Chapter I Play p5
Chapter II
Finding Play Again
p57
Chapter III Mr A p65
Chapter IV Relationships p107
Chapter V The Bs p111
PLAY PLAY began with the recollection of a particular game of building-blocks I had played as a child with a friend of mine: it had been the first of many that had ended in my demolition of our elaborately developed little worlds.
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Few activities stand out in my memories of childhood with as much vividness as when I used to play with my set of building blocks. Both my best friend and I could spend the best part of an afternoon constructing various arrangements out of the available solids, often spending several minutes at a time lying on the floor gazing in silence at the shapes we had made. These spaces of silence were not spent simply admiring our handiwork, but were rather filled by the both of us transforming the little blank canvases of wood into buildings, bridges, castles, towers, churches, and ultimately, all combined- a city. The blocks became material for the imagination to seize upon, mould and refashion into anything it so wished, no matter how tenuous the visual connection. From these moments on we possessed a small hermetic world which we could carefully modify, with each modification being an important physical change in our fabricated environment’s very own historical process. The fact that these cities changed at our bidding through a sped-up time frame eventually led to the specific sequence I want to rediscover.
As usual the blocks were laid, a world fashioned and a process of incremental change relating to a narrative embarked upon. But instead of the usual time frame my mind slipped along our narrative line to a distant point where the city was dead, empty, and ruinous. I became fascinated by the resulting building-fragments becoming even more evocative and suggestive than the buildings of our working towns had been with their clear and definite functions within our story-world. Guided by where my imagination was already, I struck our complex with my hand, reducing it to a jumble of blocks. The action was not greeted with understanding by my friend and, even after explaining on several occasions why I thought it necessary and enjoyable, she never felt the same. Although, to her credit, from that point on I was always granted time to destroy our city and gaze at it, imagining its ruins, after we had tired of the usual play.
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I have many other memories of playing with games of construction later in my life, most notably Lego and Meccano, but none retains the vividness nor the poignancy of block-playing. I think this is so because I discovered the blocks in my home at a period in my childhood when the boundaries between the imagined and the real worlds were still undefined. This meant that if an object was either rather vague in form and without purpose, or at least without a fathomable purpose, my imagination would seize upon it as a reason for a breach to occur between the two worlds. What is it? What could it be? Explanations and wild possibilities would pour through the breach, fastening themselves onto the object and altering its essence. An apparent shortfall of content in the material world would be amply made up for by a deluge of possible contents from the imagined. I believe this disposition is what made the blocks so special. Their ambiguity and the fact that we could group them in slightly less ambiguous organisations meant that firstly they offered a route for the imagined to make its way into something material; then they allowed the material, now loaded with life, to be consciously developed into more complex forms with correspondingly complex stories. The situation was one where we were moving and modifying what had essentially become our nebulous thoughts-made-flesh.
What drew me to the particular moment when I became interested by the thought of our constructs being long dead and ruinous was the unusual parity between the beginning and the end of the process. The genesis was the wooden cuboids being seeded with narrative: their shapes were without purpose, they had never had any purpose nor any past- they were little voids to be filled by our childish minds. After our filling of these voids with political plots, spires and wars, and after the sweep of my hand, we once again returned to the ambiguous, to the purposeless, but purposelessness of a different type, and with a deeply different appeal. The thought of the leftovers of our creativity existing empty and silently decaying had a pull on me because of their richness in meanings, and depth of past. As a visitor to the site of these remnants, I would imagine being affected by thoughts of what must have occurred there. Even without knowledge of their history, the fragments would each hint at glorious and fascinating pasts. The imagination was still to be tapped, but here it was not simply the imagination working on a blank canvas, rather working with objects that had had purpose, life and definite form but were now only evocative of these things. The imagination could play with something it knew had been real, and the worlds it thus constructed with the ruins as the building blocks were all the more appealing for it.
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From the beginning my exploration of the content of this past event had polarised between two main investigations. An attempted rediscovery of the additive process with which as children we had imbued the little blocks with so much life, and a parallel study of the material-stuff: the forms onto which we projected our story-worlds. These two threads often intermingled and were never meant to end in some kind of dual result. For me the one relied on and developed with the other- just as the fantastical worlds that my friend and I formulated as children had relied on the blocks for the sharpness of their believable existence, and the block’s re-arrangeability for the evolution of this existence through our narrative time.
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Exploring the blocks themselves and the act of destruction I made a series of films in which I was drawn towards the reasons behind the death blows that I would deliver to each of our constructs. I began by assuming that I was mentally wiping the slate clean and allowing for the game to begin unsullied the next time around. But after further thought I remembered how I would stare at the collapse and imagine it as an evocative pile of ruins that indirectly contained the memory of our story. The next undertaken game would then be enriched with the memory of the last because with every demolition the blocks accrued more history, more memory, and for me more reality.
final film: http://youtu.be/hChgj1W1HRE
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After feeling around the kind of spaces that existed within some arrangements of blocks
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I decided to continue with geometrical studies of the blocks, by using the generative potential I saw in the collapses as the basis for a method that would develop a relationship between the parts of my project that was akin to the one that had developed between our imaginations and the blocks. By filming a particular collapse, then modelling a series of time frames and overlapping them, I ended up with the starting point from where the project began developing a vocabulary of its own.
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The collapse was investigated through drawing where parts of it were taken through a series of transformations. The shapes were cut, inverted, constantly moved around the page and combined in ways that invited chance and mistakes as in a game of Chinese whispers. The intention was to achieve what used to happen each time I knocked the blocks down through both the initial superimposition of time frames and the following geometrical and in other drawings, programmatic manipulations. The major difference was that where before the material would still be there but with a new layer of meaning, here the form itself altered as well, visually representing the retaining of traces from where it had come.
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In parallel I was doing drawings that were exploring the programmatic, narrative and atmospheric content of this architectural game of blocks. Each drawing made in the geometrical realm spawned several that looked into what the resulting forms and spaces might contain and be transformed into.
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By doing this the next line drawing would be informed by a further understanding of what its content would be used for...
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When I moved onto using the computer I continued with the same techniques, only with 3d software I could manage more difficult geometries and could manipulate and fabricate those geometries with greater ease.
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A coterie of fragments were gathered from the process and spatially superimposed into something akin to another collapse. This organisation was then again edited and transformed as the simpler geometries had been in earlier drawings and the result was what was to become –when further developed- an internalised conflagration of the formal, organisational and programmatic investigations which had been developing in parallel.
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A model was made of the bones of this space which helped me to navigate around it and understand it as the next drawing process unfolded
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At the same time as the drawings were being made, fragments were escaping the two dimensional page. At first only little paper models
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They soon began to flesh out as the reality of constructing a structural fragment neared.
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One of the fragments from the formal coterie that was to go into the making of the internalised space was extracted to be built 1:1 and tested, or rather played with by real people.
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Plans were drawn up
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And after quite a bit of trial and error with materials and techniques, the structure was fabricated
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And along with the fragments of the rest of the unit brought to Hampstead Heath for two wet days where we rigorously played with our creations, testing them and combining them in the search for revelatory and unexpected insights.
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A number of things occurred to me as potentially important during the two days but the distillatory effect of time left two principles strongly ingrained within the project: that of intimately juxtaposed but wildly varying scales; and that of multiple gravities sharing the same space.
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All three strands were then pulled into a process coalesced around a perspective of the interior of the project’s raw material, namely the reworked fragments. At first I didn’t even manage to get the view to be inside the damn thing
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But after another try I managed that‌
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And in the end‌
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After a process the compounded the geometrical and programmatic sides in one drawing...
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I hope to have produced a drawing that allows one to step inside the imagination, inside a place that is somewhere between the beheld and that which seizes upon it as matter for elaboration. I also hope that the traces of process are evident, that, just as with the enrichment of the blocks through their repeated demise and resurrection, so here, after the repeated manipulations and reorganisations and enrichments an overall visual memory is retained of every stage.
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FINDING PLAY AGAIN The story of a disenchanted divorcee, saved by the intrusion of architecture into his dreams... The project developed starting from a short text I wrote in which I re-evaluated what I had done in the first term and began to propose a way of developing away from it. The book is written with a narrator writing about me, a disenchanted student of architecture who found a way to enjoy his project through the rediscovery of some of what combined to make his childhood moment so joyful.
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As a twenty-one year old disillusioned student of architecture, Adam was probably quite typical in his despair. In fact disappointment does seem to be a hallmark of the aging process, but what distinguished his -and possibly the disappointment of other students of the arts as well- was that there had been a powerful love which had brought him to his studies. He had believed that with passion he could avoid disenchantment. That love, mingled with its dreams needed at least space, if not support, if it was to grow permanent, but instead it came up against the sharpness of ego and the kind of intellect that only wishes to see mirrors and reflections of itself. So it was from a particular atmosphere of emptiness that he approached his twentysecond year of life and his third year of university. At the beginning of the year the class he was in was asked to choose a moment that stood out in their memory, and to take this moment as the starting point for their projects. After allowing for a little mental percolation, Adam chose a moment that I believe to be more of an event, but which for him was unitary. As part of his exploration of the moment he purchased a new set of blocks from Hamleys, and over the course of a week found that he could not tear himself away from playing with them. It seemed that with every moment passed with the toys and in contemplation of his moment, he was rediscovering the joy and delight that had brought him to his studies. Through a window that the brief had forced open Adam was given the opportunity not only to explore an event, a physicality, but through its meanings and content to explore the impulse of intuition.
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That impulse was to manifest itself in three different ways, one for each thread of what was to become his project. Firstly there was the path that had begun with the geometry of the blocks; their acerbic shapes were to be studied in a rarefied atmosphere of concentration. In these circumscribed surroundings chance and discovery (apparently becoming the ambassadors of ‘the felt’ in this context) were encouraged to enter the investigations in two ways: There was the continuous transfer of information: when in drawing, around the page, when in 3d modeling into new layers or files. When in hand drawing this meant that numerous errors would creep in as they do in games of Chinese whispers, whereas in the computer it meant a continuous breaking of attachment that encouraged him to feel freer in any alterations undertaken. Secondly there were several transformations through which he would put the objects he was studying through. He would cut, invert and insert until the result, while retaining certain qualities of the original material had become something new. Through these two techniques a simple coterie was achieved that was discernibly from-the-blocks but was no longer of-the-blocks.
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The second way was through a series of drawings that explored the programmatic, narrative and atmospheric content of a conceptual space that was beginning to emerge. This space seems to have held a powerful attraction to him as within it could be contained both the joy & the fun of his childhood pursuit, together with the depth and solidity of a part 1 architectural project. These drawings explored several potential ways of approaching the content of this space, but by looking at them it becomes clear that it was generally via a process of evolutionary aggregation that they were arrived at. This process allows elements to be inserted into a scenario, and then over a period of time be reconciled and amalgamated with the existing components to form a coherent union .There was clearly plenty of material and a process that could be further developed, but rules of application were necessary to tame, direct and unify what had been garnered from both his geometrical and his conceptual experiments. These were to be proffered by the third thread of investigation.
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MR A Taking this further I decided to create a depressed character for whom I could somehow do the same thing. The idea was that there would be a circularity within the project regarding the characters. Elements from the child affect both the student me and the middle-aged adult. Mr A, as he is known, has a highly specific lifestyle and routine and yet at the same time he is a well known character. He is everywhere and he is symptomatic of some of the most banal and yet ubiquitous characteristics of middle-class western society. This general-specific quality and its potential for development after the next immediate stage of the project was one of the main reasons I was attracted to Mr A.
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Mr A Mr A has a routine, a routine that he has finally arrived at after several years of instability in his life. He used to like instability, but that was when he was younger and since then he has found that as the years have passed, so his intolerance of the unpredictable and unexpected has increased. And for Mr A the unpredictable has come to be epitomised by the fairer sex. His impressive list of ex-girlfriends and an unpleasant experience of divorce have left him with what some people understand to be misogynistic tendencies, but which in reality are just the outward manifestations of a sensitive and wounded soul. His life revolves around three poles of which two are voluntary with the third being necessary. If he could, he would spend all of his time with his children, for whom he fought so hard in court and on whom he lavishes the love of a dozen failed relationships. The desire to be with them continuously is frustrated not only by mandatory school attendance, but also by the need for him to work extremely hard. He needs to earn enough money to pay for their lifestyle, and to manage the debt incurred by the long court-battle over the kids. Apart from his work and offspring, visiting the gym is the only other activity he fits into his schedule. He considers the gym to be of vital importance in his battle to be a good role model for his kids, but, as ever, equal to that is his determination to be outwardly healthy and good-looking just in case his ex-wife and her young boyfriend should ever happen to see him.
Mr A has built himself a safe and hermetically consistent life in which inordinate importance is placed on small every day tasks and objects. Through the value he has placed on them they have been elevated to the status of milestones, of markers in his daily journey that reassure him like so many loving embraces. The first of these is his bed. It is the kind of bed that retailers fill their warehouses with, safe in the knowledge that its innocuous and inoffensive blandness will reside happily in the most varied of residential backgrounds. This construction of pine from renewable Scandinavian forests, has become the womb into which he climbs childlike every night, and out of which he emerges adult every morning. In this bed, at night, he doesn’t feel alone. He curls himself up so tightly and pulls the duvet underneath him so far that not an inch of his flesh is left out of contact with a neighbour, not an inch of him is without a companion. Every night in his sleep he is married again and when he gets out of bed, without the use of an alarm clock, at 7:00am, he is never melancholic, and often, if the sun is shining he is even happy. The sun, and the weather it shines upon has no effect on Mr A at any point in the day, except when he emerges from between his sheets to be greeted by his bedroom’s sole window: at that moment he is faced with the only unpredictable element left in his life; neatly framed by four wooden mouldings the sky marches past, and depending on its hue and temperament, so Mr A’s distance from sadness is set for the day.
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The brushing of teeth, shaving, dressing; these activities barely occur as the fathers mind is one step ahead, immersed in the pleasure of kissing his children on the forehead and turning the lights in their room on to full. His hand always lingers over the plastic light-switch, feeling its shape, for a couple of seconds resisting the inevitable move out of the room, down the stairs, to the small kitchen where he prepares lunch for himself and breakfast for the boys who always eat in silence. The journey to school is short and when they arrive, Mr A doesn’t get out of the car because of a request made by his children. Both had suffered some abuse from other students over their doting father who would insist on taking them all the way to the classroom, and so after some tears he agreed to their demands to be left alone, and now simply waves as they walk away facing the other direction. Whereas on the way to school Mr A frequently looks in his rear view mirror to search for signs of response to his attempts at conversation; on the way from school to work his attention shifts to things going past. His eyes move from one lamppost to another, catching each one somewhere close to the horizon and losing it as it is decapitated by the roof of his car. This action is something like an inversion of what sailboat passengers do: those passengers cling to the immobility of the horizon in an attempt at defeating movement; Mr A grasps at lampposts to reassure himself of movement, to enclose himself in speed and the tunnel of his journey.
The action of enclosing himself in moving lampposts on the way to work is echoed in the layout of his office. Having a cubicle is nothing new in the world of corporate floor plans, but when yours is the only one amongst a sea of open plan desks and informal meeting areas, then it stands out as noticeable. This is so for Mr A because the software company that he works for has a policy of care and munificence towards its employees. This policy has led to the open and informal working arrangements of the office, which for most workers is a boon, but which caused great distress for Mr A. Seeing this troubled man as an opportune way of illustrating the flexibility of their corporate philosophy, the company built him his own enclosed personal space amongst the other workers. The approach has paid off, and in his 2.5 by 2.5metre space, surrounded by pictures of his children he works far more consistently than before. The only regular break that he takes from this consistency, is to make a cup of tea for himself from a travel-kettle he keeps in his drawer. The people who work near his cubicle always know when he is about to make a cup of tea, because from about five minutes before the event he starts rubbing the back of his left index finger against the material that covers the walls of his room. This action reaches an irritating crescendo, at which point he realises what he is doing and reaches for the kettle.
After three cups of tea and four hours of work he exercises himself in the office-park’s gym. Alternating between the Aerobic and Anaerobic machines his eyes are always fixed on the Plasma screen that displays MTV. He finds that when it broadcasts feline young singers, he runs far faster and attacks the weights machines far more aggressively. Forty-five minutes is spent burning away the calories and building up the muscle, after which he changes back into his clothes in front of the locker-room mirror, imagining how jealous his ex-wife would be if she could just see him, which of course she can’t and which of course she won’t.
After the dinners during which he only occasionally gets his boys to tell him how their day was, he takes part in yet more one-sided conversation through letters. He writes letters to his MP about the inconsistency between the European Charter and the failure of the British courts to adequately protect father’s rights; he writes letters to neighbours about their rubbish bags repeatedly left in the streets; he writes to Channel 4 about Richard and Judy’s deplorable attitudes towards teenage sexual experimentation. He writes many letters but none are sent, they are only stacked on the MDF shelves to one day be found by the municipal director of funerals.
His lunch is ingested on the walk back to the office and after 3 more cups of tea and 4 more hours he drives back home -grasping more desperately at the streetlights this time- to prepare dinner and meet the kids. The simple fare, always balanced and nutritious, is cooked by Mr A while his children sit behind him on the wooden dining table doing their homework. He likes this arrangement because if either of them have any difficulty he is at hand to help. The children are not so keen, but then neither of them want to see their father get upset again, so they sit silently studying and wait patiently for after dinner when they are free to go and play computer games. While they are playing, their father retreats into his tiny study, a room that is always locked when he is not in it.
This is his secret, this is what brings back the loneliness so that when he enters his bedroom once again, and is faced with the glowing window, he is bare and impotent, and crawls into bed needing the warmth, needing the closeness.
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The objects and moments that comprise his internalised routine were then extracted and altered. The alterations became the equivalents of the programmatic drawings that I had done in the first term except here they had the specific aim of addressing the sadness and isolation of Mr A’s life.
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Through insertions...
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Changes in scale...
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And extreme juxtapositions.
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In this way the story began its process of reformulation through drawing and writing.
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But to reach the stage where the process included space and structure, a three dimensional diagram was drawn up where the moment-spaces from the story were arranged to relate to each other and to begin forming a place of believable disbelief. Through the progressive reformulation of a process that included model-making, drawing, writing and 3d-modeling I hoped that a new architectural short-story could be reached whose constituent parts complemented each other as elements in a compound.
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So I began making models that tested the relationship of parts. The story and its spaces were initially contrasted quite strongly with pathways that connected them and the structure that held the.
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The structure I thought of as the material of the book‌ or rather the paper on which the architectural text is written, but I nevertheless wanted to overcome the severe separation to create a new space that was from the story but nevertheless new and influenced by process.
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Through 3-d modelling I could directly place an observer inside the constructions, create scenes and begin re-writing the story, having the text be affected by the insertions, and now the structural and spatial changes from model making.
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Then in the following model the structure’s next version could be affected in turn by the altered text
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Which in turn was analysed...
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And used to produce the next model that was somewhere nearer achieving a synthesis, a state where the structure was blending with the content, where the words were bleeding into the page and the page itself is absorbing meaning.
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Finally a ten page short story was realised in which the space, structure and content of Mr A’s re-written story-space were cemented together...
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RELATIONSHIPS
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In Mr A habit and routine had become malignant. Small everyday rituals and objects such as snuggling up in bed, waking the children up and having tea breaks soured and expanded to become necessities, addictions from which he would jump one to the next in order to see the day through. His relationship with these objects and events tied him to them in need. In the short story this relationship was upended by turning his obsessive habits into their absurd opposites. By doing this he was in turn shown the absurdity of his original self-imposed isolation. It is normal for people to have relationships with places and often these are set within habitual routines; but these relationships tend to be affectionate and lacking in the compulsiveness that clouds what should, potentially, be a pleasant life for Mr A.
People become involved with places/spaces/objects. In the same way that Mr A stuffs his life full of these moments, so most people unconsciously treat them as attachment to place, as friendship with inanimate form. Friendship implies give and take, and it is precisely this sort of interaction that I believe ties people to architecture. The impractical, the idiosyncratic: that which initially demands effort & thought and through time comes naturally is what I think animates a space and in the long run engenders personal affection. The tap that dumbfounds people because its handle works counter-intuitively; the toilet that is so small one must learn a peculiar dance to enter and leave it; the three floorboards that creak outside your parent’s room; all those unbelievably temperamental locks: these are an essential part of our everyday lives and can bond us to places as anything else can.
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THE Bs
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This led me to create the Bs through whom I could explore and illustrate the relationship between architecture, objects and occupants over a period of time during which the three would become attached and enmeshed. The objects and the architecture made for the occupants would affect their way of living, and in turn would be altered again so that the relationship become highly personalised.
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With the blocks I tried to bring together the imagined and the beheld, with Mr A narrative and structure: with the B’s I wanted to use narrative to bring together structure and occupant in time-based relationship where the architecture became their blocks, but here their imaginations would directly affect their routines, their spaces and their lifes. The couple’s apparent normality and the banality of their home were important for me as a method for exploring both the universal and specific natures of the issues I was tackling. The narrator of the story is the architect.
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The B_s being who they are my first encounter with them was a memorable one. I had gathered from the couple of e-mails we had exchanged that they were a recently married couple who, with financial aid from their respective parents, had just purchased their first home- a Victorian terrace in a pleasant part of suburban North London.
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This information had led me to picture the entering into my office of two rather average young professionals. Superficially they looked as I had expected and indeed she was a budding lawyer and he a banker with Citigroup. Apart from this apparent compliance with my stereotype there was a distinct lack of symmetry between the two of them with Mr B being of defined figure, good height and sporting the kind of face that attracts furtive glances in public places and obsequious attentions in private; she on the other hand was rather gaunt, a little sallow and with a head of full golden curls that looked as though they definitely belonged on someone else’s head. This deficit in bodily equality was more than matched by the schism between their apparent placid normality and the open war that was waged quite readily and without embarrassment the moment we began discussing their intentions for the project. I could detect neither malice in their disagreement nor vitriol in their words, but I rather got the impression that they suppressed nothing and simply enjoyed very passionate debate -possibly even more so in public than in private.
Despite my attempts towards guiding the conversation to the setting out of a clear brief, I was instead myself led into what I can only describe as a paragon of lateral conversation. By the end of this meandering flow of topics and opinions, they had managed to convey to me how their drab and efficient working lives had led them to yearn for a place that was truly theirs. They made it quite clear that they had no intention of being different just for the sake of it, but rather that they wanted a quirky and idiosyncratic environment in which to live that was both tailored to their lives and reflective of their personalities.
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Having been infected with their openness and enthusiasm I was quite disappointed to then have them explain that they were looking for a long-term relationship with one architect because their finances, or rather their mortgage -even though it only funded three quarters of the cost of the house- would only allow them to make changes to the house incrementally, over time as funds became available. I accepted this as a price I was willing to pay for an interesting client with an unusual brief -one that soon became stranger as we decided on its contents. As is often the case Mr B -the man- was forced by Mrs A –the woman- into postponing his dream of a library to store his collection of Antique books...
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...while the money was instead spent on raising the ceiling and the roof of the house to accommodate a higher ceiling in the living room, to create what Mrs B humorously referred to as her little ‘Baronial Hall’.
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Aside from this we together pinpointed a way in which we could add maximum character to the house without actually spending any more large sums of money on structural interventions. Taking the most repeatedly used elements of the house –the door knobs- and the front door, and transforming them into playful disruptions of their usual functionality, we intended to test our developing approach at a manageable scale. The ‘Slide, Pull, Push, Click’ front door...
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...and the ‘Turn, Pull, Push, Click’ doorknobs were born (again Mrs B’s humour) and as well as their success, another was born of an apparent defeat.
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Unknown to me the intern in the office who dealt with the planning application for the raising of the living room had not included the extension of the roof in the brief document. Quite reasonably he had assumed that because so many other houses of identical design on the same street had extended their roofs in precisely the manner we were planning to, that we would not need official approval. What he did not reckon with was the recent preservation battle that had been waged to save the only Norman Shaw house in that part of London from vulgar disfigurement. Happily it was saved. Unhappily it was saved by the council’s snap introduction of a preservation zone that not only protected the house itself, but also the surrounding roads, including ours. Having raised the ceiling we were stuck with the main bedroom being half-height, a situation that would have been unacceptable to most clients and should have landed me in trouble, but with the Bs was instead turned into a triumph. They adored its novelty and even filled it with such paraphernalia as sawn-in-half cupboards and children’s chairs.
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In the period between this first stage and their return to my office for the initiation of the second phase, my practice had reached a size where we had been able to purchase costly machines, software and equipment that were expensive to maintain and required a high turn-over from each employee in order to keep us in the black. Small projects such as the B’s had become not only unnecessary, but effectively loss-making: and so I had steeled myself to gently explain the situation to them on their return and offer them the business cards of a couple of friends of mine from university. The business cards never managed to escape the drawer of my desk due to the unrelenting torrent of enthusiasm that descended on me from the Bs the moment they burst into my office. In retrospect I believe that they had already guessed as to my circumstances and had decided to remind me of my admittedly strong personal interest in the project; and after half an hour of discussion I had entirely forgotten about the dreary reality of the practice’s incomings and outgoings.
Mr B had recently been promoted and had borrowed on the strength of future income. For the fact that it was him financing this round of construction Mrs B had selflessly agreed to the inclusion of his library in their plans: however, as she was careful to point out, her charitableness had limits and she was not going to have his “dusty, pointless old books” as she called them, ruining her plans for a grand “banqueting” table that was to suitably fill her Hall. As they had earlier emphasised during their assault on my rationality, they wanted neither of these additions to be plain. Delighting in the small impracticalities with which they had lived, and with the baffled incomprehension they had engendered in guests, the Bs were eager for their new features to be both full of character and slightly awkward to use.
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The table was constructed using an Aalto fan leg table...
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...and an ersatz Empire style table the couple had received as wedding presents and had since kept in storage.
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Since the table would only be opened for dinner parties it was made enlargeable: a small permanent table would contain a spring-loaded extendable armature which...
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...using the handle from the kitchen door to operate a mechanism, would open to create a spine down the length of the Hall around which the rest of the table could be constructed.
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The table was made to be like an irregular jig-saw puzzle so that it could be made fully, or have significant portions left out.
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This facet was born of pragmatics but had the delicious side-effect of Mrs B taking great care in planning the table’s form and the respective seating at each of her parties, so that friends and family with bad blood between them would be positioned facing each other on a secluded fragment of table and inevitably produce what she termed as “the dramatic melodrama at the heart of every good dinner”
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When the pieces of the table were not in use they resided in the ground floor walls, replacing the couple’s personal photos as decoration and recalling, in a domesticated manner, the fragments Mr B had noticed embedded in the walls of buildings he had seen when on holiday in Italy.
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The process of denuding the house’s walls quickly became an extension of the dinners themselves: one would always know if you were on Mrs B’s good list or not as it was the core friends from each invite list that would be asked to come around early, and help take the relevant pieces down.
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All this was done to the ironic theatricality of Mrs B’s direction which would always take place at a safe distance from the action...
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...except for when it came to the taking down of the kitchen door, at which point she and Mr A would proceed alone under the insistence that it was too delicate and complicated a job for anyone else to undertake safely, when –of course- it was in fact by far the easiest of the tasks.
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Because the hall had to be left free for entertaining, Mr B’s library was punched up through the building, reaching into the hall only above head height. It was made as a wooden-framed, plastic-coated pod inside which were bars at the level of every shelf so that it in effect became an internalised climbing-frame which was reached by a retractable ladder.
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The inside was lit so that when guests were over they could look up and see the yawning inverted tower of Mr B’s proud and largely unread collection. At first-floor level six openings were made on the exterior of the shell so that some of the book-shelves could also be used from the study and the bedroom.
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My suspicion that their overt extroversion contained the seeds of exhibitionism were confirmed when they returned to me only weeks after the completion of the library. They had found that they enjoyed the visual penetration of their rooms by the library rather more than they should and would occasionally enact “scenarios� - I am still not quite sure what they meant by thatwhen guests were potentially scaling the insides of the tower. I was asked to take down the wall between their room and the study, and open a cut to the hall below in the space between so as to allow them to watch, as well as be watched.
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By the time we embarked upon the final alterations to the house I had come to see the house with not unjustified affection. The project so far had not only come to affect the lives of the Bs, but had become something of a wellspring of ideas from which my following architecture had become profoundly affected. I was indebted to the Bs and as was pointed out in the first monograph of my work -published around that period- a lot of the generating concepts for my first major British cultural commissions were gestated in that seemingly insignificant little suburban incubator. No mention was made of the couple in that particular publication, but then it was mostly a discussion of the abstract principles behind my work, and besides, it was my waxing fame, and the ensuing lucrative commissions, that allowed me to work on the ultimate stage of the project without the need to worry about the finances of my practice.
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As Mrs B had been proudly telling her friends for quite some time, we were to build a grand staircase to replace what she described as “her paltry little example of British modesty”. Mr B also explained to me that when he was young he used to take great pleasure in playing vertical hopscotch and enacting gunfights on the labyrinthine staircase of his family’s country cottage, and that he wanted the child they were expecting to have similar experiences in their own house. Their eventual irregularity meant that the staircase was effectively used as a playground slash battlefield with the boy’s tilted tree-house-bedroom –to which one had to scale a notched wall to enter- being the effective fort in the children’s games.
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A long horizontal opening in the wall of the tree-house that faced the stairs became an integral part of these siege games but was later used by the parental Bs as a way of forcing quiet on their, by that stage, noisy adolescent son. Fed up of the absurd levels at which he kept MTV on in his room, they placed his television across the landing, from where he was forced to watch through the window with headphones, or not watch at all.
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Because of the scale of the staircase we broke the bathroom up into fragments with two small rooms, one of which contained the shower and the other the toilet, and into which were made openings -in the latter at the head-height of someone seated and in the former of someone standing- so that the visual interpenetration started in the library and the study could be extended.
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No room was left in either for a sink and so a small landing was made on the stairs where one was placed and from where each member of the family was invariably splashed by another at least once in a day.
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We also did away with most of the ground floor walls whose obstructions were replaced with the sculptural presence of the stairs around which one could duck and manoeuvre.
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Upon the arrival of any guests who had never previously visited, Mrs B would walk them from the entrance...
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Through to the now open kitchen...
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...and around to the hall so that they view the space in full.
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This substantial undertaking left the couple with a heavy financial burden, which, when combined with the boy’s private school fees meant that when they reached their mandatory retirement age they had insubstantial savings and their only major asset was the house. No longer entertaining as they once did and with their child gone the pair intended to stay in the house, surrounded by the memories that had become so interlocked with the building. Unfortunately reality intervened when Mrs B had a bad fall on the stairs and broke her hip, an accident which -though common- was probably hastened by the awkwardness of the design and which meant that, when they were informed of the impossibility of installing a Stena stair-lift in the house, they were forced to put it on the market.
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Meanwhile those British cultural commissions I had started to win had broadened to span a number of countries and with that inflation so my reputation has grown both among the architectural community, but more profitably for me, among the general public. Appearing often on Channel 4, and more recently on PBS and cbs in the US, my admittedly gratuitous use of apparently profound metaphor has led to a surprisingly large amount of general interest in my work; and so when the Bs found no buyers for their house -which had effectively been rendered worthless by the alterations- they were forced to sell it to the National Trust for a token sum and places in a countryside care-home.
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In local guide books one can now be directed to two “local gems,� a well preserved Norman Shaw house and my museum, where one can now apparently explore the essence of my spatial philosophy -at a human scale. Nowhere in the house are the Bs mentioned, but after all, it is a display of the architectural, and not the personal origins of my oeuvre.
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With the greatest thanks to Katrin Lahusen, an inspirational tutor who gave all of us who experienced her unit that year, one of the most important and formative adventures of our lives.