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FORWARD
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REVIEW
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COvEr sTOry
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stand(ing) and Deliver(ed)
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Blueprint Awards Listen 1 025
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On the List
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Now with an opening date in sight, Herbert Wright talks to Ricardo Bak Gordon and Brazil’s greatest living architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha about the new Museum of Coaches in Lisbon
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runway success
review: ruin Lust review: Crossover — Cecil Balmond 221
review: Lina Bo Bardi 223
review: In The Making 225
Winging it
review: Adventures in Letterpress
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Meet
Drawing as documentation
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Infographic 032
On the drawing board Blueprint for the Future The art of repetition 041
Architecture project 043
Design project 044
Exhibition 046 – 47
Curated diary 049 – 50
Milan preview
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It’s all about the money Art in the open richard Hamilton and design 156 – 172
Battleship island 174 – 184
reclaiming the public realm in Belo Horizonte 186 – 198
Passing through 200 – 210
Driven voids
CONTENTS
review: BE OPEN Made In... India: samskara review: The Brits Who Built the Modern World 230 – 231
review: United visual Artists: Momentum 233
review: speculative Everything FACADE FOCUs
235 – 251
Features: Wiese Haus, Berlin and MegaFaces Pavilion, Winter Olympic Park, sochi 252 – 258
Archive
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photography by: Gwenael Lewis
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IssuE 333 EDITORIAL
Front cover — Museu dos Coches, by Paolo Mendes da Rocha. Photography by Fernando Guerra. Blueprint masthead set in Reduct by Dylan Kendle, Tomato.
EDITORIAL T. ++44 (0) 20 3220 0851 Editor Johnny Tucker
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Staff writEr Cate
St Hill
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Pamela Buxton, Clare Farrow, Anthea Gerrie, Jonathan Glancey, Jane Hall, Terry Hawes, Clive Joinson, Corinne Julius, Chris Lefteri , Andrew Meredith, Rowan Moore, Aidan Potter, Alice Rawsthorn, Rebecca Ross, Veronica Simpson, Michael Sodeau, Erik Spiekermann, Jo Valentine
contributorS
The great news is, the first-ever full Blueprint Awards have arrived! We want to celebrate the best parts of our industry, so have created a set of awards that allows peer to recommend and award peer, while also looking more specifically at individual architecture and design projects. There are more details on the categories and how, where and when to enter on page 21, but the gist of it is that there are three Blueprint Awards, one each for architecture, design and critical thinking, for which candidates are nominated, and then six project-based awards, which can be entered by individuals, practices and consultancies. The latter cover everything from public projects, through schemes by young and small practices, to sustainable and innovative design. Please take a look as we’re very keen to get you all involved in both entering and helping to judge. There will of course also be a full judging panel and we’ll reveal more details about this in due course. Meanwhile, Italo-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi is becoming something of a household name these days. But I admit that I’d never heard of her a few years ago. I had put this down to the sexist, Eurocentric nature of past reporting and critical analysis, but it was interesting to hear Bo Bardichampion Noemi Blager, herself South American, saying she had similarly not heard of her until the past decade. That’s all changing now. Blager’s exhibition Together, at the British Council in London in 2012, continues to tour and you can read about the Bo Bardi-designed Arper chair that has been released and whose profits will be going to increasing awareness of the architect (see page 43). Also in this issue inaugural British Council Lina Bo Bardi scholarship holder Jane Hall looks at 21st-century Brazil (see page 174), Rowan Moore reviews a new Lina Bo Bardi biography (see page 221), and her buildings feature in our infographic looking at 20th-century Brazilian architecture (see page 31). Two other themes also run through this issue: one is airports, or in particular extra capacity for London (see pages 23, 29 and 74). The other is the attraction of dereliction, the subject of Tate Britain’s Ruin Lust (see page 216) and a stunning photo essay by Andrew Meredith, who visited the Japanese island of Hashima that was once one of the most densely populated places on the planet and abandoned virtually overnight (see page 156). Johnny tucker, editor
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ARCHITECTURE | DESIGN | ART
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Zaha hadId archItects In aZerbaIjan
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For the first time in its illustrious 30-year history, Blueprint launches a full awards scheme celebrating the very best in architecture and design
Airports are not only transport hubs, they’re shopping malls and meeting points — our list compares the world’s busiest airports
Veronica Simpson visits a small Finnish structure in a canal-side nature reserve in King’s Cross
Blueprint Awards
On the list
Architecture project
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Chief executive of London First Jo Valentine is on a mission to see one of the designs for airport expansion in London through to the end
A Tropicalia-inspired map of Brazilian modernism, from Lina Bo Bardi to Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Oscar Niemeyer, to accompany our feature on 21st-century architecture in Brazil
Listen 1
Infographic
025
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Architecture has lost its fundamental connection with real people and needs to regain the moral high ground, argues John McAslan + Partners’ director for urban design Aidan Potter
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Meet
London-based practice 42 Architects has developed a broad spectrum of small projects, from fashion shows to skateparks 035
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Listen 3
Apple’s True Color system has millions of different colours, while the HDMI spec has trillions — but are they all necessary, asks Erik Spiekermann
On the drawing board
The Windermere Steamboat Museum, designed by London firm Carmody Groarke, will open in 2015 and house an impressive boat collection in a series of new boathouses on the lake’s shore. Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke talk through the design
Design project
Arper has put Lina Bo Bardi’s Bowl chair into production, 63 years after its design and 22 years after her death 044
Exhibition
Corinne Julius takes a tour of the Sensing Spaces exhibition at the Royal Academy, London 046 – 047
Curated diary
Michael Sodeau, designer and creative director of designjunction and Edit by designjunction in Milan, selects his top events for the coming months 049 – 050
Milan preview
Johnny Tucker meets four UK designers asked to reinterpret Kvadrat’s fabric Divina for Salone
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Blueprint for the Future: Smart materials
Chris Lefteri turns his attention to smart materials — plastics and metals that can be twisted and deformed and then returned to an original shape when heat is applied 038 – 039
The art of repetition
Artist Victor Enrich has digitally manipulated images of the same Munich hotel 88 ways
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blueprint AwArds For the first time in its illustrious 30-year history, Blueprint launches a full awards scheme celebrating the very best in architecture and design blueprintawards.com
We’ve hinted at it for a couple of months and now we are able to announce the first-ever Blueprint awards are open for business. Now we want you to get involved — not only entering your projects and products, but also in nominating candidates for the three inaugural Blueprint Awards for 2014. The awards themselves are split into two sections. There are three awards that cannot be entered: the Blueprint Awards for Architecture, Design and Critical Thinking. These are the ones where we would like you to nominate individuals or practices that you think deserve this level of recognition. You will also have a chance to vote for the winners, along with our panel of judges. The second section is aimed at projects and products and these can be entered. They have been split up into six categories, which are listed below. To help you decide which category to enter, take a look at our awards’ website at.blueprintawards.com. The entry deadline is 21 July. A panel of judges is being assembled, with judging set to take place during the summer. We will publish a shortlist of award contenders in Blueprint 336 September/October. The awards ceremony will be held in October in an exciting central London venue (watch the website for details) and a full list of winners will be published in Blueprint 337 November/December.
tHe AwArds Blueprint AwArds • Blueprint Award for Architecture 2014 • Blueprint Award for Design 2014 • Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking 2014 Aimed at individuals or practices, these cannot be entered but you can nominate individuals, companies or institutions that you believe should win. You will also have the opportunity to vote on the shortlist once compiled from your contributions and that of our panel of judges. The BlueprinT projeCT AnD proDuCT AwArDs Architecture: • Best public project • Best non-public project • Best small project Architecture and Design: • Best interior project or product • Best sustainable project or product • Best Design innovation project or product Individuals and companies can enter their projects or products into one or more of these categories, which will be judged by our panel of respected industry professionals.
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LISTEN
In the wake of the government’s Airports Commission interim report recommending expansion at Heathrow and Gatwick over plans for a new Thames Estuary airport, Baroness Jo Valentine says that we should make our choice and just get on with it. She is chief executive of London First, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the views of its membership, made up of the capital’s leading employers in sectors such as financial and business services, property, transport, creative industries, hospitality and retail, as well as tertiary education. For a detailed look what’s being planned for London’s airport expansion (see Runway Success, page 74)
JO VALENTINE
PHoToGRAPHy By ?????
Not many people have been winners on the journey towards airport expansion. Perhaps one exception though has been architects, who are called on to design new runways and hubs every time another airport initiative comes along. Multiple schemes, commissions and white papers have shown that, whenever architects finish a set of drawings, they can feel safe in the knowledge that a collective failure in political courage should mean their talents are called on again in the near future. With the best will in the world, I hope that particular project pipeline is going to bear less fruit from now on. The Airports Commission, led by Sir Howard Davies, has published its interim report and stirred up a hornet’s nest over where and when we should expand air capacity in the UK. Now London First and its campaigning ally, Let Britain Fly, are on a mission to see one of the designs it shortlisted through to the bitter end. Of course, the interim report is just the first step to delivery, with the full report not published until the summer of 2015. But that doesn’t mean the ball can’t start rolling. Firstly, there’s Sir Howard’s short-term recommendations that the government must act on to make better use of existing capacity. We welcome the recommendations to improve rail links, particularly to Gatwick, and Stansted, which are poor compared with Heathrow and international rivals. Airlines tell us time and again that local connections to airports are a key factor in where they choose to fly to and from, meaning the Department for Transport and Network Rail must
work together to deliver quick, reliable services. The government has already approved funding to improve Gatwick’s train station and work continues on the Thameslink franchise to provide a world-class Gatwick Express service. The Stansted Express meanwhile is in need of investment in additional track to speed up the service and reduce delays. We are also very pleased that the commission backed our call for the creation of an independent aircraft noise authority (‘More flights, less noise’), because the economic argument for having more flights could be lost if we don’t win the hearts and minds of people who worry that their lives will be blighted by noise. An independent noise authority would make sure that all airlines fulfil their obligations and give local communities the assurance that someone is looking out for them. It would also give policy makers a source of objective information on which to make their decisions. But it’s the long-term solutions that will make the biggest difference, and it’s time political parties of all hues backed this process through to its conclusion. That means manifesto promises to back airport expansion for the good of the nation. It’s also now up to those whose plans made it on to the shortlist to work these up so they can be judged on a like-for-like basis and put to public consultation before the next general election. At London First and Let Britain Fly, we are neither backing a particular solution nor scolding the commission for favouring one project over
another. Now is not the time to unravel the purpose of this commission and set the UK back even further. International links have always been one of London’s greatest assets and adequate airport runway capacity is critical to the competitive position of London in a global economy. Business leaders believe that demand in London for flights will continue to grow over the next decade, with demand for business flights forecast to grow by 80 per cent to 2030. If London is to remain globally competitive, new runway capacity in London and the south-east is required to provide direct long-haul flights to business centres and growing economy cities. We face fierce global competition from European rivals that are increasing their air links to new and established markets. Frankfurt Airport and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport have four runways each while Amsterdam Schiphol Airport now has six. Since 1992, Heathrow’s capacity has grown 53 per cent, while Frankfurt Airport has grown 84 per cent, Paris Charles de Gaulle 142 per cent and Amsterdam Schiphol 160 per cent. Our lack of capacity threatens to hamper London’s success as a global business centre and its ability to spearhead the UK’s economic recovery. So, with due apologies to architects everywhere, for the sake of the wider UK, I hope you won’t be called on to design nearly as many new airports in the UK as you have been during the past 40 years or so. But, on the bright side, at least you’ll have had plenty of practice when you pitch for business internationally!
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John McAslan + Partners has set up an office – N17 Design Studio – in the heart of Tottenham, north London, to engage with the community and help regenerate the area from within. Its director for urban design, Aidan Potter, also the N17 Design Studio project director, argues that architects have become marginalised — they need to regain the moral high ground and become agents for change rather than simply profit
AIDAN POTTER Our new office in Tottenham is, at one level, a clear demonstration of our continuing belief that architecture can help change people’s lives and architects have a direct social responsibility. This obligation was so clear in the corpus of work developed by architects and planners in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in response to its devastating damage to urban fabric and civic morale, and was essentially a commitment to aim to provide our citizens with a decent built environment. Enlightened and essentially democratic, this modernist ideal sought to sweep away pre-war concepts of social hierarchy, offering better working and living conditions for all. The idea for a new studio in Tottenham came out of a discussion between Nick Walkley, chief executive of Haringey Council, John McAslan and myself. In July 2013, Nick invited us to come to Tottenham and see the challenges facing the council in terms of urban regeneration for ourselves. The resulting idea to embed ourselves in the High Road — as it turned out almost immediately opposite the police station where the riots started — was an immediate response that followed naturally from our experience in Haiti, Malawi and India. What better way to reach out and engage with the local community and, more importantly, to establish credibility? In these circumstances, you can’t be a tourist if you really want to understand the social and urban context and be an agent of change. The new studio will offer young people in Tottenham a range of opportunities such as
internships and work placements — giving them an insight into the way a design studio operates and, hopefully, encouraging them to explore career opportunities in the sector. As a practice, this new venture provides a valuable opportunity to assess the area’s immediate need for regeneration, and is precisely the kind of pragmatic engagement advocated in the late Nineties by the Urban Task Force Report, Towards an Urban Renaissance. Commissioned by a Labour government and chaired by Lord Rogers, the report identified the urgent need to revitalise hitherto neglected inner-city areas. The sobering reality is that, some 14 years later, these problems have not retreated and, in the case of Tottenham, have indeed intensified as is clearly evident when you walk the streets and see the effects of unemployment and urban deprivation on the local community. In some regards, the N17 Design Studio offers a new paradigm of an engaged, participatory and socially relevant architecture practice. The recent boom-and-bust cycles of urban speculation have often reduced architecture to just another material commodity to make money. In this mode, design has become an asset to be traded in the markets, and architecture per se has lost its moral compass. It has lost its fundamental connection with real people, real communities, real need and with this, the essential concern and obligation to promote equality and make the benefits of design available to everyone. We believe that the gradual adoption of this
morally neutral, ‘architecture and design as good business’ philosophy has led artists and architects to their currently marginalised status in society. Architecture is no longer a fundamental tool of social progress but rather only a means to create and celebrate wealth for the benefit of a relatively small and privileged few. The challenges of regeneration in Tottenham after the riots, after years of neglect, after the decline of local services, community support and the economic downturn, are enormous and complex. But this complexity needs to be understood and debated on the ground and within a local community that has been badly served by the design profession in recent years. It’s our intent at N17 to bring architecture back into a more vernacular, everyday world, taking it out of the rarefied and remote sphere of professionalism. At the very least, we aim to become a legitimate part of a community trying to rebuild and express itself as one of London’s most diverse and authentic neighbourhoods. Our hope is that, by applying a lighter, more participatory design approach than that of our modernist forebears, we can help in some small way to promote growth and gradual improvements to areas such as Tottenham. The proof of the pudding is in the eating — I believe an initiative such as our N17 Design Studio is not the only way for architects to engage in regeneration, but in some regards artists and architects are always pioneers of regeneration, and we hope in time many others will join us in Tottenham.
ARchITEcTuRE hAs lOsT ITs fuNDAmENTAl cONNEcTION wITh REAl PEOPlE, REAl cOmmuNITIEs AND REAl NEED
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We’ve come a long way from Henry Ford and his any colour ‘so long as it’s black’ line. Pantone’s system, now half a century old, offers more than 10,000 colours and is bigging up an ‘enigmatic purple’ for 2014 (18-3224), while digital screen colours now run into the millions. Maybe it’s all gone too far, say Erik Spiekermann. Erik Spiekermann set up MetaDesign and FontShop, and is a teacher, author, designer and partner at Edenspiekermann
ERIK SPIEKERMANN In 1909, when the Model T was the only model made by the Ford company, Henry Ford said: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.’ In 1963, Lawrence Herbert created a system of identifying, matching and communicating colours to solve the problems associated with printing accurate matches. He realised that everybody sees colour differently. This led him to produce the Pantone Color Matching System, a book of standardised colours, printed in the shape of a small fan so one could spread the samples and compare them next to each other. Today, 50 years on, there are 1,677 solid PMS values for spot-colour and 2,868 for 4-colour printing, 3,000 Pantone paints, 2,100 colours for textiles and fashion, plus metallics, pastels and neons. The anniversary colour for 2013 was Emerald, a ‘luminous, magnificent hue, the colour of beauty, new life and prosperity’. Emerald looks very green to me, and I always thought that green was the colour of money, but then I am a typography guy who doesn’t venture much beyond black and white. This year we get PANTONE® 18-3224 Radiant Orchid, a ‘captivating, magical, enigmatic purple’, from the other side of the colour wheel. I have no
idea what that means for the fashion world or anybody else’s for that matter, but I thought it interesting that 2009, the year of the financial crisis, stood under the influence of 14-0848 Mimosa, a ‘warm, cheerful shade that sparks imagination and innovation and expressing hope and reassurance’. Apart from the convoluted grammar in that statement, in retrospect it shows that colour predictions are as accurate as fortune cookies. If the thought of a system with more than 10,000 colours frightens you as much as it does me, do the maths when it comes to working out all possible combinations available to us digitally and it gets really scary. The lowest common denominator for VGA monitors used to be 4-bit, that is 16 colours (1-bit means off and on, aka black and white, so 4-bit is 2 to the power of 4, = 16, and on so on), with all Apple Mac hardware offering 24-bit or 17 million colours (16,777,216 to be exact). That equals 256 shades for each RGB pixel, which sounds very reasonable until you do the maths: 265x256x256. This system is called True Color in tech-speak. Apple simply says ‘millions of colors’ – meant as a promise, not a threat. Since the human eye can distinguish a mere 10 million colours, True Color is quite an overstatement and physically not
necessary. That hasn’t stopped the HDMI spec from going as far as 48 bits, (281.5 trillion colours), giving us more than 17 colours for each dollar of US Gross Domestic Product for 2012 ($16.244 trillion)! There is, of course, no relationship between the inflation of technically possible colours and the amount of money produced by an economy. These days, millions, billions and trillions are thrown around so readily that we have forgotten what they really mean, a fact that is exploited by people with a vested interest in spending other people’s money. We just don’t register numbers anymore with less than nine zeroes. Life is colourful enough without counting the shades, halftones, transparencies, hues and saturations possible. Millions of colours don’t improve the quality of the TV programme, just as colour photographs in newspapers haven’t advanced the standards of investigative journalism. Lawrence Herbert’s invention over 50 years ago standardised communication between designers and their various suppliers and we should be grateful to him. Perhaps we could learn to allow more colour into our discussions, into religion, politics and opinions. 4-bit would go a long way away from divisive black and white.
PHotograPHy by StEvE Carty
MIllIoNS of colouRS doN’t IMPRovE thE quAlIty of thE tv PRogRAMME, juSt AS colouR PhotogRAPhS IN NEwSPAPERS hAvEN’t AdvANcEd thE StANdARdS of INvEStIgAtIvE jouRNAlISM
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ON THE lisT The world’s busiest airports
Elsewhere in this issue we look at the plans to expand London’s airport capacity (see Jo Valentine’s Listen, page 23 and Runway Success, page 74) and here we put London into a national and international context
UK’S busiest airports by total passenger traffic* 1 London Heathrow
70 million
2 London Gatwick
33.7 million
3 Manchester
18.9 million
4 London Stansted
18.1 million
5 London Luton
9.5 million
6 Edinburgh
9.4 million
7 Birmingham
8.6 million
8 Glasgow International
6.9 million
9 Bristol Airport
5.7 million
10 Liverpool John Lennon
5.3 million
World’s busiest cITy airport system by passenger traffic***
WorLd’S busiest airports by total passenger traffic** Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Beijing capital International Beijing, China
London Heathrow London, UK
Tokyo International Tokyo, Japan
o’Hare International Chicago, Illinois, USA
Los Angeles International Los Angeles, California, USA
Paris charles de Gaulle Paris, Île-de-France, France
dallas-Fort Worth International Dallas, Texas, USA
Soekarno-Hatta International Banten, Indonesia
dubai International Dubai, UAE
95.5 million
81.9 million
London – Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City, Southend
New york city – JFK, Newark, LaGuardia, Westchester County, Long Island, Stewart
135 million
112.4 million
Tokyo – Haneda, Narita, Ibaraki
99.88 million
67.8 million
Atlanta – Hartsfield-Jackson
95.46 million
67.1 million
Paris – Charles de Gaulle, Orly, Beauvais, Vatry
92.7 million
63.7 million
chicago – O’Hare, Midway, Gary, Rockford
86.4 million
61.6 million
Beijing – Capital, Nanyuan
70 million
58.6 million
Los Angeles – LAX, Long Beach,
85.39 million
Bob Hope, John Wayne, Ontario
84.1 million
57.7 million
Shanghai – Pudong, Hongqiao
78.7 million
57.7 million
Miami – Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach
68.6 million
London Heathrow, with T5 on the far left * Based on UK CAA statistics for 2012. ** Based on figures by Airports Council International for 2012. *** The total number of passengers from all airports within a city or metropolitan area combined. Based on figures by Airports Council International for 2012.
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InfographIc a glossary of Brazilian modernism During the mid-20th century, Brazil saw an outpouring of modernist designs, spearheaded by home-grown talent Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa — firstly with their Brazilian Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and later with their ambitious plan for a new capital, Brasília. To complement our review this month of Brazil’s architecture today (see page 174), the reproduction of Lina Bo Bardi’s chair for Arper (see page 43), and the Bo Bardi book review (see page 221), as well as Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Museu dos Coches in Lisbon (see page 56), here is a visualisation of the nation’s greatest architectural monuments centred around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
NATIONAL CONGRESS OF BRAZIL Oscar Niemeyer
An UNESCO World Heritage site, built 1957-64
THE CHURCH OF SÃO FRANCISCO DE ASSIS Oscar Niemeyer
Four undulating concrete parabolas, built 1940
BRASILIA THE CATHEDRAL OF BRASILIA Oscar Niemeyer
The first monument in the new city of Brasilia, built 1959-70
CLUB ATHLETICO PAULISTANO Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer A new national capital founded in 1960
CONJUNTO HABITACIONAL PEDREGULHO Affonso Eduardo Reidy
SESC POMPEIA Lina Bo Bardi
A centre of culture and leisure, built 1977-86
Mendes da Rocha’s first major project, built 1957
BELO HORIZONTE
A residential complex, built 1948-58
ESTÁDIO MUNICIPAL PAULO MACHADO DE CARVALHO Lúcio Costa
PALÁCIO GUSTAVO CAPANEMA Lúcio Costa
A football stadium, built 1940
RIO DE JANEIRO
SÃO PAULO
GLASS HOUSE Lina Bo Bardi
ILLUSTRATION BY IAN DUTNALL
Bo Bardi’s first architectural project, built for herself and her husband 1950-51
A government office building, built 1939-43
MUSEU BRASILEIRO DA ESCULTURA Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Widely considered the masterpiece of the Pritzker Prize-winner, built 1995
SÃO PAULO MUSEUM OF ART Lina Bo Bardi
A concrete and glass structure supported by two giant red beams, built 1968
COPACABANA BEACH PROMENADE Roberto Burle Marx
Colourful abstract mosaics line the length of the famous beach, built 1970
NITEROI CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM Oscar Niemeyer The saucer-shaped structure has been likened to an UFO, built 1996
OSCAR NIEMEYER MUSEUM Oscar Niemeyer
An architecture museum completed when Niemeyer was 95 years old in 2003
CURITIBA
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MEET 42 Architects
Who WhAt Where When
Johan Berglund, the founder of 42 Architects, who hails from Stockholm, admits that he is still figuring out how to be a practice. ‘It started with a one-year experiment to see if it was even possible, and we’re still here,’ he says. ‘I think to some degree it still feels like an experiment that could end any second.’ The secret of the practice’s diverse portfolio he says is not to specialise in a certain type of project, but ‘almost taking anything that comes through the door’. Yet what comes through the door hasn’t been just ‘anything’, rather a broad spectrum of small public projects ranging from skateparks and port developments to fashion shows and shop interiors, all demonstrating an attention to craft and context. ‘We do all sorts of things we’re not officially trained for,’ says Berglund. Over the past couple of years, the practice has been designing the show spaces used by Topshop and the British Fashion Council for London Fashion Week. Last year, for Topshop’s Autumn/Winter show held in the Tate Modern Tanks, 42 Architects created a curved high-gloss black wall on to which 1
Founder Johan Berglund; plus two staff Architects Cambridge heath, east London Founded 2009
an Eadweard Muybridge-style motion sequence of models was projected. For the latest Topman show in January, a sprinkler system showered the models as they walked down the runway in the Old Sorting Office, where designjunction is held each year. Last year, 42 Architects was one of three practices commissioned to draw up designs for a contentious new skatepark under Hungerford Bridge on London’s South Bank. The space was planned — before mayor Boris Johnson’s objection in January — as an alternative to the current graffiti-covered undercroft at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, to make way for Feilden Clegg Bradley’s overhaul of the Southbank Centre (now on hold). 42 Architects was chosen for the South Bank competition because it had already designed a new skatepark on the site of a former copper mine in Falun, Sweden – and Berglund is a skateboarder.
1 – The Hyttgårdsparken skatepark in Falun, Sweden 2 – Topman fashion show, 2014 3 – Johan Berglund
The first stage was completed in January 2012. The ground of the 6200 sq m site is carved out to expose the geometric, sunken concrete surfaces that form the park’s skateboarding areas. The second stage, confirmed as Blueprint went to press, will provide more skateboarding pits as well as green spaces and bespoke benches to integrate the park with the rest of the site. Berglund describes 42 Architects as the type of practice that ‘designs everything on a project down to the nuts and bolts’. While Berglund’s dream project would be a library, for the moment the practice is focused on small public projects and ‘avoiding doing house extensions, [which pose] a danger for small practices to get stuck’. Berglund notes that it is difficult for a practice being based in London but not coming from London. ‘London is a relentless place because you can’t rely on anyone but yourself,’ he says. ‘It’s quite fostering in that sense.’ His adopted city will be welcoming an exhibition of 42 Architects’ work this spring as part of Buro Happold’s Emerging Architects series. CSH 2
1, 2 & 3 Courtesy 42 ArChiteCts
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ON THE DRAWING BOARD Carmody Groarke
in 2011, London-based Carmody Groarke saw off an eight-strong shortlist, including terry Pawson and adam khan, to win a riba open competition to design a new museum on the shores of Windermere in the Lake District. the museum will open in 2015 with an impressive boat collection, telling the stories of their construction and use on the lake. Practice directors kevin Carmody and andrew Groarke talk with Cate St Hill about the project
What past experience did you bring to the Windermere Steamboat Museum competition? Our studio has designed a variety of exhibition fit-outs for museums and art galleries that work with very diverse content. This gave us a strong appreciation for the quality of a visitor experience grounded in a sensitivity towards the display of collections. We appreciate that the Windermere Steamboat Museum is intended to be a living museum with an active programme of boat conservation. Our previous experience designing bespoke studios and workshops for artists Antony Gormley and Julian Opie helped enormously. How has the design changed since you won the competition in 2011? The museum is proposed as a cluster of several pitched-roof forms that are composed around a wet dock. The intention of the building is to make a direct connection between visitors and boats, water and landscape — this remains at the heart of the concept. We were always keen to make these buildings look somehow familiar yet also notable as a new public museum. Our initial idea at the competition stage was to clad these forms (roofs and walls) in cast stainless-steel panels. However, after designing the building for more than a year, we realised that a material that registers the
weathering and transitions of this unique environment was far more appropriate. For this reason we chose to use a natural copper, which will develop a patina over time and thereby integrate the new structures into the surrounding landscape.
architectural identity of the new museum, we felt that it was very important to react to both the heritage of Windermere, being both a picturesque landscape for recreation and also its industrial legacy as a working site.
What main aspects of the competition brief did you pick up on to inform the design? The new museum will replace a series of existing dilapidated structures on the shore of Lake Windermere. Although now host to an internationally significant collection of steamboats, the site was originally used for extracting gravel from the lake and, as such, provided easy access for boats to the shore. When we considered the
How is the museum organised? The museum is organised around several buildings with different functions and characters rather than one large singular building, for two reasons: firstly, we broke down the scale of a large museum in order to be more coherent with the local environment. Secondly, there are many diverse museum experiences in which to experience boats, from conventional gallery display to active conservation workshop and boatyard, to an internal wet dock. The cluster of buildings are interlinked and arranged around a clear visitor route inside and outside of the museum
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1 – Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke 2 – A series of new boathouses surround an existing wet dock on the shore of Lake Windermere
How will the museum connect with the lake? The building is sited on the lake’s shore to create a direct relationship with the water and also to enable boats to be ‘slipped’ on and off the water into the various spaces for display. Jetties that project into the lake extend the possibilities of visitor interaction with boats and water and provide a new public ferry service terminal.
1 Mark Guthrie 2 forbes Massie
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blueprint for the future Materials: Smart materials
1 & 2 Courtesy DeCker yeaDon
Chris Lefteri turns his attention to smart materials – plastics and metals that once altered have the ability to return to a previous form with the application of heat. Lefteri is a designer and has written seven books about new materials and their application
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There are many materials that are defining the future: renewable resources, completely new materials such as graphene (see Blueprint 332, January/February 2014), but one of the biggest and most fascinating groups — that continues to grow — is smart materials. Ezio Manzini says in his book, The Material of Invention, trying to capture a snapshot of materials is like trying to take a group photograph where everyone is continually moving. This comparison relates to smart materials in two ways: firstly that it is a rapidly changing family, and secondly that many of the smart material families are in essence about change and motion. In this spellbinding family, metals and plastics can be bent, twisted and deformed, but when heat is applied will return to an original shape that has been pre-programmed during production. For example, imagine heating a coiled spring so that it expands and locks itself into place in a specific location within an ordinarily hard-to-access place, or a coil that unwinds itself once put into position, or a strip of material being fed through a small opening and turning up the heat so that it expands into a bigger shape. If these sound vaguely biological and medical that’s because one of the largest arenas for shape-memory materials is in the
medical industry, where various plastics and metals are used for intricate surgery, either as medical instruments or as implants. Furthermore, these materials are not just flimsy shape transformers: if needed to work against an external force, a 4mm-diameter actuator, for example made of nickel titanium metal alloy wire, is able to lift a tonne. Apart from the medical industry, most applications are in engineering — it is used for tube coupling in spacecraft, actuators in a range of industrial applications, on/off switches and thermostats. One of the main advantages is that they can replace complex or heavy motorised parts. But shape-changing materials have entered the lens of designers and architects, who are exploring practical and poetic ways to harness shape memories to create alternative energy projects through to self-disassembling mobile phones. New York-based architect Decker Yeadon illustrates a wonderful approach to the fusion of technology and buildings with many of its projects. Its Smart Screen and Homeostatic Facade System changes shape and creates moveable facades with a seemingly living surface. This is based on R-Phase
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1 & 2 – New York architecture practice Decker Yeadon’s shape-shifting Smart Screen and Homeostatic Facade System in action
shape memory alloys that respond by opening and closing depending on changes in interior room temperature to permit or deny heat gain from the sun. Shape memories are not restricted to this level of outward-facing application. Smart Mandrels is a process used in industrial production that uses smart tooling to create complex components that traditionally would have been difficult to remove from the template. It makes the component’s shape memory and, after it has been produced, heat is introduced changing the shape in which the piece is accommodated so that it can be more easily removed. Current research is looking at how to create metals that will change shape at multiple temperature ranges, perhaps paving the way for a single tool that is completely variable. Industrial production has yet to be fully realised but the future of shape memories could lead to a revolution in the deconstruction of objects rather than their manufacturing: one of the biggest potential areas for helping create sustainable products is to aid their disassembly. Imagine a complex office chair of electronics, plastic and glass that uses heat-activated screws that, by putting the chair in a hot tub, change shape to self-unscrew all the various components.
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The ArT of repeTiTion
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Spanish photographer Victor Enrich has digitally manipulated the same hotel in Munich 88 different ways for his new project NHDK. Enrich cut his teeth as an architectural visualiser for Barcelona practices before packing it all up and travelling across Germany, Latvia and Israel in search of inspiration. His love affair with the Deutscher Kaiser Hotel, located in front of the Central Station in Munich, began when he couchsurfed in the city for two months. The idea of making 88 pictures came about because 88 is the number of keys on a piano, an instrument Enrich has a long association with since studying classical piano until he was 18. He says: ‘I felt that I had to bring back my “piano side”, and what better way than dedicating an art piece to it: 88 images for 88 piano keys.’
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EDIT by designjunction 9–13 April 2014 Palazzo Morando Via Sant’Andrea, 6 20121 Milan thedesignjunction.co.uk In partnership with
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Project VIEWPOINT
London’s first Finnish building has landed quietly in a canalside nature reserve in king’s Cross. Veronica Simpson goes birdwatching
1 & 2 Max Creasy 3 Johnny TuCker
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Humility is a quality that Finnish architects seem to ingest at birth — the opposite of so much ego-driven grandstanding evident in architecture from many other parts of the world. Finnish style has a quiet intelligence, a ‘hapticity’ — a keen awareness of the importance of the touch, smell, sound and feel of a place. Up until now, London didn’t have any Finnish buildings, but a small Finnish structure has just landed in the building site that is King’s Cross: Viewpoint is a little oasis on the canal, a place for watching birds, enjoying lush waterfront plants and wildlife and a moment of calm amid the frantic activity of cranes of the non-feathered kind. Viewpoint is the work of three Finnish architects — Erkko Aarti, Arto Ollila and Mikki Ristola, who operate under the banner AOR. Fellow architecture students at Helsinki’s Aalto University, they are still completing their studies while honing their skills at various Finnish practices. In late 2012, the trio won a competition run by The Finnish Institute, Helsinki’s Museum of Finnish Architecture and the UK’s Architecture Foundation, to create a viewing point and shelter for visitors to Camley Street Natural Park. One of 40 wildlife reserves operated by the London Wildlife Trust, this one is a semi-secret, 1ha chunk of greenery on a kink of the Regent’s Canal. This simple shelter made of small, wood and Corten steel pyramids is visible from the pedestrian bridge to Granary Square, the new piazza that fronts Central Saint Martins. But if you didn’t know it was there, you could easily miss it.
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Anyone familiar with Finland will guess where the trio found their initial inspiration: the coast is peppered with thousands of small, rocky islands, most of which are occupied by pine trees and simple summer residences. These islands are usually fringed by smaller lumps of curiously pointed rock. It is almost as if AOR has spirited three of these rocks directly to the urban jungle. Yes, says Mikki Ristola, Viewpoint’s geometry borrows from the rocky islets, but it is also inspired by the Finnish laavu — a temporary, ‘humble structure in a forest which, in addition to providing shelter for the users provides an opportunity to observe nature without disturbing it’. Inhabited by birds, bats and other creatures by night, by day the Viewpoint will host groups of up to 20 people, who can sit on the benches inside the 1 – Viewpoint is anchored to the bank at the widest part of the Regent’s Canal 2 – It is visible from the pedestrian bridge in front of CSM 3 – The three-pyramid structure is delivered on a flat-bed lorry
structures and gaze out on to the canal-scape. Viewpoint, says Aarti, ‘respects the place but has its own identity’. Materials have been chosen to resonate with the industrial surroundings and are deployed with a fine haptic sensitivity. The Corten steel, says Ristola, ‘provides a hard outer shell, while the inner surface is lined in oak — an organic and warm material to sit and learn in’. Peep-holes inserted into the sides at different eye levels for both adults and children offer opportunities for observation of the shyer wildfowl. The floor is graphic concrete — a Finnish invention. Bird-like footprints are slightly indented into the surface, serving as both playful decoration and slip-proofing — ‘functional ornament’ Ristola says. Much thought was given to the proportions and placement of the structures. They had to offer a sense of dialogue and communion with each other to facilitate group instruction, while allowing individuals private space and clear views on to the surrounding waterscape. The trio spent hours experimenting with models and CAD before, last summer, constructing a 1:1 rendition of the structure in a field near Aarti’s home village. Carlo Laurenzi, chief executive of London Wildlife Trust, is delighted with this new landmark. He says: ‘The key to this site is to embrace and engage with its urban characteristics.’ It certainly does that, but it’s also a neat advertisement for how well Finnish culture and craft sits within the London cityscape. I’d say it’s just what the place needs.
03/03/2014 10:34
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Project Lina Bo Bardi/Arper
Some 63 years after its design, Lina Bo Bardi’s Bowl chair has gone into production. Johnny Tucker takes a seat. And there’s plenty more about Bo Bardi’s work in this issue: see the Brazil building infographic (page 31), Brazil in the 21st century by Assemble founder Jane Hall, holder of the British Council’s Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship (page 174) and a Lina Bo Bardi biography review by Rowan Moore (page 221)
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Building the international profile of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi has become something of a personal crusade for architect and curator Noemi Blager, currently acting director of London’s Architecture Foundation. A couple of years ago, she approached Italian furniture manufacturer Arper to help finance the show Lina Bo Bardi: Together, which she curated and which opened at the British Council’s Gallery in 2012. Arper came on board as a sponsor, but has since taken its involvement to a new level, by putting into production a chair designed by Bo Bardi back in 1951. What’s more, all of the money generated by the limited edition of 500 Bowl chairs will be ploughed back into the touring exhibition and given to the Lina Bo Bardi institute to help preserve and build her reputation. Lina Bo Bardi: Together was probably most people’s first brush with the architect, and has now travelled to Basel, Vienna, Paris and is in Stockholm until 23 March. There are further plans to take it this year to Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan. Bo Bardi herself, born in Rome in 1914, went to work in Milan with Gio Ponti, before leaving Italy for Brazil after the Second World War. In 1951, as well as the Bowl chair, she designed her own house Casa di Vidro – Glass House (see page 31 for this and other Bo Bardi buildings). The following years saw her designing a series of public projects, in particular the high-profile São Paulo Museum of Modern Art and Solar do Unhão Folk Art Museum, while also focusing on city planning and social 2
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housing. Between 1977 and 1986, she worked on the much-lauded SESC-Pompéia Factory in São Paulo renovating an old factory and adding to it to create a thriving arts and social centre. She died in 1992 in the Glass House. Her Bowl chair is elegantly simple: upholstered, hollow, half sphere, held loosely in a light circular frame that also binds the legs together. Designing the chair in the Fifties, she was prescient in removing the strictures surrounding seating, allowing people to interact directly with the chair to alter its angle and so their seating position. A single sketch, showing colour and pattern combinations, also appears way ahead of its time, and became a useful guide for Arper’s variations. Apart from the laudable philanthropic element, 1 – Only a single sketch existed for Lina Bo Bardi’s chair 2 – Lina Bo Bardi, whose face is now becoming more familiar 3 – Arper’s Claudio Feltrin with three Bowl Chairs
the chair’s production represents an interesting move for Arper, one that takes the company outside its comfort zone. Unlike many manufacturers, it’s never produced limited edition pieces before. Add to that the fact that the designer died more than 20 years ago and there is actually only one prototype – not even a production model – of the chair, in existence. And finally into the mix goes the fact that this prototype sits in Bo Bardi’s Glass House. The Lina Bo Bardi institute was loathe to let it leave, so that meant numerous visits by Arper’s team to study it in situ while the design for production was developed. It’s no wonder then that Arpers’ CEO Claudio Feltrin, with a smile that hints at understatement, adds: ‘The birth of this chair has been a little complex really…’ He continues: ‘We had to develop our product in an industrial manner with a designer who no longer exists and was represented by the institute. It’s been a sort of post-mortem design development. ‘One clear difficulty was respecting the original idea from Lina Bo Bardi – the quality of craftsmanship – while updating it to work with present-day production techniques. I think the team has managed to retain the historical elements and adhere to the original idea, while updating and actualising it. We’ve not pushed it too far industrially speaking, or we would have lost the craftsmanship spirit of the original. This chair represents a bridge between the spirit of Lina Bo Bardi and the DNA of Arper.’
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03/03/2014 10:34
Exhibition Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined
Kate Goodwin has created an architecture show in the unlikely surroundings of the Royal Academy designed to allow visitors to really interact with the built environment. Corinne Julius takes a tour
Most architecture exhibitions in museums are somewhat arcane affairs. There are models, photographs, the occasional structural piece, some writing but very little that helps the visitor experience architecture. Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined at the Royal Academy is in no way a traditional show. The brainchild of curator Kate Goodwin, it is all about the experience of architecture. How does architecture, or rather what architects design, make us feel? It is about both our conscious and unconscious responses to their built environments. It also acknowledges how previous experience and memories colour perception and how architecture connects people to time, place, and people. Goodwin wants visitors to explore both emotionally and intellectually, spatial relationships, proportions, volumes, materials, light and shade, textures, sounds and smells, and so selected seven architects to create immersive, multisensory environments. It’s a show that is probably unique in encouraging visitors to touch, smell, hear and maybe even lick the exhibits. Her international choice contains no British contributions, but each practice or architect brings their own particular sensibility, shaped by the places, cultures and times in which they work. All share a desire that their architectures should connect with the human spirit. Eduardo Souto de Moura and Álvaro Siza (Portugal) examine the history of the building. Siza’s three yellow columns in the RA’s piazza are the most subtle interventions, while Souto de Moura’s arches — mouldings of the doors — redefine the spaces of the galleries, with a tactile concrete work. 2
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Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s (Chile) enormous wooden construction takes up nearly half the main gallery, with four spiral staircases leading up to what looks like a large box. The volumes have a brutalist feel, but the quality of the wood gives a more human dimension. Climbing the spiral staircases is warm and comforting, but emerging out on to the top space is like being in the gods; with a perfect platform to view the ornate ceiling with cut-throughs to vistas below and on to the gilded decorative figures. In the darkened spaces of the Weston Galleries, Kengo Kuma’s (Japan) installations of delicate waving fronds of bamboo, impregnated with Japanese cypress and tatami, are like the flickering of flames on the retina. They entice the viewer in, although the smaller installation that surrounds visitors is less successful.
Germany-based Dièbèdo Francis Kèrè’s (Burkina Faso) installation is all about encouraging visitor participation, based on the way women in his West African homeland construct their buildings communally. His installation, made of honeycomb plastic sheet, rises up like a huge plastic igloo, bursting up against the arch and into the next gallery. Visitors are encouraged to insert gigantic brightly coloured straws into the honeycomb sheet, although the overall effect is rather forced. This flamboyance is in complete contrast to Li Xiadong’s (China) hazel maze; a place of quietness and delight. The underlit, white translucent floor of the hazel twig-lined passages is like walking on a river of ice through an enchanted forest. The maze opens out on to a Zen garden of pebbles, magnified in the vast mirror-lined walls. The visitor emerges into the blinding glare of the first of Grafton’s (Ireland) explorations of light. This is less successful than the second large gallery, where, in the darkened space, Grafton has created a mini Ronchamp. The huge volumes and play of light are cunningly created from suspended panels, but it feels like being inside a massive concrete structure. Persuading the powers that be at the RA to let such an un-museum-like exhibition take over the main galleries on such a grand scale is a considerable achievement. For a traditional RA audience more accustomed to walls crowded with Impressionism or the cluttered hang of the Summer Exhibition, the show will be very challenging.
1 – Kengo Kuma’s delicate bamboo creation uses its location in a unique way 2, 3 – Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s bring viewers up to the rafters
Sensing Spaces is at the Royal Academy, London until 6 April 3
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CURATED DIARY Michael Sodeau
Designer and designjunction creative director
1 Diverse Maniere: Piranesi, Fantasy
2 Dx exhibition — this is not a toy
3 eDit by Designjunction
Sir John Soane’S MuSeuM, London Until 31 May Forever a source of inspiration, the exhibitions here are not to be missed. diverse Maniere: Piranesi, Fantasy and excess looks at the relationship between Soane and the great italian printmaker, antiquarian and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. We are promised large-scale 3d prints of amazing designs visualised by Piranesi in his influential publications, but never realised. along with these prints, examples of Piranesi’s interpretation of classical antiquity will be on show. soane.org
deSiGn exchanGe, ToronTo Until 19 May What’s not to like with Pharrell Williams as the guest editor of this exhibition, and containing giant wooden sculptures by KaWS, vinyl figures by Michael Lau and work by Takashi Murakami to boot. Surely no one will fail to enjoy the breadth of scale, colour and design that this exhibition promises, with the celebration of the conceptual toy, also dubbed ‘designer toys’ or ‘urban vinyl’. What’s more, the show goes beyond the plastic too. These art toys are a fusion and celebration of street culture, hip-hop, graffiti and fashion. dx.org
PaLazzo Morando, Via SanT’andrea 6, MiLan 9 March-13 April This year we have moved ediT by designjunction to Palazzo Morando, a historic 18th-century building in the heart of Milan’s fashion district, just to the south of the Brera design district. The venue continues our ethos of finding architecturally interesting venues to house the designjunction showcase. We’ve divided the space into zones and galleries rather than stands to create a flow through the venue. We’re continuing our collaboration with La Marzocco to produce an outdoor cafe. thedesignjunction.co.uk/edit-by-designjunction/
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Michael Sodeau Michael Sodeau graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in 1994, cofounded inflate and set up his own design studio Michael Sodeau Partnership in 1997. His awardwinning design studio has designed everything from chairs and scissors to holiday resorts and ice-cream flavours. michaelsodeau.com
4 BAILEY’S STARDUST
5 ARAB ConTEMpoRARY
6 UnITED VISUAL ARTISTS: MoMEnTUM
NAtioNAl PortrAit GAllery, loNDoN Until 1 June the iconic, gritty, glamour of David Bailey’s work and his craft of the difficult portrait shot has everyone loving or hating the idea that photography is art. Set to be one of the main exhibitions of 2014, the retrospective Stardust, curated by Bailey himself, is proof that this is the photographic age, accentuated by the double portraits in which he poses with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí. Damien Hirst, who designed the poster and catalogue cover, cements this. npg.org.uk/whatson/bailey/exhibition.php
louiSiANA MuSeuM of MoDerN Art, DeNMArk Until 4 May Architecture is both a bearer of identity and promotes the shaping of the cultural distinctiveness of a country or a region. this fascinating exhibition hones in on features shared by the Arab countries — from the Arabian Peninsula through lebanon to Morocco. the Arab world is foremost connected by language, but there are other common features that point both to a shared understanding of space and a visual culture where one can draw lines to new cities like Dubai, and old yemenite civilisations. louisiana.dk/dk
BArBiCAN CeNtre, loNDoN Until 1 June At the Barbican’s Curve Gallery, london-based art and design practice united Visual Arts has created an immersive experience of sound and light. there are 12 pendulums, built from steel, aluminium and custom electronics that hang in the space, activating light and sound as they swing. it is designed to unsettle our sense of time, movement, mass and space and as you move through, you are further unnerved. i have always been a very big fan of uVA’s work. (see review, page 230) barbican.org.uk
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MILAN PREVIEW
It’s Milan Furniture Fair time again but it’s about a lot more than furniture these days, as every nook and cranny of the city, not just the Salone, shows off its design credentials and ‘novelties’ 8-13 April. Danish material manufacturer Kvadrat has a history of bringing in interesting designers to reassess and experiment with its materials. Johnny Tucker caught up with four UK designers, among a raft of 24 that it has asked to reinterpret its Divina material designed by painter and graphic designer Finn Sködt in 1984. If you enjoy this exclusive preview, you can see the finished pieces and more at the Salone as well as a detailed review of Milan 2014 in the next issue of Blueprint (334)
ANTON ALVAREZ
Thread-wrapping architecture With his show currently at the Gallery Libby Sellers (see Blueprint 332, January/ February 2014), Alvarez is keeping busy right now, and when I spoke to him the night before opening, he was still finishing off a few pieces for the exhibition. Like these, his work for Kvadrat is an extension of his thread-wrapping investigations, which he is intent on pushing to the very limit. For Milan he’s using the material on an architectural scale in the shape of three arches just over 2m high: ‘I’ve been doing things that correspond to the human body in scale such as furniture, stools, chairs and some lamps, and I wanted to expand the size. It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot so when this material was given to me for experimenting I knew it had possibilities. I have created these arches, the simplest suggestion of an architectural space that you can have inside. ‘Usually I join solid pieces of material together with glue-coated thread. Now what I’ve done is wrap pieces of textile in tubes, like sausages of material, and to hold them together and hold the threads in place I decided to accentuate the adhesive rather than hide it. ‘I started using textile paint and that has become part of the piece and explaining more about the process. We get the paint on our hands while we are doing it and then we move our hands and you can see the traces of the paint in other areas, so you see the traces of the making and in a way it’s a more honest way of telling the story of making.’
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BETHAN LAURA WOOD
(in collaboration with Laura Lees) Guadalupe day bed While in Mexico last year, Wood had something of an epiphany at the New Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (1976, by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez) — a design one rather than the religious kind. She fell in love with the basilica’s fenestration: a dramatic circular band of coloured glass, like a thick belt around the building. And that has become the starting point for her project, working with the embroiderer Laura Lees. ‘I fell in love with the architecture of the basilica, especially the windows, and I really wanted to work on a pattern based on these windows at some point,’ she says. ‘Then when I got the samples of the fabric I just knew this was the right pairing, because the fabrics are so rich in colour plus it’s a kind of material which behaves like a really high-quality felt and so lends itself really well to being embroidered and appliquéd. ‘I took lots of pictures of the basilica’s cast-glass windows — they are very three-dimensional. I used a mix of those images to create a new pattern, trying to keep a feeling of that 3D depth. Then I did a lot of line drawings from these until I developed it into a pattern that would repeat, before starting to work on it with crayons that matched the colours of the fabrics. Originally I planned to do it as a patchwork, but it worked better with appliqué techniques. I was introduced to Laura and asked her to work with me. It’s quite a full-on project and it’s taking us a lot longer than we expected!’
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milan preview
MAX LAMB
Smock There’s a tactile robustness to Max Lamb’s work that, like many of the best designers, is informed by an obsession with materials and process. When he got his hands on Kvadrat’s Divina fabric, given his highly furniture-orientated output to date he quite naturally started thinking along those lines, before his project evolved into his first-ever piece of clothing, a smock. He sees it as honest workwear, which he believes plays to the strengths of the material. ‘I like to explore the properties and potential of all materials without prejudice, and fabric is no exception,’ he says. ‘Divina is typically an upholstery fabric and although I started by looking at the possibility of designing a piece of furniture, after receiving samples and working with the material, I began to appreciate that the quality of the woollen yarns and the felting process, applied after it has been woven. ‘Designing my first piece of clothing, while maintaining consistency with my approach to designing and making furniture, has been the most challenging yet gratifying aspect of this project. Focusing on a product type previously unexplored revealed a set of questions and problems that have helped reinforce my approach to design and problem-solving in general. Why must one chair fit all people when clothes are available in a multitude of sizes to fit all body types and shapes? My approach has been the opposite, to design one garment that fits all, or at least most.’
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PETER MARIGOLD
Jib Peter Marigold’s output is an unusual mix of the inventive, practical, personal and artistic. He has a documented love of the unusual, particularly when it comes to mass-produced objects that haven’t come out as planned. In this project, he has addressed mass-production (using his time-honoured ‘favourite’ material, wood), but gone to great lengths to make sure the unexpected isn’t part of the finished project. And he also learned to sew: ‘I was very curious about working with fabric, as it’s something that I just don’t do. I’ve actually always been incredibly bad when it comes to fabric. I’m quite used to working directly with more solid materials. I almost always prefer to make things myself and so I had to teach myself how to use a sewing machine, pattern cutting and upholstery techniques. It’s always nice to learn a new skill and I’m really into sewing now! I made my two-year-old son Leon a wolf costume from all the little off-cuts. ‘A lot of my previous work has leaned towards more artistic objects — things that would not be relevant for an industrially produced object, however I am very interested in those kinds of objects. I saw this as an opportunity to make something that could be mass-produced — that has that language — but at the same time has some qualities of personalisation. The stools are composed of four colours that can be brought together, almost like comparing fabric swatches. ‘They are simple-looking objects — but there was a lot of time and experimentation spent to make them look as uniform as possible.’
03/03/2014 10:32
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LP2014_Kube_Blueprint_dps.indd All Pages Untitled-3 2
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100 – 110
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Herbert Wright talks to Ricardo Bak Gordon and Brazil’s greatest living architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha about the new Museum of Coaches in Lisbon
Shumi Bose takes a look at the drawings by British Museum’s artist-in-residence Liam O’Connor of its new extension, and talks to its designers from architecture practice Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
Assemble’s Jane Hall, recipient of the British Council’s Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship, visits Brazil and reports on the young architecture practices making waves in the 21st century
Stand(ing) and deliver(ed)
Drawing as documentation
Reclaiming the public realm in Belo Horizonte
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Runway success
Pamela Buxton weighs up the options for airport expansion in London and the South East 088 – 098
Winging it
Architect David Hertz, of the Studio for Environmental Architecture, has created a unique house in the Santa Monica Mountains made of the components of a Boeing 747. Anthea Gerrie visits
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186 – 198
Some of the UK’s most interesting architects are doing their best work for developers. Veronica Simpson investigates the property sector’s conversion to the cause of good design
A growing number of architects are experimenting with structures that focus on lightness, mobility and transience, Clare Farrow discovers
It’s all about the money
Passing through
200 – 210 124 – 138
Art in the open
Instead of plaques or statues commemorating the worthy, public art is enjoying a renaissance that is sparking new directives and public debates, reports Veronica Simpson
Driven voids
Steven Holl’s new Reid Building for the Glasgow School of Art is a study in light, directly responding to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous building opposite
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Richard Hamilton and design
The first retrospective of the work of influential British artist Richard Hamilton is running at Tate Modern. Alice Rawsthorn looks at Hamilton’s life, career and legacy through a design lens 156 – 172
Battleship island
Photographer Andrew Meredith visits the abandoned island of Hashima, just off the coast of Nagasaki in the South China Sea, and discovers a city resembling a battleship
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Stand(ing) and deliver(ed) Words Herbert Wright Photography Fernando Guerra
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At a globally significant Portuguese heritage site, Brazil’s, Pritzker Prize-winning Paolo Mendes da Rocha, has left a vigorous example of his hallmark modernism and commitment to urban space. But government austerity measures have held up the Museum of Coaches... so far. Now that an opening date is finally on the cards, Portuguese architect Ricardo Bak Gordon, associate on the project, talks to Herbert Wright about working with a legend, and Mendes da Rocha himself responds from São Paolo
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1 (previous page) – The Museum of Coaches auditorium below an administration level is rendered in the colour of adjacent houses 2 (opposite) – The exhibition volume’s dramatically cantilevered stairs 3 – Rust sets in on the unused entrance turnstiles 4 – Skylight and water feature above the auditorium. The sloping ramps to the left will connect the annex volume with the unfinished skywalk over the railway 5 – North-south cross-section shows the unbuilt skywalk between the museum and car park 3
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In 1500, the Portuguese explorer Pédro Alvares Cabral set forth from Belém, now a riverside quarter of Lisbon, and found Brazil. Five centuries later, that country’s greatest living architect and winner of the 2006 Pritzker, Paolo Mendes da Rocha, has left his mark in Belém. Yet the new Museu dos Coches (Coach Museum) he designed stands inert behind hoardings, empty and still since construction stopped in June 2012. Rust has etched itself into the turnstiles beneath the great exhibition space that patiently awaits the installation of fancy gilded carriages and other baroque vehicles, mainly from the 18th century. This volume, a great modernist box 126m long and 48m wide, seems to float on air. A second volume sits within an acrobatic concrete frame, and both are set in a plaza that plays with paradigms of public realm, and reaches into vernacular housing. But, like a highwayman holding up a coach, Portugal’s incoming austerity government in 2012 held up the new Coach Museum. Humidity and sea airs have brought the first corroding rust. The air conditioning inside has never been fully activated. As leading Portuguese architect Ricardo Bak Gordon, who worked on Mendes da Rocha’s project along with structural engineers afaconsult and Brazilian practice MMBB, comments: ‘If you go to bed and don’t move, your health will not be good.’ Luckily, things are starting to move again. An opening date has been set: May 2015. Bak Gordon reckons that just seven per
cent of the construction work remains to be done, namely a 180m-long pedestrian bridge over the railway line that cuts through Belém. This will directly connect the museum to the Tagus riverside. The plaza beneath and around the museum might even open earlier. The project will extend the touristthronged heart of Belém, a World Heritage site and home to the bakery where the pastel de nata, Portugal’s world-famous egg-custard tart, was perfected. Presently, the Coach Museum is housed in a neo-classical royal equestrian school designed by Giacomo Azzolini in 1786. It is Portugal’s most visited state museum (though only half as busy as the semi-private Alvaro Siza-designed Serralves Museum in Porto). Just a third of the museum’s 148 historic coaches can be displayed — more are housed in a palace 200km away. Before Portugal’s economic crisis, the government had casino revenues to disperse on culture, and decided on a new museum. There was no architectural competition — Bak Gordon recalls that ‘an international name’ like Zaha Hadid was wanted, but Portugal’s own Pritzker winners Eduardo Souto de Moura (see Blueprint 328, July 2013) and Álvaro Siza both recommended Mendes da Rocha. He was appointed in 2007. The 85-year old São Paolo-based Mendes da Rocha is a legend. His work dramatically introduced itself to São Paolo with a bold, sculptural, flying saucer-like form on six tapering pillars,
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for the Club Atletico SP (1957). Along with his mentor João Batista Vilanova Artigas, he was at the heart of the Paulista School, the city’s brutalist movement from the Fifties, which stood in contrast to the Rio School of Niemeyer and others, with their curvier, lighter forms. Mendes da Rocha and Artigas also shared a socialist zeal. Bak Gordon says they were of a mind on everything, ‘particularly the political’, and after Artigas died in 1985, he remains ‘an inspiration forever — in architecture, space and politics’. Mendes da Rocha’s mastery of concrete is perhaps most seductive in São Paulo’s sunken sculpture museum MuBE (1988-95), while there is a heroic audacity to his downtown urban intervention with a canopy suspended from a bridge beam at Praça do Patriarca (2002), also in São Paulo. It’s an example that demonstrates what Rui Furtado, engineer at afaconsult who worked on the Coach Museum, calls Mendes da Rocha’s ‘genuine feeling for structural behaviour and real knowledge of how structures work’. When Furtado first met Mendes da Rocha in 2003, they were visiting Souto de Moura’s Braga Stadium in northern Portugal. ‘The roof cables were being installed and he asked me their diameter,’ Furtado recalls. ‘I answered and he thought for a moment; then he told me what the force in the cable must be... He was right.’ Bak Gordon has known him even longer. When he won a
design competition for a new (unbuilt) Portuguese embassy in Brazil in 1997, he knew no-one there and got in contact with Mendes da Rocha for advice. ‘He was very kind, we became friends, we kept in touch down all the years,’ says Bak Gordon. When Mendes da Rocha wanted a local Portuguese architect to collaborate with, Bak Gordon was the obvious choice. Nowadays, Mendes da Rocha does not have his own practice, but starts an idea and then collaborates. When the Coaches Museum design started in 2008, Bak Gordon and Furtado went to São Paolo for several workshops. ‘It’s very pleasant and easy to work with Paulo,’ says Bak Gordon. ‘He’s old but he was the youngest of all of us, fresh... an optimist.’ Furtado adds that ‘to talk with Paulo about design has always this degree of wholeness — art, science and technology are the permanent drivers of the design, without concessions between the three.’ So, what are the essentials of the design? On presenting drawings and a model of his proposals in May 2008, Mendes da Rocha said there were two architectural questions the new museum must address: museology and urbanism. On the latter, the 16,170 sq m site is awkward, sandwiched between the railway which cuts it off from the river Tagus, and two centuries-old houses which were to be preserved in the government initiative Belém Rediscovered. At its western end, it faces gardens in front 6 – The entrance to the museum is from underneath the exhibition volume 7 – The auditorium has an especially large door opening on to the plaza 8 – Beneath the galleries, the ochre-walled space houses reserves from the collection.
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9 (opposite page) – Passing between stairs and gallery reveals a glimpse above the cobbled plaza, looking west
West Elevation
West Section
Annex Transversal Section
South Elevation
Central Section
Exposition Section
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of Azzolini’s building, and beyond it, towards the Atlantic, the vast, 16th-century Manueline gothic facade of the Jerónimos Monastery. Trams glide past amid constant traffic, tides of tourists wash between historic buildings, cafes and modern coaches. Mendes da Rocha creates a vast cobbled plaza, extending the urban surface into ramps at the top of which the old houses huddle. In total, there is 12,605 sq m of built surface in the plans. He actually lifts the exhibition hall 4.5m above the plaza, and offers no preference for what is front, back or side. Another, more complex volume — the square-plan annex — is connected by a high-level walkway. That other, still unbuilt, skywalk bridge shoots from beneath it towards the river. It was to end in a 60m-wide drum car park, but that element has been dropped. ‘It’s very rich from an urbanistic point of view,’ says Bak Gordon. ‘He’s very generous.’ Beneath the exhibition volume, the plaza squeezes into an almost abstract geometric space between a diagonal ochre wall, behind which the reserve collection is stored, and a glass pavilion is the entrance. Lifts with a capacity of 75 persons bring the visitor into the exhibition halls themselves. Allowing for up to a million visitors a year, they occupy a neutral box 126m long and 48m wide, with a continuous concrete slab floor. It rests on 14 circular columns, each 1.8m wide, topped by sliding bearings
to cater for thermal expansion. The vast space is split longwise into three. On either side of a central, solid spine runs a spectacular, long, airy space, stretching to a window slit running across each box ends, narrow because the coaches’ delicate paints can be destroyed by over-exposure to sunlight. Trapezoid openings punctuate the white walls of the spine, allowing cross-passage or forming showcase windows for enclosed exhibits. Walkways are mounted along this central spine, connecting with bridges across the exhibition floor so that the fancy coach roofs can be viewed from above. To the north, the walkway branches out to the annex. Ironically, apart from its floor, this volume is not the concrete that characterises so much of Mendes da Rocha’s work. Furtado explains: ‘A steel structure has been chosen for its lightness — the building is in a seismic area and its dimensions and big spans would be too demanding of the foundations if we had chosen concrete.’ The light construction allows easy integration of services, and there are even glimpses of pipes painted red above metal grid ceiling panels. Bak Gordon denies any British high-tech influence here — Mendes da Rocha ‘always wanted to reveal the infrastructure. It’s pedagogic in a way’. Is the way the exhibition box is suspended above the plaza a reference to the way coach bodies are suspended above the ground? Enclosed stairs cantilever out from the river-facing 10 (previous page) – Lisbon’s initiative Belém Rediscovered ensured the preservation of old houses immediately north of the site. Mendes da Rocha has linked them to the new plaza with ramps
Second Floor Plan Section 1
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Restaurant Water feature on auditorium roof Administration offices Skywalk Permanent exhibition space (level 1) Education room Temporary exhibition space Internal and connecting raised walkways Railway (ground level) Car park and access to riverside
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11 – The exhibition volume is framed in steel rather than concrete, as revealed in the construction phase. The funnels above belong to the Museu da Electricidade, beyond 12 – An early model seen from above includes a circular structure to the south, which would have been a spiral car park, but was dropped 13 – Rui Furtado, afaconsult engineer 14 – Ricardo Bak Gordon, Lisbon-based project architect
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south side, in a solid, stepped section that widens out to 70m as it climbs — might it allude to how a coach body widens from its chasis to its windows? Bak Gordon says no to both, saying rather that Mendes da Rocha ‘lifts in every project’ because he and Artigas had ‘a political conviction...you never block the territory of the city’. This can be seen at the Cais das Artes in Brazil’s island city of Vitória (due to open December 2014), a collaboration with Metro Arquitetos of São Paulo, designed concurrently with the Museum of Coaches. It is also two linked volumes, with its exhibition space lifted. Indeed, the drama of the rectangular slab form raised on columns has a continuous lineage with a key Paulista School concrete building, Artigas’ Faculty of Architecture & Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (designed 1961). Of course, Le Corbusier too raised modernist volumes on piloti, but Bak Gordon says the Paulista School ‘is more radical’. And in an odd parallel, politics and practicality also caused the Richard Rogers’ practice to bring the plaza in beneath the building at London’s Cheesegrater (Leadenhall Building — see Blueprint 325, April 2013). Back up on that high walkway to the annex, the visitor emerges beneath a concrete grid that, when conditions are right, magically casts squares of light on to a water pool lying on a roof immediately below. A sculptural concrete frame holds the skylight grid aloft. Stretched across its top level is offices on one
side, a restaurant on the other. It presents a bold, full-width glass facade that seems to challenge the historical architecture to the west. Inside the hollow frame nestles a smaller rectangular volume with its roof pool. It’s painted pink, the same colour as the old building across to the north — as Bak Gordon explains: ‘The idea was to bring something chromatic to the site, to connect the continuity of the city.’ Inside is a 350-person auditorium, with bench seating. Again, Bak Gordon explains: ‘The idea was always to do something very simple... a popular theatre, not classical.’ Age has obscured neither Mendes da Rocha’s imagination nor passion. But will his new museum wow visitors as the current Azzolini building does? Its magnificently madly baroque interiors are as rich as the coaches themselves, and that may be part of the attraction. Could the new gallery lose its appeal without that submersive extravagance? Graça Santa-Bárbara, of the Coach Museum, seems unconcerned: ‘The light and clear environment together with the larger exhibition area will give more visibility to the objects,’ she says. Furthermore, extraordinary architecture itself draws visitors. Here, Mendes da Rocha offers it in a way that no European architect could — with New World’s vision and muscularity. And, particularly with its plaza, it speaks of spatial principles where people are paramount. It stands, he has delivered. The people should come… 15 (opposite) – The auditorium has simple, unpretentious bench seating 16 – Walkways above the exhibition floor recall Mendes de Rocha’s bridges in the Sao Paulo Pinacotea.
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17 – Paolo Mendes da Rocha 18 – The Cais das Artes, under coonstruction in Vitória, Brazil also lifts its exhibition space to liberate the public realm beneath
Paolo Mendes da Rocha Brazil’s legendary Pritzker Prize winner talks to Herbert Wright from São Paolo, about the new Museum of Coaches, his approach, and Portugal
Blueprint: Were lessons learned from the baroque building that currently hosts the museum? MdaR: The lesson for me is that architecture can no longer see the building as an isolated object, but rather an instrument for transformation of the city. The spaces of the city are always changing. Blueprint: Did the composition of the museum project gradually evolve? MdaR: A specific project doesn’t engender a ‘gradual evolution’ in the imagination of an individual, an architect. He always summons everything he knows, his memories, and sees the whole project at once. Blueprint: You were keen to capture memories of colours from the city — could you explain? MdaR: There is, in the small inner square bordering the museum site on the side away from the Tagus, a set of charming historic buildings with these remarkable colours. Always pale shades of pink, blue, ochre ... clays. In the new, closed prismatic auditorium volume, the idea of one of those colours was irresistible. At full volume. All four walls. As if to say: don’t worry about this new apparition, it’s nothing more than the transformation of the same eternal thing. The construction of the city. Right now.
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Blueprint: Is there a humanistic meaning in creating the plaza by lifting the exhibition volume off the ground? MdaR: Yes, with some logical reason: the volume taken by the museum is always very large, inevitably. The whole enclosure in this area of Belém, a major tourist attraction, is for touring, daydreaming, walking. To take this obstacle off the ground is nice. Blueprint: The museum is clearly similar to the Cais das Artés in Vitória, Brazil. MdaR: In both projects, the quality of the place has a historic, clear monumentality: they are maritime works. Ships, labour, territory won from the sea. Making this scenario part of the construction, an extraordinary window, is irresistible. 18
Blueprint: Why the water feature above the auditorium, and the square perforations in the canopy above it? MdaR: It praises water, sunlight, moonlight. An artificial capture of some of nature’s virtues. A fantasy... an ever-intriguing figure in the history of architecture. Blueprint: Has Portuguese architecture, from Távora and Siza onwards, inspired or influenced you? MdaR: As Portuguese speakers we are without doubt made with the presence of Portuguese architecture... The schools of Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto are notable centres of studies and reflections that we follow very carefully, always. Architects, particularly those mentioned, are examples of the ongoing dialogue between the scholarly and the popular, and above all, they are remarkable examples of intellectual integrity. Blueprint: Can you describe your collaboration with contemporary practices such as Metro Arquitetos and Ricardo Bak Gordon? MdaR: Collaborators are always indispensable in work of this scope. The work method is rich and indescribable.
Milan’s Triennale Design Museum hosts a Paolo Mendes da Rocha retrospective, curated by Daniele Pisani, May-August 2014
17 ANA OTTONI
Blueprint: You have written that as Brazilians, ‘our historical experience begins with the modern world’. How does that effect your approach? MdaR: The idea, the image of planet earth as a small piece of matter revolving around the sun is recent, coinciding with the great voyages, with Columbus and Galileo, with the ‘discovery’ of America. That inaugurated the modern world. From the point of view of building the city, the world is unitary, and nature is a set of phenomena, not merely landscapes.
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Runway success Words Pamela Buxton
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The only thing that seems certain is that London and the South East needs more airport capacity. With a range of proposals put forward, the Airports Commission is due to get down to the nitty-gritty of where and how it is to be supplied
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Should it be a four-runway mega-hub in the Thames Estuary? Or maybe super-long runways at Heathrow? How about an incremental approach expanding Gatwick now, and Stansted later? Should Heathrow really be closed? These are the issues that will occupy Howard Davies’ Airports Commission this year as it gets right down to the bare bones of how to expand airport provision in London and the South East. This is one big hot potato, one of those eternal, unsolved issues that has always proved just too strategically — and politically — hot to handle. Expansion first came up for discussion nearly 50 years ago, and since then there has simply been too much riding on it for anyone to agree and implement a strategy. What’s at stake is not only the homes and well-being of those unlucky enough to be near any new runways but — we’re told — the very future of the UK’s airline industry, with huge knock-on effects for the UK economy as a whole. So it’s not really surprising it is taking so long to solve. This is a huge strategic question about so much more than airports and runways, involving everything from roads, rail and port infrastructure, flood barriers, economic regeneration and the north–south balance of England. How to actually design the airport terminal will be the easy bit — the cherry on the icing on the cake, the final topping on the baked potato.
There has been no less than 52 submissions to the Commission of which just three have been shortlisted in its Interim Report (see box below). Two are for expansion at Heathrow (despite this being ruled out in 2010 by the Coalition Government) and one at Gatwick, with further consideration of an inner Thames estuary-based hub. The latter location is backed by London mayor Boris Johnson and may yet be promoted to the shortlist over the next few months. Meanwhile, the shortlisted schemes have until May to develop their proposals further in response to set-assessment criteria. The aviation industry argues that something needs to happen if London airports are to maintain their global position in the face of competition from growing hubs such as Dubai, Istanbul and Amsterdam (Schiphol). Heathrow serves the largest number of international passengers in the world but is now effectively full, and Gatwick, London City and Luton will be at capacity by 2030. The Commission cites the cost to the wider economy of doing nothing as £30bn-45bn. The question is, should the new capacity be a hub transfer airport or a more incremental solution, and whether hub expansion should be at an existing or new site. Expansion is understandably opposed by those who would potentially be directly adversely affected by it, and also by environmental lobbyists and activists Plane Stupid and
52 submissions were made to the Airports Commission — here are the shortlisted schemes and the best of the rest...
The sTory so far
WhaT happens nexT
November 2012 Airports Commission, chaired by Howard Davies, set up
First half of 2014 Further appraisal of Isle of Grain as a location for a hub airport
December 2013 Airports Commission Interim Report names a shortlist of three from 52 proposals: • Gatwick – new 3,000m-plus runway to the south of the existing runway (proposed by Gatwick Airport) • Heathrow – new 3,500m runway to the north-west of the existing airport (proposed by Heathrow Airport) • Heathrow – extension of existing northern runway to the west to at least 6,000m, enabling it to operate as two separate runways (proposed by Heathrow Hub) In addition, Isle of Grain/Thames Estuary is retained as a location for further consideration and potential elevation to the shortlist. Stansted is described as a ‘plausible’ option for any second additional runway in the 2040s.
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May 9 Shortlisted schemes submit more detailed proposals against a set appraisal framework Autumn 2014 Consultation on shortlist and appraisal results May 2015 General Election June 2015 Airports Commission final report into remaining options and recommendation
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1 (previous page) & 2 – How the Thames Reach Airport could look. The air/rail hub is proposed to future-proof the UK’s position in global aviation
Greenpeace, which cite noise, pollution, community destruction and greenhouse-gas emissions. Comparing the options is a tough — some would say impossible — task, as they are all answering different questions in the absence of an overall strategic vision, aside from the vested interests of airports, airlines and London’s mayor, says Chris Williamson of Weston Williamson, one of several architects who have admirably got stuck into the airport provision debate off their own bats, in its case proposing Luton. Foster’s has been working on its Isle of Grain vision for four years, while Farrells was exploring the airport provision strategies before Gatwick asked the practice to advise it on runway expansion. At the same time, Gensler has been working on a hub for the outer estuary, Make at Stansted, and Grimshaw has been putting together a London hub City proposal. All present compelling cases. ‘The estuary airports would be a fantastic location for London, and if London is to grow by two million people in the next 20 years, it makes sense to grow eastwards. But it’s a terrible location for the rest of England,’ says Williamson, describing the Commission process as ‘a bit of a beauty parade’. What’s really needed is a strategic planning framework, according to Zoë Metcalfe, aviation director at Buro Happold. ‘Lots of people think that the biggest thing we’re missing is a UK
planning framework to know how this fits in.’ Buro Happold’s independent view is that a four-runway hub airport would be best for a viable and profitable aviation business by delivering the right combination for long-haul, short-haul and point-to-point flights. Metcalfe is personally unconvinced by an estuary location, which she feels is overly driven by the need to regenerate the east of London rather than by what is right strategically for the whole country, and may result in a costly white elephant. So will this Commission be the one to crack it? The timing of the next general election does not bode well in that a new government could simply duck the issue. What’s essential, says Metcalfe, is that the business community presses for the outcome of the Commission to be acted on to ensure the UK doesn’t lose out by doing nothing (see Listen, page 23). The outcome of one of the previous commissions — Roskill 1968-1970 — is a salutary tale and perhaps gives hope to the options not chosen, or even shortlisted. Back then, the chosen option of Cublington in Buckinghamshire was swiftly abandoned and another location — Foulness in the Thames Estuary — chosen, only for this too to be shelved in 1974 amid the oil crisis. Forty years on, when the current commission finally delivers its verdict next summer, it will be anything but the final word in this debate. This one will run and run and maybe one day fly.
Thames Reach — airRailhub
Norman Foster’s vision wasn’t the only inner estuary proposal. The less high-profile Thames Reach AirRailHub concept is for a 25 sq km platform 8m above sea-level projecting into the estuary from the Hoo Peninsula (Kent) and providing three 24-hour-a-day operable runways supported by two terminals with 12 satellites and two 10-track railway stations with direct access to Crossrail and HS1. It also involves a road/rail tunnel to Canvey Island (Essex) and a tidal pool. Thames Reach Airport director Matthias Hamm argues that such a hub would future-proof the UK’s position in global aviation and would be far less expensive, safer and less noise-polluting than expanding Heathrow. Central to the proposal is an integrated rail strategy incorporating Crossrail High Speed, regional and commuter services. Three runways could be completed by 2032 with potential for a further fourth. ‘It’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime chance to really plan something with synergy, where one can produce an outcome that can be truly integrated,’ he says, welcoming the Commission’s decision to give further consideration to an estuary location. 79
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heathrow hub
This hub option, an independent proposal, expands and divides Heathrow’s two runways to effectively create four, and was considered the wild card on the shortlist when it was announced. The first phase could be completed in just five years. Heathrow Hub director Captain William ‘Jock’ Lowe argues that the Heathrow Hub is the most sensible, safe and cost-effective option and avoids the commercial risks of relocating to a new airport. It would, he says, disturb fewer people by extending what is there already, and by using the extra runway length to land early morning flights on the further parts 3km further west. He maintains that it is the simplest option, despite the need to either tunnel, bridge or divert the M25 to accommodate the longer runway/s. This, he says, is an opportunity to sort out the road bottleneck. Lowe envisages the Heathrow Hub would reduce road congestion by connecting to existing mainline Great Western Rail services plus HS2 Crossrail services to the north. This new transport interchange would be 3.5km north of Terminal 5. The plan was drawn up with engineering, construction and technical services group URS.
Heathrow Hub is the most sensible, safe and costeffective option and avoids the commercial risk of relocating to a new airport, says Heathrow Hub director William ‘Jock’ Lowe
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HeatHrow — new north-west runway
Heathrow Airport proposes a third runway to the north-west, which it says will offer periods of noise respite and affect 15 per cent fewer households than today due to steeper landing approaches, quieter aircraft and the more westerly location. The airport considers there should only be one new runway in the South East, and that this should be at Heathrow, where expansion is necessary to enable Heathrow to maintain its hub status and compete with Frankfurt and Amsterdam (Schiphol). This could be built, it says, faster and more cheaply than a new airport and operate 24 hours a day handling 110 million rising to 150 million passengers a year. The extra runway would be 3,500m long — 1,500m longer than the previous expansion proposal in 2003. Passengers would travel through a new Terminal 6 and expanded Terminal 2 with satellite piers serving the new runway. It would cost an estimated £17bn and could be built in six years to be operational by 2026. The airport argues that this scheme would provide £100bn in economic benefits.
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Gatwick
Farrells has been working independently on aviation provision in the South East and is currently advising Gatwick on its expansion plans. Rather than a single location mega-hub, Farrells proposes an incremental, constellation-hub approach forming what it terms a ‘superaerotropolis’. The first stage is another Gatwick runway and associated surface transport improvements; the second, another runway at Stansted when needed, thus avoiding the creation of one dominant airport while maintaining competition. The new Gatwick runway could be added after 2019, when a legal agreement with local residents not to expand expires. It could be delivered by 2025 at a cost of £5bn-£9bn. Farrells partner Neil Bennett says this approach has the least carbon costs and environmental damage, would cause the least noise disturbance, and has political support in the region. It is also far more achievable and less risky than an all-eggs-in-one-basket estuary solution. ‘With the continued changes in aviation, we don’t favour one big solution,’ he says, pointing to future changes in plane types, airlines and travel patterns that are currently hard to predict. ‘We suspect the time to be a hub airport has passed’. Farrells has drawn up three options for the new runway location to the south offering different capacities up to 87 million people by 2050 ahead of a public consultation in April.
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Thames hub
Foster + Partners has been proactively proposing a new hub airport on the Isle of Grain in the inner Thames Estuary since before the commission was established. It is an exciting, compelling vision for an integrated transport and economic strategy encompassing a new orbital rail system, and a new flood barrier. ‘Transformative’ benefits of an estimated £75bn would include 100,000 new jobs and regenerating the Thames Gateway. Foster + Partners argues that, rather than the ‘sticking plaster’ incremental approach of expanding existing airports, this bold proposal meets urgent extra capacity need and offers a long-term strategy for future growth. ‘If you’re creating a global hub you need four runways,’ says Foster + Partners’ partner Huw Thomas. The airport would drastically reduce the number of households affected by aircraft noise and demolish fewer homes than expanding elsewhere. There are however major issues with bird feeding grounds. The airport would be built on a rectangular-shaped platform, 5.2km long, 4.5km wide and 7m above sea level, on a 20 sq km total site. It would be 26 minutes from central London via multiple rail routes. While the Airports Commission thought the Isle of Grain scheme had the most merit of the estuary proposals, it called it extremely costly at around £112bn. Foster’s doesn’t recognise that figure, instead estimating £24bn.
‘If you are creating a global hub you need four runways,’ says Foster + Partners’ partner Huw Thomas
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London Britannia
Gensler is surprised and disappointed that its outer estuary vision isn’t being considered further by the Commission. As well as its noise pollution advantages, an outer estuary location east of Sheerness offers more freedom than an inner estuary site on the Isle of Grain, where there are shipping lane, bird feeding and gas issues, says managing director Ian Mulcahey. Instead, the 15km-long outer site offers an unencumbered ‘blue Greenfield site’. This would allow for the design of the optimum airport layout, bringing passengers out to the planes — which are situated in the middle to give access to all runways without crossovers, rather than bringing the planes to the passenger terminal. London Britannia has potential for six runways providing 160 million passengers per year and, with the advantage of no land assembly or planning delay, could be built in seven years for £47bn. It would have an international ferry terminal plus high-speed rail connections to London, Gatwick, Stansted, the regions and Europe and would both revitalise the Thames Gateway and free up Heathrow for ‘recycling’ as homes and a tech enterprise zone (right).
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StanSted
Architecture practice Make felt Stansted was being overlooked in the airport debate and independently researched it as a potential site for expansion. Its proposal is for a hub with four parallel runways, two on either side of expanded terminal provision, ultimately handling around 120 million passengers each year. ‘We thought we’d like to look at it with a clean slate as architects and think of what strategically is best for the country,’ says partner Cara Bamford, adding that it then found Stansted to be extremely well placed for a gradual, phased expansion that utilised existing facilities and infrastructure. The proposal, provisionally costed at £18bn for the airport campus, would utilise surrounding farmland and provide fast rail links into London and elsewhere via links to Crossrail 1 & 2. Other rail infrastructure options include linking into existing East Coast mainline and routes to London Stratford and Cambridge. In its favour, it avoids flights over London and associated noise pollution, and would directly affect far fewer locals than a Gatwick or Heathrow option without the logistic complexities of proximity to the M25/M23. It would encourage economic regeneration to the east by boosting the
growth of a development corridor from Tech City in east London out towards Cambridge. Stansted Airport also made its own submission to the Commission, but neither was shortlisted, although the airport was mentioned as a potential option for a fourth runway in the 2040s. If not at Stansted, it’s essential that runway expansion does happen somewhere, rather than being lost in the post-election fallout, says Bamford. ‘The thing we all agree on is that whatever’s chosen, something needs to be done, because economically it is the best opportunity for the country,’ she says.
The expansion of Stansted avoids flights over London and associated noise pollution, and would directly affect far fewer locals than a Gatwick or Heathrow option
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Luton Hub
Following its involvement in Crossrail and Old Oak Common (HS2), architecture and design practice Weston Williamson independently proposed a hub airport at Luton with potential for four runways. According to Chris Williamson, it makes sense to locate a hub where the infrastucture is already good, and Luton is well placed for the whole country not just London. As well as the A1 and M1, the Luton hub would link directly to Thameslink and to both East (seven minutes) and West Coast (10 minutes) mainlines with new light-rail spurs to the terminal, the latter line freed up by HS2. Luton’s growth could be phased and wouldn’t preclude further expansion at Heathrow, but would have scope to grow to four runways if needed. Expansion would be on land currently used for farming without the complications of birdlife and shipping lanes presented by some estuary options. It would expose drastically fewer people to noise pollution and congestion than Heathrow or Gatwick options and would be a stimulus for the whole of the UK. Inside, the terminal would be a departure from the usual sterile airport environments with natural ventilation, indoor-outdoor spaces, and leisure facilities. ‘We think that if you’re going to do something at Luton, it ought to have potential to be a hub,’ says Williamson, although Luton Airport itself is proposing rather less ambitious expansion.
Growth at Luton could be phased and wouldn’t preclude further expansion at Heathrow, but would have scope to grow to four runways if needed
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Winging it Words Anthea Gerrie
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A unique house has taken shape in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, with the component parts of a Boeing 747s cut up and integrated — with some physical difficulty — into the house designed by architect David Hertz, of the Studio of Environmental Architecture
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1 david hertz 3 (top left) david hertz, other images Courtesy of syndesis
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1 (previous page) – The Wing House incorporates a Boeing 747 wing and more 2 – The plan and the elevation of the wing house 3 – Choosing and dismantling the appropriate plane
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Master Suite Dining / Living Area Courtyard Covered Patio
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Is it a house? Is it a plane? Strictly speaking, both. It was the timeless, uber-functional design of a Boeing 747 that inspired, and eventually formed a crucial part of, the house David Hertz built for Francine Rehwald in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And given his commitment to repurposing industrial waste, the environmental architect has used the lot. The wings and two stabilisers from the tail section enjoy star billing atop the main residence, while a studio outhouse has a section of fuselage as its roof. The upper deck that once housed first-class passengers now shelters a guest house on the property, while another piece of the fuselage has made it into the interior as a room divider. And that’s not all: the cockpit has been transformed into a meditation pavilion in which the windows through which pilots once looked serve as a skylight. Even the engine cowling has been incorporated on the 22-ha site as a fountain-cum-fire pit. Remaining bits of fuselage have been carefully stored to realise future projects on the site, including roofing for a barn. Starting with some literally blue-sky doodles and taking five years to realise, this project is likened by Hertz, of the Studio of Environmental Architecture in Venice Beach, California, to
‘using every part of the buffalo, like the Native Americans did. ‘My client had challenged me to come up with curvilinear, feminine shapes for the building. Standing on the property, I imagined a floating roof overhanging the site to allow unobstructed views’, he says. Soaring aircraft wings, with their massive span, came to mind as a design inspiration. ‘But given that a wing-foilshaped roof would be complex and difficult to build conventionally, I thought, why not use a real wing?’ This was not such a daft idea given the number of aviation graveyards in California where abandoned planes lay rotting, or, as Hertz so eloquently puts it, ‘dessicating in a desert of obsolescence’. He adds: ‘These boneyards of industrial technology seemed to have great potential for secondary uses. The material processes used to make the wing represent one of the most efficient use of resources in achieving the highest strength with the lightest weight.’ But was there a law against recycling aircraft into residences? ‘After verifying with the building department that there was nothing specifically prohibiting the use of an airplane wing as a roof, we examined whether other components might
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4 – The plane’s wings, which were separated for transport, were reattached to form the basis of the unique roof structure 5 – The house has dramatic view all around
4, 5 Douglas Hill 6, 7 DaviD Hertz
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6 – The repurposed wings feel as if they were custom-made for the house 7 – The unusual view profile seen from a distance
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8 (opposite page) – The parts were flown to the site by Chinook helicopter
be used for additional structures on the property. We did find we’d have to register the roof of the house with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), though, so pilots flying overhead did not mistake it as a downed aircraft.’ Hertz also had to answer questions from Homeland Security about exactly why he wanted to buy what since 9/11 had become a potential weapon of mass destruction, and get approval from 17 US government agencies. Having identified his aeronautical salvage yard and determined that the 747-200, with a single wing able to cover 232 sq m, was the model to go for, Hertz persuaded his client, who was only too receptive to the mad idea, to fork out $30,000 — about £18,000 — for an abandoned model. It turns out that passenger planes, which cost around £150m new, are terrific value once their flying days are over: ‘The scale of this aircraft is enormous — more than 70m long, 59m wide and 19m tall — a tremendous amount of material for the money,’ Hertz says. But perhaps this plane had exhausted its flying days more than most, as it was one of the first 50 747s ever built, commissioned by the long-defunct Pan Am. Then came the very tricky logistics and eye-watering expense of getting the material
to the site: ‘First, using a laser, we beheaded the plane, removed the tail and cut it longitudinally. Next, transverse sections reduced the segmented fuselage and wings to a manageable size for transport,’ he says. But not just any transport: three freeways and two highways had to be closed while the California Highway Patrol escorted trucks loaded with giant wing sections measuring 38m x 14m. Once safely arrived at Camarillo, the nearest airport to the site, the wings had to be cut in half to position for suspension from a Chinook CH-47, the world’s largest cargo helicopter, for their final journey into the remote hills. Hertz defends what he admits was ‘a very large carbon burst’. But the total emissions and embodied energy of transporting these large pieces was less than the transportation of thousands of small parts in a typical construction, and made the $8,000-an-hour [£4,800] cost of transporting the parts ‘realistic’. Concrete walls were cut into the hillside to support the wing structures and steel brace frames attached to strategic mounting points on the wings where the engines were previously mounted. Existing retaining walls from a previous
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Rear spar Mid spar Front spar Re-lamp existing landing lights Steel tube column Thru-bolted to (E) wing mount locations Custom fabricated steel plate brackets Wing support system Self supporting full height glazing system
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building on the site, part of designer Tony Duquette’s estate destroyed by fire in 1993, were reused to minimise the need for any significant grading and its impact on the topography and landscape. Frameless, structural self-supporting glass created the enclosure from the concrete slab to the wing roof. The two-year construction phase was far from simple, with ‘winging it’ acquiring a literal significance for the sometimes befuddled architects: ‘In the absence of data from Boeing, which was concerned both about proprietary technology issues and post-9/11 issues of national security, we needed to investigate the wing by cutting it up and then piecing it back together,’ says Hertz. But $2m later, the Wing House was finished, winning numerous awards over the next two years. The house retains and exudes the essence of flight, even though the wings have been radically reconfigured from their initial position on either side of an aeroplane cabin. Now, one floats above the other in a cascading design that makes them clearly visible as aviation parts when viewed aerially. Teardrop-shaped cross sections that once connected to the body of an aircraft are now exposed to the elements,
showcasing beautiful, normally hidden attachment devices. Yet the nature of the wings, with their long span and shiny, reflective surfaces also causes them to recede into the landscape rather than competing with the real show-stoppers, the sea, sky and mountains. As Hertz puts it: ‘They cascade down the ridge line, integrating the structure into the landscape.’ But whenever Francine Rehwald, a retired Mercedes-Benz car dealer, wants to pay homage to the origins of her thrilling new home, she need only step out of her bedroom, to which one of the wings is connected. From here, it’s just a step down to the companion part, allowing this visionary homeowner to achieve what no 747 pilot ever managed, and go wing-walking as she gazes over an unparalleled view to the ocean. ‘The message is repurpose, reuse, and to think what you might build out of a discard,’ she told CBS News when it visited her new home. And the message, which to be fair is an echo of the architect’s, has been heard far and wide, with another 747 being converted into a hostel to sit on a disused runway at Stockholm airport, around 8,900km away from the glamorous Wing House and a planet away from its breathtaking setting. 9 – Interior views of the finished house
9 (top right) DaviD hertz, all other images Douglas hill
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DRAWING AS DOCUMENTATION Words Shumi Bose Drawings Liam O’Connor
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Artist-in-residence at the British Museum, Liam O’Connor has been hiding away inside for the past three years while Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ new extension went up around him, documenting its construction in drawings. He tells us about his practice, while Graham Stark of RSH+P relays observations from the building process
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As artist-in-residence at the British Museum, Liam O’Connor’s hide-like room has perched at the edge of a building site for the past three years. The World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre — a new extension to the British Museum designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners — which opened this spring. O’Connor has been documenting its construction, since construction began in 2010. After a long process of scrutiny and an almost physical, Stendahl-like relationship with the site, O’Connor’s ‘final’ piece is a single drawing recording many layers of observation and study, made over many months — first recording the voided site, then the turbulence of excavation, later the imposition of structural steels and the reorganisation of the space. In the act of building the world around us, the drawing is the first site of construction. In the 16th century, Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti championed the architect as an intellectual professional, and the drawing as the architect’s original act of creation. So emerges the claim of drawing as a fundamental practice of architecture: still today, through the complex process of producing a building, the drawing remains the architect’s space for exploration and expression. Trained as a graphic designer, O’Connor cites summer jobs labouring on building sites as having a profound impact on his working methods. Indeed, as spectacular as his layered pencil drawing is in documenting RSH+P’s museum extension, much of his drawing research at the British Museum allows the site to ‘record’ itself on paper — almost casting the site as the author. O’Connor has gathered marks, rubbings and textures made from the building materials and process of construction — like the arc of a digger, or the rust marks left by iron nails — that produce some of the most moving works. The carpenter’s bench is a ubiquitous structure on building sites: this unromantic object supports everything that is measured and built there; its surface recording innumerable saw-cuts and tool-traces. It is in itself a drawing, and every physical process ingrained on its surface exists somewhere in the building. O’Connor allows these otherwise mute elements to speak through the marks
they make; as well as observing and documenting the changing construction site, he records the physical traces of the site itself. During his MA studies, which he completed at the Royal College of Art, O’Connor settled on architectural and urban spaces as the subject of his experimental reportage drawing spaces. Mainly narrative significance and composition, he noticed that these ‘concrete’ spaces were also in flux. Drawing a set of stairs in King’s Cross, he returned to find these filled in: they had disappeared and were no longer available to use or view. Something seemed significant in drawing these precarious places; O’Connor’s work thereafter takes on an almost documentary, albeit subjective, fervour — reconciling the artist with alterations in the perceived world. O’Connor works strictly from observation, positioning his work from the real rather than remembered or imagined space. But although they observe the present moment, O’Connor maintains that his drawings are made in relation to a site’s past, which is always present and must make itself known. Seeing the city fabric as a dynamic process rather than a fixed entity has informed his choice of charcoal and vivid pastel, capturing something of this fluidity. According to Austin Williams, who convened the drawing workshop Paper Salon, in conjunction with the British Council, ‘Many people have reverted to a leaded pencil on lined paper, to return to the skilful artistry that has been lost to the ubiquity of the PC,’ suggesting that hand drawing ‘requires swaggering in the face of incipient failure’. Indeed the physical act of drawing has an immediacy to it; the drawing or sketch becomes a critical tool for experimenting, making mistakes and suggesting possible solutions, rather than the careful modelling of photo-real alternative realities. Perhaps our increased exposure to visual imagery in general, through our screen-dominated lives, makes us more sensitive to the specific qualities of hand drawing — expressive, humane, suggesting a dynamic space of possibility. O’Connor’s documentary drawings of the built environment bear repeated viewing, telling stories over time that would otherwise be forgotten. 1 (previous pages), 2 & 3 (following pages) – O’Connor’s drawings show a layering of graphite as well as narrative; early earth movements are visible underneath the later scaffolding structures
‘Many have reverted to a leaded pencil on lined paper, to return to the skilful artistry that has been lost to the ubiquity of the PC’ — Austin Williams
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4-10 – Site drawings, made by the construction activities. O’Connor made rubbings from an ordinary carpenter’s bench richly etched with repeated cuts, and collected rust marks from discarded iron nails
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11 – Exterior elevation of the almost completed World Conservation and Exhibition Centre, which Stirk describes as a lantern-like pavilion
12 – Despite the conservative building guidance for historic Bloomsbury, RSH+P took the decision to stick to their modern guns with the WCEC
13 – The first exhibition at the new WCEC is Vikings: Life and Legend including this 37m longboat, which could not have been shown before
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Shumi Bose talks to RSH + P about how it modernised Bloomsbury, through the new World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre extension to the British Museum
‘It’s interesting that someone takes an interest in process,’ says Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ Graham Stirk, of Liam O’Connor’s documentation of the RSH+P extension to the British Museum. ‘Our society doesn’t often value that; it’s about end-product and image.’ Indeed the construction of the stateof-the-art World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, which opened in March, has been a long journey, beginning in 2007. Stirk shudders to recall the arduous planning process for work on the Grade I listed Edwardian buildings designed by Sir Robert Smirke, in an area where ‘people want no change’. Project architect John McElgunn adds: ‘In the Square Mile, people expect building of this sort, but in Georgian Bloomsbury, they tend to want things to look a bit Georgian.’ Perhaps what saved the £135m project was an abstinence from the flashy moves so typical of cultural buildings. The WCEC was trying to solve complex logistical problems crucial to the British Museum’s ability to function as a world-class facility.
As one of Britain’s best-loved and most-visited places of interest, the museum’s visitor numbers top six million a year. Though the queues snaked right around the block in 1972 for the famous Treasures of Tutankhamun show, the museum would have struggled to put on such an exhibition again, not least because it lacked an ample and dedicated loading bay. ‘It’s almost unthinkable to move priceless historic objects around this way,’ gasps Stirk. ‘Shuffling past the public, up flights of stairs and bumping into the Reading Room.’ The new addition allows precious artefacts to be brought into the building with the necessary insurance safeguards, without leaving the special conditions needed to protect fragile items and, consequently, allowing the museum collectors and curators greater freedom. The challenge was in trying to tie all of the modern requirements of such a project into the middle of a GeorgianEdwardian building patchwork. The WCEC drops on to an awkward T-shaped hole, between historic buildings whose floor
11, 12 & 13 PAUL RAFTERY
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‘In O’Connor’s drawings ‘there’s an archaeological sense as well as one of frozen energy — it’s almost if you can see the ghosts of activity, capturing fragments that are disappearing’ — Graham Stirk
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Portland limestone elsewhere in the museum. The prevalence of structural glass keeps a certain amount of transparency between conservation activity and gallery spaces, piquing visitor interest. As an object, the WCEC is intended as a series of lightweight planes; a supporting act to the existing museum, rather than a brash new hero or stylised neoclassical pastiche. Indeed, the WCEC doesn’t even have a major new entrance because, as Stirk says: ‘This is part of the existing museum; why on earth would we try to compete with that?’ Instead the extension will be accessed through the Great Court, the museum’s major hub. The complexity of a project is often lost in the glossy final image. In Liam O’Connor’s drawings, says Stirk, ‘There’s an archaeological sense as well as one of frozen energy — it’s almost like you can see ghosts of activity, capturing fragments that are disappearing.’ The new facilities and display space will allow the museum to retain and celebrate cultural history from all over the world, which is what it does best. 14 – The interior of RSH+P’s new extension to the British Museum uses transparency to improve working conditions for conservation workers, and pique visitor curiosity
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levels and plans don’t match up. RSH+P has placed archive storage underground, where climactic conditions are more easily stabilised, while visitor and conservation study areas benefit from natural lighting. One primary and visitor-facing requirement was a vast, column-free exhibition space at the same level as the Great Court. This was conceived as a blank and adaptable box, which might be changed according the narrative required of any specific exhibition. The first event in this space is the spectacular Vikings: Life and Legend (until 22 June), which includes the 37m Viking longship Roskilde VI, never before seen in Britain. ‘It took us a long time to develop the architectural language, and saw us moving into new territories of understanding materials and surfaces,’ says Stirk. The main materials on view are heavyweight, construction-grade glass planks — ‘a veil between new and old buildings’ — and non-structural stone ‘blades’, which retains a relationship with the traditional
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25/02/2014 16:47
it’s all about the money Words Veronica Simpson
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Some of the UK’s most interesting architects are doing their best work for developers. We investigate what’s behind the property sector’s apparent conversion to the cause of good design
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1 Gareth Gardener 2 huFtOn+CrOW 3 tIM CrOCKer
Developers have not, traditionally, enjoyed a very good reputation within the architectural fraternity — or with the general public, for that matter. At worst they are seen as sharp-suited pirates of urban space, stripping out centuries-old residential or commercial buildings to replace them with shoddy, design-by-numbers structures, thrown up with no driving objective other than maximising their cash before they move on. But times have changed. Whether it’s economic necessity — driven by the lack of buyers for bad housing or poor office space — or just good sense, there is a growing number of developers out there that appear to be cherry-picking some of the UK’s better practices to transform our urban wastelands and unloved spaces. This new breed appears to enjoy and understand the value of architecture and design. Some of them even consider architects their natural collaborators — the creative yang to their commercial yin. Peter Murray, chairman of New London Architecture (NLA) — the capital’s networking and knowledge-sharing hub for all built-environment professionals — agrees there has been an evolutionary shift. He says: ‘The days of evil developers have not totally disappeared because clearly there are those around that only want to make a quick buck. But most of the developers that we see here do recognise that they have a wider duty and generally see that good design is in their own best interests.’ Derwent London is one of the most visible of this latter breed. Along with Urban Splash (and predating it slightly), the company is a pioneer of design-led development as well as adaptive reuse —more than 80 per cent of Derwent’s schemes involve the regeneration of existing buildings. Derwent is also, more to the point, an investor: it owns its properties as longterm landlord. Which is undoubtedly why, since the earliest scheme (an Old Street factory conversion with AHMM), it appears to have prioritised quality. If you look at the firms the company has worked with since the mid-Eighties, Derwent director Simon Silver emerges as an architectural equivalent to Charles Saatchi — nurturing British architecture practices from their early years like Saatchi did for YBAs Hirst, Emin and Lucas. Along with AHMM, whose Angel Building won it a coveted Stirling Prize shortlisting in 2011, the established and emerging architects on its books include: Stiff & Trivillion, Duggan Morris, DSDHA, Hugh Broughton, Sergison Bates, Hawkins\Brown, BuckleyGrayYeoman, Bennetts Associates, Piercy & Co, Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and Squire and Partners. Silver’s team may get a price advantage in picking young talent but when it finds an architect it likes, it sticks with them; AHMM was only 10 strong when it first started working together — now the practice has 160 staff. Says Silver: ‘We take all these people along the way. And they are strongly influential. I’d like to think we get the best out of them. We work as a team. It’s a collaboration.’ What the architect gets is good, old-fashioned patronage.
You don’t have to dig too deep to find small to medium-sized developers that have clearly come to appreciate the architect’s importance within a strategic team valued for their expertise
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1 (previous page) – Atrium at Clapham One, Clapham, by Studio Egret West for Cathedral 2 (opposite page) – Buckley House, Clerkenwell by BuckleyGrayYeoman for Derwent London 3 – Elephant House, by Hawkins\Brown for Derwent London
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Stuart Piercy, of Piercy & Co, who is now on site with Derwent’s Turnmills building in Clerkenwell, says: ‘Turnmills has been seven years in planning…but [Derwent] kept us all the way through four complete redesigns. A lot of developers might have been tempted to try another practice.’ The trust this generates is a precious commodity in today’s tough marketplace. says Piercy. ‘When you feel like you are trusted, then you can do your best work.’ Piercy also appreciates that, due to the size and scale of Derwent’s operations, ‘it is always doing new and bigger things, which brings the practices up that trajectory with it.’ The payoff for Derwent is an incredibly low vacancy rate — around 1.5 per cent. But it also leverages the value of its buildings through the perceived prestige of the architects’ involvement and the obvious quality of the buildings. At last summer’s launch event for its Buckley Building by BuckleyGray Yeoman (recent recipient of an AJ Retrofit award) in Clerkenwell, you could practically see the agents salivating over their sharp suits as they calculated the fees on the lofty ceilings and sweeping views over EC1. As one insider says: ‘If creative and technology businesses weren’t willing to pay top dollar for great buildings, would they still be as interested?’ But is this a problem, and if so, for whom? God knows, UK architects have needed the work over the past five years. For all the rapacious practises of some developers and the perennial battles over community consultation and environmental impacts, there is a greater spirit of cooperation now perhaps than there has been for decades between a growing number of developers and their architects. You don’t have to dig too deeply to find small to mediumsized developers which have clearly come to appreciate the architect’s importance within a strategic team, valued for their expertise in engaging with a site’s social, historical and architectural context as well as creating inspired masterplans and well-designed, appealing buildings. Those who get good word of mouth include GPE, Cathedral, Exemplar, Igloo and, of course, Urban Splash, whose fortunes may have dipped but it’s still out there, and planning to embark on the next phase of the Hawkins\Brown-led refurbishment of Sheffield’s iconic Park Hill estate. There is an undoubted London bias, however, when it comes to the really interesting projects. Long-serving Urban Splash collaborator Shedkm felt compelled to add a London office to its Liverpool base last year in order to win business from the design-savvy developers in the South East. Apart from Urban Splash, progressive developers outside of London are ‘few and far between’, says Ian Killick, director of Shedkm. He is, however, encouraged by young, forward-thinking consortia such as Capital & Centric, which has put Shedkm’s scheme for Liverpool’s Littlewoods Building back on the cards. The practice’s London move has already paid off with its winning a major mixed-use project in Brighton, for Cathedral Group, at the end of last year.
Cathedral — like most of the more design-led developers here — is an investor and regeneration specialist rather than an out-and-out developer. Cathedral’s USP is regenerating difficult sites with mixed-use schemes (at Deptford and Hayes in particular) as well as pioneering clever schemes through public private partnerships (PPP) with local authorities — such as in the Clapham One project with Studio Egret West (see case study). For Cathedral’s creative director Martyn Evans, good design and good development are the only way out of recession. ‘Property is the building blocks of economic prosperity’, he says. ‘If we are going to change the way we work and find new ways of making money, property has to foster it, fuel it, create social enterprise, give people good places to live that they can afford when they aren’t earning so much money, [and] give them nice public facilities. ‘The only way that can begin is by being clever and collaborative and understanding people and the way they live, work and enjoy themselves. Good architects are at the absolute epicentre of that.’ Christophe Egret, of Studio Egret West, says: ‘There are developers that want an easy life, and want to keep on repeating what they’ve done before if the recipe works. They don’t want to complicate their lives with mixed use. They don’t want consultations because it’s complicated, and they don’t want to work with artists because it’s messy. ‘What Cathedral does is embrace that complexity and see that it adds value. It also sees that it helps convince the planners, the council members, the partnerships that they get into that the [scheme] is better. So all the time they come to a project with [that perspective of ]: “What can we do that’s extraordinary?”. They enjoy working with us because the fact is we come from the same place.’ If ‘public consultation’ has long been perceived as anathema to developers, Cathedral has also inverted that stereotype with its commitment to ‘meanwhile’ uses — inhabiting its sites in the short-term to enrich usage for the long-term. For example, with the Deptford Project, a joint venture with Lewisham Council on a derelict site adjacent to Deptford station, Cathedral shipped in an old train carriage and turned it into a cafe. With the help of Studio Myerscough’s funky graphics, it has become a real community hub. Cathedral also cleaned up and then let the railway arches to artists and artisans, and programmed markets and summer cinema events. No doubt it was trying to make the best of Network Rail dragging its heels over the development (four years and counting). However, thanks to these initiatives, says Evans, ‘We have had a permanent public consultation facility for four years. All the staff who work in the cafe are trained about what’s happening and can talk about our scheme. It enriches the process because the architects go and have meetings in the train carriages…It de-risks our project, which means that it happens. It makes the planning process easier because our consultation
Land Securities — the biggest commercial UK developer — is midway through a 10-year, £2bn project... that harnesses the talents of Sir David Chipperfield alongside younger, edgier practices 4 – Developer Urban Splash is working on Park Hill Estate in Sheffield with Hawkins Brown and Egret West
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is deeper and better. It makes the marketing for the place easier. And it means there’s no way we’re not going to do the right thing on that site.’ (For the record, Evans has promised not to turf the artisans out of the railway arches when the adjacent Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners-designed flats are completed). There are one or two big players also surfing this evolutionary wave. Argent’s efforts in King’s Cross, for example, are widely appreciated, not least for the care taken to ensure that a good mixture of interesting practices work on individual buildings, but also for its commitment to investing in highquality public spaces that will help knit the disparate communities together. Meanwhile, Land Securities — the biggest commercial UK developer of them all — is midway through a 10-year, £2bn project in Victoria that harnesses the talents of Sir David Chipperfield alongside younger, edgier practices like Lynch Architects and Henley Halebrown Rorrison. Land Securities’ head of London development management, Oliver Gardiner, would dispute that an appreciation of design and good architecture is anything new, but he admits that relationships between all in the design team are tighter these days. ‘When we work with the teams we take the design side very seriously,’ he says. Undoubtedly, using high-end architects is part of their strategy to draw a significant number of fashion businesses to the reinvented Victoria quarter. But plans for this area have evolved substantially since 2005, with a huge amount of input from its architects and Westminster’s own planning department. Architect Patrick Lynch says Land Securities has agreed to almost every proposal he’s made in the three buildings he’s designed for them in Victoria. They are happy to listen, he says, as long as he can demonstrate that his interventions improve the building quality, longevity and performance, along with public realm and connectivity. Ultimately, Lynch feels that it’s pointless to single out developers as a different species of client to any other type — there are good and bad among all of them. ‘The whole history of London is speculative development,’ he says. What’s happening now is that good planners, developers and architects are ‘working intelligently together’, and maybe, he thinks, architects have facilitated this shift by taking a more pragmatic, less pretentious role — by presenting themselves as problem solvers rather than purveyors of ‘self-expression’. Says Lynch: ‘A lot of architects are stuck in this attitude that they can do what they want — it’s baby-boomer bullshit. If you can make a plan work and talk to a planner, you can make it happen.’ Do the architects involved get paid fairly for their time and skills? It’s impossible to get an honest response. Ultimately, developers get the craft and the kudos, architects get to create some really good buildings, unlovely parts of our cities are looking better — if collaborative spirit is responsible, then we need not just a trickle but an epidemic.
THE QUICK CRIT
We asked Professor Flora Samuels, head of Sheffield University’s school of architecture, for an independent opinion on some of the key schemes emerging from developers Derwent, Cathedral and Land Securities. Here is what she thought: VICToRIa LIbRaRy HoUsIng and offICE
Patrick Lynch for Land Securities Project summary: A mix of retail, office space and affordable housing with a new library, the building will connect with the adjacent Victoria Palace Theatre, adding opportunities for use of its food, event and performance facilities. Constructed above TfL’s proposed Victoria Station upgrade and the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, therefore requiring use of a lightweight, engineered timber structure. Prof Samuels says: ‘The play of proportion in the fenestration does something to space, opening it up in an oddly asymmetrical yet balanced facade. Spatial games and historical quotations are clearly present in this highly intellectual composition, evidently an immense investment of care on the part of the architect. This gives the building the necessary authority for this august location. It won’t be outdated in a hurry. All this was achieved while working within the alarming constraints of building over a large railway intersection.’
KIngsgaTE HoUsE, VICToRIa
Patrick Lynch for Land Securities Project summary: Replacing an existing mammoth office building with two new buildings to incorporate retail and office space in one, and retail and housing in the other, thereby breaking down massing and allowing two new public spaces to be created between the buildings and their neighbours, improving public realm as well as connections to the streets behind. Prof Samuels says: ‘Kingsgate House has a layered facade that fits immaculately well into its surroundings, offering colonnaded urban space at base level. I can actually read the layers of architectural history that have gone into its evolution. ‘Subtle articulations of form create in plan a perceptible sense of arrival, a public space, a bead of experience on the string of Victoria Street. There is strong engagement between site and building. To walk round or past the building is not a dull march but a meander through columns, variable shade and texture evocative of landscape: urban fabric at its most humane.’ 6
5 (opposite page) – Victoria Library housing and office, by Patrick Lynch for Land Securities 6 – Also by Lynch Architects for Land Securities, Kingsgate House, Victoria
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Turnmills, Clerkenwell
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Piercy & Company for Derwent London Project summary: The old Turnmills nightclub is being replaced with more than 6,500 sq m of high-quality office space, with ground-floor restaurant and retail. Massing and materiality were inspired by Barbara Hepworth sculptures where textured exterior surfaces transform and curve inwards to become smooth interiors. Each window reveal is chamfered to maximise daylight and views from within the light-filled, ‘gallery-inspired’ offices. Prof Samuels says: ‘The concept model is of a crystal object wrapped in a striated veneer. This veneer takes the form of different-coloured clay bricks by Petersen, Kolumba. There is a strong message here that this is inspired by research into the possibilities of facade and form. Although this may not be tremendously profound, a simple diagram is a nice thing in my book and it is good to have a ‘concept model’ on show. Many architects I know feel that they have to keep quiet about the underlying conceptual frameworks of the projects lest they appear over intellectual, unnecessarily expensive or somehow off-putting. The ground floor is elegantly planned, making good use of the geometrical potential of the site. Here, maximising the extent of the shop fronts allows the entrance to be gently squeezed before expanding into the hallway, adding drama to the journey.’
Clapham One, The library building
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Studio Egret West for Cathedral Group Project summary: A 12-storey, mixed use regeneration scheme, in partnership with Lambeth Council and United House, wrapping luxury private accommodation around a public library and performance space, cafe and GP surgery. Prof Samuels says: ‘It is great to see the developer providing something truly useful. Furthermore, you have to applaud all concerned for building in a position of such extreme complexity… I just can’t help feeling that the pursuit of dramatic architectural form, the perforated drum at the heart of the block, has relegated all other activities to the periphery. Inside, the drama of the drum is, however, unquestionable. ‘It seems regrettable in such a densely urban place as Clapham that there is no atrium or courtyard space to allow the possibility of natural light, ventilation and vegetation. The site, fully occupied, is completely out of scale with the grain of the surroundings in plan. ‘The block breaks down at higher level into a series of ovaloid towers and has a pleasingly uneven roofline and offers a variety of window types. I enjoy the character of the housing above but wonder what it has to do with Clapham, an urban centre of very distinct character.’
7 – Turnmills, Clerkenwell: Piercy & Company for Derwent London 8 – Clapham One, The Library building: Studio Egret West for Cathedral Group
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13/02/2014 14:16
ART IN THE OPEN Words Veronica Simpson
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Public art is a hot topic right now, inspiring new directives, new public debates and greater breadth and imagination deployed in its commissioning and execution than ever before
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It is hard to imagine how impoverished our conception of public art was a little more than a decade ago compared to our understanding of the term today. The dull, local-authority funded memorials and monuments of yesteryear have given way to an extraordinary smorgasbord of creativity supported by a wide variety of private individuals, corporations, developers, regeneration-orientated charities and arts agencies. Instead of plaques or statues commemorating the worthy, the best of public art today is all about creating joyful or emotionally charged moments of visual/sensory connectivity in urban — or rural — space. Of course, developers have long been prone to dropping shiny baubles by big-name artists into their schemes, to ramp up their perceived uniqueness and prestige. This practice has only intensified over the past decade. For example, the developer of the £10bn Hudson Yards scheme in New York has given Thomas Heatherwick Studio £45m to create an iconic public art piece to galvanise the scheme’s regenerative momentum. Yet Heatherwick’s response is unlikely to be any more creative or profound than British artists Andy Moss and Jamie Wardley’s 2013 low-budget piece The Fallen, a commemoration of the 9,000 soldiers and civilians who died during the D-Day landings in Normandy; on International Peace Day, 21 September 2013, 9,000 silhouettes were stencilled on to the beach where the soldiers had landed, 70 years earlier, to be washed away by the tide just hours later. Whatever the budget, the breadth of activities currently
Artworks arrive through a series of accidents, failures and experiments. The best commissioning processes evolve over time, creating space for the unplanned
being conducted under the banner of public art is truly mindboggling. Just as a taster, at a Contemporary Art Society (CAS) public art forum in late 2013, the audience heard about Art on the Underground’s commissioning of Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth scheme, with thousands of decorated vitreous enamel plaques placed around the London Underground — a different maze created for every station — to celebrate the 150th anniversary of one of the world’s most visually distinctive transport networks. Meanwhile, in Barking, hundreds of old bricks were assembled into a fake folly by Muf Architecture, with pink benches and trees added to bring humour and whimsy to a new commercial square. We also learned of the engagement-rich schemes conceived and commissioned by Bristol’s leading arts producer Situations, including artist Alex Hartley’s 2012 project NowhereIsland — a floating island from the High Arctic which journeyed (pulled by tug boat) through international waters to tour the south-west coast. Tens of thousands of seashore spectators signed up to become citizens of this new nation. Though she would hesitate to call it a new ‘golden age’ for public art, Claire Doherty, Situations’ charismatic director, feels there has been a distinct and welcome sea change in the various commissioning bodies’ openness towards outdoor arts. The spectacular events and activities programmed during the Cultural Olympiad have contributed to this, she says, along with ‘a maturing professional sector in public art commissioning and curating.’ Despite the drastic cutbacks to local authority budgets and
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4 – Muf Architecture – Barking piazza/folly. Muf’s work for Barking Town Square – a newly constructed folly built from vintage bricks, plus trees and seating – add a much-needed dose of human-scale interactivity to the anonymous glazed elevations of the town’s bland new commercial, healthcare and residential buildings
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5 – Jeremy Deller’s work ‘It is what it is’: a car that had been crushed in an American attack on Baghdad in 2007, and which Deller towed around the USA in 2009,
parking outside public buildings to spark conversations with passers-by about the impact of the Iraq war
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6 – Situations/Alex Hartley’s 2012 NowhereIsland toured the UK’s south-west coast, inspiring thousands of seashore spectators to sign up as citizens, including Blueprint, and sparking public debates on citizenship wherever it went
Public art can be, as Brian Eno says, ‘a celebration of some kind of temporary community’, but it can also stimulate regeneration from the grass roots up, and help forge an identity for places in transition
those of the Arts Council England (ACE), there is still a significant pot of gold to be pursued, thanks to section 106 and other ‘environmental enhancement’ requirements that planning authorities demand from developers’ new commercial and residential building schemes. Doherty says: ‘Funding for public art in the UK from local authorities alone totalled £22m in 2012. That’s comparable to the amount spent on public and street art through ACE’s grants for arts in the eight years between 2003 and 2011.’ The Olympics undoubtedly skewed this total, but there continues to be a flowering of diverse, collaborative and community-orientated schemes, thanks to the local authorities’ shift of emphasis towards ‘social as well as environmental benefits,’ as Doherty says. But the projects funded by this pool of public-art cash are highly variable in quality and impact. Local authorities, after all, still control the outcomes and they are, as one leading curator says, ‘a risk-averse breed’. Lack of awareness, rather than interest, is the main problem here, says Doherty. ‘When we start talking to collaborators, partners, funders, artists, a lot of people don’t have the knowledge, skills or experience to work with new forms of public art. That has to change.’ To this end, Situations launched Public Art Now at the beginning of 2014, a national consciousness-raising programme aimed at expanding ideas about where, when and how public art takes place. In The New Rules of Public Art, a set of 12 ‘provocations’, Doherty exhorts readers to ditch the adherence to monuments, statues and fountains, and envisage public art
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instead as a whole variety of events and interventions that can build over the course of a day, a season or even biennally. Another rule is to allow projects to develop their own life and momentum. Says Doherty: ‘This is no design-and-build process. Artworks arrive through a series of accidents, failures and experiments. The best commissioning processes evolve over time, creating space for the unplanned.’ As an example, she points to Slow Space in Oslo’s Bjørvika district. Conceived as a seven-year project fuelled and shaped by collective activity, its initiatives include the creation of a public bakehouse by Californian group Futurefarmers that acts as a meeting point and the centre of a radical urban gardening project. Says Doherty: ‘The Futurefarmers project in Oslo has fundamentally changed the future use of that area.’ Public art can be, as Brian Eno says, a ‘celebration of some kind of temporary community’, but it can also stimulate regeneration from the grass roots up, and help forge an identity for places in transition. The British seaside town of Folkestone has been harnessing the power of art and artists for its own regenerative plans since 2007, when its first Triennial was launched. Funded by local philanthropist Roger De Haan and run by his Creative Foundation charity, its aim is to establish Folkestone as a cultural destination. The curator of its first two events, Andrea Schlieker, filled the town with temporary and permanent commissioned works from both internationally renowned and local artists, aimed at encouraging visitors and
residents to explore the town in new and dynamic ways. The Triennial’s new artistic director, Lewis Biggs — fresh from a decade directing Liverpool’s own groundbreaking Biennial— will have just announced the 2014 programme as this issue of Blueprint goes to press. But what sets Folkestone’s Triennial (and Liverpool’s Biennial) apart is the clarity and autonomy of its structure. With Folkestone, the majority of funding comes from studio properties that De Haan’s Creative Foundation lets out (at modest rents) to creative tenants; £4.5m has been donated to the first three triennials in this way, with only a few hundred thousand more needed from public and private-sector agencies. Biggs agrees this degree of clarity of vision and autonomy in the commissioning process is enviable, compared to the many schemes that must negotiate the labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures and lack of awareness, insight or ambition that can hamper local authority and developer-backed projects. To help promote good practice, Biggs co-founded the Institute for Public Art last year — an international network of people active and interested in public art, funded by Shanghai University (China is emerging as an avid consumer of public art, of which more later). Biggs applauds the New Rules of Public Art proposed by Doherty (a fellow IPA member) but says: ‘Rules are all very well but it’s about how to apply the rules. If a council officer has been detailed to get on with commissioning some new street furniture, are they going to turn to an organisation called an art consultancy? There’s no recognised body of art consultancies.
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You don’t know whether it’s a good one or a bad one. Landscape architects have letters after their name. They have insurances in place. It’s safer to go for the known. For better or worse, because art by its nature is so individual — and that’s its selling point — it’s more complicated and time-consuming. You’re starting from scratch every time you sit down and talk with someone. It’s much harder work than going to a landscape architect — though I’d say you get a much better result.’ On this point, Biggs is happy to see a growing number of architects getting involved in public art and environmental schemes — thanks to pioneering practices such as Muf and FAT, and the new generation coming through, including We Made That, The Klassnik Corporation and Studio Weave, bringing their own particular sensibility to materials, context and community. ‘That’s a very optimistic development,’ he says. ‘I’d rather have a good environmental scheme than a bad art scheme.’ However, Biggs points out: ‘What’s on the side of thinking in an art way is the way it can be used in branding and identity. Everyone wants to feel they’re unique in some way. Every prospective leaser of an office or buyer of a house wants to feel they’re getting something that nobody else has. Environmental schemes aren’t able to deliver that. A properly thought-through art project is. Antony Gormley’s Another Place (Crosby Beach, in Liverpool), for instance, really did make the people who live by Crosby Beach feel that they were unique in the universe.’ Unfortunately, too many councils and their developer partners now seek to replicate that Antony Gormley effect —
looking for another monumental art project to equal Angel of the North or Another Place — without questioning the value, purpose or relevance. At the aforementioned CAS evening, Doherty was asked: ‘Does it matter who commissions the public art?’ She answered: ‘It’s knowing how and why. It’s not who. Anyone can commission as long as they have a skilled team bring it to fruition.’ For a textbook demonstration of her words, we could do worse than look to the public art commissioning programme around the 2012 Olympics. Sarah Weir, the then head of Arts Council England, stepped in at a stage when there was no budget and no commitment to public art in the masterplan. With the help of a skilled team and the support of Tate boss Nicholas Serota as Design Champion on the Olympic Delivery Authority board, she has masterminded a scheme that is — and will increasingly be — rich in community driven landscape enhancement, life-enhancing focal points and permanent visual monuments (Anish Kapoor’s clunky Orbit notwithstanding). But there are some who feel that our Western model of public art is missing the point completely. Philip Dodd, broadcaster and curator, says: ‘I think art and its role in city life is being re-imagined across places outside of western Europe and North America in far more exciting and profound ways.’ In China, for example, ‘they are thinking in much more ambitious terms. It’s much more about integrating the idea of art into the social and economic model of cities… In Shanghai they are building a “west bank”. They are building several private museums there
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7 (previous page) – The Return of Colmcille – a day-long event staged by outdoor events specialist Walk the Plank included 30 hours of original street theatre and procession
8 – Fantasticology, Olympic Park, 2012. The Klassnik Corporation recreated the plan of industrial buildings on the Olympic site, with planting replicating vanished buildings and car parks
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9 – Slow Space was is a seven-year project with initiatives including the creation of a public bakehouse by Californian group Futurefarmers in Oslo’s Bjørvika district
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and these private museums will become the fulcrum of a whole set of cultural activities that will run from galleries to retail.’ Dodd suggests more could be achieved by collaborating and pooling resources. If there is £22m available, it might be better to concentrate it into major regional initiatives such as annual arts festivals — or to ‘build a small cinema where you could show artists films and cinema’. The urgent need for intelligent debate around the uses and abuses of public art inspired the launch this February of Art and the City, a forum on public art hosted by Dodd and NLA director Peter Murray, as a new and integral feature of global art fair Art14 London. The bottom line underpinning all of this debate is, of course: how do we know that public art has made a difference? Where is the evidence, for example, that the Folkestone Triennial has had the desired impact in attracting new and creative businesses, residents and visitors? Biggs replies: ‘In the time that I’ve been there I’ve met people who say they have moved to Folkestone because of the Triennial. It was exactly the same when we opened Tate Liverpool. People said: “Is this going to make any difference to Liverpool as a place?” The Tate Liverpool, as a wider offer, got people who hadn’t previously felt they were part of the picture thinking more optimistically and engaging with communities. It was a very important part of the jigsaw puzzle that led to it becoming European capital of culture 20 years later. But it does take 20 years. Nobody could kid themselves that they can do it in 10.’ Whatever the Chinese government’s ambitions, readers of Ai Weiwei’s riveting blog will know how sceptical he is of politicians’ attempts to graft culture on to places where citizens’
rights will always take a back seat to industry and profit. But when real engagement combines with inspired commissioning and lasting public-realm improvements, public-art initiatives can have profound effects, as anyone lucky enough to attend — or even to read coverage of — Londonderry/Derry’s UK Capital of Culture events will know. In its year-long festival, described in December 2013 by writer for The Observer Ed Vulliamy as ‘edgy, subversive, joyful and new’ — which saw the city host the Turner Prize show, Grayson Perry’s BBC Reith Lectures, and a ground-breaking light show in Lumiere (for four nights, the city was transformed with 17 light sculptures and installations across its buildings) — the combination of events and locations was truly inspired. For example, Ebrington Square, the former parade ground of the army barracks from which the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre was launched, has been transformed into a public gathering and events space by Belfast-based architecture practice McAdam Design, and was used for a triumphant ‘homecoming’ concert of local-born singer Bronagh Gallagher. McAdam Design’s new Peace Bridge also played a crucial part in the mid-summer highlight, The Return of Colmcille, a day-long event masterminded by Frank Cottrell Boyce, writer of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. In conclusion at the CAS forum, Vulliamy quoted local film-maker Mark McCauley: ‘I’ve seen people awakened by the scale of these public events. Our city centre has for years been made of dark, dangerous streets; people had become conditioned into being frightened. But now those streets were full. I saw my city with different eyes…’ 10 – Jacqueline Poncelet – wrapper. Part of Art on the Underground this permanent piece on Edgware Road. Launched in 2012, Poncelet’s
mosaic clads the outside of a electricity sub station and presents a decorative and uplifting face to the street as well as Underground users
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21/02/2014 10:53
Richard Hamilton and Design Words Alice Rawsthorn
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Currently at Tate Modern is the first retrospective of the work Richard Hamilton, the influential British artist, teacher and essayist, who is considered to be a pioneer of pop art. Here Alice Rawsthorn looks at his output in the context of his design influences
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3 1 (previous pages) – ‘Interior II’ (1964) 2 – ‘The Occulist Witness’ (1971)
all images in this article courtesy the estate of richard hamilton 1 tate 2, 3 private collection
3 – ‘Advertisement’ (1975)
Once a week during the late Forties, the art director of British Vogue, Alex Kroll, invited a group of young artists and designers who had shown an interest in fashion illustration to studio sessions at the magazine’s offices, where he monitored their progress. Among them was Richard Hamilton, then a painting student at the Slade School of Fine Art, who attended these meetings for a few months in 1949 before being informed that his work was ‘too artistic’ for Vogue. ‘Too artistic’ though it may have been for a fashion magazine, Hamilton would be told repeatedly for the next decade that his work was not artistic enough by the custodians of the British art establishment, who suspected that much of it would more accurately have been classified as design than art. The reason is evident in an essay by Hamilton in a 1962 issue of Architectural Design magazine. ‘Contemporary art reacts slowly to the contemporary stylistic scene,’ he wrote. ‘How many major works of art have appeared in the 20th century in which an automobile features at all? How many feature vacuum cleaners?’ Very few, was the answer, whereas Hamilton’s paintings were filled with them as well as with robots, comic books, Hollywood stars, TV sets, billboards, Playboy pin-ups and other totems of technology and consumer culture. The titles of his artworks alluded to them too; and his essays were not only rich in references to magazines such as Design, Architectural Design and Typographica, but often published in them. Hamilton’s insistence on exploring design, technology and consumerism with the same passion and intellectual rigour as art history seemed inexplicable to the grandees, who considered such terrain to be tarnished by its association with commerce and industry. When the Arts Council organised a 1964 survey of the most important paintings and sculptures of the past decade, it included some 30 artists, but not Hamilton. Six years later, the curatorial consensus had changed so radically that the Tate devoted a solo show to his work, including many of the paintings it had ignored in 1964 as well as his investigations into the design of cars, kitchen gadgets and fashion imagery. The cover of the catalogue was devoted to Toaster, a 1967 work inspired by the promotional literature for the Braun HT 2 single-slit toaster.
By then, Hamilton’s eclectic vision of contemporary culture was widely accepted within progressive circles, in large part due to his own influence, though also to the writing of his friend and fellow Independent Group member, the design critic Reyner Banham, and the French cultural theorists Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Hamilton continued to pursue his interest in design and to champion cultural inclusivity for the rest of his life. Fraught and ambivalent though art’s relationship to design still is, it would be far more so without him and what the art critic David Sylvester described as ‘his consuming obsession with the modern — modern living, modern technology, modern equipment, modern communications, modern materials, modern processes, modern attitudes.’ Given Hamilton’s importance in the evolution of British design culture, what role did it play in his development as an artist? And what impact did he have on our understanding of design, and its rapport with art? The antipathy towards design in post-war Britain was not confined to the visual arts, but reflected a broader distrust of industrialisation and mechanisation that had emerged among the intelligentsia during the 19th century. Britain had led the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s when, for a brief period, the frenzied mills of pioneering industrialists like the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood seemed so exhilarating that intellectuals and socialites set off from London on factory tours of Manchester and the Midlands. By the early 1800s, the enthusiasm for industry had faded and the stereotype of the ‘dark, satanic mill’ was born. Factories were seen as dirty and dangerous, their wares as shoddy, their workers as subversive and their owners as vulgar, even by their own children who were mostly educated at private schools where, as the economic historians Correlli Barnett and Martin Wiener have written, they imbibed the values of the landed aristocracy, including a disdain of commerce, industry and science. By the late 1800s, such prejudices were lent intellectual weight by William Morris, John Ruskin and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement, who advocated a revival of rural craftsmanship. Their beliefs proved pervasive in Britain even during the early 20th century when the influence of Russian Constructivism transformed perceptions of industrial design elsewhere in Europe, by giving
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4 – ‘Table with Ashtray’ (2002) 5 – ‘Glider (after Duchamp)’ (1965)
London in the early Twenties, his formative influences were very different to those of the typically privileged, privately educated establishment grandees who had been, as Banham put it, ‘isolated from humanity by the Humanities’. Conversely, he and Hamilton, like several other members of the Independent Group, shared childhood memories of enjoying Hollywood Westerns at the local cinema and devouring comic books and popular music. ‘There is one very good reason why the IG was with it so long before anyone else,’ wrote Banham. ‘The key figures … were all brought up in the Pop belt somewhere. American films and magazines were the only live culture we knew as kids.’ As well as deriving great pleasure from popular culture, Hamilton was highly knowledgeable about its production, in particular about design’s role in the process, thanks to the succession of jobs he took on to make ends meet while studying painting and establishing himself as an artist. After leaving school at 14, he had to wait two years before starting a course at the Royal Academy Schools. He worked as an office boy in the advertising department of an electrical engineering firm, then joined the display team of the Reimann School, which was founded in 1937 as Britain’s first commercial art school by two Jewish émigrés from Germany, Albert and Klara Reimann. Hamilton’s job there was to build sets for exhibitions of work by the teachers and students, but he was allowed to attend life-drawing classes in his free time. Working at the school introduced him to typography, art direction, photography, fashion, set design and other aspects of ‘commercial art,’ as well as the modernist thinking of the Reimanns and the émigré artists and designers they employed as teachers, Alex 4, 5 private collection
it a moral and political purpose as a means of translating scientific and technological advances into products and services that could help millions of people to become happier, healthier and more productive. All but a tiny minority of Britons remained inured to the Constructivist zest for modernity until the Thirties, when the modern movement gained momentum as émigré artists, architects, designers and intellectuals sought refuge in Britain from the Nazis’ growing power in Europe, but its popularity proved short-lived. As the Second World War loomed, many of the émigrés left for safer havens, including Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and other former teachers at the Bauhaus art and design school in Germany, who settled in the United States. After the war, the British public associated technology with the horror and destruction caused by the Blitz and the atom bomb, rather than with social and political progress. The late Forties and Fifties were golden years for science, when many of the innovations developed for military use during wartime were translated into technologies that transformed daily life. Most of those breakthroughs were made in the secrecy of scientific research centres, like Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where the transistor was invented in 1947, and the electrical engineering department of the University of Manchester, which staged a demonstration of the first storedmemory computer the following year. Thrilling though those innovations now seem, few people outside scientific circles were aware of them at the time. The flurry of interest in design and technology in British cultural circles during the pre-war era had been replaced by indifference, if not hostility. Not for Hamilton. Born into a working-class family in
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6 – ‘Bathroom - Fig. 2’ (1999-2000) 7 – ‘Lobby’ (1985-1987)
Form (1951) and Man, Machine and Motion (1955), and his first teaching assignments were in the design departments of art schools. Hamilton taught typography and industrial design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, then joined the Fine Art Department of the University of Newcastle in 1953 as a lecturer in design where he ran a Basic Form course. Victor Pasmore had taught furniture design at the Central School before setting up the Basic Design course with Hamilton in Newcastle. At the time, so few professional designers were able or willing to teach design that young artists were often pressed into doing so. Hamilton was unusual in being better equipped for the role than many of his peers, but it would be foolish to romanticise his commitment to design teaching. He saw the Basic Design course as a means to an end, having taken it on in the hope of being allowed to teach art too, and of stopping teaching as soon as he could support himself and his family as an artist. Nonetheless he made the most of the design resources available to him at Newcastle, drawing on the university’s printing equipment and photography department, hitherto used mostly for medical research, for the exhibitions he curated at the Hatton Gallery, and their accompanying posters and catalogues. One of his students, Mark Lancaster, recalls Hamilton’s enthusiasm for the university’s photocopier, an early version of the machine. When Hamilton returned to London, he would post material to Lancaster in Newcastle asking him to photocopy it and send the copies to him by mail. Hamilton enjoyed the sybaritic side of Pop culture in Newcastle, going to lunchtime dances at the Majestic Ballroom and rock ’n’ roll concerts at City Hall, and was fascinated by
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Kroll among them. During the war, Hamilton received a similarly impromptu yet thorough grounding in technology when the Royal Academy Schools closed and he was sent to a Government Training Centre to study engineering draughtsmanship. He was then employed as a ‘jig and tool’ draughtsman at the Design Unit Group, a ramshackle operation run by the bandleader Jack Jackson for Electrical & Musical Industries, which owned various engineering firms and the record company EMI. Jackson and his team were intended to deploy their engineering skills to help the war effort, but Hamilton spent much of his time organising lunchtime concerts of recordings he found in the archives. Even so, he had a zest for engineering, possibly inherited from his father, who had worked as a driver and shared his love of cars with him, and fell in with a group of acoustical engineers who devoted their spare time to constructing sound equipment. After the war, he returned to the Royal Academy Schools and later enrolled at the Slade, but his wartime work at EMI, followed by a stint of National Service with the Royal Engineers, imbued him with a nuanced understanding of the engineering side of design, and its relationship to science and technology, that complemented his knowledge of commercial art. When Hamilton left art school, that combination of skills enabled him to earn a living while starting his career as an artist. He considered working in fashion illustration, hence his interest in Kroll’s ‘studio sessions’ at Vogue, and took on other commercial projects, including designing corporate logos for both Churchill Gear Machines and Granada Television. His experience of set building at the Reimann School served him well when curating exhibitions, including Growth and
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8 8 – ‘The White Album’ (1968) 9- (opposite page) – ‘The Beatles’ (1968)
Hamilton was adept at identifying excellence...and at spotting mediocrity, especially in what were popularly considered to be sacred cows. Often his judgements were rooted in his technical knowledge
entitled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? he critiqued consumer culture by collaging images of aspirational objects and phenomena of the era: among them, a tape recorder, tinned ham, a male bodybuilder and topless female model, a poster for a pulp novel and the blazing neon lights of a cinema. For his 1957 Hommage à Chrysler Corp and the following year’s Hers is a lush situation, he explored the role of sexuality in the design of the most fetishised consumer products of the time, American cars. Other artists occupied similar terrain, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the United States, and Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake in Britain, but thy tended to be jolly and celebratory. Hamilton’s approach was more diagnostic, though not cynically so. It is evident from his work that he recognised — and enjoyed — the sybaritic nature of his subjects, but his choices and mode of analysis were more precise and sophisticated than those of his contemporaries. Both Hommage and Hers were based on Banham’s research into the strategic use of design by the American automotive industry. The former juxtaposes elements of the cars featured in Chrysler and General Motors’ advertisements with particular parts of a woman’s body to illustrate how, say, the curves of the headlamps mimic the lines of her breasts. The contrast between the first two words of the title Hommage à, which allude to the ‘high art’ of Cubism in early-20th-century Paris, and the American corporate jargon of Chrysler Corp signals the satirical sub-text, while ‘Corp’ serves as a double entendre by alluding to corps, the French word for body. Hers portrays the lips of the movie star Sophia Loren hovering above various emblems of automotive styling, including chrome tail fins and a wraparound windscreen through which the driver can see flashes of the towering UN headquarters in New York. Hamilton found the title in the closing words of a review of a 1955 Buick in the American magazine Industrial Design: ‘The driver sits at the dead calm centre of all this motion, hers is a lush situation’. Not that he had spotted those words at random: the review was written by Deborah Allen, a talented young American design critic who he and Banham admired greatly. He returned to those themes in $he, an oil painting and 8, 9 private collection
fashion, unusually so for an Englishman of his generation. Marcus Price, who ran Newcastle’s most fashionable menswear shop, told the cultural historian Michael Bracewell how Hamilton would drop in with his own discoveries, including original Wrangler cowboy shirts from the USA with enormous cuffs and mother-of-pearl studs. Encouraged by Banham, Hamilton sustained his interest in international developments in design and technology, reading the latest periodicals and writing for several of them, particularly those edited by another IG colleague, Theo Crosby, such as Living Arts and Architectural Design. Hamilton’s concept of design, which he elaborated in Persuading Image, a 1960 essay for Design magazine, was thoughtful and open-minded, but neither original nor iconoclastic. He accepted the orthodox definition of design as a commercial force, rather than seeing it as a more fluid instinctive process, ‘not a profession but an attitude’, as Moholy-Nagy had phrased it in his 1947 book Vision in Motion. Nor did he share the political ambitions for design championed by the Italian artist and design theorist Bruno Munari during the Fifties and Sixties. The publication of Persuading Image prompted a feisty debate among designers, but the controversy reflected the conservatism of British design culture, rather than any radicalism on Hamilton’s part. Yet his design judgements were generally astute. Hamilton was equally adept at identifying excellence, being among the first to appreciate the growing importance of the new design school at Ulm in West Germany during the Fifties and at spotting mediocrity, especially in what were popularly considered to be sacred cows, like the whimsical ‘festival style’ inspired by the Festival of Britain and the showmanship of the French-born doyen of American commercial design, Raymond Loewy. Often his judgements were rooted in his technical knowledge, as illustrated by his Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound, a lecture he gave in Newcastle and London in 1959, which included an inspired analysis of the cultural impact of technological change on cinema, television and photography. Critically, Hamilton drew repeatedly on his interest in design and technology in his work as an artist. In his 1956 essay
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collage completed in 1961 in which he explored the sexualised imagery of domestic appliance advertising. ‘The worst thing that can happen to a girl, according to the ads, is that she should fail to be exquisitely at ease in her appliance setting,’ Hamilton explained in an essay for Architectural Design. ‘Sex is everywhere, symbolised in the glamour of mass-produced luxury — the interplay of fleshy plastic and smooth, fleshier metal. This relationship of woman and appliance is a fundamental theme of our culture; as obsessive and archetypal as the Western movie gun duel.’ By then, Hamilton had also begun an analysis of male narcissism in advertising by collaging stereotypically ‘manly’ images of the space race, a transistor radio, stock market listings, motor racing, classical archetypes of male beauty and the face of President John F Kennedy in Towards, a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories whose subtitles included ‘Together let us explore the stars’ (a quote from one of Kennedy’s speeches) and ‘Adonis in Y fronts’. The title came from an annual feature on male fashion in Playboy magazine to which Hamilton added the conditional first word, ‘Towards’, arguing that fashion was too fluid a field for any prediction to be ‘definitive’. He later deconstructed fashion photography in his 1969 Fashion-plates, in which the facial features of different women, including Jane Holzer’s hair and Verushka’s lips, were collaged into new ‘faces’. The collages reveal the intensity of Hamilton’s interest in fashion, including glimpses of the black models who were then becoming popular with designers like Yves Saint Laurent. They were also eerily accurate in anticipating the way that contemporary art directors digitally enhance their subjects by erasing anomalies to create
‘flawless’ representations of female beauty. By the mid-Sixties, the representation of design in Hamilton’s work had changed radically. He continued to depict the outcome of the industrial design process through the marketing imagery with which it was presented to the public, but was focusing on mass-manufactured products of exceptional quality and portraying them as ‘high design’, the industrial equivalent of ‘high art’. Rather than poking fun at consumer culture as he had once done, or revelling in its sexiness, kitsch and jollity as fellow Pop artists did, Hamilton depicted the industrial artefacts that he considered worthy of thoughtful consideration with a seriousness that was markedly more subversive than his earlier satire, beginning with the Braun electric grill in his 1965 Still-life. Hamilton had become aware of Braun’s electronic products during the late Fifties, possibly because of his interest in the Ulm School of Design, which he had visited in 1958. Founded five years before with the aim of perpetuating the spirit and values of the Bauhaus, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) swiftly developed a singular approach to design education, specifically with regard to industrial design, which was grounded in rigorous research into the materials, finishes and processes used to manufacture a product, and its subsequent performance and durability. Several of Ulm’s teachers, including Hans Gugelot and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, a student of Moholy-Nagy’s at the Bauhaus, acted as consultants to the brothers Artur and Erwin Braun, who had inherited the Braun electronics company after their father’s death in 1951. By the mid-Fifties, the Brauns were putting HfG’s industrial design principles into practice by applying the transistor and other wartime technologies to audio products,
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such as radios and gramophones, and working with Gugelot and other designers to define a restrained visual language, distinguished by its use of carefully chosen modern materials in clean shapes and subtle, carefully coded colours. Among those designers was a young architect, Dieter Rams, who would later become head of design at Braun. During the Sixties and Seventies, Braun was feted as the apogee of industrial design, playing a similar role in consumer culture as Apple has done in recent years. Thoughtful, disciplined and unobtrusive, its design aesthetic was the opposite of the flamboyantly styled American cars and electrical gizmos in Hamilton’s earlier work. The company’s marketing material was designed in the same quietly imposing style as its products. When Hamilton used a promotional image of the electric grill in Still-life the effect was respectful, almost reverential; so much so that his playful decision to replace the brand name Braun with its English equivalent Brown in identical typography seemed to signal his qualms about tinkering with something so impeccable, rather than presenting it as a jocular parody. He adopted a similar approach in the Toaster series, beginning by using chromed steel and Perspex to reconstruct one of the HT 2’s panels, and supplanting Braun’s brand name with his surname (a device he would repeat in his 1975 Advertisement by replacing Ricard, the trademark of the French pastis, with Richard). Hamilton’s decision to use metal and Perspex in the original Toaster has been read as an attempt to replicate the experience of encountering an industrial object, as has the contrast between the mirrored surface of the steel and the fuzziness of the unfocused background. But when the piece
was damaged while being shipped back to Hamilton’s studio from an exhibition in Germany, the insurance company refused to pay up, arguing that the shards of metal and plastic could not belong to a work of art. Eventually, the insurer backed down, and Hamilton remade the work. When he was asked several years later to comment on Rams’ achievements for an exhibition of his products in Berlin, Hamilton stated: ‘My admiration for the work of Dieter Rams is intense and I have for many years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.’ The allusion evoked the Cubist ‘high art’ reference in the first two words of Hommage à Chrysler Corp. Towards the end of his career, Hamilton revisited his preoccupation with Braun by making a new edition of Toaster for a 2009 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in London, but his most compelling tribute to the company’s design purism could very easily have debunked it. The Critic Laughs was a series of ready-made objects he produced in the late Sixties and early Seventies, inspired by an impromptu decision to attach the giant sugar teeth, which his son had brought back from holiday as a souvenir, to the top of his own Braun electric toothbrush, rebranded as Hamilton (1968). Ghoulish though the results look, the tacky fake teeth enhance the refinement of Braun’s beautifully resolved device. A similar sense of reverence is apparent in Hamilton’s other mid-Sixties studies of design aesthetics: a series of fibreglass and cellulose reliefs mimicking the spiralling form of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and an intriguing failure — his unsuccessful attempt to replicate the patterns of the treads of five car tyres manufactured in different
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15 – ‘Fashion-plate (Cosmetic Study V)’ (1969) 16 – ‘Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in men’s wear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars’ (1962) 17 – ‘Untitled’ (2011) 18 – ‘The Citizen’ (1981-3) 19 (opposite page) – ‘Self-Portrait 13.7.80’ (1990)
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The legacy of his fascination with design...still resonates in the work of other artists of his generation and younger ones
periods. Hamilton abandoned his first effort when the geometry proved too complex to be reproduced in a perspective drawing, but the choice of subject matter illustrates the sophistication of his design knowledge as adroitly as his early interest in Braun. Mundane though car tyres may seem, they are examples of mass-manufactured products which are made in such huge quantities that their manufacturers can justify using advanced materials and highly complex aesthetic effects. Hamilton was unusually perceptive in recognising this, and his initial failure to replicate the treads justified his choice by demonstrating their intricacy. By contrast, Lichtenstein had depicted a tyre in a far simpler style in his 1962 oil painting Tire, ignoring the complexity that so intrigued Hamilton, but initially eluded him. Eventually, Hamilton succeeded in producing an accurate rendering of the tyres by collaborating with a computer programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote a program to illustrate the treads based on his calculations in 1971. At the time, computers seemed like the stuff of science fiction to most people. They were so expensive that only the largest companies or universities could afford them, and so enormous that they occupied entire rooms, where they were operated by specially trained technicians. Everyone else was banned from entry. A number of artists, including Gustav Metzger and Bruce Lacey, were experimenting with them, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London had presented an exhibition of their work, Cybernetic Serendipity, in 1968. Many of the artists in the show were interested in exploring what type of imagery a machine would produce when left to its own devices but, as always, Hamilton was focused not on the imagery itself, but its impact on other people, what Gilles Deleuze described as its affect. The design projects he undertook from the mid-Sixties onwards had the same goal. His treatment of the most famous one, the double album released by the Beatles in 1968, officially named The Beatles but commonly known as The White Album, was complicated by the intensity of the band’s fame and Hamilton’s ambivalence towards it. Tempting though it is to interpret his decision to make the cover a blank white canvas as an inspired exercise in popularising conceptualism, the truth is more prosaic. The Beatles had planned to call it A Doll’s House after the Ibsen play,
only for another British band, Family, to release a debut album entitled Music in a Doll’s House. Unable to think of a more distinctive title, the Beatles decided to name the record after themselves. Hamilton was suggested as a possible sleeve designer by his then-gallerist Robert Fraser, who was friendly with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and was summoned to the Beatles’ offices to discuss the project. ‘I was sitting waiting in an outer office watching beautiful girls in mini skirts taking dogs out for a walk, things like that,’ he told Bracewell. ‘The whole thing was so artificial and so silly… Then I was allowed into the presence of Paul, and by that time I was bad-tempered. So when he said that they wanted me to do the cover … I said “Why don’t you do it yourself?” … Then Paul said: “Come on, haven’t you got any ideas?” and I said, “Well, my best idea is to leave a white cover” — and it went on from there.’ Hamilton was convinced that EMI would veto the idea of releasing a record with an empty cover, but the Beatles were so powerful that they forced it to proceed, even with his insistence that each of the millions of albums should be individually numbered. Haphazard though the design process was, the outcome was an eloquent protest against the hysteria of Beatlesesque celebrity and consumerism, which remains potent today, not least because of the extremity of Hamilton’s concept. Only one album can ever make such a strong impact by adopting a blank white cover: just as only one brand can do so by choosing a blank white label, as Martin Margiela’s fashion house did, or by dispensing with visible branding, like the Muji homeware stores, whose name means no name in Japanese. Hamilton was free to pursue his own agenda in subsequent design exercises, starting with one for Lux Corporation, a Japanese electronics manufacturer that invited him to develop an artwork based on its audio equipment to mark its 50th anniversary. Conceived as an amplifier, which would be flat and light enough to hang on a wall like a painting, the Lux 50 was completed in 1979. An image of the amplifier is painted on to an aluminium panel covering the machine itself. Hamilton described it as ‘a two-dimensional representation of a piece of equipment which also performs the functions expected of the object portrayed’. Robert Rauschenberg had deployed a similar strategy to dramatically different effect in 1959 by submerging
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20 20 – ‘Just what was it that made yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? (upgrade)’ (2004) 21 – ‘Palindrome’ (1974)
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projects as research exercises through which he could study their respective industries, just as today’s ‘speculative designers’ such as Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk of the Dutch design group Metahaven use the design process as a medium of intellectual enquiry to slake their curiosity about political phenomena. But his chief preoccupation was, once again, to analyse their affects: this time in terms of how the objects were perceived typologically as examples of art and design. The legacy of Hamilton’s fascination with design as an artist, teacher, lecturer, essayist and occasional designer still resonates in the work of other artists of his generation, including Ed Ruscha, Franz West and Isa Genzken, and younger ones such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Christoph Büchel, Nairy Baghramian, Mark Leckey and Helen Marten. His influence is equally evident on the emerging genre of conceptual designers, including Julia Lohmann, Christien Meindertsma and Dunne & Raby, which, like Metahaven, use the design process as a medium of research, often into the affects of design culture, and produce work whose principal function is to enable them to conduct such investigations. Resonant though Hamilton’s reappraisal of the relationship between design and art has proved to be, the spirit with which he conducted it has been equally valuable: thoughtful, empathic, passionate, rigorous and, above all, optimistic. Alice Rawsthorn writes about design for the International New York Times and is the author of Hello World: Where Design Meets Life (2013). This essay is from Richard Hamilton (edited by Mark Godfrey, Paul Schimmel, Vicente Todolí, Tate Publishing 2014) that accompanies the exhibition of the same name at Tate Modern, which runs until 26 May. The footnotes that appear in the original have been removed from this version.
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three radios in the paint and plaster of Broadcast. A decade after completing the Lux project, Hamilton worked with OHIO Scientific, a computer company owned by the Swedish group Isotron, on the development of a minicomputer, which he named — and branded — the 01–110. The project proved to be unexpectedly complicated, not least because Isotron was taken over by the Diab Data group in 1986, but the 01–110 was finished in time for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hamilton insisted that it was operative throughout the show, as he would in later exhibitions, presumably to demonstrate that it was capable of executing a practical function alongside its role as an artwork. Neither work would be deemed remarkable if judged solely on its design merits, though nor were Hamilton’s commercial design projects, such as his corporate logos for Churchill and Granada. Conceptually, the Lux 50 is the more original of the two, but not when compared to other technological concepts of the era. Stylistically, both products aspire to Braun’s subtlety and discipline, but lack its finesse. Like Donald Judd’s furniture, Hamilton’s amplifier and computer are interesting not in terms of their design, but for what their ambiguity tell us about his evolution as an artist. The Lux 50 and 01–011 were intended as provocations to the stereotypical distinctions between both disciplines. As they fulfil one essential requirement of industrial design by executing their practical functions as an amplifier and computer respectively, why should they also be deemed to be artworks? Because someone calling himself an artist conceived them? Because they were exhibited in an art gallery? Or because, as works of art, they were free from the threat of obsolescence that haunts conventional versions of the same products, once their technology was superseded? Hamilton treated both
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battleship island Words and photography by Andrew Meredith
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Photographer Andrew Meredith was one of the first people allowed on to the tiny Japanese island of Hashima. It took him three years of negotiations with the authorities to gain access to this unusual place — once a densely populated mining community that was abandoned practically overnight in 1974 and left to rot. He documented his visit in photographs and records for us his feelings of being on the island
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In 1959 the South China Sea’s Hashima Island — locally known as Gunkanjima — was the most densely populated place on earth. More than 5,000 people were packed on to the tiny island the size of 15 football pitches. Lying around 20km off the coast of Nagasaki on the south-west coast of Japan, the coal-mining settlement owned and developed by Mitsubishi sprung to life in 1887 and expanded rapidly in order to house the many workers and their families living on the island. Fast-forward to 2013 and I stand on the shore of Hashima behind a huge iron gateway that resembles a blast door, about to step foot into the walled city nicknamed Ghost Island. Population: zero. Four years earlier, I had been trawling various blogs and websites looking for ideas and inspiration to drive personal projects —work that would hold a certain weight and longevity. Alongside editorial and commercial shoots, I’d done a number of self-initiated projects since graduating from university: documenting South American and Mexican landscapes, cityscapes of Hong Kong, and, most notably, a series of portraits and brutal scenic interiors from an abattoir. A number of years had passed and I felt like it was time to get back to my landscape and architectural-photography roots. Drawn to abandoned places and the stories behind their desertion, I stumbled on this mysterious island in Japan. When viewed from afar, the walled
city’s landmass — densely packed concrete blocks that seemed to intermingle chaotically —resembled a Japanese Tosa battleship. It certainly caught my attention. During the Second World War, an American Navy torpedo targeted Hashima (its nickname Gunkanjima means battleship island in Japanese). Because of the island’s scale and shape — reminiscent of a rugged warship — it was mistakenly viewed as an imposing threat. Fortunately damage was minimal. The island had, after all, been specifically designed to withstand time and the constant battering of high waves and typhoons. Hashima was once one of the world’s most remarkable mining communes. It thrived and expanded through the industrialisation era thanks to the lucrativeness of extracting coal from beneath the seabed by its owner, Mitsubishi. Travel to and from the island was heavily restricted, with inhabitants needing express consent to come and go. The regulations on travel meant that all of the employees had to live and work on the island itself. Workers and their families were provided with free accommodation and the island catered to every aspect of a modern family lifestyle. As well as living accommodation in huge apartment blocks, it had a school with a gymnasium, multiple playgrounds, tennis courts, a hospital, shops, restaurants, religious shrines and, later, a cinema and swimming pool. 1 (previous page) – Lightwell and walkways in the Nikkyu Company flats for miners 2 (opposite page) – Items left in a kitchen in the Nikkyu Company flats
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In 1974 Mitsubishi was forced to close the mine. A decade of falling fortunes within the coal mining industry and the soaring prevalence of petroleum in Japan had given the Nagasaki government no choice but push the owners to close the doors. The islanders were relocated to the mainland. Their departure happened practically overnight as the now-jobless inhabitants rushed to the mainland to try and secure work. Lack of space on the departing boats meant that many personal possessions were left behind: TV sets remained on their stands, books and school furniture were left in classrooms, mining helmets and bottles of local whisky lay forgotten on shelves, and bikes were abandoned in the streets. Hashima was abandoned to nature. Soon after the mass exodus, a law was passed that prohibited anyone to step foot on the island, punishable by a year’s imprisonment. This harshness made me wonder what Hashima was really hiding behind its concrete walls and I started in on the three-year process of getting access. One of the key hurdles was signing an insurance waiver issued by the government to cover every member of the team. It stated that, if we died, it was no one’s fault but mine. During my three-year wait for official permission a few illegal, urban explorers snuck across the waters on fishing boats to document their own fascination with the place and — perhaps
the most annoyingly — the last James Bond film Skyfall saw the island used as inspiration for some of the CGI scenes, frustratingly earning the island yet another moniker: James Bond Island. My only consolation was the later discovery that not even the stuntmen, never mind Daniel Craig, agreed to step foot on the island for filming because it was considered too dangerous. When our official access documentation eventually arrived from the mayor of Nagasaki City, I hurriedly gathered my equipment together as weather conditions around the area can change rapidly. Time was short between the approval and the agreed access dates. Out of sheer loyalty to photography as a traditionalist art form, I intended to produce the entire project on large format 4in-x-5in film. The bulky equipment is built with precision, and takes a lot of patience, mathematics, luck and organisation to work successfully. And it all packed down into a neat, backbreaking five flight cases. I didn’t take any digital equipment. Arriving in Nagasaki to meet our translator, Miyuki Ogawa, we were introduced to Doutoku Sakamoto, a former resident who is passionately and single-handedly campaigning to have Hashima Island recognised as a world heritage site and protected for posterity. Mr Sakamoto, who also had a hand in getting us on to the island, told us that, architecturally, the
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island was a pioneer. Not only was the mining slag used to expand landmass by 40 per cent, but the first concrete apartment building in Japan was also constructed there in 1916 to initiate the housing projects. I’d assumed that living in such a confined space with little escape would have been quite hellish. Mr Sakamoto however, who moved from Fukuoka to Hashima when he was 12, says that while he was at first bewildered by island life, the standard of living was higher there than in his hometown. The confines of the walls did not inhibit him at all. He was 19 when everyone left Hashima and remembers the locals bidding farewell to their island home with sorrow, in tears. Each day we had access to the island via fishing boat (returning at night), and were instructed to arrive at 5am. When we first glimpsed the island through the mist and early light, its resemblance to a war ship was uncanny. Pulling up to a makeshift dock, we unloaded all the equipment, and it took four of us to swing the huge iron door open. We were greeted by utter silence, save for the occasional dull clatter of falling debris. Directly to our left was the huge, imposing, eight-storey school and ahead of us a wide-open playground. There were hundreds of corridors and classrooms, some filled with piles of desks, others dotted with musical instruments. Balance bars still stood in the gymnasium, whereas some rooms were empty
— except for piles of rubble where the walls and ceiling had collapsed. Predictably, some looting — and a small amount of graffiti — had occurred over the years. It was bizarre to see old sleeping bags and the remnants of campfires in a classroom amid piles of school textbooks and broken floorboards. On the school’s roof was a relatively preserved — albeit slightly rusty — play area with a slide. The light up there was beautiful and the views breathtaking. Stepping into the hospital was like entering an eerie horror movie. Medical equipment littered the rooms, rusting and withering in the salty air. We stumbled into a tiny filing room where piles of old X-rays spilled out of cabinets on to the floor. While the images had long faded, the echoes of human life still seemed to fill every room. Walking the empty streets of this impressive and once over-populated place reminded me of something else Mr Sakamoto had told me: one of Hashima’s many nicknames, Ghost Island, was linked to the stories of inevitable collapses in the mines, where many people had lost their lives. Much of the reported death toll was rumoured to be of Korean and Chinese forced workers. And, with that in mind, we headed towards the industrial section of the island to see the quarry. Navigating the tiny winding paths and streets without maps seemed impossible. Thankfully we had our council guide to
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10 (previous page) – Mining buildings — view from the Green Promenade
11 (opposite page) – Dorms in the miners’ training camp
12 – An old clock and a pile of electrical conductors, Mine General Office
13 – Remains of the jetty at the entrance to the second mineshaft
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counteract the disorientation we felt from being surrounded by towering buildings. The main focal point on our scribbled map was the Stairway to Hell: a steep, thin set of stairs that serviced hundreds of the apartments on one side of the island, named for the sheer amount of constant traffic on them. The winding mazes of stairs were the only way in and out of these blocks. Trees and roots broke through pathways, making them unstable and unnerving to walk on. Once into the main accommodation area we were treated to something quite astonishing: televisions were arranged in corridors and apartments, almost as if they had been placed there as an art installation. While making long exposures of dark areas, we decided that Erwin Schulz, my assistant, should scout out unusual and untouched apartments as subject matter. On one occasion he returned covered in dust after falling through one of the damp wooden floors. Luckily he was fine, and hadn’t fallen far, but it was a stark reminder of what we were dealing with — and why we had been obliged to sign insurance waivers. At the end of our final day on the island, all of our film was exposed and safely packed away, ready to be processed back in London. Chemicals from the Polaroid film that we’d used to visualise the compositions covered my hands and clothes.
We were covered in cuts and bruises, tired, and a little sunscorched. We boarded our boat to the mainland one last time, feeling both delighted and relieved about what we’d seen and photographed. But the overbearing emotion was sadness. If nature continues to take its toll, we may never be able to step foot on this amazing island again. Horrific overcrowding and lack of space had not even entered our minds as we worked among the rubble and ghosts of the past. Hashima seemed to be a beautiful place for a child to grow, learn and play. An abundance of playground and social spaces are left behind but there was little room left to adapt and utilise, which is why play areas were located on the top floors. I had the feeling, though, that no one ever sensed any danger. I understand why Doutoku Sakamoto is so passionate about his former home and why his heart and memory remain there, wanting the island to be preserved and struggling to promote its existence and importance — both architecturally and socially. Hashima Island is now partly open to tourism. A concrete jetty was built so that people can stand on the periphery of a small section of the island. They can look upon remnants of the mine buildings and see where the swimming pool used to be. Proposals are currently being accepted to stabilise the island so that what’s left can be preserved. 14 – View of Battleship Island from the fishing boat Andrew Meredith and his team hired to transport them the 20km from Nagasaki
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Reclaiming the public Realm in belo hoRizonte Words Jane Hall
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The riots that broke out in Brazil last summer were a culmination of several years of peaceful occupations of authority-controlled ‘public spaces’. And while the unrest has dissipated in much of the country, in its third largest city Belo Horizonte, different groups of activists that include architects and architecture students, are showing how to use and plan the city’s spaces while adding a political dimension to the popular movement
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In December 2009, a beach appeared in the middle of Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities in the interior state of Minas Gerais. It was named Praia da Estação (Station Beach), after its location in the square in front of the city’s main train station, Praça da Estação. Every Saturday, people came to spend the afternoon tanning and playing in the fountains. The beach however was part of a much more important political movement that was occupying the square, in reaction to a recent decree by the mayor to prohibit any events in this central piece of public space. This imaginative collective transformation has since become emblematic of other ways that people in Belo Horizonte have chosen to occupy public space as a way to protest against local government plans to place restrictions on their use. The weekly event created a meeting place for a continuous open discussion that expresses a growing dissatisfaction with a politics that operates in the interests of big companies and the property market. Building up over the past five years, these peaceful occupations culminated in last year’s summer riots, which originally began in São Paulo and spread across Brazil. The force used against protesters by police became as much headline news as the social and economic issues at the centre of the uprisings. Since then, much of the action in many Brazilian cities has dissipated, with the protest movement largely dismissed by the political elite as a minor infraction on the ongoing attempt to stage the World Cup this year. But in Belo Horizonte, traces of last summer’s unrest can still be found in pockets of public space. In turn, this has had wider implications for how an otherwise socially stratified society goes about planning and using the city, adding a more far-reaching political dimension to the existing popular movement, growing to include demands for improved public services and changes to transport infrastructure. All of this is highly unlikely activity for a Brazilian city. The notion of the ‘public realm’ holds much less significance in Brazil than Europe, polarised as it is by economic differences and widespread concerns for safety. Yet in Belo Horizonte, the streets have a certain calmness that is being positively reinforced by the outcomes of last summer’s protests. This is an interesting moment for the urban development of the city, a place that many outside of Brazil have never even heard of despite its status as the country’s third largest metropolitan region after
São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Historically it was famed for its association with the progressive president Juscelino Kubitschek, who in the Forties fostered an unusual partnership with Oscar Niemeyer, allowing the revolutionary architect to use the city as an experimental playground for his early ideas. Since this golden era of modernist building (see infographic, page 31), Belo Horizonte has unfortunately developed in a similar way to other Latin American cities, dominated by monolithic high-rises and multi-lane highways: another concrete jungle. But it is beneath the roads, and within its few squares created by the mega-structures of urban growth, that a new sense of what actually constitutes public space, and its central importance to the democracy of the city, is being articulated. On Rua Aarão Reis, under one of the flyovers, a previously derelict space has now become the setting for daily musical events from samba to MC battles, while also hosting public debates on the future of Belo Horizonte’s urban development, showing images and film footage from the riots. Among several other self-organised groups that use the spaces established since the protests is Assembléia Popular Horizontal (Popular Horizontal Assembly), which instead of demonstrating against the government and its policies, organises members into ‘work teams’ to tackle thematic political and social issues, suggesting its own alternative urban policies. The most successful so far is Tarifa Zero, which advocates a free public transport system. Although it has not yet been successful, it has been instrumental in preventing bus prices going up in the city. Contributing to a growing ‘bottom-up’ culture, these groups have helped facilitate the unification of a diverse range of voices that are usually ignored by local government, which is a testament to the success of the city as a platform for their activities. The collective organisation of these groups and the theatrical character that the events adopt relate closely to the annual traditions of Carnaval that are particular to Belo Horizonte, where discussions about the production of urban space are frequently incorporated into songs and performances. The transformation of these spaces through such spectacle plays into a much deeper existing narrative, long established by local architects and architecture students, who are negotiating a new role for themselves within this political culture of urban change. Vitor Lagoeiro, a student from the Federal
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1 (previous page) – A proposal by Vazio S/A to occupy the river Arrudas and attract visitors to the downtown area
2 – A street in Belo Horizonte was closed off by architecture collective Micropolis in 2012 to host a public picnic
3 – Protesters create a temporary beach in Praça da Estação to campaign against restrictions placed on how the square can be used
4 – Carnaval in Belo Horizonte is characterised by theatrical displays that occupy public space in the city
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University of Minas Gerais (UMFG), comments that the occupations so far ‘are mostly ephemeral and lack a tectonic character’, describing the role of architects as ‘agents who articulate subversive actions’. As an active participant, he has witnessed how the protests have similarly affected possibilities for architectural practice. Practitioners are now being challenged to formalise this progress into more permanent structures that engage a new political consciousness, capturing the public imagination as seen during the riots with equal vitality. Belo Horizonte is thus proving to be one of the first places in Brazil where it is evident that architectural design can distance itself from serving the wealthy, adopting a more critical view of the city, including the participation of all of the people who live in it to affect change.
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Common ownership : espaço Comum Luiz estrela
Discussions regarding the use of public space as a tool for demanding improved public services has been a growing trend in Belo Horizonte, yet what constitutes public space itself and the ways in which it is managed frame a different conversation about political divisions within the city. The Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela, established last October, is one such project that calls for a new approach for operating within the public realm. The newly occupied space, inside an abandoned government building, historically used by the military during the dictatorship and empty for 30 years, has now been adopted as a collectively run cultural centre. Here a continuous forum of events, meetings and activities are organised by a volunteer force that manages the space collectively. From this type of project, a specific differentiation between the idea of ‘common space’ and ‘public space’ is articulated. The former refers to spaces that are organised 5 – DOBRA architects installed Museu Do Instante, a one-day event in Belo Horizonte’s Praça da Liberdade to display unusual objects
by the people, for the people, as opposed to ‘public space’, which in Brazil implies scenarios where spaces are controlled by local government or institutions despite their ready access by the public. What is surprising is that the Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela has received unanimous support from all sorts of opposing political groups, from the conservative media to the black bloc protesters, which advocated direct-action tactics during the riots. This is due in part to the accepted lack of public space available in the city and has led the government to sacrifice its ownership, donating the building to the people in recognition of this necessity. Even the street outside the centre is now occupied with a makeshift living room that has been allowed to remain despite it blocking most of the road. The success of Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela and the autonomy that this project has gained has established a precedent that many believe should encourage the popular movement to begin thinking more physically about how to create permanent changes in the urban environment. By taking on a project that has many architectural tropes, volunteers are being asked to reflect on how the changes they are calling for politically can also be negotiated in spatial terms.
CoLLeCtive praCtiCe : micropolis
Formed by a group of six undergraduate students at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UMFG), Micropolis is an enthusiastic and endlessly optimistic collective that conducts interventions in the public realm, delivered as an extension of the members’ education. Micropolis has an extensive knowledge of the social and political actions that determine how the city is used, conducting projects born out of a frustration with how architecture is taught in Brazil.
6 – An abandoned building in the centre of Belo Horizonte has been transformed into a cultural centre run by local volunteers, hosting events and debates about the city
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The members describe the group’s work as a ‘collaborative practice that runs away from the traditional approach of describing a place or a city’ and are advocates of self-build methods, learning through the practice of making while engaging the public in innovative performances that encourage people to interact in the most unlikely conditions. Their approach is sociological, teasing out the narrative of how the city is used by its inhabitants, the results of which often manifest themselves in publications as a way of inviting people from outside the discipline to act as accomplices in the production of their work: ‘We like to have our ears open to what is around us because we don’t want to come up with answers, we want to discover as we go,’ they say. Their projects have involved Picnic in Transit, where they staged a communal picnic to engage commuters on one of São Paulo’s metro lines, and Quintal Elektronika, in which Micropolis united with other local collectives to close a street in Belo Horizonte for a picnic in 2012. Their latest event, Casa Instantanea, created a public living room out of objects brought by people to one of the city’s main squares, Praça da Liberdade where the items were exchanged and the stories behind each piece shared. Like many other students in Brazil, Micropolis members have benefited from the generous opportunity, funded by the government to study abroad while taking their degrees. They therefore represent a generation of young architects who have been encouraged, by an open and wide education, to think more critically about architectural practice back at home. Remarkably dedicated to the cities where they grew up and studied in, these students are reinterpreting ideas specific to their localities, while incorporating a political dimension to their practice seen on a national scale.
Collaboration : MaCh architects
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7 – Quintal Eletronika, a one-day event to occupy the street for a picnic, hosted by architecture collective Micropolis
8 – Coarquitetura, a project designed by students of MACh arquitetos at UFMG
9 (opposite page) – Designed by MACh arquitetos, a structure weaved from bamboo provides space for a new cooking school on top of Belo Horizonte’s famous food market
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MACh is an architecture practice based in Belo Horizonte, founded by architects Fernando Maculan and Mariza Machado Coelho. Formed with a collaborative ethos, MACh shares its studio (unusually) with two other architecture practices (Vazio S/A and BCMF) as well as a graphic design studio. Together they occupy a small house and extension near Savassi, a district of Belo Horizonte, sharing meeting rooms, the receptionist and even swapping employees. Maculan believes this is indicative of the way in which architects are moving towards more horizontal structures in Brazil, working in a collective way that reflects a wider shift from ‘architectonic objects to the city, from the individual to the collective’. For MACh, however, collaboration has always been central to its work, citing this process as a ‘form of continuous learning’ that informs both its approach to architectural practice and pedagogical work at the school of architecture UMFG. The studio specialises in projects of cultural significance, with an interest in the relationship between public and private use. In addition, many commissions have resulted from professional collaborations with people from different fields of artistic creation, where even ‘clients, users, engineers and builders can become creative agents’. Reflected in MACh’s teaching work, this approach helps to foster the idea that architecture is produced through a set of working relationships, constituting a wider dialogue. Coarquitetura, a project with students at UMFG, sought to teach the complexity of architectural design through enacting the building process, with a selection of the students’ work being built with funding from a municipal incentive scheme that encourages cultural projects. MACh’s philosophy, to teach collaboration as an architectural design tool, plays into more
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Hidden SpaceS : Vazio S/a
Carlos Teixeira’s work at architecture practice Vazio S/A has developed from a preoccupation with the possibilities of the latent voids in the city. Vazio (meaning ‘void’) works on a range of speculative projects that look at the city under construction, focusing on aspects not usually dealt with by architects. Many projects highlight hidden spaces, occupying obscure structures with theatrical performances that relate to its interest in the interaction between the body and the city. This creates an ongoing dialogue with artists to help transform leftover spaces into spectacle, a common theme in its work, which Teixeira says, ‘corroborates the idea that the scenic arts and small interventions can be triggers for urban change and resignify urban voids’. The practice’s attempts to draw attention to such spaces can be seen in works such as Topographical Amnesias, where the amazing structural framework built to elevate houses on the hills of Belo Horizonte above a four-storey limit imposed by the authorities, became occupied by performances. Another of Vazio’s proposals is to uncover the city’s river that has slowly disappeared beneath highways. With such scarcity of public space, Vazio seeks to reimagine the infrastructure of the city on an urban scale for the purpose of leisure, which would in turn attract more people to the depressed city centre. Such projects also negotiate the psychology of the city, exposing new ways of engaging with lost spaces. This demonstrates a dedication by the practice to the city’s history and the structures that make it both the megalopolis that it will surely become, and the potentially exciting place that this will be.
cultural economy : doBra architects
Parallel to the increasing occupation of public space, many institutions and the local government have begun to promote events in the city through an incentive scheme, in which big companies financially support cultural projects in place of paying some taxes. Despite this backing, often the projects manage to retain quite critical views, such as the latest event to take place in Praça da Liberdade, designed by the young architecture practice DOBRA (meaning ‘fold’). Its project Museu do Instante proposed occupying the square with everyday objects and events that constituted an alternative type of cultural expression. Its intervention was a comment on the contemporary museum as a closed, privileged space: ‘We wanted to show that spontaneous ways to occupy the streets are just as much “cultural” — and perhaps more political — as those that take place inside museums.’ DOBRA filled the square with activities aimed at uniting different points of view across the city to promote a new experience of the public realm, if only just for a day. These experiences, it believes, reinforce the idea that public space should be used as a place for leisure, alongside all the recent political activism, to achieve real urban improvements. In doing so, DOBRA fulfilled the brief to broaden the demographic of visitors to the museum while also expanding the purpose of the institution itself. It also collaborated on this project with other groups engaged in cultural projects across Belo Horizonte to make the project ‘richer and and closer to what happens all over the city’. As a result it brought together a new generation of architects who are seeking a more critical and purposeful attitude to the production of architecture, finding ways to do so through both conventional and atypical means. 10 – Staged events attracted new visitors to Praça da Liberdade for DOBRA’s installation
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recent local discussions about the ‘right to the city’, where its vision to see a more participatory system is beginning to find a more permanent voice.
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just passing through Words Clare Farrow
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Architecture, for so many years obsessed with permanence and making grand statements, is now looking at ways in which structures can be reused and transported elsewhere while maintaining their initial concept
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1 (previous page) & 2 – Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Diogene, Weil am Rhein, Germany 2013 2 – Shigeru Ban, New Temporary Housing System
iron lattice structure for the 1889 Paris Exposition, was meant to be dismantled in 1909, and either moved or demolished. It took time to prove its worth, in engineering, scientific and human terms, becoming directly linked to advances in science and aviation, and above all, symbolising the Parisian spirit: the lift cables, for example, were cut by the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, but restored within hours of the liberation. This worth developed in Paris like an intimate journey, giving it a permanence that corresponds to the words of Japanese architect and humanitarian Shigeru Ban, also a bridge builder, but in cardboard rather than metal. His first paper church, in Kobe, Japan (1995) — built in just five weeks using beer crates and cardboard tubes — was dismantled in 2006 and donated, as a symbol of friendship, to Taiwan: ‘It is whether people love a building or not [he might also have said ‘need’, in a spiritual, not only material, sense]; this is what gives it permanence.’ (The same might be said of the London Eye.) Ban’s is a philosophy that reinterprets the line between temporary and permanent, and taps into the innate flexibility and fragility of human experience. It acknowledges the need for powerful architectural symbols (‘monuments that are
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1, 2 COURTESY VITRA 3 COURTESY SHIGERU BAN
Around 20 years ago, I saw a tramp waking up in a garden square in London. As he stood up to move on, he bent over and began smoothing the flattened grass where he had been sleeping, combing the green blades through his fingers, as if to make sure he had left no permanent mark, had done no lasting damage. Only when the grass was just as he had found it did he walk away. It was an extraordinary gesture of delicacy and compassion, from a man who had nothing; and it’s an image that somehow resonates today when architecture is questioning its relationship to materiality and nature. A growing number of architects and engineers are experimenting with structures that focus on lightness, mobility and transience. At the other end of the scale, the grand urban gesture making its permanent imprint on the visual identity of a city, continues to play a vital role — even more so at times of austerity, when a dramatic feat of design and engineering can resemble a deft move in a poker game, instantly restoring both image and confidence. Significantly though, some of best-loved landmarks were never intended to be permanent. The Eiffel Tower, for one, designed by the company of a bridge builder as a temporary
At the other end of the scale, the grand urban gesture, making its permanent imprint on the visual identity of a city, continues to play a vital role — even more so at times of austerity
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5 5 & 6 – Daiken-Met Architects, Sugoroku House 7 & 8 – Sugoroku House in transportation
beloved by people’), but meets the impermanence of existence head-on, with weakness rather than strength — cardboard (or other ‘humble materials’ such as wood or membrane) rather than concrete; like the Japanese fishing boat that scaled the tsunami wave in 2011. He has since designed innovative threestorey disaster housing in Japan, using a chequerboard pattern of shipping containers and paper tubes that may, if residents wish, become permanent. In 2013, he travelled for a second time to China’s earthquake-stricken Sichuan province with Japanese students (a profound gesture of friendship given the countries’ shared history), to design a cardboard nursery school, now under construction. Speaking to him in December about this project in his bustling Paris office — full of cardboard chairs and cardboard bookshelves — his excitement was tangible. He is clearly driven to help ordinary people (he had just sent off a prototype design to the Philippines), and his stubborn insistence on the power of the temporary is now leading him to address wider issues regarding social housing and changing urban infrastructures. Among his new projects is a ‘temporary housing system’ made from fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP) — a light, graceful living unit that can be adapted in its specifications and floor planning to
suit different countries, lifestyles, climates and economic levels, providing the simple beauty and privacy that Ban sees as universal human needs. It’s an ongoing project, he says, aimed at post-disaster situations, but also at council or social housing around the world. The use of shipping containers is certainly on the move: in 2011, Daiken-Met Architects designed a three-storey office in Gifu, Japan, comprising containers in a mobile steel framework (with construction-site plywood storage systems) — a prototype for the nomadic use of urban spaces that have been left vacant or derelict. A more high-profile experiment has been the Boxpark pop-up units in London’s Shoreditch — recently endorsed by Richard Branson, who launched his Virgin Startup for young entrepreneurs there in November, and now the model for other pop-up units in Paris (2013) and Vienna (40Bloxx, early 2014). Nomadic structures, however, are not limited to the use of shipping containers: Daiken-Met’s steel-plate Sugoroku House, which looks something like a cross between a concertina and an armadillo, is a small residential unit that can be dismantled, transported, and reconstructed on a new site in less than a week. Designed for a sociologist in 2009 as part of research into social and urban regeneration, and due to hit the road again
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Just as music is ephemeral, so theatre is a transitory, travelling art form. It’s therefore fitting that two recent projects have matched temporary, mobile structures to performance
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9, 10, 11 courtesy société d’Architecture AlAin-chArles Perrot And Florent richArd
9, 10 & 11 – Alain-Charles Perrot and Florent Richard, Théâtre Ephémère de la Comédie Française, Paris
in 2014, the structure utilises vacant city lots, and illustrates the practice’s ‘floating [surface] foundation method’, conforming to the planning criteria of short-term land leases and enabling mobility. It is also an engagement with a social philosophy: ‘If these vacant lots can be used to house people, then this may be able to stop the fragmentation of the city and regenerate the community.’ One architect more used to the grand urban gesture is Renzo Piano, but even with his permanent structures he speaks of pursuing a lightness and immateriality, comparing the mathematical precision and aerodynamic transparency of The Shard in London, for example, to ‘the condition of music’ or poetry. He talks about a desire ‘to float, to fly’, and ‘a way to be’ — a static soulmate perhaps to Sou Fujimoto’s Cloud Pavilion at the Serpentine. This fascination with movement and transparency, which Piano traces back to the water of Genoa in his childhood, has found expression in his public work over the years, in particular the design of concert halls and his collaboration with composer Pierre Boulez in Paris (1978). But in 2013, he took a further step by fulfilling a very personal dream, a ‘long journey’ towards designing a ‘refuge’. It was initially self-funded, but now with the financial backing of Vitra.
A mobile ‘living unit’ named after the Greek philosopher Diogenes (whose extreme asceticism led him to find shelter in a large ceramic jar), Piano’s tiny mobile and fully self-sufficient 6 sq m house places an emphasis on individual rather than social needs. It is self-moderating and, in that sense, a privileged place of ‘spiritual silence’, he says, that has been developed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris, with engineers and technical specialists, including Matthias Schuler from Transsolar and Maurizio Milan, an expert in static equilibrium. Citing Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, the prefabricated house structures of Charlotte Perriand, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kurokawa as influences, Piano has designed this single, portable wooden unit clothed in aluminium This is independent from the local infrastructure, with photovoltaic cells and solar modules, vacuum insulation, a rainwater tank, biological toilet, natural ventilation and triple glazing. It’s a slick expression of personal freedom: a desire to withdraw, as evidenced by Vitra’s statement that communication ‘will take place elsewhere’; and driven, as Piano says, ‘by dreams’, but also by ‘a scientific approach’. Unusually for Vitra, Diogene was tested out on the public at Baselworld (2013), and the company has been assessing the response, mainly from individuals and hotels. The latest
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news is that Vitra is working on ‘the industrialisation of Diogene and hopes to be ready with the product in autumn 2014.’ (Prices will range from €20,000 to €50,000.) Just as music is ephemeral, so theatre is a transitory, travelling art form. It’s therefore fitting that two recent projects have matched temporary, mobile structures to performance. In Paris the forced closure of the Comédie Française for renovation (2012) initiated an intimate reflection on the building’s history and also a reinterpretation of what it is to be ‘temporary’ (in 1787, a wooden theatre was built in the Palais Royal during the construction of the Comédie Française, and then demolished in 1790). For architects Alain-Charles Perrot and Florent Richard, the ‘unexpected, exceptional’ commission to build a theatre in the heart of Paris (the first in 25 years) led to something ‘intellectually satisfying’, ‘a tool of wood’ that would never be demolished, but instead would be ‘removable and reusable’. It is a Théâtre Ephémère that can be dismantled and put up for sale, taking its life and experiences with it. The frame is visible, corresponding to the ‘perfect geometry’ of the Paris site, but based on a prefabricated laminated wood and glue construction system that allows it to be taken elsewhere, though always retaining ‘the trace of the initial frame’. As the architects
recently explains, ‘Being completely raw, the building reflects the theatre work that is performed. It is alive.’ The theatre was dismantled in late January 2014 and has been sold to the Libyan government (Tripoli is the capital of Arab culture for 2014). Now it is getting a new lease of life in a new city, the architects are questioning their use of the word ‘ephémère’: ‘It suggests that it was not solid, when in fact it provides the acoustic and thermal qualities, as well as the comfort, of a permanent structure, all things that do not exist in a tent!’ A more fluid, fast-paced and humanitarian solution to the nomadic theatre has been devised by architect Arata Isozaki and sculptor Anish Kapoor — a balloon-like membrane called the Ark Nova. It began life at the Lucerne Festival (summer 2013) before travelling through the Tohoku region of Japan, taking performances of music and theatre to people whose lives were torn apart by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. It is intended to aid ‘the rebuilding of culture and spirit’, like a colourful suitcase of hope and shared joy, going beyond the first basic needs of shelter and materiality: a kind of portable medicine cabinet for the spirit, or magic carpet turned container, touching down lightly on its travels, and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
12, 13 courtesy Lucerne FestivaL ark nova 2013
12 (previous page) & 13 – Arata Isozaki and Anish Kapoor, Ark Nova
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Driven voiDs Words Cate St Hill Photography Iwan Baan
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American architect Steven Holl’s new addition to the Glasgow School of Art, created in concert with Scottish practice JM Architects, uses a palette of contemporary materials but still manages to complement Rennie Mackintosh’s landmark edifice across the road
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By the genius solution of light wells, or as he calls them ‘driven voids’ of light, Steven Holl has brought some muchneeded light into the depths of a new seven-storey building located on one of Glasgow’s drumlins overlooking the city. The Reid Building, replacing the Foulis Building and Newbery Tower on Renfrew Street (opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s seminal building) to provide extra space for the Glasgow School of Art design departments, is a study in light, capturing, reflecting and tunnelling every possible ray of Glasgow’s limited sunshine into the art studios below. On a dull and rainy day in February, the interior of the new building feels a world away from the storms that have been battering the UK. In fact, it doesn’t even feel like Glasgow at all. This is Steven Holl Architects’ first building in the UK; shortly after winning the project, the practice lost out to Kengo Kuma for the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee. It was also won through a hotly contested competition that chose the American architect over Scottish talent such as Nord, John McAslan, and Elder and Cannon, as well as Dublin’s Grafton Architects and London’s Hopkins Architects and Benson + Forsyth. Holl was selected after the judging panel visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas and the Pratt Institute, a cousin to the GSA extension, which sandwiched a glass wing between two historic red-brick buildings for the architecture school in New York.
Steven Holl Architects was paired with local practice JM Architects, whose partners teach at the adjacent Mackintosh School of Architecture. New York-based Holl’s ultimate challenge was to design a landmark building that would merit the same international acclaim as Mackintosh’s austere statement in masonry and brick did a century earlier, while at the same time designing a building that would fit the historic environs. Says Chris McVoy, SHA’s lead architect on the project: ‘The Mackintosh was very important to me as an architecture student and it was very important to Steven Holl, so when we heard about this competition we immediately did our best to get it. The opportunity to build across from the Mackintosh is a once-in-a-lifetime one. It’s intimidating, but it’s inspiring.’ The exterior of the Reid Building is the silent companion to the star of the show — the interior. While Mackintosh’s building has a thick skin and thin bones — decorative stonework with a steel structure — Holl’s building has thick bones of structural concrete and a thin skin of matte, translucent glass. The glazing is similar to that used by Holl for his ‘horizontal skyscraper’ — the Vanke Center in Shenzen, China. ‘We always felt a silent facade would contrast best with the masterwork of the Mackintosh building — if you look behind that calm street front, you’d see inspiring interior spaces for students and faculty’, says Holl.
Ground floor: Reid Building
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Students’ Union Main entrance Driven ‘Voids of Light’ Digital media workshops Visitor centre Principal seminar rooms Exhibitions gallery
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1 (previous pages) – The glass Reid Building wraps around the retained Students’ Union
2 – The rear of the Reid Building, as seen from Hill Street 3 – The Fashion and Textiles weaving workshop on the third floor
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4 & 5 (previous pages) – Triple-height windows, in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library, which inspired Holl’s ‘driven voids of light’ in the Reid Building
6, 7 & 8 – The central circulation space passes around and through the ‘driven voids of light’
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Although the building at first appears fairly substantial from the street — an uninterrupted length of glass at odds with the historic surroundings — the light colour of the facade makes the street feel more open and almost acts as a blank canvas to focus attention on the darker Mackintosh building. From the outset, the brief called for the demolition of the Students’ Union building on the corner of Renfrew Street and Scott Street, but Holl wanted to retain the block to balance the darkened stone with the Mackintosh building further across the road. So the extension appears as if it is floating above the street, breaking the monotony of the glass facade on Renfrew Street. This also has the added benefit of making the building appear more discreet from the adjacent streets — the building is only ever seen as a fragment above the Glasgow rooftops from the bottom of the hill, and it is only on Renfrew Street that the whole volume is revealed. Indeed, from inside the Mackintosh, the Reid Building becomes almost imperceptible, as if you were looking at the sky and not a solid building next door. The double-height entrance to the building is marked by a colourful glass artwork by Turner Prize-winning artist and GSA graduate Martin Boyce. Called A Thousand Future Skies, it comprises 25 steel frames, suspended vertically from the ceiling, supporting 140 panes of glass in greens and autumnal browns to echo the stained glass in the Mackintosh building. Each opening
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and window in the Reid Building is positioned to create connections with the Mackintosh — the new public exhibition space on the ground floor lines up with the Mackintosh’s entrance while a green terrace on the refectory aligns with the large first-floor windows of the studios opposite. ‘When Steven was here during the competition, he stood in one of the studios opposite and thought “there has to be something special on our side from the Mackintosh”, and came up with the idea of a garden inspired by the Scottish landscape,’ says McVoy. ‘In a way you will have a new horizon overlooking the Mackintosh.’ When SHA first undertook the task of building opposite the Mackintosh, the team studied the different ways in which Mackintosh himself brought light into the building. Mackintosh manipulated light with mastery — there are large, industrial windows that light the artists’ studios, a top-lit museum and the ‘hen run’, a glazed gallery connecting the fourth-floor studios. Specifically, it was the triple-height windows in the library that inspired the three concrete light wells or ‘driven voids’ of light in Holl’s building, tilted at 12 degrees to capture and diffuse light to every storey. ‘The form of our building is in many ways dictated by how the light comes in. Mackintosh’s triple-height windows are volumes of light, they push out from the building and they push into the building to create a space that exists solely for light’, says McVoy.
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When Holl visited the uncompleted building last May he added: ‘My Glasgow building is my most important project because of its proximity to the Mackintosh building. It is a homage to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose inventive manipulation of space to deploy light inspired me to invent the “Driven Voids” of light. I have never used them before, and I will never use them again, because they come from Mackintosh, who created the most important building in the UK.’ The rest of the Reid Building is organised around these three light wells and an open circuit of stepped ramps, which connect 15m-wide studios — the main building block of the building — with social spaces and refectory on the second floor. Not only do the light wells bring in light, they also provide a connection between the different levels, giving an expansive feel to the circulation spaces in addition to round seating areas on the ground floor to encourage stopping and reflecting. Each studio to the north side of the building has an opening cut out where the driven voids meet the rectangular walls, creating snapshots from across the corridors and stairway of students working. ‘The idea is that the cross section through the different activities inspires an interdisciplinary action within the school... and there’s this awareness of what other students are doing,’ says McVoy. ‘We design buildings as they would be experienced.’ Studio spaces are positioned on the north facade, where
there are large inclined windows to maximise access to artists’ favoured north light. Holl used as a precedent the artists’ studios in his Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, which catch the low light of Helsinki’s northern latitude and open up to exhibition galleries via a large pivoting wall to exhibit artists’ work, as well as the north-lit studios of the University of Iowa School of Art History, which were modelled on Constantin Brancusi’s Paris studio. The best spot in the building, however, is a small, intimate glass box on the corner of the silversmithing workshop on the fourth floor, which is cantilevered above the retained Students’ Union building and looks down the hill of Scott Street and over the city of Glasgow to the hills beyond. At the Reid Building the interior is king. You really get the impression that this is a building which will be in its element as a functioning art school, buzzing with activity. The exposed concrete is sturdy and acts as a monochromatic canvas, designed to take a beating from the experimentations of young art students, while the horizontal views into the studios provide inspiration for the next generations of creatives. But one is left wondering, what will happen to the Mackintosh when all the students have this great new building at their disposal? Will it fade into the background and become a museum of the past? Or will it simply be a reminder of the name they have to live up to? 9 – A sketch by Steven Holl and Chris McVoy shows the contrast between the Reid Building and the Mackintosh opposite
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Shaped differently. We all know men and women are shaped differently. Considering the differences, you would expect to find many chairs specifically designed for women. We were surprised to find there were none at all. So together with designer Monica Förster we made Lei – the office chair made to truly support women at work. Read more at www.officeline.se or contact our local distributor: Couch Potato Company 0208 894 1333,
[email protected]
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30/10/2013 09:08
Celebrating the Best of Design Excellence... ENTRIES LIVE MARCH at www.fxdesignawards.co.uk
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PROJECT CATEGORIES Global Project for 2014 UK Project for 2014 Drawing and 3D Model-making Leisure or Entertainment Venue Museum or Exhibition Space Workspace Environment Public Space Schemes Bar or Restaurant Lighting Design Public Sector Retail Space Hotel PRODUCT CATEGORIES 2014 Product of the Year Public, Leisure or Office Furniture Workplace Seating Lighting Product Surfaces SPECIAL AWARDS Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Design Interior Design Practice of the Year Breakthrough Talent of the Year Product Designer of the Year AWARDS NIGHT 26 November 2014 at The Grosvenor House, Park Lane, London W1K 7TN ENTRIES & QUERIES www.fxdesignawards.co.uk
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05/03/2014 12:26
216 – 217
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Shumi Bose speaks to Brian Dillon, co-curator of Ruin Lust, which explores our perverse fascination with the melancholic and powerful idea of the ruin
Corinne Julius finds food for thought at the Design Museum, with Barber & Osgerby looking at the process and materials behind everyday objects
Exhibition – Ruin Lust
Exhibition – In The Making
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Book – Crossover, Cecil Balmond
Designer and engineer Cecil Balmond’s book encourages readers to think across a spectrum of maths, music and digital technologies, says Jonathan Glancey 221
Book – Lina Bo Bardi
Rowan Moore finds Zeuler Lima’s biography of Lina Bo Bardi useful as the first book to assemble the full span of her life and work into one volume
Book – Adventures in Letterpress
Clive Joinson finds Brandon Mise’s book on the recent rise of the near-extinct art of letterpress printing an engaging read 227
Event – BE OPEN Made In... India: Samskara
FACADE Focus 235 – 251
Feature: Wiese Haus, Berlin and Megafaces Pavilion, Winter Olympic Park, Sochi Cate St Hill looks at a Bauhaus-style home in Berlin, which used acrylic stone panels, and Asif Khan’s interactive pavilion in Sochi, Russia 252 – 258
Archive
We revisit Blueprint 91 (October 1992), in which Deyan Sudjic argued that airports are no longer simple pieces of transport infrastructure, but vast, complex, hybrid spaces
The rich tradition of craft and the handmade in India is celebrated through a commercially focused event in New Delhi. Shumi Bose checks it out 228
Exhibition – The Brits Who Built The Modern World Pamela Buxton assesses the latest RIBA exhibition in a new space at 66 Portland Place, designed by Carmody Groarke 230 – 231
Exhibition – United Visual Artists: Momentum
United Visual Artists has installed a mesmerising installation of swinging pendulums at the Barbican’s Curve gallery. Cate St Hill pays a visit 233
Book – Speculative Everything
Rebecca Ross finds a book which reads like a missing manual to Dunne & Raby’s previous work
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REVIEW
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Exhibition
Ruin Lust Tate Britain, London Until 8 May Interview by Shumi Bose
Ruin Lust offers a trans-historical guide to the mournful, heroic and even perverse appreciation of the ruin in art from the 17th century to present day. Shumi Bose spoke with writer and critic Brian Dillon, who curated the exhibition alongside Emma Chambers and Amy Concannon. Shumi Bose: I hadn’t realised that Ruin Lust came from a German word. Brian Dillon: We keep being asked whether we’ve chosen the phrase over Ruin Porn, which people keep using. I came across the term ‘Ruin Lust’ in Rose Macaulay’s book Pleasure of Ruin, published in 1953. It’s not a completely wrong-headed comparison — there is a crass tendency to think of things that people like as porn, and there is certainly something about desire in this subject.. Lust, we hope, implies something a bit more complex than the superficial consumption suggested by porn. SB: What’s the relationship between the ruin and the ‘Sublime’? BD: Well, the ruin is not a classical phenomena; it’s not medieval either, though there are a few examples — it’s basically a post-Renaissance idea. Ruins play a part in at least three of the great aesthetic categories that apply to architecture, art and literature in the 18th century; the Sublime, the Picturesque — which was more localised, more human scale — and the Gothic. We wanted to signal quite early on a sort of modern sublime; we move from a modern appreciation of the ruin to a modernist appreciation. For example, Jane and Louise Wilson’s photographs of the Nazi Atlantic Wall defences are really beautiful, and you can see a relationship with brutalist architecture, which is increasingly seen as a ruin of modernism today.
might conceal a sense of hubris. And so when John Soane commissioned Joseph Gandy to draw the completed Bank of England, what we get is this exploded perspective that gives you an awful lot of architectural detail, but purposely drawn to look like a classical ruin of this new building, entirely depopulated. SB: There’s also this strange takeover by nature in that image, creeping up on the building. BD: Yes, I think that the image of the architectural the urban ruin is often affected by — perhaps even prompted by — some kind of ecological catastrophe. The idea of nature’s inevitable return is shown very well in the great Gustave Doré engraving, The New Zealander (1872). The motif comes from an essay in which there was an idea that centuries in the future, a tourist might arrive from New Zealand to find London in ruins. Nature encroach on the city — and tellingly, one of the 2
SB: Having identified some periods of history then, why do you think it’s at those points — perhaps the moments of progress — that there is this reach for decay? BD: That’s very obvious to see in terms of the 18th century — but that kind of rapid progress is also linked to a sense of emergency, and fragility. For example in France, Hubert Robert — or Robert des Ruins, as he became known — painted the Louvre in ruins, and after the French Revolution this became a particularly charged gesture. In 19th century Britain, there’s definitely a sense that Imperial expansion and mercantile confidence
‘Now it’s possible to look at brutalist architecture with a sort of ruin-lust gaze, in terms of a picturesque decay’ — Brian Dillon
buildings depicted is Commercial Wharf, so it shows not only the ruin of architecture and civilisation, but also the decay of imperial power. SB: Which could equally be a very contemporary concern — the ruination of ecology at the behest of commerce. BD: We like that relationship, between someone like Gandy and Doré, to a contemporary artist like Laura Oldfield Ford, who talks about post-war modernism and the very vexed role that those buildings, particularly brutalist examples, play in Britain right now. Ford talks about the fact that we tend to look at these modernist ruins from the outside; she’s starting to think about them
from the inside out. Interestingly, not many of the other images are populated; if they are, they tend to show one or two small, male figures. Some of the recent work in the show is by women artists, who are often very aware of opposing this maledominated, ruin-loving gaze. SB: There’s a very literary vein running through the exhibition, and indeed a literature series alongside it. BD: Lurking behind the exhibition there’s a long literary tradition — for example through Tintern Abbey, there’s a link between William Gilpin and Wordsworth; several of the works allude to the work of JG Ballard, WG Sebald or London writers, such as Iain Sinclair There is also whole room given over to the Irish artist Gerard Byrne, whose work often involves a restaging of historical texts. In the works we include here, Byrne recasts a roundtable discussion, originally published in a 1963 issue of Playboy, in which a dozen science-fiction writers — including Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury — were asked to imagine life in 1984. With this work we’re even thinking about how imagining the future itself could be sort of antique: there’s a sort of persistence of the past, even in the future that is being imagined. SB: In terms of temporal confusion, what about our current fascination for things with a patina, for vintage, for things such as Instagram? BD: For these earlier artists, that temporal confusion was real, as opposed to a style of aged-ness that we can apply — as we do now to sound, for example, or to images.
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Or in terms of post-modern architecture, of recasting styles, to make things look like they were from the past. For artists before the Sixties, the sense that you’re living in a number of different time periods symbiotically was an actual predicament, a problem. There’s an important distinction as well to make between ruins and monuments. Ruins are a temporary condition; what is seen as a ruin may not have been intended as such, and may not remain a ruin in the future. For example, now it’s possible to look at brutalist architecture with a sort of ruin-lust gaze, in terms of a picturesque decay, which would not have been possible 20 years ago. You can then place on them ideas of cultural value and preservation, which differ from ideas of, say, renovation. SB: Are there cultures either more prone or resistant to the idea of the ruin lust? What about Britain in particular, as a former industrial and also heavily bombed nation? BD: I suppose the ruin in art is primarily a Western European phenomenon. In British art and culture there is a real tension and unease towards grandeur and the aspiration of the sublime — we don’t really have the antique architecture, nor do we have the sweeping, sublime landscapes that Kant talked about. So the ruin takes on a picturesque, almost familiar, domestic scale. Keith Arnatt’s photographs take on that romantic history with an almost comic sense. And the photographs by Jon Savage, of a desolate London in the late Seventies, still shows evidence of areas that were either derelict or decayed; some of them show the ruination of the post-war rebuilding, which already in 1977 look monstrous and threatening, having invaded a still-historic city.
All imAges courtesy the tAte collection
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SB: I wanted to ask you about the romantic sensibility, even indulgence, that goes along with looking at ruin and devastation as pleasurable. BD: Yes, I don’t think that goes away, even if you’re very aware of the political and social contexts — the wartime context, for example, in Tacita Dean’s Russian Ending series. There’s that sense of devastation and horror, but there’s also an aesthetic distance. That ambiguity is one of the things that drew me to the topic. Ruins are never wholly prurient or nostalgic, horrific or mournful; it’s always this complicated mix.
1 – Patrick Caulfield, Ruins, 1964 2 – Jane and Louise Wilson, Azeville, 2006 3 – JMW Turner, Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking towards the East Window, 1794 4 – Tacita Dean, The Wrecking of Worthing Pier, 2001 5 – Eduardo Paolozzi, Michelangelo’s ‘David’, 1987
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Book
Crossover Cecil Balmond Prestel, £40 Review by Jonathan Glancey
Whenever some publishing bigwig, newly thrilled by digital technology, squeals ‘Print is dead!’, there are those of us who turn instinctively to our bookshelves while making a point of popping into our nearest bookshop, or even co-opting digital technology to order books online, to enrich our lives with the printed word OR good old-fashioned paper and board. I mention this because Cecil Balmond, a fecund designer and inspired engineer, is no stranger to the ways of computers and the possibilities of digital technology. And yet, reassuringly, he has produced another book — a lovely, compact thing. For Balmond the book is a place of research and experiment as well as record. It is a toolbox, a magician’s hat and something of a Pandora’s box too. It is also an object — no, a project, to use Balmond’s own word — in its own right. It is not an apology for a website. It is not a building, or a bridge. It’s a book.
Balmond suggests a world of buildings, bridges and artworks that echo to the music of Bach, with all its mathematical games and soul
More than this, Balmond, who makes full use of available computing power to explore the idea of structure in every which way, manages to surprise and delight the reader with analogue revelations: such as the fact that the first thing he and Rem Koolhaas did when they formulated a design for the CCTV headquarters in Beijing was to make a paper model of this radical structure. And, in small print at the end of this engaging book, we learn that the author relaxes by enjoying ‘his vinyl collection and playing guitar’. Like the piano and vinyl records, guitars are essentially percussive instruments, as seemingly remote from the world of digital technology as a song thrush is from a stegosaurus. And yet there is a connection — just as with birds and dinosaurs — and one witnessed throughout the bright pages of Crossover. That connection is mathematics. Music, engineering, architecture and computers, and models made from folding paper, are the stuff of mathematics. But what makes Crossover, and Balmond’s work, special — from an HQ building with OMA in Beijing and the 2002 Serpentine Pavilion with Toyo Ito to the daunting Marsyas sculpture with Anish Kapoor at Tate Modern — is the very crossover he makes between formal and informal maths; between what we know for sure, like Pythagoras’ theorem, and what might be very uncertain indeed. When Balmond designs a bridge, as he did for example at Coimbra, Portugal, which (conceptually)
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refuses to meet in the middle while being a perfectly safe, if puzzling, pleasure to walk across, you can see how remarkably practical, yet teasing, testing, eye-catching and yes, musical, such a design — rooted in mathematical experimentation — can really be. The Pedro e Inês Bridge has something of an Alice in Wonderland quality about it, so I was unsurprised to find Balmond referring to Lewis Carroll’s logically teasing tale. It is perhaps worth noting that Charles Dodgson [aka Lewis Carroll] was, of course, a noted mathematician as well as a renowned whimsical/ intoxicated novelist. Balmond’s evident delight in the coalescing play between formal and informal maths, and thus design, stems in part from his discovery of Kurt Gödel, the Austrian mathematician and philosopher; in particular his Incompleteness Theorem of 1931. In a nutshell, this states that is it is impossible to reduce all of mathematics to the application of fixed rules. There is no absolute certainty. There will always be some ‘true’ facts that one cannot prove. As a result, maths, which will
forever be incomplete, has an element that is completely creative. Which is why Balmond believes that the ‘author’ — his word — of a building is a ‘researcher’. It helps to explain why he believes ‘Repetition corrupts, experiment revives’, and why, in the design process, he seeks out ‘informal radicals’, those intangibles — mathematical as well as intuitive — that infiltrate the pages of Crossover. Balmond suggests a world of buildings, bridges and artworks that echo to the music of Bach, with all its mathematical games and soul, while refusing, as Gödel did, to hide behind intellectual convention. So, Crossover: each page a surprise, each a part of Balmond’s ‘forensic’ approach to design — encourages its readers to think across the spectra of maths, music, analogue and digital technologies in a neverending game of speculation put into practice. As sure as 1 + 1 = 2 — as I think they do — this is a special book that happens to be nicely designed and happily printed too.
1 – Pedro e Inês Bridge, Coimbra, Portugal
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Book
Lina Bo Bardi Zeuler Rocha Mello De Almeida Lima. Foreword by Barry Bergdoll Yale University Press, £40.00 Review by Rowan Moore
One of the many colourful characters with whom Lina Bo Bardi had to deal in the course of her colourful life was Juracy Magalhães: army general, president of Brazil’s national oil company, and eventually successful candidate for the governorship of the state of Bahia. He also played an editorial role in a newspaper to which Bo Bardi contributed. How’s that for conflicts of interest? It makes the multiple hat-wearers of modern British architectural politics look like rank amateurs. Magalhães embodies the tangled networks that Bo Bardi had to negotiate and manipulate to achieve her many and varied works, and it is one of the strengths of Lima’s careful and factual biography of her that figures like this are given their place. She is not shown as a maestro, producing masterpieces in an apolitical void, but as someone
whose life was an open-ended exploration buffeted by wars and revolutions, whose next episodes were always uncertain, who sometimes had to duck and weave, but who through it all was guided by powerful beliefs and values. This consistency of purpose in compromised settings is true heroism, especially when compared with Ayn Rand’s model in The Fountainhead, of the lone genius pitting his vision against the world. For Bo Bardi, the core belief was in the social and cultural role of architecture, accompanied by a faith in the productions of the untrained and the poor. She devoutly held the view that architecture should be popular, not elitist, and lived out the implications of that view as fully as she could. This did not mean that professional skill and knowledge were unimportant — and if she were judged only by her formal brilliance and innovation she would still be an important figure — but only that she gave these qualities no special privilege. Architecture, she said, is ‘an adventure in which people are called to intimately participate as actors’. Her view of architecture as something
enmeshed and engaged meant, among other things, that many of her works were not actually buildings, but included exhibition design and curatorship, journalism, and design for stage sets and furniture. She was as multiple as Magalhães indeed, but more noble. Lima communicates this multiplicity, too, showing Bo Bardi as more than the architect of the three concrete buildings in São Paulo that make her look most like the normal idea of a modern architect, and for which she is best known — her Glass House, the Museum of Art, and the sports and cultural centre SESC Pompeia. Spellbinding though these projects are, they are only part of the story, and Lima is good on Bo Bardi’s life and more subtle work in Salvador de Bahia, a place which she found more vital than the business city of São Paulo. The book gives due space to the houses and churches which, departing from conventional
Her core belief was in the social and cultural role of architecture, along with a faith in the productions of the untrained and the poor
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modernism, used textured masonry and rough timber. It shows how Bo Bardi was as radical in converting existing buildings as with new build, and could use scaffolding or blue paint as powerfully as cantilevers and wide-spanning reinforced concrete. Lima also brings out the ferocity of her opposition to Oscar Niemeyer, whom she saw as a purveyor of empty form-making, pompous and meaningless, whose Ibirapuera complex was ‘an embarrassment, a provincial, ignorant, and reactionary humiliation’. The writer delves gingerly into her personal life, revealing a possible affair with Mussolini’s leading architect Marcello Piacentini, and an attraction on Gio Ponti’s part that was ‘more than professional’. Lima is not really a romantic writer, however, and he leaves you wanting to know more. The book’s weakness, in fact, is a murky and pedantic prose style, that is the downside of its conscientious fact-gathering and doesn’t match the vivacity and audacity of its subject. There are great stories in there about a spectacular person, but it is a laborious wade to find them. But this flaw is outweighed by the book’s usefulness as the first to assemble into a single narrative the full span of Bo Bardi’s life and work, in all its multiple aspects. It hardly needs saying that it is timely. At her Glass House not so long ago I saw among the recent entries to the visitors’ book the names of Lord Foster and family, and Julia PeytonJones, director of the Serpentine Gallery. This confirmed to me that the rapid rise in her reputation in recent years has reached the highest possible levels. A few years ago, architects and critics who should have known better would look blank when her name was mentioned. Now everyone wants to know more about the architect whose position, so opposed to the corporate, the globalised, and what would now be called ‘iconic’, looks so pertinent. 1 – Spellbinding – Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and cultural centre SESC Pompeia, in São Paulo
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03/03/2014 15:03
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03/09/2013 17:22
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Exhibition
In the Making Until 4 May Design Museum, London Review by Corinne Julius
The understanding of how everyday objects are created from raw materials and transformed by the manufacturing process into useable/ consumable objects would have been commonplace less than 40 years ago. In an age where people order goods off the internet at the click of a button, it’s no wonder that many have lost all knowledge of how things are made. Today, relatively few people in the UK are concerned directly with manufacture, yet creating and making seem almost hard-wired, which perhaps explains the current interest in baking, knitting and generally getting one’s hands dirty. Playing with process and materials has become the mantra for today’s crop of designers, in part because many have had limited opportunity to work with manufacturers. Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have worked for many manufacturers, but experimentation with materials and process is key to their approach. As children, both were fascinated to see how things were made and they have retained that sense of wonder. ‘We work with many different companies in different materials in different countries. Whenever we are about to start a project with a new manufacturer, we insist that we go to visit their manufacturing facility, before we start the project, because we always, always, see something that will either inspire us at the early stage of the project or a process, which they don’t expect us to be interested in, but which we find fascinating and bring into our project,’ enthuses Barber. Now the design duo, who invariably finish each other’s sentences, (described by Deyan
Sudjic as the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of British design), have come up with In the Making, at the Design Museum. They have selected 25 (mostly) everyday objects and show them in an unfinished state, in a frozen moment of their production. In the darkened gallery each object is mounted on a flocked black plinth, displayed as a rare jewel. That is how they want visitors to view the objects — as beautiful, fascinating and intriguing, perhaps more so in this moment of their development than in their final form. The show opens with an aluminium moulding of the front of a Tube train and then in the black
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The show isn’t just about unexpected beauty but about introducing visitors to production processes from the old to the new tunnel space, visitors are confronted with a striking lime-yellow pierced hanging, the felt left once the covering for tennis balls has been cut out, next to the almost ballerina-like form of the bentwood backrest and legs of a Thonet 2014 chair. Alongside is a shining black and deep blue lump of silicone ingot, from which silicon wafers are cut; a hand-blown marble is still attached to its cut-cane stick, and several natural-cork stoppers just stripped and punched from the bark. It is an intriguing mix and goes on to include a slug of extruded brick, a tap, a sofa and a football-boot flat pattern, that looks like a Darth Vader mask. The show isn’t just about unexpected beauty but about introducing visitors to production processes from the very old, to the cutting edge, the hand crafted to the digital. This is emphatically not a review of Barber & Osgerby’s work, although three of the practice’s pieces are used to demonstrate processes: the Olympic Torch to illustrate the art of laser cutting, the £2 coin to show how to join metals without gluing, and the Tip Ton chair to explain injection moulding. Most of the processes are explained in more detail in a series of short films displayed within the
space. These are intriguing and the nearest most visitors will ever get to visiting a factory. The unfinished objects are illustrated next to their final forms outside the display space. Importantly there is also a wall of free leaflets that describe the objects, their production, the moment in production when each item was stopped, plus in some cases history of the objects and their manufacturers. The leaflets, really informative and well designed by Build, are the key to the whole show. Sadly they are on a side wall at the exit, and many visitors will overlook them, but they are an integral part of the show and might have been better displayed at the entrance as well. The show is a paean of praise to making and it is surprising that it hasn’t been done before. Some of the items might well have an interesting production process, for example the B&B Italia Charles sofa , but the object itself fails the jewel test, while others such as the football boot are rather obvious and blokey. Overall the show is fun, but the real meat comes in the films and the leaflets. Irritatingly, space constraints mean that object and process are separated, but nevertheless it is a provocative attempt to get visitors to appreciate the ideas and skills behind the objects they use daily.
1 – Partially finished optic lens 2 – A French horn in the making 3 – Soon to be Derwent pencils
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STEEL
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Sleek features and stunning good looks demand admiration: That’s why the architects and specifiers chose CANAL as their partner for this bespoke architectural metalwork project in Central London.
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Book
Adventures in Letterpress Brandon Mise Laurence King, £17.95 Review by Clive Joinson
American Brandon Mise, maverick letterpresser and author, has written an engaging book celebrating the recent rise of the near-extinct art of letterpress printing. Adventures in Letterpress is a revivalist, secular hymnal to this colourful, quirky art. Letterpress, a design based on the extant wine press, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century and was, for some 500 years, the dominant mode of print production. Letterpress machines, most of them delightful Heath Robinsonesque affairs, though very cleverly and ornately made, were still the workhorses of the printing industry until recent times. As they became technologically obsolete they were superseded by more sophisticated offset-litho presses, and yet this seeming obsolescence in the digital age became part of their innate charm and attraction to designers. Everything
This almost-forgotten technique has been revitalised, showing that the old letterpress dog can perform new visual tricks 2
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about them is the opposite of the fast and throwaway of today’s design production processes. As such, they have been reinvented as post-modern boutique items, hallmarks, in a sense, of a designer’s integrity and individuality, or as Mise says, using them means ‘relearning the beauty of doing old-fashioned things in an old-fashioned way’. This volume showcases some 200 examples of designers’ work; tactile hand-printed pieces by practitioners who have rescued copper, wood and cast-iron presses from scrap yards and warehouses. Stylish card designs vie with edgy posters, highly crafted contemporary packaging and sharp, witty, promotional pieces. This almost-forgotten technique has been revitalised, showing that the old letterpress dog can perform new visual tricks. After dropping out of design school, Mise switched at the last minute to an English degree in order to graduate on time, but design, and in particular letterpress, has remained his passion. Mise’s dedication to his new-found métier meant he quickly achieved guru status among his letterpress colleagues, and that eager clients, seeking something out of the ordinary, beat a path to his door. He was by then, he says, a confirmed ‘press monkey’. Today Mise heads a collective of some 400 letterpressers, called Blue Barnhouse, that since 2000 has helped spearhead the future direction of the art. Mise’s fellow
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crafters pool their expertise and old hands pass on their knowledge, gained over generations, to new workers in the Small Press Movement. Letterpresses were once ubiquitous, manufactured by scores of companies. Back in the Fifties even Lagonda, the car-body maker, marketed a model. But in the age of mechanical reproduction they were inevitably superseded by more advanced processes. Now anyone with a Mac or PC can independently produce print, but letterpress status guarantees its adherents, and their product, has a bespoke and hand-made quality lacking in any other form of print. It’s clear from reading Mise that, once the letterpress bug has bitten, a user’s enthusiasm stays and blossoms. Yet you might wonder why any graphic designer, from the comparative comfort of their Charles Eames chair, Power Mac and mouse to hand, would want to engage with the messy hit-or-miss individuality of a letterpress. But the results, as the work in this book shows, are well worth the effort. Those who swear by letterpress talk of outstanding qualities such as greater print definition, the clarity and ‘wattage’, or vibrancy, of the inks used. And oh for the texture of a newly impressed design on handmade, organic and tree-free paper! Excellent examples of the art in Mise’s book include a design promoting the then president-in-waiting, Barack Obama. ‘Stand by your man’ reads a
caption in bold serif type, an image of a smiling Obama to its left. But who of the letterpress’s original operators could have foreseen it would have been used, 500 years on, to help successfully promote the USA’s first black president? A poster promoting gay rights shows a saloon car from the Fifties, the couple in the front seat just married, tin cans tied to its bumper, the message ‘Marriage is so Gay’ written over the boot, the number plate reading, ‘EQUAL’. Here, then, the medium is the message, the hard-won technique of the process lending added authority to these items, now pressed into our memory. As the letterpress gospel spreads, it is sure to endear itself to new generations of users. Letterpressistas talk about their machines as if they were members of the family. The smell of printers’ ink, classic feel and finish, the reassuring hum of well-oiled gears and rollers, along with the challenges of an experimental and unforgiving technique — all these will ensure that contemporary messages in this old medium will riff in new and memorable ways, earning letterpress additional stripes. A process that a decade ago seemed to have no future is shown in these pages to have risen as a bold and forward-looking art.
1 – Front cover of Adventures in Letterpress 2 – The nearly extinct process of letterpress printing is used to highlight modern issues in Marriage is so Gay 3 – Promotional literature for president-inwaiting Barack Obama
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Exhibition
BE OPEN Made In... India: Samskara Until 28 February Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi Review by Shumi Bose
The fact that India is a country so much mythologised in the West as well as internally makes it hard to discuss without resorting to cliché. It’s a country where ancient and modern collide, where feudal secularism coincides with almostmiraculous levels of democratic participation, and where tradition holds hands with progress in thrilling, and often perplexing, manifestations. That India continues, almost 70 years after independence, to reify itself strongly through foreign sanction is both a symbol of an increasingly confident national dialogue in a global economy, and also one of these perplexing, contrary manifestations of subjugation. The exhibition BE OPEN Made in... India: Samskara was indeed a timely compilation of contemporary Indian design practice across several disciplines, with 23 designers or collectives selected from across the nation. That such an event, held in the national capital, was organised by the private Russian organisation BE OPEN, however, is indicative of a culture that, decades after emancipation from colonial rule, still depends on a foreign stamp of approval in order to validate itself. I’m well aware that such an observation may not win me any friends in my own country of origin. The super-wealthy Elena Baturina, businesswoman and entrepreneur, is the founder of BE OPEN, a selfprofessed philanthropic initiative dedicated to finding links between creative innovation, design, industry and the marketplace. In a precursive text, Baturina clearly states the agenda of her endeavour: to bring a ‘business focus’ to the future of craft and the handmade in India. This commercial attitude explains the explicitly showroom-like exhibition design, as well as the decision to display design products in a semblance of a ready-to-buy shopfloor, complete with Samskarabranded tags (though no prices, as the objects are not actually for sale). Further aspirational pronouncements such as marketing Indian handicrafts to a ‘luxury audience’, and ‘creatives becoming the ruling class of the future’ are somewhat disturbing to my personal politics, so perhaps better to move on to the design objects — or rather, products — themselves. The lighting design studio Klove chose to explore elemental themes
in its contribution to Samskara, creating sinuous lamp fittings in hand-blown glass, metal and stone. Unlike many of the works included, its did not refer to any recognisably Indian visual tropes, perhaps making it easier to enter that all-important global marketplace. On the other side of this spectrum, but no less viable in its exotic charm, a beautiful low table decorated with a traditional enamelling technique by Sahil & Sarthak. Artist-design outfit Thukral & Tagra was perhaps the only company whose pieces had a genuine sense of humour. Self-consciously ethnic forms wrought in raw terracotta, disguised unromantic 21st-century functionality as speakers and phone chargers. Displayed on plinths like organic sculptures, delightfully out of proportion to their purpose, these were the only pieces that had the confidence to take to the brief with a tongue in cheek; the elemental forms suggest a vernacular piety while hiding a singularly practical function. Several sartorial participants highlighted India’s historic tradition of producing covetable fashion 2
Traditional techniques were restrained within a generically contemporary aesthetic, adding a tasteful sprinkling of ethnic ‘masala’ fabrics, from wool-woven saris to elaborated pleated and hand-stitched silks, by designers including Aneeth Arora, Samant Chauhan and Gaurav Gupta. Other works included examples of brass, copper and steel tableware — including unusual twists on the traditional Indian thali. According to its blurb, Samskara looks at how work by small-scale producers can adapt and survive without losing ‘integrity and local flavour’ — indeed the bedlinen, upholstery on display demonstrated traditional techniques in weaving and embroidery within a generically contemporary aesthetic, adding just a tasteful sprinkling of ethnic ‘masala’. The ‘showroom’ concept for display was devised and executed by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo — whose fusion of vernacular and contemporary research methods
earned her a huge display in the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. Her concept patchworked elements made of hand-chased granite and prefabricated ferroconcrete, to form a flowing surface across floors, display podiums and atmospheric, watery pools. The contrast in hand-finished and modern materials paid tribute to the constant evolution of manual labour and craft technology, strongly emphasised in her practice. BE OPEN’s focus on handicraft within design seeks to support and retain heritage and craft traditions, boosting their presence from local to international luxury markets. However India’s handicraft heritage has a strong political history; handloom and khadi fabrics, for example, were worn as a symbol of resistance, inspired by Gandhi’s call for in self-sufficiency. The Arts and Crafts movement failed due to high costs of production passing on to consumers; such a failure would be a strength for BE OPEN’s agenda to market exclusively high-end buyers. Indeed many items would sit happily in a branch of Heal’s. Setting aside personal politics, perhaps it is not necessary to wish for any higher aspiration. But it is notable that while the products shown were universally well crafted, they tended not to address design as a critical or even problem-solving act. There is a fine but clear line between designers who act critically, and those who act aesthetically; one hopes that Indian design matures to reflect its own sociopolitical and cultural contexts, rather than over-diluting itself for the benefit of foreign palates. 1 – Made In…India: Samskara celebrates the emrging design scene of the sub-continent 2 – Samskara emphasises the importance of craftsmanship, building on a rich tradition
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Exhibitions
The Brits Who Built The Modern World & New British Works RIBA, London Until 27 May Review by Pamela Buxton
It’s staggering: a quarter of the biggest architecture practices in the world are based in the UK, and a fifth of RIBA practices’ workload is overseas. These statistics alone make examining the global influence of the British practice a valid line of enquiry even without the hook of BBC’s recent series The Brits Who Built the Modern World. The RIBA exhibition of the same name, the first in its new ground-floor gallery space, is a worthwhile spin-off for both a general audience and architects alike. The RIBA and its architect Carmody Groarke (see On the drawing board, page 35) have done well to carve this 135 sq m area out of what was back-of-house space by the reception at 66 Portland Place. Already, on the show’s busy opening Saturday, the new gallery was doing much to animate the august building, although in itself the new space is not particularly distinctive. The interest lies in what’s on display, and for this, curator Mike Althorpe had rich subject matter at his disposal — the disproportionate and continuing influence of British architects around the world over the past 50 years. It’s a big subject, which could have done with a bit more space to breath. While the television programme was tightly focused
on the architectural journeys, collaborations and rivalries of the leading five British architects of this period — Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, Richard Rogers, Terry Farrell and Nicholas Grimshaw — this show has a much broader, less peoplefocused range. As well as these central figures, there’s work by BDP, Trevor Dannatt Architects and Farmer & Dark among many others, as well as more recent projects by David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid. Nevertheless the final message of the show is clearly the impressive global reach of the Big Five, graphically underlined through dots representing their projects on a world map. The core question is how did UK architects come to have so much influence post-war overseas? This is kicked off with a run through the Festival of Britain and the success of the British take on modernism all over the world, in particular Africa and the Middle East. Trevor Dannatt’s King Faisal Conference Centre in Riyadh (1973) looks particularly impressive. Material on the huge influence of American culture, British radical Archigram and emerging building technologies pave the way for the rise of Foster, Rogers et al, and their development of what became known as High-tech, with its emphasis on legibility of structure and services. This show is a reminder of how radical these now establishment figures once were, with the futuristic
The final message is clearly the impressive reach of the Big Five, underlined through dots for their projects on a world map
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Willis Faber & Dumas office in Ipswich and Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership’s aluminium-clad Mercury Housing Society flats in central London. High-tech’s evolution into the defining international style of the late-20th century is the key stylistic story of the exhibition. There is some great material here — models and drawings of Rogers & Piano’s Centre Pompidou and, in particular, the story of Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank headquarters and Farrell’s Peak Tower in Hong Kong, plus footage of the architects discussing their work and Prince Charles’ famous ‘monstrous carbuncle’ outburst against the National Gallery’s extension plans. Emphasis is given to the role of the government, both as client of embassies and international pavilions and as cheerleader of British talent abroad in trade missions and promotional material. Temporary pavilions seem influential, illustrated by projects such as Grimshaw’s pavilion for Seville Expo 92 and
Heatherwick’s for Shanghai 2010, and with a quote from Basil Spence likening them to hothouses where new seeds are planted and forced. This success story is by no means over. Upstairs in the accompanying New British Works exhibition, showing models of forthcoming and proposed work by UK practices — from David Adjaye’s diamondpatterned high-rise in Shanghai to Zaha Hadid’s sleek Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan (see Blueprint 332, January/ February 2014). The emphasis is on work in China and the Middle East, reflecting the shifts in the global economy. And why be held back by global boundaries? Foster goes one step beyond global domination with the practice’s Lunar Habitation project, a proposal to use lunar earth and a 3D printer to ‘print’ a building on the moon. 1 – The RIBA is hosting the two new shows, the first in its latest new ground-floor space 2 – Models on show include forthcoming and proposed works
1, 2 Courtesy the rIBA
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Exhibition
United Visual Artists: Momentum Barbican Art Gallery, London Until 1 June Review by Cate St Hill
In the pitch-black 90m-long Curve gallery, which wraps around the back of the Barbican’s concert hall, young experimental practice United Visual Artists (UVA) has orchestrated a sequence of 12 pendulums, which move and light up like a giant Newton’s cradle. Step down the stairs into the Curve gallery, and it feels like you’re entering into some sort of larger-than-life metronome that controls the belly of the London Symphony Orchestra next door. Although it looks deceptively simple, the movement of the pendulums has been carefully calibrated and meticulously planned to work individually and in sequence with one another. The tempo and cyclic sway of Momentum was inspired by French physicist Léon Foucault’s pendulum from the 1800s, which created a simple device to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. ‘ We’re interested in these sort of experiments; that something so simple can show you something about a force or energy which is so much larger than yourself,’ says UVA’s Ben Kreukniet, who has been with the team for the past six years. The opening of the Curve is marked by a solitary pendulum, which casts a plane of light that makes the edges of the room fade 2
away and the space feel infinite. It is only when you walk around the tight arc of the Curve and into a more narrow and constricted space that you are met with a compact sequence of pendulums, swinging back and forth, highlighting the curvature of the gallery. The soundscape produces a rhythmic, meditative space, in which the longer you stay the more you notice that these pendulums are not just moving at random, but are subtly oscillating as part of a much larger whole. Kreukniet explains: ‘We imagine the series almost as if all the pendulums are one piece. We create these oscillations that we put into the system and they wash through the space from one end to the other to create a loop, almost like a string vibrating. We imagine that the Curve is not just a section of an arc but actually a full circle and that there are these oscillations that are continuing around that circle.’ It touches one of the themes of the studios’ work, which is an interest in the tension between real and synthesised experiences and the creation of phenomena that transcend the purely physical. UVA, founded in 2003 by Matthew Clark, Chris Bird and Ash Nehru, and now with 12 people onboard, is well known for creating immersive and absorbing environments, in which the visitor plays a vital role in the success of the installation.
UVA is well known for creating immersive and absorbing environments in which the visitor plays a vital role
Previous work includes Speed of Light in 2010, which transformed four storeys of an industrial art space behind the OXO Tower with a series of laser sculptures, and High Arctic (2011), a vast, abstracted arctic landscape that invited visitors to reflect on the Arctic region and the human impact on this fragile environment. In Volume, first exhibited in the garden of London’s V&A in 2006 before moving to Hong Kong, Taiwan and St Petersburg, a labyrinth of luminous, sound-emitting columns responded to visitors’ movements. In all its work, UVA aims to distil complexity down to its very essence, just like Foucault’s pendulum a century earlier. Momentum itself is a natural successor to Chorus (2009-2010), a kinetic installation of eight pendulums, each with a light and sound component, which toured a number of venues including Durham Cathedral and the Wapping Project. While in that installation the light was not used to shape the experience but rather to highlight the pendulums themselves, Momentum goes a step further. It uses the moving pendulums to cast shadows and beams of light across the 6m-high walls and curved floor of the space, to alter visitors perceptions and shape their individual participation. ‘We wanted the installation on the one hand to fill the space, and on the other for it to be completely empty. It’s not about the walls, or the floors, or the pendulums; we’re interested in everything in between, the immateriality of everything in between. ‘And that’s why we’re drawn to mediums like light and sound, because we can use them to control that space and we can switch them on and off. So at one moment it can feel very open and vast, and another it feels small and tiny’, says Kreukniet. UVA was initially slated to be part of the Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican this summer, but Momentum took on its own pace and became a separate entity in its own right, in part to coincide with the practice’s 10th anniversary. Reflecting on the past decade, UVA admits that Momentum couldn’t have been created before, and that a long process of experimentation found an outlet because of the Curve space. ‘The Barbican was a very good fit for us as a studio. It is a space we’ve always dreamed of working with,’ Kreukniet says. ‘There’s a concert hall downstairs and an art gallery upstairs, and we’re somewhere in the middle.’
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1 – 12 pendulums light up and move back and forth in the Barbican’s Curve gallery 2 – Chorus (2009), installed in Durham Cathedral
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1 (top and bottom left) bethany clark, getty images; (bottom right) james medcraft
The world’s leading trade fair for Architecture and Technology
Frankfurt am Main 30. 3 – 4. 4. 2014 www.light-building.com
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New international design ideas and sustainable solutions for energy efficiency are in the spotlight at the world’s largest trade fair for lighting, electrical engineering, home and building automation and software for the construction industry. Discover ecologically and economically smart ways of saving energy. Themed expert guided tours also offer a wealth of inspirations for architects.
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04/03/2014 15:35
Book
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby MIT Press, £19.95 Review by Rebecca Ross
Anthony Dunne’s 1998 book Hertzian Tales had been a game changer within the design world, bravely provoking a repositioning of what it meant, and what it could mean, to identify yourself as a designer. It was the only book recommended to me on my first day of my final year at design school, in 2001; one week later, the World Trade Center came down and so much changed. Speculative Everything, the most recent book by Dunne and Fiona Raby, would also be most usefully encountered in the setting of design education, as a lucid exemplar of how to pursue and enact a critical position through practice or as a foil to an unreconstructed, market-led approach. It is accessibly written, thoughtfully organised, and generously infused with a thoughtful selection of images. The book additionally functions as a missing manual or annotated bibliography to most of Dunne & Raby’s previous exhibitions, texts, and objects, given that not everything always gets interpreted, contextualised, or mobilised in the way that its originators may hope. In a departure from Dunne & Raby’s earlier writing, Speculative Everything conforms to the desires of a world in which — despite how much critics of a certain stripe like to dismiss TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) legitimately
1 dunne & raby 2 tommaso lanza
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and for sport — TED talks have a significant impact. Perhaps pitching to that wider TED talk-watching audience, Dunne & Raby makes the case for design as having an important role to play in disturbing a culture-wide presumptiveness and complacency around scientific and technological advances. This comes through at best, for example, in Huggable Atomic Mushrooms (2007-08) and Designs for an Overpopulated Planet (2010). In both projects it deploys distinct objects that assault the senses with crucial, but not nearly visible enough, contradictions of contemporary culture. In Designs for an Overpopulated Planet, staged in collaboration with its students at the Royal College of Art where it leads a well-regarded MA in Design Interactions, it activates an explicit encounter with our planet’s risk of overpopulation by partially materialising a series of wearable augmentations to the human body that would maximise its capacity for foraging. The green plastic forms, projected into an imagined but not beyond reference future environment, concurrently evoke fascination and discomfort. Dunne & Raby’s most recent project, United Micro-Kingdoms, shown at London’s Design Museum last summer, tests the applicability of the speculative futures method to what it labels ‘big thinking’ — addressing whole socio-technicalenvironmental systems. The duo articulates a future in which the UK is divided into four principalities with distinct political leanings, expressed through variances in the design of
Dunne & Raby make the case for design as having an important role to play in disturbing a culturewide presumptiveness
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their technological, in particular transport, infrastructure. The Communo-nuclearists, for example, live all together on an autonomous two-mile-long train resembling a mountain range that never stops. Anarcho-evolutionists subsist on the core strength of the human body. They adapt their genetic profiles to sustain travel, for example, by large group bicycles powered by members with extremely big thigh muscles, represented in the exhibition as bright-red figurines. Dunne & Raby is right to push its audience to grapple with the fact that much is at stake right now. Though it can often feel like technological change is a singular vector, there remains open a wider, more complex range of possible futures than most individuals, whether optimistic or cynical in temperament, bother to envision or express. At the scale of the region or nation state, however,
certain intellectual shortcomings of the approach reveal themselves. Having engaged in funded research collaborations with engineers and bio-scientists, Dunne & Raby incorporates an in-depth understanding of the technologies involved in its proposals. At a talk given at the V&A marketing the launch of the book, Raby was careful to point out that its vehicle designs are ‘not purely fictional, [but] possible and engineerable’. It does not refer to technology beyond what’s possible given the current state of engineering and bio-science in the vehicle designs. However, it neglect to engage in such detail with the gravity of our present culture’s deep embeddedness in institutions, such as those of advanced capitalism, which a concept such as anarcho-evolutionism implies are plausible to overturn. It may well be possible with the right amount of the right kind of investment to produce zero carbon footprint, bio-fuel-powered cars through farming, but the question of whether we should or how we might ever do so is far more embroiled in complexities of class, culture and politics. Speculative Everything does touch on a range of fields, including literature and anthropology, but these flirtations remain passively surface. In my opinion, in the production of humanity’s future design has the potential to contribute far more as an interface between intellectual and market-based practices than to accept the pre-eminence of engineering and science, in relative isolation from other forms of expertise, as given. 1 – Augmented digestive system and tree processor, from Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers, 2009 2 – Train, from United Micro Kingdoms, 2013
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In support of
Time for life—with two limited edition timepieces in support of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Each watch raises £100 for the Nobel Peace Prize winning humanitarian organization. And still these handcrafted mechanical watches with the red 12 cost the same as the classic Tangente models from NOMOS Glashütte. Help now, wear forever. £100 from every product sold is paid to Médecins Sans Frontières UK, a UK registered charity no. 1026588. NOMOS retailers helping to help include C S Bedford, C W Sellors, Catherine Jones, Fraser Hart, Hamilton & Inches, Mappin & Webb, Orro, Perfect Timing, Russell & Case, Stewart's Watches, Stuart Thexton, Watches of Switzerland, Wempe. Find these and other authorised NOMOS retailers at www.nomos-watches.com, or order online at www.nomos-store.com.
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Volker Wiese, with the help of local architect Kaden Klingbeil and today’s hi-tech materials, created a home in Berlin that would make the Bauhaus envious, while London-based Asif Khan created a dramatic interactive architectural facade for visitors to the Sochi Winter Olympics
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Study: Weise Haus, Berlin
Architect Volker Wiese eschewed concrete in favour of an acrylic stone facade to realise his Bauhaus dream house, finds Cate St Hill To the west of Berlin’s city centre — not far from where Mies van der Rohe relocated the Bauhaus to a derelict factory in the district of Steglitz for a couple of years in the early Thirties — German architect Volker Wiese has designed his dream Bauhaus-style house. In the leafy district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Wiese’s new home, which is formed of two wings that partially enclose a courtyard garden, was built on the site of a former run-down post-war building in a quiet cul-de-sac. The modern L-shaped building is sheltered from the adjacent road by a solid white facade, but opens up on the rear side with large glazed windows and terraces on the first floor and roof level. Wiese had previously lived in a spacious home nearby, but felt forced to move after a new five-storey building overshadowed his carefully nurtured 3,000 sq m garden. The sheltered courtyard of the new home aims to recreate this green paradise, with a large carp pond at the centre of the garden, separated by a single glass panel from the swimming pool.
Internally, the light-filled rooms are kept natural with wooden soffits and flooring, while the living room features a large open copper-clad fireplace. Although the proponents of the Bauhaus set out to create a new rational type of housing, with smooth facades and functional features, the material technology of the time often let them down. The Bauhaus rejected ornamentation of any kind in favour of steel frames and reinforced concrete, but before long, the whiter than white facades had faded to a dull grey and were streaked by the unapologetic European rain. Fastforward to 2014 and Wiese was able to realise his own sleek white box with the help of a new acrylic stone that is both non-porous and highly resistant to staining. From the outset, Wiese, a gardening enthusiast, was intent on using a sustainable, natural treatment for the exterior facade of the two-storey house. He settled on HI-MACS facade panels, which are formed of natural stone powder, acrylic resin and natural pigments that, combined with an eco-friendly timber frame, give the appearance of a solid stone building and the architecture of his Bauhaus forebears. ‘We wanted to cover the wooden structure with a smooth, sustainable product, and HI-MACS fitted all those demands. By using a wooden sub-structure, and HI-MACS cladding, I was able to reduce the use of energy by 70 per cent and also avoid the need for damp proofing,’ says Tom Klingbeil of local architecture practice Kaden Klingbeil, who had
1 – The L-shaped building partially encloses a courtyard garden and large carp pond
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previously used eco-friendly timber frames in medium-rise apartment buildings in the largely stone-built Berlin and was bought on board to oversee the construction of the Wiese Haus. ‘It was the obvious choice out of a number of facade options,’ he says. ‘These materials are specifically designed for exterior facades, and apart from being weatherproof, also look amazing.’ The ventilated facade panels were mounted on to the timber structure with adjustable aluminium fixtures by BWM Montagetechnik and secured with KEIL inserts, which are invisible from the outside. The panels are anchored on to walls, leaving a 20mm gap between the insulation material to prevent condensation and ensure air circulation irrespective of low or high temperatures externally. The interior glued and laminated OSB panel acts as a vapour barrier, while the external timber panel is finished with a cement-bound, fibrereinforced plasterboard. For Wiese, this intelligent composition of acrylic, natural minerals and pigments has created a longer-lasting, more durable version of the classic Bauhaus white box without the potential weathering. The technical innovations in solid surfaces and facade treatments are starting to catch up with the ambitions of young architects of today. If Bauhaus architects and designers such as Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe had had access to similar material technology in the Thirties and Forties, they might have created something altogether different, and perhaps even more in line with their machine-age aesthetic.
2 – The facade panels are mounted on to adjustable aluminium fixtures and secured with inserts, which are invisible from the outside 3 & 4 – The smooth, white facade conceals a wood-frame construction
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Study: MegaFaces Pavilion, Winter Olympic Park, Sochi
Asif Khan Studio created an interactive pavilion with a kinetic facade acting like a giant pin screen, for the Sochi Winter Olympics. Asif Khan talks to Cate St Hill
Visitors to the 2,000 sq m cube commissioned by Russian mobile network MegaFon were able to see their faces appear on the side of the 8m-high building like giant pin art. First they digitally scanned themselves in photo booths and then their faces were recreated on the three-dimensional surface via 11,000 cylinders underneath the building’s stretchy fabric membrane skin, which moved in and out to form the images. Each of the cylinders had a translucent sphere at its tip, which contained an LED light that acted as one pixel within the entire facade. For designer Asif Khan the current trend for facial iconography, such as emoticons and selfies in digital communication, was a very clear and literal starting point. ‘We started to think about how people communicate with each other and the strongest way of communicating is through the face — it is much more concise and immediate. Could the face maybe communicate what a telecommunications network such as MegaFon is about?’ ponders Khan. ‘In history the depiction of the face, for example Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, venerates heroes, whereas on the internet we celebrate ourselves continuously. We wanted to give visitors to the Olympics a chance for them to record their own piece of history.’ 241
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Glastroesch
The realization of contemporary glass projects calls for an environmentally compatible energy saving concept. Here glass coatings make an important contribution to environmental protection. In 1988, Glas Trösch took its own magnetron coating plant in operation and offered heat insulation glass for the first time under the name SILVERSTAR. Today, with several magnetron coating plants and its own 4 float glass plants, the company supplies a wide range of innovative coatings for the most diverse requirements. An actual example is the Strassco-Tower in the middle of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. With temperatures of 30° in summer and 12° in Winter, a good sun protection as well as a good thermal insulation is advantageous. The integration of a modern tower in the existing surrounding area was one of the architects goal. Our blueish reflecting solar control glass SILVERSTAR SUNSTOP Blue 30 T combined with the thermal insulation glass SILVERSTAR ENplus T fulfilled completely the requirements.
Main: The Strassco-Tower project in Beirut
Facing page right: Metro Central Hotel in Abu Dubai
Opposite right: Neue Monte Rosa Huette Zermatt
Facing page far right: HQ Abu Dubai
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Glastroesch company email company phone
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Schueco UK
In every one of the 78 countries in which Schueco operates, it is its unrivalled range of façade systems that sets it apart. These tried-and-tested systems constitute the core of the business, their superb quality helping to define Schueco as a global market-leader, a name synonymous with first-class engineering and unsurpassed product innovation. In particular, the Schueco FW 50+ and FW 60+ façade systems carry a formidable reputation with architects, contractors and clients. Backed by extensive testing at Schueco’s HQ in Bielefeld, Germany on one of the largest testing rigs for façades in Europe, they have also undergone full-scale independent testing to European and CWCT standards. Proven in use in the UK for over 30 years, they can be specified with complete confidence. However, a secret of their continuing success has been the way in which Schueco has continually updated the façades’ specification to match the demands of the market and the challenges posed by ever-tighter performance standards. The latter include, of course, the higher levels of thermal insulation and lower level of CO2 emissions demanded by new Building Regulations: Schueco’s positive reaction has been to augment the basic version of both systems with .HI (high insulation) and .SI (super insulation) versions. Both .SI systems have been tested to CWCT standards and have been given official PassivHaus certification, meaning that they are able to achieve ‘U’ values as low as 0.80 W/m2K. These are the result of using innovative isolator technology that improves insulation in the area between the inner structural profile and the outer pressure plate and cover cap. This exceptionally high level of insulation makes these systems the obvious choice for architects and clients who are seeking to design more energy-efficient buildings. In addition, both façades can accommodate double- and tripleglazed units from 24 mm to 64 mm, supporting glass loads up to 700 kg. These systems can also show evidence of
Schueco UK
[email protected] 01908 282111
responsible sourcing in accordance with EN 14001 and can provide a project Environmental Performance Declaration (EPD) via SchüCal software. What’s more, there is now a further option of incorporating components such as gaskets and pressure plates made from renewable materials with the same technical and structural properties as their non-renewable equivalents. And importantly, given the mandatory EU-wide application of CE marking, both systems are already fully documented as CE-ready products. In a parallel development, the increasing demand for structurally glazed façades led to the introduction of two systems, the Schueco FW 50+ SG and FW 60+ SG, both of which are proving their worth in a wide range of applications. A recent example can be seen at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital where the Ronald McDonald House has a projecting load-bearing FW 60+ SG insulated façade sited above the main entrance. This makes use of Schueco’s popular mullion/transom system and has a flush external appearance with only glass surfaces and slender shadow joints visible from the outside. The latest addition to the structurally glazed range is an .SI version that can achieve similar PassivHaus ‘U’ values to other Schueco FW façades; there is also a new range of Schueco AWS 114 SG vents incorporating larger sizes (including a TipTronic concealed motor-driven version) and higher insulation values. Available in top hung and parallel opening types, these are complete with new Schueco hinges and easy-fix, adjustable, integrated limit stays. All these façade systems utilise traditional stick construction, but the area that is likely to see the greatest growth over the next decade is the unitised market. Schueco has a series of systems, including structurally glazed (designated USC 65 and UCC 65 SG) that can provide a cost-effective solution for any type of project. This means that when it comes to large-scale fabrication contracts, Schueco partners are well-positioned to compete effectively with large firms from mainland Europe.
Main: The highly-insulated Schueco FW 50+.SI façade Below left: Ronald McDonald House, Manchester Below right: Christ Church University, Canterbury
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Rockpanel
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Above: The rejuvenated Edward Woods Estate, Hammersmith, London.
Opposite left: An example of how the Estate looked before work began.
Left: A detail of the roof showing a combination of ROCKPANEL Woods and ROCKPANEL Rockclad cladding.
Opposite right: How the regenerated building now looks after its extensive facelift.
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rockpanel www.rockpanel.co.uk
An ambitious project in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham is breathing fresh life into a deprived neighbourhood. The £16 million project at the Edward Woods Estate in Hammersmith, West London has used the decorative ROCKPANEL façade cladding among other building materials to rejuvenate the tower blocks and the surrounding area and is as a result fostering greater pride and social cohesion within the community. creating a striking and wellinsulated building The façade system specified for the tower blocks was a combination of ROCKPANEL cladding and ROCKWOOL Rockshield. “With this refurbishment the objectives were to achieve a cost effective, high performing, safe and attractive construction which would benefit our tenants. With these four aims in mind, the right building materials were sourced to enable the objectives to be achieved.” Explains Melbourne Barrett, Executive Director of Housing and Regeneration London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham Council. The ROCKPANEL cladding applied in these tower blocks is fire-safe and rated with European Fire Classification B-s1, d0. Its recently introduced FS-Xtra boards offer even greater fire-safety which complies with European Fire classification A2-s1, d0. Especially in relation to the fire risk in high rise buildings such as tower blocks, fire-safe board material whilst also providing an opportunity to create unlimited cutting edge design is a must. The ROCKPANEL boards specified also benefited from a ProtectPlus finish, an extra protection layer which gives optimum protection for external cladding against weathering, UV radiation, graffiti, and pollution and has excellent self-cleaning properties. As a result, the façade will maintain the aesthetics for decades to come with minimum maintenance required. the edward woods estate This estate is the third most deprived
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neighbourhood in the borough, comprising 754 flats built in the 1960s – 528 in three 24-storey towers and 226 in four low-rise blocks. The Edward Woods Estate was at the end of its lifecycle. The exposed concrete and brickwork panels required significant repair work. The flats were cold and plagued by condensation, as a consequence, residents faced excessively high fuel bills in part due to the building’s poor insulation and were at risk of fuel poverty. Fast and eFFicient installation The existing mosaic wall panels were overclad externally with ROCKPANEL Rockclad and Woods boards to further reduce heat loss and to give the tower blocks an attractive appearance. “Cladding a building of this size requires building materials with which you can work quickly and efficiently. ROCKPANEL is lightweight and easy to cut and shape so detailing can be completed quickly and easily, even when the building is in use by the tenants,” describes Irfan Dhoia, Commercial Manager at Breyer Group Ltd. an attractive Façade with a Fresh appearance For decades to come ROCKWOOL products have successfully improved both the life of the building and enhanced the residents’ comfort while at the same time helping reduce the buildings’ carbon footprint. “By cladding the tower blocks with ROCKPANEL we achieved an attractive façade which enhances the tenants’ and local community’s identification with the building. This building can now make a positive contribution to local regeneration activity,” says Ian Sarchett, MD of ECD Architects. a successFul regeneration solution By using ROCKWOOL products, the original Edward Woods Estate buildings were saved from demolition, and instead fully regenerated with a new and creative design; a long-lasting solution to benefit both tenants and the building’s owners.
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Wienerberger
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Wienerberger www.wienerberger.co.uk
Showcasing intricate brickwork, the new Carmelite Monastery in Liverpool boasts ethereal qualities on the outside as well as inside, giving the building an eye-catching, elegant and modern appearance rarely associated with monasteries. The unique architectural design has captured the imagination of architects across the country. Indeed, so much so, that it was awarded the Architect’s Choice award at the 2013 Brick Development Awards (BDA). The brickwork itself embodies a sense of timelessness, tradition and calmness in keeping with the monastic way of life. Indeed, this aspect of the project was specifically chosen to compliment other elements of the architecture, and to continue to project a sense of both silence and light that would reflect the building’s purpose. With the monastery located in a traditional village, the use of a singular material also serves to ensure the building is coherent and expresses a sense of community appropriate to the area. Of course, in order to deliver the effect intended by the architects, Austin-Smith Lord, the project required the brickwork to be delicately matched to the designs. Wienerberger’s Con Mosso brick was chosen for its soft and textured appearance, which makes it equally suitable for internal as well as external use. As such, the brick was used internally most notably within the chapel and the cloister. On the façade, the appearance subtly changes according to the time of day and weather conditions; the changing shape of the shadows deliberately exudes a sense of calmness and tranquility. Whilst the building is modern in its expression, it also showcases a traditional monastic design in its form and layout that has successfully created a striking but harmonious transition between internal and external living. The garden is a wildlife haven, which leads through to a kitchen garden and orchard that provides homegrown fruit and vegetables. Within the chapel interior, the headers project at a higher level in order to break up sound reflections and maintain the peaceful atmosphere.
In addition to the chapel and the cloister, the building also has a refectory, community room, library, workspaces, guest house, 24 cells, two hermitage cells and six fully accessible infirmary cells. As with everything on this project, each space was made to the highest quality, while being both comfortable and modest, befitting the Carmelite philosophy. Beyond the brickwork, the building was recognised for its minimal energy requirements. By incorporating natural ventilation, improved insulation, maximised daylight and renewable energy - such as ground source heating pumps and solar water heating - it is able to function as a sustainable community. For centuries past, monasteries have been built of brick and the Carmelite Monastery is no different in this respect. However, the bricks provided by Wienerberger allowed the building to deliver from both a traditional and a modern architectural aesthetic through the cumulative effect of its textured brickwork. The result was a project that Wienerberger was extremely proud to have been a part of; a building of gentle integrity, perfectly executed to provide a home for the Carmelite Sisters in Liverpool long into the future.
Top: The interior of the new Carmelite Monastery, Liverpool. Opposite left: Inside and out the brickwork demonstrates its unique qualities.
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MDT-Tex MDT-Tex is a manufacturer of tensile structures with a dedicated team of architects and industrial designers that stands apart from its contemporaries due to its focus on collaboration with creative agencies - architects, landscape architects and event designers - to create works specifically suited to their context and purpose. MDT manufactures and supplies innovative, high-quality sun protection systems, membrane constructions and custom-made products for outdoor architecture. The company carries out the entire production process in its own factories in Germany, the USA, Latvia and Croatia using the latest custom built CNC machinery. This guarantees both flexibility and high quality for innovative projects, and ensures absolute supply security. In the world of membrane structures, innovation is not easy to find. The process of context sensitive design and engineering development requires a significant amount of collaboration early in the design process, while many inelegant, replicated solutions fabricated in the ‘80s have eroded the industry’s image and created a price-competitive market. Understanding that a lack of innovation would only reduce the capacity of an industry focussed on standardisation, MDT established a new creative design and engineering department in 2012 focussed on collaboration with architects, landscape designers and urbanists. The range of work undertaken by MDT includes tensile mechanical structures: textile facades, pod-style canopies, umbrellas including giant parasols and sunshades, tent structures and stretched canopies, but also integrated furniture, power, sound, heating and drainage systems. The commencement of each project involves an analysis of context, weather conditions and design aims and budgetary requirements. MDT engages
with project architects and engineers early to optimise efficiency in the delivery of a project. Elegant and innovative formal solutions also often require advanced manufacturing capabilities and design integration. As parametric software allows complex calculations to be executed instantaneously, the possibilities in membrane structures remain largely unexploited without careful integration with manufacturing technology. In parallel, the performative qualities of membrane structures have a close relationship to the rapidly developing field of material science. New formulations of high performance fibres and coatings such as PTFE, PVDF and PU polymers are being successfully exploited in key urban projects such as Meeting House square in Dublin, Ireland. This is where MDT-tex is directing its focus. It continues to demonstrate an ability to transform places by increasing habitability in the exterior through a combination of innovative structures and an integrated design process between designers, engineers and clients.
Above: Bellevue Palace Park, Berlin 2010 Architect: MDT Photographer: Stefphan Minx Left: Meeting House Square, Dublin 2012 Architect: Seán Harrington Architects/MDT Photographer: Donal Murphy
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Right: Studen_LeShop.ch DRIVE, Switzerland, 2012 Architect: Atelier-Oï, La Neuveville, Switzerland Photographer/Customer: LeShop.ch Drive Far right: Furniture Fair, Milan 2010 Architect: MDT Photographer: Urban Zintel
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MDT-Tex www.mdt-tex.com MDT AG, Rheinblickstrasse 6, Tägerwilen, CH-8274, Switzerland
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FROM THE ARCHIVES October 1992 According to Blueprint 91 in 1992 airports are no longer simple pieces of transport infrastructure but huge, complex, hybrid spaces — city gate, industrial estate and shopping centre all rolled into one; so much so that they have taken on some of the urban qualities of the cities lying beyond their perimeter fences: ‘The largest airports have acquired the characteristics of living organisms; like machines that have learned to think, they have taken on qualities that were never expected by their original planners and which it is beyond the power of their operators to control,’ wrote Blueprint founding editor Deyan Sudjic. From then to now not much has changed: more than ever airports still need to respond to constant change, technological advances and increasing passenger numbers, as discussed in this issue in the context of airport expansion in London and the South East (see pages 23 and 74). This month, our pick from the archive traces the transformation from transport hub to urban village — from Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York to Renzo Piano’s Nineties’ offshore airport for Osaka and Norman Foster’s sweeping scheme for Hong Kong airport. For the latest figures on the world’s biggest and busiest airports see On The List (page 29). CSH 252
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MARCH/APRIL 2014 ISSUE 333 / £30
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