Ideas from the Royal Academy’s Architecture Programme No. 03 • Summer 2019
Above: artist Jon Adams photographed his chair in locations across the RA during the festival ‘Alternate Languages’, in March 2019
Architecture& This serial publication is called Architecture&. The ampersand represents the idea that architecture is always connected – to arts and culture, to society and politics, and to everyday experience. Architecture& is published both as a bound-in supplement to RA Magazine and as a stand-alone publication. The RA’s Architecture Programme aims to inspire fresh thinking about the discipline through exhibitions, events, awards and publications. The RA Architecture Programme is supported by Rocco Forte Hotels 2
P H OTO: J O N A DA M S
INTRODUCING
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OPINION WE MUST BUILD FOR ALL BODIES Architecture Curator Kate Goodwin on a festival that challenged preconceptions of the RA’s campus My eyes were closed and a hand was gently on my back, guiding me through spaces that I could see in my mind’s eye after 15 years working at the RA, but was experiencing anew. We moved across the front hall of Burlington Gardens. Something changed underfoot momentarily, then again a step or two further on – later I discovered I had been walking over grates in the floor. A few steps further, in a new space, my attention shifted to a playback of a recording of four voices, each singing at a different pitch. Each resounded in a different way due to the specific dimensions of the space. I stood still, enjoying how the architecture was being played like an instrument around me, enabling me to grasp its scale and surfaces through sound. I stretched out an arm, edging forward until my hand touched the curved timber wall beneath the Lecture Theatre. My guide ran her own hand across the surface, tapping each timber strip, providing an aural trail to follow. The space became measured in my steps and I was surprised by how many I took as the wall continued. The scale of the building was understood in my body. This experience, instigated by a partially-sighted artist, left me feeling centred and attuned to the spaces and people around me, aware of how much of the world we miss when we rely primarily on vision. It was one of many activities and installations that were part of the ‘Alternate Languages’ festival in March that took place across the public spaces of the Academy. In some cases the spaces were claimed by those for whom the RA might not feel a natural home. Thomas McCarthy, an Irish traveller, singer and storyteller, and self-professed outsider, sang on the staircase in Burlington Gardens. Jon Adams, an artist with autism, photographed his chair, an object he views as alive, in locations across the site (opposite); he also has synaesthesia – a condition when one sense triggers another – and described the intensity and discomfort he felt in the sound installation beneath the Lecture Theatre. A spatial practitioner, aided by fellow students, traversed the site without touching the ground, after which all involved gathered to critique the visible and invisible barriers of the institution. Empathy was made palpable in artist David Cotterrell’s film installation, in which two young actors played the child of a victim and a perpetrator in the Rwandan genocide – without us being able to decipher who was who. Over the course of the day these interventions invited a more nuanced reading of the RA’s institutional architecture and confronted us with questions. For whom are the spaces built, how do they feel to others, and what role should our cultural spaces play in challenging our acceptance and tolerance of one another? My conclusion? Our buildings are generally designed for those who fit a perceived physical or behavioural norm. Not only does this exclude many but it seeks to limit us all. 3
DISCUSSING
INTERVIEW ELIZABETH DILLER AND RICARDO SCOFIDIO
Above, from left: architects Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller
The problem with interviewing Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio is that they don’t really agree on anything. Scofidio will say something about their early work and Diller will dispute it. And vice versa. I suppose it’s not unusual for a longstanding couple – they are partners in life as well as architecture – so I ask whether it produces any problems. ‘We usually disagree,’ Diller tells me. ‘It’s the way we work, it’s a format.’ For once, Scofidio agrees. ‘It makes us think,’ he says. ‘Stops us falling back on standard fare.’ Diller and Scofidio, it should be said, are not known for standard fare. The format clearly works. I’m in New York, talking to them about the opening of The Shed (opposite), a $475m cultural space designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (Lead Architect) and Rockwell Group (Collaborating Architect). It’s located at the edge of Hudson Yards, a $20bn development built over the snaking tangle of rail lines on the west side of Manhattan. It’s a colossal translucent roof that rolls on wheels to expose or cover the public plaza below, becoming, in the process, the housing for anything from opera to art installation via rock concert. But I could just as well be in London talking to them about their plans for a new concert hall in the City or the new storage space for the V&A. Or, of course, their newly-minted Royal Academy Architecture Prize, awarded each year ‘to an architect or individual who has been instrumental in shaping the discussion, collection or production of architecture in the broadest sense.’ Diller Scofidio + Renfro are one of the rare practices that seem to have successfully negotiated the journey from being darlings of the avant-garde to commercially 4
P H OTO: G EO R D I E WO O D. P H OTO: I WA N B A A N
The RA Architecture Prize 2019 goes to the celebrated American architecture duo. Edwin Heathcote meets them on their home turf in New York
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Above: The Shed cultural centre in New York, 2019, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
successful global practice without, apparently, losing their soul or their intelligence. The practice has struck a balance, carving out unusual public spaces and creating striking new buildings, with designs including New York’s High Line, an abandoned elevated freight railway now transformed into a pedestrian park and walkway; Los Angeles’ futuristiclooking Broad museum; and Boston’s ICA, which juts out from the city’s industrial marina. Most importantly, however, they have cleaved to an idea of the city as a public resource, always taking on work that has a civic aspect, some contribution to urban life beyond the building. It’s an approach rooted in a critical architecture, in an early history of a very different kind of practice. Diller and Scofidio started out on the academic fringe, using their provocative work as resistance to the status quo. ‘We didn’t want just to do building – we thought it was corrupt,’ says Diller. ‘Not architecture itself,’ adds Scofidio, ‘but the institutions of architecture.’ ‘So,’ continues Diller, ‘we started to imagine a new kind of practice. We were both academics and both very interested in what was going on in New York at the time. There was so much experimentation and cross-disciplinary work, punk, experimental music, artists like Gordon MattaClark and Steve Reich, and a lot was happening in the academic world too, like the emergence of critical theory.’ That world was the Manhattan of the late 1970s and early ’80s, post-punk and pre-Aids, a world in which Chelsea warehouses were still abandoned and space was cheap, where Warhol was working and hip-hop was emerging from the graffiti scene. The city itself was going 5
Top: a composite of stills from Overexposed, 1995, by Diller and Scofidio Above: PARA-site, an installation at MoMA, New York, 1989, by Diller and Scofidio
bust but the netherworld of clubs and sub-cultures was booming. ‘Ric had been my professor [at Cooper Union] and we tried to keep it a secret that we were together then. When I graduated we began to work together.’ That early work – including installation, film and performance, as well as design – carried a darker perception of the city than Manhattan’s party culture. There seemed to be an obsession with surveillance, with intrusion into the private sphere, with CCTV cameras and architecture as a screen, a window onto people’s intimate existences. ‘All that came from a broader interest in the culture of vision – we were examining vision as the master sense, looking at voyeurism, surveillance, exhibitionism,’ says Diller. ‘Big brother,’ adds Scofidio, ‘is always watching you.’ It is work that elides eerily with contemporary concerns, though it dates from a pre-internet age. Their art and 6
P H OTO: D I L L E R + S C O F I D I O
DISCUSSING
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designs were unsettling in their use of technology and in putting the viewer into an often uncomfortable position as spectator and voyeur. Overexposed, a work shown at the Getty Centre in 1995 (opposite, top), was a film which consisted of a 24-minute continuous video pan across the façade of the Pepsi Cola HQ in New York. The mid-century architecture with its floor-to-ceiling glass appeared as a grid of screens, a very Hitchcockian scene reminiscent of Rear Window in which both protagonist and viewer are caught in a web of speculation taken from fragmentary evidence. The voiceover is part fictional, part study, blurring the lines between observation and speculation. ‘We were looking at the history of glass, this optimistic material for the 20th century,’ Diller says. ‘At some point in the middle of the century it became a two-way system, seeing in and out, and we became interested in the interface – who controls the view? We actually set up our camera in the hotel opposite the Pepsi Cola building and just started filming. It was a stakeout.’ Soft Sell, in 1993, took over the doorway of an abandoned porn cinema, the Rialto on 42nd Street, and took the form of a female mouth with vivid red lipstick offering fantasies for sale, an intriguing foreshadowing of the transformation of Times Square a decade later from red light district into mainstream tourist phenomenon. The work that has had most impact was Para-site (I remember it made waves during my student years), a 1989 installation at MoMA (opposite, bottom). The architects set up CCTV cameras across the institution with relays to a set of screens displayed on alien-like architectural fittings. The gallery was painted with dotted lines and featured furniture cut through like sections. The effect was like being inside an architectural drawing, an unsettling mix of voyeurism and a flattening of the planes of the space. Rather than architecture being put on show in the gallery, it was an architectural interrogation of the idea and use of the gallery space, a sinister undermining of our idea of observing art by becoming, ourselves, the observed exhibits. Now, 30 years on, Diller and Scofidio are back at MoMA, designing its extension, due to open in October. But have they gone from radical provocateurs to paragons of the establishment? Have they lost anything along the way? From mounting a paranoid installation that questioned the role of the museum, they have graduated to remodelling the institution itself, melding MoMA with the Jean Nouveldesigned super-luxe residential skyscraper next door. It was a controversial decision, which involved the demolition of the Billie Tsien and Tod Williams-designed Folk Art Museum only 13 years after it was completed. Diller Scofidio + Renfro also radically redesigned their native New York’s most esteemed cultural complex, the Lincoln Centre (2009-10). The High Line (2009-ongoing) has proved a huge success, an adrenaline shot for the Chelsea property market and a vein through which billions of dollars in investment flowed, transforming an area of post-industrial architecture into one of global property investment. The question, then, has to be: how did a radical, intellectual practice almost pathologically opposed to the idea of being co-opted by capital, become one of the world’s most successful and revered offices, building from Los Angeles to Moscow and, soon, in London? 7
P H OTO: I WA N B A A N . P H OTO: B E AT W I D M E R . © D I L L E R S C O F I D I O + R E N F R O
DISCUSSING
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Opposite, top: The High Line in New York, 2014, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro Opposite, centre: The Blur Building, for Swiss EXPO, 2002, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro Opposite, bottom: a visualisation of the planned Centre for Music in London, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
‘I never thought you could do architecture and execute ideas,’ Diller says. ‘I thought the two were mutually exclusive.’ What, I wondered, was the turning point? ‘A young Japanese guy commissioned us to do his house, and that became the Slow House.’ The Long Island house, designed in 1991, was never completed, but it did develop some of the ideas from Para-site: sophisticated manipulations of space and surveillance, eccentric arrangements of non-hierarchical interiors. When I ask Scofidio to tell me more about their process, his answer is strikingly honest. ‘We’ve always stepped into projects where we have no idea what we’re doing, so we would read and research and attempt to apply some intelligence.’ Diller arches an eyebrow at him, as if about to disagree. Their transformative moment came with The Blur Building in 2002 (opposite, centre). A cloud on a jetty in a Swiss lake, where visitors could walk and become immersed in vapour, it was a brilliant rebuttal of architecture’s necessity for solidity, a dematerialisation of structure. ‘It was all about visuality,’ Diller explains. ‘How you remove vision as the master sense.’ ‘Hiding in the shadows,’ adds Scofidio. The leap in scale from gallery installation to outdoor spectacular set them on their current path. Charles Renfro joined them in 1997. ‘He broke the symmetry,’ Diller says, ‘adding another voice to the conversation.’ In 2006 they completed Boston’s ICA. Its huge cantilever suspended above the waterfront became a canopy sheltering a stepped outdoor public space. A lecture theatre protruded out of this overhang at an angle, so that from within one looked down onto a dramatic view of a section of water – no sky, no ground, just ripples. It was a precursor to their Tenth Avenue ‘sunken overlook’ on the High Line, a spot for sitting and watching the head- and tail-lights of the city’s traffic, transforming the banal into high urban drama. Benjamin Gilmartin became a partner in 2015. That year the Broad opened in Los Angeles. With its storage sited counter-intuitively in its core and turned into an intriguing spectacle, the museum turned heads, as did their remaking of the Lincoln Centre, which has itself been useful experience for their upcoming concert hall for London on the edge of the Barbican (opposite, bottom). A stacked, twisting pyramid, it is an ambitious structure that piles functions on top of one another. They are simultaneously working on the new V&A East Collection and Research Centre, a storage and archive building incorporating public access, in the city’s Olympic Park. ‘For so long,’ Diller tells me, ‘we had been critical of the museum, and then we suddenly found ourselves having to speak in the voice of the museum. But you can still use architecture to provoke.’ ‘The early projects,’ she continues, ‘were works of resistance.’ Are they still resisting? ‘We can still be critical,’ she responds. ‘The questions and provocations become generative. They create problems in order to solve them.’ ‘Well, that might not be right,’ suggests Scofidio. — Edwin Heathcote is the Financial Times’ Architecture Critic. The RA Architecture Prize is supported by the Dorfman Foundation (Founding Partner), Derwent London (Headline Sponsor) and the British Council (International Partner) 9
RECALLING
PERSPECTIVE RACHAEL YOUNG ON PERFORMING IN THE BRITISH PAVILION, VENICE
This was to be an experiment. A navigation, a visitation, an exploration, a possession; a mapping-out of space and a questioning of my place within it. It was something completely visible, a performative action with an awareness of its surroundings. Would I be inhibited by the unfamiliar high ceilings or vastness of these entrance halls? A room; a body uncomfortably compact, made small by violence towards its gender, crushed with suspicion towards its skin, contracts into one corner of the huge space. It waits, overwhelmed by the possibility of movement forward, into unknown territory. The body knows how to weave through dark streets at night; it has navigated the world invisible, or hyper-visible; it has learnt to keep quiet in voiceless pain. In the corner of the room surrounded by crisp white walls the body contracts, moves limbs forward, weighted by black hooflike shoes. Poised, the body cuts through space, moving in silence with only its heartbeat and breath to keep it steady. Black lace outlines the contours of this body, occasionally revealing soft brown flesh. The body, strong and delicate all at once, shapeshifting; its thoughts are not on the many eyes that gaze upon its flesh from up close or in the middle distance. Instead it thinks of those first explorers, the ‘discoverers’ of new lands, lands that had existed for millennia before the explorer’s first footprint on seasaltsoaked shoreline. It thinks of invisible borders that threaten free movement and hostile proclamations of ‘Britain for the British!’ It contracts and unfurls, strides longer, shoulders wider, unpacking a history of contempt for its invisibility, and with its next step grants itself ‘Leave to Remain’. This once quiet vessel now fills the cavernous space with sound. A body no longer silent punctuates the walls with harmonic echoes; it will no longer apologise for its place in the world. The body uncurls further, thrashes with possibility, no longer inhibited by the vastness of the space and its place within it. Its eyes focus, return the gaze. It meets the room and the people within it with a defiant calm; it contracts and unfolds one last time to reveal a woman, resolute, resisting the urge to make herself small, and instead she expands, filling all of the building’s four rooms, soaking everything with her presence, until there’s nothing left but black lace and soft brown skin. — Rachael Young is a performance artist. She curated and performed in ‘No Woman is an Island’ as part of the RA’s programme of events in the British Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale
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Above: a large cardboard model of the Ramp House, central to the design process, that was created and annotated by the family
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P H OTO: C H A M B E RS M C M I L L A N . P H OTO: DAV I D B A R B O U R
EXPLORING
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CASE STUDY THE SELF-BUILT HOME THAT BREAKS BARRIERS Thea McMillan describes how she and her family designed an inclusive home that changed her understanding of how buildings can work
Above: the Ramp House has an open-plan design around a ramp, allowing access for all users and connections between spaces
When wheels are your means of navigating spaces, the way that these spaces are configured is critical. Our daughter, Greta, is a wheelchair user, confronted with the physical barriers that the built environment presents. My husband Ian and I have an architectural practice, and we wanted to design and build a family home that enabled Greta to lead a barrier-free and included life. We already lived in the very supportive community of Portobello, Edinburgh, but we realised, as Greta grew older, that our house was no longer working for us. We were lucky to find a small brownfield site in the middle of an urban block, which allowed us to build our house in the centre of the community that supports Greta. We were able to create a fully inclusive place, the Ramp House; completed in 2013, it uses a ramp to allow access to all levels, providing an equality of space for us all. The experience of the Ramp House changes as the ramp unfolds, connecting both horizontally and vertically to spaces across the home, offering opportunities to look back or forward into those spaces. For example, during the long, slow processions when leaving to go to bed, Greta can say goodnight from the ramp to those in the sitting room. The ramp also contributes both width and height. Our bedroom cantilevers over the ramp and ground-floor spaces (above); we made an opening in its wall, above the ramp, that allows a visual and aural connection back down to Greta when she is sitting on the sofa. When Greta is in the living room, the open-plan design allows her to see and hear us and her sister Bee while we are in six other spaces in our home. 13
P H OTO S: DAV I D B A R B O U R
EXPLORING
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Opposite, top: the Ramp House exterior, with the long windowed wall enclosing the ramp Opposite, below: the ramp allows places to pause and communicate, as well as to move through
These many and varied connections enable a lot more independence for Greta: she cannot follow us physically, so being able to understand where we are going around the house, and to hear us talking with her from many different places, keeps her involved, and shows her an expectation of being part of everything. It is the concept that chimes most with other families with wheelchair users visiting us. To make the design process a family project, we used models, as these were especially important for Greta’s understanding of space: we made them large enough for Greta to look into them easily, giving her a sense of what it might be like to be in the house, and they allowed us to develop the connections between the different spaces. We also embraced a reversal of the usual design process: we first designed a ramp that could take us to the different occupiable levels; we then designed spaces leading off this ramp for all the different things we wanted to do, both as a family and separately. It was a design where spaces were verbs, not nouns. Now the ramp provides variation, complexity and flexibility in the everyday use of the house, as we realise how rooms can be used concurrently and how the house reaches its potential when it is inhabited: movement around it, by foot or on wheels, brings it to life. When friends visit us, they enjoy moving up and down the ramp, and they have their perceptions of disability challenged, as they realise they are using space in a different way to other buildings. Educators and health professionals also see Greta differently when they visit her in this inclusive environment, and it makes them see us differently too: the house embodies our expertise and our understanding of Greta. The designing and building of the Ramp House also included the wider Portobello community, and Greta’s place in that community has been established through those processes. When I visit a new building now, I am instantly aware of how I move around that building – where the visual, physical and aural connections are, and also where barriers might be. Of course, this comes from 14 years of experiencing spaces with Greta, thinking about her viewpoint, but it’s also the result of the daily practice of using a ramp – it has given my mind and my body expectations of a connected experience in the spaces that I navigate. In order to create inclusive spaces in the spirit of the Ramp House, architectural practices must approach a brief with participatory design, involving a fully inclusive range of users, whatever their age, right from the project’s start. We are now designing a playground and centre in Dundee for The Yard, a charity running adventure play areas for disabled children. We recently held creative workshops for the children, so that they could develop the brief for their own building. Once complete, the spaces will not only fulfil their needs and desires, but sustain a strong sense of ownership and belonging for children and young people who may have had a long experience of exclusion. — Thea McMillan is Design Director at Chambers McMillan Architects. The Royal Academy has been collaborating on events with DisOrdinary Architecture, which develops models of architecture informed by the creativity and experiences of disabled artists 15