AWP towards a climate
Impermanence BY ROWAN MOORE
All buildings are temporary, said Cedric Price, but some are more temporary than others. He was right – for all that architecture seems to be about completion, certainty, fixity and permanence, buildings are subject to physical and perceptual change and eventual disappearance. In saying this Price articulated a central theme of the reaction to classical modernism which, from Archigram to Parametricism, has been going on now for more than a half-century. What these movements have in common is a desire to animate the infuriating massiveness of built form, to design for dynamism and change.
Rowan Moore is architecture critic of The Observer. He was formerly director of the Architecture Foundation, London, architecture critic of the Evening Standard, and editor of Blueprint. He was a founding partner of ZMMA architects. His book Why We Build, about the interaction of architecture and human desires, was published by Picador in September 2012.
AWP also talk about impermanence and instability, but in different ways. They give priority to the idea of “climate”, of sensory and perceptual experiences that are fundamental to the inhabitation of the built environment, but often overlooked. AWP’s materials include, without privileging one over another, vegetation, light (artificial and natural), water, sound, temperature, the space between objects, and composition, as well as the more usual concrete, steel and timber. They are not afraid to create fixed structures, but always as means to an end, as instruments for enabling certain kinds of inhabitation or atmosphere. They work with instability that is both actual – the fact that a space might be occupied and altered in unforeseen ways – and perceptual, the creation of buildings that look as if they might fall over or evanesce, but don’t. AWP’s masterplan for La Defense raises the radical prospect that these concepts can be applied to a project costing over 300 million euros, and to a huge and apparently intractable megastructure. The subtle substances with which AWP work might seem delicate for such a situation but, in a place where rigidity is the problem, they are essential. Nor should an appearance of fragility obscure the fact that there is an underlying toughness in the architects’ approach. The work at La Defense was to some degree anticipated by two previous projects, the renovated park for the Lille Metropole Modern Art Museum, and the series of pavilions designed (with the Swiss practice HHF) for the Parc des Bords de Seine in Poissy. The two have a similar purpose, to create within a given territory a range of atmospheres, a climate, but they use opposite means. Whereas, in Poissy, a series of distinctive pavilions are to be constructed, the architects’ involvement in Lille is, at a casual glance, close to invisible – it is a matter of editing and re-orienting, of eliminating as much as adding, of disposition, planting and lighting rather than building new structures. In Poissy “follies” will be disposed across the landscape, some of them serving purposes such as restaurants and a visitor centre, some of them with no more function than to be places from which to look at the view, or to be explored in their own right. With their pitched roofs, they refer to some kind of domestic normality, almost-gemutlich, but they also have an uncanny hollowness. They are made to look as if their structure “doesn’t really work,” as Alessandra Cianchetta says, “as if they might fall”. They are ambiguous too, part suburban house, part tower, partly referring to the barges and aquatic structures in the nearby river Seine. This is instability in its perceptual form.
/ 26
la dĂŠfense paris, fr
/ 27
/ 28
Through repetition of their quasi-generic look, and through their spacing, the follies create frames for their environment. Like framing and composition in art, they provoke interaction. Or, better, and to use a comparison liked by AWP, they resemble framing in movies, in that they encourage particular ways of seeing and moving through a place. Cianchetta cites cinematic framing as an inspiration for the Lille park, in particular by Antonioni in Blow Up, and in his long slow tracking shot in The Passenger, which moves from inside to out to in. At Lille the role of the park is to be an outdoor gallery for artworks, that extends and complements the museum’s indoor collection, and so the vegetation is seen as a green/grey, “monochrome” equivalent of the white walls of galleries, “neutral enough to make the sculpture stand out, but also vibrate”. It was a matter of “redefining the topography”, of eliminating distractions, and choosing new plants for their textures, their qualities of light, and the sounds they make in the wind. Together the aim is to make a “hyper nature” or a “more intense nature”. “Plants are just another material,” says Cianchetta, “like concrete, leather, or cashmere.” Decisions you might not notice have a profound effect: the sculptures, for example, are not lit directly, which gives them a ghostly presence at night. Architecture here is something that overlaps with other disciplines, with film, art, landscape design, and couture. It is something that can be experienced obliquely, without knowing it is there, even as the option is also used, as with the Poissy structures, of making it visible. And then there is their fascination with night, manifest in a book, in an exhibition and in their concern with nocturnal environments in the Lille park and other projects. At La Defense they promise to make out of artificial light “a structure in its own right”, “an architectural and urbanistic gesture”, “a luminous environment”. Where classical and modernist architectural discourse habitually favours sunlight, AWP are fascinated by the creation, through artificial light, “of a temporary city, a temporary space, and a particular form of nature, at a particular time.” The La Defense masterplan combines concrete and pragmatic proposals, such as the recovery of tens of thousands of square metres of forgotten space, with techniques for structuring the intangible, such as lighting and the particular atmosphere of the place (“ a lot of air, wind, minerality; not welcoming but not suffocating.”) Impermanence is embraced, but not in the Archigram way of making buildings walk. Rather it is understood both that some parts of habitable space are more slow-moving than others, and how much of architecture exists in addition to the fixed and solid. The important question is how these elements – slow, fast, hard, soft, intangible, solid – interact.
Rowan Moore. London, UK. July 2013.
/ 29