Tamir Aharoni th e faรงa de as masquera de The origin of a city for developers
The Lilian Knowles House is a student accommodation at the London School of Economics. It was built in 2006 behind a facade of the former Cock & Hoop public house and tavern and has 360 bedrooms for postgraduate students. It is located on the corner of Artillery Lane and Gun Street, which, in its hilarious combination of names, recall its former use: The Fraternity or Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handguns, in Spitalfields, London. The Victorian façade made of a layer of varying brick courses rising towards an ornamental stone scrollwork, has been preserved as part of the construction of the new building. This preserved facade is (very much) not incorporated into the new building but stands in front of it and is attached by pins. The floor levels and fenestration are completely unrelated to one another. The carved stone windows now frame expanses of brick, while the students’ bedroom windows look directly on to the blank back of the preserved wall, which stands less than a metre away. I consider this extreme example in order to unfold a discussion about the notion of preservation: what might be right to consider fake and what real, instead, which are the right approaches to context and history? The façade here seems to act as a stage set, a decorative mask. Are we not supposed to notice what is peeking behind it? If this is how “history” is treated, maybe it would be better forgetting it. It looks like it was copied and pasted in a bad-uncarefully-self-aware-ironic collage. If buildings were genres of writing, the Lilian Knowles House would be fake news. With its misleading façade, which thought maintain its historical appearance it looks like a sneaky gesture that allows the architect to completely revolution the inside. But the Lilian Knowles House is not a unique example in London. Another exemplary building is, funnily enough, another student accommodation, at the University College of London. This amazingly unsuccessful building was awarded the Carbuncle Cup in 2013. The Carbuncle Cup is an architecture prize, given annually by the magazine Building Design, to the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months. It is intend-
Elevation of Lilian Knowles House, drawing by the author.
ed to be a humorous response to the prestigious Stirling Prize, given by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The name of the award comes from a comment by Charles, Prince of Wales, an outspoken critic of modern architecture, who in 1984 described Ahrends, Burton and Koralek’s proposed extension of London’s National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend [the existent Wilkins building in Trafalgar Square]”. 1 We might synthesise that Prince Charles’ relation to architecture is mostly and exclusively concerned with the appearance of buildings, therefore with their façade. His advocacy of Quinlan Terry’s Richmond Riverside, for example, actually argues that a Neoclassical façade is compatible with the electronic infrastructure or current needs, but plan-wise, there is nothing incompatible between such a Neoclassical fake and a conventional floor plan.2 In Charles’ writings on architecture there is almost nothing about internal space or of the spatial quality of a building, aspects which clearly do not concern him. Charles views architecture as an exterior practice and is concerned with the provision of certain appropriate facades which provide a certain ‘look’ to buildings. Going back to the UCL’s student accommodations building, one may notice that the main problems are not the cramped rooms with low ceiling nor the lack of privacy (the windows face each other less than 5 meters apart). Rather, the main problem is that many of the windows face a blinded brick wall. The new building is, in fact, built behind a preserved brick facade of a nineteenth-century warehouse, now acting the part of as a Victorian mask. In the same way as the Lilian Knowles House, this façade is disconnected from the new building, which stands a metre away. Can its acting as a masquerade be considered the first strategic act of speculation? But moreover, how could the council approve such a “carbuncle”? After the Islington council first refused to give approval to build this failure in 2010, the building construction was later approved on the grounds that the main function of these rooms is to sleep, so the students don’t need daylight, a
Richmond Riverside, designed by Quinlan Terry in the late 1980s, imitates 18th century buildings.
view from their window, or privacy. Has daylight become a luxury? It is certainly an optional feature if you are lucky enough to be a student at UCL living in these accommodations: the UCL scheme, designed by Stephen George and Partners (who already won the Carbuncle Cup in 2007 for its Opal Court housing development in Leicester) is a hall of residence, which falls into the same use class category (C1) as hotels and guest houses. Due to their limited occupation, these building types are exempt from many of the codes and standards that govern residential dwellings (C3) – from daylight to acoustics – and the developer is often excused for the usual obligation of providing an affordable housing contribution. All this makes student housing an attractive proposition for investors. The short-term letting contracts provide regular opportunities in which to hike price levels and adjust lease terms. Piled high and sold not-so-cheap, building student silos can be a lucrative business: Knight Frank reports that it currently outperforms every other commercial property class, with a rental income worth around £4bn per year across the sector. What do these two example actually teach us? In order to begin the analysis I will introduce the notion of Façadism as “the business of saving the fronts but scooping out the backs of landmark buildings”.3 Façadism happens, for example, when the façade is built separately from the rest of the building, when only the façade is preserved and the rest is brand new, which undoubtedly recalls the conditions of the two building here examined. Such a “business” can find its roots in postmodernism: Postmodern architects intentionally built in a way that the façade and the rest of the building are different entities. If we think of Venturi, Site Architects or Michael Graves, most of them believed that the façade doesn’t have to express the interior, that it doesn’t have to be honest. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi shows two manifestations of contradictions in facades: one, Villa Pignatelli in Naples, where contradicting elements are accommo-
Elevation of UCL student accommodation in Caledonian road, drawing by the author.
dated and fit together; and second, Villa Palomba in Capri, Italy, where the different parts clash violently with each other. Venturi comments: “Contradiction adapted ends in a whole which is perhaps impure. Contradiction juxtaposed ends in a whole which is perhaps unresolved”. 4 Venturi was not the only one who wrote about such a separation, in Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas speaks about how the skyscraper, incorporating so many different functions on each new floor, made a representation of these functions on the facade simply impossible. Delirious New York implied a latent Bigness and the Problem of Large based on five theorems, one of them discussing the separation of the façade from the interior: “In BIGNESS, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of ‘honesty’ is doomed; interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other-agent of dis-information- offering the city the apparent stability of an object. Where architecture reveals, BIGNESS perplexes; BIGNESS transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.”5 The term Façadism was already used in July 1985, when the 712 Fifth Avenue building was built in New York. The building was previously a bookshop of Rizzoli (the Italian publisher) before the new tower, designed by the architect William Pedersen, was built. Pederson proposed to leave the old façades of the block in front of the new office building with a completely different scale. The fact that it could be planned proves the extent to which smaller buildings became pawns in the game of large-scale real estate. I view this as one of the major problems that lead to Façadism: small buildings, like the ones on Fifth Avenue, are pawns, rather than active players. No matter how good they are in their architecture, they do not have the economic strength to be treated as essential parts of the cityscape, and as a result they are valued mainly as sentimental objects.
UCL student accommodation in Caledonian road. The faรงade is connected only by metal pins, and the windows are not lines up. Photo by the author.
It is thus easier to understand how Façadism was made possible in the 80’s when construction technology allowed retaining a mere sliver of a frontage and the conservation movement increased pressure to preserve the historic streetscape – even if it didn’t care much for what happened beyond the surface. Another notion that needs to be considered when talking about Façadism is preservation, which seems to be dominated by the lobby of authenticity, beauty, and ancientness. The first law of preservation was passed in 1790, a few years after the French revolution, to counter the revolutions desire to erase all vestige of the past. The first buildings to be preserved were ancient monuments and religious buildings, and thus helped to preserve France’s sacred and sociological identity. This begs the question: do concentration camps, department stores, factories and amusement rides all deserve to be preserved, as they reflect the socio, political and economical identity of an entire country? In 1818 mankind would preserve buildings that were 2000 years old, and in 1900, mankind preserved buildings that are the 200 years old. Today, 20 year old buildings are already regarded as having historical value. Preservation decisions are no longer even made retroactively: some houses are destined to be preserved at the moment that they are completed. Such a rule may be deemed reasonable if we consider that many of the buildings built today are of mediocre quality; hence, when something good is being built, it has to be immediately preserved. Façadism holds a great temptation - it seems to give both developers and preservationists what they want: the older and historical building appear to be saved, while new ones can still be built by developers. But does saving the facade of a building equate to saving its essence? While Façadism feigns a certain earnestness, it is actually rather pernicious, and for the compromise it seeks it seems not to be a preservation act at all. Façadism, instead, seems to rather turn the building into a stage set, into a cute toy intended to make a new ugly building more palatable, and the street becomes a kind of Disneyland of false fronts. Façadism is, in fact, used mostly in urban developments, where the most important
712 Fifth Avenue building in New York. The old faรงade is kept and a new tower rose behind.
aspect of the city appears to be its unity image. Preservation, as well as renovation, relates to the original building, by reusing the existent in a different way, while keeping its shell. It is purely aesthetic and decorative, through retaining one or two exterior walls of the previous existent building, it ends treating them as a wallpaper. Such an act of preservation through Façadism gives the illusion of integrity to the original building. But it is fake. With this in mind now, we may realise how the conservatorism that Prince Charles invokes with his own idea of architecture influenced the idea of continuity that London carried throughout its history. Façadism appears often in cities where there is a strong pressure for new development together with a high demand of external unity. It is a great consequence for Google Street View, the nowadays “low res” experience of the world that has been developed quite a lot in the past few years, and consists in a Google truck which takes nine images every ten metres and stitches them together: this looks a great basis to start playing with tiles of a big puzzle, whose aim is to compose a fictional urban scene. Such a tool can be used to view canonical buildings, parking lots, or whatever is happening on the street as Google’s vehicle passes by with camera. In Google Street View, the same as with VR and 360 videos, there is a paradox: while you are supposed to be in the centre of the scene, everything revolves around like a spherical universe but, at the same time, your body is usually missing from the scene.8 This human absence is exactly the same we are witnessing in the two Student Accommodation buildings analysed, where the people missing here are the students. This does not only allow a dramatic clash of styles, but, as we can see from both drawings, it is a functional clash as well. The floors and windows tend to not line up, while the façade is left butchered and awkwardly marooned. To turn the façade of an older building into a fancy front door for a new one does not respect either the integrity of the new or that of the old, but it rather renders both buildings ridiculous because such a juxtaposition makes both the old and the new sections seem equally out
Screenshots from google maps of Lilian Knowles House. Even from google street view it is clear that the faรงade is detached from the building.
of place. It is not only a token gesture, treating architecture as two-dimensional but it allows developers to build their buildings even if they do not fit to the existing: it is so extreme that is it amusing. A confirmation of Façadism as an almost capitalistic tool is also confirmed by other example, this time in West London, the true historical part of the city where everything has to be preserved under the eye of the monarchy. Here houses are too small for the super-rich: they are old and full of rooms and corridors. It is not allowed to build higher and these buildings are forbidden from being torn down. The only way to develop is to construct below the street level. These new underground spaces include a swimming pool, gym, steam room, staff bedroom, cinema, wine cellar, car lift, yoga studio, hot tub, cigar room, massage room, sauna, steam rooms, gardens and even decorative waterfalls, as Sam Jacob underlines in his intervention in London is liquid. On Luxury Basement.9 The historic envelope cannot be touched but the inside changes completely in order to construct an entire new way of living. Like grow houses – those suburban homes transformed into marijuana farms – the exterior of the house remains only as a camouflage for an entirely different kind of interior. These “iceberg homes are schizophrenic”10 – they maintain the desire of the picturesque image of the traditional London terrace house, while simultaneously exercising violent destruction within the same form. Here in the West, history is obliterated except for its surface quality, in order to make way for the fantasies of a superrich lifestyle. Sam Jacob describes it as houses remaining like Ed Gein’s bodies: Ed Gein took the bodies from the graveyard, and removed the skin and sew it to make a suit. This extreme comparison explains in a very straightforward manner that the buildings, like Gein, use the envelope of the old as a cloak. It is a declination of the same technique used for the Lilian Knowles house, where the façade remains the same but what is behind is completely revolutionised. No regulation says how much you could excavate in London – as far as you avoid alterations on the façade/envelope.
Basement Extension, Alain Bouvier Associates. Taken from SQM – the Quantified Home, 2014.
Mark Cousins said once that the façade, like the mask, is ambivalent. The functions of the façade are to hide, but also to express. And if we go back to our main example, we find that on one hand, behind the façade there may be a contemporary high tech office, or a student accommodation building, but it is the function of the façade to conceals it. Every aspect of modern society can be used and exploited as long as it is hidden behind a façade which suggests something entirely different: exactly as Prince Charles preached, that traditionalism means that modernity must be dressed up as something else. On the other hand, Prince Charles expects these consistent Neoclassical facades to reform human behavior and produce a level of civility in the population, because well-mannered conduct must be produced by well-mannered imagery. These cases, epitomised in the two London accommodation projects, demonstrate a paradoxical operation that represses what is actually behind the façade, while suggesting that there is an actual connection between the interior and the exterior. Does the façade as a mask, as a fake appearance, have to present the building? How would you treat a façade, in its role as a medium between inside and outside? If we go back return to Postmodern architecture and consider the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, 1964, described in Venturi’s book it is easy to note that the house is viewed as an embodiment of the ideas in the book. Venturi, in fact, explains that the inside spaces of the house are complex and distorted in their shapes and interrelationships but on the other hand, the outside form is simple and consistent, it represents the house’s public scale. The façade creates a symbolic image of the house. In his description, Venturi claims that the house is both big and small, open and closed, good and bad, generic and personal. The complex combinations do not aim to be harmonic or to exclude elements, but are based on inclusion and on acknowledgement of the diversity of experience. In another book that Venturi wrote years later together with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, titled Learning from Las Vegas, the authors clearly delineate this theory through distinguishing architecture between “ducks”, when it is made of elements that
Vanna Venturi house, 1964.
Sketches by Robert Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas, p. 88-89.
are coherent and easy to read, and “decorated shed”, when it instead made of inclusive, complex and contradicting elements. In the cases of the Lilian Knowles House, the Caledonian road accommodation building or even the luxury basements in West London described by Sam Jacob, the façade becomes almost a billboard, a two-dimensional claim, a decorated shed that is completely detached from the inside. There are two important aspects pertaining to the preservation of a facade. The first is the notion of continuity, that tries to unify the buildings within a continuous cityscape; and the second is the economic forces that appears to profit from this. These two aspects are dependent on one another. The longing for a sense of continuity leads to the absurd role of the developer under the economic pressure, who builds these accommodations only because of their profitable business. I believe that such a Façadism attitude is encouraged by postmodernism, which becomes then one of the major cause that allows the contemporary city to take place, a city where architects do not need to be careful anymore about the notion of context, since this is what only remains in order to allow carbuncles to be constructed. Every aspect of modern society can be used and exploited as long as it is concealed by a façade which suggests something entirely different. The contemporary city takes us back in time, such an attitude that London demonstrates towards continuity and preservation, emphasised by the activism of the Prince of Wales is not new in history but it brings us back to 1898 and the bitter writing of Adolf Loos on the Potemkin City. The expression “Potemkin city” means impressive fake objects that have no content. An impression, a fraud, a sham, a mask. Reminding the Potemkin village story, where wooden cottages full of happy peasants in canvas, cardboard and paint were erected by Prince Potemkin in Crimea in order to fool Catherine the Great on her visit. In the same way Adolf Loos accused the Viennese architects of erecting stone palaces from brick and cement, where he recognises the same principle. Developers in contemporary London inherit the same attitude.
On the right: Daun Kinsky, Palace in Vienna (1730). The ornaments are specific to the owning family and represents them. On the left: apartment building in Vienna (1893). The ornaments are generic and try to imitate the faรงade of a palace.
To the question of if the architects are to blame, Loos answers: every city gets the architects it deserves. Building styles are regulated by supply and demand, which means that the architect who can best meet the wishes of the clients will build the most. Nothing exemplifies this principle as much as London. The London developer would prefer to build as cheaply as possible without the façade, covered with plastic, but this is how people want to live. Loos claims that architects in Vienna don’t even use the typical materials from a Renaissance or a Baroque building the buildings built in concrete but aim to look stone-like: a cube wanting to be a palace. It can be dangerous to adopt the two student accommodation buildings, approved because “students only sleep there”, as an antecedent. Imagine a city where orphan facades are placed one after the other. Conceiving the façade as a mask is not just an idea that puts forward a continuity between époques but it also constitutes the winning card of capitalism where the city is turned into a money machine, where its interiors are completely revolutionised while maintaining its image unviolated.
Imagine orphan facades placed one after the other. Drawing by the author.
A speech by The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects 1984. 1
2
Mikuriya, 2011.
3
Goldberger, 1985.
4
Venturi, 1966, page 45.
5
Koolhaas 1993.
Hannah Arendt can inform this quite nicely: “Through many ages before us—but now not any more— men entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with other to be more permanent than their earthly lives.” The idea of permanence is inherent to the public, and the artwork inhabiting it. Architecture is removed from the realm of art. (The Human Condition, page 55) 6
The aspect memory as a reason for preservation vs quality: Hannah Arendt explains the influence consumption has on the lifespan of an object: “The least durable of tangible things are those needed for the life process itself. Their consumption barely survives the act of their production; in the words of Locke, all this “good things” which are “really useful to the life of man”, to the “necessity of subsisting,” are “generally of short duration, such as, if they are not consumed by use—will decay and perish by themselves. (…) “The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words — which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immoral except themselves.” (The Human Condition, page 96) 7
8
Steyerl, 2017
9
Jacob, 2014
10
Jacob, 2014
bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Eisenman, Peter. The futility of objects: Decompositions and differentiation, Lotus International, 42, Fubruary 1984, pages 63-75. Frances H. Mikuriya, Duchy Unoriginal: Prince of Wales and Architecture, Architectural Association Thesis, London 2011 Hutchinson, Maxwell. The Prince of Wales, Right or Wrong, an architect replies, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, 169-178 Jacob, Sam. London is liquid. On luxury basement. In SQM – the Quantified Home, Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. Pages 148155 Koolhaas, Rem. Preservation is Overtaking Us, GSAPP books, 2014. Loos, Adolf. Potemkin Village, in On Architecture, Ariadne Press, 2002. Mikuriya, Frances. Duchy unoriginal : Prince of Wales and architecture, London: Architectural Association, 2011. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning From Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architecture Form, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1977. Simmel, Georg. Venedig (1907). In M. Cacciari (ed.), Metropolis. Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel, Rome: Officina, 1973, p. 195. Stoppani, Teresa. Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice: Discourses on Architecture and the City. Routledge, 2012. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966.
websites Sources A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace 30th May 1984. Goldberger, Paul. ‘Façadism’ on the rise: preservation or illusion? In The New York Times, July 1985. Wainwright, Oliver. ‘Prison-like’ student housing wins Carbuncle Cup for worst building. In “The Guardian”, August 2013. Wainwright, Oliver. Some front: the bad developments making a joke of historic buildings. In “The Guardian”, August 2014.
other sources Cousins, Mark. Lecture series The Mask. Architectural Association 2017-2018. Steyerl, Hito. Bubble Vision lecture in Guest, Ghost, Host: Machine! In London city hall, 2017. Welles, Orson. F for Fake. Documentary movie, 1973.