A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Amagazine March 2015 • Issue 2 • £3.50

For RIBA Friends of Architecture

March 2015 • Issue 2

The RIBA Manser Medal Alison Brooks offers an architect’s insights into the challenges of designing a new house

A Steady Pace

The pleasures of walking in a city by Kim Wilkie

With Craxton and a Camera in Crete

Ian Collins on John Donat’s images that captured everyday life on the island in the 1960s

Contents

05 06 08

Welcome from Harry Rich, Chief Executive, RIBA Contributors T he Building I Wish I Had Designed

Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library has been a source of inspiration for Robert Adam

11 Events and Exhibitions

Highlights of the season’s shows and activities, including RIBA’s current exhibition, Mackintosh Architecture

16 Brutal Endings

John Grindrod celebrates our Brutalist architectural heritage and describes the very different fate of iconic examples of the style

A Steady Pace

From New York to London, Kim Wilkie describes the different experiences of walking in the city, and the importance of discovering the clandestine network of routes that bring moments of peace

ith Craxton and a Camera W in Crete

The architect and photographer John Donat’s encounter with John Craxton on a trip to Crete in 1960 resulted in a remarkable series of images, as Ian Collins discovered 2

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34 Baltic Shells

William Firebrace celebrates the unique small-scale buildings created by Ulrich Müther on the Baltic island of Rügen

40 The RIBA Manser Medal

The annual prize for the best new house and the impact on the architects who are selected, by Alison Brooks

44 From the Collections

Kent Rawlinson on the wide range of images of chairs designed by architects to be found in the RIBA Collections

48 5 Best… Miami Buildings

Richard Walker picks his favourite architectural landmarks in the city

52 Books

Peter Parker offers a personal selection from recently published titles on architecture

56 Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture

The project to update this classic architectural history volume is examined by Catherine Gregg

59 RIBA Friends of Architecture News, offers and events

64 LValeria ook Up Carullo on the Apollo Victoria Theatre

Cover Maison L, Îlede-France, 2012, by Christian Pottgiesser Architecturespossibles, winner of the Manser Medal 2012. Photograph © George Dupin. This page Bandstand (detail), Bexhill-on-Sea, 2001, by Níall McLaughlin Architects. Photograph by Nick Kane.

RIBA Friends of Architecture 66 Portland Place London W1B 1AD UK Registered charity no.210566 Tel: +44 (0)20 7307 3810 Email: friends@riba.org architecture.com/friends

Editorial A Magazine friends@riba.org Publishers: Jane Grylls Kim Jenner Editor: Mary Scott Researcher: Myran Lynch-Bathgate Advertising: Irene Michaelides: +44 (0)20 7300 5675; Jane Grylls/ Kim Jenner: +44 (0)20 7300 5661; Catherine Cartwright: +44 (0)20 7300 5657 Photography: RIBA Collections (unless stated otherwise) Design: Tina Hall Repro/ Printing: Tradewinds London Editorial Committee Lottie Cole Peter Parker Elena Smith Published 16 March 2015. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture is published twice a year on behalf of the RIBA by Royal Academy Enterprises. The contents of this magazine are copyright. Reproduction in part or in full is forbidden without permission of the editor. The opinions expressed by writers of signed articles (even with pseudonyms) and letters appearing in the magazine are those of their respective authors; the RIBA, RA Enterprises and A Magazine are not responsible for these opinions or statements. The editor will give careful consideration to material submitted – articles, photographs, drawings and so on – but does not undertake responsibility for damage or their safe return. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Welcome A warm welcome to the second issue of A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture. With the brighter days of spring upon us, there is much in the architectural calendar to look forward to, both at 66 Portland Place and beyond. I know that many of you will be reading this issue at some distance from RIBA HQ – we are fortunate to have friends and supporters in all corners of the UK and indeed across the world. Appropriately, then, this issue is international in scope, from Richard Walker’s top five buildings in Miami to William Firebrace’s exploration of German engineer Ulrich Müther’s concrete shell structures on the Baltic island of Rügen. Robert Adam’s choice for ‘The Building I Wish I Had Designed’ feature takes us to Stockholm, where he highlights the city library that inspired Grey Wornum’s design for 66 Portland Place. Closer to home, Kim Wilkie reminds us of the importance of walking in our urban landscapes and why the built environment is so often best explored on foot. With this in mind, I do hope you will be able to join us on our architectural walking tour of the City of London in April – and indeed at some of the other events on offer to Friends. Finally, what better way to celebrate the RIBA Architecture Gallery’s first birthday than with an exhibition devoted to the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh? If you have not visited already, I do hope you will soon and that you will enjoy this inspiring exhibition of over 60 original drawings, watercolours and perspectives spanning the whole of Mackintosh’s career. It is only with the opening of the museum-quality Architecture Gallery that we are able to showcase such precious objects from our collections and those kindly lent by other institutions. We are excited at the prospect of telling many more stories of the past, present and future of architecture in this unique space, and it is only with your wonderful support as Friends, Patrons and donors that we can continue to do so. Thank you. Harry Rich Chief Executive, RIBA A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Contributors

Robert Adam

Alison Brooks

Robert Adam is well known in the UK and internationally as a major figure in the development of traditional and classical architecture, as a pioneer of contextual urban design, a designer of furniture, an author and a scholar. He has been a prolific author on the theory and practice of traditional architecture and urbanism since 1975 and has practised in the city of Winchester since 1977. He was a contributor to the book Swedish Grace: The Forgotten Modern (Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Stockholm), published this year.

Educated at the University of Waterloo, Canada, Alison Brooks founded Alison Brooks Architects in 1996. Her practice has developed an international reputation for delivering design excellence in urban regeneration, buildings for the arts, higher education and housing. Recipient of the Stirling, Manser Medal and Stephen Lawrence Prizes, the practice’s current projects include a new quadrangle at Oxford University. Alison Brooks is a CABE panellist, a member of the RIBA Awards Group and an External Examiner at the AA and Bartlett UCL.

Valeria Carullo After completing a Master’s Degree in Architecture in Italy, Valeria Carullo moved to London to work at the RIBA Photographs Collection and to study photography. She assisted the photographer Richard Bryant before returning to RIBA as co-curator of the Photographs Collection. Valeria has given numerous talks on architectural and photographic subjects, cocurated the exhibition Framing Modernism and, more recently, the RIBA exhibition Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith.

Ian Collins Dr Ian Collins is curator of the exhibition A Poetic Eye: John Craxton on Cranborne Chase and Crete, at Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, from 28 March to 19 September 2015. His Craxton monograph was published in 2011 by Lund Humphries. He has written numerous artist monographs, and curated the exhibition Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia, which helped to earn the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich a shortlisting for the Art Fund’s 2014 Museum of the Year award.

William Firebrace

Catherine Gregg

John Grindrod

William Firebrace is an architect and writer. His publications include Marseille Mix (2010), and his books Memo for Nemo, on living undersea in fact and fiction, and The Missing Planet, on the London Planetarium, will be published this summer. He is currently working on Baltic Hop, about the culture and architecture of a number of Baltic cities.

As Editorial Officer on the Banister Fletcher Project at the RIBA, Catherine Gregg is managing the production of a new edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture. Catherine studied History at University College London, followed by an MA in History of Design from the V&A Museum and the Royal College of Art.

John Grindrod is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain (2013), described by the Independent on Sunday as ‘a new way of looking at modern Britain’. He has worked as a bookseller and publisher for 25 years. He runs the modern architecture website dirtymodernscoundrel.com and can be contacted on Twitter @Grindrod.

Peter Parker

Kent Rawlinson

Richard Walker

Kim Wilkie

Peter Parker is the author of two books about the First World War, The Old Lie (1987) and The Last Veteran (2009), and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and writes for the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the TLS and Hortus. He is currently writing a book about A.E. Housman and Englishness.

Kent Rawlinson is the Head of Collections of the British Architectural Library. His 20 years’ experience includes working as an archaeologist, archivist and researcher, as well as a decade as the Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace. He is currently writing a book on Henry VIII and early Tudor architecture. More generally, Kent is concerned with promoting both public and academic interest in architectural culture.

Richard Walker is a painter, printmaker and musician. He regularly exhibits in London and internationally and has work in many public and private collections. His works include a mural in the Axis Restaurant at the hotel One Aldwych, London, and window displays for Barneys of New York. He also creates and leads architectural tours for the 20th Century Society, most recently taking a group to Miami. He is currently working on various projects including a series of collaged surreal cityscapes.

Kim Wilkie collaborates with architects and landscape architects around the world. He studied History at Oxford and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, before setting up his landscape studio in London in 1989. He is involved with various national committees on landscape and environmental policy in the UK. Current projects include the redesign of the grounds of London’s Natural History Museum, the Churchill memorial at Blenheim Palace, a new city in Oman and a series of estates in Cheshire, Suffolk, Sussex and Hampshire. His book Led by the Land was published in 2012.

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The building I wish I had designed

Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library Robert Adam, a Director of Adam Architecture, is asked to pick a building he admires and would like to have designed himself

Gunnar Asplund designed his Stockholm Library, completed in 1928, at a very particular moment in architectural history, often forgotten. In the early part of the twentieth century Sweden led the way with a new and inventive form of classicism; in 1925 the British architectural critic Morton Shand called it ‘Swedish Grace’ and the name stuck. Current descriptions of this period, however, follow what Herbert Butterfield called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’, where the past is presented as an inexorable process that will ratify and glorify the historian’s view of what the present should be. As Swedish Grace doesn’t fit into an assumed orderly progression from Gothic Revival to Modernism, it has been airbrushed out of architectural histories of the 1920s and 1930s in favour of a small group of radicals who would be raised to hero status after the Second World War. As a result, the strong influence 8

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of this architecture in its time is little known today. It is, perhaps, an irony that one of the most notable homages to this style in Britain is George Grey Wornum’s RIBA Building in Portland Place (1932–4). As a practicing classicist in a largely hostile architectural community, my work is often described as only suitable for ancient Rome, or perhaps the Georgians, or most pejoratively Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. But the work of Asplund and his fellow Swedish classicists, working in a northern European democracy pioneering a welfare state, tell a different, modern and inventive story. This is architecture I have long admired. It had many successful practitioners in the Scandinavian countries and further afield but Asplund’s Stockholm Library is one of its most famous examples, a fame much assisted by Asplund’s conversion to currently fashionable Modernism in the 1930s. The Library has power, invention and

Above left Main façade, Stockholm Public Library, completed 1928, designed by Gunnar Asplund. © Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Above right Central reading room. © Roland Halbe/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Right, above Brass water tap. Photograph © Robert Adam. Right, below Main entrance to the central reading room. © Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

simplicity based on a knowledgeable interpretation of classicism. The form of the building is simple: a square base surrounding a tall drum all in stucco. The square base (originally a U-shape in plan, but soon filled in to form a square) contains all the ancillary facilities. The drum holds the main body of the library. A powerful mass remains the dominant impression, emphasised by rows of unadorned window openings, but this is relieved by subtle classical detailing. On the square base, rustication defines the tall lower floor which is topped by a classical entablature decorated with a shallow relief band of decorative motifs and fluting. Above this is just a plain wall with only the suggestion of a cornice. The drum is simpler still: only the classical entablature remains as a base for tall windows and a larger but still simplified cornice. The approach to the building is dramatic, and shallow steps lead to a huge, fully glazed Doric marble doorcase. The drama is continued in the interior. No sooner have you entered than you are faced with another huge doorcase framing an unadorned straight staircase, hemmed in by sheer walls, that leads to and gives a glimpse of the inside of the drum. Secondary stairs to each side, tight up against the doorcase, follow the curve of the drum. The interior of the drum is simple, with curious coarsely textured walls above the bookcases and a large saucer-shaped light hanging from the plain flat ceiling. The interiors contain more delights: austere spaces, relief sculpture and Asplund’s neoclassical furniture. This is a classicism to which I aspire. It is full of knowledge and understanding of the classical legacy but wears it with a subtlety that overlays its power. It doesn’t need columns or sash windows; it is modern and traditional at the same time, the architect intelligent enough to realise that these things are not contradictory. Like all good architecture of any kind it is infused with an understanding of how the drama of space and form can enhance function. If all architects could open their eyes and understand that classicism includes this and much more, modern architecture could again have a richer, deeper and more comprehensible dialogue with our shared past. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Events and exhibitions

The pick of this season’s shows and other things to do around the UK Photograph of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1893, by James Craig Annan, © T. & R. Annan.

Mackintosh Architecture Architecture Gallery, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, until 23 May 2015

The Scottish architect, artist and

designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) is celebrated worldwide. Yet during his lifetime his career was marked as much by its difficulties as by its successes, with many of his designs unrealised. Mackintosh Architecture is the first exhibition to be devoted to his architectural work and offers the opportunity to view over 60 original drawings, watercolours and perspectives spanning his entire career. Seen together, they reveal the evolution of his style from his early apprenticeship to his later projects as an individual architect and designer. From an early age, Mackintosh was an exceptional draughtsman. He became an architectural apprentice aged 16 and one year later embarked on a decade of evening classes in art and design at the Glasgow School of Art. Visitors to the exhibition will have the chance to see some of Mackintosh’s exquisitely detailed, and highly characteristic, ink drawings for projects including the Glasgow Herald Building, Scotland Street School, the Hill House,

Queen’s Cross Church and Windyhill. The exhibition also features Mackintosh’s original designs for the Glasgow School of Art, which he prepared at the age of just 29. A model showing a cross-section of the school and photographs of the external and internal details illustrate his early focus on designing every aspect of a building: the exterior, interior, furniture and lighting. The show highlights the context in which Mackintosh was designing these projects: the city of Glasgow and the opportunities and clients he found there; both his early collaborative work as part of an architectural practice and his work as an independent architect and designer; the inspiration he drew from traditional Scottish baronial architecture; and his collaboration with his wife, the accomplished artist and designer Margaret Macdonald. Although internationally celebrated today, Mackintosh achieved little popular success during his lifetime. The majority of his projects were realised between 1896 and 1909, after which he was frustrated

by the lack of commissions and patrons, leaving many of his designs unrealised. Visitors can discover some of his unbuilt designs including artists’ studios in Chelsea, country lodges and the ‘House for an Art Lover’ (subsequently built in Glasgow in the 1990s), alongside specially commissioned models. Don’t miss the four artworks – an audio piece, a poem and two animations by Katy Dove, Liz Lochhead and Lucy Reynolds respectively – being shown in adjacent spaces to the main Architecture Gallery and in the basement. Some respond directly to Mackintosh’s masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art, while others subtly evoke Mackintosh’s artistic processes, techniques and style. Collectively, they enable connections to be made between Glasgow at the turn of the century and today when the art school continues to act as a key creative centre in the city. ‘Mackintosh Architecture’ runs until 23 May 2015 (Mon – Sun 10am – 5pm, Tue to 8pm); architecture.com/mackintosh

Friends are entitled to discounted tickets to the RIBA’s Mackintosh Architecture season of talks and debates. Highlights include Cities of Modernity: European Art and Architecture 1880–1914 on 21 April, and Beyond Buildings: Architects as Designers and Makers on 12 May. Don’t miss our Late Tuesday on 31 March, when the event Great Scots! Architecture, Invention and Icons will see the whole building come alive with talks, film screenings, workshops, a quiz and more.

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Events and exhibitions Make Yourself Comfortable at Chatsworth Chatsworth, Bakewell, Derbyshire DE45 1PP 28 March – 23 October 2015 chatsworth.org

The Bibliochaise, 2013, by Nobody & Co. Photograph courtesy outdoorzgallery.com.

This exhibition focuses on the best in contemporary chair design, with items from the private collection of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire presented alongside furniture by internationally acclaimed and innovative designers. With items positioned around the house by artists and designers including Thomas Heatherwick, Amanda Levete, Marc

Small Stories: At Home in a Dolls’ House V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA Until 6 September 2015 vam.ac.uk/moc Discover the fascinating stories behind some of the UK’s best-loved dolls’ houses. Explore the history of the home, everyday lives and changing family relationships over the last 300 years, through displays featuring dwellings from country mansions and a Georgian town-house to suburban villas, newly built council estates and high-rise apartments – all in exquisite miniature form.

Newson, Tokujin Yoshioka, Piet Hein Eek and Moritz Waldemeyer, visitors will have the opportunity to experience Chatsworth and its collections in new and surprising ways.

Antony Gormley’s LAND, in collaboration with the Landmark Trust Sites around the UK From 16 May 2015 landmarktrust.org.uk To celebrate 50 years of the Landmark Trust, five distinct life-size standing sculptures by Antony Gormley, cast in iron, will be installed at five Landmark sites across the UK. Each work is conceived in direct response to its location. The sites, which were personally selected by Gormley, include the Martello Tower, Aldeburgh, Suffolk; the Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset; Saddell Bay, Mull of Kintyre, Scotland; Lengthsman’s Cottage, Lowsonford, Warwickshire; and Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel.

Photo London Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA 21 – 24 May 2015 photolondon.org At this unique photography event at Somerset House, visitors will have the opportunity to explore an international photography fair featuring some of the world’s leading photography galleries, together with an innovative public programme of screenings, talks and debates.

London Festival of Architecture Various locations around London Throughout June 2015 londonfestivalofarchitecture.org

Whiteladies House, England, 1935, by Moray Thomas. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The theme for this year’s month-long, city-wide celebration of architectural experimentation, thinking and practice, is ‘Work in Progress’. A programme of inspiring events includes exhibitions, installations, talks and debates, film screenings, family activities, walking tours and cycle rides. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Events and exhibitions

Tile Mile, installation by Russ & Henshaw in association with Turkishceramics at St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell Design Week, May 2014. Photograph © Sophie Mutevelian.

Clerkenwell Design Week

Untitled, box construction with sand drawer, c.1956–8, Joseph Cornell, Washington, D.C., private collection, The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, Courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/ VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2014. Photo: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC.

Various locations around Clerkenwell 19 – 21 May 2015 clerkenwelldesignweek.com This internationally renowned design festival returns to Clerkenwell for its sixth year, bringing together the latest innovations by some of the best creative forces from the UK and around the world. With exhibitions highlighting innovative design and architecture projects, as well as street spectacles and pop-up workshops, the area is set to come alive with talent and inspiration.

Serpentine Pavilion 2015 Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA 25 June – 18 October 2015 serpentinegalleries.org Over the past 15 years the Serpentine Pavilion has become a site for architectural experimentation, presenting inspirational temporary structures by some of the world’s greatest architects. This year, Spanish architects SelgasCano will design the fifteenth Serpentine Pavilion. The award-winning studio, headed by José Selgas and Lucía Cano, is the first Spanish architecture practice to be asked to design the temporary pavilion on the Serpentine Gallery’s lawn in London’s Kensington Gardens. The firm specialise in semisubmerged builds in harmony with their 14

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natural surroundings, and promise an ‘absolutely experimental’ pavilion that will ‘really embrace the garden’.

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD 4 July – 27 September 2015 royalacademy.org.uk American artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell hardly ventured beyond New York State, yet the notion of travel was central to his art. His imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops and dime stores, collecting a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted ‘shadow boxes’. These miniature masterpieces transform everyday objects into spellbinding

treasures. Wanderlust brings together 60 of Cornell’s most remarkable boxes, assemblages, collages and films, some never before seen outside the USA.

London Design Festival Various locations around London 19 – 27 September 2015 londondesignfestival.com This annual event celebrates the city’s creativity in a programme of hundreds of events and installations at venues across London. From galleries and museums to shops, showrooms, studios, markets, restaurants and warehouses, the festival reflects the huge range and high quality of the design activity that takes place in the capital throughout the year. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Brutal endings The icons of the Brutalist style of architecture, dominant landmarks constructed in cities around the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, have always attracted controversy. Some examples have been demolished and others are threatened with destruction, while a few have been either rescued by stalwart campaigners or renovated and reinvented as luxury housing. John Grindrod explores this curious phenomenon and celebrates the sculptural qualities of the style.

Main picture Chamberlain Square, Birmingham Central Library, 1974, John Madin Design Group. Both images on this spread © Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Above Ground-level view of the concourse, Birmingham Central Library.

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This January the first tentative steps were being taken to clear the site at Paradise Circus in Birmingham. It had once been the location of the mid-Victorian Gothic grandeur of Mason Science College, designed by a local man, Jethro Cossins. This building would be torn down within a century. But now it was the work of another local architect, John Madin, that was being rudely ripped apart on the same site. Birmingham Central Library, opened in 1974, had barely made it to 40 before being scrapped, thanks to the flinty hearts and closed minds at the city council. Controversy had surrounded Madin’s building ever since its construction. There was the loss in 1974 of John Henry Chamberlain’s fancy 1882 library, deemed outmoded by the council as early as the 1930s. Then there was Madin’s epic, sprawling 1960s plan for a new civic centre, which, apart from the library, would remain unbuilt But the most obvious cause of complaint was the style in which the building had been realised. What had started life in Madin’s original plan as an elegantly clad marble structure became, after budget cuts and much chin-scratching, a rough-concrete monolith in the heart of Birmingham. From the coffered ceilings to the exposed concrete internal walls, it would become the city’s most uncompromisingly Brutalist building. It wasn’t as if the city had shied away from the architectural fashions of the 1960s and 1970s. Scandinavian-style brick tower blocks circled the city centre, and a noticeably flashy offshoot of American modernism had influenced the Bull Ring and Rotunda. But there was nothing so sculpturally pure, so dramatic, as the inverted ziggurat A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

of Madin’s masterpiece. Soon after the building’s completion, the council began meddling with its carefully planned layout. A tacky shopping arcade was added to the quiet through-walks of Paradise Circus, and some feeble postmodern awnings were bolted to the front, a sign of the city’s insecurity about the building’s Brutalist form. While the Library was gaining some badly bolted-on additions, the basic infrastructure was being ignored. It became messy inside and out, stained and cluttered. No wonder some people came to dislike the Central Library, and cheered when the frilly knickers of its replacement, the Library of Birmingham in Centenary Square, were revealed. Yet even before its predecessor had been demolished, the new library had been hit by reduced opening hours and its services by mass redundancies. This exercise in hope and cultural expansion is now beginning to look suspiciously like self-defeating folly on a grand scale. Birmingham Central Library is only the latest in a long line of great Brutalist buildings to be demolished in Britain in the last 20 years. Hardest hit among architects have been Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon: their Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Trinity Square shopping centre and car park in Gateshead have both bitten the dust. The Tricorn was opened in 1966 and demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, known by many for its role in the violent 18

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revenge-thriller Get Carter (1971), opened in 1967 and was demolished in 2010. Gordon’s designs were much admired for their sculptural drama and intelligent use of space. The Tricorn was a particularly space-age structure, resembling more the design of a moonbase from a Gerry Anderson TV series than the tame shopping centres being knocked up by the likes of contemporary developers Arndale and Ravenseft. Gordon was well aware that building such a complex structure could be a problem for the contractors, and so tried to make it as easy as possible. ‘I realised the shuttered concrete was not going to be up to the quality of the South Bank,’ he told John R. Gold in The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (2007). ‘Therefore I learned that the more convoluted you made the shape, the less the inaccuracies of the pourer of the concrete are going to be noticed.’ With its sophisticated form, the Tricorn immediately became an icon of the city’s modernisation. Yet, tucked away from Portsmouth’s city centre, it struggled to attract the big-name shops it needed to become a success, and that lack of footfall and funding sealed its fate early on. With insufficient money spent on its upkeep, the cash-strapped Tricorn began to suffer from leaks and faults that no one was prepared to tackle. Trinity Square was an even bigger project,

Above Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth, opened 1966, by the Owen Luder Partnership (demolished 2004). Both photographs on this spread by Sam Lambert, 1965, © RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Opposite Tricorn Centre seen from Market Way.

15 storeys towering over the landscape of Tyneside. The shopping centre immediately suffered from competition from an even bigger rival, Eldon Square in Newcastle, and like the Tricorn it never succeeded as a commercial powerhouse. The demolition of Luder and Gordon’s buildings has left huge holes in their respective cities, not least the loss of a significant and still much-discussed era of recent history. An architect similarly hit by a backlash against Brutalism has been Basil Spence, whose Queen Elizabeth Square flats (1962) in the Gorbals, Glasgow, were blown up in 1993, and whose Hyde Park Barracks look set to go the same way, although the Twentieth Century Society has launched a campaign to stop its demolition. Spence, like his contemporary Frederick Gibberd, was an architect who worked in every modern style, rather than having a singular vision. There was the international style of his Festival of Britain Sea and Ships Pavilion (1951) and the Scandinavian modernism of his Coventry Cathedral (1956–62). But he contributed a number of significant Brutalist buildings to Britain, including the former Home Office building in St James’s Park, completed in 1976 and now the Ministry of Justice. His Gorbals flats were spectacular and controversial, offering something of the design of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s towers on the Barbican Estate (1960s) without anything like the finish, attention to detail or means

of upkeep. They became one of the first high-profile casualties of the backlash against Brutalism, and didn’t last long enough to come out the other side, like Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith (1957–61), and now being renovated by Urban Splash. A flawed and over-ambitious vision, Queen Elizabeth Square was brilliant for the first few years, before falling rapidly into disrepair and disrepute. The loss of Spence’s Hyde Park Barracks would be more significant. They were always a more provocative gesture, with the 33-storey tower rising above the tree-tops of Hyde Park and visible from Buckingham Palace. Unlike his Gorbals flats, the barracks have remained well kept and fit for purpose and instead have fallen victim to London’s insane property bubble and the sustained assault of its privileged neighbours. Given these tales of woe, one might be forgiven for thinking that Brutalism is finished as a style, a failed fad. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the most curious thing has occurred. For a new breed of property enthusiast, Brutalism now denotes luxury. Take Ernö Goldfinger’s sister blocks, Balfron Tower (1967) and Trellick Tower (1972). They overcame early ‘Tower of Terror’ media scares to become desirable social housing in East and West London respectively. Those days of social housing are now behind them, and both blocks are A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Opposite Preston Bus Station, 1969, by the Building Design Partnership. Photograph © Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Right St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, Argyll and Bute, 1966, by Gillespie, Kidd and Coia. Photograph by Richard Chivers, 2010, © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

being renovated by housing associations for new private middle-class owner-occupiers and buy-to-let landlords. So desirable are they that the buildings have even become the front line in a new battle over ‘social cleansing’, where working-class tenants are being eased out of housing designed for them. The towers are now the stars of tea-towels, prints, tote bags, mugs and cushions, alongside other Brutalist classics such as London’s National Theatre (Denys Lasdun, 1977); Park Hill; the Apollo Pavilion in Peterloo, County Durham (Victor Pasmore, 1969); and the Barbican Estate. A resurgence of interest after decades of neglect has meant that our remaining Brutalist buildings are being appreciated as never before. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the story of the most surprising resurrection of recent years. Preston City Council had wanted for a long time to demolish its vast concrete bus station and replace it with buildings that might make lots more money. The bus station, designed by the Building Design Partnership, was finished in 1969: a huge development long enough for 40 bus stands each side, topped by 4 upward-curving balconies hiding layers of car parking. The threat of demolition has been hanging over it for a decade in the form of a 32acre redevelopment scheme that would have created new shops, restaurants, private homes, a cinema and markets. A brilliantly co-ordinated campaign to protect the bus station led to its listing in 2013 and a 20

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Heritage Heroes Award for the team who succeeded in saving it. One particularly gratifying aspect of this recent development is that the building remains true to its origins: while the Park Hill and Balfron regeneration schemes move them away from social housing, there is still something of the Welfare State about Preston Bus Station, a building for use by all, not just the wealthy. Perhaps the biggest challenge for campaigners keen to restore Brutalist buildings to their rightful glory is the ruined wreck of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Argyll and Bute. Gillespie, Kidd and Coia’s much admired building is characterised by shallow arches, cylindrical curves and concrete, faced with pebbles that give an organic feel to the four storeys. It opened in 1966 but due to falling student numbers the Catholic Church abandoned it in the 1980s. Since then it has become a spectacular, if tragic, listed ruin. But there are plans afoot to resurrect the building, perhaps as a college or arts venue. Fans of ‘ruin porn’ might be disappointed by this turn of events, but if turning this remarkable structure back to a useful state without destroying its character or heritage can be done, future generations will thank us for preserving such a masterpiece of design, even while we have junked many others. This is why it is so sad that we cannot save Birmingham Central Library from destruction. Watching a mistake as big as this being so gleefully undertaken is a terrible thing, and shames any attempt to claim we are protecting our best buildings against the excesses of greed and vanity that rule the day. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Below Orange and Pink London , 2014, Barbara Macfarlane. Both images on this spread courtesy Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery.

A steady pace Walking in cities can be stressful and exhausting, with traffic lights, street junctions and seething crowds to contend with. But, as Kim Wilkie points out, there is a clandestine network of small alleys and narrow pedestrian connections in most cities, and in London much is being done to improve riverside paths and link green spaces, all of which offer the walker a more peaceful, rhythmical experience of city life.

In many ways New York is the ultimate city, with the thrill of the architecture, the energy of the crowds and the sense of metropolitan confidence. But while the city pumps you with adrenalin, the rhythm of walking saps your strength. The grid of streets stops you at every block to wait for traffic. Unless you are in Central Park or on the High Line, you can never gear up to a steady pace. You walk to a form of Morse code – just as you get into your stride you have to halt again. Red lights repeatedly jostle for attention – ‘DON’T WALK’ – and while your feet are held fast, 22

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your mind cannot wander. There is something profoundly calming about gentle, continuous motion; the rhythm of a train, the rocking of a cradle, the shuffle of a dance. Steady, rhythmic walking proves to be good for your mind as well as your body. Doctors don’t just recommend it for preventing coronaries; it seems to keep dementia at bay, too. Meditative walking around cloisters and labyrinths is an intrinsic part of spiritual exercise. As you walk at a steady pace, you enter a form of trance where problems are transferred to the back

Opposite Blue Black Midtown, 2014, Barbara Macfarlane. The two paintings show the contrast between the ordered grid of Manhattan and the sinuous chaos of London.

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of the brain and somehow seem to have resolved themselves by the time you get home. Despite the apparently chaotic street pattern, London on foot can be surprisingly soothing. It is a city of interconnecting parks, long meandering streets and a watery backbone of river. Occasional slipped discs between the vertebrae are gradually being repaired. The reconfiguration of Hyde Park Corner has joined up the central Royal Parks, from Speakers’ Corner to Embankment Gardens. Small incremental links along the Thames now make it possible to walk absent-mindedly along the south bank, from Vauxhall to Shad Thames. Bit by bit the north bank is also improving. Small sections of riverside path that planners demanded as part of consents in the 1990s – and at the time looked like isolated irrelevancies – are finally linking together to make a proper walk. The path running between the Tower of London and Temple begins to make sense at last. There is still the odd gap, such as Lower Thames Street, but the recent link under London Bridge leading to the new Hanseatic Walk shepherds you gently towards Southwark Bridge. Even the active wharf beside Cousin Lane protects pedestrians and allows them passage beside the water. And little by little there are dedicated pedestrian bridges across the river. The Charing Cross Bridge pedestrian walks were followed by the Millennium Bridge, and now a new Nine Elms Bridge is planned. As well as being good for individual sanity, a walkable city may also be the route back to conversation. While the French whisper confidences head to head across coffee cups, or the Americans side by side at a bar, the British bare their souls striding out, looking fixedly forward without eye contact. Thames paths, park strolls and High-Line saunters may help to get us talking, exchanging ideas and sharing thoughts rather than rushing past one

Main picture On Shad Thames (detail), 2014, photograph by Garry Knight, flickr.com/ photos/garryknight. Near right Footscape One, 2012 (Millennium Bridge), photograph by Daily Sublime, flickr.com/photos/ dailysublime.

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Opposite London Walking, 2000, by Kim Wilkie. An idea to change the perceptions of walking in London.

another as if everyone else were invisible. Much attention has been given to walking as an effective way of navigating cities, and as the best route from home to work or home to school. That is all excellent and makes cities more civilised places to live. But it misses a further dimension: walking to think and walking for sanity. Computer analysis of urban layouts tends to prioritise efficiency over sanity. In London, Oxford Street comes up as the principal pedestrian thoroughfare of the capital: the lemming route to madness. Many of us would take endless detours to avoid Oxford Street. The quality of the walking can be more important than the speed, and a lot less bruising. Small alleys and narrow pedestrian connections between buildings become part of a clandestine network – short cuts that are cool and quiet and make the city feel like a labyrinth, secret to the walker who discovers the route. The discovery is an important part of converting the city into somewhere personal and manageable, a place where you feel in control, and gives you a sense of belonging and almost ownership. The passages through the Inns of Court and St James’s are lovely examples. They speak of ancient plot lines, rights of feet and burrows. Medieval cities are rich in these routes. Paris, Rome and of course Venice have a raku of fine fractures through their urban blocks that makes for wonderful walking. Even Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area has an alternative network of stepped alleys between the houses that lead up to the hills, avoiding the road switchbacks. Temporary walks give a further dimension. Special road closures, such as the Mall on Sundays or the Victoria Embankment for demonstrations, flip the city from a place for cars to one for people. There is a particular thrill of taking possession of usually forbidden space. The beaches that appear in the Thames at low tide provide great meditative walks that come and go with a rhythm, thankfully largely beyond the control of the metropolis. For your mind really to be released to wander on a good urban walk, you also need a clear and obvious sense of direction, provided by beacon landmarks such as tall buildings or a river. Relatively low-rise cities with occasional tall buildings work really well for orientation. Centre Point acts like a lighthouse, guiding you through Mayfair and Soho without having to navigate the deadly rapids of Oxford Street. Once the city becomes a canyon of skyscrapers, the distant beacon can no longer be seen. Being able to improvise your way across the metropolis is key to feeling familiar and comfortable. The London tube map is a masterpiece of clarity and offers a ready 26

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mental map of the city. It is only when you emerge from underground – like a meerkat out of its hole – that the panic starts. Compasses set into the pavement at each tube exit would be a real help; at least then you would know which way up to hold the map. The power and clarity of the tube map may, however, be responsible for encouraging people to scurry underground rather than walk. A similar map of walks may help people to form a surface mental map of the city and feel safer orientating themselves around the twisting streets; an On the Ground map – as opposed to Underground or Overground maps. The lines of the parks, the river and the principal London squares could help to give a fresh sense of the layout of the capital for pedestrians. It is interesting how much of the South Bank path is pretty basic and how little that matters. The walkways are not always particularly elegant or beautifully garnished, but if you can saunter at a steady pace and look out over the river, the quality of the detailing is less important. The freedom of movement, without fighting traffic or having to stop and start, gives the pleasure. In some ways, the more rudimentary and straightforward the link, the better. As funds become available, they should be concentrated on forging more connections ahead of gilding the finishes of existing paths. The route past Temple tube station and along to Whitehall is crying out for simple connections. The most transforming investment has probably been in the footways under the Thames bridges. Lighting, ceramic panels and materials that reassure make a big difference and keep the urine away. The New York High Line is beautifully designed and very expensively detailed. This undoubtedly brings much delight and a valuable sense of care and safety. But perhaps the greatest achievement is the ability suddenly to rise above the traffic and float across the grid with vistas out to the Hudson and up to the skyline. The effect is so impressive that people are drawn to the tiered seating that looks down – from a pigeon’s perspective – on the maelstrom of traffic beneath. The ability to be close to activity and watch without fear or turbulence is magnetic. Our democratic society has become so used to ranking things by numbers that places tend to be rated by the quantity of people that use them. Solitude is not highly esteemed. The moments when you can be alone – on a temporary beach at low tide in the river, or adrift in your head as you stroll uninterrupted by red lights – are harder to value and given less weight. Yet it is these moments of peace in the seethe of the city that keep madness at bay and make it possible to cope with the crowd. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

With Craxton and a camera in Crete In 1960 the architect and photographer John Donat paid a life-changing visit to Crete. Ian Collins describes how a chance meeting with the painter John Craxton led him back to Byzantine art and forward to creative freedom.

In November 1960 the young John Donat, close to breakdown in a conflict between his profession as a London-based architect and his passion for photography, was sent abroad on doctor’s orders. He found himself – in every sense – in Crete. In a café in Chania, having arrived by ferry in error when aiming for Herakleion and Knossos, he shied from an encounter with two laughing Englishmen. Both were artists and adventurers. Their spirits had been buoyed by six months of liberated living in a Cretan paradise, an island freed at last from centuries of oppression and now largely – and briefly – self-contained in a local culture and economy, save for being awash each weekend with conscripted sailors from the nearby naval base of Souda Bay. As Donat would recall: ‘Later, on the beautiful Chania waterfront, the one who proved to be Christopher Mason came by and I reluctantly introduced myself. It transpired that his friend was the painter John Craxton. I knew every member of his family except John. When we met I mentioned my interest in Byzantine painting. He was astonished: “I’ve been waiting for someone to come who could photograph them properly.” So began my Cretan adventure.’ Craxton’s supremely fortunate life was to be rich in lucky encounters such as this. He had wandered in Greece since 1946, when the rest of his family moved to a large but shell-shaken Arts and Crafts house in Hampstead to create a centre for music. The Donats lived in a lovely Voysey building next door, John’s father being the actor Robert Donat, who had won an Oscar for his role in the 1939 film Goodbye Mr Chips, and the illustrious designer of the family home was a maternal relation. The Johns Donat and Craxton, when they finally met, established an immediate rapport. 28

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Craxton was ever the ruthless exploiter of anyone who could be helpful to his purposes, and his mission of the moment was to obtain a photographic record of the valuable icons that filled the churches and monasteries of western Crete, which he feared were at imminent risk of being stolen and then of vanishing without trace. An artist who insisted on using the finest materials, he had noticed at once that his new friend carried not just the required camera but a prized Hasselblad. Here was a true professional. Donat’s planned three-week break to ponder his future turned into a laborious trek by bus, taxi and – mostly – foot, to photograph Byzantine churches with interiors painted by artists who had inspired the Cretan-born El Greco. Craxton was the perfect guide: he spoke the colloquial Greek of shepherds and fishermen, and had first visited these parts in 1948 when seeking out the former Resistance comrades of his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor to portray in haunting drawings. While search parties had been sent out for him by anxious associates in Athens, who feared he was missing and possibly murdered in a lawless land, he had gone thoroughly and joyfully native. Traditional Cretan hospitality was anyway munificent, even (or especially) in the poorest villages, but for Craxton and his friends it was at its most magnificent. Donat was charmed into capturing an inhabited landscape with his camera, which as a documentary legacy is now even more important than his beautiful photographs of medieval buildings and paintings. Travelling from Kouneni in the west to Kritsa in the east, and trekking through the Aradaina Gorge to the remote village of Agios Ioannis, Donat and Craxton went in search of Byzantine relics and found an everyday existence still seemingly rooted in ancient history and mythology, with people living a stoic and heroic life close to nature in a rugged landscape

Harbourside, Chania, Crete. All photographs by John Donat, 1960–1, © John Donat/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Detail of fresco depicting the Entombment, Church of the Transfiguration of Christ, Meskla, Crete.

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View from the balcony of John Craxton’s house, looking across the outer harbour, Chania.

Taverna, Chania, with John Donat, right, and Harry Snowden, centre left.

Juke-box at taverna, Chania, with drawing by John Craxton of the owner, right.

where the wild goat was still king. Some religious sites were in ruins, but the chapel in the village of Alikambos was still intact, with frescoes signed by Ioannis Pagomenos in 1316. Here was a key influence for both El Greco and Craxton. Had Christopher Mason not been forced to return to Paris, when a tenant set fire to his flat there, he could have warned the photographer of the perils of working with their anarchic painter friend. Since many of the frescoes were covered by a thick, dark greasy film from centuries of olive-oil lamps and beeswax candles, Craxton decided to make it easier to see them properly with applications of soap and water. Soon the pair were summonsed to appear in court for ‘desecrating’ the near-invisible Alikambos frescoes by such means. Mason remembers: ‘John suggested that I should be the one to answer the charge while he acted as counsel for the defence. It soon became clear that we had done no damage and had acted strictly in the interests of Cretan heritage. I ended up being complimented by the magistrate.’ Almost exactly the same experience awaited Donat, though he was to use a popular brand of detergent after further advice from a Chanian chemist. Donat had to leave to sort out his affairs in London. Back home, he soon decided to quit his job as an architect and return to Crete. Raising £800 by cashing in his pension, he drove his car to Athens in September 1961, set for a longer adventure. While he was waiting for the ferry from Piraeus to Chania, he received a telegram from former colleague Harry Snowden. It read: ‘Hold everything. I’m coming with you.’ The furniture designer was also an excellent photographer in his own right. When they arrived in Chania, Donat and Snowden were surprised to find

Craxton away, but the neighbour who kept house for him handed over the keys as if they were invited and expected. They photographed the view from Craxton’s Venetian house across the outer harbour. With his equipment for making and enjoying Cretan mountain tea positioned on the parapet of the roof terrace, the absent host remained a powerful presence as director of the enterprise. In the local taverna, Donat captured sailors performing the zeibekiko, a solo dance climaxing in a back-flip over an upturned chair, which Craxton was the first to recognise as an amazing cultural survival, connecting across the millennia to Minoan bull-leapers depicted in the frescoes of Knossos. The taverna’s juke-box was decorated with snaps of Greek showbiz stars of the day, and a Craxton drawing of the owner. Donat’s roll of evocative black-and-white images ranged from back streets bearing darkly clad women to barefoot children beside buildings with Ottoman overhangs and Venetian cores, possibly resting on Minoan foundations. The shifting focus then continued from bustling livestock markets to giggling boys in religious processions and card-playing old men in cafés. Donat also charted hard labour among farm workers – shepherds and goatherds, ploughmen, olive pressers and distillers of raki fire water from grape skins boiled in old oil drums – as well as weavers, tanners, cobblers and net-makers. The sun shines down on everyone and everything, and most faces in these pictures seem lit from within. Naturally, smiles abound in celebrations such as a village wedding – where the initials of the bridal couple are spelled out in sugared almonds on a handcrocheted bedspread – but they also predominate

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Right In Ayios Ioannis a young woman rolls the flat clay roof of a traditional village house with what seems to be a fragment of classical stone column. Below Church of Panagia, Lamibini, Crete.

Cretan farmhouse, with some of the resident livestock.

in the everyday. A woman rolling the clay roof of a traditional village house with what appears to be a fragment of ancient column wears a comic and ironic expression, which we may then begin to notice (or imagine) even in the painted medieval faces of saints undergoing all manner of tests and tortures. Donat had returned from travels through Turkey and Iran in 1956 with a fine crop of Near and Middle Eastern architectural photographs, and had already formed the view that architecture – and therefore architectural imagery – was about people. Crete confirmed it. Imbued with the photojournalist ethos of the Magnum school, and echoing the work of Roger Mayne and Henri Cartier-Bresson, his dynamic style was to win him many magazine commissions and struck a particular chord with architects such as Norman Foster, Denys Lasdun and Eric Lyons, as was reflected in a fine RIBA exhibition in 2007, Image and Experience: The Photography of John Donat. As Donat saw it, the prime duty of his work as a lens-man was to communicate ‘an experience of a slice of time in the life of a building’. What he caught in Crete was eternity in a passing moment. Craxton did one more favour for Donat: putting Byzantine art historian Maria Vassilaki on his trail. She went to see him in his studio home in Regent’s Park 32

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Road (bought with the proceeds of a David Hockney painting which had been purchased from the then art student for £6), and was astonished by the quality and quantity of the Cretan photos (450 black and white images and 250 colour slides), which few people had ever seen. She selected 140 of the monochrome images for a splendid book, John Donat: Crete 1960, with texts by Donat, Craxton and writer-traveller and former British ambassador to Greece Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith. Crete University Press published the first edition in 1999 and issued a reprint in 2014 (available from the Crete University Press website). As in that book, let’s leave the last word to Donat himself: ‘On the 31st July 1966, England won the World Cup and Annabel and I were married. We came to Chania for our honeymoon because I wanted her to be able to share my friends and experience, something of the atmosphere which had come to mean so much to me. When I had returned from that second journey in 1961 I still didn’t know whether I was an architect or photographer, but I knew one thing forever: I would never be an employee ever again. I would be my own man. Since then I’ve freelanced as photographer, broadcaster, writer and film-maker – but always about art and architecture. Crete had set me free.’ A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

1980s postcard of the seaside resort of Binz, Rügen, showing, top right, the first version of Ulrich Müther’s Lifeguard Station, 1977 (demolished in 1993). Photograph © Bachmann, Sassnitz, from the Dietrich Otto Collection.

Baltic shells The engineer Ulrich Müther was born on the Baltic island of Rügen, and the small-scale concrete shell structures he designed during the socialist GDR period populate the island’s coast and have their own distinct, dream-like charm. William Firebrace describes the man and his work.

The coastline of the Baltic island of Rügen consists largely of long lines of sand dunes, often covered in pine trees, sloping gradually into the shallow sea. The small towns and villages have traditionally provided relaxed summer holiday resorts for those arriving from big inland cities. The coast was portrayed in various paintings by the nineteenth-century artist Caspar David Friedrich as a kind of dream landscape, Germany’s equivalent of the romance of the Mediterranean, in which minute human figures hover among the flat fields and on the wide open spaces of the dunes. The Nazis, missing the aesthetic potential, constructed on the east coast the massive blocks of the holiday camp at Prora, now being renovated as smart seaside apartments. However the most characteristic built form along the dunes is much smaller in scale, the traditional Strandkorb, an ingenious beach chair of wickerwork, enclosed at the sides and above and providing protection for two occupants against the sun, rain and wind. The island belonged from 1945 to 1990 to the socialist German Democratic Republic, a state whose architecture usually conjures up images of the Plattenbau, rows of anonymous housing blocks. However no national state is completely monolithic, and Rügen was the home of the ingenious and very individual engineer Ulrich Müther (1934–2007), responsible for a large number of small-scale concrete shell structures set out along the coast. 34

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A range of thin shell structures had been built in Germany in the pre-war period, in particular domes for early planetariums, in a system invented by Walther Bauersfeld, an optical and structural engineer working for the Jena firm Zeiss, but these tended to be simple geometrical forms based on the sphere. There are many other examples of shell structures from the 1950s and 1960s, such as the spectacular roof by Eero Saarinen at Dulles Airport in Chantilly, Virginia (1958–62). Müther’s work is more modest in scale and rather different. Trained as an engineer, he early on found an enthusiasm for the shell structures of the Spanish-born engineer Félix Candela, such as the Church of Our Miraculous Lady (1955) and Los Manantiales Restaurant (1958), both in Mexico City. Such structures use a frame of metal bars, usually set out on a temporary timber framework, then plastered or sprayed with concrete. The complex three-dimensional curvature enables remarkably thin shells, of sometimes less than an inch thick, to cover substantial spans. The transfer of this adventurous style of Mexican engineering to the Baltic coastline might seem unlikely, but both were countries with mass societies and plentiful cheap labour, with access to a supply of basic building materials such as timber, wire mesh and cement, which allowed an architecture simultaneously rough but also with considerable sophistication to be developed from the simplest technology.

Lifeguard Station, Binz, Rügen, second version, 1981, engineer Ulrich Müther. Photograph © Annica Jahnke, MütherArchiv, Wismar.

Müther possessed an unusual combination of pragmatism and an ability to dream and invent. He was the only person in Eastern Europe with the ability and gradually also the experience to come up with these shell forms, often without having fully worked out on paper the statics, but proceeding from what he knew would work. His office and building firm, inherited from his father, were based in his birthplace, the small seaside town of Binz, on the east coast of the island. He proceeded to produce large-scale shell roofs for buildings in East Germany and abroad, including churches, planetariums, community centres and factories, but his earliest and most personal buildings are located not far from where he lived and worked. These are small-scale structures, almost seaside installations, which belong specifically to this landscape. An example of an early Müther building was the Lifeguard Station (1977) on the beach at Binz. It resembled a space capsule mounted on a post, hovering above the dunes, formed of two curved shells, one inverted upon the other and each between 7 and 15 centimetres thick, with a large glazed window in each façade. From the post, a cantilevered platform stretches out, linked up to the capsule and down to the dunes by a slender stair. Within the

building the lifeguards sit, able to observe the beach and react quickly in case of an emergency. An important part of the design involved the easy construction of the building among the dunes. Müther faithfully documented all his works, and his sketches and photographs, now often rather faded, have survived in the Müther-Archiv at Wismar, run by the architect and Müther-enthusiast Matthias Ludwig. Photographs from the archive show how the two halves of the shell were built on a formwork of sand and timber ribs, on which were laid the reinforcement bars; this structure was then sprayed with liquid concrete. The shells were brought to the site on a truck and lowered into place on the post by a small crane; the window and interior fittings were then installed and the building was ready to be inhabited. The whole process was simple and economical, performed by workers using experience gained over years of working for Müther. Here is a perfect piece of seaside architecture, light-weight, elegant, slightly whimsical but also completely functional. In 1993, at a time when there was a general lack of respect for GDR architecture, the Lifeguard Station was demolished, but fortunately in 1981 Müther had built a second station, a little further along the coast. The shell of this second version was even slimmer A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Left Music pavilion, Sassnitz, Rügen, 1987, architect Dietmar Kuntzsch, engineers Ulrich Müther and Otto Patzelt. Photographs on this spread © MütherArchiv, Wismar. Left, below Construction system of steel rods before the application of concrete, Music pavilion, Rügen.

Inselparadies restaurant, Baabe, Rügen, 1966, engineer Ulrich Müther.

than the first, between 3 and 5 centimetres thick, made this time with concrete sprayed on to chicken wire. This capsule no longer functions as a lifeguard station, but the architecture of the GDR now being rather fashionable and the romantic connotations of the site finally recognised, it is used today for the performance of wedding ceremonies. On Rügen alone there are at least 15 Müther structures. Most were designed by architects, because as an engineer Müther didn’t have the necessary legal competence to design buildings. But with Müther’s involvement the designs acquired their characteristic elegance. Some are also test elements for larger 36

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structures, which have found a new use on the island. The bus shelter at Buschvitz (1974), known to local inhabitants as the Diving Helmet, is formed of a single curved ferro-cement shell, with two curious oval windows at either end. It was intended as a prototype for other bus shelters but in this case the construction process proved too time-consuming. Another bus shelter is located in Binz, a parabolic hypershell standing on two supports, appearing precariously balanced but actually remarkably stable. This hypershell was originally a test element for the roof of a larger building in Rostock, but was ingeniously reconsidered as a small independent building still used today by

the Binz inhabitants for an everyday purpose. The Book Kiosk (1971) in Baabe, on the south-east coast of the island, is formed of a circular concrete funnel, much like a mushroom, with a simple glazed façade. The single post evolving into a spreading roof is typical of many of Müther’s structures, which usually have minimal contact with the ground but provide a substantial amount of shelter. A later version of the funnel structure is the Music pavilion (1987) on the promenade in Sassnitz, a surreal piece of minimal architecture, its form spreading out like a large leaf from a circular base and accompanied on either side by a small service hut. Photographs from the archive show once again the most basic of construction systems, with the iron bars bent to form the curves, covered with mesh and plastered with concrete, a fine demonstration of how simple materials can produce an elegant piece of architecture. In a list of Müther’s Rügen buildings, which one can never complete, there is also the Inselparadies restaurant (1966) on the beach in Baabe, where another of his mushroom roofs rises up through a void in a banal concrete base and spreads out to form a square glazed building, the elegance of the roof sitting rather uncomfortably over the orthogonal form of the architecture. The roof is another ethereal, almost hallucinogenic, seaside structure, studded with lights so that at night it appeared to rise out of the dunes. It once housed the Milch-Moca bar, the inplace to be in Rügen in the late 1960s, with the best disco on the coast. Sadly this remarkable structure was abandoned in the early 1990s, and has since been

unsympathetically renovated. As an example of a larger Müther structure in the area, one should mention the Teepott restaurant (1968) – named for a previous restaurant on the site that resembled a teapot in its design – not on Rügen but on the mainland in the popular seaside resort of Warnemünde. Müther was responsible for the hypershell roof, with its complex parabolic curves, spanning twenty metres and standing on three supports. The structure has its own structural integrity, happily remaining standing when all the exterior walls were removed in the recent renovation. The light-weight roof contrasts with the vertical form of the nearby lighthouse and bulk of the large ferries on their way up the River Warnow to the port of Rostock. Many of Müther’s hypershell roofs, such as the Seerose pavilion in Potsdam and the Kosmos in Rostock, were designed as places of popular entertainment; they celebrated the communal lifestyle of the socialist state, accommodating large numbers of people under one roof. After the fall of socialism these buildings were seen as symbols of a discredited regime, and many were abandoned or demolished. The Teepott restaurant was left empty in 1991, narrowly survived demolition, and has now been renovated, but unfortunately the large open interior has been divided into separate restaurants. Still, if one approaches it from the narrow streets of the town one comes upon it with surprise, as a drifting form beside the sea, the roof hovering over the sands. To understand the achievement of Müther it is worth comparing these structures to similar works A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Right Back view of Bandstand (with Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s 1935 De La Warr Pavilion in the background), Bexhillon-Sea, 2001, by Níall McLaughlin Architects. Photograph by Nick Kane. Right, below Postcard of Binz showing the Lifeguard Station, first version, 1977 (demolished in 1993), engineer Ulrich Müther. The photograph also features the traditional Strandkorb wicker beach chairs. Photograph © Müther-Archiv, Wismar.

Top Teepott restaurant, Warnemünde, 1968, architect Erich Kaufmann, engineer Ulrich Müther. Photograph © MütherArchiv. Above Teepott restaurant seen from the beach. Photograph © Sven Gieratz, Müther-Archiv.

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produced along the English coastline. The coast is traditionally the place for amusing buildings, matching the idea of the seaside as a place for relaxation and entertainment. Our own seaside architecture includes the flamboyant nineteenth-century piers, or early twentieth-century pieces such as Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s modernist De La Warr Pavilion (1935) in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex. It is difficult to think of many ingenious small-scale structures produced along our coasts during the period when Müther was active. In the last decades of the twentieth century the English seaside became increasingly run-down, devoid of invention, assigned to cheap holidays for those unable to afford bargainpriced flights to sunnier beaches in other countries. By contrast the German Baltic coast remained a popular holiday resort, partly because its quality was preserved and partly because the citizens of a state behind the Iron Curtain had few opportunities to travel anywhere exotic. Only in this century have we begun to experience a revival of interest in contemporary architecture along the British coastline, with small-scale buildings such as Níall McLaughlin’s fibreglass bandstand (2001)

in Bexhill-on-Sea and Thomas Heatherwick’s East Beach Café in Littlehampton, both in East Sussex (2007). Müther’s buildings are quirkier, rougher, bolder, the work of an inventive designer working with the limited means at his disposal, rather than the advanced material technology we now possess. He reveals an unexpected aspect of the GDR, its lack of urgency and competition, where alongside all the mediocrity there existed a certain dreaminess. Out on the Baltic coast, away from the big cities, unusual forms, relating to the idea of a mass society but also very individual, could emerge from the pine woods and sand dunes. In a photograph in the archive, the capsule of the Lifeguard Station hovers over the mass of surrounding wicker beach chairs, like a small alien spaceship amongst a crowd of worshippers. One almost expects it to begin to rise, with Müther in his white shirt and grey engineer’s suit at the controls, and move slowly off northwards over the smooth Baltic Sea. With many thanks to Professor Matthias Ludwig of the Müther-Archiv for his assistance with photographs and information. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

The RIBA Manser Medal The RIBA Manser Medal, sponsored by Hiscox, is awarded every year to the best new house. It was created in 2001 to celebrate excellence in housing design and is named after Michael Manser CBE, a designer of notable homes and former RIBA President. Alison Brooks, architect and founding director of ABA, considers the particular challenges that designing a house presents to an architect, and the impact of the Manser Medal on the selected practices.

The design of a one-off house for a private client is often one of the most significant commissions of an architect’s career. This is in part because a house, or home, embodies the concept of dwelling that is at the heart of many forms of architecture. The home as dwelling-place is intimately connected with most people’s experience of life, either as an individual or part of a family. It is the setting for the most private, informal aspects of our lives as well

as for social gatherings. There is a universality to each element of a house – threshold, door, window, kitchen, hearth, gathering space, sleeping rooms, bathing area – to which everyone can relate. A house commission is on a scale at which an architect can test conceptual, formal, technical or material ideas difficult or impossible to realise in bigger buildings. Many major architects made significant initial statements of their careers with the

Stealth House, south-east London, 2005, by Robert Dye Architects, winner of the 2005 Manser Medal. Photograph © Robert Dye Architects.

design of a house, and their designs reflect major movements in architecture, such as the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, designed by Gerritt Rietveld in 1924; the houses by Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, Illinois (1889–1913); Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in Poissy (1931); Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea, in Noormarkku, Finland (1939); and, more recently, examples such as Michael and Patty Hopkins’s Hampstead house (1976). Some of these houses represented ideas that were later translated into solutions for larger scale social housing, which illustrated a key purpose of the twentieth-century’s ‘modern project’: to maximise light and space, promote health and create efficient, good design for society in general. A crucial element in the design of an extraordinary house is the client. Clients must trust in the architect to deliver a home in which they are prepared to live day and night, perhaps for a lifetime. The relationship between a client and an architect must survive many years, thousands of decisions, compromises, tweaks, budget cuts, life-changes, obstacles and delays that inevitably accompany the building of a house. The near-impossibility of this is only made possible by a shared ideal. The ambitious house commission by a client fully committed to the making of a work of architecture unconstrained by practical considerations is not,

however, the condition under which most new houses are produced. The project normally begins with a request for a bespoke design to a defined budget and limited time-frame, subject to planning and dozens of other constraints. In my experience the challenge of designing and building a one-off house is so enormous that the possibility of winning recognition at the end of it all is extremely unlikely, even unthinkable. The quest is primarily to build while revealing new possibilities for domestic architecture. But a house not only houses people and their activities; it also houses things, and human beings are innately collectors. I regard a house as a ‘repository of meaningful objects’: it should be able to accommodate the artefacts that represent an individual’s particular life. A professional award for the design of a completed new house judged by highly respected and critical peers is a huge accolade for the architect and the client. The RIBA Manser Medal brings the architectural achievement embodied in a single house to a wide audience, reminding us that good architecture is possible at a small scale, and at its essence is a place for us to dwell. The Salt House commission, for which ABA won the Manser Medal in 2007, came at a time when I had never before completed a stand-alone house, only extensions and conversions. The client had inherited a seaside site with a bedraggled 1960s house, and he

Left Hampstead house, 1976, by Michael and Patty Hopkins. © Architecture Press Archive/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection. Above Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht, 1924, by Gerritt Rietveld. Photograph by Hans Jan Durr, 2011, © Hans Jan Durr/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

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The RIBA Manser Medal brings the architectural achievement embodied in a single house to a wide audience, reminding us that good architecture is possible at a small scale, and at its essence is a place for us to dwell.

and his wife hoped to build a weekend house that would in time become the full-time family home. They had compiled a list of four or five architects and invited us all to participate in a design exercise to a succinct brief. They were keen on an ‘atrium’ house with as much visibility as possible between floors to maximise family contact in the space. The site was in a flood plain and had to be designed to withstand a 1-in-200-year risk of flood levels rising to over a metre higher than the current ground level, and formed part of a terrace of nineteenth-century oyster fishermen’s cottages on the Maldon estuary. The project seemed to raise three questions. Could the local vernacular house format (oyster cottage with outrigger) merge with an atrium house format? Could the house be designed to withstand extreme forces of wind and weather, while remaining open and transparent? Is there an architectural language or device that can give coherence to this combination of design styles? Our initial designs became the basis of a conversation with the client. The diagrams evolved from a simple orthogonal atrium house to a gradual loosening of form, resulting in a house that responded

Salt House, 2007, by ABA, winner of the 2007 Manser Medal. Photograph © ABA.

in its design to the forces of wind, folding open internally to draw in light from the sky and garden space while bending outwards to capture the views across the estuary. As with most house designs in the UK, it took about six months to design the project and obtain planning consent, six months to produce construction documents, and eighteen months to build. A local contractor, E.O. Jones & Sons, won the project, and built the house without a formal building contract. A simple exchange of letters and a handshake guaranteed that the 325sq.m. house shown on ABA’s drawings and specifications would be built for £450,000. The price seems miraculous in retrospect. The build was not easy, the geometries not straightforward, and the finishes demanding. In spite of this, ABA received only one or two queries throughout the entire construction process. The contractor considered the building of the Salt House his life achievement. The client has reassured us that it is not only a wonderful home, but also the best possible house for gatherings and neighbourhood parties, with the inside and outside dissolving into a

kind of shared landscape. When the jury for the Manser Medal visited the Salt House, it was not clear to me exactly what the award was, or why the jury was there. I related the story of its conception and realisation, then pointed out all the things that I thought weren’t quite right and apologised for them; I wanted to make clear that I had envisaged a more perfect expression of the idea. I didn’t realise until afterwards, when a juror told me, that I should have been telling them how fantastic the house was. I was amazed when the Salt House was awarded the 2007 Manser Medal. Having the conceptual, spatial and constructional ideals of the Salt House validated by the Manser jury gave ABA the confidence to carry these forward into much of our future work as a practice. The lessons learned – the resolution of organic geometries, the exploration of roof forms and the choreographing of the relationship of a building to its landscape – led directly to the design of ABA’s Newhall Be housing project in Harlow, Essex, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2013. The Salt House continues to inform our architectural thinking at every scale.

Above Interior, Stormy Castle, Gower peninsula, 2014, by Loyn & Co., winner of the 2014 Mansel Medal. Photograph by Charles Hosea. Right Interior, the Salt House, 2007, by ABA, winner of the 2007 Manser Medal. Photograph © ABA.

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From the Collections RIBA’s Head of Collections, Kent Rawlinson, offers a personal selection of images of chairs designed by architects from the RIBA British Architectural Library. Many early twentieth-century architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Le Corbusier are remembered and celebrated for their design of striking furniture and interiors as much as for their buildings. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos satirised the desire of his contemporaries to control every element of a building or room in his essay Poor Little Rich Man (1900), in which he imagines an architect who designs and furnishes an entire house, and then sternly refuses to let his client introduce his own choice of belongings or even clothes. This intimate relationship between furniture and architecture is, of course, nothing new. For hundreds of years architects have sought to shape the entire experience of a building, from its basic plan to the smallest details of the interior décor and furnishing. As a result, the RIBA’s Collections are filled with designs by architects for furniture and furnishings of all kinds, from wallpapers and carpets to tables and – of course – chairs.

In the Lords Chamber, at the ceremonial heart of the Houses of Parliament, is one of the most famous chairs in the world, the Royal Throne, where the Queen sits when she opens and addresses Parliament. This richly gilded faux-medieval extravaganza was designed by A.W.N. Pugin, and represents the triumph of his lifelong ambition to promote Gothic architecture as Britain’s national style.

Greek amphitheatres are elegantly formed from rank upon rank of seats. In the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, built in its present form from the 4th century BC onwards, a stone throne and a ring of richly carved marble chairs were set out for the priest of Dionysus (the god of winemaking and theatre) and other civic dignitaries. These worn and broken chairs, inscribed with their owners’ names, hauntingly evoke the individuals who once crowded into this theatre. Main picture Theatre of Dionyus (Athens), 4th century BC. Photograph by Edwin Smith, 1962.

Opposite, above Design for gold canopy, throne and consorts’ chairs for the Lords Chamber, House of Lords (detail), c.1846, by A.W.N. Pugin.

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Opposite, below Design for an upholstered chair (detail), 1800s, by Anthony Salvin.

Anthony Salvin (1799–1881) is best known for his dramatic restorations of medieval buildings such as Alnwick Castle and the Tower of London. By contrast, this design for a chair – with its bold circular back-rest – is in the contemporary Regency style and would have formed part of a contemporary classical interior filled with furniture and fittings of gilded wood, brocade and shimmering crystal. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art (1897–1909), is the epitome of a building in which every element – such as this armchair and grandfather clock – is conceived and designed as a whole, from the dramatic windows of the exterior to the sculptural ensemble of the bookcases, chairs and light-fittings in the library (one of the rooms that was sadly gutted by fire in 2014). The result is a building that has inspired and fuelled the creativity of generations of Scottish artists.

Peter Moro was a German emigré architect, whose playful but thoughtful approach to Modernist architecture saw him focus on the design of architectural interiors, in particular theatres and auditoriums, such as those of the Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Opera House. Moro also collaborated with the furniture designer Robin Day, and can be seen here sitting on a perspex chair of his own design.

In the 1960s, the architect and interior designer Max Clendinning designed a series of visually bold ‘Maxima’ chairs, partly inspired by the forms of early digital or computer lettering. The Maxima chairs were also an early example of flat-pack design, made from simple plywood sheets that slotted together.

Top left Grandfather clock and armchair for the Glasgow School of Art, 1909, by C.R. Mackintosh. Photograph by Eric de Maré, 1968.

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Above, centre Peter Moro sitting on his perspex chair, designed in 1947.

The ‘Series 7’ chair was designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in 1955, and remains one of the most iconic and popular chairs of all time. The design relied on a newly invented technique for shaping plywood, and reflects Jacobsen’s pared-down functionalist approach to designing both buildings and furniture. More than 5 million Series 7 chairs have been sold and numerous imitations produced.

Left Design for a Maxima chair, sketched perspective, 1950s, by Max Clendinning.

Zaha Hadid’s provocative use of fluid and sinuous forms is wonderfully illustrated by this contemporary chair. It is part of the Dune Formations installation of sculptures – including benches, tables, shelves and an artificial tree – formed from molten metals and resins. The continuously flowing contours of these pieces are deliberately designed to contrast with the ‘Cartesian geometries’ of traditional furniture design.

Left Chair from the Dune Formations installation for David Gill Galleries, Venice Biennale 2007, by Zaha Hadid. Photograph by Orsenigo-Chemollo. © ORCH.

Above Rows of Series 7 chairs, 1955, in Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, by Arne Jacobsen. Photograph by Dennis Hance, 1993. © Dennis Hance.

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best …

Miami buildings

Below South façade, main building, Bacardi Building, 1963, Enrique Gutierrez.

Miami is the archetypal twentieth-century city: it was hardly in existence before 1900, just swamps and alligators. When you visit it today you marvel at the mark of man in such a short period, and there is some extraordinary architecture to celebrate. Unburdened by the weight of history, the buildings display many hybrid styles and excursions into fantasy. Two major periods are the Art Deco of the 1930s and the MiMo (Miami Modern) of the 1950s to the 1970s. Artist Richard Walker selects five examples of what the visionary Miami architect Morris Lapidus called the ‘Architecture of Joy’.

The Fontainebleau The most iconic and recognisable building on Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau on Collins Avenue and 44th Street, was designed by Morris Lapidus in 1953. It has been very influential on hotel design around the world, introducing the concept of a resort having all the amenities in a single complex. Lapidus was an architectural visionary and had a masterplan for the city, but he was not taken seriously by his peers, and was criticised for his curvy, flamboyant and highly decorative designs at a time when the rest of the world was building Miesian boxes and Brutalist blocks. This hotel, along with Lapidus’s other MiMo creations in the area, celebrated the architect’s maxim, ‘too much is never enough’. Many heroes, villains, gangsters and movie stars visited over the years, as did James Bond in Goldfinger (1964). Frank Lloyd Wright, who was generally dismissive of the architect, declared a genuine affection for the Fontainebleau. Another of Lapidus’s confections, the Eden Roc, built next door to the Fontainebleau in 1955, was considered more restrained by his critics. That said, one visit to the lobby bar of this hotel, with its Greek columns, swagged drapes and starry ceilings, proves that Lapidus was way ahead of his time with his ‘Baroque Modernism’, a style that developed some 25 years later into postmodernism. The Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc have both been restored and extended, and this has mostly been done sympathetically, giving a stylish backdrop to these hotels’ new roles as 48

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corporate entertainment venues. There is an extensive conservation programme underway for many of the buildings in Miami Beach, and the whole area is now protected as a ‘historic district’. Even chain hotels like Holiday Inn and Best Western have now adopted a retro aesthetic, often

with mixed results. Further up the coast, the Deauville (Collins and 67th Street), designed in 1957 by Melvin Grossman, a protégé of Lapidus, has a sweeping space-age entrance canopy, funky neon signage and a film-set lobby.

South-east elevation, the pavilion, Bacardi Building.

Bacardi Building Situated on Biscayne Boulevard, the Bacardi Building comprises a single Miesian block and a satellite pavilion afloat on an elevated plaza. Designed in 1963 by the Cuban architect Enrique Gutierrez as the US headquarters of Bacardi Rum, it is now an arts foundation. The main building has distinctive hand-painted ceramic-tile murals by

the Brazilian artist Francisco Brennand that cover two sides. On the top floor, the conference room doubled up as an entertainment area, where Bacardi executives and their clients used to drink rum and dance the salsa into the early hours. The adjacent pavilion is a glazed ‘jewel-box’ balancing on a shiny red plinth.

The colourful hammered glass is based on a work by German artist Johannes M. Dietz and depicts the history of rum production. The two buildings are linked internally via a car park beneath the plaza, which features the Bacardi logo laid out as a mosaic of paving stones. The whole complex is one of the most extraordinary sights in Miami.

San Juan Hotel

Left Forecourt, the Fontainebleau, 1953, Morris Lapidus. All photographs by Richard Walker, 2014, © Richard Walker. Below Entrance façade, Eden Roc Hotel, 1955, Morris Lapidus.

San Juan Hotel, 1948, Henry Hohauser.

The original Art Deco district of Miami Beach officially stretches from 5th Street to 23rd Street. Much of the architecture dates back to the 1930s and is mainly the work of Henry Hohauser, L. Murray Dixon, Albert Anis and Roy France. Landmark buildings include the Essex House, the Winterhaven, the Colony, the Bancroft and the Berkeley Shore. The San Juan Hotel in Miami Beach at Collins Avenue and 16th Street was designed by Henry Hohauser in 1948 and is currently been sensitively restored. It is a good example of a hybrid style that shows the transition from the curved, flowing lines of Art Deco to the more boxy, rectilinear forms of the MiMo style of the 1950s and 1960s. If you move further up the coast as far as 40th Street, many other hotels reflect this crossover period, examples being the Delano (Robert Swartburg, 1947) the Sagamore (Albert Anis, 1948) and the Sans Souci (Roy France and Morris Lapidus, 1949). A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

1111 Lincoln Rd The main shopping mall in South Beach boasts many high-quality ArtDeco buildings and was once known as the ‘Fifth Avenue of the South’. It was originally planned by the developer Carl Fisher before he fell on hard times. It was then revived, landscaped and pedestrianised by Lapidus in 1959. A 2010 addition to the streetscape of South Beach is a deconstructed multistorey car park by Herzog & de Meuron, which has won awards, showing that the city, as well as protecting its past, has a vision of the future. 1111 Lincoln Road has divided opinion, some seeing it as brave and bold, others likening it to an unfinished office block on a building site. However, it has proved popular, going some way to help with solving the Beach’s chronic parking problem and also providing an exclusive rooftop restaurant and bar, with views across the city and bays. Herzog & de Meuron have also recently completed and opened the Pérez Art Museum by the waterside in Downtown Miami, which is essentially a large veranda, incorporating canopies, platforms, columns and vegetation, introducing a new tropical vernacular to the district. 1111 Lincoln Road, 2010, Herzog & de Meuron.

Florida Southern College Florida Southern College is an entire university campus designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built between 1941 and 1958. Titled ‘Child of the Sun’ and located in Lakeland about 20 miles east of Tampa, this group of structures forms the largest collection of buildings by the architect and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There have been limited alterations over the years, leaving most of the original concept intact, although there have been some new additions. The campus includes an auditorium, two chapels, lecture rooms and laboratories all linked by ‘esplanades’ across a wooded landscape beside a lake. Wright apparently almost abandoned the project because the budget was too tight to enable him to produce his complete vision, which led to some ill feeling. The whole complex is a comprehensive showcase of his unique style and ambition, and it is hard to understand why it is so little known and celebrated except among architects. 50

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Auditorium, Florida Southern College campus, 1941–58, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Books

Layered city

Peter Parker selects some of the season’s best architectural books

The Glasgow herald Charles Rennie Mackintosh James Macaulay W.W. Norton & Co. 304pp. £42.00

Charles Rennie Mackintosh Gordon Kerr Flame Tree Publishing. 128pp. £12.95 (hbk), £4.99 (pbk)

Two books can be recommended to anyone who is inspired by the RIBA’s current exhibition to find out more about the life and work of C.R. Mackintosh. James Macaulay admits that in spite of the mass of material written on Mackintosh’s work, the man himself remains something of an enigma. His book nevertheless provides a fine account of the architectural and artistic movements that prevailed while Mackintosh was growing up, the mentors he had when he started out as an architect in Glasgow (John Honeyman, John Keppie and James Herbert McNair), the tour of Italy he made on a travelling scholarship, and his gradual emergence as ‘a pioneer of modernism’. Mackintosh often designed not only buildings, but all their fixtures and fittings, with every detail contributing to and enhancing the overall effect, creating a fully integrated whole. This attention to

detail had its drawbacks: Scotland Street School, commissioned by the Education Department in 1903, boasted beautiful ironwork gates and railings featuring symbolic abstract plant-forms, but it went £1,500 over budget. Macaulay’s book is elegantly written and very well illustrated, both with archive material and colour photographs taken specially for it by Mark Fiennes. It would be hard to better, but for those who prefer a shorter read, there is Gordon Kerr’s little monograph for the ‘Masterpieces of Art’ series. While Macaulay’s book proceeds chronologically, Kerr’s is arranged into thematic sections: ‘Building as Work of Art’, ‘Tea Rooms’, ‘Watercolours & Design’ and ‘Interior Design & Objects’. There is a brief and lucid introductory chapter, and the full-page photographs that make up the greater part of the book are supplied with properly informative captions.

Les Grands Dessins Making use of over 2,000 images, this spectacular visual biography covers all aspects of Le Corbusier’s life and career as an architect, painter, city planner and writer. From a mobile exhibition pavilion for Nestlé in the 1920s to a new city of Chandighar in the Punjab in the 1950s, Le Corbusier’s work was directed by a clear, though sometimes controversial, social vision. Le Corbusier Le Grand reproduces family snapshots alongside architectural plans and models, personal and professional letters and postcards, pages from sketchbooks, designs for 52

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furniture, murals and tapestries, and photographs of buildings both completed and under construction. Scrupulous notes supply English translations for anything reproduced that is written in French, whether complete letters or mere jottings. Jean-Louis Cohen provides a succinct and lively biographical Introduction and Tim Benton neatly summarises each phase of Le Corbusier’s career. Essentially a very well-ordered and beautifully designed scrapbook, this is entertaining, enlightening and astonishingly inexpensive.

Calcutta remains one of the most architecturally pleasurable cities in the world, particularly if you like walking and are an aficionado of decayed grandeur and riotous eclecticism. Although characterless new malls are springing up in the wake of India’s economic boom, there is still a lovely architectural surprise round every corner from Dum Dum to Tollygunge. In its heyday Calcutta was dubbed the Second City of Empire; today (renamed Kolkata) it is a palimpsest, with traces of its spectacular colonial past clearly visible beneath its vibrant and chaotic presentday incarnation. A tardy recognition of the city’s rapidly disappearing architectural heritage has led to the preservation and restoration of large public buildings, but it is the smaller domestic structures, with their wealth of both Oriental and Western detail, that give the city its particular flavour. These are mostly found in North Calcutta, where wealthy Bengali merchants built substantial mansions in the nineteenth century. Even houses far more modest than these extravagant rajbari, with their

Courtyard of the Mitra House in North Calcutta.

splendid courtyards, colonnades, galleries and thakur dalan (halls for worship), boasted such decorative flourishes as Corinthian pilasters or Indo-Gothic arches, now crumbling beneath layer upon layer of different-coloured paints. In The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta, Laura McPhee’s photographs, taken with a 1950s Deardorff replica of a nineteenth-century large-format box-camera, perfectly capture the essence of the city, both in North

Calcutta and in the leafier, more affluent Jodhpur Park in the south. The Calcuttaborn novelist Amitav Ghosh provides an evocative foreword, while a substantial essay by Romita Ray gives an excellent account of the social and architectural history of this wonderful city. The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta Laura McPhee & Romita Ray Yale. 160pp. £35.00

Nation building ‘If he’s anywhere, he’d be here,’ Nathaniel Kahn said at the end of My Architect, his extraordinary 2003 film about his father. ‘Here’ was Bangladesh, where Louis Kahn completed his final major project, the Parliament Building and Capital Complex in Dhaka. Commissioned in 1962, it took twenty-three years to build, entirely by hand – ‘the same as the Taj Mahal’. Anyone who saw the film (and if you haven’t, you should) will remember the moment when a visibly moved Bangladeshi said simply of Kahn: ‘He gave us democracy.’ He also gave them one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world architecture, created in one of the poorest countries in the world. In Louis Kahn: House of the Nation, Grischa Rüschendorf’s photographs give a real sense of this magnificent governmental complex, taking full advantage of both subcontinental light and the water on which Kahn’s massy but graceful buildings appear to float. The photographs also capture Kahn’s brilliant manipulation of space and volume within the buildings, and since this really is architecture for the people Rüschendorff rightly includes human figures. Louis Kahn: House of the Nation Grischa Rüschendorf ORO Editions. 112pp. £25.00

Le Corbusier Le Grand Jean-Louis Cohen & Tim Benton Phaidon. 848pp. £35.00

The mosque is situated in the south entrance of the building.

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Books

Books Cabin fever We tend to think of cabins as something all well-appointed American families own in order to escape the city and get closer to nature. However, as this book of 61 contemporary examples shows, architectdesigned cabins are now being built all around the world, from Lochaber to Easter Island. Drawing upon the philosophy of Thoreau and the pioneering example of Le Corbusier at Rocquebrune, these buildings have various uses, come in a baffling variety of shapes, and employ all manner of materials. Defined by their small footprint, they allow architects to experiment in a way that would be impossible in larger projects. Built on mountaintops, in forests, by lakes and rivers – or, like the DROP Eco-Hotel pod, moved around from site to site with little ecological impact – these cabins can merge organically into the surrounding landscape, or stand out like punctuation marks on a blank page. This inspirational book is generously illustrated with photographs and plans, and includes a descriptive index of the architects involved.

House on Cárdenas Street, designed in 1913 by Catalan architect Mario Rotllant.

Cuba Libre style Before Cuba gained independence in 1902, the Beaux-Arts style dominated public buildings and the grander houses. While this influence persisted, the twentieth century saw an extraordinary flowering of architectural eclecticism, from ‘Catalan Modernism’ (Spanish Art Nouveau) to some fine examples of international Modernism, notably the sleek 1953 Odontological Building and the vast, green-trimmed 1956 FOSCA building, which contains 400 apartments. Havana is particularly rich in Art Deco, a style that was both widespread – embraced even by schools and maternity hospitals – and long-lived. It enjoyed a late flourish in the style moderne Rodriguez Vázquez apartment complex, and better known as the Teatro América (1941), while 1950s flash arrived with the Hotel Riviera (1957), designed by the Miami architect Igor Polevitzky for a local mobster and much patronised by Hollywood film stars. The revolution of 1959 gave rise to a new 54

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Cabins Philip Jodidio Taschen. 464pp. £44.99

indigenous style, most famously the National School of Arts, its distinctive organic forms emphasised by the use of locally made red bricks. This complex was masterminded by Ricardo Porro, whose School of Modern Dance (1965) was intended to ‘represent metaphorically’ a smashed and fragmented sheet of glass symbolising the overthrow of the old order. In Havana Modern, Michael Connors’ authoritative text is rightly celebratory, and the Cuban photographer Néstor Marti has not only produced superb images of all these buildings (some enhanced by the careful placing of sleek old cars in front of them), but gained access to many previously unseen interiors, some in gentle decline, others immaculately restored. All in all a terrific advertisement for the city. Havana Modern Michael Connors & Néstor Marti Rizzoli. 256pp. £40.00

Also recommended

The English Country House Garden

Piano: Complete Works 1966–2014

Robert Moses: Master Builder of New York City

100 Buildings 100 Years

George Plumptree & Marcus Harpur Frances Lincoln. 208pp. £25.00

Philip Jodidio Taschen. 648pp. £34.99

Pierre Christin & Olivier Balez Nobrow. 108pp. £15.99

Twentieth Century Society Batsford. 208pp. £25.00

George Plumptree selects 25 gardens, beautifully photographed by Marcus Harpur, to represent an ideal of English horticulture in which (with a couple of exceptions) the architecture of the houses they surround plays a crucial role in the overall design. History unfolds from the Elizabethan Montacute House to the Edwardian Folly Farm. The latter was designed by Jekyll and Lutyens, but subsequently developed by Lanning Roper in the 1970s and by Dan Pearson since 2010, for gardens continually evolve. The five ‘Contemporary Designs’ demonstrate that historic houses do not necessarily demand period gardens.

This dazzling monograph describes and illustrates all the major projects undertaken by Renzo Piano in a career covering almost half a century. Whether designing exhibitions and pavilions or airport terminals and apartment blocks, Piano has produced some of the world’s most innovative and distinctive buildings. He rises particularly well to the challenge of creating unapologetically contemporary structures within older buildings, notably the astounding City Gate in the ancient walls of Valetta and some beautiful new spaces within museums. The scholarly but accessible text is accompanied by Taschen’s customary wealth of excellent illustrations.

Robert Moses reshaped New York for the twentieth century. He commissioned such well-loved structures as the Triborough Bridge and the Shea Stadium, but his unshakeable belief in the supremacy of the automobile resulted in the destruction of old neighbourhoods as parkways and freeways were carved through them. This dramatic story lends itself very well to a graphic biography. While this may not provide the detail of Robert A. Caro’s 1,200-page portrait, The Power Broker (1974), it is a nifty, even-handed and surprisingly thorough alternative. The subdued palette of the drawings is perfect for the subject-matter and the text is playful and droll.

The Twentieth Century Society asked its members and supporters to select 100 British buildings to represent every individual year from 1914 to 2013. The result is a stylish, often surprising and truly heartening book. It starts with the Edward VII Galleries at the British Museum, ends with the Bishop Edward King Chapel (built in Oxfordshire as the result of a RIBA competition), and displays a refreshingly wide range of architectural styles in between. Each building is illustrated and described, with additional essays on particular periods and a handy ‘100 Years Timeline’, which places the buildings chosen in a broader historical context.

To purchase these and many more titles, visit the RIBA Bookshop at 66 Portland Place. Present your Friends card at the till and get 10% off.* Hypercubus at Graz, Austria, designed in 2010 by Studio WG3.

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Opposite Spread of illustrations from the fifth edition of A History of Architecture, including a description of how to draw the spiral form of an Ionic volute using a cockle shell, a pencil and a piece of cotton. © RIBA/ University of London, photographer Wilson Yau.

Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture The revival of a classic The history and significance of this important classic work on architectural history is explained by Catherine Gregg at the RIBA, who is leading a major project to update the book completely for a contemporary audience

Described as ‘the Book of the Century’ when it was last published, a new edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture is now under development at the RIBA. As joint trustees of the copyright in the book, the University of London and the RIBA have commissioned Bloomsbury Publishing to produce an ‘all new’ 21st edition. First published in 1896, this world history of architecture has since become a familiar feature on the bookshelves of generations of architects. It has been updated through 20 editions over a century, and the 21st edition will represent the most far-reaching reassessment of its content in the history of its publication. The scope will be broadened, the structure rebalanced and the content wholly rewritten, with new illustrations from the RIBA Photographs Collection as well as original line drawings produced by Sir Banister Fletcher’s architecture office. A global history for a twenty-first-century audience, the new edition will be published for 56

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

the first time online as well as in print. The fully interactive digital edition will be the keystone of a new online architectural library planned by Bloomsbury Publishing: a hub of resources for the study of architectural history, culture and theory. Even after more than a hundred years, there is no other work quite like Banister Fletcher’s in terms of breadth and depth. We hope that the 21st edition will reach new audiences and inspire the next generation of readers and researchers. This would be a fitting legacy for Sir Banister Fletcher (1866–1953), an architect who put education at the heart of his career. During his lifetime, he campaigned for the place of architecture and its histories in general education, arguing for its wider appreciation in numerous essays, lectures and even radio broadcasts. He taught construction at the Architectural Association, architectural history at the University of London, and conducted correspondence courses for students taking the RIBA examinations;

Right The line drawings made by Banister Fletcher’s architecture office to illustrate the book are now held in the RIBA archives. © RIBA/ University of London.

He believed that, for those with a general knowledge of architectural history, ‘each street is a picture gallery which everyone may enter’ he was elected President of the Institute in 1929. His commitment to improving architectural education, both in terms of professional practice and popular appreciation, continues to resonate with the RIBA’s aims today. Fletcher expressed the significance of architecture in simple but striking terms, as ‘the art which gives us “home”’, and as providing the context for everyday life: ‘It is our daily companion, [and] walks hand in hand with us in most of our activities.’ He was by all accounts a great walker (when not out touring in his Rolls-Royce), and believed that, for those with a general knowledge of architectural history and principles, ‘each street is a picture gallery which everyone may enter’. He evokes the simple pleasures afforded by the buildings around us: ‘Our free gallery of buildings varies with the day and time of the year; we may see them in the haze of the early dawn, in the full flood of the noonday sun, in the dimness of the twilight, or in the weirdness of the moonlight, while in the changes of the seasons we get that variety which gives them life.’ Beyond this, however, his commitment to architectural education was also underpinned by a typically Victorian belief that ‘popular taste should be trained’. If only we were given the skills to appreciate architecture, a popular desire for well-designed buildings would develop, creating a market for ‘good design’. At times condescending – the Dictionary of National Biography describes Sir Banister as ‘patronising even to his peers’ – he was also a product of his time. The paternalistic impulse to improve popular taste was associated with a patriotic desire to improve the quality of British design and decorative arts, which can be traced to a mid-nineteenth-century drive to stimulate British industry. This effort was spearheaded by Henry Cole, the founder of the South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. When the Museum opened in 1852, Cole’s inaugural display of objects labelled ‘good design’ and ‘bad design’ epitomised the cultural establishment’s attitude at the time. Banister Fletcher’s writings also reflect other key design debates of the day. Another issue that inspired him, and continues to inspire much of the RIBA’s work today, is the relationship between architecture and public health. Fletcher went so far as to say that, in its broadest sense, ‘architecture is public health’. Railing against the evils of damp, dirt and dark corners, he extolled the virtues of sunlight, fresh air and rational planning. Writing in 1899 about his predictions for the new century, as well as anticipating a bridge from London to New York, he hoped that ‘light, air, & plentiful sunshine shall find an entrance as far as possible into every quarter of our ideal city’. His words anticipate the work of British architects and planners in the 1920s, 1930s and

beyond in providing fit-for-purpose, well-designed housing for the ordinary city dweller. If Banister Fletcher’s ideas anticipated the groundwork of the Modern movement, the concrete manifestation of such thinking did not appear to appeal to his aesthetic sensibilities. In the 16th edition of A History of Architecture, produced just before his death in 1953, Modern movement architects were given short shrift: ‘Space does not permit reference to many architects, including Le Corbusier, Frank Gropius [he meant Walter] and Eric Mendelsohn.’ The new edition, in both print and digital formats, is due for release in 2017. It is striking that, despite how much the language framing design debates may have changed since Banister Fletcher’s day, the themes and aims underlying them are still very much at the heart of the RIBA’s work.

For more information on the Banister Fletcher Project, visit our website, architecture.com.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

RIBA Friends of Architecture RIBA Friends of Architecture is a great way for anyone with an interest in architecture, design and the built world around us to get involved with and support the Institute. If you haven’t already become a RIBA Friend, please do visit architecture.com/friends to discover more about the wealth of benefits you can enjoy, including: 10% off in the café and bookshop at 66 Portland Place; access to our Friends-only events programme; discounted tickets to all public programme events; an exclusive Friends e-newsletter and this magazine – delivered straight to your door twice a year.

Coming soon: exhibitions to look forward to in 2015 Following our exhibition Mackintosh Architecture, the Architecture Gallery at 66 Portland Place will come alive with an immersive installation – The Brutalist Playground – in June. Brutalism evoked a new ethics in post-war architecture. It questioned the prewar Modern movement while pursuing a renewed socialist agenda. Today, however, these structures are remembered largely for their failure, characterised by the image of rough concrete and desolate landscaping. The Brutalist Playground is an immersive, touchable and conceptual installation that will reveal examples of play designed for these structures. It will encourage visitors to look at the materiality and visual language of

Brutalist landscapes in new ways while questioning present-day design for play. In September, we explore Palladianism in a new exhibition. With a focus on contemporary architecture, the show explores how the design principles of Andrea Palladio have been interpreted, copied and re-imagined across time and space in very different ways since his death in 1580. It includes previously unexplored and never exhibited works that put Palladio in a new social context, and brings out unexpected stories about the impact of his legacy on functionality and style. It also questions how a style and approach to architecture that Palladio intended to be democratic is now associated with wealth and privilege.

Children’s playground on the Pepys Estate, Deptford, south-east London. Photograph by Tony RayJones, 1970. © T. Ray-Jones/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Friends News Friends Online It is now much easier to share your passion for architecture and design with our ‘Friends online portal’. You can become a Friend, renew your subscription or purchase a gift subscription online, at architecture. com/friends. You can also browse back issues of this magazine and Friends e-newsletters. Even if you have already joined as a Friend, please do register for an online account to access these benefits. Email friends@riba.org for further information and assistance.

RIBA Patrons of Architecture Annual Christmas Party Every year the RIBA holds a Christmas Party to thank our Patrons and other donors for their support throughout the year. In 2014, Julian and Louisa Treger kindly invited us to their Chelsea home. Charles Hind, Chief Curator, spoke briefly about the fascinating history of the Tregers’ home, which was formerly part of the Cadogan Estate, and related stories that the owners had never heard before. We are very grateful to Julian and Louisa for hosting the party.

Guests at the 2014 Christmas party.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Friends News Friends Events

Our events programme of architectural walks, visits and exhibition tours, just for Friends, continues this spring/summer. Places are limited, so please do reserve yours soon by emailing friends@riba.org Highlights include: March

May

Guided Tour of Two Temple Place

Arts & Crafts: Tour of Kelmscott House & 7 Hammersmith Terrace

Two Temple Place, London WC2R 3BD Thurs 26 March, 9am £12 per person, including tea & coffee

Explore a hidden architectural gem outside public opening hours. Designed by John Loughborough Pearson, one of the foremost neo-Gothic architects of the late nineteenth century, this extraordinary late-Victorian mansion was designed for use primarily as William Waldorf Astor’s estate office. Friends will discover the history, architecture, opulent interior and extraordinary craftsmanship of this historic Grade II-listed building.

April Architectural Walking Tour: Architecture and Commerce in the City of London Sat 18 April, 11am, £10 per person, led by Owen Hopkins, architectural historian and Architecture Programme Manager at the Royal Academy

Owen Hopkins will lead a tour through the City of London, exploring new and recent buildings as well as a few older examples. Hopkins discusses these buildings against the backdrop of London’s position as a great commercial centre, exploring the relationship between the city’s commercial success and its architectural magnificence – or otherwise. Buildings visited include St Paul’s Cathedral, 1 New Change, No.1 Poultry, 20 Fenchurch Street (also known as the Walkie-Talkie), Leadenhall Market, the Lloyd’s Building, the Leadenhall Building (known as the Cheesegrater), the Gherkin, Heron Tower and Broadgate.

Thurs 7 May, 10am – 12.45pm, £12 per person Meet at Kelmscott House, 26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London W6 9TA

A fantastic opportunity to explore William Morris’s former residence. Beginning at Kelmscott House at 10am, Friends will enjoy a display of items including drawings, textiles, wallpaper and furnishings. There will be an opportunity to enjoy refreshments before we take a guided walk along the Upper Mall – an area rich in Arts and Crafts history. At 11.45am, we will explore 7 Hammersmith Terrace, the former home of Emery Walker, friend and mentor of William Morris. Please note: due to space restrictions, places on this visit are very limited.

April The London Library: Private Tour 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG Mon 20 April, 5.45pm, Free for Friends

Enjoy a private guided tour led by a Library guide and a director of RIBA Stirling Prize-winning practice Haworth Tompkins. Discover the history and architecture of this unique literary oasis – usually only open to members – and explore how Haworth Tompkins has transformed the building to meet the needs of twenty-first-century Library users.

We are also looking forward to welcoming Friends on a Barbican Architecture Walking Tour in June and a William Kent themed tour of Chiswick House and Gardens in September (dates and times to be confirmed).

Talk & tour of Brunswick House, 30 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 2LG Thurs 28 May, 2pm, £15 per person

In the eighteenth century, Brunswick House (originally Belmont House) stood in five and half acres of parkland with its own jetty and a handsome frontage on to the Old Portsmouth Road. Now, some two and half centuries later, it casts a rueful glance at five lanes of traffic thundering past at all hours of the day and night, a railway viaduct and a bus station. But step inside and you begin to feel a Georgian sense of ease and elegance and quickly forget the juggernauts and buses outside. Enjoy a private tour and discover the fascinating history of Brunswick House, followed by a talk by a LASSCO Director, highlighting unique and intriguing items of architectural salvage. A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Friends News

American Friends of the British Architectural Library

Discover the RIBA Collections Open to everyone and without charge, the British Architectural Library and its collections form the largest and most comprehensive resource in the UK for research and information on all aspects of architecture. Please contact us on 020 7307 3707 or library.education@riba.org for more information about visiting the Library. If you are unable to visit in person, you can still discover much more online at architecture.com. Our daily ‘Revealing the Collections’ posts highlight some of the amazing items in the RIBA Collections, from photographs to postcards, models to drawings, and more.

James Gibbs’s drawing, 1797, of the perspective view of the Palladian Bridge, Stowe, Buckinghamshire. © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Palladio and his influence: Charles Hind’s US Lecture Tour We are delighted to announce the dates for the US lecture tour which Charles Hind, world-renowned Palladio expert and H.J. Heinz Curator of Drawings at the RIBA, will be giving for the Royal Oak Foundation in May: ■■ Philadelphia: Monday 4 May ■■ Washington, D.C.: Tuesday 5 May ■■ New York: Thursday 7 May ■■ Chicago: Friday 8 May ■■ Charleston: Tuesday 12 May

Charles will examine the development of Palladianism from Britain using drawings, photographs and models from the RIBA’s public and private collections, as well as contemporary architects’ practices. He will demonstrate how the contributions of this sixteenth-century Venetian influenced centuries of style, and show how Palladianism truly is the most important style ever designed by a single architect.

Please contact Emily de Vismes on Emily.deVismes@riba.org for more information and tickets, or visit afbal.org.

Don’t forget, Hiscox have arranged specially negotiated discounts for RIBA Friends of Architecture. Visit hiscox. co.uk/riba for full details.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Reading Room, British Architectural Library, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London.

Get in touch Email friends@riba.org Call 020 7307 3810 Visit architecture.com/friends

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Look up Valeria Carullo points out an architectural feature above eye-level, in London’s Apollo Victoria Theatre The decorative feature in this photograph of 1930 is part of the fantastical interior decoration of the Apollo Victoria Theatre, near Victoria Station in London, and is still enjoyed by audiences today. Designed as a ‘picture palace’ in 1929 by Ernest Wamsley Lewis, the theatre opened a year later as the New Victoria, and is often referred to as the most important cinema building to have been erected in Britain. In contrast to the restrained Art Deco design of the two façades of the building on Vauxhall Bridge Road and Wilton Road, the auditorium was extravagantly decorated with a variety of motifs of marine life, stalactites and fountains. These features were enhanced by elaborate green, pink and blue

lighting, transforming the theatre into an undersea wonderland. It was indeed the architect’s intention to create the atmosphere of what he called a ‘fairy palace under the sea, illuminated by mysterious lights’. The theatre’s ‘unorthodox appearance’ (as described in Architects’ Journal in 22 October 1930) provoked strong reactions at the time, both favourable and otherwise. Sidney Bernstein, founder of the Granada cinema chain, was convinced that ‘people do not want this sort of thing: they want architecture with marble columns, gilt and mirrors’. Having escaped demolition in the 1950s, the cinema closed down in 1976, but re-opened five years later as a dedicated theatre space, the Apollo Victoria. Its auditorium was restored in 2002 and the theatre has since hosted a number of hit shows. Auditorium, Apollo Victoria Theatre, 1929, by Ernest Wamsley Lewis. © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Amagazine March 2015 • Issue 2 • £3.50

For RIBA Friends of Architecture

March 2015 • Issue 2

The RIBA Manser Medal Alison Brooks offers an architect’s insights into the challenges of designing a new house

A Steady Pace

The pleasures of walking in a city by Kim Wilkie

With Craxton and a Camera in Crete

Ian Collins on John Donat’s images that captured everyday life on the island in the 1960s