Journal of Civic Architecture Issue 5

JoCA

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5 On Drawing and Painting Birkin Haward 13 Drawing Ideas Birkin Haward and Patrick Lynch 21 Houses of Work and Play Patrick Lynch 47 The Idea of Álvaro Siza Mark Durden and João Leal 53 Pritzker Prize Citation for Siza Vittorio Gregotti 57 Bachelard, Bakhtin and the Architectural Colonic Casper Laing Ebbensgaard with Rut Blees Luxemburg 65 Factory, Utopia Dennis Goodwin 69 A City Without a City Fulvio Orsenigo 79 The Walker Art Museum William Tozer 85 Work and Leisure in One Building Matthew Wells 95 The Project Is a Story Jacques Lucan (translated by Oscar Mather) 97 Upstairs to Bed Thaddeus Zupancic 103 Cultural Responsibility, Design and Design Education John Meunier 107 aeiou by Tom de Paor Douglas Carson 111 Powerhouses Ellis Woodman 112 Poems Alex Niven

Editor’s Letter Patrick Lynch

One very obvious distinction, between a traditional and a modern understanding of human life, is made by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1964). Whilst Marx defined the human animal as one who labours, Aristotle’s description is of the species who works, speaks and acts. This distinction is crucial for Arendt’s argument that reflective work, what the ancients called vita contemplativa, is as important for the sustainment of meaningful human existence as vita activa, associated with cities and towns. Arendt is in part continuing an argument for the primacy of the creative role of villas and monasticism in culture, an argument that Pliny, Virgil, St Benedict and Petrarch had made, whilst accepting a degree of difference between the otium (pleasure) of country living, and the negotiations of urban politics. She was also arguing for something else: for awareness of a political dimension of human work that extends beyond materialism; for the power of human capital in excess of measurements of material production; and for the force of rhetoric and self-understanding within the theatrical, psychic dimension of public life. The capacity of crowds for revealing what she famously called “the space of appearance”, where humans recognise their own and other’s Being.

In our current predicament, six weeks into a partial pandemic-induced Lockdown in London, where I am writing today, the significance of large bodies of people cannot be over estimated, in particular their lethal capacity for danger. Elias Canetti’s words, at the beginning of The Power of Crowds (1962), are palpably prophetic today: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown... All the distances that men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses, which no-one may enter, and only there feel a measure of security.” The only way to eliminate this fear of being touched, he suggests, apart from via sexual attraction, is to integrate oneself into a crowd. “The crowd he needs is a dense crowd”, Canetti continues, not a restaurant or shop or bar, but “dense... so that’s he no longer notices who it is that presses up against him... the more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other... the feeling of relief is most striking when the density of crowds is greatest.” Canetti distinguishes though between Open and Closed crowds, however. The former is spontaneous, whist the latter, “has a boundary.

It establishes itself by accepting its limitations. It creates a space for itself that it will fill... once the space is completely filled no one else is let in... those standing outside do not really belong.”

He concludes his book with a study of paranoia, suggesting that the political use of crowds in certain contexts is not to alleviate fear of the unknown, but to actively inculcate it.

I did not mean to stray so fast, nor so far, from the topic of work into a discussion about the malign and benign aspects of crowds, never mind towards the traumatic fear of contagion; but perhaps at the heart of the question of work is a question about identity? Who we make work for is hardly ever addressed in an architectural context: although it is assumed that the work of a professional extends beyond their obligations to any particular employer, beyond financial considerations, to encompass the wellbeing of others, future occupiers and generations, etc.: towards society at large, and even today towards the health of the biosphere. Planning and Building Regulations inscribe these “duties of care” into a form of ethics, a civic code, and you find yourself in practice having to demonstrate explicitly how your work complies with, and is oriented towards, these civic virtues. The compulsion to undertake Good Works arises from reflection St Benedict tells us, but also from daily labour, and in fact the motto of Benedictine communities across the planet is “Ora et Labore” (Prayer and Work). The next issue concerns Spirit, although I think we may have already begun to discuss this topic, more or less explicitly, in the work inside these covers. The message seems clear: Keep Safe. Stay open.

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© 2020 Canalside Press and the authors.

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Editor: Patrick Lynch Designed by Emma Kalkhoven Printed by KOPA, Lithuania British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

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contributors r u t b l e e s l u x e m b u r g is an artist, reader in urban aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, and co-founder and director of FILET—a space for experimental art production www.filetfilet.uk and HI-NOON www.hi-noon.net. Blees Luxemburg’s photographic work about Nicholas Ledoux’s Saline Royale will be shown at Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris in autumn 2020.

Currently residing and working in Jersey. d o u g l as c a r s o n is a graduate of University College Dublin, Douglas is a partner at Carson and Crushell Architects, based in Dublin. Prior to this Douglas Carson and Rosaleen Crushell worked in London for Edward Cullinan Architects, Eric Parry Architects, Woolf Architects and Lynch Architects. Douglas teaches at UCD. m a r k d u r d e n is an artist,educator and writer. Recent books include Fifty Key Writers on Photography (2012), Photography Today (2014), The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory (2019). With Ian Brown and David Campbell, Durden regularly exhibits as part of the artist group Common Culture. Durden is currently Professor of Photography and Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, UK. www.commonculture.co.uk

d e n n i s g o o dw i n

is an artist.

was an Italian architect and writer. He trained at the Politecnico di Milano, and was a contributor and editor-in-chief of Casabella from 1955 to 1963. He was the author of “The Territory of Architecture” (1966), Inside Architecture (1996) and Architecture, Means and Ends (2010).

Gregotti died on March 15th 2020, aged 92, in Milan, following a pneumonia caused by COVID-19. vittorio gregotti

Photographs of FAUP and Tavora by Mark Durden and João Leal (p 32 bottom), David Grandorge (20, 26 bottom, 27, 30 38, 40, 42-45), Patrick Lynch (p 22, 23, 24, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41) and Claudia Lynch (p 25, 26, 28, 29, 32 top, 33); Saline royale (p 66) by Antoine Seguin (CC licence); Apple Park (p 66) by Travis Wise (CC licence); Le Corbusier Unité d’Habitation of Berlin (p 94) by Golliday (CC licence); Fosters images by Tim Street-Porter (p 84, 91-92), Norman Foster (86), Ken Kirkwod (p 88), Gregory Gibbon / Foster + Partners (p 89); Harvard Center by John Meunier (p 102); S. Marco De Canaveses by Andy Laurie; Leça da Palmeira and Quinta da Conceição by David Grandorge; Walker Art Center (p 78) by Mark B. Schlemmer (CC licence). All other photographs by the authors.

Thanks to all the contributors.

Cover image: Kings Lynn Docks 4, Birkin Haward, 2018 Previous spread: The Captive’s View, Saline Royale, Rut Blees Luxemburg, 2019

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b i r k i n h awa r d was born in Ipswich in 1939 and although drawn to painting as a career went to the AA 1958–63. After stints with Douglas Stephen and Tom Hancock he joined Foster Associates in 1968 leaving in 1982 having worked on most of the practices major projects over that period.

In 1983 together with Jo van Heyningen he formed van Heyningen and Haward Architects doing mainly cultural, heritage and educational projects. He became a consultant in 2009 to allow more time for painting. In 2011 he joined the Beardsmore Gallery and has now had six one man exhibitions in London and Norfolk. c as p e r l a i n g e b b e n s g a a r d is a cultural geographer. His research explores the affective and aesthetic politics of the urban night, particularly in relation to

high-rise architecture and how people come to inhabit the vertical city. He currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. is an artist and teacher. He is a full time professor in the Department of Image Arts of the Polytechnic of Porto ESMAD and member of the UNIMAD research unit. In 2005 he won ex-aequo the Pedro Miguel Frade award, from the Portuguese Centre of Photography, with the work Night Order. In 2018 he won the aquisition award of the XX Cerveira Biennale. www.joaoleal.pt

edition of the letters of Basil Bunting for Oxford University Press, and preparing a poetry collection, Newcastle, Endless, for Canalside Press. He lives with his family in Newcastle upon Tyne and teaches English Literature at Newcastle University.

joão leal

is an architect and academic based in Paris. He is a professor at the School of Architecture in Paris-Belleville and at EPFL. He was editor-in-Chief of the journal ArchitectureMouvement-Continuité (AMC) from 1978 to 1988, and is the author of a number of books including Composition, noncomposition: Architecture et théories, XIXe - XXe siècles (2009), as well as studies of OMA and Valerio Olgiati. j ac q u e s l u c a n

pat r i c k l y n c h is an architect based in London. He studied at the universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, completing his PhD at The Cass with Peter Carl, Joseph Rykwert and Helen Mallinson in 2015. He has taught at The Architectural Association, the University of Cambridge, The Cass, and since 2017 has been a Visiting Professor at Liverpool University.

He established Lynch Architects in 1997. Patrick is the author of Civic Ground (2017), Mimesis (2015), and The Theatricality of the Baroque City (2011).

is an architect who studied at the Liverpool and Harvard Universities.

He taught Cambridge university for 14 years, during which time he was also a practicing architect responsible, together with Barry Gasson, for several published buildings including the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. In 1976 he was appointed Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. In 1987 he became Dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University, a position he held for fifteen years. He is the author with Patrick Lynch of On Intricacy (Canalside Press, 2020). john meunier

grew up in Northumberland and went to university at Bristol and Oxford. He has written for publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, Pitchfork, The New York Times, The Independent, Novara and Tribune and is the author of four books: Folk Opposition (2011), Definitely Maybe 33 1/3 (2014), The Last Tape (2014) and New Model Island (2019). He is currently finishing off a first alex niven

f u lv i o o r s e n i g o is an architecture and landscape photographer. In 1997 he conceived the collective project Venezia_Marghera, exhibited at the 47 Venice Biennale (1997). Has published with Alessandra Chemollo, the volumes Senzaposa (2004) and Internofuori (2006).

From 2005 to 2009 taught photography at the University of Architecture in Venice.

Co-founder of Fuorivista, a collective of photographers with which has produced and curated the project and the book Sismycity. L’Aquila 2010 (2010), an extensive documentation of the consequences of the earthquake in L’Aquila. w i l l i a m t o z e r is an architect based in London. He holds architecture degrees from the University of Auckland, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the Bartlett, where he completed a PhD on Adolf Loos. m at t h e w w e l l s is an architectural historian who teaches at Kingston and ETH Zurich. He studied architecture at Liverpool University and at The Cass, and worked for Lynch Architects and Eric Parry Architects before studying art history at the Courtauld Institute.

His doctoral research work at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art, explored how architects thought about and used models during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. e l l i s w o o d m a n studied architecture at Cambridge University and The Cass, and after a period in practice joined the magazine Building Design in 2003, ultimately serving as its editor. He is the author of Modernity and Reinvention: The Architecture of James Gowan (2008) and Temples and Tombs: The Sacred and Monumental Architecture of Craig Hamilton (2019). He curated the exhibition Home/ Away in the British Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale. For the past five years he has served as the Director of the Architecture Foundation.

is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He has lived in London since 1991. For the first 14 years he worked as a radio producer with the BBC World Service. He is now about one third through his project, London Modernism, which documents London’s modernist council estates built in the period 1946-1979.

t h a d d e u s z u pa n či č

decorum

On Drawing and Painting Birkin Haward

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Opening page: Hadrians Villa 1, 2018 This page: Snow Wareham Cottages, 2009 Opposite: Sheds and Fence Brancaster, 2010

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o n d r aw i n g a n d pa i n t i n g

I was born into a family where drawing and painting were regular activities, and I did a lot of it; although when it came to the crunch point, I went for an architectural career. I was at the AA from 1958-63, in an interesting year that numbered Jeremy Dixon, Ed Jones, Chris Cross, and Michael Hopkins amongst an extraordinarily interesting group. Teachers at the time included Peter Smithson, Cedric Price, John Killick and Robert Maxwell.

In 1968, I joined Norman Foster, at the very beginnings of what was then called Foster Associates, now Foster and Partners, and I was involved in most of the practice’s main projects up until 1983, including the Willis Faber offices in Ipswich, the Sainsbury Centre at UEA Norwich, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and Stansted Airport. I have to say, looking back, it was an altogether indelible experience. In 1983, I left to form a partnership with my wife Jo van Heyningen, with an office in north London, and until we handed over to our younger partners in 2009, I engaged mainly on a large number of cultural, heritage and educational schemes. I always had the idea, at the back of my mind, that I would take up painting more seriously, while I could, and still wanted to. So, it is now ten years since I stepped back from our architectural practice and pursued a long-term ambition to draw and paint. To begin with, I was fortunate to inherit the naturally-lit studio that we had designed at the top of our house for the early stage of our practice. More problematic, was coming to terms with working in isolation.

At the busiest point of our architectural lives, Jo van Heyningen and I might well have had forty or more people in the office, all requiring support and guidance. Producing buildings involves groups of people in a dynamic and complex relationship, usually working against a tight timetable. So, you are always busy, and surrounded by people. Suddenly, here I was in a quiet sunlight studio, choosing my own subjects and setting my own programme.

I was grateful, at the beginning of my new career, for a generous commission for several large canvasses, which got me started.

I learnt I would have good days, and not such good days, in the course of which I would make all sorts of discoveries, mainly in the development of techniques, but also in the handling of ideas.

For example, it was only after several years that I stumbled across the benefits of working on more than one picture at a time, and I’m still coming to terms with the merits or otherwise of working small, as against working big. Furthermore, after five solo and one shared show, I have come to appreciate the important function that exhibitions have in providing impetus and focus for the work. I’ve also been lucky and enjoy great support from my gallery. I’ve had an idea all along about pushing myself in new directions, although when I’m asked, “how’s it going?”; I usually say, “I feel I haven’t got where I want to be”. It was only recently I began to realise that it might be better if it stayed that way.

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This page: St Martin de Re (Vauban) 1, 2016 Opposite, top to bottom: Villa Marlia, 2014; Entering Wroclaw 4, 2016

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This page: Avebury Blue Transformer 4, 2015 Opposite, top to bottom: Kings Lynn Docks 4, 2018; Norton Creek High Tide, 2019

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Drawing Ideas A conversation between Birkin Haward and Patrick Lynch, February–March 2020

pat r i c k ly n c h : I thought we’d start at the beginning, and talk about how you drew as a child; then how you were taught to draw at the AA (did your father help too?); then how you seemed to do most of the drawings for Foster (?) and in particular the diagram plans of UEA; and did you teach the Cambridge students to draw? And could you say something about your perspectives at van Heyningen and Haward... and the role of the plan in design, drawing AS architecture? And, of course, then we can get onto the work you’ve done over the past decade, hoping to draw out themes and differences between each period perhaps.

This might comprise the main part of the discussion, but we could then meander somewhat and talk about experience, memory, composition, type, architecture as images, paintings as autonomous things and the abstraction of reality, etc.

You could begin by saying something about the role of drawing in your life, starting with your childhood perhaps, or where you are now and working backwards? It needn’t be chronological nor Architecture vs Art... I’m curious, and thus I hope our readers are too, in why you draw: it seems like a compulsion, like a fish swimming or a dog running? b i r k i n h awa r d : Childhood: I was born in Ipswich into a family in which drawing and painting were regular activities. Interesting pictures were on the walls and art books on the shelves. Paper, paint and encouragement were always there. My grandmother Elsie Birkin (1881-1956) was an accomplished painter, both in watercolours and oils and etcher. She was fortunate to be taught in the 1930’s at Ipswich Art School by Leonard Squirrel (1893-1979 ), a fine underrated artist working in the East Anglian Cotman/Chrome tradition. My father Birkin Haward (1912-2002) was an architect and fine draughtsman and my mother Muriel Wright (1913-1956) the youngest of ten children in a family of butchers won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1934 which led to her concentrating mainly on textile design. I have strong memories as a very young child of watching both my parents’ artistic activity. My father was a workaholic and would invariably follow a busy day running a large office by drawing late into the night in his studio at home—a habit he continued all his life. All drawings exhibited his enviable pencil technique—executed fast and with little or no rubbing out and benefitting from his beautiful Isis drawing machine imported from Berlin in the 1950’s together with his precious flat headed drawing pins inherited from his time with Eric Mendelsohn. He also had a very early electric pencil sharpener and he taught me how to turn the pencil as it sharpened. His drawings are wonderful and we still have many of them in his archive in Norfolk.

One of his early passions was a deep interest in gravestones and other funereal monuments which meant as a child I spent many hours in churchyards. It was in this context that I started drawing churches while I hung around together with my siblings, waiting for him. Aged nine I recall flirting with the idea of drawing every church in England.

The AA: The decision about what to do on leaving school echoed my father’s experience thirty years earlier. His main idea in 1928 was to draw and paint but the family thought this was much too precarious.

He was taken to see his uncle, Francis Haward (1879-1950), an architect in Great Yarmouth. He later recalled “a large first floor room overlooking the sea with drawings all around and being told it was a good occupation in which one was unlikely to get rich but one might be happy”. With this in mind I tried for a place at the AA. The AA curriculum in 1958 had been restructured by Peter Smithson, the first year becoming much more of a foundation course with short exercises (I still have all the programmes) in Materials, Colour, Perspective and so on, ending the year in the design of a House in Hampstead. Finding I could draw what I had in mind when others were struggling came as quite a shock, although I recall the tendency towards slickness was countered very forcibly by Bernard Myers who was the sort of art master in the First Year. Taking trees for example, after swallowing some pretty heavy criticism, he showed me how to actually look at them and draw what I saw rather than some sort of fiction; an important turning point, although I still enjoyed sub Piper style in my second year. Although I came into the school with my pencil knowledge, we were taught and expected to use Graphos pens, the forerunner of Rapidographs. These things were temperamental and accident prone and since they were poor at curves encouraged all design in straight lines. I hated them and it wasn’t until the third year that I had the confidence to go back to pencil. Perspectives formed much of my output at the AA and towards the end of my time there I did quite a few freelance drawings principally for the Smithsons, YRM, Colquhoun and Miller and Patrick Hodgkinson.

Fosters: I first met Norman Foster at Patty Hopkin’s Final Thesis critics at the AA in 1968, where he turned in a terrific performance.

Afterwards we all went for a drink at the Bedford and he mentioned he was looking to expand Foster Associates which he and Wendy Foster had set up in the aftermath of Team 4. When I joined in October working out of Wendy’s flat in Hampstead I was the fourth assistant.

I joined the team working on the Olsen Centre in Millwall Dock which went on site the following spring. To begin, under pressure from the working drawing programme, any three-dimensional drawings and 13

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explanatory diagrams were done in the evenings, or at weekends, and even when I started doing them in a more mainstream way, they were always to service the design process. I recall my influences were Gordon Cullen, for his enviable technical skill, and Hergé, for his clean flat colour style. We always used mounted boards for presentations.

They are more personal, less accident prone and allowed us the option of adding to them by hand using markers in front of the client.

I notice that Norman still uses this method, although not exclusively.

Working out the image sequence was done using storyboards, usually developed in meetings with the whole design team. I should add that working through ideas with Norman at any stage of the design, was an exhilarating experience—he is not just a green fingered designer, but has an urgent and compelling sketching style, carried out in his black books, which I always envied. I introduced cartooning using magic markers, where their immediacy, and wide tonal range, could produce the flat colour ground that I was looking for. I realised later that they faded long term. The main problem with doing perspectives, this being the pre-computer age, was setting them up by hand. This took up 80% of the drawing time, and with some projects was extremely difficult.

Emphasising the activity in the perspective, was always of paramount importance; in many cases you hardly saw the buildings at all. Fosters started using computers (together with dedicated technicians, nonarchitects, towards the end of the Stansted job in 1980, too late to help me with all the interiors with their complex roof geometry. When I finally left in 1984, after 15 years, I had been involved in most of the practice’s major projects up to that point, including Willis Faber Dumas, the Sainsbury Centre, the Hongkong Bank, Stansted Airport and so on. Altogether an indelible experience.

p l : That is really interesting. Throughout this there seems to be a tension between “drawing for the sake of drawing” and drawing for presentation purposes, or, perhaps, art vs economic necessity.

When you joined Jo in her practice I get the sense things changed, and that architecture, whilst it was your livelihood, also became your whole life. Could you say something about the role of drawing in this please?

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b h :In

1982 I made the difficult decision to leave Foster Associates, and so I tapered out gradually over the period 1983-4, in order to work with Jo van Heyningen whom I had met at Cambridge (where I had been teaching). She had already set up her own architectural practice, but in parallel we had started doing some things together, and having enjoyed the experience of building our first house in York Rise in London in 1975, we decided to form a partnership.

It offered the prospect of being in complete control, and taking advantage of all that accumulated experience. It also represented a new chapter as far as my drawing life went. Everything I did and had learnt up to now, was now all for us. I also date the desire to take up painting again from this moment. It had been more or less dormant while I was at Fosters, but now I found I wanted to slowly feel my way into it. Looking back, I see this happened over quite a long period, and something told me I only wanted to work in black and white—and for some reason, for several years in fact, I felt quite inhibited about using colour. As far as our office was concerned, I brought to it drawing ideas that I’d developed at Fosters, although there were some technical changes that affected my work at this point. The principle one was in the impact of computers, in which we had now invested, and from the first I could set up rudimentary three-dimensional drawings, which could be traced over, saving so much time. This process became more sophisticated later, using Sketch Up. It seems like a small point, but personally I found the introduction of fibre tipped pens at this time very releasing.

For most of our presentations I photocopied line drawings, diagrams and cartoons onto 150gm cartridge paper, and rendered them in watercolour. It’s interesting to recall that much later we did have the experience of clients discounting these drawings—which I must say I thought were personal, and really much more part of the design— and looking around and asking to see the CGI’s. p l : It’s curious isn’t it that the desire to paint returned when you were working “all for us”. Did you in fact start to paint then? And were these paintings part of the presentation methods of the office?

And did you paint at home too?

I am convinced that the quality of thought that goes into architecture is exactly the same as the quality of drawings and models made, i.e. “design work” is exactly this, work, physical labour and imaginative and intellectual effort. There is no short cut. The computer makes it possible for unskilled designers to produce relatively convincing images quite quickly, but this isn’t the same thing as the tradition of Disegno, the art of design as the art of drawing. Kieran Long used to use the phrase “Sketch-Up Architecture” derogatively, and we are now used to the terrible gulf between CGIs of projects and their often sad, built reality.

I sense that you might agree? A good project has good drawings, but buildings are not drawings?

Opening page: Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Foster Associates Interior Sketch, 1980 This page: NT Dunstable Downs van Heyningen and Haward Concept Sketch, 2007 Opposite: Climatroffice Project Foster Associates Presentation Drawing, 1971

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b h : Talking about painting as distinct from drawing which I clearly never stopped doing, looking back I see that painting went sort of underground working at Fosters. Partly because to paint as I do now needs space and the ability to be able to leave stuff around while it’s in process and so. In this period I was living in small flats with young children which did make painting more or less impossible from a practical point of view. However I do also think, to be honest, it didn’t fit in while I was at Fosters in some way which I can’t explain.

Once Jo and I started working together, there was a sense of release and it did seem a natural thing to want to pick up painting again although it didn’t form part of our presentation approach, except insofar as I have explained elsewhere, and you can see from the illustrations, it did appear in the literally hundreds of line and watercolour drawings I did over the next 20 years. I am now going to have a go at another bit of history.

2009 onwards: I had always had the idea at the back of my mind that I owed it to myself to try and take up painting more seriously. It is now ten years since I stepped back from our architectural practice and pursued the long-term ambition to draw and paint. One of the important factors in making this decision was the prospect of having somewhere proper to do it—inheriting the large, top-lit studio that Jo and I had designed at the top of our house for the early stage of our practice. More problematic, was coming to terms with working in isolation, which to be honest I hadn’t anticipated. It was always a very busy atmosphere in the office. Suddenly, here I was, in a quiet sunlit studio, no phone, no clients, no planning officers, choosing my own subjects and setting my own programme.

From the beginning, one of my main starting points subject wise has been in man-made structures in the landscape, and I’ve always been particularly interested in the impact of what I see as subversive—and in some cases ominous—objects sitting in fields, or beside the road. From the beginning, I found I was drawn to, in no particular order: fences; gates; screens and barriers of various types; old airfields and other wartime structures; hangars; brick and gravel works; power stations; bridges; forts; docks; mausolea; huts; old sheds, and so on. Then I had a period looking at breakwaters, groins and other methods of coastal protection; locks and lock gates, weirs and sluices. I’m not sure how this fits with all that, but running in parallel there has always been an ongoing passion for the Italian landscape, particularly the great gardens where I have found working in black and white gets closer to my feelings for it than colour. Looking at the work as a whole I hope it contributes towards what I have always wanted to support—the idea of a sort of counter narrative— a reaction to the more conventional traditions of the picturesque and pastoral that has dominated landscape art for so long. After five solo shows, and one shared show, I have also come to appreciate the important function that exhibitions have in providing impetus and focus for the work. I’ve also been very fortunate in being taken on by the Beardsmore Gallery, who have been unfailingly supportive and helpful, and to all the friends and strangers who, to my astonishment, seem to want to have my work, and with whom I’ve had extraordinary conversations. I’ve had this

Opposite, top to bottom: RSPB Centre Rainham Marshes van Heyningen and Haward Sketch, 2002; Duxford Air Museum Foster and Partners Presentation Drawing, 1987

idea all along about pushing myself in new directions—although it’s never easy—because at a certain point the painting does what it wants to do. pl:

It’s interesting what you say about the relationship between spatiality and drawing, i.e. that you need a certain amount of room to draw and paint in, and light. Architectural practices are now dominated by computers on desks obviously, and are called “offices” rather than studios. The same is often true in architecture schools, although there are some schools valiantly trying to hold out for the space, and quality of spaces, to enable students of architecture to learn to draw in, and to make mess in.

I wonder if you could say something about this: do you think hand drawing is intrinsic to designing? And perhaps the quality of spaces that one designs in, and how you design, is evident in the work that’s produced? In my view, work that is solely produced by computing produces not only disembodied drawings, but also spatially poor buildings, i.e. I believe that the imagination is stimulated by physical phenomena and that how you make design work affects the qualities of the final product. Do you agree?

And also, your description of painting seems analogous of design thinking, in that it’s a combination of observations and memories and re-composition. In this process, “feelings about” something seem key, which come across in the atmosphere of the paintings.

And, you seem to be moved by the juxtaposition of everyday modern things and the natural world: and do have developed an anti-picturesque sensibility, one stripped of a premature, artificial aesthetic, in favour of phenomenal observation, representing the quotidian, what is there? It’s not Romantic I mean, although you are inspired not only by things you see, but also by how you feel about them? bh:

Well it’s certainly true for painting, and to some extent the same thing holds true for drawing, you really do need space to do work— both for practical and spiritual reasons—and ideally, natural light.

I have found if I’m going to work after the light goes it can really only be in black and white; and even then I don’t feel entirely comfortable, however good the artificial light is. So, in the winter months, I tend to paint for a long morning. As I write this, I realise that I, although I love my bright, well-lit studio, and my imagination takes off there, I haven’t taken to painting en plain air (although I make very great use of my notebook, particularly in foreign parts).

The hand drawing argument is so interesting: we always had a great struggle to get our younger architects to design/think/speculate on paper before switching on the computer. I just don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that some thought we were old fashioned. Of course, the problem—if it is a problem—is compounded by the lack of space in the majority of architecture school studios, and in architect’s offices today.

Yes, I could not agree more (about the importance of hand-drawings) although there is one additional thing I have discovered in painting, which is a sort of risk-taking element. Maybe it exists in architectural design too, but certainly, as I’ve done more and more painting, I have found I launch out without being entirely sure where I’m a going to finish up; and abandon it if it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Often, paradoxically, it sometimes looks quite interesting the next day.

Agree absolutely (with your description of what I’m doing).

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I love Aristotle’s observation (in his Poetics) that “art loves chance and chance loves art”. This is what seems to be in the process of being lost in our obsession with computers; the ability to be surprised by our mistakes, and to react physically to work. We use the most advanced CAD programs available in the office, i.e. Revit software (BIM), and it is incredibly useful because we literally have to “build” the project— I mean, we make it up from parts of building elements; it forces you to think early on about what walls are made of, about the art of construction. Well, that is my optimistic hope at least. We temper digital work with extremely physical work, casting things, carving them, making models that imitate construction processes, the hand-work of making an actual building. I find that the best work comes out of taking risks and of making too many things, and then in having a very physical reaction to them, often the next day (as you suggest), and editing.

What seems to be going on in this process is an accommodation between the rational aspects of design work, and the physical, subconscious ones; one is a form of proposition and analysis, one a reaction, often of disgust, and sometimes gleeful pleasure, and sometimes uncertainty, ambiguity, NOT KNOWING if something is good or bad in critical terms…. But because of this, finding in this strange reaction a sense of liveliness and light-heartedness and “otherness”.

I like very much the odd fact that Alice in Wonderland was written by a mathematician, and that what Lewis Carrol is really saying is that logic, when pushed to its logical conclusion, is so wild that it seems illogical and strange. I’m not sure that one can take a short cut to this strangeness though—it grows out of, or doesn’t, intricate observation (to use John Meunier’s phrase in On Intricacy), of the intricacy of things, resulting, hopefully, in “complex coherence”. Does this chime with your experience as a painter? To my eye, the inter-connectedness of things in a landscape is sometimes radically reduced, but not flattened in your work. Rather, the relationships between buildings and geography are 18

brought into focus, albeit as a fragment of a whole, but one that seems to distil a whole moment—made up of many, many relationships established over centuries, into a singular image; something like a memory of one part of the world condensed into a fragment of it that resonates and becomes remarkable? Does that feel familiar? b h : Regarding your two stimulating paragraphs: I have considered/hoped for sometime that the newer CAD programmes are/would be more subtle and as you say help you to “build” projects in a better way. My heart used to sink when we first started using CAD as it seemed to discourage all of what I regarded as the normative approaches to designing and encouraged bad habits in the the younger architects—i.e. switching on and starting in one corner with no overall view, and no sensible way of speculating with the design—as would come naturally with a sketch book. Much of your second paragraph seems very relevant to me, although I wouldn’t have been able to express it as well as you have. In Northrepps, for example (depicted in the picture you have in your bedroom in fact) a rather—on the surface— straightforward place that I’ve visited often, and drawn many times, I now see the landscape and building there as one; a fact I tried to express in your picture. I should also say that it is one of a handful of locations, many of which are in Norfolk, which have a very personal, almost mystical meaning for me. One of my heroes has always been Paul Nash, and there are so many aspects of his work I admire; particularly his struggle to try and express his strong feeling of a connectedness to a place. Interestingly, the power of some places he became attached to, such as Dymchurch, became too much for him, and he had to reject them, and not go near them again.

I can’t say I have that problem (yet).

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Houses of Work and Play: Álvaro Siza at FAUP (1985–1997) and Fernando Tavora’s School of Architecture at Guimaraes (2009–12) Patrick Lynch “To me, and to my occupation, hockey was a major influence: the game is so fast and demanding that it is impossible to separate previously defined strategy from improvisation.

They must act in tandem, with the decisive support of wheels.

In Architecture one can also resort to ‘flying wheels’ to deal with the complexity, the extent, and the accidents that every project entails: previous knowledge, perhaps experience and undoubtedly doubt—these are instruments continually set against each other from the beginning, until synchronism, or a certain operative instantaneousness are attained.”

—Álvaro Siza “The being of art cannot be defined as an object of aesthetic consciousness, because, on the contrary, the aesthetic attitude is more than it knows of itself. It is part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to play as play... What we mean by truth here can best be defined again in terms of our concept of play. The weight of the things we encounter in understanding plays itself out in a linguistic event, a play of words playing around and about what is learnt. Language games exist where we as learners—and when do we cease to be that?—rise to the understanding of the world. Here it is worth recalling what we said about the nature of play, namely that the player’s actions should not be considered subjective actions, since it is, rather, the game itself that plays, for it draws the players into itself and thus becomes the actual subjectum of the playing....

When we understand a text, what is meaningful in it captivates us just as the beautiful captivates us... what we encounter in the experience of the beautiful and in understanding the meaning of tradition really has something of the truth of play about it.”

—Hans-Georg Gadamer The final building of the great Portuguese architect Fernando Tavora, the School of Architecture at Guimaraes, is arguably his most didactic, in the sense that it is designed as a place to teach architecture in, and to act as a lesson in itself. His protege, Álvaro Siza, famously built a new home for their alma mater. Previously known as ESBAP, (Escola Superiore de Belas-Artes do Porto) FAUP (the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto), relocated from the art school in the centre of Porto to be part of the University of Porto campus in the 1990s.

It is, very self-consciously, a House of Architecture1, a dressing up box of fragments, quotes and well-mannered jokes. FAUP is as a sort of analogical microcosm of the cities of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia, I believe. In contrast, Tavora’s school of architecture at Guimaraes—

part of the University of the Minho—does not attempt to assimilate nor to represent an entire city’s topography in miniature. In common with FAUP though, the sloping site itself, at the edge of a concrete university campus, at the edge of a stone city, becomes part of the landscape of the interior of the architecture.

Set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro, the bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of FAUP; the school-city a gateway to the Atlantic Ocean, and the world “beyond the luxury of academia”, Wilfried Wang suggests2. An early design development plan—seemingly the primary site plan in fact— describes the generating geometric principles from which the project develops. Siza established two things simultaneously: a point from which he projects lines that “centre” parts of the composition beyond the site (actively just beyond the northern wall of the old villa garden); and at the same time he draws the scheme within the confines of a DIN Standard, Fibonacci sequence-derived, Golden Section ratio-Apaper-size. In other words, the initial drawing establishes the project as an exercise; establishing architecture as a mode of creativity founded on proportion and geometry as an analogue of order, growing from the discipline of orthographic drawing. As in all surveying and thence design work, the site is ordered by being measured and drawn first of all. Decisions made at this stage, about what to exclude or include within a project, Siza seems to be saying more or less explicitly—and I happen to think he’s making this point (pretty much) very obviously—can generate a whole concept for a building project.

In this case, the diagonal that bisects the Site as Drawing establishes a theoretical point from which disparate parts of the architectural whole are related. One can’t see this “centre”, it is not a perspective device or a visual panopticon, but once you know it exists, the uncanny sense of familiarity that relates the parts of the whole together, are explained. The point of origin is less important than the effect that it has in orienting everything outwards, beyond itself; which results in the tremendously liberating sense of the school throwing you out onto the horizon of the river and the sea. This sensation is both familiar and unfamiliar: there is sufficient sense of reciprocity between the various parts, and articulation of their differences, to establish a satisfying sense of identity and a sense of place, without this feeling introverted or totally safe. Architectural education, Siza seems to be suggesting, is a threshold between childhood and mature artistic freedom, and the school credibly seems to prepare generation after generation for the adventures of professional life.

Siza is making a case I believe, in his insistence on publishing and re-publishing this site plan drawing, for the origin of design as disegno, and in particular for the primacy of the plan (as Alberti 21

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suggested). Also, I’d suggest, for the fundamental role of geometry in unifying the visible and invisible aspects of architecture. This is, in effect, an argument for the primarily spatial character of architectural experience on the one hand, and for its fundamentally theoretical nature too. This unremarkable site plan drawing is strange but not obscure, it features as one of only six drawings of the FAUP project in the catalogue of the recent exhibition Álvaro Siza: in/discipline at Serralves Institute in Porto (19th September 2019 to 2nd February 2020)3. A version of this drawing is also for sale as a poster in the bookshop at FAUP, and has been since the building opened.

As well as the significance of the site plan as a heuristic, analytical device, the site is not some disembodied field in Siza’s theory of pedagogy—if one can assume that this is what the drawings and the school are, I’d like to suggest they are. Site is earth, world, city; it is embodied and material, thick with tacit meaning, and latent communicative cultural power.4 Siza seemingly cuts into what is in fact mounded-up, made ground at FAUP. An analogue of the riverine geology of Porto, albeit artfully faced with stone cladding, the piazza in between the administration blocks and the studio houses is reminiscent of the granite wharfs in the quays of the old town. The long, lower structures to the north of the site house the lecture hall, exhibition spaces, the library and offices, etc., and are connected via gently sloping ramps that extend beneath the central courtyard to a series of subterranean spaces forming the basements of the studio villas. These villas imitate the wine lodges across the Rio Douro, which the school overlooks. It is a perfect fusion of city and architecture—architecture as city even (as Florian Beigel and Phil Christou might suggest5)—gently teaching students about their reciprocity.

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The library is a pedagogic message in itself. The journey from thick, rocky ground to illuminated sky is completed there, and this phenomenological shift is accompanied by a declaration of the erudite, hermeneutic task of imagination. The long, triangulated white glass roof light is a quotation from the three glass roof lights in Alvar Aalto’s academic bookshop in Helsinki.6 A small door at mezzanine level opens onto a tiny terrace with view of the city of Porto below, as if inviting your imagination to take flight from within the traditions of the discipline of architecture. Alvar Siza has the wit and imagination to make such a point playfully and with tact.

The decorum of this mimetic creativity acts as an introduction to young architects to a not-so-secret world of imaginative possibilities7; reminds us that all new architectural knowledge is one part of a living archive of ideas. A “project”, Siza claims, “is for the architect what the character of the novel is for an architect… but the project is a character with many authors, and it becomes intelligent only when it is dealt with like that, otherwise it becomes obsessive and impertinent. The design is the desire for intelligence.”8 Despite the didactic elegance and precision of his prose, Álvaro Siza insists that: “Here and there I read and heard that, as an architect, I lack a clear supporting theory. I agree.”9 Elsewhere, he contradicts the veracity of this assertion by insisting upon a theory of architecture that is exceptionally demanding, and somewhat paradoxical: “Architecture is the revelation of a hazily latent collective desire. This cannot be taught, but it is possible to learn to desire it.” He continues, “Therefore, Clockwise from top left: Exhibition of student work at FAUP; early site plan of FAUP by Álvaro Siza; final site plan drawing of FAUP; early site plan of FAUP for sale as a poster in the bookshop there

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architecture is risk and risk seeks impersonal desire and anonymity, from a merger of subjectivity and objectivity. In the last analysis, in a progressive distancing from the I. Architecture means commitment transformed into radical expression, in other words, a capacity to absorb the opposite and go beyond contradiction. To learn this requires teaching us to seek the Other within each of us.” He concludes, “Architecture is Art or it is not architecture.”10 Despite Siza’s protestations not to have “a clear supporting theory”, in his writing, and in particularly in his drawings and buildings, we are reminded of the ancient meaning of theory, which Hans-Georg Gadamer describes as a form of festive participation in his essay “What is Practice?”. Gadamer declares, “This is what the Greeks called theoria: to have been given away to something that in virtue of its overwhelming presence is accessible to all in common and that is distinguished in such a way that in contrast to all other goods it is not diminished by being shared and so is not an object of dispute like all other goods but actually gains through participation. In the end, this is the birth of the concept of reason: the more what is desirable is displayed for all in a way that is convincing to all, the more those involved discover themselves in this common reality: to that extent human beings possess freedom in the positive sense, they have their true identity in that common reality.”11 It is not always necessary to have read philosophy to act with wisdom of course, and one does not need to have read nor to have written theory in order to demonstrate it: and, just as paradoxically, art tends to both precede and yet to grow out of criticism—it is a form of discourse in itself. Siza’s architecture exhibits “Maturity and freshness, tradition and innovation, repetition and difference, continuity and contrast, discipline and freedom”, Carles Muro suggests12, and this juxtaposition of opposites echoes 23

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Siza’s own declaration, cited by Muro in the Álvaro Siza: in/discipline catalogue: “Tradition is a challenge to innovation. It is made of successive grafts. I am a conservative and a traditionalist, that is to say, I move between conflicts, compromises, hybridisation, transformation.”13 Whilst Siza somewhat modestly claims to “lack a supporting theory”, this may be because his work (like Aalto’s) is a form of built architectural theory, a theory of participation where an imaginative architect, he claims: “draws what most impresses him and becomes, like all great creators, an ‘agent of cross fertilisation’— the seed of transformation. What I mean by this”, Siza continues, further clarifying his professed non-theory, “is that by mastering proven models (the model is universal), he transforms them, as he introduces them into different, distorted realities, he also interbreeds them, uses them in a surprising and luminous way; strange objects that come to earth and then put down roots. The student building in Boston (1947) is an Aalto building and it is at the same time an American building.”14 My contention is that at FAUP Siza seized the opportunity to embody his theoretical intuitions, in particular regarding the mimetic character of the architectural imagination, and that he sought to make this manifest in a spatial, and specifically spatially dramatic manner.

At the western end of the site new students are introduced to the campus through a sort of open ruin of a portal. Externally, it is painted white like the rest of the architecture of the school, but is painted red inside (in imitation of a 19th century villa situated at the eastern end of the complex). Matriculating students pass through this gateway as a right of passage en masse, at the Architects’ Christening party each September, at the start of the new school year. Domestic scales abound within a taught civic framework; in the garden of the old villa the Carlos Ramos Pavilion (named after a former professor of Siza’s) 24

unifies further a strong sense of historical and spatial continuity between older and newer designs. The “4th wall” of which is framed by a public garden loggia, an Ur Typ of fundamental construction principles: rough hewn stone columns tied to timber beams by twine, supporting vegetal growth. A minimal primitive gazebo; architecture year zero. Architectural history is recast as a matter of generations evolving from a familial past, the students occupying this background condition seemingly naturally, as if—in the pavilion building particularly—they have co-opted an existing structure, and made their home in it, in an act of audacious creative re-appropriation.

The school becomes their home, Siza’s architecture their inheritance.

Rafael Moneo suggests that Siza has arranged his buildings at FAUP like characters on a stage15, in a form of narrative postmodern architecture. The project is at once a portrait of the city and of its architecture, and its architects16. Siza depicts FAUP’s famous architectural professors in the facades of the studio houses, linking architectural character to physiognomy in a profoundly erudite riff on Beaux-Arts theory. FAUP drips with the feel and sensations of Porto, it’s a profoundly exciting and strange place to visit, and works very well in all weathers. Even the plant room chimney is a lesson; a miniature, humorous footnote commemorating Aldo Rossi’s drawings of monumental industrial structures. The message is unmistakable: Read Architecture; Become aware of it; Dream of it; Love it; Quote from it; Steal it; Make it your own. Above all, the task remains “today”, Siza suggests, “to rediscover the magical strangeness, the singularity of obvious things.”17

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Tavora had less land and less money at Guimaraes, and was building a new school; and so his project is not as biographical as Siza’s, nor is it a portrait of a city, but it is also a seriously playful and urbane building.

Tavora inherited a modern site, one dominated by cars, sat above a car park. His task was not to condense the city into a mythic landscape, but nonetheless to also create a heuristic one. Students learn about the embroiled, reciprocal character of spatiality and ground at Guimaraes, in an artificial, highly orchestrated interior world.

You enter up some steps, across a concrete bridge, above a scrappy campus edge car park, beneath a thin porch held symmetrically at its centre by an X shaped steel column. Arriving inside you find yourself in an enormously long tall hallway, at the end of which, rising before you, a long slender white stair passes overhead. WCs and lockers and lecture halls are situated to your left as you enter the building, and a cafe welcomes you across the hallway, opening onto a small stone court beyond. Everything is as it should be, you feel immediately accustomed to the architecture.

It is so mundane as to be almost banal: unthreatening, hospitable, almost enervating. Yet your eyes are drawn towards the culmination of the hallway, and there something strange and magical occurs.

The ground plane, which is made up of an orange linoleum, rises suddenly in a hump, jumping from the banal to the surreal in one jump cut. This little trick almost trips you up: the ascent is disconcerting, physically challenging, frankly odd. White balustrade walls enclose a timber stair that rises elegantly upwards, mastering the void beneath, and bathed in light falling from above. One is projected up towards the floors above as if the ground below is being broken up in an earthquake. It feels like being in a centrifugal force field, shot out of a canon, propelled to fall, somehow, upwards.

What appears beyond the base of the stair feels like the very centre of the school: a drawing studio, laid out like an anatomy theatre. Timber steps rake up around a timber floor, at the centre of which are seats and pedestals for models. Life drawing is the heart and soul of Portuguese architectural education18, and students cannot progress beyond first 38

year unless they pass a module in it. This stricture has led to heart ache and worse at FAUP (and even suicide)19, and yet the Guimaraes school, whose curriculum and staff have grown out of the Porto school, have adopted drawing as the foundation upon which architectural pedagogy and learning rests20. At FAUP, the life drawing studio, whilst delightful, is somewhat small (and cramped, now that many more students are being accepted than Siza’s brief anticipated). At Guimaraes, the drawing studio is itself a species of landscape, an intimate town square, a regal barn, a sort of church devoted to observation and phenomena.

You arrive at the top of the long staircase into yet another long, somewhat boring corridor, but immediately to your left, as if by magic, a door appears, and beyond it a timber world. The Nuno Portas Library was relatively empty still when I visited with David Grandorge in 201321.

The books from Portas’ library had not yet arrived. Two sentences by Portas are inscribed onto the walls of the room, forming a sort of minimalist ornamental frieze running around the mezzanine; they exhort the unity of the arts, and the continuous project of being modern22. In common with the life-drawing studio, it is a sort of archetype of a room for learning, an image of library, as much as a place for reading. The design studios, in contrast, are well lit and long, opening views out to the landscape above and city valley below you. Work is focused on tables and computers; the horizon beyond is incidental, something constant and inevitable.

Tavora and Siza show that you learn about architecture through repetitive movement through it, via habitual occupation, and, in the case of a school, becoming part of it. We might say, in sympathy with Siza’s comparison of architecture with play (in his case roller hockey), that architectural knowledge develops as a sort of muscle memory, both in the arms, hands and eyes, as you make it and read and write about it. Similarly, in participating in architecture school, as a student and teacher and critic, architecture enters into your psyche through the

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re-enactment of the traditions of architectural life. It does so via a more or less open, civic theatricality, evident in crits, parties, discussions and confrontations. It enters into your way of being yourself via obfuscation and effort, via the joy of work, and the seriousness and joy of play.

Demonstrating I believe, Gadamer’s contention, asserted in Truth and Method, that “what we encounter in the experience of the beautiful and in understanding the meaning of tradition really has something of the truth of play about it.”23 Siza is insistent—in the conclusion of the 1

“The House of Architecture”, Domingos Tavares, in The Building of the Faculty of Architecture at Oporto, Álvaro Siza et al, Porto, 2003.

2 “Discipline and Transform”, Wilfried Wang, in Álvaro Siza: in/discipline, edited by Nuno Grande and Carles Muros, Koenig Books, p. 79. Wang claims: “in the allusive transformations of precedents, Álvaro Siza shows future generations of architects the way to simultaneously respect their discipline’s history while also showing ways to transform its reading… the faculty complex asserts cultural intentions: first, the assertion that is a body of knowledge that is architecture; second, that each unique situation requires its own specific response and that this response, if well studies, generates an authentic solution; and third, that an architecture that an architecture that is developed in the knowledge of its own history will develop its own character… far from being a prison, history is knowledge. Design intelligence, in the way Álvaro Siza understands it, transforms knowledge into site-specific solutions. It is in this sense that we can understand Álvaro Sizas’ dictum that architects do not invent anything, they merely transform reality.”, p. 80.

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Ibid. The drawing is published on page 136.

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For a broader discussion of these themes see Civic Ground: Rhythmic Spatiality and the Communicative Movement between Architecture, Sculpture and Site, Patrick Lynch, Artifice Books on Architecture, 2017: in particular the chapter on Siza’s church of St Maria at Marco de Canaveses, pp. 147-160.

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passage that prefaces this essay—on the ludic character of architectural creativity. He emphasizes design’s ambivalent, contradictory and paradoxical nature, and this seems to be, ultimately, what he has to teach us: “Long and relentless, the process calls for (in)discipline.

In the end, discipline shapes the keystone. It does not function to the fullest until it becomes involved with a sort of disorder that precedes and draws on it, to be at once free and encompassing. Thus rolls the work of the architect. It all hinges on the tiny tip of a stick.”24

“On in/discipline”, Álvaro Siza, in Álvaro Siza: in/discipline, Op. Cit., p. 13.

10 “Educational Drawings”, Álvaro Siza, in Siza: Writings on Architecture, Op. Cit., p. 30. Cited by Wang, “Discipline and Transform”, Op. Cit., p.81.

11 “What is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason”, in Reason in the Age of Science, MIT, 2001, p 77.

12 Muro, Op. Cit., pp. 36.

13 Álvaro Siza, untitled, 1983, cited in Muro, Op. Cit., p. 37.

14 “Alvar Aalto: Three Aspects at Random”, in Siza: Writings on Architecture, 1997, p. 102, cited in Muro, Op. Cit., p. 36.

15 Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies: In the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects, Rafael Moneo, MIT, 2005, p. 251.

16 The facades of the houses, urban myth suggests, are supposedly portraits of Carlos Ramos, Nuno Portas and Fernando Tavora.

17 Álvaro Siza, untitled, 1983, cited in Muro, Op. Cit., p. 40.

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See for example Translations, Architecture Research Unit, Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, Christoph Merian Verlag, 2015.

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Carles Muro insightfully suggests the profound debt that Siza pays to the work of Aalto in his essay “Álvaro Siza: Eight Points (Almost) at Random”, in Álvaro Siza: in/discipline, Op. Cit., pp. 30-41: “Siza identifies with Alvar Aalto and finds in the Finnish master a modus operandi that he has already integrated: the introduction of certain models from the history of architecture into new contexts.”, p. 36. Muro bases his argument partly on the essay “Alvar Aalto: Three Aspects at Random”, in Siza: Writings on Architecture, Skira, Milan, 1997, pp. 98-104; and on Siza’s essay “Eight Points”, published in the same volume, pp. 203-7.

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For a longer discussion of the significance of Aristotle’s term mimesis for architecture, see “Mimesis and Imagination”, Patrick Lynch, in Mimesis: Lynch Architects, Artifice Books on Architecture, London, 2015, pp. 195-221.

“Building a House”, Álvaro Siza, in Siza: Writings on Architecture, Op. Cit., p. 51. Cited by Wang, “Discipline and Transform”, Op. Cit. p. 68.

18 For a brief but informative description of the primacy of hand drawing at FAUP as a deliberate and cultivated tradition of “analogical” enquiry see: “Pedagogy: FAUP, Portugal”, Mathew Barac, The Architectural Review, 13th March, 2013: “Against the background noise of motorway traffic to the north, a gentle hubbub rises from the shady café patio at the lower level of the sloping site, where students chat and drink coffee. Laptops and iPads share tables with overflowing ashtrays and empty paper cups. Alongside this familiar detritus is something rarely sighted in architecture schools today.

On almost every table − or under the arm or in the bag of almost every student − is a sketchbook. This should not come as a surprise. Sketching “can be considered our core didactical tool”, says José Miguel Rodrigues, director of the MArch programme. And he means it; “first and second year students are not allowed to use the computer, in order to have a direct relation between thinking and doing” through hand-drawing. This credo informs a curriculum which incorporates drawing as freehand representation of the built environment, as a tool to analyse design problems, and through drawing live models. For Rodrigues and Manuel Montenegro, who together teach drawing as a research methodology in architectural history, pencil and paper are significant for more than just pedagogical reasons. The sketch is central to the 20th-century tradition of the “School of Porto” in which FAUP is anchored. Associated with Siza as well as Eduardo Souto de Moura, Portugal’s other Pritzker laureate, the School emerged according to a regional concept of modern architecture. Scholars Eduardo Fernandes and Jorge Figueira, who completed

PhDs on the topic at FAUP, both trace the School’s origins to Fernando Távora’s “permanent modernity”: a timelessness that arises when a building resonates with its physical and cultural context. Initially set out in his 1947 publication O Problema da Casa Portuguesa, Távora developed this idea in his teaching and in canonical built works. As Fernandes explains, the School subsists in “a way of thinking connected to a way of doing”. Important to this legacy is what Figueira calls “the reinvention of the sketch”: an emphasis on analogical drawing as a vehicle for architectural creativity.” Accessed on 28 March 2020 11.25am: www.architectural-review.com/essays/reviews/ pedagogy-faup-portugal/8643155.article 19 The death of a student who had failed 1st year twice led to their fellow students daubing “Bonjour Tristesse” onto the walls of the school, an ironic reference to the graffiti that was painted onto Siza’s apartment building in Berlin (a story related to the author by FAUP alumnus Porto-based architect Dr Paulo Moreira in 2010).

20 For a discussion of the tradition of drawing in “the Porto school”, and the different types of drawings undertaken by Tavora, Siza and Souto de Moura, see “Eduardo Souto de Moura”, Francesco Dal Co, in Souto de Moura: Memory, Projects, Works, ed. Francesco Dal Co & Nuno Graca Moura, Yale, 2019, pp.482-3.

21 During the academic year 2010-11, Alun Jones and I taught a Diploma Unit (Masters level) design studio at The Cass in London, alongside Paulo Moreira, which focussed on the vexed relationships between road and rail technology, and the urban topography of the historic and modern city. We collaborated with staff and graduates of FAUP, and held our project reviews there. A PDF of the book that the students produced, including an interview with Álvaro Siza that they conducted, can be seen here: www.lyncharchitects. com/media/documents/PORTO_BOOK_2010-11_ Cass_Diploma_P_Lynch_etc.pdf 22 These statements by Nuno Portas appear in Portuguese, and in somewhat idiosyncratic English: “Being Works of collaboration, Architecture and Urbanism projects are synthesis, plastic art translations in organized space of those for whom and to whom they were accomplished; own translations, characteristic, diverse, assorted and changeable.”; “Each one of these buildings was modern, and because all of them were, the constant modernity officiates the set; the building style of each one is not important—what matters is the similar attitude that presided their design.”

23 Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Sheed and Ward, 1993 (1960), p.490; see also p.116.

24 “On in/discipline”, Álvaro Siza, in Álvaro Siza: in/discipline, Op. Cit., p. 13.

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The Idea of Álvaro Siza Mark Durden and João Leal As John Szarkowski noted in his introduction to his 1956 book of photographs of Louis Sullivan’s architecture: “When photographers of the nineteenth century first used their cameras to describe formal architecture, they were concerned with buildings the content of which had died, however alive the forms remained.” According to Szarkowski, the problem with architectural photography is that it has continued with this habit of concentrating on the forms of architecture, so much so that “the building became as isolated from life as the insect enclosed in the amber paperweight.” In contrast, his photographs were concerned with the buildings’ “life facts” as well as their “art facts”— a work of formal architecture was approached as a “real building, which people had worked in and maimed and ignored and perhaps loved.”

This series of photographs takes its cue from Szarkowski’s approach. The photographs do not attempt to illustrate the buildings and resist the tendency to isolate its subject from its lived context. In our pictorial response to Álvaro Siza Viera’s buildings, we were very much aware that we were photographing after, in the wake of another’s much more encompassing and comprehensive art. Our concern, as a result, has been very much with the tensions between photography and architecture.

The Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto involves a virtuoso play of geometric forms and elements, a hyper or embellished modernism.

Our photography responded to this by concentrating on the distortions and abstractions of the buildings’ structures through reflections, as well as the drawings and models of student work that could be seen through windows.

This allowed us to respond both to the chimerical quality of the buildings and the imaginary and creative realms within. The Carlos Ramos Pavilion, functioning as a further part of the school of architecture, is set within a garden and it is the building’s relationship to this that is integral to our pictures—the geometries and white walls of its structure may jar with its natural setting but also allows integration in providing surfaces on which shadows fall. The pavilion’s exterior is constantly animated by what surrounds it. The large expanses of glass that surround the interior court of the building allowed us to continue the dynamic established with our pictures of the Faculty of Architecture. The Bouça photographs are the most straightforward.

Our fascination here is with tensions between the buildings’ modernist forms and the play of light and shadow upon them, between the symmetries of its structures and the “life facts” of everyday clutter connected with the houses’ occupancy and use, as well as the ever-changing graffiti: wild, colourful, scabrous and vulgar.

A version of this essay and photo-essay first appeared in Scopio, www.scopionetwork.com/blog/ the-idea-of-Álvaro-siza

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Pritzker Prize Citation for Siza Vittorio Gregotti

I have always had the impression that Álvaro Siza’s architecture sprang from archaeological foundations known to him alone—signs invisible to anyone who has not studied the site in detail through drawings with steady, focused concentration.

Later on, those signs come together because they convey a feeling of growing out of something necessary, of relating, connecting, establishing and constructing, all the while maintaining the tender uncertainty of hypothesis and discovery. The construction is slow and intense. It is made of the discrete, if not downright secret, signs of an attempt to start anew, based on establishing some creative and apparently simple and explicit signs of a universal design system.

Siza’s work is characterized by just that sense of architecture as a means of listening to the real, in that it hides at least as much as it shows. Siza’s architecture makes one see, and it reveals rather than interprets the truth of the context.

It seems then, that he has very carefully removed parts from the design, which is very clearly and harmoniously drawn, in order to create expectations. All non-essentials have been removed, but even that, in turn, has left its traces, like when pencil strokes are erased and redrawn in a drawing. Sharp corners and sinewy curves are interwoven for an apparently mysterious reason, something that has to do with the very history of the design. Its thoughts, misfortunes and changes are not totally forgotten, but are transformed in the construction of a mental site, of a context just as real as the surrounding physical one. Álvaro Siza Vieira is clearly considered one of today’s greatest living architects. He is an architect still able to make authentic affirmations with his architecture, still able to surprise a culture as blasé as ours by coming on stage from unexpected quarters. The interest in his architecture shown by younger generations in particular results from the complex mixture of meanings that emanates from his work. His architecture is formed in quiet and seclusion; then there is the slight but ever precise touch of his works, which seem to emerge as clean, precious points among the contemporary urban blight, yet at the same time making one painfully responsible for those problems. In addition to this mixture and the tradition of poverty and the gentle melancholy of Portugal, his native country, there is the affection that his architecture seems to bring to the conditions of the urban periphery. On the other hand, the micro surgical confidence of his work, the emergence of the extreme eternity of the elementary acts of building, the sense of natural modification of that which exists, a suspended modification does not erase the errors of the existing nor the uncertain course of the project, but solidifies it into a single poetic objective.

Over the years, all of that has made him become more secure in the methods and processes of his craft without eliminating his sense

of trepidation, of attempting to have his designs express the margins of an architectural problem, when he checks with his hands and eyes.

The quality of the tensions which he draws up and details is touching (to use a word out of fashion like him) and derives principally, in my opinion, from two themes: attention and uneasiness; the clear certainty which is that the essential is always a little different from the directions chosen, and from possible explanations.

For Siza, even detail is not an incident or a technological exhibition, but a dimension of the accessibility of architecture, a way of verifying by touch the feel, the uniqueness of a thing made for a particular place with contemporary techniques, to come into contact with the everyday things by handling them. His is a technology of detail created from unexpected distances between the parts which introduce a spatial tension between the smallest and most commonplace elements, for their mutual placement, superimposition and interconnectedness.

To speak about Siza’s architecture, however, one must start by admitting that it is indescribable. This is not critical or textual indescribability alone (in fact the latter would certainly be one of the best means for the purpose, perhaps in story-form), but the same inability of photography to communicate the specific sense of his work. This is also because his design includes a unique temporal dimension, resulting not only from the processes required for coming into contact with his structures, but also from his ability to establish a type of autonomous memory of the design, completely present in the final structure, built by the accumulation and purification of successive discoveries which are constituted as data of later structures.

Nothing is planned in and of itself, but always in relation to belonging.

Above all, for Álvaro Siza, coming from northern Portugal—stony, clear, poor and full of intimacy, where the light of the Atlantic is long and illuminates poverty in an abstract way, reveals all the harshness of surfaces, each change in the road around homes, every scrap, in a grandiose, dry and bittersweet manner.

I believe that Álvaro Siza could be justifiably considered the father of the new architectural minimalism, but a minimalism far from any abstraction or perceptive radicalism, in which the architectural sign is incision and superimposition. A timid, unequivocal, circumscribed assurance seems to characterize the forms of his new minimalism.

It is careful concentration, the capacity for detailed observation and characterization. If it appears that the use of elementary structures is most indirect, it is rather a hidden, precise plot from which emerge by cancellation some signs suspended between the memory of the plot’s established order, and a new, stringent logic of external and internal relations which the system renders clearer and more evident, even in their wavering.

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The first time I visited Portugal, I had met Álvaro Siza the year before in Barcelona, a little more than twenty-five years ago. Then, the next summer we spent a couple of days together in Oporto and went to see his works, many still in progress: Banco do Oporto in Oliveira and the Vila do Conde, his brother’s house, the pool at the ocean and the Quinta da Conceiçao in Matosinhos, already completed in 1965. I remember being particularly struck by the small homes in Caxinas, a village thirty kilometers north of Oporto and home to a few hundred fishermen. For the past several years prior to that, these fishermen were renting part of their own homes to people who came to the ocean for the summer from the country’s interior. Then, that modest gesture toward tourism created the spontaneous appearance of some one-or two-story homes, often illegal. The town asked Siza to formulate a plan to regulate development.

He began with a study of the features of the old and new existing facilities. It is essentially a work of the imagination, attempting to create a morphological vision from the few signs that poverty has left in the form of buildings: colours, materials, types, dimensions and rhythms.

Then, on that basis, he set up a linear-development plan of twostory homes: a small set facing the sea. These homes were planned and built amid many difficulties arising from the designs. One of them calls for a small square to the north, linking the internal street with the sea; another incorporates a cafe already existing on the ground floor; the rest was regulated through a series of building codes which he thought would be followed almost spontaneously. The extreme poverty of the project is put to good use with pride, taking advantage of any sign available, stretched between surfaces of coloured plaster of the utmost simplicity, in a strong Atlantic light, with elementary gestures: 54

putting up a wall, placing a window, opening an empty space in volume, colouring doors, beginning, ending. In an atmosphere that is hardly primitive or folkloric, the resort village at the tip of Europe on the Atlantic seems to make references to many modern European cultures.

The second time we met, resignation seemed a thing of the past.

Only five days had gone by after April 28, 1974 (the date of the revolution of the carnations), when, without encountering guards or bailiffs, I entered the office of the new Minister of Public Works, my friend Nuno Portas. Seated in a pompous armchair in that grand office was Álvaro Siza. He started explaining to me the work plan of the SAAL brigades, spontaneous cooperatives of planning and building. The new political opportunity seemed to have transformed his usual patience into great energy. Then, after great hopes came disappointments.

In the meantime, however, Siza became one of the great architects of international fame. The first great acknowledgements came: the invitations to the IBA in Berlin, his win at the Venice competition (later disillusioned, which is common in Italy), his work in Holland, in Portugal at Evora and Lisbon, and in Spain at Barcelona and Malaga, where we worked together. Finally came the award from the European Community in 1986 and then the Pritzker in 1992.

We met many times in various places, busily and excitedly discussing trends in architecture. Yet he never gave up his discomfort and pride of being from northern Portugal, born on the edge of Europe.

Opening Page: S. Marco De Canaveses This page: Leça da Palmeira Opposite: Quinta da Conceição

p r i t z k e r p r i z e c i tat i o n f o r s i z a

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Bachelard, Bakhtin and the Architectural Colonic Casper Laing Ebbensgaard with Rut Blees Luxemburg It is said that the process of building is intimately bound up in existential questions about being, and notably about what it means to be human.

That is why architecture functions so well as a metaphor for structuring social and psychic life, and why it comes to stand in for institutional and societal conventions—father, family, faith, work. Master, mother, maid, labour.

It locates the affective and sensuous excess within legible frameworks that rationalize vitality into predicable schemes, making efficient forms of societal governance possible. That is why The Castle, The Panopticon and the Iron Cage figure so prominently in popular imaginaries not only as premonitions but as maps of our legal and political institutions: these architectures never got built and therefore never have to answer to the haunting evidence of their architectural failures. They appear as bodies without organs.

In an odd inversion, partially completed architectures and half-dreamt up visions for society lie scattered across urban and pastoral landscapes as organs without a body. As part of his utopian model town Ville de Chaux, Nicholas Ledoux’s factory Saline de Chaux, was erected to aid the extraction of salt from underground springs and subterranean halite seams. The factory appears somehow naked, as it lies in plain sight without its protective seal that would allow it to function as intended, as intestine. Its exposed and ornamented surface—wet, shiny, soft, spineless and flesh-like—seems almost alive. Organs without a body redraw the state of want and inspire radically different lifeworlds, all hiding in plain sight. They are there when you look at sketches and blueprints or when you rotate the model in the palm of your hand. You can feel them when you walk down stone-walled corridors or when you peer through windows at the world beyond. But you should never be fooled by the seductive semblance of what it wants us to feel.

If architectural intentions are profoundly human, it implies that these organs without a body—these ornaments that designate extractive spaces of labour and production—stem from some obscure, inhuman darkness. But when we hear the torturous moans that seep through its thick walls and the building starts leaking from its fissures and cracks, something else is on the boil... In a cinematic moment architectures flood with water from an insatiable source at the building’s core. A core/lonic that flows through architectural and imaginary spaces, reminding us that there is always another story to tell—one that doesn’t translate life into reductive schemes and categories while not getting fooled by the promise of a “revolution”. Buildings are extractive, they have to devour. To retell the story, we must listen to the laborious moans of these organs that stem from a body elsewhere.

Opposite: The Dark Intestine, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 2020 Following, left to right: Urne, Portal, Ledoux, 2019; Panoptical Sublime, Ledoux, Saline Royale, 2019

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This page: Organ, Ledoux, 2019 Opposite: Vista, Ledoux, 2019

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This page: EIDOLON, Ledoux, 2019 Opposite: Nightguard, Ledoux, 2019

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Factory, Utopia Dennis Goodwin

In Arc-et-Senans, France, one can find the gates to the underworld, a semicircular fragment of a parallel reality, an alchemical symbol, a tinderbox of revolution, a pastoral factory, and a prescient example of an artist defining an aesthetics of work. It can equally be said to be a lost relic of a fallen kingdom as a glimpse of an Edenic future.

This is the Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans, the Royal Saltworks, which would in time develop in the imagination of its architect, ClaudeNicolas Ledoux, from a factory into the seed of a utopian city.

A jumble of geometric solids would litter the countryside in the shape of a phallic pleasure garden, cubes of justice and memory, a cross between a cemetery and a planetarium, a perfectly spherical sheep pen, and a series of hallucinogenic country estates, all forming a ring around the original salt factory. This was an imperfect utopia: one with class, with kings, with workplace hazards. However, the novel juxtaposition of a factory in a utopia stirs present emotions as we seek to position ourselves on a trajectory of an alternative capitalism.

It is through the logic of work we seek utopia: how to exploit our sacred gifts, to computationally distribute UBI, to dance on the tip of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If we don’t crack the world with the volcanic lightning of true creativity, we will die without being born.

Ledoux’s fragment reminds us that we live in the present so that we may turn our factory world into a garden of meaningful work.

UNESCO recognized the Saline royale as a World Heritage Site in 1982 for its contribution to history as “the first architectural complex on this scale and of this standard designed as a place of work.

This is the first instance of a factory being built with the same care and concern for architectural quality as a palace or an important religious building.”1 Factories had already been established in 18th century France, for silk, glass and textiles, but didn’t have the relentless logic of Fordism or any machinery whose power source was not human. The idea that labour deserved any conscious aesthetic at all was completely alien. Such was the verdict of Louis XV, who rejected a first design due to its excessive use of columns. This saline was a little too royale for his taste. In addition, the original square shape of this design possessed no hierarchy: the chapel had equal placement to the bakery, both shrouded in corners. There was no correct perspective, no canonical interpretation, no fatherly vision.

The second, successful semicircular design is often compared to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Hierarchy would radiate from the central perspective of the director’s house on the flat edge of the semicircle; the columns stayed. In some kind of concession, they were limited to the porticoed entrance and the aforementioned house. That seemed to satisfy Louis XV. From the 12ft walls surrounding the complex to the vegetable gardens to the workers’

quarters, to the forge and blacksmith, to the manufacturies themselves, work—and the life between it—would proceed orderly, like the music of the spheres. To Ledoux, the idea of living in such a space was an abstraction; the saline reflected an ideal, of working and living, whose conditions and details got in the way of the symbolism. The work of saline evaporation itself was infernally hot, and infrastructural concepts like ventilation hadn’t developed very far. Workers were frequently felled by disease and injury. The eye of science would wait until the next century to turn its enlightened gaze onto the plight of the worker.

The chosen site for the Royal Saltworks was at the edge of the forest of Chaux, between the villages of Arc and Senans, nestled in the Val d’Amour of Franche-Comté. Its entrance emerges almost unannounced from the earth, giving it the appearance of subterranean birth. A massive portico completely outside of human proportions protects a grotto formed by a cascade of chaotically arranged stones. It’s as if supersized salt crystals had poured out of an invisible vestibule towards the visitor, excepting the arch of a small door. Crossing the threshold that guards this temple of labour, the visitor finds themselves upon an expanse of green.

A sandy path leads directly to the paternally welcoming house of the director, or, turning right or left, leads down the gently curving paths of the semicircle past the workers’ quarters and gardens to the corners of the maisons of the managers and overseers. Completing the hard edge of the semicircle are the two workshops in which the grueling work of salt manufacture was performed. The keystone is the director’s house, which appears as if it was whittled down from a giant cube into a Neoclassical barnyard.

Throughout the saline, walls that would otherwise be unadorned, are punctuated every few meters by stone urns disgorging a lugubrious stone liquid, meant to symbolize the saline water pouring into the evaporating pans. The saltworkers were meant to remain cognizant of their exalted function in the royal apparatus by the kind of grotesques one would normally find adorning a church. Ledoux recognized that the economic machinery of the state was just as worthy of aesthetic celebration as its spiritual machinery. His vision was a society of hierarchy, authority, eternity; emanating from king to nobles, from nobles and their estates to the peasants who work it.

And for the new class of society that worked at the saline, who, from agricultural innovations, had simultaneously increased their number and been freed from the work of their villages? Ledoux was envisioning how factory and industry, how the new proletariat, could have fit beautifully into this sacred diagram. And why wouldn’t it?

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labour, for labour is sacred. The didacticism of his saltwater urn embellishments recall the social function of stained glass windows to illustrate the transformation of the mundane into the sublime.

The plumes of steam emanating from the saline would have only been rivalled by church steeples as the sole feature of the horizon for miles around. The center of this utopia was not a chapel nor a palace but a salt factory– not church, not state, but the inexorable logic of labour.

This was the beta launch of the Industrial Revolution, rudely interrupted by a popular mob that demanded change and instead received petty political freedoms. Further reforms, to be sealed in blood, for a republic of virtue or a society of equals, were ultimately squelched. The already victorious bourgeoisie valued neither virtue nor equality.

The architect’s attention to places of work wouldn’t return until the modern era, in whose apotheosis we give witness to Foster + Partners’ Apple Park, the $5 billion headquarters of the world’s most valuable company. Nestled in its own once-forested valley, it is only ever photographed through the strange haze native to the Bay Area: parts fog, smog, and faint traces of burning cash. Like the City of Chaux, it forms a perfect circle, although without the characteristic center line that brings hierarchy to the saline royale; Apple Park mirrors the egalitarianism of Ledoux’s first design. This circle is one of glass and hardly any steel. The effect is one of almost perfect, continuous glass, but like most Apple designs, only if you ignore the very obvious: black dividing lines separating each curve and bizarre glossy concrete overhangs on each floor. Rather than design within constraints, just use the “reality distortion field” to pretend the flaws of such an approach don’t exist.

With seven cafeterias, a 100,000sq ft gym, and private medical service, the late Steve Jobs envisioned Apple Park as a “retreat” for employees, focusing on their mental, physical and ecological health.

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The central garden and surrounding acres are sculpted from native, drought-resistant plants and several orchards, recalling both the bucolic factory of the Saline royale and the pre-Silicon existence of Santa Clara Valley as a primeval garden of apricot groves. This wistful mea culpa is as far as Apple is willing to go in its engagement with its surrounding environs. Employees fund the podcast economy in multi-hour commutes to ever more far-flung suburbs, displaced by the overwhelming gravitational suck of the world’s most expensive real estate market. Once you arrive on campus, you’re so aggravated by the traffic and pumped full of factoids that you never want to leave.

Apple Park’s complete disconnection from the local economy evokes the other sense of “retreat”. It is the ultimate modernist statement in an era that’s long discredited modernist ideas. For this it truly deserves the epithet “spaceship”.

Life in this glass house, with its cacophonous open plan office spaces and dangerously transparent walls, seems clinically delightful compared to its mirror image on the other side of the supply chain. One Foxconn factory in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou employs 350,000 workers who assemble iPhones for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, at 350 iPhones every minute. Workers live, eat and work in the same permanently temporary factory city within the city, where your place of work is never out of sight in your precious off hours. This factory city paradigm, powered by migrant workers, is replicated across China, India, and Bangladesh, from electronics to plastics to fast fashion. This only describes the visible architectures of modern factory work, and not thousands of invisible, modern day slaves. Machines stand by as a kind of mech of

Opening page: Plan of Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans This page, left to right: Saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans; Apple Park

f ac t o r y

Damocles, waiting to obliterate the scourge of globalization. What comes next? Machines don’t do philosophy. The workers’ only escape seems to be in the parallel Earth of the digital, where everyone is an Old Testament God of their own domain. In the dark glow of our screens, our fantasies blossom, but in real life, all we dare to hope for is incremental improvement.

Back in Western, deindustrialized societies, work has continued to sublimate, as solid labour turns into airy knowledge working.

Continuous employment turns into gig work, or even turning the performance of life itself into employment. Humans plug the gaps in the global economy that can’t yet be trusted to machines. Perhaps for such a new type of work, a new type of workplace needed to be born. This, at least, is the logic of WeWork, perhaps the modern factory we deserve.

WeWork’s “mission… is to elevate the world’s consciousness” by “chang[ing] how people work, live and grow”2, according to its S-1 filing. WeWork leases some of the world’s most expensive urban real estate and converts it into posh coworking spaces for self-styled entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, and exiled corporate “innovation labs”. There isn’t much of a business model. (As of this writing, I use the present tense charitably.) But like similar inherently unprofitable services, it functions as a sort of welfare for the upper middle class, as paid for by the upper class who have run out of reasonable investments in which to safely park their exorbitant cash reserves. For its privileged clientele, it fills the market gap between Starbucks and Soho House.

Like Ledoux with his Saline royale, WeWork tries to reimagine the workers’ relationship with their place of work. WeWork proves “‘space-as-a-service’”: “[w]e start by looking at space differently: as a place to bring people together, build community and enhance productivity. Philosophically, we believe in bringing comfort and happiness to the workplace.”3 Similarly, for Ledoux, the salt workers would be “surrounded by the sweetest illusions”, although in a virtuous daze of mysterious origin, “sheltered from all costly distractions and Bacchic deliria that could disturb Hymen [god of marriage], and tempt or surprise laziness”. The sum total of his power over those who lived in his sumptuously curving workers’ quarters would be nothing less than strict conjugal fidelity. The worker “finds his pleasures, the consolidation for his labours, and the solution for all his needs” 4 within the confines of the saline.

The tool of control linking Ledoux to Apple to WeWork: you’ll be so happy here you’ll never leave.

WeWork’s interior design acknowledges that start-up facilities have already devolved beyond self-parody and into the event horizon of gibbering, post-ironic brain failure and the heat death of all original thought. The more work becomes virtual and digital, the more we care about physical space. But clueless design agencies churn out physical spaces that resemble 3D renderings, with layouts conforming to the underlying snap grids of AutoCAD. Corporate artwork must be colorful and motivating, scraping keywords from behavioral economics dissertations to look up associated clip art to chuck into a GAN trained on the last 200 years of art history.

“We help amplify and energize an enterprise’s culture, sparking

innovation, enhancing productivity and helping the organization attract and retain talent.”5 Capital is ever more reliant on the etheric qualities of creativity and focus.

Into what void is this font of creativity poured? Corporations, too, feel the pressure to talk purpose. “Mission” is one of the most misapplied words in the corporate pantheon of misapplications.

A mission needs a telos, but the logic of a corporation is continuous returns to shareholders. What would a utopian corporation look like? Perhaps it would take a form akin to a self-detonating NGO, one which has a quantifiable social goal and promptly disbands once achieved. Rather than the blonde latte anonymity of WeWork, perhaps the future of coworking lies in the blended nitro cold brew with hemp milk of an industrial commons, a maker village and an artists’ commune. Ledoux’s Ideal City is a fragment of such a vision set in the idyll of eastern France. “Man is perfectible,” wrote JeanJacques Rousseau, “and if he is corrupted, it is by the immorality inherent in urban societies.”6 Unlike WeWork’s urban, and Apple’s suburban, visions for work, Ledoux’s vision was rural in nature.

From the ashes of WeWork rises COVID-19, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. As an unprecedented number of knowledge workers “WFH”, the home is now the site of the modern factory.

The invisible hum of fiber and 5G replace columns of steam and smoke as telltale signs of productivity. Coffee shops and gyms once tried to assert ownership of the mysterious theoretical existence of a “third space”, as if it was a gravitationally detected ninth planet.

Now there is just “one space”. Workers in this global experiment of home working report contradictory symptoms of inability to focus coupled with inability to log off. Children, pets, partially dressed spouses or roommates drift through the video background of the otherwise carefully manicured 4:3 area visible behind you. Notions of privacy and professionalism will inevitably be restructured, for better or for worse. Will we tolerate bringing our whole selves to the assembly line? Far from life invigorating work, it is always insidious logic and aesthetic of work that blobs into the totality of life.

Work is often lonely, dull, and necessary for feeling like you are not just a victim of time. Work is sacred because it is a sacred fight against the demiurge, who created this foul earth to disguise the brilliance of the true godhead. From Ledoux’s petrified saltwater urns and vegetable patches, to the corporate “retreat” of Apple’s office park, to the free beer and prosecco taps at WeWork, to the virtual backgrounds of Zoom meetings, we have an innate urge to imbue earthly toil with something of the divine spark. We make factories for living, temples for work.

Thanks to Pierre d’Alancaisez, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Anthony Vidler for their inspiration for this essay.

1 https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/203

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2 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/ data/1533523/000119312519220499/ d781982ds1.htm

Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Utopia in the Era of the French Revolution, Birkhäuser, 2005.

5 ibid.

3 ibid.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 1755.

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A City Without a City Fulvio Orsenigo On April 9, 2009, the city of L’Aquila was hit by an earthquake that ruined much of the city. Despite the relevant destructions, the exterior appearance of the city seemed to have been preserved.

The houses, built one against the other, supported each other, but imploded from the inside collapsing into one another. A pile of empty boxes. But at night there was a surprising transformation.

Walking around in the deserted city, the space appeared to be completely transformed. Brightly lit buildings alternated with completely dark areas because of the random combination of surviving public light and security lights. This unusual circumstance caused a discrepancy between what was really visible, and what I think I could see. The mind prefigures and recreates the missing connections and meanings, even though they faded away, according to previous experiences or beliefs. This series of photographs investigates precisely this discrepancy.

The second set of photographs was made in March 2020 and shows Venice, where I live, in “lockdown”: another sort of city without a city.

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The Walker Art Museum: Procurement and Architectural Quality William Tozer

Having lived for prolonged periods in five cities (Auckland, Melbourne, London, Sydney, and Minneapolis) in four different countries, each location offers a fresh perspective on architectural issues in the others.

In each place it is all too easy to be so immersed in the culture of the discipline, that the nature of the issues themselves are invisible, let alone potential solutions to them. Similarities and differences in practice are variously a result of factors that are international, national, or local—but many shed light on the architectural discipline at all of these scales, in all of these locations. As a collection of buildings but a single site of architecture, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is a useful microcosm of this phenomenon—and is particularly illuminating of the ways in which procurement processes are negatively affecting design outcomes in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

The main Walker building was constructed in 1971 to a design by Edward Larrabee Barnes, a New York architect who had established his own practice after only a few years working for another firm, and had progressed from designing houses to museums in twenty years.

The building is a sublime composition of interlocking rectangles of brick to the exterior, and the spatial complexity of the stepped interior recalls a European hilltop village. The exterior form could be understood as to some degree indebted to the work of Breuer, who Barnes studied under at Harvard, and the interior is reminiscent of Aalto or Herzberger, but the project is more than anything a unique expression of the creative output of Barnes. The project seems to emerge from Barnes’ own experiments in the design of form and space, developed serially through increasing scale and complexity, brought together to create a unique architectural outcome. Barnes’ Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, for example, seems a fairly direct source for the spatial complexity of the Walker’s interiors—the multileveled outdoor decks with connecting staircases between the discrete buildings that house the programme of the earlier project. This is surely the point of architects forming their own practices—to pursue a set of ideas that is subtly or radically different to those that are already being pursued by others.

By contrast, however, contemporary procurement processes— such as the rise of RFPs (requests for proposals) and pre-qualification, the decline of open competitions, and the rapid expansion of educational and registration or licensing requirements—have created contrary tendencies. Practices have become large in order to

Opposite: The original building on the left, and Herzog & de Meuron’s additions to the Walker Art Center

incorporate as much technical competence, experience and capacity as possible—but this inevitably comes at the expense of unique sets of motivating ideas, as a large mobile workforce brings with it a muddle of conflicting design cultures. This tends to either result in lowest common denominator design that offends and excites no one, or in the normalizing of more unusual design ideas through ordinary detailing. The latter effect is exacerbated by changes in the speed and reach of architectural media, which has resulted in practices deliberately changing design approach frequently in order to remain in the spotlight—at the expense of exploring or developing any of them more deeply. Both of these tendencies can be seen in the subsequent extensions to Barnes’ Walker building by Herzog and de Meuron and HGA, which also offer a microcosm of the way the process of procuring buildings has changed in the intervening years, and the negative impacts that this has had.

Herzog and de Meuron completed an extension to the Barnes building in 2005—a weaker example of the Swiss architects’ buildings, due most likely to its place at the beginning of a new geometric trajectory in their work, the inherent compromises of the American architect-of-record system, and perhaps their focus being split between this project and the contemporaneous de Young Museum in San Francisco. The crystalline geometry of the extension creates an interesting spectacle to the street frontage but is unconvincing in a number of locations—particularly at the rear, where the size of the unusually-shaped window openings clearly defer to the floor levels, and mullions are arranged orthogonally, undermining the credibility of the windows as angular, sculptural voids. Local practice HGA acted as the architect of record for the Herzog and de Meuron scheme, as required by licensing restrictions, and much of the detailing of the building became normalized or over-wrought as a consequence. For example, walls of glazing to the rear of the building are framelessly detailed in the same way as Herzog and de Meuron’s Tate Modern or de Young projects, but to the Hennepin Avenue facade the appreciation of this glazed opening as a void is greatly diminished by HGA’s addition of visible mechanical fixings and fritting. This type of risk-averse decision-making, focussed largely on potential liability, speaks to a core conflict in architecture—between the impulse to model the discipline on other professions, and the contradictory nature of the risk-taking that is at the essence of creative production. Conversely, the local architects of record did not use their local knowledge to address some fundamental flaws—likely a result of the new building being designed by Herzog and de Meuron from afar—because they presented no issues of professional responsibility, which is the implicit target of the process. In this category is the new 79

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pedestrian entrance that assumed a large volume of foot traffic from the main street, a route that is in fact dominated almost entirely by car traffic. It is less clear where design responsibility lies, but the extension also creates a lot of floppy, unused space due to the lack of resolution of the resulting multiple entries to the building, two vehicular and two pedestrian.

The latest addition to the Walker was completed in 2016, and was designed by HGA themselves, elevated from the role of architect of record on the Herzog and de Meuron project. HGA began as Hammel, Green and Abrahamson in 1953 but has grown into a firm of hundreds, absorbing other practices and talented practitioners along the way. Like most practices of this size, HGA in effect operates a number of different design teams, and consequently prides itself on being able to offer different styles of design to different clients.

The commercial appeal of this strategy is clear for large practices, but creatively it is highly questionable whether these teams can come even close to simulating the diversity of design output from separate practices. While individual practices are able to endlessly develop their particular interests, these large practice teams inevitably utilize company-wide production and delivery systems, which are assumed to be design neutral but in fact lead to a progressive normalization of design ideas through the procurement process. The design team that completed this project was headed by Joan Soranno and John Cook,

Opposite, above and overleaf: Herzog & de Meuron’s additions to the Walker Art Center

and while their scheme is intentionally restrained and minimal, is unfortunately underwhelming both in itself and in its effect on the other buildings.

Andrew Blauvelt, Senior Curator at the Walker at the time the latest extension was commissioned, thoughtfully suggested that it should not be a “third charm on the charm bracelet”, referring to the existing buildings by Barnes and Herzog and de Meuron. The visual quietness of the HGA design is no doubt a response to this request, but this could have been more imaginatively addressed—perhaps by operating at a different level of detail, or changing building users’ experience of the other buildings. While the latest extension by HGA is certainly a great improvement to the pragmatic problems of that entry to the Walker, I have major reservations about both the premise and execution of the project. The original building by Barnes had a symbiotic relationship with the Ralph Rapson-designed Guthrie Theater, and was lobotomized by the tragic demolition of the latter.

While the architects do not posit the scheme in these terms, the HGA extension solves the lobotomy problem by ostensibly reconstructing a diminutive version of the demolished connection to the Guthrie.

But this approach is far less effective than the original because of the absence of the Guthrie building—it is spatially superfluous, formally out of scale, and materially unrelated to either the Barnes or Herzog and de Meuron buildings.

A newly constructed view from the parking lot entry to the sculpture garden unfortunately also inevitably creates views of parked cars from the pedestrian entry, and not in a way that leverages the potential for 81

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this to appear as a readymade visually appropriated into the galleries.

The yellow-painted metal liner to the entry and the raked-profile skylight in the restaurant portion of the addition inevitably recall the works of Donald Judd and James Turrell, but the immediate adjacency of these masterful inspirations is not flattering to the execution of these elements in the new architectural addition. The HGA scheme also does nothing to address the spatial problems of the the Herzog and de Meuron addition that are outlined above. Entering the building from any orientation still feels like entering through a secondary entrance, and the building now has two shops and two restaurants, none of which feel adequately connected to the galleries. The latest addition to the Walker seems ultimately lacking simply because it is the product of a large practice, focused on faultlessly competent execution but without a clear and particular set of design goals or methods. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Walker did not in fact need another building at all, but rather changes to its existing ones, and the way their spaces are used.

The architecture of the Walker provides a useful case study of the damage that can accidentally be done to the quality of architectural outcomes through the unintended side effects of this well-intentioned increased regulation. The system of licensing in the United States protects not only the title of “architect” and the use of any derivation of the word to describe the process or outcome, but also the activity itself—one cannot design buildings unless one is licensed to do so in the state in which the project is located. In most states, houses and other small projects are excluded from licensing requirements, but 82

otherwise foreign architects and architects from other US states must work with a local architect of record to deliver a project, and in some states even that form of collaboration is prohibited. Some Australian states have introduced rules that bear a resemblance to the US system, and there is some similarity in New Zealand’s recent restriction of building design to local architects and designers who are “Licensed Building Practitioners”. The United Kingdom has so far stopped short of protection of function in favour of protection of title, and while it may seem counter-intuitive, I would argue this might be a good thing for the quality of the built environment. The lesson to be learnt from American experience, and in particular the case study of the Walker in Minneapolis, is that alternatives to a licensing system should be considered to safeguard the quality of architectural design output— through mechanisms that not only protect robust building technology, but also support the delivery of original designs, by architects pursuing their own particular design agendas. Potential models are Japan’s system of transferring the responsibility of documentation to building contractors, and the more flexible registration rules of some European countries.

While some of the problems highlighted by the Walker are the consequence of licensing, others are the result of commissioning and procurement processes that favour large practices over small ones, competency over creativity, and familiarity over originality. Changing the culture of RFPs in the private sector will be extremely difficult and likely very slow, but surely government and arts clients could lead the way. The construction industry has developed an extremely high level

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of competency for technical delivery, and could use this expertise to support less experienced practices in delivering buildings with programmes, complexity and scale outside their experience. The current system has led to large practices—in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere—continuing to absorb local talent and monopolize large projects, producing a competent but increasingly normalized architectural output. New practices all too often emerge in the image of these established practices, established or run by former employees who know that to bring clients with them or to attract clients of the same type, they must produce projects almost indistinguishable from their mentors’ designs.

Aside from licensing and commissioning, the Walker is a cautionary tale in the rapid expansion of the size of a practice or its projects without a clearly articulated design methodology. If a practice relies upon the first-hand involvement of its founders for its projects to be imbued with their authorship, the scale, number and geographic distribution of projects is limited to them personally. While Herzog and de Meuron, and in particular Jacques Herzog have written extensively on the subject of their architecture, their writing is quite esoteric and tangential to the production of the work itself. While one can understand the general interests and cultural positioning of the architects, one gets very little illumination from their writing of the way the buildings are actually conceived and delivered.

A lack of clarity on the way in which design work is produced leaves employees and architects-of-record without guidance as to how to make the thousands of small decisions that collectively comprise a completed building. To avoid this death of an architectural design idea by a thousand paper cuts, an architect not in personal contact with this scale of decision-making needs a clearly articulated design methodology—to enable an understanding of not just a broad ethos, but of how to deliver a building with details that enhance, or at least do not diminish, the original design ideas. A stark contrast can be made between Herzog and de Meuron and Le Corbusier, whose Five Points of Architecture and Modulor enabled employees, colleagues and collaborators to comprehend both the ethos and process of delivering his ideas. Le Corbusier himself needed to intervene only where he wished to deviate from his own stated design methodology, as he of course did frequently.

My PhD research focused on Adolf Loos, and the way in which his writing played a critical role in the development of his architectural design methodology. I pursued this research using my own building and writing work in practice as the lens through which to examine Loos. Using the distinction I have outlined above, Loos’s writing could on its face be compared to Herzog and de Meuron’s in that he does not directly describe his own process for making architecture—but it is in fact more similar to my description of Le Corubsier’s writing in that it directly addresses issues of architectural form and space making.

Loos’s very particular positions have been widely misunderstood due to a tendency for his buildings to be examined separately from his writing, between academia and the profession respectively, and by different factions within academia. With regard to my own design work, my doctorate enabled me to examine, interrogate and improve the way in which I use writing to describe both my building projects

and the design processes by which they are produced. This entailed becoming as direct and precise as possible—referring to particular building elements and the decisions that need to be made about their physical properties in order to genuinely give manifestation to ideas.

Writing critically about the built work of other architects is another way to improve the quality of the output of the discipline, and the progressively declining quality of the architecture of the Walker could in this sense be seen as directly connected to the decline in effective criticism in the architectural press over this time period.

Academic architectural journals have progressively moved away from the critique of buildings to discussions of more esoteric subjects, often only tangentially relevant or unrelated to the built environment.

Meanwhile, many professional journals have become mouthpieces of the architects’ institutes, some of which view criticism of their members’ work as counter to their broader mission to promote them.

Architectural magazines have similarly been driven towards almost wholly positive commentary for fear of alienating advertisers or being denied access to buildings or interviews with architects by their press agents.

The overarching lesson to be learnt from this case study of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center is that the normalizing processes of procurement need to be addressed at every stage. In order for architects to effectively innovate in buildings of a larger scale, procurement processes will have to shift significantly away from a risk-averse culture, to one that encourages the commissioning and support of architects with original ideas regardless of their technical experience. Professional bodies could reassess the assumptions that underpin registration and licensing processes, so that architects are recognized primarily as designers, rather than as technical facilitators. Meanwhile, a more robust environment of critical architectural journalism focussed on buildings could contribute to affecting this change. Ultimately, the processes that suppress architects’ creativity appear to act exponentially as the size of a project increases, so many architects might also be well served to refocus at least a part of their creative output on small projects until procurement processes are radically reshaped.

Architects could help themselves by writing more critically about their own work, being particular and direct, rather than esoteric, about how the physical elements of the buildings they produce are manifestations of the ideas they claim their work is concerned with.

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Work and Leisure in One Building: Norman Foster and the High-Tech Conception of Work, 1965–75 Matthew Wells

What we do for work seems to be an essential part of our existence, as the past few months have made self-evident. Work is where we conform, joke, talk, and resist authority. Work might allow us to escape our responsibilities. Or by providing a new set of duties work encroaches on other spheres in our life—friendship, love, family.

As our lives pass work changes us, almost unobserved. Whilst we might now at least like to conceive of our lives differently, the taskbased nature of agricultural societies held little separation between “work” and “life”, as social intercourse and work were bound together.

A transition from cyclical or seasonal time to linear time occurred due to the ascent of industrial capitalism as the predominate model of organisation in cities, towns, and villages.1 A new timediscipline was imposed primarily through the division of labour, supported by technologies including bells, clocks, and the collection of data (census, surveys, accounting systems). In the mature phase of industrial capitalism, E. P. Thompson noted, “all time must be consumed and marketed, put to use”.2 This move from task-orientated agricultural work to industrial labour ensured that leisure time in itself became a problem, or another form of work.

As the historians of the mid twentieth century began to unpick the fabric of work, in turn they began to explore time, and the notion of leisure, holidays, and rest. The “tightly woven web of techniques” of contemporary industrial capitalism was considered only as a part of a milieu.3 This environment was seen as a system formed from a series of technical factors—production, transport, communications, gender relations, entertainment—which were seen as transforming human existence, impacting new locations and situations including the office, the factory, and the home, in addition to the spaces of consumption and leisure.

It is not hard to imagine how these wide-ranging historical interests were part of a broader social interest in the environmental, as a total system. At the same time by the end of the 1960s architects and sociologists began to consider workplaces in terms of “communications” rather than workflows—ideas that were influenced by a contemporary interest in cybernetics.4 Against the typical office layout that resulted from principles of Scientific Management (also know as Taylorism), it was argued that the lines of “communication seldom follow the lines of command in an organization chart”.5 And with the emergence of Bürolandschaft (“office landscape”), workplaces became arranged loosely in relation to need rather than status, with an emphasis placed on ideas such as group participation, teamwork, and quality as means to increase productivity.6 As one of the pioneers of the idea in Englishspeaking architectural culture Francis Duffy noted, “Architecture is an image of society; office layout of organizational form.”7

Whilst the reorganisation of the workplace was a topic for architects in post-war Britain, in the 1960s the country was undergoing an alteration to the means and the relations of production. At a national level manufacturing began to stand for the economy as a whole, something encouraged by policymakers who provided central support for investment, discriminatory taxes, and nationalistic procurement. Although manufacturing was not nationalised, unlike mining or utilities, as David Edgerton has recently argued, it was regarded as particularly important because it was seen as the place where gains in labour productivity (and economic growth) were to be made.8 Alongside this larger structural development the Greater London Plan (1960) proposed that over one million Londoners should be relocated either to existing or new towns within south-east England.

On the back of this act, in collaboration with London County Council and the Borough of Tottenham, Swindon Council began a series of diversifications that eventually expanded the town’s industrial base by funding the creation of industrial estates.9 One key area was a long, narrow, six-acre site zoned as the Greenbridge Industrial Estate. The first phase of its development was the establishment of two American manufacturers on the site in 1967. Marcel Breuer designed a 45,000-ft factory for an American manufacturer of ventilation fans. Opposite Breuer’s factory Team 4 (Norman & Wendy Foster, and Richard Rogers) and the engineer Tony Hunt designed the first phase of a factory complex for Reliance Controls, a manufacturer of precision electronic instruments.

Reliance Controls was an Anglo-American collaboration with a director-client in the form of Peter Paul-Huhne, who wanted a building that would embody the management processes and corporate identity that he had experienced in America. Writing on American factories in Britain in the Architectural Review Nicholas Taylor described how the “linear relationships of mass production”, which included machines, workers, and the space between them, “can be used architecturally to express the corporate identity of social behaviour in each particular firm”.10 The expression of corporate identities present in much post-war American architecture, including universality of space, the module of the grid (structural, spatial, organisational), and the flexibility it implied, begin to emerge in suburban industrial estates around Britain.

Flexibility and the module of a grid can be seen clearly in the first phase of the project which established the idea of the factory’s linear growth with two service roads—one for goods and one for people— emanating from the existing road of the industrial estate. Laid out on a square grid of 40ft structural bays, the central spine of the factory’s plan was conceived as a constellation of spaces with a production line that 85

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ran from the delivery bay for raw materials to assembly to a machine shop and finally to packing. From the entrance hall the whole factory, offices and the production line, could be “visually comprehended in a single view”. Armatures of services such as toilets, kitchens, and plant rooms formed isolated islands within the central spine of the factory.

At the northern perimeter of the building were a range of cellular and open-plan offices, laboratories, meeting rooms, and a dining hall.

Whilst certain spaces, such as toilets and the boardroom, were enclosed within blockwork walls, the majority of the rooms were partitioned with a floor-to-ceiling-glazed aluminium-frame proprietary system. (As the factory expanded in subsequent phases the glazed northern perimeter was seen as the edge of a glazed internal courtyard). In reference to the universality of space in the building in the Architects Journal an article noted how the “Integration of all departments in one area has brought advantages in production and supervision”.11 Eager to reduce the time spent in design and construction of the factory, the client approached several construction companies that specialised in standardised factory buildings. However, by offering an integrated design team of consultants at the start of the project, Team 4 managed to persuade the client to commission them for the project.

And this commission perhaps represents a moment when the work of the architect changed. Not only content with the “intellectual work of design”, Team 4 became the project lead, the manager of the project where all design information, whether “directly relevant or not”, was circulated between the engineers, surveyor, and architect. Although no “real drawings” were produced until late December 1964, the project was tendered in February 1965 and work began on site in the same month, thanks to the close co-operation of all of the design team.12 On site, as has been taught to generations of undergraduate architecture students since the 1970s, the steel-frame structure of 86

the building was bolted on site and then site welded with a stiff diaphragm created with the corrugated steel deck roof and additional bracing provided by diagonal steel cables.13 Each element of the building—structure, cladding, internal division, lighting and services—were “all well co-ordinated so that each contributes appropriately to the whole”.14 For instance the factory was clad in a double skin of corrugated steel, coated externally in plastic and filled with polystyrene insulation, which performed the traditional tasks of a wall: structural stability, weather proofing, and insulation.

Additionally the corrugated profile of the steel walls provided a continuous vertical perimeter duct for services that ran from a centralised service trench to the troughs in the roof decking to feed a florescent tube lighting system and motorized ventilation. The floor also performed a number of different functions in the building as a structure, skin, and services.

A secondary distribution system in the floor screed contained under-floor heating coils, telephone and electrical cables, and compressed air, which were distributed to allow any area of the factory to be used for any part of the company’s industrial activity. As was noted in 1969, “This ensures an uncluttered roofline and no hanging wires; it also facilitates internal rearrangement.”15 However, this fluidity of space caused issues where the canteen could be seen, monitored, and smelt from the office spaces; the Architects’ Journal proposed, “one also wonders if a complete break from [the] workplace is not desirable”—in other words, a separation of one part of the working day from another.16 Later, when discussing Team 4’s refurbishment of an existing building for Computer Technology at Hemel Hempstead, Financial Times architecture correspondent Harold Brockman noted that there was a new recognition in the architectural profession that the separation of corporate office space from manual labour in manufacturing “had become an anachronism”.17 In the working environment of modern Britain, space became something universal

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and flexible, defined only by an applied grid of performance (structural, environmental, managerial), becoming both the appearance and the instrument of the organisational complex.18 This idea concerned many sections of the architectural profession.

In 1969 Norman Foster edited the third edition of “MANPLAN”— an experimental revision of the Architectural Review that ignored its “regular” format, content, and tone. First published in September 1969, “MANPLAN” was an attempt by the AR “to prepare for the ‘70s and beyond […] by reviewing the station of the nation in those areas where it has a patent to speak—architecture and planning.”19 “MANPLAN 1” presented the work of Patrick Ward who had been asked to photograph a month of frustration in contemporary Britain. The following month “MANPLAN 2” explored the future of transport, logistics, and communications through various real and projected technological developments—airports, motorways, shipping containers computers, video telephones, etc. Guest edited by Norman Foster, the third issue applied these larger ideas more directly to architectural production with a particular focus on system building and how the modern workplace could be produced, organised, and integrated better within infrastructural developments. In their conclusion to “MANPLAN 3” the editors noted how “the triumphs of science have made possible almost complete control of our environment (or rather habitat)”.20 But from this edition the intention of the editors was to create new spheres that allowed for reorganisation of work within society and integrate it alongside additional social programmes within urban life. In the concluding paragraph the editors noted that

Opening page: Willis Faber & Dumas Ltd (foreground); Reliance Controls (background) Opposite: Reliance Controls Above: Computer Technology, Phase I and II, MANPLAN 3

architects had everything to gain from this change. After being “frozen out of large scale industrial building like the Ford Plant”, by addressing the issue of the design of the contemporary workplace “[architects] would in the controlled environment of the city be in a position to take command again”.21 This would be both a “profit to the community” and an “advantage” to the profession.

There were further changes to the organisation of work in Britain due to the emergence of new environments created for American subsidiaries. In their study of communications infrastructure “MANPLAN 2” noted the “controlled environment” of the future working spaces in Britain, where “ceilings and floors to a common module conceal a network of wires and pipes and quietly unify the complex computer world.”22 These new environments were a part of the emergence of post-industrial society, in particular with the uptake of computers as part of the organisational infrastructure of bureaucratic tasks: computers began to order electoral rolls for district authorities, control the production of goods in factories, and record land transfers for national governments. In March 1970 Foster Associates were asked to provide a feasibility study for Pilot Head Offices for IBM UK. On a site adjoining the current corporate headquarters at Cosham in Portsmouth and close to IBM’s plant at Havant in Hampshire, the brief required accommodation for 750 people with the expansion potential up to 1,000 employees. After acquiring the land IBM specified an eighteenmonth programme at a cost comparable to the cheapest temporary structures.23 Adjacent to newly proposed infrastructure, the M27 motorway, the building was to serve as a temporary head office whilst a permanent headquarters was built on an adjoining site.24 IBM requested that the temporary head office should meet high architectural and environmental standards “in order to establish a good image for IBM […] which will attract both the London staff and new recruits”.25 87

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Within the four-month window allowed by the programme, Foster Associates devised three proposals with respect to their client’s desires for phasing, expansion, and corporate image. Drawing on the example of an existing IBM building nearby the first two propositions—which used patent timber construction system around naturally ventilated courtyards—were rejected, as they did not provide enough car parking spaces; the opening windows required for natural ventilation would cause disturbance from traffic noise; and electrical and communication services would be restricted to the perimeter of the buildings. Crucially, also, as reported in Architectural Design, such a low-tech building “would not reflect a good image (visually or environmentally) for IBM relocating in a new area”.26 Instead, Foster Associates proposed a third solution, a custom-designed deep plan building with full environmental control, which used lightweight industrial prefabricated components. This alternative solution allowed for the elimination of the internal courtyards for ventilation, all windows could be sealed to reduce noise disruption, and a Metsec system could be extended indefinitely as the company required. The open form of the building, the servicing network, and the system of components would allow the net-to-gross efficiency of the building to be increased, whilst still presenting the client with a technically highly efficient building. Again as with Reliance Controls, the architect’s role was not simply to provide a design, but also to organise that design before and during construction. In order to deliver the building on schedule, Foster Associates relied on pre-tender letters of intent to the suppliers of major systems including structure, roof, external 88

envelope, and the air handling equipment. As noted at the time, a high proportion of the work was performed by sub-contractors, with the role of the general contractor on the project confined to management and organisation of the subcontractors.

By May 1970 the design had been agreed with the client: a rectangular plan (2:1 proportion) provided a 10,870m2 building.

The superstructure of the plan was formed from 24ft × 24ft Metsec beams above a mesh-reinforced concrete raft: thereby allowing fast construction time, and a continuous flexible space that could be expanded in any direction. This 24ft module established the principle structure, organisation, and environmental strategy of the building.

The only fixed elements were housed in two blockwork cores to the north containing plant, toilets, and the computer machine room.

Air conditioning, power, and telephone cables are organised into a ceiling zone, with outlets dropping vertically down alongside columns to users below. Each column (both structural and services) organised the plan of the building, serving either a group of four managers (defined by full-height partitions) or a group of six desks in the open plan of the main office space. The architects designed a soft brown and pink carpet and colour tested their design under mercury vapour recessed light fittings. As the central avenue of desks was up to 150ft from the building’s perimeter, Foster Associates wrapped the shed in a curtain wall system formed from aluminium box sections and fullheight solar glass (Pilkington Spectrafloat), secured with a neoprene structural gasket. First produced in 1967 Spectrafloat was an example of the electro-float process, which allowed Pilkington to economically

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produce small quantities of heat-rejecting glass for use by the automobile and building industries.27 On the building’s completion in June 1971, IBM UK News noted how the brown-tinted Spectrafloat glass that formed the exterior walls added a “definite sense of luxury” to the building.28 The architectural press were less certain, praising both the glass’ detailing whilst being critical of the overall visual effect of the building. Writing in 1973, John Donat noted how the external envelope “reduces architectural detailing to a currently irreducible minimum […] Not until somebody invents a structural and invisible adhesive can this kind of detail be further simplified”.29 However, this in turn disrupted the appearance of the building as “It has no top and no bottom and nothing very much in between—at least in the conventional sense.”30 As a result, Donat classed the project as “a nonbuilding—a scientifically accomplished enclosure of great serenity, in which those who work here count for more than the man-made container”.31 Casabella argued from a similar position, claiming that “architecture as a constructional fact has been practically eliminated” by the detailing of the curtain wall.32 Others believed that this detailing was not simply the desire to reduce architectural expression to its absolute minimum requirements: Lance Wright, then editor of the Architectural Review, proposed that the building’s structure or form was so minimal it was “no more than a prop for an enclosing

This page and opposite: IBM Pilot Headquarters

membrane: seen from outside, the building is almost invisible […]

This is not an architectural setting but an ‘environment’.”33 To borrow John Harwood’s analysis of IBM in the US, this environment was a material regime by, for, and of the logic of corporate organisation.34 For IBM the process of management was the control of space. As Eliot Noyes, consultant director of design for the company, stated: “if you get to the very heart of the matter, what IBM really does is help man extend his control over his environment […] I think that’s the mean of the company”.35 IBM wanted architecture itself to operate as a coherent system, like the data processing machines that it sold.36 Formally this manifested itself in the ordered and pure interiority that IBM sought to offer through its products. Initially, in 1950s America, courtyard plan forms were used; however, in IBM Cosham, a total enclosure was formed to produce a fully disciplined corporate environment. Whilst several reviews noted the surrounding parkland and trees, the building was not designed with any specific view or relationship in mind.

Concealed by the reflections of its surroundings, the building became the setting for experiments in the organisation of work. At the 1972 RIBA Awards ceremony for the Southern region of the UK, IBM Managing director E R Nixon noted, “We hope to use this building to learn something of working environments that can be applied in our permanent administrative offices.”37 The open-plan interior lead to a rearrangement of work within the building itself, with the “one secretary-one manager” method of other IBM offices was replaced with a new “group-orientated secretarial system”.38 Referred to internally 89

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as the “modular unit secretarial concept”, or “MUSC”, the company believed that it brought increased efficiency through the subdivision of secretarial work into three types of labour working on discrete tasks: word processing operatives, secretarial assistants (who answered telephone and postal communications), and secretarial personal assistants (who organised departmental research and finances).

Overseeing these three types of staff was a “secretarial unit manager”— originally known as “modular unit managers”, the associated acronym was felt to be too maternal. In addition to the system “prov[ing] its worth in providing a fast, efficient support service”, as IBM noted themselves, the various hierarchies of organisation “provides a clear career path for the girls employed within it.39 And the system’s deployment at Cosham was no coincidence, as Carlton Hobbs, a secretarial methods manager at IBM, noted, “Cosham was an ideal location to try the concept [as it represented] a new environment for new ideas”. Internationally IBM divisions around the world were said to have been interested in how the new system operated, with the secretarial methods department “inundated with requests for presentations on the new system”.

Around the same time as the opening of IBM Cosham, the insurance brokers Willis Faber & Dumas Ltd interviewed architects in relation to a proposed company re-organisation. Like many other brokers, the company had historically been based in the City of London, with a satellite office in Southend-on-Sea on the southeast coast of Britain. The company wanted to rationalise their business with the construction of a new main headquarters to house 1300 employees in Ipswich, 75 minutes away from London by train.

A one-hectare site was identified on the edge of Ipswich, on the periphery of the medieval town and at the junction with a new ring road. Existing four-storey buildings—terraced houses, a pub, a hotel, and a warehouse—were spread across the site, which was split by two roads into three parcels of land. Additionally, a seventeenthcentury Unitarian Meeting House lay to the east, just beyond the site’s perimeter. As a part of the design process Foster Associates worked closely with their client to analyse the commercial working patterns in the company. The architects understood that a plan form was required which would “allow a department to regroup or expand at short notice”.40 Alongside this factor, a wide range of building types and plan forms were evaluated in order to assess the amount of usable square footage for the building. Following the architects’ analysis of internal movement patterns at the company, net-to-gross area schedules, and the study of the existing streetscape, the final design was for a threestorey deep-plan building pushed out to the farthest edges of the site, with a two-storey small pavilion above. One assertion by the architect, is that through this massing the building reinforces the existing streetscape, rather than imposing an unrelated geometry on the site.

The building was comprised of two levels of open-plan offices, sandwiched between plant rooms, data processing equipment; a swimming pool at ground level, with a pavilion and lawns on the roof. One contemporary review of the building suggested that this demonstrated “Norman Foster’s belief that it is not necessary to draw hard and fast distinctions between work and play”.41 Other than the primary structure (concrete waffle slab and circular columns), all wet trades were eliminated from the site, with an external envelope 90

formed by the bronze-tinted curtain wall, and all internal walls formed from non-load bearing metal partitions. Domus noted that Foster Associates initiated “sophisticated programming techniques” in order to achieve rapid construction phasing, demolition, road closures, and the diverting of underground services.42 As the article noted, “in an inflationary building climate”, these techniques were essential in order to maintain the overall cost of the building in line with the contract sum. Here again we see refinement to the work of the architect in society, where their intellectual labour is not simply focused on design, but management. Underlining this point, an article on the project in Architectural Design noted that, “During the complexities of demolitions and service diversion, the architects were more involved in management consultancy than the exercise of any normal design-based skill.”43 Despite the completion of the building just after the 1973–74 oil crisis, the building was based on a total system of servicing, fuelled by carbon resources. As the mechanical engineer on the project wrote, conceptually the building took “due note of the need to consider energy conservation, but … a stimulating environment leads to efficiency and productive work which leads to energy conservation in its wider sense.”44 Within the building, the data processing computer and electronic telephone exchange have independent air-conditioning systems, running 24-hours a day.45 Separate to these, in the rest of the building, one important design aspect was integration of various elemental parts to perform different requirements: structural frame, ceiling void, lighting, suspended ceiling, raised access floor for power and telephone cables—”essentially the various elements are planned as interdependent parts of a multi-layer sandwich”.46 Similarly integrated, was the concept of a single volume to accommodate all of the company’s employees.47 There were no barriers or partitions to break the flow between escalators and office areas, or between offices areas and roof-top restaurant. One effect of this, the architectural press noted, was that “Orientation is immediate; you always know where you are. The barriers are few, seldom visual.”48 Internal circulation was provided by a pair of escalators that were swept along the depth of the building’s floor plate. The practice’s monograph noted that “several directors commented that the company had developed a true family spirit in the new building because people now stopped and talked on the escalators, creating a social focus at the heart of the building”.49 In their review of the building from November 1975, Domus noted how the two, open-planned office floors “virtually eliminates traditional communication problems and has vastly simplified office procedures and paper handling”.50 In turn, this reduction “made the expansion— or contraction—of individual departments a relatively painless operation”.51 In addition to this ability for the working environment to change, the building facilitated techniques of surveillance with management situated on the edge of each floor plate, adjacent to the perimeter circulation route, allowing them to monitor their subordinates. Reflecting on the project in 1977, Norman Foster noted “Management […] is here reflected by a virtual absence of doors”.52

Opposite and overleaf: Willis Building

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As discussed above, at IBM Cosham in the 1970s Pilkington were experimenting with silicon sealants in order to connect individual glass sheets. At Willis Faber and Dumas, this logic was used along with a “patch” system, where individual panes were connected by steel patch fittings at each corner, and the joint sealed with silicon. Working with Modern Art Glass, the subcontractor, each steel patch had an internal fitting to a glass mullion, that in turn was fixed to the concrete slab above. For safety reasons, the system required the use of toughened glass, which, with solar glass required by the architect, added complications to the production process. Only at the tendering stage did Pilkington agree to be included, and after providing the most competitive (i.e. cheapest) tender, the company took on full design responsibility for the system; which was comprised of 930 12mmthick panes of glass. In their editorial on the building the Architectural Review considered the curtain wall as “a specific solution to a specific problem”.53 However, the magazine questioned the “Willis Faber and Dumas sheath” as a ubiquitous technical device, with the material of glass converted “from something you look through, a mere facility, to something you look at”.54 And this thing we look at is one reduced to almost nothing, “since the incidents of the design—the fixings and the joints—are minimised to the point of disappearance”.55 This disappearance, contemporary critics noted, meant that “Questions of scale are neatly avoided. What is the size of the building’s subdivisions?”56 Writing in the New Society, Reyner Banham noted that at Ipswich Foster Associates had fused together “two completely different (some would insist, utterly opposed) sets of architectural approaches, expectations, and customary usages”.57 On the one hand, glass as “the party of order and hygiene”, was used as a symbolic material to represent “clarity, literal and phenomenal”. On the other—alluded to by the perimeter of the building following the curve of both the post-war traffic improvements and the irregular medieval street pattern—was the “Townscape Modernism” of 1950s Britain (or a more contemporary “Contextualism” emanating from Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.58) However, the perimeter of building 92

is not contextual, rather it simply follows the offset line of the site’s boundary in order to maximise floor area. Initially the client did not own the whole site, but the approach of “Organic form” allowed the building to accommodate a very late change in the shape when the client acquired more land.59 Combined with the planning requirement that restricted buildings on the site to four to six storeys, the intention to push the perimeter of the building to its limits was done for reasons of building economics and efficiency.60 When looking at the “featureless facades”, Banham noticed that every period, and style of “East Anglian urban architecture” was visible in reflection.61 But the curved façade, with its flat panes of unbroken glass, not only reflected its surroundings, but also provided fragmented, overlapped, and repeated images on simultaneous glass planes. It is unclear exactly what is the register of the curtain wall. Described seven years after its opening by Sutherland Lyall as a “complex and fundamentally ambiguous external form”, the building is a heavily serviced shed, a neutral enclosure, with a free-standing structure inside.62 It signifies nothing other than a form to house an environment for the organisation of work.

Laurent Stalder identifies how either side of the Second World War, one mode of modern architecture—that understood their task as a spatial-structural one—conceded ground to another, that aspired to control the environment.63 The former, thanks to the dissolution of the wall as a purely structural device, operated in various forms of the free plan; whilst the second conceived the human environment as a series of distinct spheres that needed to be regulated and controlled.

In the early career of Team 4 and Foster Associates we see the choral effect of both of these schools of thought, with the task of the architect being to systematise work through the combination of spatialstructural devices (walls, columns, partitions); and the construction of environmental enclosures (climatic, organisational). We see this combination switching from one company to another, one suburb to another, one form of production to another. This is the logic of organisation, and it became the future of work in Britain.

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1

For the classic studies on time and work see Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass. / London, 1982) pp.426434; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans.

John Moore (London, 2002) pp.52-56

2

E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present 38 (December 1967) p. 90-91.

3

George Friedmann, “Leisure and Technological Civilization”, International Social Science Journal 12. 4 (1960) p. 509

4

Norman Foster, “Exploring the client’s range of options”, RIBA Journal (June 1970) p. 247.

5

H. J. Lorenzen and D. Jaeger, “The office landscape, a systems concept” Contract Magazine (April 1968)

6

The Quickborn Group of “office organisers” are considered the inventors of the Bürolandschaft concept.

See Kurt Alsleben, Büro und Großraum (Quickborn, 1961); Eberhard Schnelle and Alfons Wankum, Architekt und Organisator: Probleme und Methoden der Bürohausplanung (Quickborn, 1965).

March 1969. Steve Parnell, “Manplan”, Architectural Review 235. 1405 (March 2014).

41 “Glass house for Ipswich”, Building 228. 6886(23) (6 June 1975) p. 55.

20 “MANPLAN 3”, Architecture Review 146. 873 (November 1969) p. 397.

42 “New in England: Work and leisure in an office building”, Domus 552 (November 1975) p. 58.

21 “MANPLAN 3”, Architecture Review 146. 873 (November 1969) p. 398.

43 “Foster Associates: buildings and projects”, Architectural Design 47. 9/10 (September / October 1977) p. 614

22 “MANPLAN 2”, Architectural Review 146. 872 (October 1969) p. 316.

23 “125 Acres by the Sea”, IBM UK News no. 6 (April 1970) p. 1.

24 In 1970 IBM in fact were a part of the analytical team who analysed and projected future traffic loadings on roads and railways in the south of England for the British government. “Network of Motorways”, IBM UK News no. 11 (26 June 1970) no foliation.

25 “IBM Head Office”, Architectural Design 41 (August 1971) p. 474.

26 “IBM Head Office”, Architectural Design 41 (August 1971) p. 475.

44 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 141.

45 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 141.

46 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 141.

47 Only at ground-floor level could division be found in the separation of delivery areas.

48 “Foster Associates: buildings and projects”, Architectural Design 47. 9/10 (September / October 1977) p. 614 49 Foster Associates: Buildings and Projects Volume 2 19711978 (London, 1989) p.44.

7

Francis Duffy, “Bürolandschaft”, Architectural Review (January 1979)

27 L. A. B. Pilkington, “Review Lecture. The Float Glass Process”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Vol. 314, No. 1516 (16 December 1969) p. 11.

8

In particular see David Edgerton, “Chapter 12: National Capitalism”, in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 2018) pp.309-338.

28 “Cosham rises like a Phoenix”, IBM UK News 37 (July 1971) p. 3.

51 “New in England: Work and leisure in an office building”, Domus 552, (November 1975) p. 58

9

In the period 1951–1981, Swindon’s population grew by 70 percent, Child, Mark (2002). Swindon : An Illustrated History. United Kingdom

29 “Least is most: British IBM is the understatement of the year”, Architecture Plus vol. 1, no. 6, (July 1973) p. 30.

52 “Foster Associates: buildings and projects”, Architectural Design 47. 9/10 (September / October 1977) p. 614

10 “Made in Mid-Atlantic”, Architectural Review (July 1967) p. 12.

11 AJ, p.188 12 AJ, p.185 13 The steel sub-contractor, Modern Engineering Ltd (Bristol) were an ambitious company, working with German and Japanese engineering patents including hyperbolic concrete shells and space frames. They also once constructed the largest ice cream factory in the world for Unilever.

14 “Winning Design”, Financial Times (30 November 1967) p. 14.

15

Michael Webb, Architecture in Britain today (Feltham, 1969) p.173

16 AJ, p.188

30 “Least is most: British IBM is the understatement of the year”, Architecture Plus vol. 1, no. 6, (July 1973) p. 27.

31 “Least is most: British IBM is the understatement of the year”, Architecture Plus vol. 1, no. 6, (July 1973) p. 30.

32 “Foster Associates: assembly without composition.

Using a technical catalogue in an essential way is an alternative to the formal reinvention”, Casabella 37. 375 (3) (March 1973) p. 45.

33 “Offices, Cosham, Hants: Criticism by Lance Wright”, Architectural Review Vol CLI (January 1972) 34 John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945/1976 (Minneapolis, 2011) p. 4.

35 John Harwood, The Interface, p.5, quotes Scott Kelly, “Curator of Corporate Character Eliot Noyes and Associates”, Industrial Design 13 (June 1963) p. 43.

17 “A Carpeted Factory”, Financial Times (4 November 1968) 9: “One of the principles […] was the recognition that in a factory for light industry the separate office and works entrance had become an anachronism. We have become so accustomed to seeing the office box hiding the factory shed that such an arrangement has become taken for granted”.

36 John Harwood, The Interface, p.13.

18 Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass, 2003) p.5.

39 “New World Look for Secretaries at Cosham”, 5. It appears that individuals would move from working as a secretarial assistant to a secretarial personal assistant before being promoted to word processing operative.

For a discussion of this see “Just rewards at Cosham”, IBM UK News 65 (13 October 1972) p. 4.

19

“MANPLAN 1”, Architecture Review 146. 871 (September 1969) 173. Steve Parnell suggests that the series of produced in response to Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price’s article in New Society titled “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” from

37 “E & C thanked for role in award winning project”, IBM UK News 67 (10 November 1972) p. 4.

38 “New World Look for Secretaries at Cosham”, IBM UK News 50 (11 February 1972) p. 5.

50 “New in England: Work and leisure in an office building”, Domus 552, (November 1975) p. 58

53 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 131.

54 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 131.

55 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 132.

56 Christopher Woodward, “Head Office, Ipswich, Suffolk”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 149.

57 Reyner Banham, “Arts in Society: Grass above, glass around”, New Society 42. 783 (6 October 1877) p. 22.

58 Banham proposed that these two separate groups were united by a negative: “not putting up standardised glass boxes all over the world”. Reyner Banham, “Arts in Society: Grass above, glass around”, p. 23.

59 “Federated skills: office block in Ipswich for Willis Faber & Dumas Ltd”, Design 321, (September 1975) p. 44.

60 “Ipswich Reflections”, Architectural Review 158. 943 (September 1975) p. 138.

61 “Arts in Society: Grass above, glass around”, p. 23.

62 Sutherland Lyall, The State of British Architecture (London, 1980) p.126.

63 Laurent Stalder, “Air, Light, and Air-Conditioning”, Grey Room 40 (July 2010) p. 91.

40 “Main office for Willis Faber & Dumas Ltd., Ipswich”, Architectural Design 42. 11 (November 1972) p. 687

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The Project Is a Story Jacques Lucan (translated by Oscar Mather)

Making an architectural project entails enunciating a specific idea relative to a program (or functions), and to a situation (or context).

Imagining a project involves telling a story—imagining a narrative.

In other words, developing a scenario. Of course, there is not one, but multiple ways of telling a story. The manner of doing so depends on the point of view that is adopted. An architectural project is a project of the transformation of reality; every project being to some degree the transformation of reality. At the end of a project’s development, what is at stake is the coherence of the narrative.

In trivial terms, the story has to make sense, i.e. it has to be convincing. Convincing, firstly as itself, to its author, but then, convincing enough to win the support of those to whom it is told— the support of an audience. For students, the first audience is a jury composed of their teachers, to whom the project is primarily addressed. For architects, the public audience is diverse. Their audience includes the client, representatives of the state, the city, the public in general, and also the juries of competitions in which they take part. In sum, architects are confronted with juries throughout their professional careers, and they need to be convincing story tellers. t h e d e f i n i t i o n o f t h e p r o j e c t ’ s l aw s

For a scenario to be convincing and valid, the essential condition of a project is that it is coherent and possesses a logic of its own, an intrinsic logic. This intrinsic logic does not depend solely on extrinsic conditions, especially conditions relative to the urban or landscape context. An intrinsic architectural logic is formal, i.e. it implies the presence of rules that led the establishment of the project. Yet these rules or laws are not anterior and applied; they are what the project seeks.

To illustrate what I mean by rule or law, I will call upon three distinct authors, each of whom evokes, in his own way, what it means to make artistic work, i.e. creative work in general.

The historian and philosopher of art Thierry de Duve, writing about the artistic work of Marcel Duchamp, suggested that: “The formal work of an artist… cannot obey pre-existing rules, but it is not without rules. It establishes them in the same movement at which it interrogates them.”1 Similarly, the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard considers philosophical writing to be a form of art: “As an artist, a postmodern writer is in the situation of a philosopher: the text she writes, the artworks she realizes, are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged through prejudice, i.e. by the application to their text, to their artwork, of pre-existing categories.

Rules and categories are what the artwork, the text, seeks. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules; in order to establish the rules that determine the work that has been done.”2 Additionally, the

artist Remy Zaugg is emphatic that art has its own laws: “Everything that is in the artwork-object is decisive, nothing can be set aside, neither by decree, nor by any other reasons whatsoever. No extrinsic law rules this system of signs; it contain its own laws. The work is its own law.”3 the extension of the project’s domain

We have however witnessed, in recent years, what I would like to call an extension of the project’s domain. This is the result of two phenomena in particular. Firstly, digital tools have achieved a seemingly unavoidable grip over architectural design. Digital tools are not only a means of representation, they allow the designer to undertake operations that traditional tools could not, e.g. to describe complex forms and to work with interdependent numerous parameters, etc. In addition, do they not force us to question the coherence of a project, i.e. the rules or laws that a project gives itself?

Secondly, territorial preoccupations have become predominant; preoccupations that we no longer dare to call urbanistic, as they are often unmeasured, i.e. without any realistic measure, on the pretext that situations, for example Asian or Middle Eastern situations, bring certain phenomena to their climax; whilst European cities seem to be existing in extended context of protected heritage. In these paroxysmal situations, how can one still speak of coherence and rules?

The questions asked here express the belief that architecture must nonetheless continue to direct our attention to what it wants to say.

To conclude this little argument, I would like to recall a challenge that Le Corbusier gave himself. In front of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, a primordial but also an enigmatic building for him, one which alone symbolized architecture for Le Corbusier, he set himself a challenge: “Modern architecture can and must face the clamor of the Acropolis: iron, sheet metal, reinforced concrete, stone and wood, can and must, by obeying their own profound laws, contain, in the tension of great economy, the very grammar of architecture, which is: what did you want to tell me?

1

2

Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, Thierry de Duve, University of Minnesota Press, 1991 (Nominalisme pictural: Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité, Minuit, Paris, 1984).

The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985, JeanFrancois Lyotard, Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Trans. Don Barry, University of Minnesota Press, 1993

(Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: Correspondance, 1982–1985, Galilée, Paris, 1986).

3

Das Kunstmuseum, das ich mir erträume oder der Ort des Werkes und des Menschen (The Art Museum of My Dreams: Or the Place for Work and People), Remy Zaugg, Verlag für Moderene Kunst, 1988.

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Upstairs to Bed Thaddeus Zupancic

On Sunday, 23 January 1955, Margaret Willis, a sociologist in the Planning Division of the Architect’s Department of the London County Council (LCC), gave a talk for the BBC Home Service. According to her LCC bosses, who gave her permission for the talk and allowed her to retain the fee (“probably 8 guineas”), she “would informally talk about her work at County Hall”.

The talk—for the programme Home for the Day—was titled simply My Job. Willis explained that a sociologist is a “sort of liaison officer between people like you, the housewives, and the Council’s technical men and women who make the plans in the drawing office”. She was, though, mostly talking about the scarcity of land in “the centre of our cities”, and how planners and architects “realise how important gardens are to many people and they are doing their best to provide them”. One of their ideas, she explained, was to build “a compromise between a house and a flat, it’s a four-storey building, like a house on top of a house”. The main benefit of these buildings was the attached gardens, but there was also something else: “People prefer this type of building to a flat, because they like going upstairs to bed.”

Such “houses on top of houses”—more commonly known as maisonettes—were designed and built in London from around 1947–8.

The first was Brett Manor in Brett Street, Hackney, by Edward Mills for the Manor Charitable Trustees (Mills used the same Arup-designed box frame as Tecton did at Spa Green Estate, which was completed in 1950); swiftly followed by Powell & Moya’s low-rises at Churchill Gardens in Pimlico (to a competition-winning design from 1946, built in 1947-51). The latter were the first modernist maisonettes built or commissioned by a local London council (in this case Westminster).

Margaret Willis’s employer was not far behind. Already in the early 1950s, as Elain Harwood points out, a group at the LCC Architect’s Department, worked on “an efficient maisonette plan, which they then cast into ten-storey slabs, built at Bentham Road, Hackney, at Loughborough Junction, Lambeth, and, most impressively, the Alton West Estate, Roehampton.” Similarly, the Gascoyne Estate in Hackney was built in 1952–4; the Loughborough Estate in 1956–8; and the Alton West Estate in 1955–8.

Maisonettes thus became an integral part of mixed development, the dominant ideology for housing in the 1950s, as Harwood calls it; “houses, flats and maisonettes” was a mantra not only for the LCC, but also for London’s metropolitan boroughs and the City of London.

In 1952, for instance, Geoffry Powell won a competition for a new housing scheme in the City. After winning, he formed a practice with Peter Chamberlin and Christoph Bon, whose subsequent Golden Lane Estate consists of various blocks of flats and six blocks of maisonettes (plus a community centre, swimming pool and a tennis court).

Also in 1952, Denys Lasdun—then working in the architectural firm Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun—designed the three blocks and two towers of the Greenways Estate for Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council (built in 1955–8). Both towers—Sulkin House and Trevelyan House—are eight floor cluster blocks (consisting of four maisonettes), and form a fine precursor to his nearby, probably betterknown, Keeling House, completed in 1959, for the same council.

The reorganisation of the London local government, in 1965, saw the creation of the new Greater London Council, and 32 new London borough councils (plus the City), which became responsible for a substantially larger part of housing projects and planning than before.

More importantly, every borough now had to have its own architect’s department.

Whilst mixed developments and comprehensive redevelopments started losing their lustre somewhat, maisonettes remained an important, and evolving feature in most council housing projects, well into the 1970s.

The last great hurrah of mixed development was Thamesmead, the heroic new estate by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design (the successor to the LCC Architect’s Department). The two most architecturally intriguing structures, Coralline Walk and Binsey Walk, were linear maisonette blocks built in 1967–8. More maisonettes were included in the later stages of the development, Parkview (1969–79) and The Moorings (1971–7).

Neave Brown, working in the Camden Architect’s Department, designed two of the most remarkable post-1965 council estates in London: the Dunboyne Road Estate (a mixture of three- and twobed maisonettes and one-bed flats; designed from 1966 and built in 1971–7); and the Rowley Way, part of the Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate designed in 1968 and built in 1972–8 (block B, for instance, comprises four storeys of two- and three-bed maisonettes).

Equally remarkable, is Kate Macintosh’s all-maisonette estate Dawson Height (1966–72) in Dulwich, designed when she worked for the Southwark Department of Architecture & Planning. She described it as a “Chinese puzzle of differing types to be assembled in various combinations”, and it still works perfectly well.

So many maisonettes, and all built because Londoners wanted to go upstairs to bed.

Opposite: Dunboyne Road Estate, Gospel Oak, by Neave Brown of the Camden Architect’s Department under Sydney Cook; designed in 1966–7, built in 1971–7 In the background: Odhams Walk, Covent Garden, by Donald Ball of the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; 1979–81

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Coralline Walk, Thamesmead, by the GLC Department of Architecture and Civic Design; designed from 1966, built in 1967–72

Dawson Heights, Dulwich, by Kate Macintosh of the Southwark Department of Architecture & Planning under F.O. Hayes; 1966–72

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Vaine House and Granard House, Gascoyne Estate, Homerton, by the LCC Architect’s Department; 1952–4

Wooley House, Loughborough Estate, Lambeth, by the LCC Architect’s Department; planned and designed from 1952, built in 1956–8

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Winchfield House, Alton West, Roehampton, by the LCC Architect’s Department; designed in 1952-3, built in 1955–8

Golden Lane Estate, City of London, by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon for the Corporation of London; design won in competition in 1952, built to revised designs in 1954–6

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Jane Austen House, Churchill Gardens, by Powell & Moya for Westminster City Council; design won in competition in 1946, built in 1947–50

Sulkin House, Greenways Estate, by Denys Lasdun of Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun for Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council; designed in 1952–3, built in 1955–8

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102

Cultural Responsibility, Design and Design Education: The Ordering of the Human-Made Environment John Meunier, Inaugural Lecture as Dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University, 25 September 1987

I would like to do three things this evening. First, fairly systematically, to explore the implications of the ideas in the title of this lecture.

Second, to take a brief look at some of the buildings and projects I have been involved with as possible illustrations of those ideas.

And third, I will attempt to fulfill my own responsibility to sum up, and try to make coherent sense out of this rather linear stream of ideas and images.

Some time ago, when I was first asked to extend my academic responsibilities beyond architecture towards interior design, I found it necessary to attempt to define the two disciplines. The two definitions I came up with were: “Architecture is the culturally responsible augmentation of the built resources of a community,” and “Interior Design is the culturally responsible adaptation of those built resources to the immediate and specific needs of an individual or an institution.”

You will note that the idea of cultural responsibility was what made the difference between building and architecture and interior design.

They both include building, but become architecture and interior design when that building was culturally responsible.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the attempt to be culturally responsible was what we look for in all the professions and indeed, if we take it far enough, in all of our acts as citizens.

Now I face the task of attempting to define for myself both Planning and Industrial Design, and I am sure that I will find the phrase culturally responsible central to my definitions. How about: “Planning is the culturally responsible structuring in space and time of man’s efforts to support and shelter the activities of life,” and “Industrial Design is the culturally responsible giving of shape and form to the artifacts needed by man.”

They are not as well honed as the other two, but they will do to begin with.

So what do we mean by the phrase culturally responsible?

Let us start with the idea of culture, for when I began to make my

Opposite: Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard

first definitions I deliberately chose not to use the phrase socially responsive, which was perhaps more commonly used and accepted.

I chose the word culture rather than social for two reasons. First because it includes aesthetic and well as ethical issues. Second, because it is used qualitatively as well as descriptively. We may talk of something or somebody as being more or less cultured.

The idea of culture is based on the idea of shared values and concepts, manifested in behavior and artifacts. Like languages, different cultures address life’s experiences in different ways. Anyone who speaks more than one language knows that there are nuances of difference in the way two languages treat a given set of ideas.

So do different cultures manifest their different valuation of similar phenomena.

Also, we have learned that it is necessary to be culturally tolerant.

Books like The Ugly American and The Silent Language introduced us to the idea that what was proper behavior in our culture may not be proper in another. And we have more recently become aware that even within our own culture there are subcultures whose values, behaviors, and artifacts we have to respect, although different from our own.

The notion of culture as something that can be measured qualitatively is, of course, much in the air today as we focus our attention in universities on general education, and read books that criticize the superficiality of the grasp of our cultural heritage by today’s students and graduates.

All our actions and our artifacts necessarily respond to the cultural context within which they are executed. That is indeed why I do not ask for responsiveness. We cannot escape being responsive, at least to our own culture. During the period of growing up within our own culture we become socialized to seeing things, and expressing ourselves in certain normative ways. To use slightly technical language, we learned to adopt particular schemata and to structure our actions within some culturally specific paradigms.

I ask for responsibility because we need to be conscious, not unconscious, of the impact of our actions within the culture where those actions occur. Culture is not a static thing; it is constantly shifting. One of the causes of those shifts is the impact on that culture of the actions of its designers.

Responsibility implies an ethical burden in relation to the concept of thought. But for the designer, as for the artist, it also implies an aesthetic burden. The major responsibility of the designer being not just to ameliorate the conflicts and pressures of life (problem solving), but much more to enrich and intensify the quality of life (adding value) by accepting the full range of conflicts and pressures and then transcending them.

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Responsibility implies a critical relationship to our normative schemata and paradigms, and a willingness to take the risks of challenging, extending, or even replacing them. In doing that the designer, or the design scholar, may have a profound impact on the cultural context. Such an impact requires the care of responsibility to ensure that the full richness of the culture is being extended not constrained.

Responsibility also requires a willingness to recognize the continuing validity of some of those paradigms and schemata, and a preparedness to utilize them with a fresh enthusiasm in a thoughtful and careful way.

Having looked, perhaps somewhat superficially, at the opening phrase of my title, I would now like to move on to the central term, the idea of design. To design is to propose form for something that will exist in the experiential world. The form that the designer proposes, to be effective, must be comprehensible. That comprehensibility may be either highly accessible, or only fully accessible after the investment of a great deal of time and effort. High art is only accessible after prolonged contemplation. Some designed products must be immediately accessible, at least on the primary level of use, as in a traffic sign. Ideally, I suppose all designed artifacts would be multivalent. That is, both immediately accessible, and also rewarding to prolonged contemplation. I remember meeting someone who worked in Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard who said something to the effect: “You know, I’ve been using this building for years, but I’m still finding new things in it.”

Design, however, is rarely invention of new forms. It is more often the relatively unprecedented assemblage of known formal subsystems.

Design is like literature, which uses alphabets, words, grammar and concepts, which are common to a culture, and widely understood in that culture, but uses them to increase our knowledge, understanding, experience, and emotional awareness.

One of the tasks of the designer is to refresh our acquaintance with the world as our culture addresses it. There is indeed a role for fashion. There is always room for a new dress, a new kettle, a new door knob, a new supermarket, a new church, but ideally that novelty needs to be related to some underlying shift in the culture, such as the changing role of women, or new aesthetic ordering principles, or new technological potentials (i.e. some modification in the value system which is at the root of our culture).

Design for us as Planners, Architects and Designers is the development of concepts that inform the human-made environment.

These concepts have to be realized physically, through technology.

Technology involves the conversion of physical resources from one condition to another. That conversion implies two things: the expenditure of effort or energy, and the production of unintended and other undesirable by-products.

The first leads us to economics, and the second to pollution.

Sometimes the negative by-products of design, or their cost, outweigh the positive benefits. We are back with the need for responsibility.

Design Education in a university environment is a very recent phenomenon. Historically, design was learned through the apprenticeship system, a system which thrived in many countries well 104

into this century. My parents, when they first accepted the idea that I wanted to be an architect, took me to meet one, to see if they could negotiate an articled apprenticeship for me. He, however, pointed out that there was a good school of architecture in the local university.

Liverpool University was indeed the first British university to have a School of Architecture, and it was only established in about 1907.

Institutionalized design education was more often found in an Art Academy, such as the Ecole des Beaux Arts, or the more Anglo-Saxon equivalent, the College of Arts and Crafts.

Universities are places where theories are developed. In most fields they are theories of explanation, whether scientific, philosophical or historical. Schools of Design are places where the primary emphasis tends to be rather on theories of action. Universities tend to be answering questions dominated by the phrases; what was, and what is? Design Schools are primarily concerned with the more speculative question: what should be?

Research is a central activity in a university because it is the direct way to approach the questions: what is, and what was? The question of what should be is certainly informed by research, because how can we approach the future without knowing the past and the present?

But nonetheless, the center of our disciplines lies in our ability to make responsible speculations. Criticism is often the central stimulus to speculation.

Although Design Education may have its differences from other forms of education in the university context, and another one is the emphasis on manipulative skills as opposed to the acquisition of knowledge; nonetheless, I believe we should relish its position in the university context for several reasons: It has been ennobled by being placed in a context where the goal of education is freedom; freedom to fulfill one’s potential within a culture; freedom from the prison of ignorance, ill-formed ideas and arbitrary rules of behavior; and freedom to understand, evaluate, criticize and contribute to the culture. For within the university context, education is not training, education is not inculcation into the rites of a mystery, and education is not the transfer of dogma.

Within the university, education implies the transfer of responsibility for learning and action from the teacher to the student. Teachers may, indeed should, inspire, but within the university context, teachers must forego the temptation to demand discipleship and the use of their superior knowledge and skill to dominate and indoctrinate.

Design Education requires not only the transfer of knowledge and the development of skills of understanding, but also the special skills of formal manipulation and the ability to generate aesthetically rewarding physical structures that are isomorphic with man’s social, intellectual, and emotional structures (i.e. the very specific skills of design).

We now come to my subtitle, The Ordering of the Human-made Environment. I have substituted human-made for built specifically to include the discipline of industrial design.

We have said that design gives form. To give form is to order material in space and time. Comprehensible order is vital to our ability to live in the world, without order we are insecure to a degree that provokes anxiety, fear, nausea, and trauma. One of the sources of the stature of architecture in history lay in its ability to make manifest

c u lt u r a l r e s p o n s i b i l i t y , d e s i g n a n d d e s i g n e d u c at i o n

man’s ability to create order in the world. Architecture was held to represent both the order of the heavens and the implicit order of nature.

The concept of classicism is associated with extraordinarily clear, yet subtle, ordering systems; ordering systems that have proven to be almost universal in space and time in their ability to calm the anxieties natural to men and women in their transitory presence in the world.

These orders symbolize stability in the relationships between things in the face of flux and change.

But we have also had ordering systems that are as Dionysus to Apollo; orders that flirt with chaos; orders that reflect change; orders that manifest conflict and difference, incompletion and an uneasy balance of forces.

Sir Christopher Wren, in his Parentalia, discussed the difference between Natural and Customary Beauty: Natural being the beauty of mathematics and proportion as manifested in the classic; Customary being that beauty that changes with The Gust of the Age. I am guilty of a tricky elision when I make a transition from The Gust of the Age to the idea of The Zeitgeist. Gust means taste, and geist, for all its similarity of sound, is German for Spirit. Zeitgeist is The Spirit of the Time and is an idea that has been, at least in its impact on architecture, planning, and design, recently much criticized and questioned. It is too big a debate to do justice to here but in so far as it affects the question of order, it is of great importance. It has been suggested that the simple ordering of classicism made sense when human’s concept of the order of the universe and of nature was equally simple. But since those earlier explanatory theories have been replaced, first by the concepts of infinity, then later by the concepts of relativity and space and time, it is necessary and appropriate that the order we manifest in the man-made environment should also change.

I find it both necessary and natural that in our human-made environment we will find an oscillation between Natural and Customary Beauty, between stable classicism and dynamic modernity.

The human spirit responds to both. Indeed in Chinese Architecture you may find them side by side, just as in the heroic modern period you will find the regular structural grid playing off against the idiosyncratically free plan.

The point is that when we as planners, architects and designers give order to the man-made environment, we are realizing in a physical sense the concepts of order that structure our culture.

That could lead to a discussion of structuralism and deconstruction as recent theories, derived from literary analysis. These theories have had a profound impact on some avant-garde designers, but I must reserve that for another time.

But cultural responsibility requires that, as we give order, we not only reflect general concepts of order within the culture, but also that we make an order that releases the components of our design each to do their proper job within their own terms while still supporting the whole. In this sense, I must say that I find great similarities between the task of the designer and the task of the administrator.

Science is not the only place where we might find ordering principles which we could use to inform our work. Music, painting, literature, and now film are clearly as interested in questions of form

and order as we are, and I find myself very interested in the subtle ordering commonly used in that most popular and accessible art form, the movie.

We live in a human-made world. As Planners, Architects and Designers, we are only partly responsible for it, but we do have a particular responsibility to attempt to view it holistically. The engineer and the chemist may have more impact than we do, but it is never conceived of as their responsibility to consider the interrelationships between all of the components of that world.

Quite clearly our cultural responsibility is to do what we can to ensure that world is positive and coherent in its impact; that those negative by-products I was talking about earlier are either avoided or ameliorated, and that our goal is to increase the value of that environment on all the axes of value—economic, social, ethical, technical and aesthetic.

In the very particular circumstance of being a College that promotes the disciplines of planning, architecture and design, we must clearly prepare our students for those roles, but we also have the other tasks of research, creative activity and service that are associated with a university. We can best do the latter not by offering a cheaper equivalent of professional practice, but by taking advantage of the elevation of our viewpoint, first to understand the normative conditions that govern the practice of those disciplines, and then to generate, where appropriate, alternatives to those sources that could prove to be more culturally responsible.

(Slide presentation of buildings and projects occurred at this point.)

To sum up, I am convinced that the work of planners, architects, and designers is central to our cultures, for it is they who manifest and make concrete the values that inform our culture. But it is more than that, for as designers we can challenge, enrich, and elaborate those values. In particular, we can symbolize in our work the way in which our culture conceives of order. By ordering the human-made environment, we make it more accessible, more understandable, more supportive and more enriching. It is our job as educators to introduce our students to that task in a way that both challenges them and also leads them to self-confidence they will need to be able to act free of dogma. They will need both technical knowledge and design skills, but most particularly and importantly we must put them in a position where they can act with cultural responsibility.

Thank you.

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aeiou by Tom de Paor Douglas Carson

I met Tom de Paor at the opening of his exhibition in the Sarah Walker Gallery in Casteltownbere. Talking outside on the jetty, we spoke of the similarity with his “close encounter” installation at the 2018 Biennale which, with multiple sketches, referred to Giovanni Michelucci’s Church of the Autostrada. Following a performative slideshow on the church, Tom’s students were instructed to quickly sketch its interior from memory. The students thus became coauthors of an installation charged less by massive, referential effort than by the mass joy of participation with minimal labour. In Josef Albers’ words: “The measure of art: the ratio of effort to effect, the aim of art: revelation and evocation of vision”1.

The conversation moved onto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, where, in the 2nd edition, Robert Venturi includes an apologetic addendum to the 1st. Following his visit, his opinion of Michelucci’s church had veered from one of initial disdain to one of pleasure. The “willful picturesqueness of the haphazard structure and spaces” becomes a more sympathetic, albeit duller description of, “an extremely beautiful and effective building”2. Similarly, the ambiguous photographs of the 1st edition appear with greater resolution in the 2nd. The mist has cleared but some mystery is lost.

The ambiguous haphazardness of a picturesque imagination has made way for the extreme effectiveness of first hand examination.

Tom de Paor’s latest exhibition is, in his words, “more of the same thing”: a series of multiple unframed watercolours entitled “a e i o u”3, completed in the Spring of 2019. The letters are compiled randomly within rectangular grids of differing sizes, their serifs and lower-case character otherwise eschewing architectural reference.

Each watercolour is one vowel on landscape 210×305mm, 300gsm watercolour paper. Indeed, despite their specific symbolism they appear more as watery landscapes: ox-bow lakes, puddles, tarns, chutes, sedimented pigment stranded after water’s evaporation.

Vowels feel like liquid in the mouth. Without the tongue click, teeth hiss or lip smack of consonants, these are the glyphic sounds of pleasure or delight at beauty and never too far from the sounds of pain or distain. To quote Timothy Morton, “beauty is always a little bit weird, a little bit disgusting4. Bad-taste-disgust being an essential criteria to good-taste-delight.

The vast swathe of watercolours come from controlled gestures and exceptional use of a variety of vibrant colours, form and colour swimming together like a happy child in the sun. The “i”s perform a joyful leap to reach their dots with serifs splashing. But then, occasionally, a bloated, muddy “a” comes into view or an erratic “e” veers too close to the paper’s edge, its centre cracked open. A rare uncontrolled splash and an unpredictable colour. So this beauty

is all tinged with ambiguity and weirdness: something is not quite ideal: is this writing or painting? Where between outsider art or more conventional Irish watercolour landscapes do they sit? Thankfully the ambiguously haphazard does not suffer from the hand of extreme editing.

The scale and life of the exhibition continues that curiously generous aspect of the Irish Pavilion of 2010 with de Blacam & Meagher’s pamphlet stacks slowly diminishing as they were taken away. So too did these watercolours begin to quickly sail away from the harbor side gallery on opening night, for a sum (or an i.o.u.) of ¤100 each, with voids quickly filled by others from the edges like water. The overall body of work slowly evaporating into the landscape.

1

Josef Albers, “The Origin of Art”, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p107.

2

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, MoMA Art, New York, 1966, p.19

3

Despite its evident singularity this grouping has an oddly sparse usage in visual art history. “Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan” or “All the world is subject to Austria” was 15th Century emperor Frederick III’s motto with AEIOU carved onto his buildings: the “I” reinforcing the weird symmetries of the rounded, gothic “E” with “O” and the “A” with its opposite, angular “U”.

4

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology, Colombia University Press, 2016, p 124. On this beauty/disgust paradox also see pages 134 & 149.

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Powerhouses Ellis Woodman

Liberally illustrated in the opening pages of Vers une Architecture, the American grain stores and elevators of the early twentieth century occupy a foundational place in the mythology of the modern movement. Le Corbusier proposed these monumental concrete structures as offering an urgent lesson for the contemporary architect:

in the lake. (The lake was one of the few places from which the towers could not be glimpsed). Leylandii, trees that he had always dismissed as suburban, were suddenly found to have a certain stately grace: no other trees would grow fast enough to preserve his favourite views.”

“The architects of to-day, lost in the sterile backwaters of their plans, their foliage, their pilasters and their lead roofs, have never acquired the conception of primary masses... The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture.”

Despite Seymour’s best efforts to disguise it, Ratcliffe-on-Soar is still a looming presence on the edge of the Thrumpton Estate but perhaps not for much longer. The phasing-out of coal in the United Kingdom has seen all but four of the country’s coal-fired power stations decommissioned and, along with Kilroot in County Antrim, Ratcliffe-on-Soar is scheduled to be the last to go, with an anticipated closure date of 2024. George Seymour died twenty-five years ago but his daughter still lives at Thrumpton Hall and having witnessed the power station’s construction as a teenager, she may very well live to see its demolition. However, as she recounts in her book, this is not a prospect that she altogether welcomes:

When this polemic was published in 1923, most European readers would have struggled to imagine these buildings’ sublime presence but within a few years concrete structures of equally formidable scale and sculptural economy would become a common sight in their countries too. In 1918, the Dutch engineers Frederik van Iterson and Gerard Kuypers had secured a patent for the design of a hyperbolic cooling tower and oversaw the construction of the first built examples outside the city of Heerlen. The earliest British cooling towers were built six years later and following the nationwide rollout of coal-fired power stations in the decades following the Second World War, examples punctuated the skyline of almost 200 locations across the country.

They may have been of startlingly novel form and uniquely obtrusive but these interventions soon secured a place within the national imagination of the English landscape. The romantic depictions of cooling towers in the early paintings of Prunella Clough and the photographs of Eric de Maré remind us of the discourse then being propagated by The Architectural Review about the relevance of the English picturesque tradition to the development of contemporary planning.

Sadly, one man who remained entirely unpersuaded by the cooling tower’s charms was George Seymour, the owner of the seventeenth century Thrumpton Hall in Nottinghamshire. He had spent twelve years of his life restoring this Grade I listed house, only to learn in 1963 of plans to construct the vast Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station on land at the edge of his estate. A legal battle ensued but in 1967 the matter was settled and work began on the construction of the plant, which incorporates eight cooling towers and an even taller chimney. In her 2007 family memoir, My Father’s House, Seymour’s daughter Miranda recalls the emotional impact of the plant’s construction: “My father moved the garden benches to face away from the devastated hilltop, and discovered a new enthusiasm for fishing

“As old laws protecting the landscape grow weaker by the year, and the population of provincial cities and towns continues to increase, it’s apparent that the closure of the station would open the area to the threat of new and less contained forms of development of the kind that swiftly blossom around city fringes: shopping centres; car parks; factories; warehouses; housing estates. These would feel no obligation to beautify a location that had already been ravaged. The station, however, conscious of its massive size and the pollution, both visible and invisible, that it creates, has always worked hard to offer compensation. A golf course lies at the foot of the cooling towers; visitors are encouraged to take tours of the site and listen to the overwhelming roar of the turbines thudding at its heart in the sealed box of the powerhouse; around it, new woods and banked plantations soften the impression of a desecrated landscape.”

Few will be as personally invested in the story of Ratcliffe-on Soar but when the plant does finally meet its fate, I suspect many will share Miranda Seymour’s regret at its loss. The cooling tower continues to command much the same visual excitement as the grain silos of early twentieth century America drew from Le Corbusier—indeed his own interest in the type is clear from the way he adapted it for use as the hyperbolic tower of the Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh. As the last examples of van Iterson and Kuypers’ invention are demolished over the coming decades that at least might provide a lasting reminder of one of the quintessential spectacles of the coal age.

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Poems Alex Niven

civic centre

s t t h o m as ’ c r e s c e n t

w/ Fruela Fernández

Here above the street it is the future

we see the city as a map of

change diagram of unintended

glissade by arachnids in Marks & Spencer suits but here and there

everything is open the burgess

the planner the council clerk

all for a minute led a quiet crusade out of impulse or chivvied by a

phrase read dimly in outline

in borrowed books though recently

the lapses are everywhere the Metro station shouldering a corpse the stag do

tank the student oubliette yet at sky

height the town is still moving sunk

in the groove between mountain and sea.

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Neighbour please handle these

lanes lovingly even on a dull day

the city bends lyrical it points away

from England it is where the island comes to the brink and still my answer

to every question in the Trent House

Soul Bar the old jukebox remains if

you tip it a certain way the whole world comes out nine tenths of the

city enbullioned in the weekend dub

plate when speech paragons like

a Fender Rhodes later in the evening when the beat drops at the back of the

comicbook bar perhaps a hen night

junta will divine how to make

these circus streets revolt.

s p i ta l t o n g u e s

“That night the city wore the mask of a capital”—Joyce On millionaire row the sun has gone

down we reach the twilight impasse

again angelic starlit monochrome

city strung with pink palaces moon terraces tower block crescendo up to

the vault the cows love it here

from March to autumn our Cotswold

jigsaw with Wadsworth filter our pit village as Corbusian hop oh T

Dan with what dreams were

you harrowed on those piss

sodden diazepam nights I have carried you over the culvert now all I

ask is that you calculate a way to

draw the perfect line between the

townhouse and the mephedrone highrise.

decorum

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