PATRICK LYNCH
Patrick Lynch is the founding partner of Lynch Architects, an award-winning London practice whose work has been widely exhibited and published, including at Venice in 2008 and 2012, and Milan in 2019. He studied architecture at the universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, from where he holds a MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture. Patrick completed a PhD, “Practical Poetics” in 2015 at London Metropolitan University where he was supervised by Peter Carl, Helen Mallinson and Joseph Rykwert. He is an honorary professor at Liverpool and has taught at UCL since 2020. Before this he taught history and theory at Cambridge and design the AA, London Met and Kingston. He is the author of several books including The Theatricality of the Baroque City (2011), Mimesis (2015) and Civic Ground (2017), Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect (2022), etc. In 2018 he founded Canalside Press alongside Claudia Lynch. Thus far they edited and published 10 issues of the Journal of Civic Architecture and 10 books. These include architectural history, photography and poetry, and books of theory concerning urban culture and ecology as both praxis and reflection. He is also a poet, and the father of two teenagers.
BEYOND THE ORDINARY: WESTMINSTER CORONER’S COURT
This complex ensemble of a restored and re-modelled coroner’s court, a new extension and two courtyard gardens is an exercise of working within the city at three scales simultaneously: the urban, in a place of portentous but uncoordinated government placemaking; the inhabitable monument; and the intimate, the delicate and the subtle. The old building at the core of Lynch Architects’ project is, as it always has been, an active coroner’s court for an extensive reach of central London, and it masks a mortuary built on the very large scale required for any major emergency. A comically inept foundation stone from 1893 – one word continues off the edge of it onto the wall beyond – tell us that the building was designed by G.R.W. Wheeler, architect and surveyor to the united vestries of St John the Evangelist and St Margaret, that is, the baroque St John, Smith Square and the venerable parish church by Westminster Abbey. No one knows much about Wheeler for all the pomposity of his appointment, but here he successfully combined the elements that architects will have seen every week in The Builder and the Building News: cheerful red brick banded with stone, and the combination of early and late seventeenth-century details that was so popular at the time. It is a small but dignified building in Horseferry Road, a dog-legged route leading from Victoria Street to Lambeth Bridge that from the late nineteenth-century was increasingly peppered with large state and commercial buildings.
Lynch have treated this building with great respect. Its door leads to a narrow corridor continuing straight ahead to the mortuary; to the left is a stair and above is the courtroom itself, a fine Victorian room now in perfect condition and complete with its fireplace and fittings. The rest of the building consisted of unremarkable offices, with at one point temporary accommodation on the top floor for families displaced while their homes in the borough were fumigated. The architects have opened up the western side of the ground floor with a little play of arched openings; beyond are two new spaces. The first is the court’s now open-plan office area, but the second is located on the ground floor of the new extension and provides a friendly and warm space for families and visitors who in the nature of things may be upset by the court’s proceedings. The external form of this extension is a monumental north elevation with a barrel-vaulted roof, a bit like a very tall gravestone. This responds magnificently to two public buildings nearby: one is the 1935 Westminster Baptist church which also combines the Jacobean with the late Stuart but, interestingly, in a different way to the courthouse; the other is a red-brick Catholic church, gothic but about the same age. For many people who know the area well, this corner is also memorable for a rear view of Edwin Lutyens’ chequerboard-faced flats in Page Street and for the surviving ancient urinal, patronised by taxi drivers, which for a long time shared its gas lighting with the nearby lamp post.
This new lower visitor space is lined in timber and has a vaulted ceiling which runs counter to the one above outside; it also provides a first glimpse of the quite exceptional stained glass that is incorporated into the extension, all by Brian Clarke and of a quality that I have seen in no other recent building, mostly in blue and yellowy-gold. Clarke is an enthusiast for the arts and crafts era and his glass here is infused throughout with the jewel-like quality of the finest fin-de-siecle work. A subtle touch in this room is a short marble post between the entrance and the seating area: you can lean on it, but Patrick Lynch adds that it provides an informal demarcation point between groups of people who might not want to stand close to one another, as well as, in its somewhat mysterious totemic quality, an allusion to the fact that this is, after all, a building that deals with death and perhaps also with redemption.
TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN
Courtroom attendees rise up through the old stairs and can reach both the old chamber and the upper floor of the extension. Lynch have designed a long, narrow space to divide the two. At either end of this is another blue and gold window; since a former window to the courtroom now faces this corridor, some of its colourful light permeates into it. On the new side of the corridor there are openings into two rooms, an office and a larger jurors’ room that can be divided by folding doors and also double as a second courtroom. We are here below the barrel vault, which is split by a Kimbell-type continuous longitudinal roof light and lined, like the room below, with oak slats. But the lighting in here is extraordinary: Clarke’s windows, which occupy the wall to the coroner’s left, are a blaze of poppies against a blue background, with green, yellow and purple highlights. This is an astonishingly powerful and beautiful space which at once turns the project as a whole into something well beyond the ordinary.
There are a pair of gardens either side of the building. That on the east side was completed in 2018 and consists of a paved court with small geometrical planters and a blank aedicule resembling an unopenable door – inspired, as Lynch told Michèle Woodger in a review published in RIBA Journal in March 2020, by the “impenetrable doorways of Michelangelo’s San Lorenzo Chapel in Florence”. The final phase of the project has included a second contemplative space in the form of a water garden on the western side, reached through the visitor waiting space, with three objects in or by it, all sharing the circular theme of the extension: a round basin in the centre of the black granite pool planted with a tree; a roll-top low stone parapet protecting visitors from stumbling into it; and at the far end an abstract limestone screen.
Lynch make the Kimbell reference themselves but are no doubt fed up with architectvisitors also making a comparison with van Heyningen and Haward’s 1983 rare books library at Newnham College, Cambridge, considered then outrageous but now canonical. But the closest comparison is surely with Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Gothenburg law courts, not only because he turned an intimidating institution into a friendly space, but also because similarly there his new extension partly slides in, effortlessly, humanely, behind Nicodemus Tessin’s pompous baroque façade of 1672. I have a feeling that Lynch’s newold building is one that will permeate the consciousness of both architects and visitors for a long time.
LYNCH ARCHITECTS
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
2016 - 2024
BODY AND WORLD: WESTMINSTER CORONER’S COURT RENOVATION AND EXTENSION
Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lieOpen unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
“The Latin word for a building is aedes; the word for a little building is aedicula and this word was applied in classical times more particularly to little buildings whose function was symbolic - ceremonial. It was applied to a shrine placed at the far end, from the entrance, of a temple to receive the statue of a deity - a sort of architectural canopy in the form of a rudimentary temple… It was also used for the shrines - again miniature temples - in which the lares or titular deities of a house or street were preserved.”
John Summerson, “Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic”
BACKGROUND CONTEXT
1 https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/listentry/1066635?section=official-list-entry
When my father died suddenly in 1992, I was a 4th year architecture student on an Erasmus Exchange in Lyon, France. Interpol failed to contact me, so it was my younger brother – an architecture student in Newcastle - who had to go to the mortuary to identify our father’s body, and I flew home the next day. A few weeks later we attended his inquest at the Victorian Coroner’s Court at Taunton, and my overriding memory is not of the exterior of
the building, but of its interior. Exposed to press photography and intrusive journalism that day, I vowed that if I was ever called upon to design a coroner’s court, then I would place the needs of the bereaved above anything else and aim to protect their privacy as much as possible. Having worked with His Majesty’s Coroner for Inner West London over the past eight years on the design of the extension to Westminster Coroner’s Court and its Garden of Remembrance, I now know in even more exquisitely painful detail how the needs of the bereaved are central to the mission of the coroner’s service. Our design reflects this, and represents an unusually close collaboration between architect, artist, client, planning authority, Historic England and the four local borough councils that fund and use the building. Our task has been to try to accommodate individuals’ private experiences of sorrow and loss in their intricate use of quite a complex public building. This is a task which we and Sir Brian Clarke have approached with modesty, pragmatism and tact, in the hope that our efforts will ease the suffering of the bereaved, will respect their plight and dignity, and respect also the dignity of the existing Victorian courthouse building. My MPhil research at Cambridge concerned urban festivals and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, and my doctoral dissertation explored the relationships between gardens, artworks and architecture, and their fundamental reciprocity in the creation of communicative public space. Intense study of the courthouse formed part of project architect and associate director Rachel Elliott’s research for a Masters in Building History at Cambridge, and our appreciation of the original architecture led naturally to the creative continuity of spatial motifs there. Westminster Coroner’s Court’s original architectural character, of upright civic decorum commingled with welcoming bodyscaled furniture, acts as the touchstone and counterpoint to our new architecture.
Sir John Summerson suggested that “the idea of the aedicule or ‘little house’ is an idea of fundamental importance in the aesthetics of architecture” itself. The original designer
01 22mm Junkers Oak Parquet Floor [22mm x 58,3mm x 467,6mm (±0,2mm)] laid in herringbone pattern set with Junkers parquet glue
Finish: Osmo Oil Polyx Satin 3032 – PTV of 36 specified (wet and dry)
15mm Underfloor heating
32mm heavy density enhanced cement board (layer density min. 48kg/m2) – 32 GIFA FHB FloorBoard
170mm floor void – F18 GIFAfloor raised (non-resilient) floor system
100mm Isover Acoustic Partition Roll (APR 1200)
18mm heavy density cement board (layer density min. 27kg/m2) – Knauf 18 GIFA LEP FloorBoard
5mm resiliente layer – Pliteq Giniemat RST
140mm structural CLT
02 Ideal Combi Futura + double glazed side hung (FS30 handle) Timber/alu internally Aluminium in RAL 7022 externally
03 50mm Jura limestone (fixed back to CLT on brackets SZ bespoke fixing)
250mm cavity
200mm Rockwool Duo Slab
Insulation or equivalente (specified & fitted by SZ) Tyvek Housewrap Breather Wall Membrane 120mm CLT 50mm SW batons to provide services void 18mm Birch Plywood
04 22mm Junkers Oak Parquet Floor [22mm x 58,3mm x 467,6mm (±0,2mm)] laid in herringbone pattern set with Junkers parquet glue
Finish: Osmo Oil Polyx Satin 3032 – PTV of 36 specified (wet and dry)
15mm Underfloor heating
32mm heavy density enhanced cement board (layer density min. 48kg/m2) – 32 GIFA FHB FloorBoard
150mm floor void – F18 GIFAfloor raised (non-resilient) floor system
100mm Isover Accoustic Partition Roll (APR 1200)
200mm concrete slab
FEATURED WORK
WESTMINSTER CORONER’S COURT
LONDOM, UNITED KINGDOM
2016 - 2024
Architect
Lynch Architects
Gross Internal Area
509.9 sqm
Images
page 08 and 21
© David Grandorge
paper dust jacket and page 53
© Johan Dehlin
page 08, 11, 12, 13 and 62
© Lynch Architects
page 06, 10, 21, 24, 26-27, 38, 43, 46, 55 and 58
© Pedro Cardigo
page 02, 14-15, 18-19, 22, 28, 30-31, 33, 34, 36, 40, 44, 49, 51, 57 and 60-61
© Rory Gaylor
PUBLICATION
DATA INFORMATION
COLLECTION AMAG LONG BOOKS
VOLUME
LB 27
TITLE LYNCH ARCHITECTS westminster coroner’s court
ISBN 978-989-35767-4-8
PUBLICATION DATE
November 2024
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AND GENERAL MANAGER
Ana Leal
EDITORIAL TEAM
Ana Leal, architect
Filipa Figueiredo Ferreira, designer
João Soares, architect Ricardo Figueiredo, designer
PRINTING Graficamares
LEGAL DEPOSIT 480255/21
RUN NUMBER
1000 numbered copies
PUBLISHER AND OWNER
AMAG publisher
VAT NUMBER 513 818 367
CONTACTS
hello@amagpublisher.com www.amagpublisher.com
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LB 03 DAVID ADJAYE the webster
LB 04 CARVALHO ARAÚJO casa na caniçada
LB 05 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES centro coordenador de transportes
LB 06 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES PEDRO GUEDES DE OLIVEIRA fábrica em barcelos
LB 07 DAVID ADJAYE winter park library & events center
LB 08 DAVID ADJAYE 130 william tower
LB 09 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS community hall laufenburg
LB 10 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS
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LB 11 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS
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LB 12 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school aarwangen
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LB 14 ANGELO CANDALEPAS the castle
LB 15 PAUL MURDOCH ARCHITECTS flight 93 national memorial
LB 16 ÁLVARO SIZA monte da lapa volume l
LB 17 SO – IL amant
LB 18 AFF spore initiative
LB 19 LYNCH ARCHITECTS n2
LB 20 VIANA DE LIMA casa das marinhas
LB 21 SPASM parikrama house
LB 22 JOSEP FERRANDO social center
LB 23 SJB 19 waterloo Street
LB 24 KENGO KUMA cam
LB 25 TOMOAKI UNO terabe guest house
LB 26 AM2 ARQUITECTOS | ARENAS & ASOCIADOS | NOARQ halo
LB 27 LYNCH ARCHITECTS westminster coroner’s court, is the twenty-seventh title from LONG BOOKS COLLECTION
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