Block Magazine Issue 2 Façade by Block Magazine

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architecture etc...

Issue no. 2 Façade Alexander Apóstol Stephen Bates Bernd and Hilla Becher Peter Blundell Jones Pablo Bronstein Nicholas Champkins Julia Chance Phil Coy Gregory Crewdson Rosamund Diamond Bernice Donszelmann Leo Fitzmaurice Foster + Partners Step Haiselden Hawkins\Brown Louisa Hutton Sam Jacob Helmut Jacoby Thorsten Klooster Heike Klussmann Ola Kolehmainen Martin Richman Francis Terry Hans Scharoun Fredrik Torisson Ed Wilson Rob Wilson Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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Issue no. 2 Façade

184_2_Block_Facade_COVER_aw_amend3_Layout 1 04/07/2011 18:05 Page 2

Cover Pablo Bronstein, Design for a Villa, Ink on paper in artist’s frame, 2010, 112 x 88cm © the artist, Courtesy Herald St, London Endpapers Ed Wilson, Milton Keynes, 2211, 2011 ©Ed Wilson

The next issue of Block will take as its theme: Commerce

Issue no. 2 Façade This, the second issue of Block, takes as its theme ‘Façade’, offering a good chance to wallow in the pleasures of the overtly superﬁcial, whilst digging a little deeper, throwing the possible readings, constructions, and deceptions behind this traditional ‘front’ of architecture into high relief. As a term its use is rarer now in both day-to-day architectural business and theoretical discourse, usurped by talk of the skin and the envelope – terms that appear to have morphed fully formed out of it, cleansed of all perceived negative connotations that the husk of ‘façade’ still holds – of empty, superﬁcial old hierarchies. ‘Façade’ has been a compromised term in architecture for over a century, ever since, post-Freud, it became de rigueur to question formalised, constructed faces to the world – even for buildings, and particularly those that referenced the past. The insincerity of plastering a dead language over the face of a building seemed clear, when, with form following function, buildings (in theory) could wear their whole structure on their sleeve, whilst glass walls opened up a supposedly more honest approach to dwelling. When in 1922 Edith Sitwell chose Façade as the title for a sequence of poems detailing highly eccentric characters and using near nonsensical language, its adaptation as a performance piece – seeing Sitwell stentoriously reciting each poem, set to the music of William Walton, through a megaphone issuing from a huge mouth – appeared to sum up the word in all its fey, clunky affectedness. A sensibility later echoed when façades were picked up, played with and pasted on by post-modernism. But it is the more loaded and useful a term because of, rather than despite, the host of complex baggage and possible meanings it carries, positive and negative, many of which are explored here. This issue of Block gets under the skin of this rather unfashionable term, whether taken at face value, as identity: stereotypically windows for eyes, door for mouth; as surface: the ubiquitous glazed wrapping of the contemporary city; or as screen: plucking away at building’s borrowed plumes. Many thanks to everyone who contributed.

CONTENTS 4 FACING CINECITTÀ Bernice Donszelmann 8 NOTES (EXCERPTS) Leo Fitzmaurice 10 SANSOVINO’S LIBRARY Francis Terry 12 MATERIAL CUT Interview with Phil Coy

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (26), 2009 pigmented inkjet print, 72.4 x 89.5cm framed ©the artist, Courtesy White Cube

14 MODERNIST ABSTRACTION: HANS SCHAROUN AND THE HANGING WALL Peter Blundell Jones 18 SURFACES, MEMBRANES AND BOUNDARIES Thorsten Klooster and Heike Klussmann 20 PERMANENCE Stephen Bates

24 BERLIN IM LICHT 1928 25 LIGHT AND IMAGINATION IN THE CITY Martin Richman 26 RESIDENTE PULIDO Alexander Apóstol 29 E2 CAPRICCIO Rob Wilson

30 THE POLITICS OF THE ENVELOPE Alejandro Zaera-Polo

40 DOUBLE TAKE Louisa Hutton

50 FULL FRONTAL Interview with Pablo Bronstein

33 SIBERIAN FANCIES Nicholas Champkins

42 THE FAÇADE OF THE ARCHITECT Julia Chance

54 IMAGE PROBLEM Sam Jacob

34 BERLINER STADTSCHLOSS: CREATING A PAST FOR THE FUTURE Fredrik Torisson

44 GRID OPERATION: RECLADDING PARK HILL

56 DRAWING TRANSPARENCY Willis Faber & Dumas Building

46 ON FAÇADES IN THE CITY Rosamund Diamond with Step Haiselden

58 DARK FAÇADE Rob Wilson

37 UNTITLED WORKS Ola Kolehmainen

Contact details mail@blockmagazine.co.uk www.blockmagazine.co.uk Editor Rob Wilson Deputy Editor Ed Wilson Editorial Assistant Hannah Burgess Art Direction and Design Katya and Ellie Duffy Published by Block Publishing 30 Knighton Road, Forest Gate, London E7 0EE Subscriptions subscriptions@blockmagazine.co.uk Advertising advertising@blockmagazine.co.uk The views expressed in Block are not necessarily those of the publishers or editors. Articles or contributions submitted for possible publication will be considered, but it is advisable to contact Block beforehand with an outline. Whilst every effort will be made to safeguard unsolicited mss, images or other material submitted, the Editors will not accept responsibility for loss or damage. ©2011. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. Printed by Micropress Printers Limited, Suffolk on 100% recycled paper. ISSN 2042-4485

Material Cut The artist Phil Coy talks to Block about his recent film Façade, which he describes as ‘a journey through a topography of contemporary glass architecture.’

What interested you in looking at glass architecture? Phil Coy My interest grew parallel with a commission for a glass façade I received three years ago for a new building in Lewisham. Until then I had a pretty pedestrian knowledge of architecture which grew considerably on seeing what’s involved in planning and constructing a building. I became fascinated with the intricacies and language of the architectural process – it’s like a foreign language – but also slightly obsessed by the prevalence of glass architecture today. It seems to have so many perceived functions in contemporary culture – both actual and notional. But as a subject it’s so full of complexities, contradictions and tensions that it seemed to warrant making a film. Which became almost a companion piece to the commission. Do you see parallels between the process of architecture and film-making? PC Well particularly in terms of how a large scale production is managed both as a spectacle and as a process. But also I came to film-theory from the practical side – as an editor – and the work of Sergei Eisenstein and his theories on editing and film language always interested me. So when I found parallels between his work and that of the early modernist architects, it was like a gift.

In particular you’ve said Façade was in part suggested by Eisenstein’s unmade film The Glass House. PC Yes – this was a film project that Eisenstein developed after going to Berlin in March 1926 for the premiere of The Battleship Potemkin. He visited the sets of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it was a sort of polemical response to that film but also to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Bruno Taut. In 1930, he took the film to Hollywood – but it was never made. So I began to think that a contemporary film concerning glass façades could perhaps reimagine and transmit some of Eisenstein’s original intentions and critique – the visions of flawed utopias and polarised theories that he developed for it. It seems that so many of the concerns and dialogues of the pioneers of modernism are in a way still around, just rebranded. Façade starts by using archive footage from the 1920s… PC Yes, it’s of plate glass manufacture at Pilkingtons I found with the help of the BFI. There are the obvious metaphors between the cutting of glass sheets and the cutting and editing of film, but I also liked the tone of triumphal utilitarianism used to herald the technological advance in materials. This feeling then dissolves progressively into a much more

muffled, unreal world in the main body of the film, which you shot in a green screen television studio using as a backdrop a CGI cityscape of unbuilt glass buildings. PC I wanted to give a sense of the opposite of this physicality of glass production – the closeness and affinity that working people had to materials once, compared to now with the aestheticised almost immaterial quality of surface in contemporary glass buildings which seems to mimic CGI visualisations. So I worked with Miller Hare, who are architectural visualisation specialists, and they created the high definition digital animations and the cityscape of unrealised London towers. The figure of the young woman who appears in the film is dressed totally in white – she seems a bit like a patient in a sanatorium. PC Yes – it sort of parallels imagined inmates of buildings like Aalto’s Sanatorium in Turku – but I was more trying to make her costume and movements appear like a generic CGI figure – an animated architectural model made flesh. Why did you ask the newsreader Julia Somerville to be the narrator? PC Hers is a voice that is embedded in millions of people’s psyche – one that is supposedly objective. I was interested in how

it has somehow become a material in itself – something that by being so defined, becomes in a sense a commodity, sellable – like property. This seemed to throw up interesting parallels between the construction of property and the construction of language. I suppose I saw the film as an exercise in the taking apart of a practice or system – filmmaking, architecture – in which everything is highly controlled. Even the actress acts a bit like an automaton, following the narrated direction. PC I think I nearly drove her crazy during filming! But this breaking down and taking apart of a medium – of questioning, almost destroying, a way of working comes from my interest in 1970s Structuralist film

theory, which focused on working with process and material, exploring it for its own sake. I wanted to test and translate the conceptual ideas explored then with film, using digital technology. Façade as the title for the film is a word you seem to identify with artifice – either that of false architecture or a layer of presentation, of something covering up another reality – as with the focus on the actress being made-up. PC It was just a working title which seemed to touch on many of the associations I wanted to explore in the film, but which in the end remained ambiguous enough as a word to retain.

Phil Coy is an artist who lives and works in London. Above Phil Coy, Stills from Façade 2010, 35 mins/colour and black and white/5.1 Sound/16:9 Façade was shown as part of the exhibition Façade: Through a Glass Darkly at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, UK (March 18–July 10, 2011), curated by Rob Wilson developed from an original idea by Grainne Sweeney. Façade is a single projection film, commissioned by Arts Council England through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network, Whitstable Biennale and Futurecity, with co-support from the BFI National Archive, National Glass Centre, Miller Hare, Pilkington Group Ltd and Foggo Associates. Coy is a Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network’s (FLAMIN) Productions Fund award winner, 2010–11.

Linocuts by onlab showing two functions at the nano level of a surface Top Photo-induced catalytic reaction, (NANO Technical Background) Above Touch screen, (INFORMATION Technical Background) from the book Smart Surfaces, and their Application in Art and Design, Thorsten Klooster (Ed.), Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 2009, pp. 79 and 143 ©onlab

Surfaces, Membranes and Boundaries Thorsten Klooster and Heike Klussmann consider how research into the technical properties of the edges and faces of materials, is unlocking new functional applications for design

oundary surfaces determine the reality of the new materials are therefore determined now by their micro world we live in. They define and catalyse the and nano scale properties as well as by their visual and processes of life, as cellular membranes, skin, the physical macro ones. In design and the arts, design theorist immune system, or between different ecological Ramia Mazé describes this ‘strategy of enlivenment’ as a fields. Phenomena at material boundaries play a role in many change of focus from the appearance of a material to the important areas, whether visible and usable in daily life or performance of surfaces: ‘As structural, chemical and removed from sight in the applied natural sciences, computational properties are integrated at nano-, micro- and nanotechnological materials research, or at the level of macro-scales, even the most traditional material might biotechnological and chemical processes (catalysis, filtration, become more dynamic.’ Along with the Italian material electrophoresis). Connections to the production of art and researcher Ezio Manzini, we can speak of a technologisation architecture show up in the material appearances of surfaces, of materials, which increasingly allows designers to in their media representations in photography, film, and determine their behaviour in advance, rather than simply digital image media, but also in experiences of indifference taking it into account. In seeming sobriety, material technology research is like Duchamp’s concept of ‘inframince’, which is the almost imperceptible separation (or ‘simultaneous delay’) between concerned with what it simply calls the function of a surface. In a technical respect, we are pursuing the approach of two adjacent events or states. In architecture, terms like façade and shell designate many- a functionalisation of surfaces. This could for instance be faceted situations. With his statement about the house as a a protective function, but could also refer to an energygenerating function, or to light-generating second skin extending our sensory or information-providing surfaces. Out system, Michel Serres has been one of of this, a classification structure for the clearest in expressing the idea of the ‘God made the bulk, surfaces divided into the categories of envelope or shell of a building as a the surface was invented Nano, Energy, Light, Climate and significant synthetic extension to our Information could be deduced as a next bodies, that aids us in relating to our by the devil.’ step. These terms allow the technological surroundings. Here, concepts of the Wolfgang Pauli characteristics to be ordered in a membrane and the surface stand for a quantum physicist, 1900–58 meaningful manner, whilst at the same system’s openness, while concepts of the time describing their current application boundary stand for its closure. In fact, the prospects for both research and design. permeability of the shell is an essential measure of the relationship to the environment. Our Design strategies that are appropriate for surfaces arise from fundamental ability to live is determined by this degree of this congruence. A discussion of surfaces permits inclusion connection, quite apart from the state of technology, culture, of the term skin, together with the principles, material and mastery of nature: we maintain ourselves as closed concepts and philosophies on which it is based (from an engineering science, building construction and design point systems by being open systems. In the design of objects and spaces, considerations of view). For the significance of the term ‘surface’ is the same as far concerning surfaces are generally understood to be a decision as technical research and design are concerned, and on on materiality. According to the words of Nobel Prize Winner Wolfgang account of this versatility, the word lends itself particularly Pauli, ‘The material is divine’. With current debate, the design well to making a broad spectrum of current developments in and development of so-called ‘divine’ materials based on the other disciplines accessible to design. Helpfully also, the concept of surface furthermore has a principles of biological growth, or the simulation of the physical forces that act upon them, enables us to produce meaning in the humanities, and in the arts, thus making complex geometries that recall myriad living systems – on important, yet disparate, contents accessible. Surface has which they were often modeled in the first place. This can become the arena in which both the status quo and the often approximate to living systems’ ways of functioning, improvement of substances can be represented. It has become without actually achieving it. Hence there is something here an interdisciplinary space of negotiation. of an unfulfilled promise, but one which the investigation of surfaces touches upon – with the inherent possibilities of Heike Klussmann is an artist based in Berlin and a Professor at “enlivening” materials by taking the surface as a starting the School of Architecture, University of Kassel. Thorsten Klooster is an architect based in Berlin and author of the book Smart point both conceptually and technically. At present, materials research has arrived at the molecular Surfaces, and their Application in Art and Design, Birkhäuser level, on which electrostatic natural forces dominate over the Verlag, Basel, 2009. Together they head the BlingCrete Research forces of gravity and inertia relevant on the macro level. Many Group for Surface Design.

PERMANENCE Stephen Bates reﬂects on solidity and the making of enclosure in architecture

t seems necessary to place one’s work as an architect within the frame of architectural culture, to recognise value in its continuity and inheritance and its ability to offer meaning and context in one’s own deliberations on how to act. There is consequently little reluctance on our part to refer directly to precedents or to 2,500 years of architectural history despite the fact that this places us at a point of resistance to much contemporary architectural discourse. The source of this position lies in the ideas of Venturi absorbed at a pivotal point in our development as architects and later fuelled by the Smithsons who referred to ancient architecture in their exploration of an appropriate modernism. Motivation and inspiration have since come from the lineage of teacher-architects we encountered in Germany and Switzerland, as well as the friends and colleagues operating in studios in Zurich, London, Flanders and Lisbon. Architectural culture has historically regarded permanence as one of its underlying qualities providing an atmosphere of comfort, security and protection. However in the modern consumerist world this is no longer the case. Change, replacement, transience and speed influence every aspect of our lives but the question of how architecture should engage with this reality remains. This is a challenge every architect has to meet. The task of making an enclosure of wall, window and room – central to the role of the architect and the focus of this paper – requires the development of a position in this regard. In recent years we have sought to decipher for ourselves the subjective and technical art of making an enclosure. Our interest in giving a magnified presence to material and surface, familiar shape to objects, making adjustments to reflect the specificity of place and making rooms with character, leads us consistently to speculate upon notions of permanence and to articulate a frame of ideas to provide rigour and discipline in the making of work. It is now convention that the contemporary building façade is multi-layered and that the solid monolithic wall has

gradually slipped into obsolescence. As technology has developed and the needs for environmental insulation and waterproofing have become pronounced, the contemporary façade has become recognisable as a series of separate layers; a load-bearing inner layer, or structure to be infilled, a heat retaining lining, and a thin weatherproof outer layer or cladding to protect the building and deflect wind and rain. But environmental concerns and technology apart, it is the legacy of modernism that fully exploited the separation of the wall from the structure and contributed to making it conventional building practice. Modernism’s interest in this separation of architectural skin and bone was motivated by the opportunities it offered for a more abstract formal evolution of openings and surfaces. The dubious ethical preoccupation with honesty or truth that followed, and which then justified a late-functionalist consciousness to express everything or to relate form only to function, was perhaps more about the recurring anxiety of architects over the intangible character of form-making and the need to find rules to control form and composition. But when such limiting disciplines are combined with increasing economical thrift, the formal expression of the external surface of buildings leads to the reduction of material thickness, with surfaces becoming more flush and open joints displaying generally unfinished edges and the unavoidable dimensional tolerances of the materials. This gives a provisional character to even the most technically resolved building where often the inherent physicality of material is lost, the expression of components dominates and our relationship to enclosure becomes more pictorial than sensorial. Semper’s theory on cladding, an immense and powerful work, written in the 1850s, identified through etymology and historical investigation the difference between cladding and structure. Semper argued that, despite its elemental structure, the wall should manifest itself as a coherent whole and not as a sum of a number of unconnected, interchangeable

elements. Semper’s theory challenged many conventions of architectural discourse at the time, but his work remained centred within a context of unity between engineering and art, between the pragmatics of structure and the wilfulness of composition. It may be argued that since the midnineteenth century these two inter-related disciplines have become separated, with engineering dominating in an obsessive exploration of progress, with the palpable consequences of a one-sided technical optimisation of construction. Semper, consistent with nineteenth-century architectural practice, believed in an artistic basis for form where proportion, order and materiality provide the elements of expression. He followed a tectonic order, to give the façade structural character and structural ornamentation, allowing it to merge with the building to give it unity. We share Semper’s interest in architectural wholeness, where each element of a building is joined together according to tectonic principles, and acknowledge that there should be a natural hierarchy to the elements constituting the object, and an inter-relationship of elements, each sized and joined in accordance with its scale – a top deﬁning the upper edge against the sky, a middle and a bottom, the junction with the roof and ground being expressed differently, the form of the window cill not being the same as that of the lintel. This approach gives us possibilities to express the themes of load-bearing and weight and to realise our instinctive ambition towards achieving a sense of permanence in the buildings we design. Designing

the façade in relief, with steps and setbacks, and working with the masonry bond, for example, are ways in which a monolithic image is achieved, promising the eye stability and the senses security and safety. This expression of the solidity of the external wall is of course representational, as it is independent of the actual structural system, but we find this a legitimate strategy to adopt in order to achieve material physicality and unified form. This is not a position led by nostalgia for the past but by the desire for continuity with it. Our previous work with lightweight rainscreen construction also showed an articulation between elements and from these investigations emerged an attitude towards the inner and outer layers of construction and the loose space between. We referred to ‘claddings and linings’, terms learnt from the essays of Loos on interior comfort and quiet exterior urban form, and built projects in which the intricate detail of the outer cladding gave the building an external order, while the interior lining independently enclosed and enveloped the rooms behind. The shift in both geometry and volume between the two interested us and reference to architectural history legitimised it. At Hardwick Hall the seemingly eccentric relationship between the highly formal and geometric façade of the English country house and the collection of variously shaped rooms displayed to us the potential for beauty and mystery by making the façade a mask, refraining from revealing the spatial generosity of the rooms until you find them from the

Above top Robert Smythson (attrib), Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, completed 1597 Above middle Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Feilner House, Berlin, 1828–9 Above Sergison Bates Architects, Home for Senior Citizens, Huise-Zingem, Belgium, 2011 Window elevation, section and plan ©Sergison Bates Architects

E2 CAPRICCIO Prologue to an un-written story

A PPROPRIATELY the house stood ruin-like now. (‘And looks the better for it’, thinks Tom, rather pleased – despite having designed it – viewing it through a fugged up window on the top deck of a Crossrail replacement bus, diverted unexpectedly past and now stuck in backed-up traffic.) Boarding encased its muscular iron-clad base – which had once contained the upper part of the basement gallery space – a somewhat perverse protective layer for such a ruggedly impervious cast-iron skirt, moulded to resemble textured blocks of stone and designed to resist the wash of the lower reaches of the Bethnal Green Road (‘an urban rustic’ Tom had once airily termed it in a magazine interview – ‘alter-modernist mannerism’ he had added for good measure). But this temporary street-level carapace had been there for years now, attracting a seaweed-like tidemark of fluttering, ripped and peeling fly-posters, covering the long forgotten graffiti tags and subBanksy street stencils that were applied liberally in the months after the minor Götterdämmerung marking the Gallery’s final days. Above this, lifted clear, the sheer polished steel flanks of the upper storeys still rose pristine. The massive bronze-framed windows of the first floor Salon that punctured them – imported from Germany at great expense and necessitating a day-long road closure to be winched into place – maintained their sleek blind stare to the City in the distance. Appearing as dark cut-outs – with vast single panes of matt tinted glass – these windows were intended to be reminiscent of the blank openings rendered in pen and ink on eighteenth-century architectural drawings (at least in Tom’s head). They had always made the house look bleakly hollow and empty, even when it was lived in and packed with parties. Now their dead gaze finally reflected the house’s abandonment. Yet this sombreness was somewhat undercut from the roof terrace above, where a mad windswept halo of saplings tilted outwards – the feral offspring of the once neatly espaliered lime hedge – appearing like some sacred grove at the top of a cliff.

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Pablo Bronstein, Jail House, 2010, ink and gouache on paper, 153 x 107.5cm ÂŠthe artist, Courtesy Herald St, London

Full frontal: Artist Pablo Bronstein talks to Block about his drawings, structures and performances – from Piranesi to pissoirs Architectural imagery features strongly in your work. What interests you about architecture? Pablo Bronstein: I’ve always been interested in architecture. But I suppose this interest became more critically charged around the time I went to Goldsmiths, less a purely sycophantic love of buildings and more an interest in what we do when we build, why we build in a certain way. Not just,’Wow! That’s a rather great palace.’ But you didn’t think of becoming an architect? PB Well I studied architecture for about two months at the Bartlett – or not even that – I probably turned up about three times. They told me I didn’t have the patience to be an architect – which is ironic as I spend half my life doing the most stupidly anal drawings. But they were probably right. My reason for wanting to study was based on a misunderstanding of what I was going to do. Architects should be pretty interested in how people live their lives and keen on improving their lot – and I wasn’t. I realised that I didn’t really care about people! Much of the architecture and architectural imagery you depict or quote from is sixteenth- to eighteenth-century classicism, and echoes the work of Piranesi or Boullée. What interests you in this style and its representation? PB It was the golden period of the presentational drawing – in which architecture was deliberately distorted in order to glamorise it – primarily of course for the eyes of a patron. And I’m really interested in the question of who the patron is, what the patron wants and how this is represented or made visible

through an architectural drawing. This feels much clearer – and easier to understand in the eighteenth century than today. You mean now clients are often amorphous institutions? PB Exactly. It may not now be harder ultimately to identify the client, but it’s certainly less visible. The question of why or how someone would want to be represented through architecture interests me. I like how I can in some way create an identity for a client through a drawing. You also draw post-modern buildings and quote from 1980s pastiche classicism. I’m thinking particularly of your 2008 book A Guide to Postmodern Architecture in London. PB A lot of my interest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries comes through my interest in the 1980s when I grew up – through certain things and influences that were around in the culture at the time – Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell – and of course through the architecture. I think the language of classicism is quite useful in talking about and comparing the 1970s to the 1980s, throwing up interesting parallels and oppositions. You mean in its contrast to modernism? PB Well more in the content of postmodern architecture – the way that certain ideas about democracy and civic-ness became sold in quite cynical ways to aid the privatisation of public space. Your drawings of 1980s buildings make them appear to be unoccupied or ruined. They seem to have a quality of either

memorialising the past – as romantic ruin or nostalgic paeon – or of projecting a dystopic future. PB Well of course, it’s partly ironic – anybody who’s been to Canary Wharf and seen No 1 Canada Water can’t feel that sentimental about it. But at the same time, yes, I am very ambivalent about all that postmodern stuff and how some of it looks today – particularly in the light of the huge nostalgia for modernism that has been going on over the last few years. My heart absolutely breaks at the awful developer retro-modernism happening now – it is totally lacklustre in comparison. The architecture and buildings you depict do not in general appear to have an interior life. They appear either as just surface – like the heavily rusticated Jail House, or to be paper-thin – as in Plaza Monument, just empty – like Design for a Villa, or reminiscent of a temporary stage set. Can you talk about this emphasis on the exterior and the façade? PB You’re right many of the drawings are of just flat façades – like the drawings I did of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for my exhibition there in 2009. I am interested in architectural surface but more I suppose in ornament, and particularly in the prefabricated ornament from the later eighteenth century. I mean I do like Hawksmoor but at the moment I’m really drawn to the later architectural pattern books that developed – those catalogues of standardised ornament that showed that, you know, you can have it this way, or this way. It’s almost like a minimalist gesture. That was the idea for my book Ornamental