E NDO

metal could suddenly become an impressive substance, adopting new and dramatic forms that can enclose flowing silvery spaces. The new house and studio in a suburb of Biwa-cho in the Shiga Prefecture takes the development rather further than earlier experiments. It is fundamentally a single continuous strip of corrugated metal bent to enclose all the internal spaces of the building, and some of the external ones too. The wide metal ribbon slides and writhes sideways, east to west, in flattened coils starting with the garage, then defining a partly covered outside platform, thereafter soaring up to make a double-height gallery, descending to kiss a pool and finally returning to the ground to define the bedroom. The spaces it defines

are pinned and connected by a long axial route that runs westward from the main entrance and garage through the doubleheight space, past a comparatively conventional terrace (which is defined to the west by the glazed wall of the poolside kitchen/dining room) and ending with the bedroom in the south-west corner of the site. The metal ribbon is not pierced, so all daylight comes from glazing on the east and west flanks. By setting the entrance back from the access road on the east side of the site behind the garage and the metal terrace, the house is ensured a good deal of privacy, which is enhanced by the imperforate metal walls that prevent overlooking from close neighbours on the tight suburban

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Curvaceous corrugated Endo continues his exploration of bent corrugated metal in a domestic application.

1 From pool with kitchen/dining room in foreground. Endo manages to achieve a wide variety of space in a tight site.

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2 North terrace. 3 Compressed kitchen/dining room. 4 Garage and entrance with metal terrace left. Colour and texture of galvanized steel relate to traditional grey tiles on neighbouring houses. 5 Junctions of flowing steel and more orthodox elements are not always easy.

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sites to north and south. Ingenuity of composition and construction is undoubted, but the adaptation of what Endo calls ‘Springtecture’ to domestic architecture involves several problems: thermal and acoustic ones are obvious. And there are also difficulties in relating the basically orthogonal geometry of rooms to the writhings of the steel. Partitions are made in orthodox brick, and in glass framed in steel and timber. Particularly acute problems occur where walls meet the roof curves and special pieces have to be made to achieve the junctions. Yet such difficulties have proved soluble, if at a price. Springtecture is clearly coiling itself for further leaps. VERONICA PEASE

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) A B C D E

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R HINELAND R EGIONAL M USEUM , B ONN , G ERMANY ARCHITECT A RCHITEKTENGRUPPE S TUTTGART

CRYSTAL CASE The Rhineland Regional Museum in Bonn is a model of its kind in both urban and cultural terms.

The Rhineland Regional Museum started as long ago as the 1820s, and has accumulated a distinguished collection ranging from the 40 000 year old skeleton of Neanderthal man to contemporary artworks. The original purpose-made museum building was set up in the 1890s on a site stretching north-south between two streets just south of the main railway station. An extension was added in 1909. During the Second World War, the main building was bombed, leaving the 1909 extension at the north end intact, and a boxy new museum building in sub-Mies vocabulary was made to replace it in 1967. By the late 1990s, this had become technically unsatisfactory, submitting its valuable contents to unacceptable variations in temperature and humidity, quite apart from the sheer unattractiveness of the uninspired and ageing fabric. At first, the museum authorities intended to rework and update the thirty year old structure, but this promised to be an expensive task, hardly less than renewing the whole. Having just lost the status of capital, Bonn was being handed generous cultural money, so a new building to the highest technical standards was possible. A competition was held and won by Architektengruppe Stuttgart, who decided to make a new block to the south, its main entrance fronting a shallow square, while preserving and internally converting the 1909

1 The layered facade ... 2 ... which, on the south side, contains a café and some exhibits in the transition space.

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extension to the north. Rather than working directly with the exhibits, the architects were asked to produce a range of exhibition rooms flexible in character, allowing for changes of interpretation. The exhibition design was placed in other hands as a separate operation. Most remarkable in the new museum is the layered treatment of the south facade, which flips between transparent and reflective as your viewpoint changes. A single-glazed outer screen-wall serving as rainscreen and climatic buffer stands some 4m forward of the timber inner facade surmounted by a completely glazed roof. This glass case is not just an empty symbol for a museum, but also a transition space. It provides a protected outdoor area for the café enjoying the afternoon sun, and it also houses a couple of exhibits which belong outside but require protection from frost and acid rain: a Roman arcade and a Gothic cross. The naked wooden inner facade behind is presented in contrast like a series of display cases or open drawers shallowly angled to project from the facade plane. The twist in its components makes the facade more three-dimensional, brings down the scale, and exaggerates the degree of openness. In fact it is largely solid, though there are narrow windows between the boxes framing views to southeast. The timber treatment continues inside, its texture enhanced by the sidelight, so the visitor easily makes the connection. The organization of the new museum is commendably clear and makes a virtue of the marriage of the buildings, for nowhere does it seem a strain. The ground floor central entrance introduces the main axis along which the complex is deployed. It leads on through a glass wall to a visually open but fully controlled layer housing ticket hall and café, and near-central stairs in a large well lead down to cloakrooms. Entrance to the museum involves passage through another glass wall which brings one to a well with stairs to one side and numerous other flights and ramps passing overhead. This atrium is the heart of the building, mediating between the shallower floor heights of the new part and the more generous old ones in the 1909 part. It is a clear reference point for reorientation and is spatially the most interesting volume, but so little daylight is admitted by the clerestories of the rooflight that it

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3, 4 ‘Like a display case or open drawers.’ 5 The atrium, which is the heart of the building, relating the disparate floor heights of old and new elements.

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long section

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) feels completely internal, dominated by electric illumination. From the well you can move into exhibition rooms in either direction. The new building offers a wide central hall, a narrower room on each side, then a yet narrower one, a linear gallery with daylight only at the ends. But if you continue instead on axis into the old building, you discover a suite of taller rooms: a single central hall with six columns and gallery, and traditional side-lit rooms at each level on each flank. Set under an updated version of the original glass lantern with an inner translucent ceiling in barrel-vaulted form, the central hall is bathed in daylight, bringing the whole museum to an appropriate climax. Somewhat church-like, this space has appropriately been used to accommodate religious and monumental objects of stone, such as Roman funerary inscriptions and Romanesque capitals from lost churches. In presenting the collection, the curators decided against a traditional chronological progression, reorganizing the material around nine themes including Periods, Power, From wilderness to city, From gods to God, Secrets of discovery, and Rhineland and the World. It is like the themed arrangement of Tate Modern in London, and has similarly brought both praise and criticism. It seemed to me to work well, and has at least the advantage of demonstrating that classification is neither fixed nor neutral, and it also gives the curators a more visibly active role. That it may all be reorganized by fresh curators with a new world-view seems no bad thing, and is a good argument for the kind of general-purpose loose-fit attitude taken by the architects. The exhibition designers have added a certain amount of deliberate scenesetting, but the building takes it quite well. Fortunately, the whole treatment is more sober than most recent museums, and the signage relatively restrained. It evokes some atmosphere of reverence and one can enjoy the objects without the intervention of the shouting gimmicks and interactive gameshows that spoil many recent museums in the UK. Reconstruction models are generally helpful, and a computer simulation of the changing local landscape over millennia is really engaging. The decision to commission life-size wooden sculptures of local heroes from Agrippina – after whom the Romans named their first settlement Cologne, (Colonia Agrippina) – to Max Ernst shaping one of his sculptures, has also paid off. Since the initial reason for changing the building was technical, the new one is environmentally well controlled, with a high thermal mass due to its concrete construction, temperature control through heat exchange using pipes embedded in floors and walls, and humidity control through air-conditioning kept at a moderate level. It was one of the architects’ stated aims to avoid showing off the technical apparatus, and the construction too is rendered rather basic and pure, with deceptively simple detailing that could even be called overprecise. My greatest disappointment was the general gloom inside the building and the suppression of relations with the outside world. The curators felt that history does not stop but goes on around us, so they actively wanted visitors to be aware of the city beyond. They

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encouraged the architects to provide regular views out, but the phobia against daylight has for the most part won the day, for even key viewing windows are toned down by screens, and side-lighting in old rooms is filtered by solid if translucent blinds. Strong light can of course damage many kinds of materials, and museum objects are meant to last for ever, so the caution of curators is understandable. At the same time, exhibition designers most easily achieve control by applying artificial lamps of their own, and have made this their automatic habit. But many of us prefer to see objects by daylight if at all possible, and its variability – the very thing that puts curators and exhibition designers off – is also its virtue. It changes at different times of day and year, and helps locate us in time. It is possible to calculate an object’s speed of destruction in variable light and put it in darkness when it is not being seen. It is also possible to filter and control daylight and sunlight so that they are not excessive. But this requires close collaboration between architects, designers and curators rather than the assumption that exhibition areas are essentially black boxes. PETER BLUNDELL JONES

6, 7 Climax of museum: central hall bathed in daylight from translucent ceiling.

Architect Architektengruppe Stuttgart Knut Lohrer, Uli Pfeil, Dieter Herrmann, Gerhard Bosch, Dieter K. Keck Job architects Cathrin Dietz, Verena Wortelkamp Assistants Ulrich Hanselmann, Achim Buhse, Karin Koschmieder, Monika Krönke, Bernd Remili, Nicola Sibiller, Walter Ulrich, Jörg Wenzel, Andrea Wiedmaier Photographs All by Roland Halbe except no 6 by author

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TUNED INSTRUMENT Piano’s arts museum in Dallas rivals Kahn’s in neighbouring Fort Worth in lucidity and the subtle use of limpid light.

S CULPTURE MUSEUM , D ALLAS , T EXAS , USA A RCHITECT R ENZO P IANO B UILDING W ORKSHOP

Combining a gallery and walled garden, both displaying works in its collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas joins Tadao Ando’s recent Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (AR August 2003) in further consolidating the neighbouring cities as a major art destination within the US. The Nasher is also the latest of a family of museums the Renzo Piano Building Workshop has built so that the public might enjoy exceptional private collections of modern art. Like the Menil Collection (AR March 1987) and Beyeler Museum (AR December 1997), its galleries are lit through an all-glass roof, although here all sun-control devices are above the glass that is also the gallery ceilings. Also, while the Menil’s external walls are the same grey clapboard as the surrounding bungalows, and the Beyeler’s are clad in a stone resembling the streaky red sandstone of Basle, the Nasher does not adopt a material found in its immediate locality. Instead it is clad inside and out in travertine, as is Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth (AR November 1978). This, and the top-lit vaulted galleries, suggest a deliberate dialogue with what many deem the last unarguably great American work of architecture, a dialogue set up by a new building that, despite evoking a mythic past, is as light and contemporary in feel as the Kimbell is heavy and archaic.

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Since the 1960s, real-estate developer Raymond Nasher and his late wife, Patsy, amassed an outstanding collection of modern art, concentrated mainly on sculpture. Now totalling some 350 works, these were displayed in their house and garden – and some, so the public might encounter and enjoy them, in Nasher’s North Park shopping centre. The sculpture centre now allows the public to view these works displayed on a rotating basis, which, along with visiting exhibitions and other events, should encourage regular revisits in a contemplative verdant oasis on the edge of the city centre. Nasher, having met Renzo Piano at the Beyeler opening, entrusted design of the museum to him and the garden to Peter Walker. The 2.4-acre city-block site is in Dallas’ Arts District, across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art and a block away from I. M. Pei’s Meyerson Symphony Center, between the sleek, skystriving towers of downtown and a sunken motorway. The design challenge was to create a modestly scaled building that could belong to such a site, bereft of history and consistent contextual cues, overlooked by behemoths and edged by massive metropolitan-scaled infrastructure. Piano’s initial instinctual response, poetic rather than rational, was to neither compete with nor conform to this context. Instead the new gallery is quiet and low, and subtly emphasizes the

1 The whole is ordered by the rhythmic stone-faced walls, from which the roofs are suspended.

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relative newness of the surrounding structures, which thus need not be deferred to, by suggesting his building springs from archaeological remnants that predate them. These remnants of earlier construction, between and around which the sculptures have seemingly been rediscovered, are the parallel tall stone walls dominating the gallery’s plan, exterior and interior. (There is an irony here: Kahn advocated architecture that would make great ruins; but the stones of these ‘ruins’ are flimsy claddings that would soon fall away to reveal a complex mass of steel structure, ductwork and pipes.) Though few would recognize (and none be fooled by) the fantasy that sparked the design, the result is a building that nestles into place. The walls assert a footprint of the scale of the surrounding buildings, yet despite these prominent walls the building has a recessive and delicate grace that contrasts refreshingly with the muscularly chunky buildings that characterize Dallas. Beyeler’s design also grew from the generating gesture of parallel stone walls, although these are capped by an oversailing glass roof and faced internally in white plasterboard. Ranged parallel to the street, the main volume of galleries they define is entered from the lobby, side-on (as at the Kimbell) bringing some cross-axial stability to these elongated spaces. But the Nasher’s stone-faced walls reach high above the vaulted roofs, providing anchorage for the tension ties supporting the midpoint of the roofs’ curved steel beams. The walls are also perpendicular to the street, offering views from it, through the fully glazed ends of the bays they define, into the garden; and entrance is directly and end-on into one of these bays. Two of the other bays are galleries; the last bay at one end contains a shop, directors’ offices and boardroom; the last bay at the other end a café and security centre. The entrance bay also gives access to the garden and, via a staircase, to the basement. Like the Beyeler, the building is much bigger than it first appears. In the basement are a further gallery (for works vulnerable to the bright light above), offices, kitchen and an auditorium that can extend through a sliding glass wall to stepped seating outdoors. Ringing this basement, and extending beyond the edge of the building above, is an extensive service area for mechanical plant and storage.

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2, 3 Peter Walker did the magnificent garden, which resonates gently and quietly with Piano’s building. 4 Bay ends are all glazed, easier in a gallery devoted to sculpture than one that shows mainly paintings. 5, 6 Beautifully cut Travertine limestone, the material from which Classical Rome was built, adds solidity to the myth of the mass.

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cross section of typical bay showing construction and lighting

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Outside and inside, the pale neutrally coloured natural materials of the travertine walls and white oak floors predominate, enlivened by the contrast with the white steel roof structure and sun-shading panels, which are clearly visible through the super-white glass roof, and the charcoal grey frames of the fully glazed walls. The travertine is used unconventionally: instead of showing the usual vertically sliced faces of horizontal beds of stone separated by holes, it has been sliced horizontally, along rather than across the beds, and pressure hosed to expose a rough and varied pitted surface. The stone slabs (30mm outside and 20mm inside, where the pitting has been filled) have then been so skilfully matched and mitred as to give the impression of thick solid blocks. The main street facade is low key; the eye is caught mainly by the contrast between the tall, substantial stone piers and the graceful slightness of the slender steel beams that spring and are suspended between them. (The tension ties justify the height of the walls and reveal these to be curved beams rather than arches. Yet they are the one element of the building that will probably look passé with time: they are too High-Tech and nothing dates as fast as the futuristic.) The relationship between the street and the galleries inside is not as intrusively immediate as is suggested by the open-ended, perpendicular orientation. Planting and porches distance the sidewalk from the glass walls – and the piers stepping forward further relieve any abruptness, not least by introducing a slot of space parallel to the pavement. This interruption enhances the separation and makes more intricate the flow of space. It is easy to imagine Kahn describing these piers as breaking away from the walls to begin their evolution into properly articulate columns that create distance and dignifying decorum; some sense of this is in fact subliminally suggested. Even the main entrance lacks emphasis, revealed only by the omission of planting in front of it. Once in and past the ticket desk, a cross-axial enfilade of openings slicing right through the building, and

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) the generous stairs downward, suddenly reveal the extent of the whole building, as if offering itself in a gesture of welcome. The immediate impression in the entrance hall and galleries is of the twin touchstones Piano is apt to repeat mantra-like, ‘lightness and transparency’, here revealed in the weightless roof and the bright light that floods through it as well as in the pervasive presence of sky and garden visible through the roof and end walls. All this, together with the stone walls, recalls a Victorian conservatory or orangery rather than a conventional museum, and is only possible because most sculpture, unlike paintings, is not vulnerable to light. Piano’s preferred solution of lighting the whole gallery evenly, rather than reflecting light primarily onto the walls where paintings would stand out when seen from the more softly lit centre of the room, is particularly apt for showing sculpture that may be placed at any point between the walls. Direct sun from above is excluded and diffused by cast aluminium panels that rather resemble egg-crates, with openings shaped and angled to admit only north skylight directly. Because Dallas’s street grid is angled 45 degrees from north, so too are the openings in the sunshades which reveal differing amounts of sky and create differing patterns as you move around. The sunshade panels span between flanges propped up above the glass from the slender curved beams, which have spotlight tracks along their lower edges. The ends of these beams sit in brackets that swoop down slightly to connect (beneath concealed gutters) with the steel columns within the walls, and so also seemingly sit on the head of the stonework. The character of the spaces is given not only by the lightness and transparency, as enlivened by the pared and repetitive structural elements and detail, but also by the sure judgement of proportion and dimension. The cross-section of the bays is based on a double square, 32ft (9.75m) between the walls and 16ft (4.87m) to the springing of the curved beams, which rise only another foot at mid-span. This breadth gives a feeling of great generosity and the relatively low ceiling, with only the shallowest curve, gives a contrasting feeling of intimacy. The galleries suit sculpture (and the occasional painting) very well but viewing paintings would be distracted by the views out and movement of space through the galleries. Outside, the garden is set down a few broad steps from a plinth that extends out from the building. Integrating museum and garden are lines of trees that extend outward from the parallel walls, between which stand various sculptures. Terminating the garden, a planted berm acts as an acoustic barrier to the noise of the sunken motorway, which is further screened by the splashing of a row of fountains that stand out enticingly against the planted backdrop. The Nasher is a building of great understatement and restraint, and also of the richness that comes from precision: precision in judgement of dimensions and proportions; and precision of engineering, craftsmanship and detail. Designed to show off another art form, it is an architectural instrument so finely tuned as to sing its own song softly in the background, a song so serene that some find it spiritual. (An equally apt metaphor, mechanical rather than musical, that keeps coming to mind is of a purring, highly-tuned machine.) Although it may also seem a slight building, almost as much like a garden centre as a museum, it is so well done, its artfulness raised to the extreme of seeming artlessness, that it enhances and even elevates the contemplation of sculpture. PETER BUCHANAN

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10 From inside, it is difficult to comprehend ... 11 ... the elaborate egg-crate construction of the north-seeking aluminium castings on the roof. 12 ‘A building that offers itself in a gesture of welcome.’

Architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa Project team R. Piano, E. Baglietto, B.Terpeluk, S. Ishida, B. Bauer, L. Pelleriti, S. Scarabicchi, A. Symietz, E. Trezzani, G. Langasco, Y. Kashiwagi, F. Cappellini, S. Rossi Associate architects Beck Architecture, Dallas; Interloop A/D, Houston Structural engineer Ove Arup & Partners Landscape consultant Peter Walker and Partners Photographs John E. Linden

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) S HAW F ESTIVAL T HEATRE PRODUCTION CENTRE , N IAGARA - ON - THE -L AKE , C ANADA ARCHITECT L ETT /S MITH A RCHITECTS

SHAW PRODUCTION A sensitive addition, carefully knitted to a distinguished theatre, provides new facilities and civilized spaces for staff and public alike.

Niagara-on-the-Lake is a picturesque town at the point where the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. Set in the spectacular scenery of the Great Lakes near Niagara Falls, the town is the focus of the region’s burgeoning wine industry and the home of the internationally distinguished Shaw Festival. The combination of historic architecture (dating from the 1790s when the settlement was briefly the capital of the colony of Upper Canada) with nature and culture makes the town both a popular bolt-hole from nearby Toronto and a destination for visitors from around the world. The Shaw Festival, started in the late 1950s as a summer event to stage the works of George Bernard Shaw, now embraces a catholic range of theatrical tastes during its eight-month season from April through November. Productions are presented at the small historic Court House and Royal George Theatres in the centre of town, and at the 860-seat Festival Theatre, designed by Ron Thom and built in the 1970s at the east edge of town looking over the Commons and federal parklands beyond. As the Festival grew over the years, so backstage facilities became increasingly inadequate, a problem that has been addressed by the new production centre which serves all three theatres. Designed by Lett/Smith Architects and recently completed, the 4000m2

extension doubles the area of the Festival Theatre. A major concern was how to expand the building’s facilities, yet minimize the apparent scale of any addition in this sensitive setting. It was also important to maintain the intimate feeling of the Festival Theatre and the views from its foyers and terraces. Operationally, the obvious place to build the extension would have been at the north end of the site, where the existing stage and backstage areas are located. However, the only available land was the space used for coach parking to the south and adjacent to the theatre’s entrance and foyers. In section, because the stage and dressing rooms of the theatre are one level below ground, the logical connection to the new production facilities was at this level. Above ground, the new production centre reads as a separate pavilion that makes a new courtyard with the existing theatre. Both buildings are entered from a new forecourt and parking area on the west side of the site. The theatre entrance has been rebuilt to house an expanded box office and shop together with a small library, a space for preperformance talks, and a new meeting room planned in a glassy corner bay. This area has also been excavated to incorporate the critical basement level link to the new building. A more modest entrance to the

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1 Upper foyer looks over pool and court towards old building. 2 New entrance, left, with box of big rehearsal hall behind. 3 Looking from court towards upper foyer with rehearsal hall behind.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 4 Large rehearsal hall can be made light-tight with adjustable fabric baffles between columns. 5 New staff restaurant and greenroom is much less daunting in use. 6 Upper level of foyer, from which … 7 … light pours down to lower level.

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1 existing Festival Theatre 2 upper rehearsal hall 3 lower rehearsal halls 4 green-room 5 lower lobby 6 recording suite 7 box office call centre 8 office 9 dressing room 10 sunken courtyard 11 south terrace 12 patrons’ lounge/ upper lobby 13 receiving 14 library/multimedia room 15 new theatre entrance 16 Shaw shop 17 wardrobe cutting and fitting 18 set/lighting design 19 lobby extension

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production centre alongside opens into a separate foyer, which serves the large new rehearsal/multi-purpose room at ground level. Within this foyer, a skylit well with a glass stair provides daylight, access and a visual connection to the lower level at the point where the theatre’s existing backstage corridor meets the new building. At this junction, a large new green-room and staff restaurant opens out to a south-facing sunken garden terrace and, adjacent to this social hub, staff offices also look into the sunken court. On the east side of the new building, a sound studio and two smaller rehearsal rooms – one daylit from the sunken garden and the other dark – extend out under a newly created lawn. The glassy large rehearsal hall provides a working area equal to the stage of the Festival Theatre. Columns are pulled inboard to create a circulation zone around the perimeter, and adjustable fabric baffles at the column line enable the room to be blacked out, acoustically dampened, and planned to simulate different stage layouts. The space has a lighting grid and control room at high level as well as access for scenery and props from a new loading bay. Much of the warmth and intimacy of the Festival Theatre was created by its red brick walls, brick pavers, cedar shingled roofs and wood pergolas. This principle of using untreated natural materials without applied finishes both inside and out – which makes the Theatre resonate strongly with the work of

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Aalto and other Scandinavian Modernists – has been continued in the new production centre. Externally, the rehearsal room is clad with copper to distinguish it from the theatre, while the entrance lobby provides a transitional piece between new and old. A new expressed concrete structure is integrated with brick walls and pavers that are detailed to match the original theatre. The double-height stairwell wall is clad with riftcut oak veneered panels with the grain running horizontally. Partially wrapped by a reflecting pool and pergola, the lobby is fully glazed on the north and east, with views out to the theatre and the Commons respectively. Used by company and staff, this space also serves as a members’ bar for theatre patrons and as a venue for special events. The courtyard between the existing and new buildings provides the theatre with an elegant outdoor room and new gardens to complement the mature wisteria on the pergolas of the theatre. The threshold to the space on the west facade of the buildings is marked by a covered outdoor walkway and the pavement lights that illuminate the lower level corridor. Small windows to the box office and the new building’s lobby are

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seemingly carved into deep, chamfered copper-clad reveals, both to emphasize the solidity of the brick volumes and to frame the courtyard threshold. The thoughtful relationship between the two buildings is a seemingly effortless resolution of complex operational requirements. This is a scheme in which voids – courtyard, lightwell and sunken garden terrace – are as important as the programme spaces. They not only bring daylight generously into areas below ground level, but also ingeniously connect back-ofhouse with front-of-house, and old with new. The simple strategy of designing circulation so that one is always walking toward views of landscape – both natural and designed – humanizes the typically dark, maze-like backstage spaces of the theatre. Combining the green-room and restaurant provides company and staff with a much-needed place to meet, talk and socialize informally. Unlike the many recent buildings that call for attention, the new production centre is quiet and understated, allowing the Festival Theatre to continue to play the starring role, while at the same time providing fine new facilities for staff and public alike.

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Architect Lett/Smith Architects, Toronto Project team Peter Smith, Bill Lett Jr, Chris Lyons Structural engineer Chris Turner Associates Mechanical engineer TMP Niagara Landscape Janet Rosenberg + Associates Acoustics Aercoustics Engineering Theatre Theater Consulting Group Photographs Ben Rahn

8 Looking back at new building from old at dusk. Walkway is illuminated by light from corridor below shining up through glass blocks.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) M USEUM OF N ATURAL H ISTORY , M ATSUNOYAMA , N IIGATA , J APAN ARCHITECT T EZUKA A RCHITECTS

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SNOW BOUND In the high backbone of Japan, rusted steel superstrong skin resists winter loads and thermal stresses.

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The Niigata Prefecture is to the east of Japan’s big island Honshu, and runs from the sea to the high central backbone of the country. In the mountains, up to five and a half metres of winter snow can settle, literally submerging buildings and the even young trees of the magnificent, scented evergreen forests. To allow the public to interpret and investigate the natural world, the Matsunoyama Natural History Museum has been set up on the edge of the forest overlooking mountains and meadow. Takaharu & Yui Tezuka have made a building that wriggles, snake-like east-west through the landscape in a brown, almost smooth rusted steel skin. Entered from the south, the snake encloses an exhibition gallery showing natural and artificial worlds, a reception hall, administration, a lecture theatre and, as the snake’s head twists round from east to west, a posh cafeteria called ‘the culinary arts experience’. A rusted steel observation tower terminates the tail to the east, and is climbed by energetic visitors to obtain magnificent views over forests to the mountains. At key moments in the plan, notably where the snake changes direction, great transparent panels are inserted in the skin, offering marvellous views into the forests surrounding the site. The mullionless transparent expanses are so big that they cannot possibly be called windows; they are almost invisible thresholds between interior and the outside. They reinforce a feeling of heightened reality, enhanced by the strange perspective tricks of the route.

1, 2 Like a deserted industrial site or a strange animal, the museum snakes through its clearing between forest and rice field.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 3 Tadashi Kawamata’s paths and deck relate interior and nature … 4 ... as do the huge thick acrylic panels.

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ground floor (scale approx 1:450)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) M USEUM OF N ATURAL H ISTORY , M ATSUNOYAMA , N IIGATA , J APAN ARCHITECT T EZUKA A RCHITECTS

In winter, the temperature difference between inside and exterior is often very great. And pressure from deep snow can be extraordinary (depending on the nature of the snow, how it fell, and how long it has settled and so on). So the ‘thermally stable’ plates of rusted steel that form the outer skin are 6mm thick, and are supported on a skeleton of steel I beams. Skin and skeleton are designed to withstand pressures of 1500kg/m2; the equally pressure resistant acrylic panels are 75mm thick. All steel elements are thoroughly insulated. Inside, there is a skin of plasterboard supported by a lightweight inner steel skeleton. This white skin is separated from the main structure by a generous cavity that acts as part of the ventilation and heating system. Warm air is injected along grilles in the polished concrete floors and stale air is extracted through slots in the plasterboard at eaves level. Heat is radiated to the interior through floor, walls and ceiling. In summer, the system can be used to circulate cooling fresh air. In winter, the museum projects through the snow with its tapering tower acting as a landmark and sign of civilization; it groans with snow stresses. People look out into the surrounding banks of snow in which a surprising amount of life flourishes below the surface. In summer, the long brown snake slips along the contours of its semiwild habitat, which is enhanced and intensified by timber paths and a deck by Tadashi Kawamata. From some points of view, the museum seems like a picturesque long-abandoned industrial building, a mine perhaps, in the middle of the countryside. Other aspects in different seasons reveal a cave, a shelter amid the snow, a lighthouse, a welcoming hut in the forest. And of course always an animal: snake or even fox. The museum’s complexity of possible readings and spatial events enhance those of the natural world it sets out to interpret.

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VERONICA PEASE Architect Tezuka Architects: Takaharu Tezuka + Yui Tezuka Associate architect Masahiro Ikeda/MIAS Project team Takaharu Tezuka, Yui Tezuka, Miyoko Fujita, Masafumi Harada, Masahiro Ikeda, Ryuya Maio, Mayumi Miura, Taro Suwa, Takahiro Nakano, Toshio Nishi, Hirofumi Ono, Tomohiro Sato, Makoto Takei, Hiroshi Tomikawa Mechanical engineer Eiji Sato, Kisakatsu Hemmi/ES Associates Landscape Shunsuke Hirose/Fudo Keisei Jimusho Photographs Katsuhisa Kida

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5 Special collection. 6 Museum is intended to interpret local ecology. 7 Snow building up. 8, 9 Cranked plan causes perspectival illusions of exploding and shrinking space.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The modern vogue for weddings in unusual settings is also highly popular in Japan. Since most Japanese are not dogmatically religious, tending to cherry-pick aspects of Buddhism, Shintoism and Christianity, wedding ceremonies are not so firmly tied to particular places of worship. Klein Dytham’s recently completed Leaf Chapel in the Yamanashi prefecture makes the forested landscape in the foothills of Japan’s southern alps the appropriately inspiring setting for the solemn rituals of matrimony. Set in the grounds of a big swish hotel (whose trade has perked up markedly since the chapel’s opening), the new structure resembles an elongated eyeball partly bunkered into the ground overlooking a small reflecting pool to the forest and hills beyond. The intimate, cavelike interior of the chapel is

screened by an ‘eyelid’, an openable veil studded with 4700 acrylic lenses, punched into the surface in a swirling leaf pattern. When the eyelid is closed, scintillating pin-pricks of light percolate through the lenses, creating magical luminous patterns and effects. The moving eyelid/veil forms an important part of the wedding ritual. At the end of the wedding ceremony, when the groom lifts the bride’s veil, the veil of the chapel also opens, revealing the ravishing panorama of nature beyond. After the ceremony, as the congregation walks out across the pond to a drinks area, the veil slowly closes so that the chapel can be reset for the next wedding. This also cannily ensures a regular throughput of customers (not surprisingly, the chapel has proved immensely popular).

Though touched with Klein Dytham’s signature playfulness – the transparent backrests of the chapel pews are printed with green lollipop trees familiar from an earlier scheme for Tokyo department store Laforet (AR October 2001) – this imaginative little structure also evokes and connects with wider Japanese traditions, such as setting buildings very precisely in the landscape in order to frame and define particular views. The lightpercolating veil could also be seen as a contemporary version of shoji screens. In any event, the interaction of building and landscape makes a memorable beginning to the charms and challenges of married life. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect Klein Dytham, Tokyo Photographs Katsuhisa Kida

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1 The chapel in use. It has proved phenomenally popular. 2 The luminous interior with the perforated veil lifted and views of the framed landscape beyond. 3 Building and nature as one.

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A verdant forest landscape forms the backdrop for this ingenious little Japanese wedding chapel.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Spain, like Italy, maintains a most distinguished tradition of tombbuilding, but in many places it is becoming eroded by what Manuel Clavel Rojo calls a ‘kitch-esque style’, with a language composed of PVC door and window frames and bathroom tiles ornamented by plastic flowers and musical angels. So when he was asked to make a family mausoleum in the little La Alberca cemetery in a pine forest on the edge of Murcia in south-east Spain, Rojo was determined to return dignity and simplicity to the rites of burial and mourning. Yet he did not want to fall into what he considers to be the trap of wistful Classicism like Loos and Aalto with their broken column grave stones. The Murcia tomb is orthogonal, with no references to history; it

speaks through light, space and materials. It is made of slate and glass with a big wooden door, and is fronted by a simple rusted steel cross. Built on a slope, the tomb is designed to enhance the vertical dimension of the entrance sequence that rises from a massive slate base that emerges from the hillside in rather the way that Peter Zumthor’s thermal bath protrudes geologically from its Alpine incline at Vals (AR August 1997). The tomb chamber is entered at the lower level through a narrow, 3.6m high door of solid wenge wood which, once opened, reveals a shaft of luminance falling from the tall translucent panel that rises vertically in the upper part of the entrance sequence. The panel is made of thick sheets of glass laid

horizontally on top of each other with slightly ragged edges that, externally, give the glass a texture that relates to the surrounding slate blocks. Looking up from the doorway, an image of the metal cross is discernible through the translucent plane, while its shadow is thrown on the thick glass when the sun is in the right direction. Rojo calls the platform on top of the slate block ‘an altar where burial occurs’. It is of travertine, penetrated by two slots. One is for the internment ritual, in which the coffin is lowered down into the tomb-chamber, while the actual insertion of the remains into their niche is hidden from above. This opening is closed by a solid slab of Pakistani onyx, which can be slid in and out of position.

1 Tomb speaks through light, space and materials. In foreground is onyx slab covering coffin entrance.

DIGNITY IN DEATH Imaginative understanding of materials makes this tomb a fitting set for rites of passage.

M AUSOLEUM , M URCIA , S PAIN ARCHITECT M ANUEL C LAVEL R OJO

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) A shallow pool with a glass base is formed in the other slot in the travertine. Here, water is continuously in motion, gently pouring from a smooth slot. So the light that passes through the pool to the underground chamber flickers, in contrast to the more constant luminance from the onyx slab and the translucent vertical glass panel. In daytime, the space is filled with constantly changing light, a reminder of the evanescent nature of life in the constant, calm presence of death. E. M. Architect Manuel Clavel Rojo Project team Luis Clavel, José Estrada, Jose Domingo Egea, Antonio Victoria, Jose Antonio Abad, Marmoles Santa Catalina, Cristaleria Acriper Photographs All photographs by Juan de la Cruz Megías, apart from no 4 which is by David Frutos Ruiz

2 Visitors’ entrance is at lower level with huge translucent panel above. 3 Travertine podium is an altar for burial rites. In foreground coffin entrance, beyond pool slot. 4 Chamber with light from onyx slab. 5 Cross with pool behind.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

Rundles Restaurant and tower house in a riverside setting in Stratford, Ontario.

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H OUSE AND RESTAURANT , O NTARIO , C ANADA ARCHITECT S HIM -S UTCLIFFE A RCHITECTS

Life in Stratford, Ontario revolves around a summer Shakespeare festival that was started by Tyrone Guthrie in the early 1950s and has become a driving force of the local economy. In this setting, Rundles, a restaurant housed in a former boathouse overlooking the river, has prospered and grown incrementally over the last thirty years under the watchful eye of the same proprietor. The most recent addition, designed by Shim-Sutcliffe for an adjacent site that was formerly a small parking area, provides both a new entrance to the restaurant and a residence. The boundary between living and working is marked by a 20ft (6m) high sitecast concrete wall that slices obliquely between the orthogonal volumes of the two buildings. The angle of the wall gives the restaurant more street frontage, provides space for a reconfigured entrance and additional indoor and outdoor seating areas. Passing a small garden, patrons enter into a toplit space with a ramp up between the concrete boundary wall and a new low wall to the expanded dining area. Within this slot, guests can also continue up to a smaller rear dining room, which looks out to

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an existing garden at the side. In contrast with restaurant entrance, the tapered sliver of space created against the other side of the concrete wall defines the rear entrance to the house, which is smaller in scale and mysteriously illuminated by isolated shafts of daylight. This entrance makes it possible for the proprietor to move discreetly from the restaurant into the rear garden and down into the sunken double-height kitchen of the dwelling. This lowest level of the house is cut into the sloping site and is

and rear of the house. Rooms facing the street are generous in section and open into the central void, while those looking over the rear garden are more intimate in scale and shielded from view by screens of immaculately detailed fir studs and shiplap cladding. A backlit translucent glazed aperture in this wooden skin momentarily

formed by highly articulated sitecast concrete that creates the long outer face of the house, a ramped parking space on the street, and a water garden outside the kitchen. The more private areas of the dwelling are held in a tall, slender volume perched on this concrete ground, entered by a wooden ramp. The foyer is the base of a doubleheight toplit void, which captures the sky at the heart of the house. Vertical circulation moves theatrically around and through this void, connecting floors on alternating split levels at the front

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long section through residence

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reveals the silhouette of the stair and the occupants of the house, who are subsequently seen on the bridge across the void leading to the master bedroom or on the landing that projects into the kitchen. Although there are no doors, each room has a clear threshold marked by a change of floor finish from the wooden stair to carpet, stone or concrete. Moving through the house, unfolding views alternate between pastoral river scenes generously framed by windows that slice open the front corners of the house and close-up oblique views of the informal backs of adjacent buildings. While at first glance the construction of the new concrete wall seems to define an impenetrable boundary, the relationship that it creates between restaurant and dwelling is both complex and malleable. Just as the restaurant has a seasonal life, closing from October through May to become a cooking school, so the house kitchen can be private or utilized for demonstrations for the cooking school. Likewise, the proprietor can live in a former flat above the restaurant kitchen, enabling the residence to become a guesthouse during the theatre season. This shifting boundary between public and private does not merely provide flexibility, but underlines a rich and ambiguous relationship between life and work, giving new meaning to the concept of living above the shop.

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3, 4 Each building has its own primary circulation space: the house – a fir-lined lightwell; the restaurant – a toplit ramp.

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ground level kitchen plan (residence)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) F IRST N ATIONS G ARDEN P AVILION , M ONTREAL , C ANADA ARCHITECTS S AUCIER + P ERROTTE A RCHITECTES

Designed as a permanent commemoration of the great peace of Montreal negotiated by the French and the aboriginal people in 1701, the First Nations Garden Pavilion in that city’s Botanical Gardens creates a place where visitors can learn about the cultures of Quebec’s 11 aboriginal nations and a venue for sharing First Nation wisdom. Confronted with the problem of designing a building for a diverse group of people whose existence was traditionally focused on the natural landscape, the architects chose first to study the land. Working with the aboriginal communities, they selected a site along a path in the Botanical Gardens that marks the boundary between two forests – one a conifer forest that was the ancestral home of groups including the Naskapi, Cree, Innu and Algonquin and a second, made up of deciduous trees, where the Micmac, Malecite, Abenaki and others had traditionally lived. Seeking to develop a scheme that captured the significance of this route and boundary while retaining existing trees, a long, thin ribbon of space defined by a roof was envisaged as a casting of the path. Warped to acknowledge land contours and the bed of an existing stream, this roof was cast in concrete and lifted high into the trees. Supported on slender randomly distributed columns of selfrusting steel, it forms a canopy threaded through the forest. The new pavilion provides exhibition spaces with a conservation workshop, offices, storage, shop and small meeting room for educational programmes. To minimize the impact of this building in the landscape, museum workspaces and storage are below ground and the other public spaces grouped in two small blocks at each end of the canopy. The shop is housed within a light glassy pavilion above the museum workspaces. Screened with a mat of lashed tree branches that

1 Building follows existing path between maple forest (left) and spruce (right). 2 Undulating roof takes form from land and bed of existing stream. Cast in-situ and lifted onto rusted steel columns.

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WINDING THROUGH THE WOODS To celebrate the cultures of the aboriginal peoples of Quebec and the natural landscapes in which they evolved, this pavilion in the Montreal Botanical Garden evocatively enhances and responds to the woods in which it is set.

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provide shading along the south-west facade, it merges with the surrounding forest and exploits the ambiguity of inside and out. At the opposite end, a meeting room is made with walls of rough shuttered concrete and self-rusting steel – materials that successfully embed it in the ground. These moves reduce the apparent bulk of the new building and leave the wisp-like canopy as the scheme’s predominant element. The museum exhibits are planned in a series of large free-standing glass vitrines placed along the path and sheltered by the undulating canopy. Emphasizing the importance of the land, the designers have focused the exhibits on the raw plant materials from which everyday objects such as baskets, hats, toys and other household objects were traditionally made. These are collected to create an outdoor display that is beautifully organized, clearly legible and carefully lighted. A birch bark canoe, up-ended and set against a translucent screen of birch bark, is viewed against the backdrop of the forest, alongside displays of other significant examples of everyday objects juxtaposed with screens of cranberries, twigs and cones sandwiched between sheets of glass. By carefully scrutinizing the form of the land and considering its particular significance to the First Nations’ people of the region, this new pavilion radically transforms the programme of the building to create an educational focus and a distinct place in a fragment of forest at the heart of the city. BRIAN CARTER Architect Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, Montreal Project team Gilles Saucier, André Perrotte, Anna Bendix, Maxime-Alexis Frappier, Christian Hébert, Sergio Morales Engineers Genivar Landscape Williams Asselin Ackaoui et Associés

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3, 4 Concrete roof is clad in lead-coated copper and provides shelter for display cabinets. 5 Ramp to lower level. 6 Exhibits in display cases elegantly emphasize importance of the land to aboriginal peoples. 7 Shop is above museum workspaces and screened with lashed tree branches.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) To preserve the picture postcard view over Lake Bled, an hour’s drive from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, the local authorities insist that every building and tree visible from the lake be preserved, including a decrepit hillside villa a company president bought for the same enchanting view. He decided to move his family here from an apartment in the capital, invited several architects to make proposals, and selected Oﬁs on the recommendation of a friend. It was an inspired choice, for Oﬁs, though it had yet to complete a building at that time, had demonstrated a gift for interweaving old and new and creating ﬂuid interconnecting spaces. Rok Oman and Spela Videcnik established their ﬁrm in 1995 after meeting at architecture school in Ljubljana, and set up a satellite ofﬁce in London when they went there for their Master’s at the Architectural Association. They soon began winning competitions – for a remodel of the Ljubljana City Museum (which opened last year, AR December 2004), a cineplex

and stadium in the provincial city of Maribor, and a ground-hugging housing complex in Graz. Just ﬁnished is an apartment block with boldly modelled balconies on the Istrian coast (AR April 2005). Le Corbusier is cited as a major source of inspiration. In Bled, the challenge was to create a generous addition that could not be seen from across the lake. Oﬁs decided to gut the villa, lower the ground around it by a storey, wrap new living spaces around the exposed base, and insert a staircase that would rise through the central void to the children’s bedrooms on the ﬁrst ﬂoor and the master suite on the second. Permits were issued and construction was almost complete when the entire complex was seriously damaged by ﬁre. Work resumed, and the ‘old’ villa is now a replica that’s more solidly built than the original. Oﬁs has played up the hybrid character of the 1200sqm house, contrasting the plain walls and gabled bays of the villa with the fully glazed, round-cornered plenum that coils like a python

around its base. This is extruded into a three-car garage that is half buried and set at a right angle to the house to deﬁne a forecourt. Berms formed from the excavated soil shield the entry facade; trees screen the house from the lake, except in winter, and the public footpath is far below. This stealth strategy paid off, giving the owners openness and privacy. A simple plan is enriched by shifts of level, a generosity of scale, and a sense of procession. The family go directly from garage to kitchen, but guests enter though a massive door that is set at an angle to the facade and into a long, enigmatic gallery. Automatic sliding glass doors open to a stepped bridge over a fountain, which provides a soothing murmur, and a moat that reflects light up onto the walls. You walk forward to the open living area, which faces south over a wood deck to the lake. Steel columns and expansive glazing provide a vitrine for the inner structure of iroko wood, which is used consistently for floors, ceiling

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1 The new part wraps sinuously around the base of a nineteenthcentury villa on the shores of Lake Bled. 2 The glazed addition coils around to create a forecourt.

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and the cladding of rectangular structural columns. The feeling is that of a rather grand yacht, which is appropriate since the owners spend the summers on their boat, and this sensation is heightened by the play of sunlight off the pool and lake. Panels of studded leather punctuate the panelling. Ramps lead up to the raised areas at either end. To the west, the kitchen is partially enclosed with a screen of translucent glass plates and can be shut off by wood sliders. The husband’s study and library to the east has built-in cabinetry and massive book stacks.

The ramps complement the gentle sweep and broad treads of the staircase, which is cantilevered out into the central atrium. Children’s bedrooms and bathrooms are laid out symmetrically to either side, and the parents’ suite occupies all of the top ﬂoor, wrapping around the stair hall. Three round-headed windows in a gabled bay of the villa frame views over the lake, and you can step out onto a balcony with a glass balustrade to immerse yourself in nature. MICHAEL WEBB Architect Ofis Arhitekti, Ljubljana Photographs Tomaz Gragoic

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3 A processional staircase opens up the interior. 4 The grand stair winds up from the living area at ground floor level, to two floors of bedrooms above.

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product review

Habitare, Finland’s largest furniture and interior design fair, formed part of Helsinki Design Week at the end of September. The theme of this year’s Habitare design competition was ‘My music’: the development of spaces for listening to music. Of the 74 submissions, Jasper Morrison shortlisted four for their diverse and clever use of materials. Julia Dawson reports.

Aisti (Sense) was in Jasper Morrison’s opinion the most impressive scheme as it is so cheerful, colourful and alive. By Inka Ahola and Karoliina Korhonen, assisted by Richard Widerberg and Kimmo Modig, it was certainly the funkiest, with tubular foam plastic tentacles stretching out from two parallel walls, cushioning the space and affording strong absorption of secondary sounds. The designers say the idea behind Aisti was to create spatial tension between two existing walls with one material, creating space, enhancing the music and providing a place for people.

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Mafoombey, a corrugated cardboard space designed by Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää, assisted by Martin Lucasczyk, was the overall winner of the competition. Morrison was impressed with the transformation of a humble material like cardboard into something so wonderful. Inside the sound box is a ledge to sit on and listen to music, cocooned by layers of cardboard providing good acoustics as well as beauty and elegance. Photographs by Timo Wright (exterior) and Jukka Uotila (interior).

Julius Kekoni and Seppo Tusa designed Pino (Stack), a contemplative cuboid acoustic space made of a lattice of timber elements creating an enclosure that breathes yet insulates the inhabitants from the outside world. The simple structure is composed of two 600mm thick wooden walls, I- and U-shaped, built by stacking a grid of 40mm x 40mm timber section members. The architects’ inspiration was the old traditional woodbuilding techniques of Finland, using neither glue nor nails to hold it together but a few pull-bars. Loudspeakers are installed in the walls.

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Haze is a white misty double-walled nest resembling a soft snowball. It is cushioned by a thick mattress and pillows for lying down on to listen to music, reminiscent of childhood escapism in tents. The shell structure of the felt nest, made of 8mm thick reinforcing steel bars, was designed by Aino Aspiala and Antti Lehto from Helsinki University of Technology, with help from Varpu Mikola, Tuukka Linnas and Ville Nurkka. The acoustics are superb. Photographs: Hannu Lehto.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE , B ERLIN , G ERMANY ARCHITECT B EHNISCH & PARTNER

HISTORY AND MEMORY One of Berlin’s great cultural institutions has been imaginatively remodelled to connect with the life of the city.

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1 The great glazed facade of the new Akademie der Künste speaks of a welcoming sociability, binding the life of surrounding Pariser Platz to the life of the institution.

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AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE , BERLIN , G ERMANY A RCHITECT BEHNISCH & PARTNER

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The Akademie der Künste is a bit like the British Royal Academy except that it involves a larger spectrum of arts, including literature, theatre, ﬁlm and dance as well as painting, sculpture and architecture, and that it draws its membership – currently 370 persons – from an international ﬁeld. Founded in 1696 under royal patronage, it had various homes until 1907, when it took over the former Arnim Palace at the corner of Pariser Platz. In this central location, on Berlin’s east-west axis between Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate, it grew and ﬂourished until 1937, when the arts were ousted in favour of Albert Speer’s ofﬁce for the replanning of ‘Germania’. By the end of the War much of the building had been destroyed, and as Pariser Platz lay close to the Wall of 1961 on the Eastern side, it was reduced to a station for border guards. Meanwhile, revived academies grew up in new homes separately in the East and West sectors of the city, the Western one in a building by Düttmann in the Hansaviertel. Only after reuniﬁcation in 1989 could a return to the original home be entertained, and only through combining the East and West academies could it be achieved. The members overcame their differences and accepted the necessary reduction in numbers, so by 1993 a decision had been made to return to the old site. State funding was promised, a brief was drawn up, and a limited competition was opened to the internationally distinguished architect members, 18 of whom took part. Günter Behnisch stood aside from the ﬁrst stage, but after an indecisive outcome he decided to take part in the second, and in 1994 an architectural jury led by Gabriel Epstein was unanimous in declaring the Behnisch design the winner and recommending its construction. Their choice was supported in style and intention by representatives from all the other arts, seeming to point the way to a happy future, but support from the city was less consistent. Delays over permissions and struggles over funding were compounded by contractual difﬁculties which is why we have had to wait until 2005 to see the completion and opening of Behnisch’s building. Pariser Platz originated as part of the new western suburb of Berlin laid out on a rectangular grid for Friedrich Wilhelm the First of Prussia in 1733. It was part of a processional route used for victory parades, and the name Pariser Platz commemorated victory over Napoleon in 1814. The west side, as main gate, was always the most formal and symmetrical, and the Brandenburg Gate as we know it today was added in 1789. The rest of the square, when ﬁrst laid out in the 1730s, was fronted by noblemen’s palaces in two grand stories with Classical orders and mansards, though irregularly grouped and with varying plot widths. Long deep sites left room for generous gardens behind. As the city grew in the nineteenth century, the peripheral position became central, and the buildings exchanged their domestic roles for institutional ones. Density of accommodation increased, provoking expansion upwards and rearwards into gardens. The Akademie was

typical: it used the existing three-storey Arnim Palace for ofﬁces and meeting rooms, then ﬁlled the garden to the back with a large block of top-lit exhibition halls, leaving only a narrow open space next to each party wall. After the destruction of 1945 and subsequent clearing of debris, these exhibition halls – protected by ﬂanking rooms added by Speer – were the only remains of the former square apart from the gate. To maintain historical continuity and memory of the institution it was desirable to keep at least some of these exhibition rooms, and now that art often consists of installations and performances rather than painting, artists seem to prefer a dialogue with an existing place rather than being framed inescapably by the white room of the architect. But retention of the old chain of rooms was not easy. Taking more than half the length of the site, they ran down the middle, and their roof lights required void overhead. With its many departments, meeting spaces, ofﬁces, and archives, the Akademie constituted quite a large programme, constrained by party walls each side, building lines to front and rear, and a height limit respecting the Brandenburg Gate. The site could have been ﬁlled with artiﬁcially lit and air-conditioned ﬂoors like a huge open-plan ofﬁce, but to meet the accommodation requirements in a civilised way, giving people daylight, views, air and visible spatial progressions, demanded ingenious exploitation of every opportunity for transparency. Accepting the central string of galleries, Behnisch chose to make a relatively open block fronting the square for the ceremonial and public parts, and a more solid south block to rear for the archives. These set up a fruitful contrast, for while the archive block was to be a straightforward piece of rational modern building with solid and repetitive ﬂoors, ofﬁces to the facade, and storage within, the front block varied in storey height and took diagonal slices across the plan, varying from one level to the next. This allowed a series of stairs to develop irregularly in the well behind, setting up a rotation in the space. The ascent from level to level was to be a drama and a discovery, with ever-changing views into the spaces behind as well as back through to the Pariser Platz, and a generous open terrace in the middle. Its ﬂoors would carry the principal elements of the Akademie: on the ground, foyer and book sales; on ﬁrst, the reading room for archive material; on second, main lecture hall; and on third, presidential ofﬁces. The fourth rooftop level with glass roof and open terrace with views of Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate has become the members’ bar. In plans of the developing design, the speciﬁc features of each ﬂoor varied, but the contrast between ﬂoors in shape, height and layout was retained, and the stairwell with its many diagonals remained the vertical visual link. Having determined the destiny of back and front, there remained the question of the sides. The solid party wall to the west backing onto Frank Gehry’s DG Bank (AR August 2001) could take a single row of ofﬁces at three upper levels, looking out over the galleries and fed by

2 Hemmed in between the Adlon Hotel (left) and Frank Gehry’s DG Bank (right), Behnisch’s controversial glazed skin is a rare moment of lightness amid Pariser Platz’s po-faced historicism. 3 To the rear, the building becomes more expressive. 4 The glazed winter gardenstyle passage linking the Akademie’s front and rear departments. At ground level, this is a public space.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 5 Networks of stairs, terraces and landings provide points for informal interaction. 6 Entrance hall, with flying bridges and staircases. 7 The convivial members’ bar at top floor level, with views over Pariser Platz. 8 One of the original core of gallery spaces.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE , BERLIN , G ERMANY A RCHITECT BEHNISCH & B EHNISCH

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a corridor behind. On the east, by contrast, the rebuilt Adlon hotel already presented a windowed facade a short distance away, and was best left open. This was the obvious place for a through pedestrian street that links Pariser Platz to Behrenstrasse and the Holocaust Monument beyond (AR July 2005). This public space remains open from dawn to dusk, lit by a glass roof. It contains the Akademie’s public café on a slightly raised level, for the ﬂoor slopes gently up from one side and down to the other. To link the Akademie’s front and rear departments more directly outside the public realm, a pier-like passage was added, linked to the main stair system and suspended within the space at ﬁrst ﬂoor level. Behnisch is well known for his ﬂowing spaces and his belief in transparency, and the whole idea of the Bonn Parliament (AR March 1993) was to create a parliamentary chamber visually open to the outside world, letting the public see the debate and members see the Rhine. In the history of German architecture, this concept of a glass palace reaches back to the Expressionist period and to the dreams of a glass architecture ﬂaunted in the drawings of Bruno Taut and the poems of Paul Scheerbart, sources acknowledged by Behnisch and Durth.* In the case of the Akademie, the contained site and dense programme necessitated the elimination of as many solid walls as possible, and the building’s public role required not only that the foyer seem open and inviting, but that the main functions appear behind an open facade. Other architect members submitting designs to the competition had also envisaged heavily glazed facades, so it came as a shock when this assumed freedom to exploit the unrestricted face of the site was refused. Following a town-planning concept of the early 1990s, a law had been passed in 1993 compelling all facades on Pariser Platz to be clad in yellow or grey stone with window holes showing the same ratio of solid to void as the Brandenburg Gate. The Akademie assumed that this law would be negotiable, and the glass facade was adjusted in detail to satisfy the authorities. After much discussion, permission was granted in December 1995, but it was rapidly rescinded after local elections, for a new conservative politician had taken over building policy. Although Behnisch has always tended to make the most of contingencies, he considered the facade rule ill-founded and threatening to the whole social identity of his project. He argued that stone facades with vertical window holes had been an inevitable part of nineteenthcentury technology, but that in a framed building they make no sense. With the full backing of the Akademie he challenged the law, working with the German historian Werner Durth to produce further revised facade versions. These correctly restated the divisions and proportions of the Akademie’s old front to strengthen the historical argument, but remained predominantly glazed.

Eventually Behnisch won his case, but building was delayed three years, and the ﬁnancial situation became in consequence more difﬁcult. Fearing that it would run out of money, the Berlin Senate decided to sell off the part of the site intended for the archive block, moving the archives instead to a deep basement under the front. This policy backﬁred, for difﬁcult ground conditions meant cost increases, reducing the value of the sale. Further delays and cost increases were caused when the general contractor appointed by the Senate went bust. The intended archive block has been built to Behnisch’s general plan, but by other architects and for other uses, compromising the Behrenstrasse facade and removing the main justiﬁcation of the pier-like link. Also lost is the continuity through layers from street to street and the intended contrast between the ordinary back and more dramatic front. Fortunately little sense of the delays and struggles persists into the completed building. As the only public building in the square and as a primary representative institution for the arts in Berlin, it seems apt that the Akademie be open and inviting. Its penetrability, declared in the through-street and friendly top-lit café, give new life to a rather po-faced square that desperately needs it. Events taking place within can be witnessed from without, especially at night, binding the life of the square to the life of the institution. All would have been hopelessly constrained by a stone mask. The feeling in the plenary chamber or in the member’s bar of being ‘on the square’ would also have disappeared. The constraint of the facades only teaches us, once again, that aesthetic quality cannot be assured by decree and is not achieved through materials and regulating lines, even if plot lines and height restrictions are essential. Memory – of cities, institutions, and buildings – matters, but is always subject to selection and interpretation, and a good architect is needed for a creative dialogue. Behnisch’s choice to concentrate on the old exhibition halls as the heart of the institution was a more profound act of memory than facade rules read into historical evidence by modern bureaucrats. PETER BLUNDELL JONES *The story of the struggle over the building’s style is recorded in the book Berlin Pariser Platz by Günter Behnisch and Werner Durth, published for the Akademie by Jovis, Berlin 2005 (German with English summaries).

Architect Behnisch & Partner, Stuttgart, with Werner Durth Photographs Werner Huthmacher/artur except nos 1 & 4 by Jürgen Henkelman/artur

9 Deck leading out to the sculpture garden beyond. Light cascades through the kinked atrium space that unites the various floors and activities.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The centre of Oxford is a three-dimensional palimpsest. Many of the quadrangles and gardens date back to medieval times, when the colleges were religious foundations and all the dons in holy orders. Since then, the buildings have been altered and added to, generation by generation, often by the best architects of the day, so the whole intricate interlocked fabric is a commentary on English architecture from medieval to modern times. St John’s is not one of the oldest colleges, but it is the richest. It was founded in 1555 by Thomas White, a London merchant, who left it very well endowed with property (among much else, it owns many of the pubs in central Oxford). It was formed on and around the Cistercian monastery of St Bernard, dissolved in the early 1540s as one of the last victims of Henry VIII’s policy of seizing the assets of the great monastic institutions. In the twentieth century, having wealth and a lot of land from having carefully looked after White’s bequest, it was natural that the college should expand, and there have been several major building projects. MacCormac Jamieson & Prichard have much experience of building for Oxford and Cambridge colleges and in the early ’90s the office was chosen to design the Garden Quadrangle, a reinterpretation for the late twentieth century of traditional student accommodation set round a raised secret garden over an auditorium and dining hall (AR October 1994). The quad has worked well, so when ever increasing numbers of fellows caused the college to decide to extend its Senior Common Room (SCR) with new dining and social spaces, Richard MacCormac was given the job. While St John’s has large grounds, they are precious, and the site for the extension was constricted, between the President’s garden and the existing SCR building (parts are seventeenth century, and the whole is listed as a historic building Grade 1). MacCormac’s extension replaces one built in the early 1950s by David Booth and Judith Lederboer to the east side of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parts. Stone-faced over a concrete structure, the Booth and Lederboer building was a chokingly buttoned-up, po-faced compromise between neo-Georgian and Modernism (AR November 1957). Its disappearance can scarcely be mourned. The new piece could not be more different. At first floor level, it cantilevers eastward toward the President’s garden as a simple and elegant glass box. All along the east side of the floor is an external slatted screen of oak shutters supported on a semiindependent frame of oak members flitched to stainless-steel splines. This device serves two purposes: in the morning, shutters are closed and protect the east-facing glass box from the sun; later in the day, shutters are opened mechanically until they stand at right angles to the glass facade. From the inside, the arrangement frames the medieval garden between fins, intensifying the relationship between the new lunch room and the trees over the ancient green space,

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LUNCH BOX This addition to an Oxford College elegantly extends the historic continuum.

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1 The new extension is a simple glazed box housed within an external screen of oak shutters.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 2 Detail of the layered facade. 3 The new sitting room overlooks a narrow garden. 4 Linking stair between sitting and lunch rooms. 5 The generous, luminous new lunch room, which can seat an extra 36 places.

COLLEGE EXTENSION , O XFORD , E NGLAND ARCHITECT MAC CORMAC JAMIESON & PRICHARD

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 6 Shutters and glazing filter the light. 7 The elegant, legible box adds to the historic continuum of the college.

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while protecting (to some extent) the president’s privacy – one of the reasons why the ’50s extension was so buttoned up was that the then president was much less generous, and required fenestration of the east front to be kept to a minimum. The new lunch room is deep in plan, and the back of the space, away from the great east window, is illuminated in daytime by light slots along the north and south sides that pour luminance down the oak panelled walls à la Soane. (There is further homage to Soane in the SCR antechamber designed in 1980 with a shallow saucer dome by the distinguished architectural historian Howard Colvin, a fellow of the college.) The new lunch room is big enough to offer 36 new dining places, and its specially designed furniture can be reconfigured to provide a formal meeting place for senior members of the college. Joinery of the furniture and the room itself is immaculate. So is the wide oak balustrade that edges the room inside the glass wall, helps to provide gentle visual transition between room and garden, and prevents diners looking straight down into the President’s garden. The lunch room is the focus of the new addition. Existing stairs have been supplemented by new lifts, and new kitchens have been knitted in on the ground floor. Under the cantilever is a new sitting room, which looks out east across a slender garden and straight into a tall newly-planted, impenetrable evergreen hedge that protects the President’s privacy at ground level. On the second floor is a terrace that serves another communal sitting room and rooms for visiting fellows. By being drawn back from the edge of the building, the terrace does not intrude on the President and his garden. Such sensitive and nuanced understanding of geometry, locus, history and the craft of building gives the little place great subtlety, and makes it an enriching addition to Oxford’s three-dimensional historic palimpsest. PETER DAVEY

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Architect MacCormac Jamieson & Prichard, London Photographs Peter Durant/arcblue

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1 The cemetery museum building sits discretely behind the boundary wall. 2 Entering through the boundary wall the axial view is framed through the burial field toward the memorial wall. 3 The inlaid cast-iron relief, the Square, marks the entrance of the burial field.

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The Belzec Cemetery continues a powerful tradition of monuments that literally build upon the horror of past events. Instead of shying away from the scale of the atrocity – be it a killing field, a battlefield, the site of a massacre or in this case the site of a former Nazi death camp – such monuments reuse often vast areas of land in an attempt to freeze history, cast in stone the scale of lost life, and to make something strangely beautiful and moving from something that derives from absolute evil. Haunting and mysterious, such places use abstract expressionism to capture negative energy and transform it into something with

new life. Avoiding conventional, religious or morbid symbolism, sculptors, fine artists, poets and architects trace lines of meaning within the landscape to plot their story through space. Here in 1942, at Belzec, south west of Tomaszów Lubelski, a former Nazi work camp was turned into a six-hectare death camp. Almost unfathomably, during the 9-month period that year from March to December, over 600 000 people were murdered; Jews from the south Polish ghettos, Bohemia and Germany together with Poles accused of aiding the Jews were among the victims. Only two people ever escaped.

Following a design competition in 1997, sculptors Andrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek and Marcin Roszczyk set about transforming the six-hectare site in collaboration with architects from DDJM. Their developed competition-winning scheme comprised three elements: the monument, a museum building, and an exhibition. The dominant form of the monument occupies most of the large rectangular site centring on an oblique crevice or path that dissects the monumental burial ground. The path cuts through the gently rising surface of the cemetery, a black ash burial field, within which mass graves are

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marked as ghost-like territories with subtly differentiated grades of material (blast furnace slag mixed with cinders and barren soil). Defined at one end by the Square, a cast-iron relief set flush in the ground which marks the entrance to the burial ground, the path terminates in a monumental lighthued granite wall; a spatial sequence that engulfs visitors as they approach the wall, cutting through the burial field that rises to a dwarfing 9m height. Walking between concrete walls, cast against rough earth as shuttering and topped with buckling steel reinforcement bars, visitors disappear into the unknown in a symbolic journey that recalls the death of the thousands who were

lost without trace. Passing thresholds that draw lines between life and death, most are reduced to silence before being confronted by the imposing granite screen wall. A structure that in its relief recalls the blood spilt and the familiar patina of bullet-peppered walls. Standing opposite this wall, polished concrete niches are covered with the names of victims. Names also frame the burial field as a low wall forms a horizontal stone frieze that chronologically lists Jewish communes recalling the sequence of transports. With these powerful layers of meaning set within a muted yet dramatic reconstructed landscape, you could very easily miss the cemetery’s museum building. Set in

a low-lying 2m high structure that forms part of the southernmost boundary wall, the unadorned bunker-like structure cuts into the ground to contain, among a series of more conventional exhibition spaces, an empty and haunting reinforced-concrete Void-Hall; a space which resonates with the isolation, pain and ultimate death of millions of lost souls; and more specifically the hundreds of thousands of people who died on this very site. ROB GREGORY Artists Andrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek, Marcin Roszczyk Architect DDJM Biuro Architektoniczne: Marek Dunikowski, Piotr Czerwinski, Piotr Uherek Photographs Wojciech Krynski

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H OUSE , K OBE , J APAN ARCHITECT H IROAKI O HTANI

When designing houses for their own use, architects are usually more able to succumb to the pleasures and perils of selfexpression with sometimes intriguing, sometimes dismaying results. This new house in Kobe falls into the former category. Building any sort of dwelling in Japan’s overcrowded cities is a challenge, met here with no little ingenuity by Hiroaki Ohtani, who has designed and built a house for himself and his family in the heart of Kobe. Ohtani found a characteristically tight site, only 33sqm in footprint and barely 3m wide, hemmed in between two existing houses. The lack of space and limited access precluded the use of elaborate construction equipment, so the programme assumed an even more formidable dimension. Ohtani’s response was to create an exquisitely ascetic concrete and timber casket that slots precisely into the cramped space. Within this domestic receptacle are spaces for study, sleeping, washing, living and dining stacked up with the precision of a Chinese puzzle and linked by disarmingly vertiginous flights of stairs seemingly hijacked from the illusionistic imagination of M. C. Escher. To maximize every scrap of space, the house is set back slightly from the street, creating a tiny enclosed entrance patio planted with a single tree, signifying the boundary of a private domain. Horizontal concrete slats wrap around the patio and frame a huge glazed opening cut into the street frontage. The slatted fence and

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tree conspired to screen the interior of the house from the attentions of the street. The sleeping floor is raised slightly above street level with a dining cum study room and bathroom sunk slightly below it. The topmost floor contains an integrated living and kitchen space, its soaring volume illuminated by the glazed street facade and an opening cut into

the roof above the staircase that filters shafts of light into the long deep plan. A smaller (but steeper) secondary staircase leads up from the living area to a roof terrace. Because site conditions limited mechanical construction, Ohtani used pre-stressed concrete strips laid horizontally by hand to form the enclosing walls. The technique recalls log cabin

Concrete casket This family house maximizes a tight urban site to create a dramatic internal realm.

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1 Occupying a sliver of space in central Kobe, the house is tightly hemmed in by its neighbours. 2 A tree and slatted fence demarcate the private realm.

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bathroom dining/study bedroom kitchen living stairs to terrace

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building (walls are constructed with no vertical members) and traditional Japanese structures which employ horizontal strips of timber. Stair treads, shelves and other fixtures and fittings are simply slotted in between the precast members. Within this slatted concrete box, everything is pared down to its utter minimum. Stairs, for instance, are simply a series of timber treads without the pesky encumbrance of risers, balustrades or handrails. This certainly contrives to open up the interior and encourage spatial interpenetration, but vertical circulation is not for the faint-hearted (Ohtani and his wife have a six year old daughter who must be especially fearless). Warm timber floors and furniture set off the slightly

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3 The long narrow volume of the interior is gently washed with light. 4 Formal dining and study space on the lower ground floor. 5 Living area, with staircase leading up to the roof terrace. 6 Minimal stairs are simply slotted into the concrete walls.

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austere concrete walls, so the entire house has a powerful elemental quality derived from a limited palette of materials animated by the play of light. Ohtani consciously rejects the clutter of the world; as he puts it ‘Lack of things can create a rich lifestyle’, and his admirable if somewhat rigorous personal proscriptions include not owning a car, television, microwave, curtain, fax and ‘a large refrigerator’. His ingenious little house, which in its use of space and materials has lessons for building on tight urban sites everywhere, is an eloquent manifestation of this philosophy.

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PHOEBE CHOW ground floor (entrance level) Architect Hiroaki Ohtani Photographs Kouji Okamoto

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lower ground floor plan (scale approx 1:125)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) C ULTURAL CENTRE , B ETHLEHEM , I SRAEL ARCHITECT J UHA L EIVISKÄ

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Building in the Holy Land is underscored by both the weight of ancient religions and the more unforgiving contemporary dynamics of conflict, politics and culture. Bethlehem, the site of Jesus’ birth and one of the most sacred places in Christendom, is today a scrubby hillside town in Israel’s West Bank, nominally under Palestinian jurisdiction as one of a disparate patchwork of autonomous Palestinian territories. Populated mainly by Muslims, with a Christian minority, it scrapes by on fitful bouts of religious tourism (it is also the birthplace of King David), but this has waned in the wake of recent Palestinian suicide bombing campaigns. Though like much of the region, Bethlehem’s wider future still remains uncertain, the turn of the millennium marked an important milestone in the town’s history and set the authorities thinking about what they could do to upgrade Bethlehem’s dilapidated infrastructure to improve conditions for the local population and also sustain and encourage tourism. As well as undertaking a programme of infrastructural improvements, the town’s most important streets, alleys and squares have been renovated. As part of this programme, Finnish architect Juha Leiviskä was invited to design an annexe to the Dar al-Kalima Academy in the centre of town. The Academy operates under the auspices of the local Finnish Lutheran church, but its remit is to promote connection and understanding between people of different religious and cultural backgrounds and support the folk culture of Palestine. These laudable aims have the wider backing of the Finnish Foreign Ministry which financed the project and oversaw a national architectural competition to find a suitable scheme. Leiviskä is known for his distinctively spare yet highly resonant architecture, much of it for religious programmes. His many churches succeed brilliantly in capturing a powerful sense of the numinous in a contemporary language. Here the challenge was to tactfully add to and enhance an existing complex shoehorned into a tight urban site dominated at the north end by the existing Lutheran church. Making a virtue out of adversity, Leiviskä exploits the height difference across the site to create a series of terraces that maintain and enhance connections between new and existing elements, so that in some ways, the scheme is like a town in microcosm, with a variety of places, spaces and views generated by the tight grain of the architecture. Leiviskä admits to being influenced by the denseness and informality of the historic surroundings, qualities which permeate the form and organization of the new parts. Pale local sandstone is used to clad the crisp cubic volumes (its use in Bethlehem’s historic core is obligatory), further underscoring the sense of place, though the way

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This cultural centre in Bethlehem sensitively connects with and invigorates the physical and social life of the town.

1 Clad in pale local sandstone, the new cultural complex nestles into a tight urban site next to the Finnish Lutheran church. 2 The undulating topography of modern Bethlehem.

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crypt of Lutheran church courtyard foyer performance hall stage dressing rooms technical facilities lounge entrance hall terrace bar reception restaurant kitchen

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3 The crisp geometry of the extension resembles a town in microcosm. 4 Terraces extend and enhance the internal spaces.

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C ULTURAL CENTRE , B ETHLEHEM , I SRAEL ARCHITECT J UHA L EIVISKÄ

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lower ground floor plan (scale approx 1:500)

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) in which Leiviskä applies it, as a thin facing skin, around 30mm thick rather than loadbearing blocks, is an innovation for the context. Leiviskä’s sharp-edged stone is precisely cut and finely jointed, unlike massive, more traditional loadbearing structures. The focus of the complex is a 300 seat hall for concerts, drama and meetings, giving the centre a new impetus for public performances and also encouraging general engagement with the life of the town. Sunk below the level of the original courtyard and entrance level, the hall is dug into the site. This resolves circulation problems by opening up a route below the old building to a group of small courtyards at the north end of the site. The route threads through and terminates in the crypt of the Lutheran church where the cultural centre was originally housed. Carving out and opening up spaces creates a fertile reciprocity between old and new, as well as rationalizing circulation for the entire complex. In a subtle sleight of hand, by pulling one edge of the hall back from the site border, Leiviskä also manages to preserve a quartet of ancient pine trees on the south-east edge of the site. The trees provide welcome shade to the hugger mugger geometry of cubic volumes and terraces. The main entrance to the new building is on the east side, connecting with a lounge at intermediate level between the theatre below and a restaurant above. The volumes of the lounge and restaurant are progressively pulled back on their western edges, creating a staggered facade rhythmically animated by balconies and horizontal brise soleil, which throw a pattern of deep shadows across the stone and glass facades. Each level connects with outside space, so dissolving the boundaries between interior and exterior, and alluding to the traditional form of Middle Eastern buildings, with their intimate internal realms, often animated by greenery and water. At the topmost restaurant level, the tall pine trees act as natural parasols, while planting is intended to trail up the fin-like wall projections to engulf the overhanging brise soleil, enhancing shade, filtering daylight and softening the building’s orthogonal contours. Internally, spaces are ascetically detailed with pale stone floors and walls. Blond wood furniture imparts an aura of calmness and Scandinavian civility. Glazed along its western side, the new performance hall is a dignified, double-height space that irresistibly recalls Leiviskä’s simple, solemn church interiors, with cool white walls, tall windows, suspended light fittings, no seating rake and a small raised proscenium stage at one end. And though the religious connection may be obvious, it is also appropriate, since the new building physically adds to an existing church and hopefully, despite its deeply troubled and uncertain context, can act as greater unifying force for good. CATHERINE SLESSOR

C ULTURAL CENTRE , B ETHLEHEM , I SRAEL ARCHITECT J UHA L EIVISKÄ

5 Greenery softens the stone. 6 The new performance hall, which can be used for a range of cultural and social activities. 7 The church-like interior.

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Architect Juha Leiviskä Photographs Jari Heikkinen

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Robert Hewison Ruskin famously said that, ‘the teaching of art is the teaching of all things’, setting his pupils at the London Working Men’s College the task of representing, by drawing, a white sphere by shading only. It had to be done in a particularly Ruskinian way, not as an outline, but by shading, so that the shape of the sphere emerges as the paper darkens. The illustrations with this paper are selected from drawings members of the audience made during the talk. Ruskin’s commentary on this exercise was, ‘It has been objected that a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that this study of the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective; but in a sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle becomes merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outlines be true or false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself’. Ruskin was not trying to turn working men into artists. As he told them, ‘I have not been trying to teach you draw, only to see’. Clear sight, accuracy of observation of both image and word, was a mental discipline that Ruskin taught consistently, and he believed that the best

way both to instil that discipline and test the accuracy of a person’s perception was through the practice of drawing. He believed, however, that accurate perception, refined by the practice of drawing, was more than an exercise for the eye, it was also a facility for the mind. Speaking at the opening of St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1857, he told the students that, ‘Drawing enabled them to say what they could not otherwise say; and ... drawing enabled them to see what they could not otherwise see. By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline’. This remark is significant when we consider recent investigations of visual cognition, which show that the eye and the brain work dynamically together, and that vision is active engagement, not passive reception. Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at London University, argues in his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain that one ‘sees’ with the brain, not the eye, and that what he calls ‘the visual brain’ is involved in a process of comparing and sorting that amounts to understanding. Ruskin seems to have anticipated this idea when he wrote that sight was a great deal more than the passive reception of visual stimuli, it was ‘an absolutely spiritual phenomenon; accurately, and only to be so defined: and the “Let there be light” is as much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence as the ordering of vision’. For Ruskin, to achieve a clarity and nicety of vision, it was necessary to go back to the beginning and recover what he called ‘the innocence of the eye’. But, as Zeki’s studies show, people’s eyes are not innocent. Part of the activity of visualization is the sorting and comparison of remembered

From Ruskinian drawing exercises to advanced mathematics – with architecture, painting and sculpture in between – representation of ideas and objects lies at the heart of intellectual endeavour. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.

Representation

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During Robert Hewison’s talk, the audience was invited to try Ruskin’s exercise of representing a white sphere by shading, without lines. Here are some of the attempts.

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images so as to establish a constant version of the things that pass partially and fleetingly before us. What we have seen influences what we now see. What we have been taught to see shapes our vision. And as we see we also feel and think. Ruskin believed that the unconscious, or semi-conscious ideas that come as we look at things could interfere with the truth of our perception. In cultural terms, people’s eyes can be corrupted by conventions of one kind or another, most especially by the ways in which they are taught to see. That is why Ruskin stood out against not only the conventional tastes that rejected the fresh visions first of Turner and then of the Pre-Raphaelites, but all three of the principal means by which visual perception was formally shaped in the nineteenth century. First, he learned to reject the gentlemanly amateur tradition of the Picturesque, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century watercolour landscape tradition in which he had himself been trained. Second, he became the implacable enemy of the official, governmentpromoted method for training artists and designers, the so-called South Kensington system managed by the Department of Science and Art. Third, he was critical of the training of fine artists, as exemplified by what he called the ‘base system’ for teaching students in the schools of the Royal Academy, which, he said, ‘destroys the greater number of its pupils altogether; it hinders and paralyses the greatest’. His reasoning was important because it went beyond criticizing the framing of conventional Neo-Classical perception by studying from the antique. Teaching of art began with training the eye and the hand – but it had also to develop the mind. No art teaching, said Ruskin, ‘could be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on something deeper than all art’. Sight was intended to lead to insight. Ruskin did not confuse imitation with representation. He regarded the pleasure derived from imitation as the most contemptible that can be derived from art, because mere imitation is mere deception. What Ruskin wanted to get at was the truth. Truth in painting, he said, ‘signifies the faithful statement, either to the mind or the senses, of any fact of nature’. These ‘facts of nature’ could be discovered by diligent visual observation. But, ‘Imitation can only be of something material, but truth has reference to statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions, impressions and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth; a truth of impression as well as of form, of thought as well as of matter, and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more important of the two’. Further, ‘Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols which have a definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed, although such signs be themselves no image nor likeness of anything. Whatever can excite in the mind the conception of certain facts, can give ideas of truth, though it be in no degree the imitation or resemblance of those facts’. True sight leads to insight, true insight leads to revelation. This triadic structure corresponds to his theory of the imagination: first what he called the penetrative imagination saw clearly and deeply, then the associative imagination brought these perceptions towards unity, while the contemplative imagination meditated on and expressed the spiritual, symbolic truths so revealed. The whole of Ruskin’s art theory, in a sense, comes back to representing the sphere, an exercise in the first order of truth. We cannot begin to talk about representation, until there is something to represent, and if we do not know what it is that we wish to represent,

know it physically, through the co-ordination of hand and eye, and know it morally, through the openness and clarity of our vision, we will never be able to begin our journey. As Ruskin famously said, ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one’.

Christopher Le Brun When Caspar David Friedrich claimed that, ‘The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. If he sees nothing within himself he should also forgo painting what he sees before him …’, he not only captured the essence of Romanticism; he also posed a fundamental question with which art has been concerned ever since. If, as Friedrich states, perception and imagination throw up ‘truths at least as important as objective reality’, the issue is how to find ideas and techniques for representation which avoid contingency and randomness, and allow the work of art to establish significance and meaning. Representation in art achieves significance (or depth) when it relates to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by substitution. Just as in the forest, great trees depend for their size and majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works which nourishes their potential to convey meaning. George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of resonance as the ‘field of prepared echo’. With this image, he vividly conveys the working of the canon of Western art. It is the agreed given of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value, and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density, high culture is impossible. In such a field new ideas and how they speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood. An analogy in the visual arts might be to picture a loose grid, existing in three spatial dimensions and evolving over time. Within it, compositional formulae and repeated patterns in favoured dispositions come to acquire meaning. We see them superimposed comparatively in our imaginations. The differences and symmetries

Opposite, Christopher Le Brun RA, Aram Nemus Vult, 1988-89. Oil on canvas, 271 x 444cm, Astrup Fearnley, Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Right, Philip Guston, 19131980, Dial, 1956. Oil on canvas, 72 x 76in (182.88 x 193.04cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase 56.44.

create allusion and resonance. On this imaginary field, memories gather and grow by association and proximity. In Western painting, the field comes to develop separate spaces: foreground, middle distance, background. Each has its own defining archetypes of colour, character, story and form. We sense the existence of this implicit format most strongly in Poussin, Claude and the subsequent development of the Picturesque. This imaginary, and seemingly tacit agreement within pictorial culture has had such lasting potency that I think of it, certainly in relation to my own work as an artist, as virtually a death-defying given of apparently transcendental significance. In modern times it breaks to the surface in Cézanne, and then in Cubism. In rising to explicitness, however, its effect is changed fundamentally. Since the late nineteenth century, these complex features of compositional memory which dominate the pictorial, relational art of the West, have been tested. During the twentieth century, aesthetic characteristics such as formal reduction and singularity, rather than illusion and metaphor, become pre-eminent. Truth resides in the

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concrete and the objective. Simplicity is synonymous with honesty. Only the everyday (always the street and never the palace) is authentic. In the case of the first generation of American abstract painters such as Rothko and Clifford Still, a grand and brave simplicity is certainly achieved. But I would argue that their work is still (in mid century) in touch and dependent on art historical memory and references to the former model. At such close range (50 years) their aesthetic denials and adventures retain meaning. Yet the possibility for creating this web of meaning, allusion, memory and association did not of course entirely disappear in the twentieth century. The pair of exhibitions at Tate Modern on Constantin Brancusi and Donald Judd early in 2004 shows the contrast. Each finds the poetic in apparently irreconcilable worlds. Subjective compared to objective, carved to assembled, refined to raw. It is a division which runs through twentieth-century art between the associative and the putative re-presentation of reality. A powerful example of the persistence of this imaginary field in late twentieth-century art is seen in the work of the painter Philip Guston. He, like me, has felt the

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the ground to create car parking below a green belt, how ground form, roof shape and structure ease the flow of air and invite movement of people. Having a degree of familiarity with Dublin probably helped the thinking for the Millennium Spire to happen quickly. It was an intuitive idea which became architectural, sculptural, and structural. I wanted the stand at Crystal Palace to capture the essential form of the bowl Joseph Paxton created. It sweeps up to the stage, reflecting sound and air, like a leaf in the park. The urban scene is full of images that carry meaning, which may lie, for instance, in a technical effect or perhaps in memory. A small intervention may alter the balance between images and profoundly affect their meaning, and it is in sifting and synthesizing these ideas and influences, helping to understand their repercussions, that language is so powerful. As words develop into images they pick up and evolve knowledge.

Roger Penrose I write as a mathematician who finds drawing and other forms of visual representation immensely helpful. I can think of several different ways in which such visual imagery can be important in mathematical work. In the first place, there is the following major division: • Internal, ie, aids to one’s own mathematical understanding • External, ie, aids to the conveying of such understanding to others. There are many different ways to think about mathematics, and there are considerable differences among mathematicians as to which modes of thinking come most easily. I think that the main division between such modes of thinking comes with the visual/geometric, on one hand and the verbal/algebraic/calculational, on the other. On the whole, the best mathematicians are good at both modes of thinking, but my experience has been that with mathematics students, there is much more difficulty on the geometric side than on the

Four images by Ian Ritchie RA, clockwise from left, The Spire of Dublin (monument for Ireland); White City Shopping Centre; Alba di Milano; Crystal Palace Concert Platform.

compelling pull of this invisible model which suffuses Western art. Guston’s paintings with their tidal shifts towards and away from representation, show a grid-like sensual abstract painting interpenetrating figurative, illustrative pictures. Depictions and thought-touches seem to emerge from the wealth of the painter’s memory, giving them an interiority akin to the reflexiveness of literature. His paintings exist within a mature metaphysical realm for the projection of emotion and form. What I am arguing for is a more organized form of subjectivity along the lines of Caspar David Friedrich’s injunction. It is a Classical and informed subjectivity, depending on thoughtfulness and reflection, and its effect is to allow pictures to maintain their elusiveness and privacy even when their meaning is manifestly present in the public realm.

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Ian Ritchie: language to architectural calligraphy My design process always starts with an idea, and ideas can come from many sources. Some might be environmental; others are functional, social or structural, or sculptural in the case of the Jubilee Line vents, but they exist as ideas without a clear representation. The meaning and value of an idea lies in language, so I find language a fundamental tool for exploring ideas. As a student in Liverpool and spending a lot of time at the Everyman Theatre where the poet Roger McGough opened up my appreciation of language, I saw how words can investigate rather than determine an idea. This is a pre-drawing form of representation

which I develop through language. Through draughting and redraughting, words help to concentrate an idea and bring it into focus. How this happens varies. The outcome might be descriptive or abstract; sometimes it may depend on metaphor and at other times it is more literal. Once words have given a theme or idea some existence, the next challenge is to capture it visually. In the past I used models, moulding a piece of plasticene to find the form, but more often now I use Japanese or Chinese brushes – the calligraphy of the title. The idea must exist before I can paint around it, but using different techniques of representation helps to develop it. Alba di Milano, for example, originated as a beam of light. Milan’s reputation for making fine cloth suggested the idea of weaving, so it started to evolve into a cloth of light woven from fibre optics, which emit light when broken. My first painting was a black line on a white piece of paper. Using ground on copper plate, the etching reversed that, turning it into a flash of white against a black ground. For White City Shopping Centre I wanted to capture ideas about shopping that I had described in writing. I had written about how air might flow through the spaces and the roof modulate sunlight, about how there could be views and routes to parkland on either side, and how the effect might reconfigure the relationship between shopping and the city. An early ink drawing conveys those ideas, initially formed in words, with a few simple brushstrokes, showing the manipulation of

algebraic/calculational side. As for myself, I find that geometrical thinking is what comes most naturally, and I often try to convert mathematical problems into a geometrical form first before I feel happy about trying to solve them. However, I frequently find difficulties when trying to convey my understandings to other mathematicians, or students, if I use too geometrical a formulation, as they tend to be happier with algebraic/calculational types of argument. However, there is a curious paradox here. I am often asked to give lectures to non-mathematical (or mixed) audiences, and then the request usually takes the form ‘use lots of pictures, so the audience will find it easier’. This is generally good advice, and it is certainly the case that pictures rather than equations are normally much better for conveying information – even fairly technical information – to lay audiences. The puzzle is: why is it that professional mathematicians, and those aspiring to be professional mathematicians, give the impression of being more unhappy with visual types of thinking than lay members of the interested general public? Here I venture, as a solution to this puzzle, that there is a selection effect, arising from the fact that it is much harder to examine visual mathematical ability than calculational or algebraic skills. When I was in my final year as a mathematics undergraduate, I chose geometrical subjects for my specialist topics, but I believe that I fared a good deal better on the algebra papers than on the geometrical ones. The reason was that although I did not have difficulty in solving the geometrical problems, I found it to be difficult, and particularly time consuming, to express this understanding in words, as was necessary. Moreover, in mathematical arguments, an appropriate degree of rigour is always needed, for arguments to be acceptable. This is often difficult to express adequately with geometrical reasoning, even when such reasoning may, in essence, be perfectly correct. Accordingly, those who rely on geometrical types

Left, Fig 1; centre, Fig 2; right, Fig 3, The Creator Having Trouble Locating the Right Universe by Roger Penrose, mixed media 29x25cm. [email protected] - 321 -

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of understanding are at a disadvantage in examinations, and consequently they become under represented in the mathematical community at large. My own experience with visual imagery – and this applies within both the above categories (internal and external), though with a somewhat different balance within each – is that it can take many forms. There are, indeed, various ways in which I have found visual representations to be immensely valuable. In my own work, either as an essential aid to mathematical understanding and research, or for expositional purposes, I can distinguish at least four categories: (a) Schematic diagrams representing mathematical concepts. (b) Accurate representation of geometrical configurations. (c) A precise diagrammatic notation for algebraic calculations. (d) Cartoons, often whimsical, to illuminate key points. My notebooks are full of sketches depicting (a), the pictures frequently represent mathematical structures of higher dimension than is apparent. The configuration in Fig 1 is a drawing of mine from an article ‘Mathematics of the Impossible’,* and it illustrates a nonperiodic tiling of the plane from just two different birdlike shapes. The type of precise geometrical notation that I frequently use, in accordance with (c), is illustrated in Fig 2, from another notebook of mine. The (whimsical) cartoon of Fig 3 is one that I have used a number of times in lectures, and it illustrates the extraordinary precision with which the universe must have started up (at the Big Bang), in order to be consistent with observation and with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I feel honoured that it has been exhibited as part of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2004 under the title ‘The creator having trouble locating the right universe’. *The Artful Eye, edited by Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard, and David Rose, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p326.

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Abigail Reynolds Ruskin established a clear line between drawing and comprehension, arguing that drawing triggers looking, and looking leads to understanding. But Robert Hewison’s discussion of Ruskin suggests that he saw the entire benefit came in producing a drawing, leaving open the question of whether seeing a drawing has the same order of significance. In art, Richter points out, seeing is the decisive act, so how the artist can enable the viewer to share this central act completely becomes the vital issue. I am especially interested in how art can become a tool for thinking, and potentially elevate the viewer’s thought process over the artist’s. Art should open an avenue for active thought. Having made Mount Fear, which represents crime statistics as a mountain range, I am looking at developing further strategies for representing the abstract by sculptural and physical modelling. Among these was my work as artist in residence for the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is already a representation in at least two senses: its content represents culture through time, and its aesthetic represents authority. It is constantly changed and updated, and although it outwardly aspires only to be descriptive, mapping change in language, its aesthetic of authority confuses this by being set up as an arbiter of what is and is not correct. But in shaping the chaos of experience and imposing order, the OED has points in common with art. I approached the OED by looking at systems and structures of meaning in lexicography and art, connecting the experiences of my first degree in English and my second in Fine Art. The OED itself is

Abigail Reynolds, Exchequer 1, photo-collage 2004.

Abigail Reynolds, working drawing for The Frozen Sea, 2004.

interested in opening up discussion of the place of lexicography and dictionary-making in our culture to a wider audience, but I am especially drawn to it because, as a project, it teeters on the brink of folly. The hubris of documenting all of language, a moving target, is almost monumentally absurd, and also heroic. It can never be done. My year as Artist in Residence at the OED had many joys. The simplest of these was, when asked where my studio is, to be able to respond ‘in the Dictionary’. Of course, when I say Dictionary, I mean a department of 70 lexicographers, whereas my questioner imagines a set of 20 volumes. I mean an ongoing daily process; they think of a printed authority. Suddenly, in this gap, emerges a mental image of me, shrunk like Alice moving through a world of words. It is a really enjoyable disjunction, and one which lies at the centre of my approach to creating a visual art work that responds to the OED. I started to produce word mappings quite soon after arriving in the department. Paul Klee, when drawing, would take a line for a walk. I spend time taking words for walks. Choosing a word, I sniff around it, following cross-references and other hints in the OED. The word group grows and is shaped over time as I add and subtract semantic and etymological links, arranging and re-arranging until a satisfying form evolves. Words have a shape which can amount to a secret history of their mutated meanings over time. What I find important in this phase

of my work is the methodology of visually mapping information and the psychological and emotional dimension that comes out of it. The Frozen Sea installation began in the word check-mate. Following its semantic and etymological connections took me through the various strands of the meanings of words such as check, exchequer, chess, jeopardy, hazard, and draughts. Having mapped ‘check’ to a level that satisfied me (about forty terms), I set about the problem of materializing this map. No map can convey every detail to a reader, as the information would be overwhelming. I chose to focus only on the relations between words. To know if and how words relate, their relative ages and etymologies have to be known. As my map contained semantic links, this too would have to be recognized. I chose three rules to describe the word map in three dimensions: semantic = beside, etymological = on top of, word age = volume. For The Frozen Sea I decided to create a study, with desks, chairs, filing cabinets, a full set of the OED, blackboards and so on. Having gathered my objects, I ranked them by volume and assigned a word from the ‘check’ word map to each, based on the simple correspondence that the largest volume should represent the term longest in use, the smallest, the word that had been in use for the most fleeting moment. Having assigned objects to words I arranged them according to my three rules: objects representing words that related semantically were placed beside one another; those with an etymological connection were stacked

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horizontally. The room became a working study and simultaneously, a grid with X and Y coordinates. Richard Long maps his journeys through the landscape in stones and sticks, objects to hand. I have mapped my journey through the forest of words in anglepoise lamps and chairs, also with objects to hand. The Mexican artist Damien Ortega’s recent work Matter and Spirit places text and materiality in disjunctive conjunction. Michael Craig-Martin’s 1970s work An Oak Tree looks at the mysterious chemistry of naming and duality of matter and sign. I situate The Frozen Sea in relation to these works. To return to the experience of the viewer – the installation is activated when the viewer begins to piece together the logic behind the study. The work operates as an invitation to the viewer to think through the process of decision and doubt that has created the form. It is a detective work. This is a strategy that I employ to activate the work. The decisive process of seeing is a re-perceiving. As in a conspiracy theory, things are not what they seem. Every element of the piece has a dual meaning. The desk is indeed a place where a lexicographer has been at work, with the fetishization usual in the preserved studies of thinkers like Darwin. It is also a tool that has been used in the task of working out, and also directly represents a word in the group being mapped. The title was chosen to suggest a momentary fixing of a flow of particles. The arrangement will give way to another as another word is mapped.

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Graham Modlen, Office of Zaha Hadid Drawings by Zaha Hadid’s office are powerful representations of ideas and possibilities and when I started there I had to fathom out what they might represent. The drawings I had seen previously for the Hong Kong Peak project stimulated me to think forward, to wonder that if you could do that to Hong Kong, what were the possibilities for other cities? I soon realized that this type of drawing is a process where everything is to be re-imagined, shattered and then put back together again. It is as if we are asked to suspend belief and to turn the project round graphically and re-present it. Drawing allows different people to invent and interpret, and contribute to the process. It is a real studio system. One of Zaha’s earliest commissions was a rooftop conversion in Halkin Place in Belgravia. The drawings show the flat interior with the walls blown away and the plan drawn within a floating isometric projection. Fittings and furniture are sometimes on the floor and sometimes floating. The wall is drawn as if it were a new plane through which light shines. It has a sort of surreal air to it. But the drawings also re-imagine the home ground; certain elements become recognizable; you can make out the streets with the familiar duality of a regular edge to the street and a serrated back edge. The technique of drawing she inaugurated has become a hallmark of the office. It allows anyone in the office, whether they know London or not, to reinvent it and show us how it could be. By the time of the competition for the Grand Buildings site in the mid-1980s, the techniques for drawing had evolved into a collective effort. The project was an opportunity to reinvent or imagine an idealized version of Trafalgar Square. In the drawings the square itself might be recognizable but what lies behind it has changed. The river gets lost and there are several strange undulations. Various people in the team contributed perspectival drawings, representing their ideas or knowledge of the city but, I think, they were put together with Zaha’s steadying hand. In the office are sketch books of drawings by Zaha, which are something like diaries. They may not refer to any particular project, but they are forward thoughts and reflections on past ideas. She can present them to the studio in a way which launches everybody off, or she may say, ‘there’s a sketch I did which may ... but you will have to study it’. We tease out what might relate to the project in discussion. It may

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Zollhof, Düsseldorf, by Zaha Hadid Architects.

be the silhouette that has some significance, or perhaps one image is laid over another to fathom out the kernel of the plan. The result is multi-layered and the original thought may become indistinct. With computers and copiers we can deal with all sorts of distortions. We can twist plans, build up layers and distort distances. The introductory images of the Rome Contemporary Arts Centre were ‘reliefs’ built up from two or three layers of cut card to give depth to the ground in plan. That then feeds ideas about the roof structure and for walls which descend and create outdoor spaces. At the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome, our task was to represent the workings of the mind through an interaction of architecture, art and an understanding of neurology. Its form of three overlapping snake-like shapes resembling curving lasagne layers and forms, was described as piece of sculpture and exhibitry itself with smaller elements of sculpture and exhibits inside, something like a Russian doll. The position of the steel trusses related to circulation patterns and the dome’s shape; we tickled and pushed it with cantilevers and distortions. The idea was that people walking along ramps would come across exhibits that aimed, for example, to play with visual perception, communication and identity. One of the exhibits was a built spatial perspectival trick comprising a 4m high sculpture by Gavin Turk which distorted distances. Another was a computer program which reworked a photograph of yourself to change gender, race and age. Our drawing techniques are ways not just of representing, but finding and developing ideas. For example the ‘mid-construction’ views of Cardiff Bay Opera House were drawn on black paper, but from the use of white paint, for example, it seemed to me an idea came about the use of light. In another, earlier project from 1993, based on an exdockland site in Düsseldorf, which combined a radio station, hotel and media offices, the team made a number of exploratory works including a mixed, hybrid perspective which was as if wringing a cloth. Out of it came different views represented in one painterly composition. Representation is part of the process of thinking.

Paul Schütze When I make pieces based on architecture, I aim to document the experience of a building rather than the building itself. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals captivated me partly because the building seems to have its own internal weather systems. Each room achieves its own micro climate with distinctive temperature, humidity and tepidity. Some spaces also link with the exterior bringing an unexpected haptic transparency. Rooms register as much on the skin as the eye or the ear. There are extraordinary acoustic phenomena articulated by varieties in scale, materials and ceiling heights. I was struck by how rich an experience the building would offer to someone who could not see. While its visual impact is considerable, the architect has addressed each of the senses extravagantly. Another feature is the way its water surfaces appear as part of the compositional mass of the building and yet are occupiable as spaces. This produces an almost eerie intimacy with the materials and the structure itself. The Janta Manta series takes the remarkable structures built as astronomical observatories under the Mughal Emperor Jai Singh II. Their form determined by need, they have a minimal amount of ornament, but they make an engaging collection of sculptural forms which seem strangely contemporary despite being several hundred

Paul Schütze: From the Garden of Instruments III, 2004. Lightbox, 92 x 128.4cm. Edition of three. Copyright holder: Paul Schütze. Images courtesy of Alan Christea Gallery, London.

years old. There are three of these complexes in India and while I have seen only the one in Jaipur, I chose to model the Delhi structure familiar to me only from incomplete accounts, plans and photographic records. I was keen to make an idealized version which I think reveals more of the hubris but also the beauty of these three structures. After we had made a CAD model of the site, I attempted to deconstruct the buildings by projecting animated views onto a moving stainless-steel mesh armature and re-filming the result. Most elements in the buildings are visible, and their essence survives being pulled across a complex series of curves. I was interested to see how the basic geometry would withstand this sort of distortion of representation. It is an example of what I call ‘vertical memory’, where the essence of compressed experience survives this sort of mangling. This also relates to our own inability to recall accurately which gives rise to a poetic sensibility forced to rebuild objects and experiences in our own minds. If there is a common grammar, each small part might contain the phraseology for the whole. When I introduce sound into a work I use Dolby Surround which defines a pronounced spatial configuration. I do not want a sense of front or a formal planar way of seeing a building. I want the same flexibility in experiencing representation that we take for granted in the experience of the represented. One of the two films to which this project gave rise has a sequence

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in which I overlay blurred and distorted images. This simple act of blurring curiously introduces a level of sight which for me becomes more permanently embedded than conventional means of representation. It also shows up a particular problem with pristine architectural photographs and renderings. Their apparently inexhaustible detail drawing you closer and closer to the surface, until the photographic grain interposes itself between you and the building represented. Using a different approach to representation raises questions about the ‘habitability’ of the representation itself; that is, about how it can invite you past its own surface. I find similar problems in representation with text and while I use text extensively in my work it is often in a form which acknowledges this difficulty. I spend some time labouring over the words and have a programme which will then display them as a fine grid floating apparently within the image like a fog. While the meaning is still present, it becomes lost in the image, almost irretrievable, an obscuring tint across the surface of things. Their numerous staircases aiming at the sky in elaborate calibrations and dishes, the Janta Manta are buildings entirely determined by light, moonlight, starlight or sunlight. That is why I chose to render the structures in glass. How the building both depends on light and arose purely from light sets up all sorts of fascinating possibilities for its representation.

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Sketch for the School of the Future.

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Will Alsop I am always curious that the biggest critics of our architecture are not members of the public but other architects. In general the community responds well to our designs as we can show through visitor numbers, but something we do lies outside the academic conventions of how to make architecture. Because academics have to make their way up the university ladder there are more books on architectural methodology than even architectural history – but they do not work. No self-respecting architect would follow any of their principles. To me it does not matter where you start. Even digital media simply offer another design tool; it is quick and can be dangerous, but not completely different to the pencil or other traditional techniques. The essential starting point is to de-programme yourself, which is why we work with local communities, by handing them a pencil or a paintbrush, and at the same time a glass of wine. Where you work is an equally important part of the question of representation. In my own studio (not my office) where I work with two or three assistants, there is a bar which is sometimes used as a bar, so there is a social function to the layout. But it divides the space into a dirty and a clean side, with computers, a fridge and a sofa on one side, a large plywood wall for stapling or projecting things on the other. The dialogue this invites between clean and dirty is like the open discussions that take place in art schools: dialogue happens almost without its participants realizing. Our layout also allows us to see things and possibly to misinterpret them, which can be as important in the creative process as understanding. Here we can recognize reality but also explore its limits. We work with different scales and techniques of representation. When architects are usually responsible for the largest artefacts in the world, it seems strange that they often work at a small scale. The key is to use the whole body because that gives a relationship between human scale and the scale of what you want to do.

Continuity is important too, because all our projects are really one work. An extraordinary concept you might have at the age of 21 is as valid when you are 56; you just have more wisdom to explore that concept in other ways, but hopefully with no less vibrancy. It is important to keep up a process of discovery and invention. Often I spend time in the summer on Minorca with Bruce Maclean, not working on any particular project but doing something else. These sessions might throw up some interesting shapes, forms or ideas which could find their way into design projects. We would have to do further studies to interpret how to build them, but in reality drawing, making and realization are all aspects of the same process. Discovery is an important part of our activities. We did not impose the Ontario College of Art and Design on the community; rather it came out of the community. We extended the park to the street so people who live on it can walk straight out into the park, which is now animated by the lively people who occupy the art school. Our project ‘Not the Tate’ for Barking Reach in the Thames Gateway shows how we use various techniques of representation to explore the implications of particular starting points. At the moment, the area is not on the mental map of Londoners and most proposals for it are overly academic. Our proposal is to give a series of large wooden huts over to the London art schools – one of the city’s great secrets – and curate a landscape of activity with work in, on or around each hut, fed by plenty of food and drink and free parking. In Montreal we tried another relationship between starting point and means of representation. To engage the public we built a 40m long tube of canvas for public and students to explore what this piece of Montreal could be. As it starts to break down assumptions, the design team begins to interact with the public. In part it is an exuberant messing about with paint, but it is also a documented series of ideas. It helps me to find something outside myself; although mixed with my cultural baggage it also engenders a sense of shared ownership of the ideas. In general, we do not talk about designing buildings but about discovering what they want to be. That voyage of discovery has to be a very open process.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Stuttgart’s Kleine Schlossplatz (Small Palace Square) was built in 1968, in an age when motorist freedom was the dogma of urban planning. It is situated diagonally across from the Neues Schloss, one of Germany’s largest Baroque palaces. Barren and uninviting, the square was never much more than a large raised concrete platform covering a motorway crossing and tram lines, and had been a depressing public and political eyesore for more than a quarter of a century. During the 1980s, an investor-led competition put forward an urban design masterplan by I. M. Pei, but the local community did not vote in its favour. In 1993, Behnisch & Behnisch alleviated some of the grimness by introducing a generous flight of steps which won public acclaim. But the real breakthrough came in 1998 when the City of Stuttgart held an international design competition based on a mixed cultural and commercial use of the site. A staggering number of 431 architects submitted their proposals. Ultimately, Stuttgart-born (but

now Berlin-based) architects Rainer Hascher and Sebastian Jehle won with a design that clearly separates the new art museum from any speculative commercial development. Today the rectilinear mixed-use office and retail building plays a secondary role compared with the glass-clad Art Cube, which acts as a striking landmark for the museum complex, a major intervention that has succeeded in miraculously revitalizing Stuttgart’s city centre. Nothing but Behnisch’s flight of steps remains as a reminder of the old urban condition. Yet Hascher Jehle’s crystalline landmark is only the most visible part of the Museum – more exhibition spaces are housed in the former subterranean traffic tunnels as the architects skilfully and imaginatively utilize the remnants of the old infrastructure. The building lies on Königsstrasse, the main pedestrian zone, next to the imposing NeoClassical arcades of the old Stock Exchange and opposite the Neues Schloss. The galleries at lower ground level occupy a 115m long section

location plan

1 The new Art Cube takes its place in the urban matrix of Stuttgart’s Kleine Schlossplatz, helping to revive a formerly depressing piazza. 2 The crisply detailed glass-clad cube sits above subterranean galleries.

URBAN CUBISM Signposted by a glass cube, this museum complex revives a Stuttgart square.

A RT MUSEUM , S TUTTGART , G ERMANY ARCHITECT H ASCHER J EHLE

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exhibition spaces archives entrance hall book shop cloakroom seminar room shop units lecture hall

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) of the old tram tunnel, directly under the Kleine Schlossplatz. As you enter the museum from Königsstrasse, the generously glazed 450sqm foyer is flooded with daylight, its separate shop and espresso bar bearing no trace of what was once the entrance to an infrastructural Hades. Exhibition spaces begin on the ground floor, behind a group of multifunctional rooms, and continue 60m down underground. You can peer into the open circulation area of the lower ground level directly below. Daylight filters through window strips high above, in the pavement of the Kleine Schlossplatz, helping to dispel any feelings of claustrophobia in the long corridors with their neutral whitewashed exhibition spaces. Nothing disturbs these calm, silent caverns of art, not even the noise and vibration of the 50 000 vehicles that rumble daily through the tunnels on both sides. The 1100sqm gallery space above ground is accessed by a steel staircase that climbs up between the smooth outer glass facade and the inner reinforced-concrete cube, clad externally with rough limestone. The upward journey is an object lesson in how to hang a glass facade from the top while minimizing any obtrusive structural elements. Engineer Werner Sobek has performed a miracle of transparency, using

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giant glass panels measuring 4.10m x 2.50m, the largest possible in Germany. Each side of the cube has 56 panels and the homogeneous impression is further enhanced by the use of a smooth metal seal ensuring a continuous outer surface, so that viewed from an angle, the sheets of glass appear seamless. On the inside, 600mm thick vertical glass blades strengthen the facade against wind pressure. However, a degree of transparency had to be sacrificed for the sake of solar protection. Imprinted white horizontal lines (like blinds) on the outer glass filter the sun’s intensity. So only 24 per cent of solar energy penetrates the interior, with triple glazed and argon-filled glass panes effectively dispelling most of the heat. Given the nature of the building with its precious works of art, it is imperative to maintain constant temperature and humidity. Inside the gallery spaces, 50 to 60 per cent of the heat gain is neutralized by cooling in the concrete ceilings. The remaining heat load is handled by conventional air conditioning which maintains an average temperature of 20 deg C and a humidity of around 50 per cent. Taking all these energy protection and saving measures into account, the Art Cube undercuts current German energy conservation rules by over a

quarter – a highly respectable achievement for a construction that to all intents and purposes resembles a heat trap. The crowning achievement of the glass cube is the restaurant on top of the three gallery floors. Were it not for the 114 moveable multifunctional louvres integrated within the glass roof as a combined shading, cooling and heating device, guests would be sitting right under the open sky. This fifth level restaurant floor offers the most spectacular panoramic views of the Stuttgart skyline. Kleine Schlossplatz has found a new home, 21m above the old one, but Stuttgart’s new social gathering space is an impressive and civilized change from its grim late ’60s predecessor. CHRISTIAN BRENSING Architect Hascher Jehle Architektur, Berlin Structrual engineer Werner Sobek, Fichtner Bauconsulting Facade Ingenieurbüro Brecht Photographs Roland Halbe

6 The modern Piranesian depths of the subterranean gallery spaces. 7 Looking down to the lower galleries.

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A RT MUSEUM , S TUTTGART , G ERMANY ARCHITECT H ASCHER J EHLE

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H OUSE STUDIO , T OKYO ARCHITECT S HIGERU B AN

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Tradition stood on end Sheathed by glass shutters, this house makes the most of a tight urban site.

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The Glass Shutter House, which Shigeru Ban recently completed on a cramped site in the Meguro district of Tokyo, is the latest of the architect’s experiments in blurring physical boundaries. It was commissioned by Yoshiharu Doi, a television chef, who wanted a restaurant, a studio where he could conduct classes or tape his programmes, plus living spaces for himself, his wife, and their teenage daughter. Ban stacked all of these on a 4m by 16m footprint, linking the ground floor restaurant and open kitchen to the mezzanine studio and set-back living area with an open staircase running up the inner wall. The set-back of the third level was determined by a local regulation that places a

two-storey limit on buildings fronting the street. The two exposed walls, one bay wide and four deep, are faced with aluminium-framed glass shutters that slide up, section by section, and are recessed into a rooftop container. So, all three levels can be opened up to the street, and to the narrow tapering courtyard to one side. The architect employed a similar strategy on an earlier building – the Paper Art Museum in Shizuoka, an hour south of Tokyo by Bullet Train. There the shutters, made of a sandwich of glass and fibre-reinforced plastic, fold up to open the central atrium at the east and west ends. Shutters on all three levels of the south side fold out to create

awnings that shade the interior from the sun. This precise manipulation of light and air represents one side of Ban’s practice, as the bamboo and paper structures (such as the Great Wall house and the Japanese pavilion at Expo 2000, AR September 2000) show off his highly inventive use of natural materials. Common to both is a sense of openness and the permeability of walls. In contrast to the Curtain Wall House, also in Tokyo, where white curtains provide an outer skin, enclosing a terrace around the glass sliders that protect the interior, the white polyester curtains of the Doi house are hung within the shutters and billow out only when they are

2 1 The cramped urban context showing the house sealed by its glass shutters. 2 The tapering courtyard. 3 With shutters raised, the house becomes a series of luminous spaces.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) open. But the duality of the layers – transparent and translucent, solid and fluid – allows for varying degrees of exposure and enclosure. When the shutters are up and curtains drawn, the interior becomes an 8m-high portico, open to public view. And yet, even then, attention is focused on the restaurant, and the upper levels are absorbed into a private realm that is visible yet politely ignored. Ban has reinterpreted the traditional Japanese house, with its sliding walls, shoji screens, and shutters, using the latest technology and achieving an open plan in three dimensions, rather than two. The longer you explore this crystal cube, the more ambiguous and traditional it appears. By Western standards,

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this is less a house than a restaurant with bedrooms for the owner over the kitchen. But the Japanese interior has always had multiple uses: the same tatami-matted room serving for living, eating, and sleeping, and turning into a sheltered terrace when the shoji are drawn. So, here, the studio doubles as a family cooking and dining area, and the restaurant and courtyard, bounded by a screen of creeper-hung bamboo, serve as borrowed landscape. ‘I find Ban’s architecture very Japanese,’ says Doi, who grew up in a traditional house in Osaka, ‘totally minimal and flexible.’

restaurant courtyard kitchen studio study terrace Japanese room bathroom bedroom

4 Living spaces are stacked above the small ground floor restaurant.

MICHAEL WEBB Architect Shigeru Ban, Tokyo Photographs Hiroyuki Hirai

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Dwelling

From urban housing to rural houses, residential projects are a source of experimentation.

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HOUSING , C OPENHAGEN , DENMARK

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Won in competition in 2003 and due for completion in 2009, Erick van Egeraat’s Krøyers Plads housing is located on a waterfront site in Copenhagen’s harbour district. Here, close to the sea, the scale changes and horizons widen. The competition design was inspired by the rich, almost fairytale-like atmosphere of the Danish capital, with its narrow intimate streets, cobbled squares, dark roofs, traditional materials and intense colours conspiring to suggest that anything (and everything) could happen. Van Egeraat’s starting point for the 16 000sqm housing complex was the contextual Danish tradition of simple, pitch-roofed buildings. Yet in his provocative way, he gives tradition a sharp and timely twist. New and exaggeratedly angular forms are created by stretching, morphing and distorting in three dimensions. To maximise views towards the sea and the harbour, towers are rotated and apartments fully glazed, but the glazing is wrapped in a protective cladding system of louvres and grilles that provides both sun protection and visual privacy. Materials and colours allude to the earth: copper red, terracotta and natural slate are set against more lightweight stainless steel and glass. With a random pattern of open and closed surfaces, the ensemble of blocks creates an intriguing contrast between the infinite expanse of the water and the more closed, hermetic and intimate volumes of the housing complex. To give them more prominence when seen from the water, blocks are arranged on a tilted concrete platform. Beneath the undulating platform are parades of shops, adding an element of civic animation to the surroundings. The small bay to the south-east of the site may also be incorporated as a marina for the waterfront residents. Though van Egeraat’s whimsical warpings of form are far removed from the more reticent and sober traditions of Danish architecture, this promises to be an intriguing urban set-piece. C. S.

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HAWKINS BROWN HOUSING REFURBISHMENT , S HEFFIELD , UK

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The question of what to do with Park Hill, Sheffield’s notorious monument to the social and architectural ambitions of the 1960s, has taxed the imagination of politicians, planners and architects for some decades now. Looming over the city on a windswept outcrop, its Brutalist deck access blocks have a grim Alphaville appeal, but even though such architecture has swung back into fashion, to the point of achieving listing status, the estate suffers the familiar problems of social and physical decline. The latest attempt to tackle Park Hill has fallen to Hawkins Brown working with landscape architects Grant Associates and über developers Urban Splash. Together they are currently formulating proposals to regenerate the estate’s 1000 homes and 16 000sqm of commercial and ancillary accommodation. The aim is to achieve a sustainable mix of different sorts of housing, both market and affordable, some of it structured on the apartment-hotel model. Residential uses will be supported by dedicated social facilities such as a nursery school, community hub and health centre, backed up by new local shops, bars and restaurants. The existing swathe of parkland will be remodelled as a series of landscaped courts providing spaces for play, recreation and reflection. The playful graphics suggest an Archigram-style technicolour future, but being Park Hill, one suspects the reality may be more prosaic. C. S.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) WILL BRUDER HOUSE , R ENO , N EVADA , USA

Flowing along the topographic contours of the arid rock-strewn landscape above Reno, Will Bruder’s latest desert residence is a synthesis of fluid form and movement that celebrates personal privacy and the nuances of perception. Along the soft, serpentine lines of the house, plan and sectional geometry mediate functional needs with episodic courtyards and planted spaces inspired by Japanese gardens and the local landscape. Within the main pavilion, living, dining, and library functions are unified under the gentle curve of a warped shed roof. The house’s materiality of weathered steel plate grounds it in the landscape as a mysterious dark shadow by day and as a luminous glowing aperture at night. C. S.

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SEAN GODSELL HOUSE , V ICTORIA , A USTRALIA

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Sean Godsell’s new weekend house for a family is a long, elevated bar in the landscape, which, though pleasant in summer, is riven by fierce gales in winter. Living spaces are compactly contained in a box hoisted aloft on columns, with storage and parking underneath. The box is wrapped in a rough skin of perforated oxidised steel panels which hinge open to form protective brise-soleil shutters. Living and sleeping spaces are accessed from an external promenade deck, a strategy requested by the client as an essential re-humanising reminder of the nature and power of the elements. C. S.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) UN STUDIO HOUSE , N EW Y ORK STATE , USA

This family summer house in the Catskills occupies a sloping site with spectacular 360 degree views. The site is the starting point for the house’s radical programmatic and spatial organisation. A single box-like volume is bifurcated into two separate entities: one seamlessly follows the slope, the other rises above it to create a covered parking area and set up a split-level internal organisation. The volumetric transition is generated by ﬁve parallel walls that rotate along a horizontal axis from vertical to horizontal, so walls become ﬂoors and vice versa. This new house is clearly informed by UN Studio’s ongoing formal and conceptual experiments with Möbius strips that spawned the eponymous Möbius House in the Netherlands (AR September 1999). C. S.

TADAO ANDO HOUSE , S AN FRANCISCO , USA

In designing a house on this coastal site in San Francisco, Tadao Ando attempts to introduce a sense of the powerful, rugged landscape directly into the living space. Ando’s initial image was of overlapping horizontal planes that echo the surface of the sea. The controlled geometrical composition allows light, shadows and views of the landscape to flicker vividly in the interior. Three horizontal planes on different levels are layered over the natural topography, with cuts made along diagonals. The carved voids are displaced vertically but overlap, reaching into the depths of the building to introduce air, light, nature and views so that the house becomes one with the landscape. C. S.

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OFIS APARTMENT BLOCK , I ZOLA , S LOVENIA

Ofis are a young Slovenian practice who were premiated in last year’s Emerging Architecture Awards for their imaginative addition to Ljubljana’s City Museum (AR December 2004). Formerly part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia managed to stay out of the toxic disintegration of the Balkans and is now part of the EU. As exposure to external influences grows, Slovenian architectural culture is becoming increasingly lively and sophisticated, looking northwards across the Alps to Austria and Germany for sources of inspiration. Ofis are currently working on a number of housing projects, including this one in Izola, a town on the Slovenian coast. The brief is for a block of 30 affordable apartments aimed at young couples and families, so budget and space standards are far from generous. Despite these constraints and a site on the industrial edge of town, Ofis manage to create a lively and eye-catching block, its facades animated by a series of angular, pod-like loggias. Sun and privacy shading is provided by textile screens which add to the general gaiety and variety of the composition. Now on site, the project is due to be completed later this year. C. S.

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1970

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1970: Leslie Martin and David Owers 1980: Leslie Martin and Robert Weighton 1984: Leslie Martin and Ivor Richards 1994: Bland, Brown & Cole

KETTLE’S YARD Kettle’s Yard is one of Cambridge’s most popular cultural venues. Established by Jim Ede in 1957, its collection displays an extensive range of modern art. Likewise its buildings are an eclectic mix of old and new, with Leslie Martin’s celebrated extensions. This year Jamie Fobert has been appointed as the architect for the next phase.

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Kettle’s Yard was once four tumbledown cottages in Cambridge. Today it is one of the City’s most treasured cultural venues. In a city surrounded by the formal grandeur of collegiate and ecclesiastical architecture, this curious collection of buildings holds its own as a must see destination. As a place it has become as diverse and idiosyncratic as the collection it contains; modest, yet sophisticated, and central to the cultural activities of the local community. Not simply an art gallery, Kettle’s Yard is many things. Established by Jim Ede in 1957, it has had a long and varied life. As the onetime home of the former Tate curator, the converted cottages were always open to students and casual visitors, who could meet with Ede in a place that he described as ‘a nursery to the visual arts and an introduction to the formal art gallery like Tate or Fitzwilliam’. Keen to share his internationally renowned private collection, Ede eventually presented it as a gift to the university in 1967, who very keenly took on his legacy. Since then four subsequent phases of expansion have seen home become collection, gallery become theatre, and art space become classroom; a process that many feared would destroy its charm, but throughout which, Ede’s sensibilities have been maintained.

Soon after accepting the stewardship of Kettle’s Yard, a successful appeal for funds allowed the university to build a new extension designed by Leslie Martin and David Owers; a significant phase of expansion (two phases rolled into one through the generous support of the Arts Council) that provided an additional 390sqm of display space. As featured in The Architectural Review in February 1971, the designer’s preoccupation focused on how the space and light of the new could add to the progression through Ede’s original home, maintaining the ambience of the original 150sqm house throughout a new 540sqm venue. Through careful planning and exploiting interconnected levels, the extension links new with old at an upper level, continuing the subtle sequence spaces through a series of descending levels and increasing volumes. Daylighting also progresses with the domestic windows of the old, leading to the baffled top light of the long apertures that run the full length of the extension’s rough plaster ceilings. With this language of incremental expansion, Martin’s scheme continued to migrate across the gently falling site with two lower terraced spaces in 1980 and 1984, completed by Bland, Brown and Cole’s arcaded extension along Castle Street in 1994.

sectional perspective of Leslie Martin and David Owers’ 1970 extension

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site plan showing 1970 extension

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Main image: the 1970 extension looking away from the existing house. Below: the upper level looking towards the existing house. Bottom: the entrance courtyard following Bland, Brown and Cole’s 1994 extension.

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part plan of Bland, Brown and Cole’s 1994 extension

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The search for an architect for the next phase of development began in January this year when Michael Harrison, Kettle’s Yard director since 1992, was advised by management committee member Eric Parry to run an RIBA design competition. New education facilities were required to provide space for the annual programme of 375 education sessions currently accommodated in a rather cramped education room at the centre of the plan that could only hold half a class at a time. Having reprocessed the two remaining shop fronts from tenants, sufficient space was made available to also include a new environmentally stable archive for its painting collection (that in the spirit of Ede is still offered on long loans to University students to take home), a café (to attract new visitors and give regulars a place to inhabit), and a more formal seminar space (for life long learning, lectures and so on). Having invited 16 or so practices to submit examples of their work, Jamie Fobert was chosen from a high calibre shortlist that included De Rijke Marsh Morgan, Caruso St John, Stanton Williams, Ushida Findlay and 5th Studio. (A success that was shortly followed by his appointment to design the new extension at Tate St Ives.) Having spent nine years with David Chipperfield before establishing his own practice nine years ago, Jamie Fobert is emerging as an architect of distinction. By focusing on the essence of architectural space and the practicality of process led detailing, he avoids the superfluous gestures that distract so many others. As demonstrated in the Anderson House (AR April 2004), and as qualified by his admiration for the work of Morandi and Hammershoi, Fobert’s work returns our attention to the potency of simple forms and volumes, and when shaping interior spaces reminds us of the importance of making decent rooms. As such, Harrison recalls how Fobert, without making any detailed proposals, had particularly impressed the jury with his reading of Kettle’s Yard, its art and the evolution of its architecture. In displaying and sharing its collection, daylight is the keynote of Kettle’s Yard – a place of physical and spiritual

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When discussing the nature and form of internal spaces, Jamie Fobert returns to Morandi and Hammershoi for his inspiration. Opposite (clockwise from top left): the new extension as roofscape; views through the new education suite; section through first floor level café; a new stair will open-up views to the church (plan inset).

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) Fobert’s new extension provides four new levels of accommodation behind two existing Victorian shop fronts.

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basement archive accessible lavatory new stair education room store café multi-purpose seminar room

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basement level plan

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ground floor level plan

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first floor level plan

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second floor level plan

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) By extending Bland, Brown and Cole’s sandstone fenestration, Fobert’s intervention will significantly improve the quality of the Kettle’s Yard street frontage.

illumination – and Fobert’s understanding of this subtlety was key to his success. It was also important that his intervention was not an extension that melded anonymously into the existing. Having chosen Fobert, Harrison wanted to develop a proposal that was distinct from the previous phases and as ‘of its time’ as the original extension by Martin. Since being chosen, Fobert has developed a scheme that achieves these aspirations, working with large-scale models and free-hand sketches, to resolve a tight cluster of internal and external forms that will sit quietly behind the retained Castle Street Victorian facade. A detailed and costed proposal that will help secure the sustainable future of this wonderful place. For Fobert this is not a project to design a new building, but rather in the same way that Morandi and Hammershoi focused on the same

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long section from Leslie Martin to Jamie Fobert

objects for many years, he is adjusting and adding to a place that already exists. His intervention will simply be a new composition of the same place; a project that has been evolving over a number of decades. So, forty years on it is time once again to seek funds for the next phase. Kettle’s Yard has been well supported over the years by many friends and organisations such as the Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and the Henry Moore Foundation. With Fobert’s new vision for the site, it is hoped that fundraising will be as successful as it was in the 1960s. Today, £2.2 million is needed to help write the next chapter; a chapter that will sustain Jim Ede’s original vision that Kettle’s Yard would somehow represent, a continuing way of life. ROB GREGORY

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) ART MUSEUM , B ERNE , SWITZERLAND A RCHITECT RENZO PIANO

MONUMENT FOR A MINIATURIST A new museum dedicated to Paul Klee swells seductively into the Swiss landscape.

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1 The rollercoaster profile of the arched steel members forms the defining image of the new museum.

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The arcaded streets of the old town of Berne, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have acquired a counterpart in the pedestrian concourse that links the three volumes of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Renzo Piano’s latest showcase for art. An undulating steel structure emerges from three hills to the east of the city, facing over the ringroad and surrounded by ﬁelds. It’s a monument that celebrates the work of a brilliant miniaturist; a fusion of architecture and landscape, warmth and precision, structural daring and welcoming interiors. It captures the unique spirit of a native son who made his reputation in Germany, ﬂed Nazi persecution to return home for a ﬁnal burst of creativity, and is buried close by. Klee was astonishingly proliﬁc, meticulously recording the 10 000 works he created in his thirty-year career. ‘Not a day without a sketch,’ he noted in his journal, even as he neared his death in 1940. Members of the artist’s family and the Klee Foundation promised to donate their astounding hoard of 4000 paintings and drawings if Berne would provide a dedicated space to show them. The chief sponsors were Professor Maurice Müller, a surgeon who invented the artiﬁcial hip, and his wife, Martha, who selected the location and the architect, and insisted that the building be a centre for all the arts and for people of all ages. Piano has created a museum that reaches out to embrace the visitors who stream in from footpaths, city bus, and motorway. Like so many of his buildings, the Zentrum has a strong, simple diagram that belies the complexity of its design and construction. Piano shifted the site from the one that had ﬁrst been chosen to address the sunken motorway, mirroring its gentle curve in the glass facade and even in the lines of vents cut into the ﬂoors of the galleries. That gives the building a symbolic link to the contemporary world, and to the city that lies beyond, concealed within its river valley. The undulating topography of the adjoining hills inspired the proﬁle of the steel beams, which swoop and soar like a rollercoaster, rising from the earth at the rear to form a trio of imposing arches in front. Each rounded vault encloses a discrete set

of spaces that are linked at the front by a 150m long glazed concourse containing the café, ticketing, shop, and reference area. Extended opening hours encourage visitors to come early or linger in this protected piazza. A changing selection from the permanent collection is displayed in the central pavilion, with a temporary exhibition gallery below. To the north, meeting and restoration areas lead out of the concourse, with a creative workshop for children below, and a subterranean auditorium behind. The south pavilion contains the administrative ofﬁces, archives, and seminar rooms, all on the main level. The 4.2km of steel girders were cut and shaped by computercontrolled machines but then, because each section has a different conﬁguration, the 40km of seams were hand-welded. The arches are slightly inclined at different angles, braced by compression struts, and tied to the roof plate and ﬂoor slabs. In contrast to this assembly of unique parts, the concrete ﬂoors were constructed as a single structure, without settlement joints. The glass facade is divided into upper and lower sections, which are joined at the 4m roof level of the concourse, and are suspended from girders to avert stress from thermal expansion in the steel roof. The glass is shaded by exterior mesh blinds that extend automatically in response to the intensity of the light, and the high level of insulation minimizes energy consumption. All of these measures pay off in the galleries and archives, where temperature and humidity must be maintained at constant levels, even though they are seamlessly linked to the busy public concourse. The permanent collection is displayed beneath the curved vault in a 1700sqm room that is divided by suspended ﬂats into a benign labyrinth of interconnecting spaces. Each white screen hovers a couple of centimetres above the oak ﬂoor as do the peripheral walls. To achieve the low lighting level required by these sensitive works, illumination is indirect and ﬁltered. Spots cast their beams on the white-boarded ceiling vault, and this glow is diffused by suspended square scrims.

ART MUSEUM , B ERNE , S WITZERLAND A RCHITECT RENZO PIANO

3 A serpentine path leads up to the main entrance.

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2 The trio of topographic bumps mimics the gentle undulations of the surrounding landscape.

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4 To the rear, the vaults merge into the ground. Planting will gradually be established between the ridges to make the transition more seamless.

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5 5 The tapering profile of the vaults. 6 Detail of main facade and inclined steel arches.

site plan

cross section

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long section through north pavilion (concourse, cinema, auditorium)

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long section through middle pavilion (concourse, galleries)

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 7 Café and information area in the soaring public concourse that unites that trio of vaults and runs along the main facade.

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:750)

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north pavilion central pavilion south pavilion main entrance concourse information café servery cinema AV rooms restoration workshops permanent collection shop reference section ofﬁces and administration temporary galleries auditorium children’s workshop

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lower ground floor

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) It’s easy to see in the open geometry of the plan a reference to some of Klee’s compositions, and the skein of slender cables supporting walls, lights, and scrims evokes his spidery penmanship. Piano’s greatest feat is to give these tiny, intense works the space they need to breathe. Such a concentration of invention could easily overwhelm the viewer; here, each work seems to ﬂoat in its own white void, bathed in a cloud of soft light, achieving an emotional as well as a formal resonance. Works are grouped, not chronologically, but by afﬁnity, so that you can explore the inﬁnite variety of ways in which this master employed line, colour, ﬁgurative and abstract imagery; always enigmatic and never repetitive. Toplit stairs and a piston-operated lift that is a work of art in itself carry you down to a room of similar size that presently houses the 366 sketches Klee did in his last fertile year. Here, the works are arranged on a peripheral and inner wall that trace the rectangle deﬁned by slender structural columns. Scattered around both galleries on oak plinths are 40 hand puppets that Klee made around 1920 to amuse his family. Fabricated from the commonplace materials and crudely painted, they have a compelling talismanic quality, revealing the inner child in the artist and in all who connect with his work. That spirit carries over into the children’s museum, aptly named Creaviva for its emphasis on creative play in a succession of workshops that are open to all ages. The steeply-raked 300-seat auditorium that burrows into the ground behind is a black box lined with curved sound bafﬂes in the same orange hue as the Venetian plaster walls of the outer lobby. Regular performances of chamber music (Klee was an accomplished violinist), dance, and theatre will be interspersed with lectures and readings. All will reﬂect the versatility of the artist and his friends over four turbulent decades and their enduring legacy.

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MICHAEL WEBB

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Architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa Associate architect ARB Architects, Berne Structural engineers Ove Arup & Partners, B + S Ingenieure Services engineers Ove Arup & Partners, Luco, Enerconom, Bering Photographs Paul Raftery/VIEW

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8 The curve of the arch runs through the glazed link between volumes. 9 Main gallery for the permanent Klee collection. 10 Main gallery is an airy labyrinth of suspended flat panels that subdivide the space. In places, light is diffused by horizontal scrims. 11 Part of the children’s workshop at

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SETTING THE

SCENE FOR THE FUTURE

I was rather taken aback when my fellow directors asked me to produce a special issue to mark the end of my tenure of the editorial chair. The request was embarrassing and daunting. What on earth was I to do? In the end, it seemed that the only response could be an analysis of what The Architectural Review has been up to for the last 25 years,1 and what has happened in the world of architecture during that time. A quarter of a century is no longer a huge proportion of an average Western life, but culture, politics and economics alter so rapidly over such a period that it is impossible to compress all the changes into a manageable compass. So these pages are highly selective. When he retired in 1971 after 36 years with the magazine, my revered precursor J. M. Richards remarked that ‘we are all modernists now’.2 The battle for modern architecture versus ‘period-revival’ building had been won, and in Richards’ eyes, modernism was becoming enriched because architects ‘now know that there is not one answer but any number of answers’. Even so, he could not have anticipated that within a dozen years Post-Modern Classicism (PoMo) was to emerge blowsily full blown from the drawers of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Chippendale cabinet. Few would disagree that we are all post-modernists now – though few, thank goodness, are adherents of PoMo. For all Richards’ belief that architecture was becoming more plural towards the end of the Modern period, to many it seemed to be increasingly grim, bureaucratic and dull. PoMo was an early and noisy example of the many imaginative theoretical and built reactions against tired official Modernism (and each other) that have made the last quarter of a century so multi-faceted, culturally productive and challenging. At the same time, radical changes were taking place in the role of the profession. Richards could still talk about the architect as the leader of the building team – though he argued that what really mattered is not so much formal leadership as the fact that the architect is the only member of the team ‘who has been trained to create order’ and who has the ability to ‘construct a picture of what the future world will actually be like’. Largely, that remains true, but the role of the design professions – architects, engineers, landscape and urban designers – is increasingly threatened and restricted by both business and government. Neither trusts the professional role, which was invented in the early nineteenth century to curb the excesses of the unbridled market. Business hates any attempt to restrain it, and governments believe that they are the only proper source of restraint.

ness and intellectual terms, it has been impossible to make a consumer product that has relevance to creative architects and designers or viceversa – as the few examples that have been tried demonstrate. The successful ones seem to end up as superficial followers of fashion. They tend to go in for interviews illustrated by large pictures of designers rather than what they make. All are seduced by flashy gestures.

Official philistinism Official systems of building procurement have been set up to minimize the professional position. They are almost inevitably more expensive than traditional methods, more prone to corruption and, judging by results so far, much more likely to produce second-rate results. Absurd official reports are regularly produced that attempt to make professional imagination into a mere component (and a small one at that) of the development process. We do not undergo a long and difficult process of education and training to become cogs in the construction industry, and the buildings published in the AR show how architectural imagination can still triumph over the drag of mundane to produce places that enhance human life and spirit. Richards believed that the AR had a complex role to play in communicating architectural ideas to clients and the general public; he thought of it as a ‘bridge, carrying traffic in both directions’ that ‘can span the distance between architects and the public they serve’. It may still have been possible to make such a programme work even as late as the 1970s, but I doubt it. The difficulties of trying to generate a magazine that can appeal equally strongly to both general public and the design professions have been insurmountable in my time. In both busi-

Desperate straits When I started, the AR was in desperate straits commercially, rapidly losing money and circulation. Something had to be done, and remedies ranged from turning it into a magazine covering earthquakes and natural disasters to becoming a colour supplement to The Architects’ Journal, our sibling. I was convinced that the magazine could become successful again by building on its great days under Richards and his proprietor Hubert de Cronin Hastings. The AR had flirted with amateur sociology and various forms of graphic criticism: it was essential to bring the magazine back to being fundamentally about architecture and its immediately related disciplines. The magazine clearly had to become international to a much greater degree than it had ever been. From its inception, the AR always carried articles about overseas architecture, and it had a rather small but faithful international readership. It was clear that the best architecture and the most important ideas could not be produced by one country, or even continent. And I very much doubted that it would be possible to generate enough money to make a magazine of the kind that the AR must be by focusing mainly on Britain, which has the most prolific and competitive architectural press in the world. Both the AR’s content and its marketing had to change. One of the most immediately obvious alterations was to focus each issue on a particular theme of world-wide interest. This allowed us to bring some sort of focus to the nebulous mass of ideas and projects that surrounds an international magazine.3 It was relatively easy to begin to change the editorial content, though there was much to catch up on. Getting the financial side to work was a different proposition, particularly under the dunderheaded and doomed Maxwell regime of the late ’80s, which actually attempted to reduce the overseas circulation – British Gas didn’t approve apparently. Under Emap, which bought the magazine (and the AJ) from Maxwell’s wreckage, we have had publishing directors who have pursued sensible international policies, and made it possible for us to innovate (for instance by setting up the very successful ar+d Emerging Architecture Awards).4 It may seem odd to spend so much time in my final leader talking about the business side of the operation. But there is no point in making a magazine if it does not generate a sensible profit. What is the character of the magazine that has had to be defended so carefully? Although one of the oldest architectural magazines in the world (it was founded in 1896), the AR has had only 11 editors.5 I am honoured to be of their company. Save for D. S. MacColl who was in the chair for a short unhappy time a century ago, and the great historian Nikolaus Pevsner (who stepped in while Richards was away at the War), all of us trained fully or partly as architects. So the magazine is fundamentally about place-making and the art of architecture. All the early editors (again except MacColl) were members of the Arts and Crafts Movement and, from the AR’s inception, its editors have promoted (often unconsciously) some of the movement’s strongest tenets in a continuing tradition. All of us have been deeply sceptical of the notion that architecture is an autonomous art. It must serve human purpose and be devoted to enhancing life (in terms of both quantity and quality). It is not about fashion, or what Richards called ‘in-language6 and plug-in gimmicks’. Nor is it a branch of the development industry. The chief inspirers of

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the Arts and Crafts movement were Ruskin and Morris, both of whom were early environmental campaigners: learning from them, the AR has always believed that the world’s resources are limited, and that development should respect the planet. Concern for tectonic integrity and for place are other abiding passions: buildings should be constructed right and feel right, and they should resonate (however quietly) in our subjective patterns of the physical world. In addition to the continuing core tradition, I hope we have fostered inherited interests in developments of technology and in the other arts related to architecture – and in exploration of little-known places and people, in time as well as space. None of these has received as much coverage as it deserved because we have lacked resources. Similarly, I would have liked to have devoted more space and time to the disciplines of landscape and urban design, both of which have been developing remarkably in the last two decades. Of course, I have made lots of mistakes of emphasis and omission, and am grateful to talented colleagues for preventing me from multiplying them. A magazine is a collaborative effort and in my earlier days, Jonathan Glancey, E. M. Farrelly and Frances Anderton enthusiastically explored new territories, while for many years, Peter Buchanan provided thoughtful analytical comment on the rapidly changing scene. Bill Slack enriched the mix with his special kind of graphic design. Penny McGuire brought an inimitable touch to coverage of interiors and product design. Dan Cruickshank reactivated the magazine’s interest in history. The present editorial staff (almost all of whom have worked on the AR for years) have continually maintained and enriched the magazine’s range and quality. I want to thank them all, and the contributors7 who have added to the magazine’s scope and mix.

The future As to the future, a magazine must respond to what happens, rather than trying to set the pace. It can encourage, emphasize and support but not (as I once arrogantly believed) truly initiate. Naturally, I have strong hopes for the future of architecture and the environment which I trust are made clear in the rest of this issue, but I have no more idea of what will really happen than Jim Richards had when he retired. I leave the AR in the hands of my successor Paul Finch and those of the existing staff, all of whom want to expand energetically and imaginatively into new worlds of ideas, media8 and creativity. The magazine will clearly change. But I hope that the staff and those who come after them will never forget that the aim of architecture and its related disciplines is to serve and ennoble humanity. And that, sometimes paradoxically, architecture, alone among the arts, can move every aspect of our senses and being. PETER DAVEY 1 I have been editor since 1982, but was involved with the AR for four years before that under my predecessor Lance Wright. Previously, I worked for a dozen years on our weekly UK sibling, The AJ. 2 Richards, J. M., ‘Retrospect’, AR February 1971, p69 3 And it adds to the attraction of the publication to the retail trade by giving individual issues prolonged shelf-life. But the themed format has problems: it can be very rigid, and it can prevent rapid response to unexpected events, such as the unanticipated completion of a major building. 4 Open for completed work to all architects and designers, the awards are offered annually, and have regularly drawn hundreds of entries by (as yet) relatively little known people from all over the world. 5 Henry Wilson 1896-1900, D. S. MacColl 1900-1904, Mervyn Macartney 1904-1921, Ernest Newton 1921-1922, William Godfrey Newton (Ernest’s son) 1921-1927, H. de C. Hastings 1927-1971, Christian Barman (mid 1930s), J. M. Richards 1935 (joined as assistant)-1971, Nikolaus Pevsner (temporary and part time)1942-1945, Lance Wright 1971-1980, Peter Davey 1982-2005. 6 The AR has always tried (not always successfully) to analyse architecture and architectural ideas in ordinary language. This is often an extremely difficult task as, almost by definition, architecture operates on our psyches in non-verbal ways. 7 Particularly Peter Blundell Jones, who has analytically chronicled the courses of organic architecture particularly in the German-speaking countries, Juhani Pallasmaa, whose profound essays on humanity and architecture have inspired us all, and Colin St John Wilson who has brought passion and scholarship to debate. Among photographers, Martin Charles and Richard Bryant have been outstanding. 8 Perhaps uses of new media linked to the magazine will allow creation of Richards’ ‘bridge carrying traffic in both directions’.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) BMW SALES AND EVENT CENTRE , MUNICH , G ERMANY ARCHITECT COOP HIMMELB ( L )AU

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WORLD SERVICE BMW’s sales and events centre in Munich reflects an increasing urge for spectacle. The hyper competitive world of the European car industry is forcing manufacturing companies to devise ever more elaborate events, spectacles and locations in order to sell their products. Next to Formula One racing, architecture has become a favourite means of promoting the right image. Over the last few

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years, many of Europe’s leading car manufacturers have succumbed to the lure of buildings designed by superstar architects. The list includes Norman Foster for McLaren; Nicholas Grimshaw, Rolls-Royce; UN Studio for Mercedes-Benz (p74); Ron Arad, Maserati, and Zaha Hadid for VW and BMW (p50).

In Munich, at the site where the first BMW engines were assembled in 1917, the famous Bavarian motor company is currently building a huge, multifunctional car sales and event centre, appropriately entitled BMW Welt (BMW World). Cultivating an air of exclusivity, only cars and motorcycles by

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BMW will be shown here; there will be no vehicles from other BMW owned companies such as Mini or even Rolls-Royce. In autumn 2001, 27 shortlisted architects submitted their designs for the 73 000sqm building. Joint first prize winners were Coop Himmelb(l)au from Vienna and Sauerbruch Hutton

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

(Berlin), but in the end, the Viennese duo impressed the jury the most with their bold design. Lying opposite the Munich Olympic Park, the new building will occupy a site next to the famous ‘quadruple cylinders’ BMW company headquarters designed by Karl Schwanzer in the early 1970s.

According to BMW, the centre marks a new generation of communication buildings for the twenty-first century, and Coop Himmelb(l)au’s design lives up to the client’s extravagant expectations. The six-storey structure (with three storeys below ground for car storage) contains four separate buildings

enveloped by a huge steel roof that resembles a billowing cloud. The Double Cone is a flexible event space; Premiere houses VIP lounges, administration, shops and restaurants; Forum is a 600 seat theatre; and the Hall functions as a lobby and shopping mall for visitors and car owners who will come here

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1 The new building in its Munich context with the existing BMW headquarters bottom left. 2, 3 Different elements are united by a great cloud-like glass roof that billows upwards from a double cone structure.

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4 Interior of model. 5 A new Munich landmark.

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to collect their new vehicles. Each day a maximum of 250 customers will have the opportunity to watch their new car being delivered into BMW World. A range of distractions, from restaurants, shops and VIP lounges, to driver briefing and training and special events, aims to keep prospective car owners in the building for between six and eight hours. Around 850 000 visitors are expected annually. Yet the visitor experience is only half the story. Below ground, in the caverns of the three-storey ‘underworld’, cars are lovingly conditioned for their big appearance. Up to 250 cars can be stored in a fully automated rack system. Prior to delivery, they undergo technical checks and finally are washed and spruced up for their new owners waiting upstairs. BMW World has been on site since August 2003 and is currently Munich’s biggest

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building site now that the new Allianz Arena by Herzog & de Meuron for the 2006 World Cup is finally finished. (BMW World is scheduled to open next summer.) To cope with the complex site conditions and detailed design, Coop Himmelb(l)au are working with Munich-based engineers Schmitt Stumpf Frühauf & Partner and local architect Manfred Rudolf, who are supervising the building’s progress. As the building evolves, it is passed by thousands of motorists every day, heralding the prospect of another major addition to the Munich scene. CHRISTIAN BRENSING Architect Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vienna Structural engineers Bollinger & Grohmann, Schmitt Stumpf Frühauf & Partner with architect Manfred Rudolf Photographs 1, 2, 5, ISOCHROM; 3, Gerald Zugmann; 4, Marcel Weber

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Hall Forum VIP car delivery brieﬁng centre bistro exhibition space BMW Individual shops Double Cone (event space) Premiere (car delivery) children’s area lounge restaurant

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once and future

Entry for the Arctic Centre Competition by Ain Padrick, Vilen Künnapu, Lennart Meri. October 1984.

Wastepaper collector in Alexandria, Egypt, for an issue on Third World housing. Photo: Nabil Hamdi. August 1985.

ONCE AND FUTURE ARCHITECTURE Redefine perception KEN YEANG, Selangor, Malaysia

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Saving the environment from our continued devastation is the singularly most dominant and vital issue affecting our tomorrow, feeding into our fears that this third millennium shall be our last. In the next decade or so, we desperately need answers to the question of how to design our built environment and manage our businesses for our sustainable future. We need to redefine our perception of architecture, how

it is to be designed, how it should function in the biosphere and why we also need to design its after life, regarded from the perspective both of an ecologist as well as of a designer. Our built environment – and this includes everything that we as humans make from buildings, roads, bridges, factories, cars, refrigerators, to toys – no matter how aesthetically pleasing, how well designed or made, is simply materials that are extracted and taken often from far off locations, transiently (compared to ecological timeframes) processed,

manufactured and fabricated into food, artifacts, facilities, infrastructures, enclosures (as concentrations into a single locality for our habitation and other human purposes), whose manufacture, processing, assembly, construction, operations and consumption often use huge quantities of nonrenewable energy resources, can significantly affect the ecology of its locality and of the biosphere, and whose eventual disposal (at the end of their useful life) needs to be accounted and benignly reintegrated back into the biosphere.

Thermal baths at Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland by Peter Zumthor. Photo: Henry Pierre Schultz. August 1977.

Cultural Centre, Nouméa, New Caledonia by Renzo Piano. Photo: Shigeo Ogawa/ Shinkenchiku-Sha. December 1998.

To round off this issue’s survey of The Architectural Review’s last quarter-century, I asked some of the architects and critics who have often appeared in these pages to comment on what they perceived to be the most important ideas and buildings of the last 25 years and to speculate on what will happen in the next 25. Responses varied a good deal: some concentrated on individual experience, some on future potential, with some focusing entirely on me. I am too vain (and touched) to leave the latter out. Illustrations are some of my favourite covers. PD

Will to form

Courage to create

MICHAEL HOPKINS, London

TADAO ANDO, Tokyo

In spite of a number of dotty byways along the way, both the Functional Tradition, identified by J. M. Richards in the AR in 1957, and the Modern Movement, have survived the last 25 years. In the process, they have grown richer and more complex. In the next 25 years the Will to Form will continue to be inspired by function, technology, a sense of place and history and above all, optimism for the future.

In the last quarter-century, architecture has acquired a technology that makes freedom of expression possible. I am referring to the emergence of computers. Thanks to precise simulation analyses, architects can now be as adventurous as they please. It seems fitting that the quarter-century should conclude with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s notable work. That is because the first work to raise the issue of

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freedom of expression and make an impact on architecture was the Gehry House of 1979. Its technology was by no means advanced, but that little building was full of ideas that anticipated subsequent developments in contemporary art such as the use of irregular forms seemingly free of gravity and the juxtaposition of samples of different materials. This shows the tremendous speed at which architecture, liberated from preconceptions, has evolved. In fact, today the speed of development might be said to have outstripped the

human power of imagination. I feel that the significance of the work left by Louis Kahn becomes greater as time passes. In turning his back on trends of the period and returning to the classics, he showed contemporary architecture a new direction. Kahn’s architecture seems to offer silent protest against contemporary work. It is courage to create, not technology, that opens up a new horizon. Courage must be backed by ideas, and architects’ ideas are now being called into question.

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once and future Low energy solutions NORMAN FOSTER, London

Part of frieze of Albert Memorial, London, by J. B. Philip (1871). Photo: Martin Charles. May 1984.

Old people’s home, Almere, The Netherlands by Herman Hertzberger. Photo: Martin Charles. April 1985.

In 1979, if issues of energy and the environment were discussed at all, they were framed in terms of ‘the oil crisis’ – shorthand notation for the belligerent attitude of the Middle-Eastern oil-producing countries and their tightening of the financial screws. In the UK, if we were encouraged to ‘clean our teeth in the dark’ it was to stave off imminent power cuts rather than to conserve finite global resources. Undoubtedly one of the most significant changes in attitudes of the intervening 25 years relates to the environment and our broadening understanding of the concept of ‘sustainability’. Another radical shift in architecture – both in terms of process and product – has been brought about by the computer. Twenty-five years ago the ‘computer room’ was the hallowed preserve of the few. Today the computer is completely ephemeralized. New computer software has allowed us to explore in quick-time forms and geometries that would once have taken years to refine, and it has enabled us to engineer low-energy environmental solutions – an example of technology and sustainability working hand-inhand. Vital now, these issues will become ever more pressing as we face an uncertain environmental future.

Great step forward CHRIS WILKINSON, London

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Detail, entrance to temple at Banganga, Bombay. Photo: Martin Charles. August 1987.

In the 1980s, confidence in British architecture was hugely boosted by the successful completion of two key projects – the Lloyd’s Building by Richard Rogers & Partners and the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank by Foster Associates. They both pioneered innovative thinking and the use of new construction technology as a natural progression of the ideals of the Modern Movement. Many young

architects involved in these projects gained invaluable experience which inspired them to start their own practices, and they were first recognized by the AR’s ‘Up and coming in England’ issue in May 1989. Since then, many more have flourished, nurtured by other creative incubators and benefiting from the Jubilee Line and Lotteryfunded projects. This represents a great step forward from the low morale of the ’60s and ’70s and should, provided that it continues, result in a significant improvement in the quality of the built environment. These new buildings are visually more exciting but perhaps the big issue still to be properly addressed is that of sustainability.

Another form of culture FREDERICK COOPER LLOSA, Lima

My architectural recollection of the past 25 years deals mostly with the struggle to uphold the main values of the rationality which the Modern Movement introduced in the handling of contemporary building within a country such as Peru striving to achieve economic and cultural development. This concern has led me to seek ways of processing the theoretical and professional options devised by architects and critics whom I regarded as coincidental with my own conceptions. I recall the role of Peter Rice in closing the gap between architecture and structure as particularly enlightening. Aldo Rossi’s pertinence in claiming the concomitancy between architecture, the city, history and modernity. Kenneth Frampton in illuminating the potential of rationality through the diversity of regional experience. John Hejduk in approaching architecture and poetics. Richard Rogers in extending the role of rationality into the realm of sustainability. Rafael Moneo in claiming the constant role of culture in

architectural invention. Alvaro Siza for being a constant reminder that architecture is about the joy of transposing the vernacular into fragrant spaces, shapes and materials. Renzo Piano for his structural and aesthetic convictions. Over the next 25 years I foresee a declining influence of the traditional role of architecture, as the global process of urbanization expands. The universalization and spectacular improvement of communications will undoubtedly develop exhilarating cultural forms at an unmanageable pace. I can only explain this condition as a process leading to another form of culture, an experience which I regard as comparable to that which followed the decline of the Romans, or of the Prehispanic civilizations in present-day Latin America.

Resisting conformity CHARLES JENCKS, London

Berries and Leaves by Andy Goldsworthy. February 1988.

Globalization commands RICHARD WESTON, Bristol

Globalization has been the major theme of the last 25 years: of techniques (CAD, numerical modelling of building performance); of technologies (rainscreeen cladding, structural glazing); of problems (‘sustainability’ in its manifold aspects); and of talent (architects as international superstars). In retrospect, I suspect this period may come to be seen as the apogee of the separation between design and making, building and place, that began in the Renaissance. In striking contrast, the refinement and diffusion of CADCAM technologies over the coming decades will equip architects with the tools to begin to challenge these centuries-old divisions. The most potent means of global homogenization, digital data, might yet combine with environmental imperatives to be the catalysts for the emergence of diverse new building cultures, globally aware yet locally grounded.

Composite detail of Billingsgate Market, London by Richard Rogers Partnership. Drawing by Tim Colquhoun. April 1988.

Fountains Abbey Visitor Centre, Yorkshire by Edward Cullinan Architects. Photo: Martin Charles. November 1992.

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The following predictions (illustrated below) of the next fifty years were made for Architecture 2000 and Beyond, published in the year 2000 as an update to Architecture 2000, written in 1969. They are the backdrop for more purely architectural forecasting. Most such prediction is too general to tell us anything useful about a specific field though it does put a discipline in perspective. Some things look like coming true much faster. For instance: Culture, 2015, ‘25 per cent of shopping done on the internet’ was almost true last Christmas, with ‘21 per cent’. Politics, 2012, ‘Muslim Anthrax attack on Israel/American targets’. It was not Anthrax on September 11 2001, but later. Social, 2009, ‘hydrogen fuelled cars’. They will probably come sooner. In the 1960s, when I first wrote this book, prediction was taken more seriously than today, and it was done systematically and structurally. Hence the evolutionary tree and structural diagrams. Architectural trends evolve, like species of animal, in a rich background of ecology. As in nature, variety and pluralism are keynotes. The future? It will have a continuity of past architectural species, those with

cohesion and consistency, with the addition of a few mutations and hybrids. The background of war and ecological crises will make society and architects more conservative and rulebound. Risk-aversion will dominate. Thus the role of Architectural Review and other professional magazines will be, all the more, to promote architecture as a cultural discourse resisting the ever-stronger forces of conformity, philistinism and government by fear.

Revolutionary? EVA JIRICNA, London

When I was first introduced to Peter Davey, I had a vivid image of him as a Russian Revolutionary, a Communist poster cut-out, a red star aloft in his right hand, marching forward to create a new world! Later on I discovered he was indeed a real revolutionary, an idealistic fighter, always carrying a torch to brighten up the future. What else can I say, other than that I wish him the best of luck and that he continues his journey with his passion unabated – Peter, at your age you are not going to change direction now, and thank God for that!

Part of the Jencks prediction from Architecture 2000 and Beyond

Integral part of the drama JUHA LEIVISKÄ, Helsinki

Twenty-five years is a very short timespan in architecture. The basic values and creative principles in architecture remain the same throughout the ages. I have the flaw that to be able to concentrate on my work in peace I cannot follow international architectural publications. Many of them only present the newest and most astonishing trends that lead astray especially the youth and make me all confused. The most important architectural events and ideas are born locally and individually. They are born out of the task and environment in which they are rooted in a natural way as a part of an entity, at times in an overpowering, at times in an accompanying or complementing role. Instead of emphasizing our own work we need to concentrate on whole environments. To me, architecture is creation of spatial events and processes. Architecture, like music, is experienced by moving from one space to another. There are pauses, there are highlights. One needs to create subtle yet dynamic solutions where buildings and their interiors are an integral part of the drama with the environment.

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once and future Reconsidering life ITSUKO HASEGAWA, Tokyo

Looking back on the past 25 years means thinking back to a 25-year career for me. During my trip to Europe right after graduation from college, I met Archigram in London and Hans Hollein in Vienna for the first time. Nothing but the experience told me a new wave was coming in architecture. After that, when I was working at the Kazuo Shinohara studio at Tokyo Institute of Technology, another movement of ‘Disconstruction’ by Arata Isozaki, which was started as a series of articles in a magazine, made a strong impact on me. These two deeply affected my philosophy of architecture. It was innovative enough to reset conventional fixed ideas one after another. I liked the free and pure feeling of it. I found something intriguing in architecture then. Especially graphical, enjoyable, beautiful and intense drawings by Archigram made us reconsider our life, architecture and cities as living individuals of freedom and fun. Instant-City, Living City, Walking City and Capsule Homes, symbiosis with nature showed us possibilities of designing architecture related to urban dynamism from the point of view of us as living things. Again, for me, the ’60s architectural movement, which was in the midst of my school days, could have been the most stimulating in my life.

A real flowering EDWARD CULLINAN, London

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With the overthrow of social democracy by Thatcher in 1979, the birth of monetarism and the old-fashioned Falkland War; there emerged from the backwoods various establishment figures, moaning about Modernism and tilting at concrete towers long after the last was built. And the most powerful of these was Prince

Charles whose tastes exactly reflected the tastes of his landowning class, which grew up in Georgian mansions. He made a speech in 1984 which semiclosed the doors on invention, thoughtfulness and the exercise of imagination in architecture over large areas of these islands for the next ten years. The planners’ question: ‘Would Prince Charles like this?’ became commonplace. But the Modern tradition lived on and developed and grew, mostly in other parts of Europe and in America, but here in many heads. Now we are experiencing a real flowering and development of imagination and invention in architecture. Long may it last. At least let it last for the next 25 years while the lovely concept of abstract composition can respond poetically to the demands of sustainability.

Cinema, Duluth, Georgia, USA by Richard Rauh & Associates. Photo: Peter Mauss/ESTO. February 1996.

Rationalize light

NICHOLAS GRIMSHAW, London

MAX FORDHAM, London

The last 25 years: By far the most important thing to happen in architecture in the last 25 years is that a large percentage of architects seem to have decided that form no longer needs to remotely follow function. The next 25 years: I believe that climate and environmental issues will finally start to fundamentally affect the way buildings look and the way they function. This will be inspiring.

The need for natural light will make buildings thinner so that the light can penetrate from the windows. The use of glass in buildings has to become more rational. Horizontal rooflights provide two and a half times more light than vertical windows and glass close to floor level provides very little useful light, so 100 per cent glazing for walls is not sensible. Of course, modern high-tech glass construction is so stylish that it will be a pity to see it go – unless something better turns up to replace it. That will be the innovation.

Everyone’s life CHRISTOPH INGENHOVEN, Düsseldorf

No to no poetry

PoMo’s absurdity HARRY SEIDLER, Sydney

After many years of following The Architectural Review, I believe that it continues to be about the only architectural publication that goes beyond the shallowness of other merely picture-book reviews. This is obviously due to the 25 year editorship of Peter Davey. The measure of the man during critical periods is his conviction and strength to debunk, in erudite essays, the dead-end directions embarked on and followed by particularly American publications. Thankfully he exposed ‘Post Modernism’s’ absurdity, as he did with Johnson’s Chippendale Cabinet skyscraper and Prince Charles’ espousal of Classicism as hollow pastiche. We can only hope that Peter’s leaving will encourage others to continue steering The Architectural Review into a penetrating and insightful conviction to build upon and expand the architecture of our time.

Environmental inspiration

AR Centenary issue cover designed by Michelle Ashenden, based on drawing of Inigo Jones by Muirhead Bone for The Architectural Press. May 1996.

House, Bamle, Oslo, Norway by Sverre Fehn. Photo: Jiri Havran. August 1996.

Globalization might be the most influential idea appearing in the last 25 years and we are still struggling to follow this idea with our conscious mind. There are concepts and problems all over the world, belonging to nearly everybody’s life, such as climatic change, ending resources, natural disasters, terrorism, clash of civilization, but also fusion, cross over, multi-culturalism, and there is still hope for a more peaceful future to come, although it is very difficult to see how this could happen. Why do I think that Habitat, the Club of Rome’s reports, the Kyoto and Rio de Janeiro Conferences are relevant for architects? I still hold on to an understanding of architects not being fashion designer or being mainly interested in the most fancy materials and facades. There are challenging questions and as architects we should use the next 25 years to move ourselves again into the middle of this discussion. So for me, environmentally-friendly sustainable building, housing the masses, excellent infrastructure and quality of public space is more than enough for us to cope with in the coming decades.

RAJ REWAL, New Delhi

Like many architects of my generation, I learnt the first principle of good architecture is an honest functional building, where constructivist principles are observed and the materials frankly expressed. From my own observations of traditional Indian architecture I added other attributes to honest architecture: humane values and climatic concerns (shades of Aalto). My third discovery was about architectural expression. Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel had certainly bent the principle of honest building but introduced poetic elements or to use an apt Sanskrit word imbued it with appropriate spiritual ‘Rasa’ or flavour. The correct expression for different building types is an important principle for me but hopefully remaining faithful to the ideals of honest and humane architecture. Computers and rapid advance in technology give us new tools to deal with space, light and structures. Architectural fads and trends will continue to dominate from time to time but I believe the eternal values of authentic architecture based on necessity, sense and reason without rejecting poetry of building.

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I have one hope for the future – that a new generation of photovoltaic panels can be impregnated or fused with other materials to create revolutionary buildings each of which can generate enough solar energy for its own requirements.

Shed end? SANDY & CLARE WRIGHT, London

We think the most important influences have been technical, societal and political. The development of computer programs and model-making facilities have greatly influenced architectural design. Although this has opened up fantastic new possibilities, too often there are instances in which the building becomes the model rather than the model the building. As historian Eric Hobsbawm said, the greatest change in the twentieth century was the growth of the idea of a democratic ideal; and for the postwar generation, an emphasis on the importance of the individual over the collective. These ideas have been reflected in buildings which are nonhierarchical spatially and this, with particular developments in engineering, has led to a strong strain of shed buildings, which are principally concerned with themselves and not their context. Developments in technology in the future are not only inevitable but also to be welcomed. We hope having the facility at our fingertips becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. We think architectural design is moving towards a better reflection of the complexity of society and our humanity. Interestingly, we think this shift can be seen in recent buildings by some of the original shed makers.

• The increase in collaboration between the disciplines of architecture, structure and building services, resulting in better buildings. • The huge advance in computing power enabling solutions which would have been undreamt of a few years ago (Catia and so on). • The so-called death of Cartesian grids for design – I don’t believe it! • The Millennium fund which produced a number of significant buildings.

Kyushu Railway Company poster, designed by Eiji Mitooka of Don Design Associates. May 1997.

Ideas • The development of more technically sophisticated and energy efficient glazing systems. • Advances in structural membrane technology. • Development of ETFE foils. • Advanced uses of green timber. The future • Development and acceptance of high performance lightweight ‘exotic’ materials, such as resin/carbon fibre, Airex and others to replace metals and concrete in building and bridge structures. This will come as costs come down. • An emphasis on energy conservation, both in the embodied energy in producing building materials and in the building’s use. • Strict regulations on recycling of all building materials. • Development of alternative fuel sources for vehicles such as electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells. • Advances in wind and wave energy systems. • Further advances in glass technology.

Faculty extension, Limoges, France by Massimiliano Fuksas. Photo: Philippe Ruault. October 1997.

Urban return Technical potential

TOD WILLIAMS AND BILLIE TSIEN, New York

TONY HUNT, Stroud

Events • The death of Post-Modernism and the rise of late modernist architecture in the UK.

Last quarter Computers define the image of architecture. Next quarter People will return to the cities.

British Library, London by Colin St John Wilson & Partners. Photo: Martin Charles. June 1998.

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once and future Fantastic opportunities STEFAN BEHNISCH, Stuttgart

The last quarter of the twentieth century was characterized by architectural trends of completely different quality. There have repeatedly been fin-de-siècle tendencies which have been warmly welcomed by neoconservative circles. We have experienced PostModernism, an international phenomenon, and the obstinate rigid reconstruction architecture in Berlin – originally restricted within the bounds of the city itself before proliferating into the remotest corner of the republic and generally disseminating a certain gloominess. On the other hand, there have continued to be fascinating, though often shortlived, tendencies: Metabolists, the hybrids, megastructures, Deconstructivism, and, towards the turn of the century, the beginning of new, more expressive tendencies. All of which were able to stir general enthusiasm for architecture far beyond expert circles. Of late, more attention has been paid to the issue of sustainability. Maybe it will become an integral part of our thinking, a core discipline of our planning and design work, once we start to master the subject. The structures of our cities will continue to undergo far-reaching changes as we experience the transition from the industrial through the postindustrial to the knowledge-based society. This change will leave profound marks, but without doubt also open up fantastic opportunities.

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Rectorate, Alicante University, Spain by Alvaro Siza. Photo: Duccio Malagamba. March 2000.

Parliament building, Lapland by Halvorsen & Sundby. Photo: Jaro Hollan. April 2001.

wannabes like the Chinese – fouling their nest with cars, nukes, and sprawl at truly breakneck speed – continue to mouth bromides about the environment while consuming at a rate which, should it spread to the rest of the world, will require the addition of another planet to provide enough productive surface to allow us to eat, breathe, bathe, move, and enjoy a modicum of good times. Buildings – consuming half the energy and generating half the pollution on earth – are implicated in this disaster and so are we. Waiting for a technological fix, trusting our moronic neo-liberal leadership to come up with a solution, waiting for the market to house the homeless, and thinking of all this as someone else’s problem, adds up to a formula for suicide. As does the distraction of a phony – if comforting – environmental rating system that may curb some excesses at the top end but does absolutely nothing at the scale which can save us. Although there are many rascals to be thrown out, we can only deal with impending apocalypse by changing ourselves and our piggish habits. The issue is not to transfer our know-how to everyone else but to find a way of living more like they do. Heads need to begin popping out of the sand, selfindulgent, near-criminal debates about blobs, shards, and the regulation of suburban décor must ebb, and we must begin to do with less, much less. Architects of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your Porsches, Poggenpohls and position on the wrong side of virtually every real issue of importance.

Peter principle

Mutual enrichment

MICHAEL SORKIN, New York

BING THOM, Vancouver

Is there anyone but Bush who doubts the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket? Urbanizing at the rate of a million a week, half its population already living in cities, and two billion of us mired in grinding poverty, the earth is in big trouble. Meanwhile, we first worlders and our running-dog

If one is to choose the single most impacting event of the last 25 years on architecture it would be very difficult to walk away from the tragedy of 9/11. It is a day that stopped time and forced us all to search within ourselves to find the values that motivate our actions. It brought forth the fundamental

Museum of Folk Art, New York by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Photo: Peter Mauss/ESTO. February 2002.

question of why we advance our ideas and how we should expend our energy to better the world we live in. The attention focused on how to rebuild on the WTC site became a question all architects attempted to answer to better understand themselves. Is it a place to strike fear or is it a place to make peace? The destruction of the WTC continues to remind us of our vulnerability and inadequacy in addressing the problems of our world. The next 25 years will be marked by the interpretations of this event and the way architecture works to express itself through a recovery process. Truly great architecture is achieved by mutually enriching individual and collective actions for ourselves and the planet.

Stewardship JAMES POLSHEK, New York

The most important event of the last quarter century has been your stewardship of The Architectural Review. In particular, the explorations of emerging architects, Third-World design achievements and experimental advances in environmental technology have been unique. It may well be that the inventiveness and vitality of The Architectural Review’s initiatives have inspired the work that you publish: that you have created a self-sustaining journal! The qualities of generosity, collegiality, and independence so evident in much of what appears in the AR are sadly absent on the US architectural stage. Over the past decade or so, a number of the most innovative Western European and Japanese architects have brought your pages to life here in the US – architects most certainly influenced by your reign at the magazine. The likes of Piano, Foster, de Portzamparc, Maki, Coop Himmelblau, Taniguchi, Snøhetta, Shigeru Ban, Chipperfield, Nouvel, and Rogers have creatively intervened in our relatively moribund and dollarconscious building environment. Over the next 25 years I believe

this benign ‘invasion’ will result in the elevation of US design standards, the expansion of public institutional building budgets, the emergence of a rational process for competitions and a more aggressive search for effective conservation strategies. If my optimism is warranted, Peter Davey and The Architectural Review will deserve the everlasting gratitude of all of us on this side of the Atlantic.

Mini head here

Bank, Granada, Spain by Alberto Campo Baeza. Photo: Hisao Suzuki. August 2002.

RICHARD ROGERS, London

Some of the most important architectural events of the past 25 years and for the future: • The information network which allows us to exchange ideas and receive information. • The growth of environmental responsibility. • The urban renaissance and the growth of social architectural culture. • The development of new technology and materials.

Range and scope KENNETH FRAMPTON, New York

Even though Bruno Zevi was the sole editor of the magazine Architettura for virtually half a century, 25 years is nonetheless a long time for someone to serve as the editorial point man for a leading architectural magazine, particularly in this day and age when editors come and go after a few years with distressing rapidity and when architectural editors with a discernible editorial line are few and far between. Peter Davey’s inclination was only too evident from the very beginning, dating back to that transitional moment at the end of 1980 when he was promoted from the restricted status of Executive Editor for Buildings to what was presumably the more powerful position of Managing Editor; a role he would then be destined to play for the rest of his career. His stance in this regard is already manifest in the November issue of

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ESO hotel, Atacama Desert, Chile by Auer + Weber. Photo: Roland Halbe. June 2003.

Mausoleum, Murcia, Spain by Manuel Clavel Rojo. Photo: David Frutos Ruiz. August 2004.

that year wherein he promptly reveals the two primary interests that would consistently preoccupy him throughout the next two decades; on the one hand, then as now, the much neglected civilized modernity of the north, meaning the architecture of Scandinavia in general, with a particular penchant perhaps for Norway, and on the other his constant commitment to the representation of the ‘other’ which, in the case of his last issue as building editor, focused on the Aga Khan Awards of that year with respect to which he would already display his critical discernment by regarding the famous Kuwait water towers as bordering on the flashy. By 1985, when the once luxurious partially tinted paper format of the Review had become finally curtailed, a victim surely of the perennial falling rate of profit, Peter’s editorial team, with Peter Buchanan as his deputy, entered into its stride giving appropriate attention to the maturation of European High-Tech, past and present, along with Dutch Structuralism in its prime and the long standing ‘other’ promise of the German organic tradition extending from the pre-war work of Hugo Häring to the postwar production of Behnisch & Partners, and on to Fehling and Gogel and the brilliant but still largely unappreciated Seldwyla Siedlung designed by Rolf Keller. While this is not the place to indulge in a critical résumé of the vicissitudes of the Review under Davey’s direction, one cannot help remarking on certain trends particularly as Buchanan gave way to Catherine Slessor in the second position and as the journal seemed to shift via the light neo-Finnish Constructivist line of Gullichsen, Kairamo & Vormala to the spectacular high-flying tectonics of Calatrava. The March 1995 issue gave special attention to South African architecture: a focus surely unique among Western journals and one to which Davey has returned intermittently. Apart from the ill-fated Millennium Dome and the new Tate, the year 2000 brought with it not only a new morphology, pace

Buro Happold, but also a more diverse scene in general. Through all this Peter was able to maintain the Review as the peerless magazine of record in the AngloAmerican world, one that, while global in scope, would nonetheless remain on a par with the challenging achievements of such distinguished Spanish journals as Luis Fernández-Galiano’s A&V. AR in the year 2000 also carried my millennial key note to the UIA in Beijing, not without adding to my heavy polemic a certain graphic scrambling à la mode, which I like to believe caused Peter a certain embarrassment. [It did. PD] As far as critical commitment is concerned, it is to Davey’s credit that he would steer clear of the pastiche excesses of Post-Modern stylism, being on one occasion so bold as to criticize the over celebrated guru figure of Aldo Rossi and going on towards the end of tenure to adopt an overt stance that was as categorically political as it was cultural. I am alluding to his publication of the justifiably critical reportage written by Tom Kay from the frontline city of Ramallah, in the long nightmare of the Israeli/Palestine conflict which may now, at the time of writing, have a fragile chance of being brought to an equitable resolution. I am well aware that the Review took a public beating for this audacious editorial stance and it is surely to Peter’s honour as a public intellectual that not for an instant did he deem it appropriate to back down. Thus one comes to see that the somewhat dandified, detached front of the editor was always a mask that served to conceal a critical acumen of exceptional range and scope. We shall surely miss his bloody-minded, compassionate sensitivity which is a prerequisite I would say for an editor who, in one way or another, is going to be worth his or her salt. What else can one say apart form the mandatory hail and farewell in perfectly parsed Latin? What about chapeau as they used to say laconically, now and then, on the other side of the channel?

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product review

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product review

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HOUSE AND STUDIO , NR MELBOURNE , A USTRALIA A RCHITECT DENTON CORKER MARSHALL

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Double Bass

This coastal retreat on the Bass Strait poetically responds to climate and views.

Architecture’s endless quest for ‘transparent’ buildings can simply mean excessive use of glass. This then requires ingenious design to solve problems created by the designer. In many parts of the world, sunlight, far from being the essential ingredient of a health and efficiency type of architecture, is the key problem which has to be overcome. Nor do extreme daytime temperatures imply a clement night-time environment. The Bass Strait in Australia, south of Melbourne, is a case in point. Climate comfort is more

important than universal views, and this coastal retreat, a house and studio pavilion at Cape Schanck by Denton Corker Marshall, keeps glazing to an appropriately low level. That said, the house (which is located on a steep site in the middle of a golf course) is designed so it can enjoy ocean views, but does so in the context of a ‘black box’ steel structure clad in cement sheet, with a concrete ground slab and suspended floor. It is not the black box approach which makes the house interesting, however; rather, it

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is the array of angled elements deriving from the twisting of the box tube in section. This leads to raked cladding, cranked lower windows, and a chimney which emerges from the wall at a faintly alarming angle. The desired impression was of a building which has rotated on its axis as the box lands on the site. Not just one box, but two: one sitting atop the other and peeking out through the native ti-trees, entered via a glassenclosed (but shaded) concrete stair beneath its belly. The top deck contains the living area

1 The project comprises a two-level house, courtyard and pavilion.

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with a long narrow window that frames the view along the western elevation, and cruciform columns of hot dipped galvanised steel set into the box’s volume. Living, eating and sleeping zones are located in free-standing maple timber veneer cubes within the body of the house, with the master bedroom and its bathroom separated by a concealed sliding door.

Glass ends in the house provide vistas to the landscape, and to the new studio across the northfacing courtyard separating the two buildings. The studio entrance is via glass sliding doors at either end of the box, with the interior space marked by an aluminium cube containing storage, kitchenette and bathroom. In all, a variety of materials, deployed to environmental

and/or aesthetic advantage, has resulted in a piece of architecture where client delight and climatic considerations have been successfully reconciled. PAUL FINCH Architects Denton Corker Marshall, Melbourne Structural engineer Burns Hamilton + Partners Photographs Shannon McGrath

1 master bedroom 2 ensuite bathroom 3 kitchen 4 dining room 5 living room 6 courtyard 7 studio 8 bedroom 9 laundry

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

2 The rectangular structures of house and studio twist in section, producing a roofline that follows the land to meet local planning requirements. 3, 4, 5 Interior views of living space, show internal timber cubes. 6 From studio looking back to house.

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cross section: one house ‘box’ sits on another

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Solar umbrella

Lawrence Scarpa’s own family house in Venice Beach is an imaginative and ecologically aware response to the balmy Californian climate.

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(warmed by its purple acrylic lining) and doubling as a heat chimney when the skylight is opened. Pocketing glass sliders open the living room to the front, and the master bedroom opens to a terrace, bringing the outdoors in. The notion of indoor-outdoor living in southern California was pioneered by immigrants from cold climates, such as the Greene brothers of Cincinnati and Schindler and Neutra from Vienna. Scarpa had the opposite experience: ‘I grew up in Florida,

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WOODLAWN AVENUE

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PISANI PLACE

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FAMILY HOUSE , V ENICE , C ALIFORNIA , USA A RCHITECT PUGH + SCARPA

Frugality and sustainability are the hallmarks of Pugh + Scarpa’s practice, and Lawrence Scarpa’s family house is an imaginative manifestation of those principles. Despite its imposing facade, it is an addition: a spacious living area grafted onto the rear of a vintage 60sqm bungalow, and an upstairs master suite cantilevered back without touching the roof of the old building, so avoiding the need to bring the old structure up to code. A tilt-up concrete shear wall braces a wood-frame structure, and a steel frame supports the cantilever. All the other materials are recycled: rusted cold-rolled steel for the front fence and surface cladding, cherry wood and chipboard, homosote (pulped newsprint) and a translucent screen of plastic pellets used to clean up oil spills. Ninety solar panels wrap the south side and canopy the bedroom terrace, blocking the sun and generating an energy credit. The house is cooled by cross ventilation, and all rainwater is retained on site. A narrow, wedge-shaped lantern rises above the kitchen, pulling in natural light

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where it is miserably hot and humid, and you get sweaty walking from your house to the car. The ocean breezes in Venice make this the best climate on the planet, and it’s a crime not to take advantage of it. Green architecture is an easy, commonsense thing to do – we have an in-house electrical/ mechanical engineer and typically make our buildings 50 per cent more energy efﬁcient than more conventional solutions.’ Like many architects, Scarpa launched his practice with 1 Partly wrapped in a skin of photovoltaic panels, the house reads as series of floating planes. 2 The suburban Californian context. The new house is built to the rear of an existing vintage bungalow. 3 Indoor outdoor living is ideally suited to the Californian climate, though it was originally pioneered by immigrants from colder latitudes.

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kitchen remodels and residential additions and, when he and his wife moved into a run-down 1923 cottage on a through lot, they did an inexpensive remodel for themselves. The long back yard prompted thoughts of expansion and the arrival of their ﬁrst child, ﬁve years ago, made that dream a necessity. The 130sqm addition was done on a tight budget within a restrictive zoning envelope. It was important not to overwhelm the cottages on either side, so the steel fence reduces the impact of the two-storey structure. From the front you can look through the house to the street on the far side, and glimpse treetops through the glass in the bedroom. Openness and transparency dematerialise the gritty steel and concrete, and a brise-soleil of bristles ﬁlters the light. Scarpa calls it the world’s largest scrubbing brush. The original facade (now the rear) has been abstracted. A steelframed glass box pushes forward beneath an open steel canopy, and the same material is employed for the car port and entry door. Leaves from a eucalyptus, planted by the architect ﬁve years before and sacriﬁced for the addition, were laid in the concrete forms and pattern the surface of the wall beside the entry. A low wall that surrounds the plunge pool serves as a bench for entertaining, as does the edge of the sunken living room. Almost

roof plan

everything in this inventive house does double duty. The entry to a guest bathroom and lavatory is concealed behind a hinged section of the bookcase that lines one wall. Concrete steps with a cantilevered handrail lead to a springy mesh staircase supported on a steel tube of the same rusted steel, which runs up the inner wall, hovering over a massive built-in sofa. The interior is a collage of textures and tones, from the patinated steel panels around the hearth to the soft suede ﬁnish of the homosote. A storage wall of greygreen mdf is a backdrop for the parents’ bed, which opens onto an unenclosed bathing area. Though very different from its neighbours, the house has a strong sense of place.Venice, conceived a century ago as a picturesque pastiche of La Serenissima, became a tough, blue collar neighbourhood, known more for oil, bikers, and the Beats, than for its few surviving canals. Crime and gentriﬁcation co-exist in one of the few districts of West LA that has not succumbed to the suffocating quest for respectability, and vigilante committees intent on imposing a sterile conformity of taste.Venice is getting pricey but it retains its edge, and Scarpa has made an important contribution to its diversity. MICHAEL WEBB Architect Pugh + Scarpa, Santa Monica Photographs Marvin Rand

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living room dining kitchen bedroom study bathroom closet pond bamboo planter laundry master bedroom master bathroom terrace skylight photovoltaic roof panels roof

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4 Master bedroom. 5 Dining area. Interiors are characterised by spatial fluidity and an animated collage of textures and tones. 6 Living room. 7 Vertiginous steel mesh staircase. 8 Roof terrace.

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PARADISE FOUND This tourist resort in Mozambique aims to minimise its impact on the local ecology. Tourism is now the world’s biggest industry and one of the most rapacious in terms of development, particularly along coastlines. For many of the world’s poorer coastal areas, tourism represents a crucial impulse for economic development, but often at immense cost to the environment and local communities. If we really cared about the planet we wouldn’t go anywhere, but in our First World hunger for new experiences, few places are off limits. As one of the world’s poorest countries and still recovering from a devastating civil war, Mozambique is not an obvious tourist destination. But its

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T OURIST RESORT , C ABO DELGADO , M OZAMBIQUE A RCHITECT C ULLUM AND NIGHTINGALE

paradisiacal landscape and climate still lure more intrepid travellers. The trick is to make tourism a catalyst for sustainable development and provide models that can be fruitfully emulated as the country slowly recovers its economic and social equilibrium. In the northern province of Cabo Delgado, British architects Hugh Cullum and Richard Nightingale have just completed a new tourist resort which attempts to minimise its impact on the local ecology and have sustainable, long-term beneﬁts for the local community. Cullum and Nightingale have worked in Africa before, but the challenges of designing the British Embassy in Nairobi (AR July 1997)

were somewhat different to this latest project. Set on a picture perfect tropical coastline of palm-fringed beaches, Guludo eco-resort lies in the Quirimbas National Park, a maritime and wildlife conservation area run as a collaborative project between the World Wildlife Fund and the Mozambican government. The project aims to promote the area’s sustainable development and involved extensive consultations with the community. Development is encouraged in various ways, initially through employing local labour for the construction of the resort buildings and the use of locally sourced materials. Local people will be trained to help run

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1, 2 Timber-framed communal buildings touch the ground lightly. 3 Vernacular archetypes are sensitively reinterpreted. 4 Lavatory unit. 5, 6 Construction details.

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beach guest bandas dining area diving centre reception tower amenity building stores entrance courtyard staff area staff bandas

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the resort and part of its proﬁts will be reinvested in community development projects. The resort has a commitment to buy locally grown produce and promote small-scale craft enterprises. Cullum and Nightingale reinterpret local vernacular traditions by developing modest, low energy, low maintenance structures that touch the ground lightly. The resort is conceived as small-scale buildings strung out along a path in the manner of a traditional village. At its heart is a central hub with facilities for eating, cooking, lounging and teaching loosely arranged round a courtyard. Guests are housed in 12 independent bandas facing the beach. Each banda consists of a double room opening onto a shaded verandah overlooking the

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typical banda plan (scale approx 1:200)

sea, with washing facilities in an enclosed courtyard to the rear. Staff are housed in a secondary cluster of bandas set back from the beachfront. Drawing extensively on local materials and construction techniques, building structures are generally timber framed with inﬁll panels of mud, masonry or woven matting. Roofs are thatched with grass or makuti, coconut palm thatching panels. Non-ferrous jointing methods include simple timber pegs and cord or rope bindings. Imported components are kept to a minimum and wherever possible are long life and locally maintainable. Energy use is carefully considered, with fossil fuels minimised. The form of the architecture exploits passive methods of cooling through

shading, thermal mass, stack effect ventilation and prevailing winds. Solar energy is used to generate electricity through photovoltaic arrays, and to heat water by direct radiation. Human waste is recycled in waterless lavatory units to provide dry compost for fertiliser. With its array of sheltering thatched roofs, the little colony evokes archetypes of the primitive hut or desert island shelter (albeit reinterpreted for the modern tourist), but the buildings have a scale, dignity and materiality appropriate to their setting. If only everything built for tourists could be so physically and culturally tactful. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect Cullum and Nightingale Architects, London Photographs Richard Nightingale

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The young French partnership of Florence Lipsky and Pascal Rollet has a reputation for formally sparse but technically and materially inventive buildings that make the most of limited programmes and budgets. Though the pair favour the aesthetic edginess and functional economy of raw or industrial materials, they generally play it straight with modular Miesian structures and disciplined spatial arrangements. Their latest building is a science library for the University of Orleans. Founded in 1961 and now with some 5000 students, the university occupies a peripheral campus sward at some remove from the city centre, linked by a tram line that runs on a north-south axis across town. The site for the library is next to the tram line, in front of one of the four stations that serves the campus. Emerging from a boskily pastoral setting, the building is a strong, almost graphic presence in the landscape. The taut orthogonality of its form, a long, three-storey box terminated by a full-height colonnade, suggests a scientiﬁc triumph of the rational over the romantic, but it has a more quixotic side in its appropriation of materials, handling of light and approach to energy use and environmental control. The tall concrete colonnade, like a scaled down version of Foster’s Carré d’Art museum, Nîmes (AR July 1993), is a welcoming gesture that celebrates and civilises arrival, while emphasising a route to the lake. A small glass box, which also acts as an informal exhibition space, forms a decompression zone between the blare of the outside world and the

SCIENCE LESSON Veiled in a polycarbonate skin, this science library exploits site, light and materials in the quiet pursuit of passive environmental control.

1 The translucent volume of the new library emerges from its wooded campus setting. 2 A tall colonnade creates a space for social interaction.

U NIVERSITY LIBRARY , O RLEANS , F RANCE A RCHITECT LIPSKY + ROLLET

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3 cross section 3 The colonnade marks the entrance. 4 The site lies next to a tram line linking the campus with Orleans city centre. 5 Windows puncture the translucent polycarbonate skin; glare control is provided by vertical brise soleil.

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY , ORLEANS , F RANCE ARCHITECT LIPSKY + ROLLET long section

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ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

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colonnade entrance hall exhibition space reception reading room book box study zones ofﬁces group work spaces multimedia workshop computer room kitchen research room

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silent inner sanctum of the reading room. Areas of clear glazing are punched apparently at random into the translucent polycarbonate skin frame and deﬁne views of the landscape from inside at study table height, so students can drift off in contemplative reveries. In operational terms, the modern university library is less concerned with the inducement of reverie and more with the efﬁcient storage and retrieval of information, in both paper and digital formats.Yet the process of information withdrawal, consultation and return continues to underpin and structure the library as a building type. Lipksy + Rollet articulate this process through a central ‘book box’, a dense core of books surrounded by more ﬂuid study zones arranged round the periphery. The main reading room is a dramatic triple-height space, overlooked and surveyed by perimeter study zones on the ﬂoor above, so users can inhabit a more intimate enclave, yet be aware of wider goings on. The monumental book box is clad in Fincof panels (more commonly employed for concrete formwork), a type of Finnish birch plywood stained with dark phenolic resin. The panels evoke the warm leather of traditional bookbinding and study armchairs but this is faux luxury. The budget necessitated an imaginatively frugal approach to materials, as manifest by the double skin of polycarbonate used to clad the building which combines good insulation levels with light diffusing qualities, so the reading room seems wrapped in a rice paper screen, with readers silhouetted against its translucent walls. South and east facades have vertical, manually operable white polycarbonate louvres to provide additional glare control. Depending on the sun angle and building users, the vertical brise soleil create a changing pattern on the facades. Though France is not as advanced as Germany in legislating for efﬁcient energy use, the need to keep capital and running costs down proved an important incentive, giving rise to an integrated system of low key, passive environmental control techniques that minimise mechanical systems. The building is naturally ventilated, with fresh air warming and rising up through the main reading room through the stack effect and expelled through vents in the roof. In winter, the main gas-ﬁred heating system of water pipes in the ground ﬂoor slab is supplemented by a network of local radiators for smaller cellular spaces. All this is achieved in an undemonstrative yet thoughtful way that chimes with the wider architectural intentions. Without succumbing entirely to the lure of scientiﬁc rationalism, Lipsky + Rollet manage to make complex things look elegantly simple and obvious. This is science with soul. C. S.

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7 6 Study zones on the perimeter. 7 The monumental book box at the heart of the library clad in plywood panels stained with phenolic resin. 8 Light diffuses softly through the polycarbonate skin while panels of clear glazing frame external views at study table height.

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Architect Lipksy + Rollet, Paris Photographs Paul Raftery/VIEW

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSE , C LONAKILTY , COUNTY C ORK , I RELAND A RCHITECT NIALL M CLAUGHLIN

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The architect for this project, Niall McLaughlin, was given the challenge of producing a building that would match the striking beauty of its site, at Clonakilty, County Cork, on the west coast of Ireland. In their project description, the practice makes reference to the ‘beautiful shards of metamorphic rock that finger out to the sea from the base of the small cliffs’; the new building

element of the project, which adds to the conversion of a boathouse and the coastguard’s cottage, produces a built shard of its own, distinctive but responsive to the geological forms in which it sits. The conversion elements of the project are simple and effective, providing a master bedroom and bathroom in the cottage, and guest rooms in the boathouse. The new extension

for living/dining is reached via a glazed cloister, the whole based round a quiet courtyard. The experience of each element of the design, from arrival to sitting at the dining table, is a journey in miniature, with vistas of sea and coast powerful, but not ubiquitous, and complemented by domestic interior views. The temptation to provide maximum views from all points at all times has been wisely

View point Niall McLaughlin’s house conversion and addition respect and enrich their coastal environment.

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1 Long elevation borders a courtyard space. 2 The wind protected site. 3 Light was a key design prompt.

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resisted, and the cliché of the big picture window in the extension has also been avoided, in favour of a pair of separated framed views, one from the living area and one from the dining area immediately next

to the courtyard. Responding to light has been a successful driver for the project, given that the relatively sheltered location of the existing buildings, on a south-east facing site, has resulted in a lack of sunlight.

As the architect puts it, ‘We have designed the extension to capture the last scraps of sun as it declines behind the hill in the early evening’. The new extension more than makes up for this, producing a totality in which comfort, aspect, light and geographical drama are synthesised to great effect. This is an architectural project where success has been achieved by treating each potential difficulty as a constructive opportunity. Rather than a series of tactical responses, which end up compromising the diagram of framed views and calculated routes, the building has a feeling of serenity and completeness that belie the design effort required to achieve such an outcome. PAUL FINCH

4 View sharing dining space. 5 The cottage contains master bedroom and bathroom. 6 Cottage interior. 7 The area looking back to the kitchen. 8 Separation of function avoids a picture window cliché.

Architect Niall McLaughlin Structural engineer Packman Lucas Photographs Niall McLaughlin and Nicholas Kane

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Shingle church in Kärsämäki by Anssi Lassila: a log-built core encased by a black, tarred shingle clad cloak.

Interior restoration of St Olaf ’s Church,Tyrvää by Ulla Rahola replaces the wooden interior lost in a ﬁre in 1997.

GOOD WOOD The exhibition From Wood to Architecture at The Museum of Finnish Architecture presents 17 recent buildings in Finland, many by young Finnish architects unknown in the international architectural arena.

Wood is the oldest building material known to man – the earliest known wooden artefacts date back some 14 000 years. As two thirds of Finland is covered by forests, it is hardly surprising that timber is the national building material. And as climate change becomes

more of an issue, builders are increasingly encouraged to build more ecologically. Wood, a renewable and natural material, has an important role to play with respect to climate change policy and programmes, since its use helps reduce greenhouse gases: the carbon stored in wooden buildings is kept out of the atmosphere. A well designed, well kept timber building lasts hundreds of years and if it needs to be demolished the wood components can be recycled and reused. Although its use as a structural and cladding material in Finnish construction has declined considerably over the last forty years, wood is now experiencing a revival, with new opportunities for structural use and surface treatment. This is reflected in the From Wood to Architecture exhibition in Helsinki. The buildings featured employ wood in a variety of ways, traditional and innovative, painted and natural, from glued timber and laminates to solid logwork, but always with inherent elegance and clean lines. From Wood to Architecture is housed in one large room moderated by a dividing curtain of hanging planks of wood that you can touch and smell (and, if so inclined, swing) as you work your way round the numerous large-scale photographs, explanatory texts and models. The buildings exhibited include Heikkinen & Komonen’s cultural centre in Kuhmo which has an asymmetrically sloping turf roof growing heather and lingonberry, the Kärsämäki shingle church by Anssi Lassila, built using eighteenth-century methods, a luminous chapel in Turku by Matti Sanaksenaho with a timber structure

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clad in copper, and the lookout tower in Helsinki by Ville Hara composed of a strong but light meshed shell structure of timber strips (AR December 2003). There are also several villas in coastal or lakefront settings, and an annex for the University of Oulu Department of Architecture by Claudia Auer and Niklas Sandås. Among the larger projects are the Finnish Forest Research Institute in Joensuu, which is the biggest office building in Finland, and the Sibelius Concert Hall in Lahti by Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka, both of which have loadbearing timber structures. Timber is an excellent material for long-span structures: the tensile strength of birch compared to its mass is higher than that of ordinary steel and far superior to concrete. Appropriately, one of Finland’s bestknown wooden buildings is on show in the next room. The exhibition Returning Home – Sibelius’s Ainola (with the same exhibition dates) features Ainola, an artist’s villa built for the composer Jean Sibelius in 1904 by his friend Lars Sonck, who, like Sibelius, played a leading role in the development of Finnish National Romanticism. JULIA DAWSON From Wood to Architecture until 4 September 2005, Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, Finland. www.mfa.fi Photographs (clockwise from top left): Jussi Tiainen, Jussi Tiainen, Matti Sanaksenaho and Kimmo Räisänen.

The sharply curved stair in a house in Espoo by Jyrki Tasa: a three-storey work of art of steel and timber.

Chapel, Turku by Matti Sanaksenaho, the copper-clad structure will form a green patina to blend with trees.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSE , T OKYO A RCHITECT J UN A OKI

There is a tendency among European architects to experiment with varying silhouettes. In the UK one thinks of the emerging work of Caruso St John and Sergison Bates, while more widely across continental Europe buildings by Studio Granda (AR July 1992), Gigon + Guyer (AR June 2004), and Herzog & de Meuron (AR August 2003) have derived new, distinctive and highly speciﬁc forms that have avoided the lure of bling and blob. Since the mid 1990s, in opposition to High Tech and POMO, traditional pitch roof forms and restrained Swiss boxes began to morph in response to site and programme. Articulated in detail with intricate tectonics, and through formal distortion – torsion and twists, architectural nip and tuck – typologies slowly evolved. While space and material

remained key considerations, it was the search for form that prevailed as the main concern, and with a pulled vector here, an elongated ridge there, exaggerated forms emerged. Strangely familiar, yet dramatically new, a form of abstract postmodernism brought a new play on architectural simile – ‘it’s like a barn, an oast house, but with a twist’. In Japan, a similar tendency is emerging. With earthquake regulations enforcing a minimum 500mm gap between adjacent properties, densely packed urban neighbourhoods have made the detached home one of the country’s most widespread architectural types, considered by many architects to be one of Japan’s cultural treasures. So it is no surprise that an emerging generation of architects is

bringing new interest to this area of specialism, with architects such as Yoshiharu Tsukamoto carrying out extensive research into the rhetoric and spatial composition of postwar housing. In this ﬁeld, Jun Aoki is also a serious contributor, shown here with G House, a contemporary abstraction of a traditional timber-framed pitched-roof detached house. Situated in a residential district of central Tokyo, G House is a rendered house set on top of a reinforcedconcrete podium. With internal spaces conforming to this formal division, living, dining and entertaining spaces are contained within the concrete podium, with attic bedrooms above. With no distinction between wall and roof, the distorted attic form could certainly be described as a contrived, compelling object,

location plan (scale 1:600)

ATTIC LIGHT Through the careful distortion of familiar forms, Jun Aoki’s latest Tokyo house makes the ordinary extraordinary.

1 Jun Aoki’s G House comprises a timber-framed attic set above a concrete plinth. 2 Internally the attic has a complex arrangement of interlocking spaces, lit by an irregular arrangement of skylights.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 3 The central atrium connects living rooms with the mezzanine study, from where the uppermost loftlike bedroom is accessed via stair. Direct and reflected light plays on the attic’s angular surfaces.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 4 The uppermost bedroom sits at the apex of the attic. 5 Where timber meets concrete, an interstitial void is expressed as a continuous datum. 6 Oblique views from the mezzanine study connect spaces via the atrium screen. 7 With the double-height atrium and mezzanine adjacent to one another, the full height of the lofty attic form is exploited to maximum effect.

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(see Peter Buchanan, AR August 2005), not dissimilar in form to Prada’s angular prism (AR August 2003). Here, however, justiﬁcation for the derivation of form is attributed to traditional formal types and to speciﬁc site constraints, with the subtle inﬂections in plan reﬂecting the tapering plot, and a recognition of adjacent building heights producing dramatic distortions in elevation. Furthermore, adhering to good old-fashioned Modernist truth-to-form, the internal volume reﬂects the external form, with lofty voids, passageways and bedrooms creating a complex series of interlocking spaces. The spatial complexity resonates externally, with an apparently random arrangement of timber sash windows that sit proud of the rendered surface, creating a pattern that subverts any recognition of ﬂoor levels, shifts our perception of scale, and

increases the form’s sculptural signiﬁcance. The resultant form is bold and distinctive and is further modelled by a re-entrant corner cutout, set directly above the sunken entrance court. Internally the passage of light has been carefully orchestrated with the attic form serving as an enormous skylight for the podium beneath. Two voids help achieve this; a central doubleheight atrium that serves as the focus of the house connecting living spaces with a mezzanine work study, and more curiously a horizontal void, 770mm high, that articulates the structural division between concrete basement and timber frame; a continuously expressed interstitial datum that lies coincident with the re-entrant cutout. Light ﬁlls the spaces, and set against the cool interiors that are dominated by white walls, timber sofﬁts and concrete structure, Aoki’s interest in decorative

ornamentation (most overtly expressed in his work for Louis Vuitton, AR November 2004) is also evident, demonstrating some of his more quirky inﬂuences. These include the use of silk and lace in bedroom curtains, traditionally used to make kimonos, and ﬂock wallpaper, as featured in George Cukor’s 1964 ﬁlm My Fair Lady; the wallpaper being applied with restraint to feature walls in the living room, easily changeable, he explains, as tastes change. Built to a high speciﬁcation, the budget of this house represented an equal split between land and construction, with the relatively high construction costs funding the big concrete basement, which has a large cellar and ﬁne ﬁnishes throughout. ROB GREGORY

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Site area 106.75sqm Floor area 154.98sqm Architect Jun Aoki (Tokyo?) Photographs Edmund Sumner/VIEW

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) HOUSE , C HITA , A ICHI ARCHITECT POWER UNIT STUDIO

In the somewhat culturally starved region of Nagoya City – the venue for this year’s World Expo (AR June 2005) – a young couple’s anti-suburban house from maverick designers Power Unit Studio battles against lazily packaged homogeneous architecture. Unconventionality does not have to lead to brashness, however. Suprisingly modest, the house reveals little from the street. It is not until you enter that its full force is deployed,

dramatically opening out into an expansive living room that follows the site’s topographical slope. A steep concrete floor leads directly to the back of the house, before cantilevering out into the garden, overlooking the forest beyond. Privacy is maximised, curtains and blinds are put away, and occupants exist in their own world behind gravity-defying concrete blinkers that screen unsightly views. As thin as they are, the angular screens give the impression of a

house that is curiously buoyant with no visible means of support. This visual precariousness is further heightened by the kitchen hovering on one side, the bathroom floating off on the other, and the studio hanging over the living room. A large glass screen in the studio offers a vantage point for observing the comings and goings below, adding a curious contour to the house. It is no surprise that children have been discovered playing war games in the forest, 1 Blue sky thinking: The Y House, where the imagination can take off, and the only real question is, why not?

LAUNCH PAD Standing defiantly on a suburban hilltop, the Y House declares war on conventionality.

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using the house as their enemy headquarters. You don’t need childish make-believe, however, to see the space as something other than a house, be it an army HQ, astronomical research laboratory, or aircraft carrier. Whatever it is, as the architect explains, it was always intended for a family, with the studio reserved for children. Despite the intention, less child-friendly features proliferate, not least the balcony edge and sharp corners, but also a large rectangular hole

strategically inserted in the study to bring light to the basement area below. With a 10 metre drop, enough to make cautious adults weak at the knees, it is hoped that children growing up in this house will be smarter and more agile. In concept both daring and playful, the couple engaged fully with the architect and his construction team during the fabrication of the house, all responding well to a difficult job. Minor defects in the floor required some making good,

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although the imperfections and idiosyncrasies ultimately give the house more character. This is not a place to interrogate each and every detail; it is instead a place in which to lose yourself, and to let your imagination take off, sitting on the balcony edge gazing into the forest beyond. Site area 324.73sqm Built area 124.47sqm Floor area 136.29sqm Architect Power Unit Studio, Tokyo Photographs Edmund Sumner/VIEW

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2 Defying convention and gravity, behind the modest street facade, forms become more expressive. 3 The main living space is at the centre of the spatial composition. 4 Concrete blinkers provide privacy. 5 The entrance level studio/bedroom overlooks the living space to the left, the garden to the right, and gives (assisted) access to an upper terrace.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) The only non-Japanese architect in this issue, John Pawson cultivates a formal and material reﬁnement that has obvious Oriental afﬁnities, so this commission for a house in Tokyo is especially intriguing. Having lived in Japan, Pawson has some understanding of its culture, and has designed a couple of retail schemes. This, however, is his ﬁrst residential project and presented a different sort of challenge in its intimate scale, awkward site conditions and the integration of traditional and modern aspects of Japanese domestic life. The clients are a middle-aged couple with no children who had acquired a small piece of land in Setagaya, a suburban district to the south-east of the sprawling Tokyo metropolis. The couple are keen cooks and had eagerly devoured Living and Eating, Pawson’s evangelical paean to good food

and the minimum lifestyle. Seduced by his architecture, especially his own house in London’s Notting Hill (AR May 2000), they simply cold called the ofﬁce and asked if he could design something for them. The outcome is an elegantly impassive two-storey box that though it turns its back on its surroundings, conceals a tranquil, sensuous inner realm. Made of concrete which is then lightly rendered and painted, the box has a weighty, casket-like quality, its sides pierced by the barest handful of glazed incisions. Internal organisation aims both to structure and celebrate domestic life while editing out extraneous distractions. Spaces for cooking, dining and relaxing are arranged in distinct yet ﬂuid zones at ground level, with sleeping, washing and dressing quarters above, linked by a single ﬂight of stairs.

A long low wall ﬂanking an adjacent site draws you in to the entrance at the south-west corner. Though currently vacant, the neighbouring site is due to be developed, and Pawson’s response to this uncertainty is to turn the house in on itself. A secluded internal courtyard planted with a solitary Japanese maple forms the dwelling’s focus and fulcrum. The main living quarters face on to this courtyard as does a tea ceremony room, with traditional tatami mat ﬂoor, that also functions as a guest bedroom. Boundaries between external and internal spaces are consciously blurred through familiar Pawson optical illusions – diaphanous planes of full-height glazing appear to dissolve walls and a stone workbench seamlessly extends the length of the house into the courtyard.

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1 The plot of land in front of the house will eventually be built on, so Pawson’s approach is one of tactical hermeticism. 2 The pristine box poised in typically dissolute urban surroundings.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) 1 entrance 2 kitchen 3 dining 4 living 5 tea ceremony room 6 courtyard 7 bedroom 8 dressing area 9 terrace 10 bathroom

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3 A single flight of stairs links the two floors. 4 The living area dissolves into the courtyard.

5 Characteristic domestic asceticism from Pawson. 6 Bathroom overlooking the focal courtyard.

In scale the courtyard is perhaps more Mediterranean than Japanese, but nonetheless its double height helps to ﬁlter out nondescript surroundings and the idea of perceiving nature through the meticulous framing of individual elements – an expanse of sky, the branches of a tree – is very particular to Japan. Windows set up and deﬁne views, but those on the long south side, which will be hemmed in by as yet unbuilt new houses, are inﬁlled with translucent glass to preserve privacy. As with all Pawson’s architecture, the subtle play of light and a limited palette of materials – plaster, concrete, limestone, timber and glass – tempers the formal rigour. The challenges of building on such a constricted site aptly illustrate the architectural and economic dynamics of the Japanese urban condition. Astronomical land values (in this case the site cost twice as much as the house) and demanding

building regulations generate an elaborate gavotte of compromise and deference (both to neighbours and wider authority) that often serves to discourage creative thinking. Clearly inﬂected by the more profound nuances of Japanese tradition, Pawson’s spirit of sensuous rationalism meets such pragmatic challenges head on. The house has a glacial composure and otherworldly beauty that recalls (if not too much of an Oriental cliché) the poise and grace of a classical geisha carefully settling herself down between a couple of slightly dissolute salarymen for an evening’s chaste entertainment. Though these enigmatic creatures may draw stares, they are never returned; so it is with this house. CATHERINE SLESSOR

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) H OUSE EXTENSION , LONDON ARCHITECT ALISON B ROOKS ASSOCIATES

1 The new glass and patinated brass pavilion tactfully extends an existing Victorian house.

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Delicate planes of patinated brass fold around this imaginative extension to a house in south London.

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Trinity Road in south London is a typical leafy Victorian suburb. Stolid brick houses with bay windows and big gardens exude an air of decorousness and prosperity. Yet even in a sleepy conservation area the urge to remodel is quite common. Here, however, Alison Brooks attempts something rather different. Commissioned to extend a Victorian house as part of a larger remodelling, she saw it as a chance to experiment, both with form and materials. More speciﬁcally, it intensiﬁes her investigations into the use of metal that began when she worked with Ron Arad in the early ’90s, and the idea of continuity – manipulating a single architectural material to perform a multitude of functions, so that spaces are ‘wrapped’ and tend to de-materialise. The extension opens up the house to rear, consolidating its relationship with the large garden. Brooks was adamant that the new architecture should not compete with the robust character of the existing Victoriana, so her tactic is to make the addition as intangible and ethereal as possible. But the outcome is not the stereotypical glass box. Instead, lightness is expressed through a single planar skin of patinated brass that is apparently cut and folded to form walls, roof, columns and benches. The exquisitely thin brass planes enclose a new kitchen, dining room and external terrace, as well as framing and ﬁltering views to the garden beyond. Though the crisp, orthogonal geometry was derived from simply folding a piece of cardboard, the actual construction was inevitably more complex and crafted. The richly patinated brass panels are, in fact, supported by a slim steel structure. Cor-ten was initially considered for the cladding, but it tends to bleed and stain before the coating of rust ﬁnally stabilises. By contrast, the patination of brass is gentler and its effects can be more closely controlled. Though not commonly used as a cladding material, brass is also harder (stiffer) than its closest relative copper, and more economical. Brooks likens the construction process to the fabrication of a large-scale piece of jewellery. The 3mm thin sheets of raw brass

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2 The pavilion is conceived as a series of thin folded planes. 3 Pared down architectural language does not attempt to compete with original house. 4 Views through to garden are framed and defined. 5 Mounted on a slim steel substructure, the brass planes are only 60mm thick. 2

were cut and folded in a specialist metal fabrication workshop and temporarily assembled on site. The panels were then dismantled and removed to be patinated by hand.Varying the effects of acid and heat generates different hues, from pale blue to deep turquoise, but the patina also responds to the daily effects of the weather, so the panels have a genuinely chameleon-like quality. Finally, the patinated pieces were carefully reassembled. Full-height glazing adds to the sense of lightness and seamlessness and the composition is anchored by charcoal grey porcelain ﬂoor tiles.

Thinness is another crucial aspect of this language of elegant abstraction. The brass panel constructions are only 60mm thick and, as the pavilion is seen from the upper storeys of the house, its roof is also a rigorously pared down structure, with an upstand reduced to 50mm from the more usual 150mm. Though the pavilion is a meticulously crafted oneoff, Brooks sees it as a useful prototype which feeds into an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery. The practice is working on a major housing development

in Cambridge and plans to incorporate off-the-peg brass cladding panels (developed by copper specialists KME) in a sixstorey apartment block. In an era besotted by conspicuous gestures, it is especially pleasing to see humble or disregarded materials used imaginatively. Brooks’ architecture has always reﬂected a concern for making and materials, and her latest project consolidates this lineage. CATHERINE SLESSOR Architect Alison Brooks Associates, London Metal fabrication John Desmond Photographs Dennis Gilbert/VIEW

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1 Shock of the new. 2 The cramped corner site. 3 Cor-ten panels are only 4mm thick. 4 The new block thrives on contrast.

THE JOY OF RUST Clad in a coarse carapace of rusted steel, this housing block is a startling urban presence.

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Ever since John Winter audaciously clad his seminal Highgate house in a skin of weathering steel back in 1969, Cor-ten’s quasi industrial aesthetic of shipyard and factory ﬂoor has become globally ubiquitous. According to Neil Jackson, in his entertaining study of the genre in The Modern Steel House, it took seven years for Winter’s little building to slowly acquire the coveted purplish-brown patina of worn-out boiler plating. Now pre-weathered Cor-ten clads the world, from police stations

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and parking lots to OMA’s Las Vegas Guggenheim (June 2002). Yet it never quite loses its quality of otherness, as demonstrated by its use in this recent Brussels apartment block. Here the ‘instant’ patina of age and distress still provides a bracing shock of the new and unusual amid wedding cake historicism. The building lies in Schaerbeek, to the north-east of Brussels city centre, a district populated by many Turkish immigrant families. It occupies a compact, chunky wedge that turns a corner

between Avenue de la Reine and Place Liedts. Cars and trams surge past the prow-like site which is anchored between a couple of existing muscular apartment blocks. To the spirit, if not the letter, architect Mario Garzaniti follows the familiar template of the continental walk-up tenement, though the proportions and internal arrangements are more generous and imaginative than might normally be expected. Two duplex apartments are stacked above a shop at ground level, the ﬂoors linked by a narrow

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communal staircase inserted into an intermediate slot between the new and old buildings. Despite being logements sociaux, the duplexes are quite inventive spatially, making the most of the awkward, wedge-shaped plot. The top ﬂoor ﬂat even has a modish sleeping loft overlooking the living space below. But the most striking aspect of the project is the rusting metal carapace that envelops the building in a coarse caress, as if the hull of an ageing supertanker had somehow careered into the block. Yet the monolithic appearance is slightly deceptive; the Cor-ten panels are only a thin outer skin (a mere 4mm thick) riveted to stainless-steel omega proﬁles attached to the concrete walls. Flexible bands prevent the risk of galvanic coupling (where one type of metal encourages the rapid corrosion of another) that can occur when Cor-ten and stainless steel come into contact. Slight disparities in the ochre tones of the panels add a sense of patchwork variety and animation to the overall composition. Cor-ten shutters are incorporated into the facade, ﬁltering light through vertical slits in the manner of a modern mashrabiya. When closed, the shutters lie ﬂush with the panels, giving the block an unsettlingly seamless, hermetic quality. Clearly this is a building that thrives on contrast (modern Corten and traditional wedding cake) enhanced by the jolting surprise of seeing so visually and culturally challenging a material employed on such an ambitious scale. Yet it is more than just a skin, attested by the generous proportions of the apartments and the way in which light animates the interiors. The gritty boiler plating conceals a sensitive soul. C. S.

5 Facade detail. 6 Light filters through the perforated shutters. 7 Duplex apartments are quite generously proportioned. 8 Sleeping loft.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) In a quiet backwater of ﬁelds and woods on the island of Hirvensalo in the south-west of Finland, St Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel grows from its site – a hillock surrounded by pines and spruces – embracing context and the natural environment. The chapel is not immediately apparent on approach: following the bend of the road you are suddenly confronted by the elegant copper-clad church, its volume contrasting with its surroundings. It has the appearance of an upturned ship’s hull. The design vocabulary juxtaposes copper and wood, light and shade. The chapel was ﬁnished earlier this year so the copper is new; eventually its green patina will help the church blend with the surrounding pine trees. St Henry’s is approached head on, up a gentle dogleg pedestrian ramp to the small foyer lit by natural light at the western entrance. You proceed from here through a passageway to the church proper, from darkness to light; at the far eastern end two side windows the height of the chapel throw light down onto the altar, breathtaking on a sunny day. The architect describes the main hall as the stomach of the ﬁsh, the ﬁsh being a symbol of early Christians (ﬁtting as the church is ecumenical). Gallery and chapel are one volume, with the gallery at the back, and the chapel proper in the front, with the altar terminating the axis. The benches are removed for art exhibitions and you can view the art while religious ceremonies are being conducted. The whole interior, bar the glazing around the altar, is of wood, the warm smell of which permeates the space. Seating is simple angular backless benches made of solid, edge-laminated common alder; but this elegant, pared down minimalism could prove inhospitable during long church services. The chapel’s loadbearing structure consists of tapering ribs of laminated pine

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ST HENRY ’S ECUMENICAL ART CHAPEL , T URKU , F INLAND ARCHITECT SANAKSENAHO A RCHITECTS

DIVINE LIGHT This chapel in Turku draws on a long tradition of remarkable Finnish churches in which religion, nature and light come together.

1 The wide windows at the front of the chapel light up the altar. The copper cladding will take on a green patina in time.

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[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005) two metres apart. Between these ribs is a curved interior lining of 100mm wide, untreated pine boarding. At the moment this is very light, but with time the tone will deepen to a reddish hue. The pine ribs are lit by spotlights. The ﬂoorboards are 200mm wide, 50mm thick pine planks and run parallel to the axis of the space. These have been waxed to create a clicking sound when walked on, reminiscent of the ﬂoors of old churches. The patinated altar is the last public work by academician and sculptor Kain Tapper. In the altar window an artwork by Hannu Konola ﬁlters light onto the altar wall. Matti Senaksenaho continues the distinguished legacy of the Finnish church architecture of Engel, Aalto, Sonck, Bryggman and more recently of Juha Leiviskä in his luminous churches in Myrrmäki and in Männistö (ARs June 1987 and June 1994). JULIA DAWSON

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Architect Sanaksenaho Architects, Helsinki Project architect Matti Sanaksenaho Photographs Jussi Tiainen

ST HENRY ’ S ECUMENICAL A RT C HAPEL , T URKU , F INLAND A RCHITECT SANAKSENAHO A RCHITECTS

2 The chapel, rising from its hillock, is reminiscent of an upturned hull, or, more prosaically, an upright iron. 3 Looking towards the simple altar, illuminated by natural light from side windows.

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cross section

plan

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long section

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