Design*+ Research Portfolio Adam Sharr
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Like society at-large, architecture currently faces significant global challenges – for example: combatting our climate emergency; addressing identity and ensuring diversity and inclusion; extending construction technologies and environmental approaches; improving health and wellbeing; advocating for social justice, community and civic life; mobilising creativity and innovation for the greater good; celebrating expertise at a time of fake news; and valuing both contemporaneity and heritage. Like architecture itself, such challenges are cultural concerns as much as they’re technical ones. I argue that architecture’s contribution to the big global questions comes from better appreciating the power and potential of its cultural operations, and by understanding the tools necessary to make change happen, knowing how to engage research in extending creative methods. In response, my work engages the operations of architectural culture, its habits, values and tools.
Contents Book Project Project Paper Project Chapter Award Chapter Project Project Exhibition Book Project Chapter Project Paper Project Book Book Chapter 2
2022 2022 2022 2021 2021 2020 2020 2019 2019 2018 2018 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2013 2012 2012
Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture Architecture Building Refurbishment Farrell Centre ‘The University of Non-Stop Society’ The OME ‘The Circus, the Canon and a House with One Wall’ Design Office: AJ 40 Under 40 ‘The Collective: Luxury in Lounge Space’ Armstrong Building Refurbishment Arts Incubators, Gateshead Machines à Penser Modern Architecture: A Very Short Introduction Building Science Workshop & Studios ‘Libeskind in Las Vegas’ House at Haydon Bridge ‘The Cultural Politics of Queuing Tape’ Merz Court Entrances Demolishing Whitehall Reading Architecture and Culture ‘Burning Bruder Klaus’
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I pursue architectural and research practice through designing, writing, drawing and exhibiting. The research is concerned with architectural ways of knowing: looking inward to the field of architecture to unpick the histories and contemporary operations of its disciplinary cultures; and looking outward to understand how buildings, and architecture’s creative methods, contribute more widely to society, culture, and the academic commonwealth. My projects explore how creative practice can be research, examining: ideas of identity and diversity; heritage, memory and conservation; dwelling and experience; and places of learning. All are informed by climate literate environmental design. My writing, meanwhile, has pursued the close reading of architecture – and its values, habits, and commonplace tools – to examine the differing cultures at work in the theoretical and technical discourses of the contemporary profession.
Contents Project Project Project Paper Book Paper Paper Project Book Series Book Project Book Project Book Project Project Project Project Project
2011 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2009 2010 2007 2007 2007 2006 2006 2006 2004 2002 2002 1999 1997
Hexham Abbey: Energy Study Llysdinam Field Centre House at Murvagh ‘The Sedimentation of Memory’ Quality out of Control ‘Selective Memory’ ‘Drawing in Good Faith’ House at Ingoldingen Thinkers for Architects Heidegger for Architects House at Llethr Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture Creative Industries Business Units, Aberystwyth Heidegger’s Hut Alterations to a Victorian Villa Law Department The Women’s Library Golden House, Dottery Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills
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Book Creative Practice Inquiry 2022 in Architecture Routledge Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr (eds)
This collection introduces, illustrates, and advances fresh ideas about creative practice inquiry in architecture. It concerns architectural knowledge: how architects can use their distinctive skills, habits, and values to advance professional insight, and how such insights can be extended to make wider contributions to society, culture, and scholarship. It shows how architectural ways of knowing and working can be mobilised as tools for research.
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Collected here are a series of creative practices that emerge out of architecture and actively engage with other fields and methods reaching across the academic landscape. Architectural inquiries collected in this book probe matters that lie beyond the obvious expectations, the conventions, the default, of the discipline. Drawing, borrowing, adapting, dramatising, perhapsing, monstering, experimenting, cartooning—the tools and methods of each inquiry vary but they all share a common outward gaze, engaging architectural ways of knowing with other disciplines and practices including the arts, biological sciences, ethnography, and technology. Chapters gathered here offer insight not only into incipient modes and tools of architectural research, but emerging ethical, practical, and philosophical positions intimately tied to the creative practices involved. Setting-out the idea of creative practice inquiry in architecture, this innovative volume offers a lively and resourceful contribution to a growing body of work on design as research. It will be of interest to: students keen to pursue architectural ways of thinking and writing; practitioners who want to use their distinctive professional abilities to contribute to architectural and scholarly knowledge; and academics and doctoral candidates keen to engage with the burgeoning scholarly field of design research.
Book 2022 Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, is slowing awakening to the methodological opportunities availed by creative practice research. This collection offers myriad situated examples of how creative practice research performs its important work, paying attention to material relations, place-based concerns as well as mobilising the powers of the imagination. — Hélène Frichot, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, The University of Melbourne
Routledge Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr (eds)
For anyone interested in the creation of our built environment including practitioners, students and academics, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture provides vital new answers to the question of the nature of architectural research. It reveals research by design is a rapidly growing field that operates from within the field of architecture while integrating creative combinations with external innovations. This volume of essays brings together insightful overviews of the issues with case studies that reflect a range of research sites and approaches based within a diversity of geographic locations. By taking us inside rigorous architectural research based in archive, studio, office, experimental lab and building site, that includes new technologies and materials, this book explains how we can move beyond traditional divisions between theory and practice. — Paul Emmons, Patrick and Nancy Lathrop Professor of Architecture, Washington- Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech This volume is a beautiful coming of age — a vibrant gathering of essays and projects that show with confidence and sensitivity what this field, after at least two decades, is capable of. Traversing the institutional boundaries that all too often still divide the studio from the seminar room, Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture makes vital reading for anyone embarking on a creative journey of their own, and for those keen to dive into this exciting form of architectural research in all its subtleties and depths. — Jane Rendell, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
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Project Law Building Refurbishment 2022
Design Office Initial Feasibility Study Client: Newcastle University
An initial feasibility study for altering and extending the Law Building at Newcastle University. The School of Law occupies a sequence of Georgian terraced houses which turn their back on the campus. There is little level access, and no through access except at second floor. This project adds a moot court and mediation rooms, putting them at the heart of the building, along with a new cafe and student study spaces. Connections are proposed through the terrace at each level, with long views, through and out, establishing a sense of orientation. Importantly, the work aims to foster a sense of arrival and community so that students, staff and visitors alike understand where their school is, how to find people and activities, and where they belong.
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Farrell Centre Project 2022
Design Office Initial sketch designs Subsequent development work as client for Newcastle University
The Farrell Centre is a new architecture centre and urban room for the city of Newcastle, based on the edge of the Newcastle University campus. Home to exhibitions, debates, events and programmes for schools and young people, it has been part-funded by a £1m. donation to the University from architect-planner Terry Farrell. Design Office produced an initial feasibility study testing different sites on campus, and I have subsequently worked as client through the development of the project. The project re-works a Grade 2 listed former department store, and is due to open in 2023. Programming is led by the curator Owen Hopkins, recruited from London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum. Also hosting incubator space for start-up businesses in the built environment professions, the Farrell will engage diverse publics with architecture and cities, a catalyst for transforming urban space in the North East of England, while running international exhibition programmes combining the latest insights from practice with research impact.
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Paper
2021
Austin S. & Sharr A., Architecture and Culture, 9:1 (2021), 69-97.
The University of Non-Stop Society: Campus Planning, Lounge Space, and Incessant Productivity
The University of Birmingham, UK, was at the forefront of the last decade’s marketisation of higher education in England. It was among the first British universities to engage in the widespread offering of places to students irrespective of actual school leaving grades, while emphasising the idea of student experience directed towards economically productive careers, and investing massively in its estate as part of extensive marketing and branding programmes. This paper reads the ideologies expressed in the University of Birmingham’s re-planned estate, its new architecture and landscape design. Our focus is the reinstatement of a grand axis from the original 1900 masterplan, alongside the abundance of what can be called ‘lounge space’ – which blends the architectural imagery of city, home, and leisure using familiar interior design tropes from contemporary café and hospitality brands.
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We take an autoethnographic approach to studying the University of Birmingham’s estate, engaging in reflection through writing to connect architectural, philosophical, and personal experiences to wider experiences and understandings. We begin with an account of the urban-design history of the campus. We then review the defining characteristics of lounge space, before focusing in detail on three recent campus projects: The Alan Walters Business School, the replacement University of Birmingham Library, and a garden named The Green Heart. We examine the ideological inclinations of these exemplar projects and draw conclusions about the ideas of society, culture, education, and economy that they represent. We argue that the remaking of the campus inscribes a shift from a post-war liberal view of higher education to a contemporary marketised one under the economic, social and cultural condition characterised as neoliberalism. Indeed, the refigured campus can be read as a definitive space of contemporary neoliberal economy, superseding the shopping mall and Disneyland which Jean Baudrillard chose in the 1990s as his preferred examples.
The OME Project 2021
Design Office Initial Feasibility Study Client: Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, Newcastle University
The OME is an experimental building on the Newcastle University campus for testing and prototyping new biological technologies in architecture. The OME is simultaneously a testbed, a showcase for the public, and a focus for education. The OME explores the importance of light, water and micro-climates in creating living ‘bio-buildings’. It is conceived as a building within a building: a self-contained apartment (the home) enclosed within a protective building envelope. The apartment is situated above a laboratory, used to develop processes to convert domestic waste into heat, energy and useful materials. Surfaces and ventilation systems within the building are modified to explore how the building’s microbiome can be manipulated. The lower part of the facade is expressed as a garden wall, for material samples to be tested and viewed. Above this is an ETFE 'hat' providing a lightweight enclosure.
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Chapter The circus, the canon and a house with 2020 one wall in: Joseph Bedford (ed.), Is There an Object Oriented Architecture?: Graham Harman (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Chapter accompanied by a response from Graham Harman, and a dialogue with him. First presented at The Architecture Exchange, Swedenborg House, London, 2014.
Graham Harman’s book Circus Philosophicus – billed in the cover blurb as ‘Platonic myth meets American Noir’ – provides the most vivid depictions of his objectoriented ontology. It is also Harman’s most architectural book. Most obviously because it focuses on six made artefacts – a ferris wheel; a bridge; tiny calliopes; an offshore drilling rig; a haunted boat and; a flag with a sleeping zebra – to illustrate the transactions of the radically object-centred world that he has proposed. But the book also seems architectural because its approach resonates with how many architects think. It offers a series of productive fables that allow us to imagine our surroundings differently. This is exactly the kind of storytelling – the production of imaginative worlds – to which architects devote their work lives.
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The House with One Wall, the object at the centre of this essay, was designed by Venezuelan-born Swiss architect Christian Kerez for a site in Zürich in 2007. My claim here is that the fabric and the disposition of the House with One Wall can be examined in conjunction with Harman’s philosophy. While it’s possible that the House with One Wall may be visible – imaginatively – over the fence of the Circus Philosophicus, it sits outside that fairground’s perimeter. I will argue here that the house exists instead primarily as part of another global theme park which I will call the Circus Architectura: a fairground that collects together from all seven continents the disparate artefacts of the architectural canon – some built, some unbuilt, some demolished – as they are known to architects from books, journals, zines, and blogs. I argue that the House with One Wall, read in conjunction with Harman’s philosophy, exemplifies the operations of the Circus Architectura: the group of imaginary objects which shape the field of architecture as most architects understand it: a canonical universe which exists in architects’ minds and whose presence is reasserted whenever those architects design.
Design Office: AJ 40 Under 40 Award 2020
Design Office, the design research consultancy that I established at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcatle University was included in the Architect’s Journal’s prestigious 40 under 40 listing of ‘the UK’s most exciting up-andcoming architectural talent’. The AJ wrote: Part of Newcastle University, AJ 40 under 40 practice Design Office combines built projects with books, comics and academic papers. A novel architecture and urban design consultancy run by Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, the Design Office is led by a team of five, four of whom are under 40 – Yasser Megahed, 39, Kieran Connolly, 31, Aldric Iborra Rodríguez, 33, James Longfield, 33 – plus Adam Sharr, 46. Its focus is on research-led practice. Helping the university to transfer knowledge and allow its research to have impact on the wider world, the Design Office produces a wide range of architectural output including books, comics, collages, social media and academic papers as well as built projects. These are linked to the school’s research themes and often challenge sub-optimal aspects of practice such as value-engineering or unimaginative standard specification by researching and exploring these areas and highlighting their shortcomings. Design Office often seeks to work in partnership with other practices and is also very focused on sustainability, including the sustainability and health of the architecture profession as it struggles against marginalisation. A key project has been the £25 million refurbishment of the university’s Armstrong Building, the oldest building on the campus, dating back to the 1880s. Previously refurbished in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Gothic Revival building had become tired-looking and difficult to navigate. Design Office’s project, which began in 2011, rediscovered original details and made interventions including transforming a service yard into a courtyard, creating a striking archaeology library using a found timber ceiling and re-using an extensive vaulted art studio as office and seminar space. The scheme was shortlisted for last year’s RIBA North East awards and has also generated further research, including the graphic novel Practiceopolis, published by Routledge, and three PhD themes.
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Chapter ‘The Collective’: Luxury in 2019 Lounge Space Austin S, and Sharr A. in Armitage J. and Roberts J. (eds.), The Third Realm of Luxury (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
This chapter examines a novel housing block containing 550 dwellings opened in north London in April 2016. Designed by PLP Architecture and branded ‘The Collective’ by its developers, the block was produced out of London’s hyper-gentrification. ‘The Collective’ provides the equivalent of student housing for ‘young professionals’ priced out of both the housing market and the conventional rental market. It is marketed as ‘a community of likeminded young people, living, working and playing under one roof ’. Communal spaces are provided in the block to mitigate the loss of living space. Marketing materials explain how those spaces are: ‘designed […] to bring young people together’, ranging ‘from quiet places to work, themed dining rooms and a roof garden for socializing’, providing ‘access to useful and convenient facilities such as a gym, spa and restaurant – all in your own home’. This Existenzminimum is sold as though it were a youthful and luxurious private members’ club. As we will show, luxury – here – is constituted as an experience: as the reassurance of belonging to a community whose members imagine themselves to share similar values and habits. It also refers to the imaginative projection of comfort, homeliness and carefree urban sophistication, expressed through a set of knowingly familiar architectural materials and forms.
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We review the architectural form and marketing of ‘The Collective’. We then compare it to the Narkomfin Communal House finished in Moscow in 1928 to designs by architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis: a radical exercise in social engineering which sought to socialize previously private aspects of domestic life into the public sphere to consolidate a communist way of life. Next, we examine how the idea of luxury is constructed at ‘The Collective’ through its shared ‘lounge spaces’. A palette of intertextual references blends images of stylish coffee shops and bars with fashionable ‘Googleplex’ offices, theatre foyers and pop-up shops, mixing urban imagery with homeliness to monetize consumption. We thus examine how hypercapitalism has produced a simulation of communist space at ‘The Collective’, stripping out the idealism of collectivisation to produce a collective of individuals, promoted using visual and marketing languages of luxury and youth to sell minimum space standards to aspirational professionals.
Armstrong Building Refurbishment Project 2019
Design Office Concept Architects for £25m refurbishment in five phases Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: Howarth Lichfield, Summers Inman Shortlisted RIBA Awards
Design Office were ‘concept architects’ for five phases of a £25m. programme of alterations and repairs to the Armstrong Building on the Newcastle University campus, completed in 2019. A gothic revival building with arts-and-crafts flourishes, it was built in four phases between 1887 and 1906. The first home of the University, initially as Armstrong College of the University of Durham, it remains the symbolic centre of the campus and epitomises the image of the redbrick university.
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Project Armstrong Building Refurbishment 2019
Design Office Concept Architects for £25m refurbishment in five phases Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: Howarth Lichfield, Summers Inman Shortlisted RIBA Awards
(Above) Ground Floor plan prior to refurbishment (Below) Navigability study
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Project 2019
Design Office Concept Architects for £25m refurbishment in five phases Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: Howarth Lichfield, Summers Inman Shortlisted RIBA Awards
(Above) Ground Floor plan as refurbished (Below) Navigability studies
Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
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Project Armstrong Building Refurbishment 2019
Design Office Concept Architects for £25m refurbishment in five phases Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: Howarth Lichfield, Summers Inman Shortlisted RIBA Awards
A 1960s refurbishment had altered many interiors, followed in the 1970s and ‘80s by the carving-up of numerous rooms, including ubiquitous suspended ceiling grids and partitions which cut almost-comically across original windows and decorative surfaces. Before the start of the refurbishment in 2011, the building had become tired-looking and hard to navigate, with various key interiors concealed or damaged. We organised our six phases of refurbishment around a ‘Routes and Rooms’ strategy: opening-up original volumes and revised spatial sequences inside the building; creating clear circulation routes between a series of key rooms. Drawing from conservation theory – practicing as academic historians – we developed material hierarchies, differentiating original and new materials to make the revised spatial sequences legible and navigable, adding a distinct contemporary layer to retained layers from previous alterations. Our material palette included timber panelling and joinery, and stone, timber and vinyl floors, articulated in contemporary ways, to signify primary and secondary corridors and rooms and therefore reduce the intrusive signage that blights many complex university buildings. Glazed clerestories were used widely to maintain
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Project 2019
Design Office Concept Architects for £25m refurbishment in five phases Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: Howarth Lichfield, Summers Inman Shortlisted RIBA Awards
the sense of original volumes even where contemporary functions required them to be separated into different rooms. Our survey work led to some wonderful surprises, including the discovery of various decorative ceilings hidden behind modern suspended ones, which were carefully repaired and re-used. Original details were repaired where they existed, and contemporary details employed where they did not. Key interventions included: turning a service yard into a new courtyard with a new entrance pavilion with brick vaults recalling existing architectural details in the building as well as Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul; using a found timber ceiling to create a striking Archaeology library; using another found ceiling to make a student-focussed forum space connecting seminar rooms for history students; re-configuring a tower space to make a circular oak panelled boardroom; uncovering an extensive vaulted former art studio, re-used as offices and seminar spaces; and re-opening a circular void from the ground floor entrance to a stained glass cupola on the third floor.
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Project Arts Incubators, Gateshead 2018
Design Office Client: The NewBridge Project
A low-cost conversion of the former Woolworths store in Gateshead into 20 artists’ studios, plus collaborative spaces and exhibition space for The NewBridge Project. Our designs, behind the existing shopfront, were produced in collaboration with the artist-led community, carefully conceived so that they could be self-built cheaply and straightforwardly by the tenants themselves.
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Machines à Penser I was invited to participate in the exhibition Machines à Penser held at the Prada Foundation, Venice, as part of the 2018 Architecture Biennale. The exhibition examined the thinkers huts of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Theodor Adorno. My survey drawings of Heidegger’s hut were exhibited and I was invited to speak at the accompanying symposium ‘Inside the Machines’. I have reflected on the exhibition of these drawings in a book chapter: Sharr A., ‘Three Drawings and a Replica’ in Federica Goffi (ed), The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings & Models (London: Routledge, 2022)Forthcoming.
Exhibition 2018
Drawings shown at the Prada Foundation, Venice, in a collateral event of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Invited contribution to accompanying symposium ‘Inside the Machines’.
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Book Modern Architecture: 2018 A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press Translations into Spanish (Alianza) and Chinese (China Architecture & Building Press)
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Modern Architecture: A Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. It shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air-conditioning and lighting. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, this VSI discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. It also demonstrates how modern architecture owes much to the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape the field.
Book 2018
Oxford University Press Translations into Spanish (Alianza) and Chinese (China Architecture & Building Press)
Adam Sharr has succeeded in making modern architecture modern again, with this refreshing and original account of the technological revolutions and individual designers that shaped our world from the 1850s to the 1970s. Rather than concentrate on questions and debates over style and ideology, or follow the self-promotional versions of the architects themselves, he has preferred to go to the root of the revolution: the technologies and their innovative utilization. This little book will have an effect far beyond its size, providing more than an introduction for students and the public, and for architects themselves a salutary set of careful worked case studies, from Miess IIT Campus to Rogers and Pianos Centre Pompidou. — Anthony Vidler, Professor of Architecture, The Cooper Union The great strength of Adam Sharr’s book is that it relates modern architecture to wider cultural, philosophical, and technological trends. It is also written in a very accessible style and, despite its brevity, covers a wide territory. — Jeremy Till, Head of Central Saint Martins, Pro Vice-Chancellor University of the Arts London
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Project Building Science Workshop & Studios 2017
Design Office Scheme design for £3.4m new build extension to existing building Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: PHP Architects
A £3.4m. extension to the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University (2017) providing new woodworking and digital fabrication workshops, a ‘wet-fab lab’ and additional studio spaces. The building is designed so that the construction can be easily read internally – structure and building services are expressed and highlighted – so that the building itself becomes a study tool for architecture students. Externally, the ground floor is expressed as brown brick plinth matching the surrounding context of mid-1960s modern buildings, while upper stories are expressed as a zinc-clad ‘hat’. Solar PV, green roofs and rainwater harvesting are employed, aloing with high levels of insulation. Students as well as academic staff were involved in design briefing sessions.
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Project 2017
Design Office Scheme design for £3.4m new build extension to existing building Client: Newcastle University Collaborators: PHP Architects
Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
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Chapter Libeskind in Las Vegas: Reflections on 2016 Architecture as a Luxury Commodity Sharr A. in Roberts J. and Armitage J. (eds.), Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
Around the time that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opened in 1997, journalists coined the term ‘starchitect’. Big-name architects are no longer just designers of spaces, and traders in cultural capital but also part of a group of global luxury brands whose aura can be attributed, at least in part, to the mutual interdependence and reinforcement of those brands. The soubriquet ‘starchitect’ is, arguably, most often applied to Daniel Libeskind. He is most famous for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, 2001, whose jagged forms and choreographed experiences derived from powerful ideas about commemoration. This chapter is about a further Libeskind project: a shopping mall, opened in Las Vegas in 2009, deploying again what have become the architect’s trademark crystalline shapes. Named ‘Crystals at CityCenter’, the mall’s branding derives its luxury credentials, and its name, from Libeskind’s signature contribution.
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This chapter examines Crystals at CityCenter as an example of the millennial phenomenon of the starchitect-designed iconic luxury building. It will explore the origins of Libeskind’s architectural brand forms in the architecture of trauma in Berlin and, by contrast, the re-use of those forms in service of high-end retail on the Las Vegas Strip. Thanks to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour’s 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas – a herald of postmodernism which studied the socalled ordinary buildings of the Strip according to semiotics – that city’s architecture has become understood in terms of signs and symbols. I will argue, following this characterisation of the architecture of Las Vegas in the 1970s – and the construction of super-sized theme hotels there in the 1990s and 2000s which turned buildings into super signs – that Crystals at CityCenter is also an example of architecture as sign. This time it is a sign of architecture referring only to itself, of architecture imagined as a luxury commodity.
House at Haydon Bridge Project 2015
A design for a new house for two artists and their family on a greenfield site in a conservation area, above the village of Haydon Bridge in Northumberland. The compact plan adapts to the view. A highly-insulated passive solar design, the project incorporates solar PV, solar hot water heating, a heat recovery system, and ground-source heat pump.
Adam Sharr Architects Planning permission granted Client: Lisa ArmourBrown and Ashley Hipkin
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Paper The Cultural Politics of Queuing Tape 2014
Sharr A. Cultural Politics, 10:3 (2014), 389-403.
Queuing systems—the fields of posts and tapes in railway stations, shops, theme parks, and museums where people line up to queue—are an increasingly dominant spatial phenomenon, familiar across the globe. However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which these queuing systems manipulate, control, and reprogram everyday spaces. The queue, formerly a symbol of democratic consent, has instead become managed: contained and controlled by tape within which people are assumed to behave as predictable pinballs. Moreover, queuing time has come to be seen as productive marketing time, an opportunity for queuers to be monetized. The intellectual origins of these queuing systems in cybernetics theory are considered here, and the economics of queue-jumping are addressed. A case study examines Stansted Airport in London, designed by the well-known architectural firm Foster Associates and completed in 1991. It was famous at the time it was built for its transparent ethos and its clear, easy access from landside to airside. Stansted’s architecture has subsequently been transformed by the logic of queuing tape, not just at check-in and security, but throughout the building. Foster’s Stansted is now dominated by monetized queuing, as travelers move from one queue to the next and each queue is fine-tuned to the logic of shopping and marketing. Stansted has become the definitive example of a new architecture of productive queuing. On the basis of this investigation, the spatial logic and cultural politics of queuing tape are analyzed and discussed. Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
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Merz Court Entrances Project 2013
Design Office £800K refurbishment of the Merz Court building Client: Newcastle University
A group of buildings were completed on the Newcastle University campus in the mid-1960s, in brown brick with ribbon windows, designed by Sheppard Robson and Partners. They are poorly understood by the university community with numerous unsympathetic alterations. The best of the group is Merz Court, completed in 1965. This project involved interpreting the building for institutional stakeholders - arguing that it should be understood as heritage - proposing a series of sympathetic external and internal alterations to make its entrance sequences more legible.
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Book Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin, 2013 Harold Wilson and the Architecture of Sharr A., and White Heat Thornton S. Routledge Commended, RIBA President’s Awards for Outstanding University-located research Reprinted in paperback, 2017 Reviews in: Architectural Review, Architecture Today, Planning Perspectives, Urban History, The Art Newspaper, Context, Twentieth Century Society Newsletter.
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This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London’s historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London’s ’Government Centre’. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin’s plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. The un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the ’white heat of technology’. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of ’professionalization’ and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and elitism.
Book 2013
Sharr A., and Thornton S. What an amazing saga! Officially commissioned early in 1964 to produce what would now be described as a ‘Masterplan’ for the Government quarter, the Whitehall area of London, Professor Sir Leslie Martin’s report was published in July 1965, and the final communication from him to his clients in July 1970 ends with the words ‘Please do not trouble to reply’. The sense of his disappointment, the disappointment of a dream dating to back to the youthful vigour of the Modern Movement in the 1930s, hangs heavy, and one wants to be sympathetic to him and his ambitions because he was a fine man with fine sensibilities. But the story, as the authors of this book frequently remark, is more complex. On the face of it the battle was between the ‘Modernist’ dream of Martin’s ‘total plan’ for radical reconstruction of the major Government offices pitted against an increasingly powerful preservationist lobby that eventually won the day. [...] The story deserves to be known and is well told by Adam Sharr and Stephen Thornton [...]. — James Dunnett, Architectural Review At first sight this seems to be a case study of a grand project from another age, one that now seems so unattractive that we feel relieved it was not built, but the book is much more than that. It reveals the thorough thinking and research behind Martin’s public spirited approach in relation to its place and time. From political records and memoirs the authors have also assembled a fascinating tale of patronage at a key moment of intended modernisation. They go on to clarify the architect’s attempts to make the profession and its educational institutions more scientific, a move still echoing through the universities till today. On the other hand, they document the rise of the conservation movement and its lobbying techniques, as well as the changes in methods of state procurement, so that the concluding chapters can show how modernisation has continued behind historical stage sets leading to the disparity between image and content that we see all around us today. — Peter Blundell Jones, review on amazon.com
Routledge Commended, RIBA President’s Awards for Outstanding University-located research Reprinted in paperback, 2017 Reviews in: Architectural Review, Architecture Today, Planning Perspectives, Urban History, The Art Newspaper, Context, Twentieth Century Society Newsletter.
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Book Reading Architecture and Culture: 2012 Researching Buildings, Spaces and Sharr A. (ed.) Documents Routledge
Architecture displays the values involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It traces the thinking of the individuals who have participated in it, their relationships, and their involvement in the cultures where they lived and worked. In this way, buildings, their details, and the documents used to make them, can be read closely for cultural insights. Introducing the idea of reading buildings as cultural artefacts, this book presents perceptive readings by eminent writers which demonstrate the power of this approach.
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The chapters show that close readings of architecture and its materials can test commonplace assumptions, help architects to appreciate the contexts in which they work, and indicate ways to think more astutely about design. The readings collected in this innovative and accessible book address buildings, specifications and photographs. They range in time from the fifteenth century – examining the only surviving drawing made by Leon Battista Alberti – to the recent past – projects completed by Norman Foster in 2006 and Herzog and De Meuron in 2008. They range geographically from France to Puerto Rico to Kazakhstan and they range in fame from buildings celebrated by critics to house extensions and motorway service areas. Taken together, these essays demonstrate important research methods which yield powerful insights for designers, critics and historians, and lessons for students.
Burning Bruder Klaus Chapter 2012
Sharr A. in Armitage J. (ed.), Virilio Now (London: Polity, 2011). Chinese translation, 2013
Most buildings meet a violent end – through the demolition ball or the destructions of war. This chapter is about a building that, unusually, met a violent beginning. Its trials were orchestrated by its architect, Peter Zumthor, in 2007. 120 pine trees were felled and sawn into logs still bearing their bark. Dragged to a hilltop, they were tilted together and roughly fixed to form a timber wigwam, open to the sky. This was used as formwork around which 24 successive pours of concrete were packed. When the concrete had cured, numerous small circular holes were diamond-drilled through the solid mass. The logs were then set on fire. Fed by air drawn through the holes, the conflagration reached an extraordinary temperature, burning for three weeks and billowing clouds of black smoke over the horizon. When the blaze finally subsided, a concrete monolith was left containing a stinking blackened void which bore the shape of the logs and the imprint of their bark. Molten lead was then dripped laboriously onto the floor of this space forming a weirdly striated surface, a miniaturised unshifting dune landscape. This concrete mass was dedicated, in a Catholic mass, to the fifteenth century Swiss saint Niklaus von Flüe, known commonly as Bruder Klaus. It surveys the village of Wachendorf, located in the rolling landscape of the Eifel between Cologne and Bonn, and it is open to visitors for a few hours each week. Architecture manifests the ideas informing its procurement, inhabitation and design. After accounting for the circumstances of its construction, I will read the artefact of the Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle here to examine what it stands for.2 The violence of this small building’s origins, and the speeds of its construction and use, are related to Paul Virilio’s thinking about architecture. The chapel opens his thinking to question. I will explore what it contributes to an appreciation of Virilo’s ideas about architecture, now.
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Project Hexham Abbey: Energy Study 2011
Design Office Study exploring the integration of sustainable technologies with the historic fabric of Hexham Abbey Client: Hexham Abbey, The Church of England, Department for Energy and Climate Change
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Project 2011
Design Office Study exploring the integration of sustainable technologies with the historic fabric of Hexham Abbey Client: Hexham Abbey, The Church of England, Department for Energy and Climate Change
A design study funded by the UK government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change, working with the Church of England, exploring how sustainable technologies – photovoltaics, wind generation, a ground source heat pump – could be creatively integrated with the historic fabric of Hexham Abbey. We also explored more fanciful, speculative ideas, such as gargoyle waterwheels. Our proposed strategy suggested heating locally to where the building is used, changing the heating routine of the Abbey to reduce heating outside service times, and loaning visitors fleecy ‘habits’, to minimise energy consumption. See: Pendlebury J, Hamza N, Sharr A., ‘Conservation Values, Conservation Planning and Climate Change’, DISP – The Planning Review, 50:3 (2014), 43-54.
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Project Llysdinam Field Centre 2010
Adam Sharr Architects Initial study for extending a Field Centre at Llysdinam in the Wye Valley Client: The Llysdinam Trust / Cardiff University
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Art Fund Pavilion Competition 2010
Adam Sharr Architects Entry to open design competition
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Project House at Murvagh 2010
Adam Sharr Architects Scheme design for new house in Co. Donegal Client: Elke and Karl von Oppen
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Project 2010
Adam Sharr Architects Scheme design for new house in Co. Donegal Client: Elke and Karl von Oppen
Sketch design for a courtyard house, on a flat coastal site overlooking the Blue Stack Mountains of Co. Donegal. Planned as a retirement home, the house is laid out on a single storey with windows placed to open the rooms to particular views, some more exposed and others more sheltered. A series of sculptural rooflights capture sunlight at particular times of day relevant to the clients’ routine. Guest bedrooms are organised to provide semi-private accommodation for visiting friends and family. The courtyard is clad in gold pre-patinated copper, and the rooflights decorated yellow and orange, to provide twinkles of sunlight on overcast days.
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Paper The Sedimentation of Memory 2010
Sharr A. Journal of Architecture, 15:4 (2010), 499-515. Reprinted Journal of Architecture Anniversary Special, 23:5 (2018), 780-796.
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This paper explores how architecture can embody the past. In the context of Berlin— the site of much prominent contemporary memorial architecture—it examines one project in detail: Reitermann and Sassenroth’s widely overlooked Chapel of Reconciliation, completed in 2000. This building, I argue, demonstrates a distinctive and critically acute approach to memory. Unlike the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenmann, and the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, which are projects that make worlds-unto-themselves—and unlike the work of Carlo Scarpa in Verona, or Sverre Fehn at Hamar, or Peter Zumthor in Cologne, where layers of history are conspicuously displayed one-on-top-of-the-next—the Chapel displays a sedimentary approach to the past. This sedimentation is not an outright rejection of history; nor does it suggest that history proceeds as a single, linear narrative. While the Chapel’s architecture may not have immediate visceral impact, its thoughtfulness and subtlety repay careful scrutiny. The chapel is read here as a cultural artefact, its organisation and details examined in relation to its specific historical, physical and intellectual contexts.
Quality out of Control: Standards for Book Measuring Architecture 2010 Dutoit A., Odgers J. and Sharr A. (eds) Routledge
Formerly grounded in values of craftsmanship, in the skilled making of products, ‘quality’ is now associated with the management of administrative or technical processes. Its appreciation, once based in the exercise of individual judgement and taste, is now often founded on supposedly objective systems of evaluation. Practitioners of design are under pressure to quantify ‘quality’, but it is questionable whether it is possible or even desirable to do so. This book considers this important issue, looking at how quality is defined, appreciated, evaluated, managed and produced. With contributions from eminent architects and architectural critics, this book is for architects, academics, students and anyone interested in what architectural quality is, and how it may be achieved.
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Paper Selective Memory: Contesting 2010 Architecture and Urbanism at Sharr A. Potsdam’s Stadtschloss and Alter Markt German Life and Letters, 63:4 (2010), 398-416
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This paper is about the curious phenomenon whereby GDR-era modernist buildings in Germany are being demolished and substituted with new buildings which appear older than those they replace. The most famous example is the ‘reconstruction’ of Berlin’s Stadtschloss on the site of the GDR’s Palast der Republik. This discussion concerns a lesser-known project: the ‘reconstruction’ of Potsdam’s Stadtschloss. The project involves re-housing the Brandenburg ‘Landtag’ in a new structure with classical façades which replicate the Prussian palace that formerly stood on the site, and densifying the surrounding district in order to return it to an approximation of the pre-war layout. The Stadtschloss building will be a concrete-framed structure - like the modernist buildings to be demolished - but this time faced with classical decoration in brick and stone. The paper argues that this project displays a strange insecurity about the present and a desire to return to some nostalgic image of the ‘olden days’, replacing the recent past with a looser image of an older past. It concludes by discussing a polemical counter-proposal which seeks to make current values apparent architecturally as another historical layer in the city fabric. It argues against the selective removal of previous architecture, recommending instead that multiple interpretations and the images of multiple pasts might co-exist simultaneously.
Drawing in Good Faith Paper 2009
Sharr A. Architectural Theory Review, 14:3 (2009), 71-85.
This paper introduces measured drawings that record the inhabitation of domestic interiors. It locates them in the tradition of measured drawing and explores their particular theoretical provenance in Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “the everyday” and Martin Heidegger’s conception of 'building' and 'dwelling'. Expert drawings, but recording non-expert design, they are questioned in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about taste, competence and virtuosity. It is concluded that, while these drawings come from the professional realm and follow professional conventions, they criticise the boundaries and priorities of architectural expertise. In this way, they involve drawing in good faith. Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
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Project House at Ingoldingen 2010
Adam Sharr Architects with Gapp u. Gapp Architekten New house near Biberach, Germany Client: Bernhard and Claudia Schmid Exhibited National Assembly of Wales 2008, and WashingtonAlexandria Architecture Center, USA, 2010.
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Project 2010 A new house for a musician, a biochemist, and their two boys, on a serviced plot among other new houses on the edge of the small village of Ingoldingen, which has a distant view of the Alps on a clear day. The house has a music room for teaching and home concerts, living and dining spaces suitable for entertaining, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Many people build more-or-less identical kit houses on such plots, but this bespoke house is highly individual - fitting its site and tailored closely to its inhabitants’ needs, from music and cooking to somewhere for planting the basil where slugs can’t reach it. The form addresses specific planning rules establishing the position of the building on the plot, eaves level, the roof pitch and angle and percentage of dormer window possible. It seeks to express an identity simultaneously modern and 'everyday'.
Adam Sharr Architects with Gapp u. Gapp Architekten New house near Biberach, Germany Client: Bernhard and Claudia Schmid Exhibited National Assembly of Wales 2008, and WashingtonAlexandria Architecture Center, USA, 2010.
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Book Series Thinkers for Architects 2007
Sharr A (ed.) Routledge Currently 17 volumes in the series with one more due in 2022. Shortlisted: RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University Located Research, 2008. Reviewed in: Architectural Review, Architectural Record, Building Design.
Architects have often looked to thinkers in philosophy and theory to find design ideas or in search of a critical framework for practice. Yet architects, and students of architecture, can struggle to navigate thinkers’ writings. It can be daunting to approach original texts with little appreciation of their contexts. And existing introductions seldom explore architectural material in any detail. This original series offers clear, quick and accurate introductions to key thinkers who have written about architecture. Each book summarises what a thinker has to offer for architects. It locates their architectural thinking in the body of their work, introduces significant books and essays, helps decode terms and provides quick reference for further reading. If you find philosophical and theoretical writing about architecture difficult, or just don’t know where to begin, this series will be indispensable. Books in the Thinkers for Architects series come out of architecture. They pursue architectural modes of understanding, aiming to introduce a thinker to an architectural audience. Each author in the series – an architect or an architectural critic – has focussed on a selection of a thinker’s writings which they judge most relevant to designers and interpreters of architecture. Thinkers for Architects has proved highly successful, now with over ten volumes dealing with familiar cultural figures whose writings have influenced architectural designers, critics and commentators in distinctive and important ways. The series continues to expand, addressing an increasingly rich diversity of contemporary thinkers who have something to say to architects.
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‘[…] a valuable addition to any studio space or computer lab’ — Ian Volner, Architectural Record ‘Each unintimidating book makes sense of the subjects’ complex theories.’ — Building Design ‘[…] a creditable attempt to present their subjects in a useful way’ — Timothy Brittain-Caitlin, Architectural Review
Heidegger for Architects Book 2007
Sharr A. Routledge
Informing the designs of architects as diverse as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, Hans Scharoun and Colin St. John Wilson, the work of Martin Heidegger has proved of great interest to architects and architectural theorists. The first introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy written specifically for architects and students of architecture introduces key themes in his thinking, which has proved highly influential among architects as well as architectural historians and theorists. This guide familiarizes readers with significant texts and helps to decodes terms as well as providing quick referencing for further reading. This concise introduction is ideal for students of architecture in design studio at all levels; students of architecture pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in architectural theory; academics and interested architectural practitioners. Heidegger for Architects is the second book in the new Thinkers for Architects series. Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
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Project House at Llethr 2007
Adam Sharr Architects with Ian Standen New house in the Wye Valley Client: Mary and Michael Elster Shortlisted: RIBA Awards 2007 Reviwed: Touchstone: The Magazine for Architecture in Wales Published in Temple N. and Bandyophay S. (eds.), Thinking Practice (London: Black Dog, 2007) and Touchstone
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Project 2007
Adam Sharr Architects with Ian Standen New house in the Wye Valley Client: Mary and Michael Elster Shortlisted: RIBA Awards 2007 Reviwed: Touchstone: The Magazine for Architecture in Wales 'The clients are totally enamoured with it. It meets all their needs and more. It expresses who they are. It's operationally very efficient in its plan and use of resources. It's utterly delightful to be inside [...] It is certainly one of those rare pieces of house architecture where exterior and interior with all the furnishing and fittings plus artworks feel utterly comfortable together, and that comes from Sharr's intimate listening to, and understanding of, his clients, and working outwards from that [...] there is not a single first time visitor to Llethr, according to Mary Elster, of whatever age or class who has not gone away musing how thoroughly splendid and uplifting a proper modern architecture can be. That must count for something and be worth celebrating.'
Published in Temple N. and Bandyophay S. (eds.), Thinking Practice (London: Black Dog, 2007) and Touchstone
— Patrick Hannay, Touchstone: The Magazine for Architecture in Wales A new house built for a couple to retire with their books and art. At the end of a country lane above Newbridge-on-Wye, the south-facing site has magnificent views over the Black Mountains, Mynydd Epynt and the Brecon Beacons. The form recalls both the slate-hung gable ends of traditional houses in the locality, and its steel-framed agricultural buildings. The site provides an opportunity for passive solar design, aided by super-insulation, a heat recovery system, and solar hot water heating. The kitchen
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Project House at Llethr 2007
Adam Sharr Architects with Ian Standen New house in the Wye Valley Client: Mary and Michael Elster Shortlisted: RIBA Awards 2007 Published in Temple N. and Bandyophay S. (eds.), Thinking Practice (London: Black Dog, 2007) and Touchstone (Spring 2008).
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Project 2007 and the dining table are central to life in the house. Generous living space and the main bedroom are located on the ground floor to help with mobility in old age. Upstairs, three bedrooms provide for visiting family, plus an office. The house is articulated as two elements. First, a run of service rooms built into the slope in concrete and masonry. Second, a steel- and timber-framed block, pitched-roofed, slate-hung and shelf-lined, containing the main living spaces. These are joined by a north-lit picture gallery. At the entrance, the pitched roof extends beyond the walls to form a porte cochere, framed in steel. The underside is lined with red-stained ply, with oculi - circular openings - for birds to fly through, allowing for summer dining facing the setting sun, and sheltered access in winter. An article on the phenomenology of the house and its environment was published in the book Thinking Practice edited by Nicholas Temple and Soumyen Bandyophay.
Adam Sharr Architects with Ian Standen New house in the Wye Valley Client: Mary and Michael Elster Shortlisted: RIBA Awards 2007 Published in Temple N. and Bandyophay S. (eds.), Thinking Practice (London: Black Dog, 2007) and Touchstone (Spring 2008).
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Book Primitive: Original Matters 2006 in Architecture Odgers J., Samuel F. and Sharr A. (eds.) Routledge
The word primitive is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the west, providing a convenient starting point for the many myths of architecture's origins. Since the almost legendary 1970s conference on the Primitive, with the advent of post-modernism and, in particular, post-colonialism, the word has fallen from favour in many disciplines. Despite this, architects continue to use the word to mythologize and reify the practice of simplicity.
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Primitive includes contributions from some of today’s leading architectural commentators including Dalibor Vesely, Adrian Forty, David Leatherbarrow, Richard Weston and Richard Coyne. Structured around five sections, Negotiating Origins; Urban Myths; Questioning Colonial Constructs; Making Marks; and Primitive Futures, the essays highlight the problematic nature of ideas of the primitive, engage with contemporary debate in the field of post colonialism and respond to a burgeoning interest in the non-expert architecture. This now controversial subject remains, for better or worse, intrinsic to the very structure of Modernism and deeply embedded in architectural theory. Considering a broad range of approaches, this book provides a rounded past, present and future of the word primitive in the architectural sphere.
Creative Industries Business Units, Project Aberystwyth Arts Centre 2006 Adam Sharr Architects with Design Research Unit, Wales Outline design for a series of lightweight, semi-permanent, timber-framed creative incubator spaces located adjacent to Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Client: DCA/ Aberystwyth Arts Centre
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Book Heidegger's Hut 2006
Sharr A. MIT Press Paperback edition, 2017. Winner: Scholarly Illustrated Category, American Association of University Presses Book, Journal and Jacket Show, 2007. Translations into Spanish (GG), German (Brinkmann and Böse), and Czech (Zlin). Reviews: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, TLS, Bookforum, Architectural Record, Cultural Politics, Chronicle of Higher Education (US), Wilson Quarterly. Radio interview with ABC National Radio Australia.
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Beginning in the summer of 1922, philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) occupied a small, three-room cabin in the Black Forest Mountains of southern Germany. He called it 'die Hütte' ('the hut'). Over the years, Heidegger worked on many of his most famous writings in this cabin, from his early lectures to his last enigmatic texts. He claimed an intellectual and emotional intimacy with the building and its surroundings, and even suggested that the landscape expressed itself through him, almost without agency. In Heidegger's Hut, Adam Sharr explores this intense relationship of thought, place, and person. Heidegger's mountain hut has been an object of fascination for many, including architects interested in his writings about 'dwelling' and 'place'. This book - the first substantive investigation of the building and Heidegger's life there - reminds us that, in approaching Heidegger's writings, it is important to consider the circumstances in which the philosopher, as he himself said, felt 'transported" into the work's "own rhythm." Indeed, Heidegger's apparent abdication of agency and tendency toward romanticism seem especially significant in light of his troubling involvement with the Nazi regime in the early 1930s. Sharr draws on original research, including interviews with Heidegger's relatives, as well as on written accounts of the hut by Heidegger and his visitors. The book's evocative photographs include scenic and architectural views taken by the author and many remarkable images of a septuagenarian Heidegger in the hut taken by the photojournalist Digne Meller-Markovicz. There are many ways to interpret Heidegger's hut--as the site of heroic confrontation between philosopher and existence; as the petit bourgeois escape of a misguided romantic; as a place overshadowed by fascism; or as an entirely unremarkable little building. Heidegger's Hut does not argue for any one reading, but guides readers toward their own possible interpretations of the importance of 'die Hütte'.
Book 2006
Sharr A. MIT Press Paperback edition, 2017.
23. The bedroom, with Heidegger emerging from his study. Towels are hung on the back of the door to the Vorraum. A warming pan and picture of a woman in traditional Black Forest clothing are fixed to the wall. (Copyright Digne Meller-Marcovicz.)
24. The bedroom, with the washing table to the right. Flannels hang from a small mirror-fronted cabinet. A toy boat is setting sail on the ocean of the mattress. (Copyright Digne Meller-Marcovicz.)
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'Heidegger's Hut is and is not a book about a hut. It's about how a place inspired a life's work, and how that work inspired modern architectural theory and, to a lesser degree, the sustainability movement. […] Many of the book's photos are posed, though the light is beautiful. The hut has a confidence, a rightness that is oddly indisputable, making even the philosopher's work seem transient' — The Los Angeles Times 'Offering clear and precise structural and phenomenological descriptions of the hut, Sharr gives us access to the habitus that conditioned not only the essential concepts but equally the inimitable style - as richly suggestive for some as it is emptily obscurantist for others - of Heidegger's thinking. It is a beautifully produced book, its verbal account of the hut fleshing out a compelling visual record of its interior and exterior, as well as its surrounding landscape [...] Heidegger's detractors will likely find confirmation in the portentousness of his studied poses; moreover, Sharr's discussion of Heidegger's decision to electrify and install a telephone in the hut provokes the question of whether his talk of "authentic" poetic dwelling was, as Adomo's withering phrase would have it, so much "jargon"' — Josh Cohen, TLS 'As Adam Sharr reveals in his remarkable study Heidegger's Hut, the philosopher's timber-shingled cabin (which had no running water and, at least for the first decade, no electricity) can be interpreted as a locus of contemplation, a romantic escape, and a place where, given the politically problematic nature of Heidegger's writings, fascist over-tones cannot but linger' — Andrea Walker, Bookforum
Winner: Scholarly Illustrated Category, American Association of University Presses Book, Journal and Jacket Show, 2007. Translations into Spanish (GG), German (Brinkmann and Böse), and Czech (Zlin). Reviews: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, TLS, Bookforum, Architectural Record, Cultural Politics, Chronicle of Higher Education (US), Wilson Quarterly. Radio interview with ABC National Radio Australia.
Architectural ways of knowing Histories, cultures, societies Dwelling and experience Cultures of technology Places of learning Identities and diversity Climate emergency Heritage, memory, conservation
8. The hut viewed from a path between Todtnauberg Youth Hostel and the hamlet of Büreten.
9. The hut viewed from across the valley.
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Project Alterations to a Victorian Villa 2004
Adam Sharr Architects Alterations and extensions to a villa in a conservation area, Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan Client: Lucy McCall and David Clarke Published: Touchstone, Summer 2005
An extension to a Victorian villa to open-up the kitchen to the garden, making places for cooking, dining and sitting. A range of sheds blocking the garden from the house was cleared away. The back of the house was propped on steel to open up a corner. Three changes in level from house to garden were consolidated in one place to add spatial drama and make sitting steps. A roof terrace was introduced on top of a small extension offering new views across to the Holm Islands in the Bristol Channel. The result is a series of places tailored around use, which suggest to people how to imagine and re-imagine them. The first inhabitants were two adults, two children and two cats. The room was conceived always with them in mind, the scheme re-worked in conversation to get the best fit of people and building.
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Project 2004
Adam Sharr Architects Alterations and extensions to a villa in a conservation area, Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan Client: Lucy McCall and David Clarke Published: Touchstone, Summer 2005
EXISTING
PROPOSED
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Project Law Department, 2002 London Metropolitan University Project Architect with Wright and Wright Architects Client: London Metropolitan University Published: Architects Journal, February 2006
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The Women's Library Project 2002
Architect/Architectural Assistant with Wright and Wright Architects Lottery funded project for a new library for the Fawcett Trust's collection of Women's suffrage material Client: The Fawcett Trust / London Metropolitan University Published: Architectural Review, January 2002
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Project Golden House, Dottery 1999
Architectural Assistant with Dean Hawkes Architect Extensions and alterations to an existing house in Dorset Client: Robert Golden Published: RIBA Journal, June 1999
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Conservation: Waltham Abbey Project Royal Gunpowder Mills 1997 Architectural Assistant with Carden and Godfrey Architects Conservation masterplan and repairs to 17 buildings Client: Ministry of Defence Published: Architects’ Journal, July 1997
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