10 minute read
Place, time, architecture
1. Purcell designed and
delivered the new hangar at Aerospace Bristol, tailor made and purpose built for Concorde Alpha Foxtrot, the last to be built
and to fly 2. Purcell’s Liz
Smith and Harriet Pullman inspecting the dome of Sydney Smirke’s British Museum Reading Room
Understanding the unique nature of heritage has allowed Purcell to develop a consistent, rigorous approach to design in context, writes Jeremy Melvin
If the past is another country, heritage is its diplomatic mission to the present, our conduit for various forms of history from hard matter, incomplete archives and collective memories. Purcell partner, Liz Smith, characterises heritage as ‘the continuing history of everything’, and so it lies at the root of all Purcell does in three core disciplines of architecture, heritage consultancy and masterplanning.
From the practice’s origins in the 1940s, through its incarnation as Purcell Miller Tritton, and with a reputation for conserving great gothic cathedrals, it has helped create an interface between a growing interest in historic buildings and the expanding scope of legislation around them. In this capacity, it has assumed those diplomatic heritage obligations in forging links between communities and policy, hard (and hard-to-decipher) facts and soft ones, and building physics.
This nexus puts a twist on Purcell’s definition of architectural practice – it gives clients much more than a design by focusing, first and foremost, on fulfilling needs in a way that meets people’s aspirations. These needs can stem from the condition of a building’s fabric or a community’s wishes. The architect’s ambassadorial role involves representing these varying needs and mediating between the forces behind them. More often, diplomacy sets up subtle, insightful and sympathetic collaboration to resolve what might initially seem to be irreconcilable problems. In this, Purcell’s first publication, its diplomatic endeavours are explored in its own words by crossdisciplinary experts. Architect Tom Brigden and heritage consultant Rowenna Wood describe missions in conservation at home and abroad, while heritage consultant Jon Wright and architect David Hills discuss how conservation philosophy is becoming increasingly dependent on understanding architectural design intent.
Brigden and Wood outline contextual complexities associated with one of the practice’s largest and most unique conservation plans, written for the British territories in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Unsurprisingly in this forbidding, barely inhabited zone, there was no buildings conservation policy or legislation (though there is a slowly growing recognition that the heritage of whaling and exploration is worth recording, if not always preserving). After a small team spent days measuring sheds and stores in outfits to protect them from asbestos, Purcell proposed that the sites be digitally scanned so that a record of the sheds and stores could made available anywhere. The team then embarked on a six-day voyage across the stormy Southern Ocean back to civilization, and wrote the policies that exist today.
Wright and Hill’s essay concludes the narrative, discussing how this trailblazing work could be extended to include the conservation of seminal 20th-century buildings, as the practice is demonstrating greater agility in jumping between construction techniques and design philosophies that are centuries apart. This was a skill perhaps most clearly tested in a unique, but significant, collaboration between different types of construction, evident at the British Museum in the dome of Sydney Smirke’s British Museum Reading Room of 1857 and Foster + Partners’ roof of the Great Court, which encloses it. Smirke used cast iron and, for the ceiling, that stalwart of Victorian interiors and furnishings, papier mâché; Foster, as much a creature of his time, used glass and parabolic steel ribs. The problem is they respond differently to climatic conditions – Purcell had to use its polyvalent knowledge of construction technology to find a balance that works for both. 2
PURCELL
3. Before breaking ground
for the new Purcelldesigned Concorde Alpha Foxtrot hangar, contributors and community members traced out the plane’s
iconic form 4,5,6. A trio of
Purcell case studies describe three modes of collaboration at Cardigan Castle (page 10), Auckland Castle (page 16) and the National Maritime Museum (page 22)
7. Purcell’s new gallery
building extends Percy Thomas’s recently listed buildings at St Fagans National Museum of
History 8. Community
action – the start of Purcell’s 13-year engagement with Arnos Vale Cemetery that
continues today 9. Clifton
Cathedral, Bristol – the youngest and most recent addition to Purcell’s portfolio of cathedral projects
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Three further themes are also explored within these pages, with Paul Finch writing on identity (page 12), Ken Powell on typology (page 16), and Hugh Pearman on tradition and innovation (page 24).
Masterminding collaboration
The practice’s approach to collaboration goes beyond the profession’s standard engagement with engineers, cost consultants, other professionals and statutory bodies. For Purcell, collaboration is everything, a vital part of its modus operandi because the diplomatic connotations of heritage define the nature of its interactions with other parties in particular ways. Its relationships with local communities, for example, are heavily coloured by the nature of the heritage in question, while its broad experience opens up the possibility of collaboration – or at least an exchange of ideas – between different buildings. All this makes for a tangled skein, which we illustrate with three core case studies that, in their own way, demonstrate Purcell’s enduring collaboration with place, time and architecture.
Cardigan Castle (page 10), a magnificent if remote medieval structure commanding the lower reaches of the River Teifi in Wales, shows how Purcell’s ability to lead collaboration with an extremely broad community of stakeholders can define aspirations and meet needs that, ultimately, result in sustainable economic proposition. Partner Niall Phillips remembers the first approach by a retired GP, the local vet and a bookkeeper, who wanted to bring the castle into the service of the community but had little idea how to do it. He subtly took the lead in constructing a collaboration framework and identified emerging aspirations, turning them into genuine possibilities defined by funding, the bounds of the historic fabric and the legislation protecting it. Here, Purcell’s new glass restaurant rests enticingly between two massive medieval walls, establishing another ‘collaboration’ between old and new, with further threads running through the built fabric to the social and economic context.
Another castle project – this time by Purcell with Niall McLaughlin and SANAA – inspired a different collaborative outcome at the site of the Bishop of Durham’s historic residence at Auckland Castle (page 16). Purcell’s conservation plan for the town creates a context for new buildings; here, the practice mediates, perhaps to the point of invisibility, collaborations between old and new.
And third in this trilogy, the National Maritime Museum (page 22) demonstrates different extremes of community collaboration, with Purcell satisfying both the local community in Greenwich and the world community as affected by Britain’s maritime history. The scheme improves circulation around the 19th-century structures that were not designed as a museum. In this instance, the firm developed and delivered a new entrance and café, which picks up footfall from visitors to Greenwich Park and the Observatory. In this context, the building provides a coherent frame so the diverse objects can collaborate in telling a credible and engaging story.
Masterplanning change
Beyond these recent and ongoing case studies, other projects demonstrate Purcell’s fluency in masterplanning and managing change in complex contexts. These projects demand commitment for periods of time that extend well beyond those of conventional appointments.
Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol is a place where many locals have a great uncle, granny or third cousin four times removed in the ground so community connections are many, strong and varied. Purcell became involved, galvanising locals outraged at proposals to redevelop the 45-acre site, metamorphosing that outrage into a positive direction that unlocked sweat equity, local funders and, ultimately, the Heritage Lottery Fund, which provided just enough to restore several Grade-II* buildings, cut back the undergrowth, mow the grass to a certain distance from the roadways, restore the Raja’s tomb and introduce a small, elegant and unashamedly contemporary café alongside the neoclassical former crematorium. Not surprisingly it took some time to evolve, running for 13 years.
Alongside the expert repair of 18thcentury masonry, Purcell’s new steel and glass building is subtly contextualised with terraces, including a lift and stairway to the crematorium’s basement, where visitors can enjoy a small exhibition and peer at the
macabre remains of the furnace and bonecrusher that sped up the process of ‘ashes to ashes’. Meanwhile, lightly restored, the former funerary chapel above has become one of Bristol’s most popular wedding venues, giving a modern take on the old vow of ‘til death do us part’.
The Aerospace Bristol museum also took many years and, growing out of the firm’s initial conservation management plan, shows how opportunism and accident play a part in creating a heritage-focused visitor attraction. Here, people who shared a passion for Bristol’s long history of aircraft production had assembled a wide-ranging collection of its artefacts and were looking for a place to display them to the public. A century-old hangar on Filton Airfield, redundant for modern planes but listed because of its magnificent Belfast trusses, became available – on condition that the last flying Concorde, then grounded and stored on adjacent land, would receive a fitting home on site. Adding what is probably (with the Spitfire) Britain’s most famous flying machine to the collection was a challenge and a boon. While the existing hangars set a powerful frame around which the exhibits could be organised, Concorde’s distinctive form determined the shape of its new award-winning enclosure, designed within extremely tight margins by Purcell.
While quicker in delivery, St Fagans National Museum of History in Wales is another example of heritage reaching into, and helping to define, national identity across multiple generations. Founded in 1948 with a series of reconstructed rural buildings from across Wales, and modelled on Skansen in Stockholm and other Scandinavian open-air museums, it acquired a new building in the 1970s; designed by Percy Thomas Partnership this housed indoor exhibitions, a shop, café and WCs. Its austere rigour says little about Welshness but much about 1970s architectural ideas. Purcell’s significant new-build additions transform an unusable courtyard into a spacious foyer, while updating and extending the gallery areas for the displays ‘Wales Is…’ and ‘Life Is…’, which bring together the national collections of history and archaeology to create fresh perspectives on Welsh history. The firm also helped write the building’s listing, which influenced its whole strategic approach.
Like St Fagans, Clifton Cathedral in Bristol comes from the stable of Percy Thomas Partnership. As a cathedral it evokes some of Purcell’s most prestigious projects, including those at Durham, Ely and Canterbury – though the Jesuitical mind might claim that Clifton is, in fact, closer in its purpose to the origins of those great buildings as they were adapted to meet the reformed needs of the Church of England. While currently not in the same league as other architectural works, Clifton does deserve to be better known – it is superb. Based on a hexagonal unit, it brings sanctuary and seats, clergy and congregation together with mysterious light, ringed by a series of crude but moving concrete reliefs depicting the 14 Stations of the Cross.
Purcell’s cathedral portfolio undoubtedly remains one of the jewels in its crown. Initiated by founder Donovan Purcell, when he was appointed as Surveyor to the Fabric at Ely Cathedral in 1960, several subsequent partners have extended this legacy: John Burton was the first person since the 1360s to simultaneously hold both Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey surveyorships, while Jane Kennedy had care of more great cathedrals than anyone since George Gilbert Scott. Today, this tradition of stewardship is maintained by Chris Cotton and Jonathan Deeming (Durham and Canterbury Cathedrals respectively).
All this shows that a common thread to Purcell’s varied body of work lies in teasing out new aspects of heritage and presenting it in imaginative ways. Understanding how history relates to communal identity, and the technical processes needed to preserve and adapt historic fabric, allows the practice to animate the relationships in various strands of heritage, form collaborations between them and add award-winning new buildings to create experiences that are intriguing, satisfying and empathetic.
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PURCELL Mark Richards, Director General and Director of Operations, National Museum Wales
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