MAP 2 by Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

MAP路TWO ALLIES AND MORRISON

漏 1996 The University of Michigan College of Architecture+ Urban Planning

and Allies and Morrison, London Editor: Annette W. LeCuyer Designer: Dennis B. Smith ISBN 0-9614792-7-2 College of Architecture+ Urban Planning The University of Michigan 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard Ann Arbor, Michigan 4B109-2069

ALLIES AND MORRISON

5 7 14

Foreword Commentary Andrew Saint A Particular Point of View Bob Allies and Graham Morrison

20 22 24 26 28 32 36 40 46 48 50 54 60 62 70 74 80 82 84 86 90

Selected Projects 1984 - 1997 Clove Building British Museum Forecourt Minories Dulwich Picture Gallery University of Essex Library Morrison House Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar Admiral Court National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Hayward Gallery South Bank Center Sarum Hall School Pierhead, Liverpool British Embassy, Dublin Nunnery Square, Sheffield Newnham College, Cambridge Students' Union, University of Southampton People's Palace Regent Street Contemporary Applied Arts Abbey Mills

Postscript Joseph Rykwert

Chronology

106 108 109 112 112

Appendices The Office Exhibitions Bibliography Acknowledgments Contributors/Photo Credits

FOREWORD

Discussions about architecture have rarely respected national boundaries. Rather, they have thrived on the free exchange of ideas and the energy of young architects to provoke the

The Michigan Architecture Papers aim to present architecture of the highest quality for study. This work certainly fulfills that requirement. It is the work of young architects

predictable and question authoritative statements offered by established practice. This publication , which brings together the work of Allies and Morrison for the first time, has been prepared as a contribution to such discussion .

who have been extraordinarily successful in design competitions and have used that success

Working in London and seen against a backdrop of practice which is dominated by the looming figures of Foster and Rogers and the ever present ghost of James Stirling, theirs is a modest contribution . However it is an architecture which is amongst the most considered and poetic that is being made in England now. It is work which is especially thoughtful and holds particular promise. It also presents an alternative view. Whilst the work of the established giants may be seen as representing those characteristics which Nikolaus Pevsner defined in his book The Englishness of English Art, as "imagination, fantasy, irrationalism," the work of Allies and Morrison more closely relates to the familiar opposites which he noted- "moderation, reasonableness, rationalism, observation." This is, however, an architecture which is of more than parochial interest or mere national acclaim.

to develop an inspiring practice with important commissions in highly significant places. The architecture of Allies and Morrison is influenced by the economy and elegance of modernism and informed by an impressive knowledge of history - pre-occupations noted by a grid of talismanic images of work by Aalto, Asplund, Albini, Louis I. Kahn and Scarpa, the paintings of Mondrian, a glazing detail by Frank Lloyd Wright and a plan from the Italian Mannerists which hangs at the door of their office. The work is legible, free of the haze of rhetoric and is presented here for your critical consideration.

Brian Carter Professor and Chair of Architecture University of Michigan

COMMENTARY Andrew Saint

If an epithet served to encapsulate the character of Allies and Morrison's architecture, 'reflective' would be the word . It's a quality found in embryo often enough in British architecture: in an old culture, on a crowded island , there's plenty to reflect upon. What distinguishes the work of these architects is the consistency and delicacy with which they have coaxed that habit of reflection into their own taut feeling for beauty. Somewhere at the bottom of Allies and Morrison 's work lies the dwelling- that primal building type that lurks in the psyche of most British architects. The amiable scale and crisp grids of Georgian terraces, the comforting roof envelopes and lingering surfaces of idyllic Arts and Crafts houses- these are what England is renowned for. You can't unravel the tangled skein of British modernism until you grasp how much the pursuit of the expression of home has meant to the national culture. Ever since Arts and Crafts days, there has been controversy between traditionalists, radicals and compromisers over how far the tenets of the Modern Movement in architecture furthered or hampered that pursuit. Up until the Second World War, architects in Britain had ample opportunity to build the private houses over which these battles

of housing, not houses. Then came Thatcherism and the collapse of public housing, without any sufficient growth in the number of individual architectdesigned houses to make a genre in which the debate could be coherently furthered. Allies and Morrison began designing and building in the 1980s, a period when the home as an ideological priority had been eclipsed in part by the initiative and energy of the British high-tech movement. Like all their contemporaries, they have been deeply affected by this movement, even if they don't identify with it. Each of their projects (their urban projects in particular) is touched with the elaboration of the public wall- the revolution in revealed structure, cladding and modular discipline- that has developed over the past twenty years. And yet the house still lurks there as a memory and point of reference in the most prominent buildings they have built thus far. It proved indeed Bob Allies and Graham Morrison's starting point. They first worked together in the 1970s under Martin Richardson, one of the few survivors among English specialists in thoughtful housing, on a sector of Milton Keynes, that last grand British experiment in town-making and community-making. Milton Keynes is underrated just now, but its time will come again. Richardson 's contributions to the Bradwell

were fought out. Afterwards, that market shrank and

Common and Great Linford neighborhoods there are

for thirty years the argument switched to the sphere

object-lessons in refined, restrained 'ordinariness' -

a virtue that comes up time and again in British architecture and, despite the image-conscious times we now live in, is still not disdained by Allies and Morrison. The Richardson projects at Milton Keynes stand for a moment of equipoise between design ambitions and living habits which wiser architects achieved after the grim turmoil of the housing argument during the 1960s. Graham Morrison witnessed other such successes in creative compromise when he worked for Eric Lyons, shrewdest of the private housing architects in postwar Britain. For Lyons, he helped build the later stages of the Span estate at Blackheath in southeast London -that subtle essay in the city-reknitting advocated by Patrick Geddes, here applied to a suburb. Morrison's own house in Blackheath overlooks different styles of Span terraces front and back . Daily he is confronted by the integrity and humanity of Lyons' vision which the house, albeit with an ethic and aesthetic of its own, reflects. Again that word.

But the real focus of the practice, to the extent that focus is possible in these days of unpredictable demand and the competition culture, is on placemaking and space-making. Civic design, meaning doing just a little or nothing to buildings but making the spaces in between come together, has been a constant in their work. Their first success was a competition win for recasting the Mound area in front of the National Gallery at Edinburgh; they have recently completed a piazza on windswept Pierhead, Liverpool, and are soon to re-

Houses and housing form only a small part of the Allies and Morrison oeuvre. Besides Morrison's home,

landscape the environs of the Tate Gallery in London. They came second, as many think regrettably, in the crucial competition for rejuvenating and updating London's whole South Bank Center. Here they also hold the brief of watching over the Royal Festival Hall, one of the finest examples of modernism in Britain and now a protected historic building. When it comes to new buildings, this place-making instinct often becomes the determinant of architectural form. In their suburban project s, the setting and articulation of the wall as street boundary tend to come first, with internal arrangements following after. Likewise,

there have been flats behind retained facades in

at context-free Nunnery Square outside Sheffield, the

Blandford Street in the West End of London and a

urge to make a real place out of a suburban business park rather than a rash of dissipated incidents in a

development around a barn at Farningham near the M25 in London's green belt- urban and rural essays respectively in juxtaposing old with new. Their range

landscape or off an axis, as most business parks are, fixed first the relation of the buildings one to another

at Newnham College, Cambridge, is domestic too.

and hence the shape of t he buildings themselves.

A deep-seated domestic and British orientation; some influence from the high-tech movement; a passion about civic design: these are the qualities that give Allies and Morrison's work its slant. If you peer beyond that into style and detail, Scandinavia is the main place to look. Ever since 1930 there has been a rich Scandinavian seam running through English modernism which this practice continues to mine. The partners are passionate about Asplund (the Gothenburg Town Hall extension especially) and Aalto; Morrison worked with Keijo Petaja and has strong Finnish connections. Their interiors are shot through with clean bleached wood and white walls , spaces they characterize as 'ordinary' and easy to colonize. This Scandinavian neatness and fastidiousness is shared with other alumni of the Cambridge School of Architecture, where Allies taught and Morrison studied . But there is muscle, too, to everything they design . And here perhaps is the point at which they emerge from the Anglo-Scandinavian closet and become themselves. Muscle in architecture is usually about revealing or emphasizing structure. In Corb or Kahn, as in much of the best concrete architecture, there is constant, rhetorical flexing of sinew. That is not Allies and Morrison's way. Instead they offer a concern, almost a worry, about structure, cladding and the tension between them which any sophisticated building of today is bound to embody,

if it's to furnish not just a puritanical lesson in revealed construction but pleasure and sensuousness of texture as well. Like the mature Otto Wagner and the young Adolf Laos, they believe that structure matters but must not become a rationalist tyranny. So much emerges from the three most individual of their recently completed projects: graduate housing in Cambridge, Sarum Hall School in London , and the new British Embassy in Dublin . All in different ways are suburban projects, with the unfashionable (and still, for some architects, suspect) parti of a simple pitched roof, offering both delight and discipline. Yet each building has a stringency or tautness that plays strange counterpoint to the luscious textures of stone or metal or brick and to the pleasurable fatness of these gabled buildings, with their healing memory of the house. There is an obsessive slicing and puncturing of surfaces with thin cuts (not the deep slots of Louis Kahn) and stops and the scribing of lines. There is an insistence upon inhibiting the building envelope as tightly as possible. Above all , there is a commitment to overlapping layers that command each major surface and draw the impatient eye from one plane to the next. These recurrent, tantalizing devices offer a language for architectural development that could furnish cues enough for a lifetime's work. The degree to which they convince in situ depends upon the context

which the architects have been given to reflect

The Sidgwick Avenue side of the college remains a

upon, and what inference they have drawn from that reflection. The burden of context is, after all,

muddle indeed, even though they have improved one end of it. The new building lines the eastern edge of the college, mediating between two contexts: a fussy 1960s block on one side, a simple site boundary on the other. The spaces created on either side are markedly different tributes to Allies and Morrison's place-making and

a heavy one for those who take it seriously. There are no rules about contextualism, only sensibilities and responsibilities. Architects must look and listen, then make a leap of faith in such a way as to marry their a priori instinct or personal idiom with mood, place and building type. That is true reflectiveness in architecture.

landscaping talents . As for the building itself, the first impression is of

The Rosalind Franklin Building for graduate students at Newnham College, Cambridge is Allies and Morrison at ease in a context they know well. Newnham is the Arts and Crafts masterpiece of Basil Champneys and the beau ideal among the Oxbridge women's colleges: red-brick, whitewindowed, amiable and frothily inventive. There have been good buildings at Newnham since Champneys, but none with the authority that Allies and Morrison have stamped upon it.

calm and conventional homage to an Arts and Crafts milieu: Lutyens compounded with Champneys, but both chastened in the modernizing process. The brickwork, albeit of modular stretcher bond pattern, is beautifully toned; there are swept tile roofs and wide gabled ends, asymmetrical at the base in Lutyens fashion . Then the Allies and Morrison mannerisms reveal themselves: breaks and gaps above the windows and between the rafters where they overhang the roof plate; timber uprights fronting the handsome balcony recesses which are spaced off the adjacent brick walls and float above the ground; down pipes prodded into projecting far beyond the wall in order to play their part in the game of planes. It could all be an irritant, but such is the repose of the overall envelope and its rhythm that these interruptions perfo rm the same role as the applied decoration on Newnham 's early ranges , that of slowing down the eye.

Newnham College

Sarum Hall School

Slate, glass, metal , render and brick: each inhabits a zone of its own, segregated from the neighboring layer. Only the big art-room window, towering up behind an anomalous strip of brickwork, and a deep timber porch escape this discipline.

Sarum Hall School in Belsize Park, North London, has a not dissimilar context to Newnham, one of highclass, exuberant brick villas of the 1880-1910 period. The school itself had been in one such villa down the street; the new building replaces a rendered house on the site, of which the gate piers and front wall have been kept. Again, delicacy and constraint are paramount. But here the architects have pursued a different route, taking their cue seemingly from a fine Arts and Crafts fire station (by C. C. Win mill) opposite, itself something of an interloper in the street. The comparison is instructive. Both have twostory brick facades of greater length and gravity than the villas. But the devices Win mill uses to decelerate and draw the eye to his surfaces- mottled bricks in English bond, relieving arches, handmade tiles, wide eaves and high chimneys- are not available to Allies and Morrison. They make do instead with layers of contrasting texture, kept apart by the rectangular slot.

The rendered, recessed layer in the Sarum Hall facade is a provocation of a kind: does it convey anything about structure or function, or is it just a picturesque, relieving device? In the center it marks the entrance, at one end the assembly hall-cumgym; and round the back of this T-shaped building are further rendered recesses on the end and return walls of the gym and against the staircases. However, they don't correspond to the exact dimensions of these areas; a signal about room uses is given, but not with precision. As Tony Mcintyre remarks in an acute criticism of the school : "This is an architecture where two nearly congruent buildings are hypothesized but each is only half realized." ' Where layers such as these are not locked into some other ordering device about the nature of the wall or what lies behind it, there is bound to be some hesitancy to the sleekness. Nonetheless, primary school interiors often bring out the best in architects, and so it has been here. Nuances of asymmetry in the gym, an airy hall and staircase with a splash of yellow at the base, and light, likable classrooms help to make this a building which liberates its occupants, little and big.

The British Embassy in Dublin , by contrast, is certainly a nervous building- the half-conscious outcome of a process of reflection on An glo-Irish

Again here the practice has chosen the flat-faced, fat-

relations . It arises, as always with these architects, out of a personal reaction to context. After their venerable Georgian embassy in the city center was torched by rioters in 1972, the British mission retreated out of the limelight to a suburb. The new building has been built on an open site next to those temporary headquarters. It stand s back from the road behind a barriE'!re-like lodge and tall fence: wary, granite-clad, yet dignified and without the

gabled block, deep enough to convey substance, narrow enough to allow natural ventilation, which is worked into broad and handsome window panels. The main block turns out to beT-shaped, just as at Sarum Hall; but here a garden court is formed to one side of the T by means of single-story ranges , so turning the embassy into an inward-looking building with a secret to discover behind its back facade . The court is a tranquil place to be, away from the security obsessions of the perimeter; but when you contemplate the design , some of that tranquillity dissolves. Paths vary in widt h, planting and sculpture are

least hint of vainglory. For this is not a grand diplomatic residence but an amalgam of consular and commercial offices, dealing with a day-to-day closeness between the two countries that belies their edgy public relationship .

off-center; windows differ in depth and in the ordering of their powder-coated mullions and panels; many materials -granite, limestone, brick and slate- play against one another in the game of neatly clipped rhythms and planes; there's even a quirky little interjection of timber.

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British Embassy, Dublin

Likewise along the front facade, the procession of eight long granite-dad bays beneath the big roof and behind a calm pool of water is reassuring at first. But then the split between five symmetrical bays for the diplomatic end and three recessed bays for the consular services, each with its own entrance, injects an air of nervousness. Busy scribing and layering of planes heighten and intensify the pitch yet further. Above, the great roof is cut into panels, while the edge hovers defiantly over a continuous strip of window. At the ends Allies and Morrison let go, allowing the roof to come flying out and turn into hearty gable ends of a depth they deny themselves elsewhere. It is all restless, troubled even , one is tempted to say; the shade of mannerism is not far away. Round the sides the building relaxes, and as one looks out and about at its neighbors, the choice of Wicklow granite for the main block and brick for the lower blocks falls into satisfying place. The interiors are quiet enough, with the staircase, as at Sarum Hall, specially fresh and pleasurable in detail in a Scarpa-like way. Perhaps because it was always bound to be seen as a formal statement, Dublin appears to have stretched and tested Allies and Morrison's architectural instincts to their furthest limit thus far. For architects who develop a consistent vocabulary, as they have done, the challenge is to know how much you can 'say' in your language, whether it's equal to all the

moods and places and tasks which the sensibilities of context may place upon you ; whether it can be extended in expression and still remain your distinctive own; or whether it's in danger of becoming a straitjacket out of which you have to break and do something different. With the Dublin Embassy, Allies and Morrison have begun building bigger, more prestigious projects. They appear to be at a turning point. We can only watch with fascination to see how one of the most consistent languages in contemporary British architecture now develops, where the process of reflection will take them next.

Mcintyre, A. , Architecture Today, September, 1995.

Andrew Saint is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. He worked for many years in the Greater London Council's Historic Buildings division and English Heritage. He is the author of Richard Norman Shaw, 1976; The Image of the Architect, 1983; and Towards a Social Architecture : The Role of School Building in PostWar England, 1987.

A PARTICULAR POINT OF VIEW Bob Allies and Graham Morrison

The projects illustrated within these pages represent the gradual evolution of a series of architectural procedures for working and thinking that have directed and shaped the way in which we design . Unusually, perhaps, our starting point for this process is not so much how things might be, as how things are. We are, in other words, profoundly interested in the everyday, in the reality of the life that surrounds us and in the conditions that characterize the places in which we are asked to build . For us, observation is as important as speculation.

Academic Bookshop, Helsinki, Alvar Aalto

In his project for the Academic Bookshop in Helsinki, constructed on a corner site overlooking the Esplanad e, Alvar Aalto created in 1969 an elevation which, while initially generated from the repetitive rhythm of the universal, flexible office space that Jay behind its upper floors, responded equally directly to the underlying structure of the city. For where the finely delineated bays of the copper curtain walling turned the co rner onto the Esplanade they received an additional layer of white travertine , acknowledging and reinforcing the significance of this, the primary street. Eight years earlier, Franco Albini had completed his department store fo r the Italian company La Rinascente occupying an entire block in the center of Rome. Although the accommodation required in the new building was completely unlike that of its 19th century neighbors, the new building nevertheless adopted the same urban type of the palazzo, its facade articulated in this case by its expressed steel structure and a masonry wall whose pilaster-like undulations enclosed the vertical service risers.

La Rinascente, Rome, Franco Albini

Campidoglio, during construction,

c. 1554-60

What is interesting to us about both these buildings is the way in which they make a direct response to the hierarchy and order of the existing urban structure. The significance of this gesture lies not in the impact it has upon the appearance of the buildings, but in its direct acknowledgment of the importance of the existing urban structure, and of the value of that structure as a means of orientation , helping to make the city comprehensible to its inhabitants and therefore easy and reassuring to use. They are both buildings, in other words, which are grounded in an understanding of how things are, of how the city works. And while they conform to the conventions of the city, they are also manifestly modern buildings, and therefore succeed not only in sustaining but also in re-invigorating the urban matrix of which they form a part.

Campidoglio, after M ichelangelo, 1569

whose constructions or installations are directly provoked by the contexts in which they have elected , or been invited to work . It is nevertheless a process which is fundamental to the development of cities, whose successful evolution depends equally on the strength of the forces of continuity and change. For some cities in particular it has been crucial to the generation of their urban form . Rome, from the beginning of the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, rebuilt itself entirely within the land originally enclosed by the Aurelian walls, reconstructing itself literally, and metaphorically, upon its past. Sometimes this process occurred in an ad hoc way as Roman

In this they are unusual: Modernism , for all its revelations rarely explored the nature and potential of this engagement with the pre-existing. Some architects do emerge of course as exceptions to this general rule - Scarpa in his work at the Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona; Asplund in his extension to the Law Courts in Gothenburg; Pikionis in his landscape insertions at the Acropolis; de Carlo

buildings were colonized by medieval additions; but on occasions this engagement unquestionably assumed the status of architecture. Of these the most remarkabl e example must be the highly charged space created by Michelangelo in the middle of the sixteenth century at the Campidoglio . As contemporary drawings show, he ingeniously engaged both the existing medieval buildings on the site and the surviving Roman equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, while also articulating, through the convex, elliptical paving in the center of the space, the ancient significance of the site as the

in his series of projects at Urbina- but it is an approach which is perhaps more often encountered

omphalos of the Roman state . The result is a work in which the past and the present are conjoined to

in the work of landscape architects, or of sculptors

create a moment of rare urban intensity.

British Embassy, Dublin

The contribution made by the Academic Bookshop and La Rinascente to their respective cities is of course much more modest. But in both buildings the elevation becomes the vehicle not merely for

entrance space or th reshold to the buildingdefining the connection between the public and private domains- and in others to provide a scale of entrance appropriate to the size of the

articulating the organization and function of the interior of the building, but also for its integration into the structure of the city. Both buildings, that is, explicitly acknowledge the dual purpose of the building elevation . On the one hand it has to enclose and make sense of the internal volume it contains; on the other it must delineate and characterize the external space it addresses.

external space that it addresses. Elsewhere the interstitial space becomes the route for daylight to filter into the heart of t he building: here inspiration comes again from Aalto who, like Soane before him, explored in projects such as the church at lmatra the potential of completely delaminating the internal lining of the space from the external enclosure.

This notion of a distinction between the obligations of the inner and outer surfaces of a building has lead us in our work increasingly to conceive of the

But on urban sites, where space is at a premium, these layers are contained within the thickness, or the thinness, of the external wall. Independent

building envelope as a series of discrete layers, each of which can be individually controlled and manipulated . Sometimes this manipulation can effect a direct correspondence between, for example, the internal cross-section of a building and its external expression, but sometimes, conversely, it can instead allow an architecture to develop out of the mismatch, the contradiction, the syncopation, between the internal logic of the building and the

layers of metal, glass and masonry- all employed as cladding to a stru ctural frame- become the vehicle for the communication of the building's content and the means of engaging it with its urban context. In th ese projects we have never been concerned to express directly the structure or the construction of the building, but have

external logic of its expression.

represent, the way in wh ich it has been built, a

Sometimes these two layers are held apart to create,

process in which the architecture, as Peter Smithson suggested in his essay comparing Doric

in effect, a building within a building. This has allowed us in certain projects to establish a discrete

preferred instead to explore ways in which the surface of the building might describe, or

and ancient Japanese architecture, operates as a metaphor, a "magical, exact showing forth ."'

Palazzo Massimo, Rome, Baldassare Peruzzi

In these buildings the disposition of the structural frame, the position of floors and ceilings, and the rhythm of the planning grid provide the matrix for the organization of the facade, expressed in the majority of the projects in the form of a tracery of metal. This universal surface is then infilled with layers of glass or masonry to create a facade which, while expressing the underlying structure, also responds to the particularities of the internal organization and the immediate context. It is perhaps in the nature of a surface created in this way that it should suggest an ambiguity between the building as frame, and the building as wall. This is an ambiguity that we enjoy. As in the surface of a leaf, or the composition of a Mondrian painting, there is in the facade an almost unsettling equivalence between line and plane, now holding, now releasing the eye. In a similar way the composition also seeks a moment of balance between the regularity of the underlying rhythm and the succession of incidents which work against it.

Willis Faber & Dumas, Ipswich, Foster Associates

structure, must in the end also adjust to the specific constraints of site and program. This is the distinction between the symmetrical perfection of a Renaissance plan - hermetic and unconfined- and the plan of a

palazzo by Peruzzi in which the ideal courtyard form is allowed to ease and adjust itself into the specific topography of the site; or, to take a more contemporary example, between the configuration of

a central core, Miesian office building of the 1960s and Norman Foster's Willis Faber & Dumas building at Ipswich, where the generic type molds itself effortlessly to the contours of the medieval street pattern. While this form of urbanism, which is prompted by site as well as program, is in many ways antithetical to the exaggerated, individual rhetoric of much contemporary architecture, it does imply a continuing need for interpretation and invention. In this respect, the particularities of site and context are for us a source of stimulus and provocation and never a constraint. In this we are not alone: Peter Blundell Jones has identified a similar attitude, for example, in the work of the organic architects Mendelsohn, Haring, and Scharoun.'

This tension between the universal and circumstantial, the ideal and the pragmatic, which is revealed in the elevations of our buildings also preoccupies us in our plans. For where buildings are required to engage with the complexity of a real city,

In the same article, Blundell Jones also discusses the importance to the organic tradition of allowing the different components of the building to be individually

it seems inevitable that the logic which may inspire the organization of a plan or the disposition of

finds early precedents in the English Gothic Revival

articulated, a process of fragmentation for which he

and more recent examples in both the English

And in a similar way the selection of materials and

Hertfordshire schools program of the 1950s and, once again, in the work of Alvar Aalto. For Aalto certainly the

the development of constructional detail are driven not merely by some techn ical imperative but by the role we require them to play in the articulation of

notion of the farmstead or niemelantorppa- a group of discrete buildings which together define external space and movement- continually informed his work. What is interesting to us about such building groupings is that their coherence is derived not from their adoption of any rigid formality, but from their simple manifestation of a clear hierarchy, introduced not in order to control and impress but to explain and make tangible . What such a hierarchy involves, at its most straightforward, is the expression of 'difference,' the difference between front and back, major and minor, public and privat e, special and ordinary, center and perimeter- elementary distinctions fundamental to our understanding of the physical world. In certain projects our expression of these distinctions has led us not only to allow the components of the building to fragment as they respond to site and program, but to exaggerate their inherent differences through the adoption of contrasting architectural languages. Elsewhere we have explored how different faces of a single building can, through minor variations, be transformed in terms of their character or significance. Assimilating these distinctions therefore has not only practical value- we thin k the resulting buildings work better- but also offers a stimulus for the generation of architectural form.

the underlying idea. The notion of a continuum between the making of th e part and the making of the whole remains for us a fundamental, if always difficult, and often elusive, goal.

' Smithson P., Architectural Design, November 1966. ' Blundell Jones P., Architectural Review, February 1992 .

CLOVE BUILDING Butler's Wharf, London 1990

The Clove Building was formerly an unremarkable concrete and brick warehouse built during the 1940s on a landlocked site near the south bank of the Thames. It is part of a large group of 19th and 20th century riverfront warehouses which are being converted to residential, retail, offices and public uses. The scheme provides shops and parking at ground level, a gallery on the first f loor and four floors of offices above. The entrance is located at the southwest corner of the building as part of a new vertical circulation core serving all floors. From the ground floor reception, a single straight flight of stairs leads to the first floor gallery space. Shops are entered directly from the street. On Maguire Street to the west, the shop facade is flush with the pavement, while on Shad Thames, the curved metal shop facade is set back within an arcade which leads to a small square at the northeast corner of the building. The majority of the robust existing reinforced concrete mushroom-headed column and flat slab structure is retained. However, selective demolition has been carried out. A new lightwell provides daylight for the office floors and a rooflight at the heart of the first floor KEY

gallery. Demolition of the corner bays of the warehouse has created a distinction between the perimeter

shop

storage

structural frame which conforms to the line of the

parking gallery

office

10m

adjacent streets and the regular gridded structure within. This gridded volume is expressed on the top floor which has been complete ly rebuilt utilizing a wide span structure on slender circular columns. The new facades have a tripartite order, with the shops and first floor gallery forming a double height base. Three typical floors of offices comprise the middle, and the attic story is created by roof level offices which open out onto terraces behind the frame of the street facades.

• Maguire Street facade • Stair detail

~- --

Proposal for the Heinz Gallery exhibition, " Rediscovering the Public Realm "

KEY

existing entrance gates new entrance gates

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ice cream kiosk York stone paving granite setts

BRITISH MUSEUM FORECOURT London 1990

At present, the forecourt of the British Museum is a rather undistinguished space used for parking and a temporary, unsightly ice cream stand. The focus of the proposal is a large, paved square in the center of the forecourt which forms a new threshold to the museum, replacing the narrow axial tarmac path that connects the entrance gates to the stair of main portico. To open up the space to more extensive public use, additional entrances to the forecourt are created to the west and east. The primary visitor approach from the west is acknowledged by a new asymmetry in the plan.

Within this proposed landscape- from which car parking has been eliminated- positions have been identified for seats and litter bins, the paraphernalia that inevitably accompany all public activity. The ice cream kiosk, too, has been allocated a specific position within the setting, but it is now conceived of as a piece of furniture , a mobile structure that can be wheeled away at the end of the summer season. Exaggeration of the wheel emphasizes mobility, thus making possible such an insertion within the neo-classical landscape of the forecourt.

Tea trolley, Alvar Aalto

Section of ice cream kiosk

â&#x20AC;˘ Piranesi hay cart

MINORIES London 1990

The scheme re-establishes a strong corner to an urban block and makes maximum use of a small, restricted corner site. Each elevation responds specifically to its

Minories

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context. Portland stone facings supplement the steel framed elevation on the main frontage to Minories. The resulting distinction between the Minories and India Street elevations therefore reasserts the fundamental urban hierarchy of major and minor streets . Where the new building abuts its neighbors, intermediate bays of stone and brick ease the transition and fenestration adjusts to the particular configuration of the existing facades. Like these facades, those of the new building adopt a tripartite- and therefore essentially classical- division into base, middle and top, with a piano nobile suggested by the detail of the fenestration at first floor level. At the top floor, the building is set back to produce a fully glazed office space with terraces overlooking Minories. Plant rooms are grouped at roof level in the center of the plan. The combination of services and structural elements above the 'cornice' line provides a rich and complex profile to the street.

KEY

1 reception office

skylight above toilet refuse

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY London 1990

The Dulwich Picture Gallery, designed by Sir John Soane and completed in 1817, was the first public art gallery in England. However, the desire to expand the ancillary public activities of the gallery has been frustrated over the years by lack of space. In 1990, an open competition was held for the design of an extension.

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College Road Gallery Road Dulwich Pidure Gallery

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The gallery is set in an enclosed garden bounded by a street of Georgian houses to the east, open fields to the west and almshouses to the north.

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Garden facade of shop and tea room .

Rather than compromise the existing gallery by building alongside, this proposal takes the form of a pavilion located adjacent to the College Road entrance to the east. This produces a new enclosing wall to the site and reinforces the sense of an entrance courtyard already implied by the almshouses. For the visitor arriving at the Picture Gallery, Soane's building continues to dominate the approach , while on departure, the entrance to the pavilion is immediately apparent. Further in the distance, the glazed wall to the cafe opens out discreetly to the gardens towards the south .

entrance reception

shop

tea room 7 8

In the new building the functions of reception, bookshop, tea room and multi-purpose hall are concentrated together in order to reduce circulation, to encourage flexibility in use and to minimize the level of supervision . A separate entrance provides access directly from College Road to the education room, enabling the pavilion to be used for private functions during hours when the Picture Gallery is closed to the public. The framing workshop is separated out and is located in a second pavilion adjacent to the main gallery and independently serviced from Gallery Road . The enclosing walls of the new building are constructed of London stock bricks with a combination of oak and steel windows. Only the extending wall that marks the new entrance and the recessed panel adjacent to the door itself are of Portland stone . The garden elevation is framed in steel , with large glazed openings to the education room, reception and tea room overlaid with security grilles and brises-soleil. Oak panels line the bookshop. Internally, the walls are of wh ite painted plaster and floors in the main spaces are hardwood or stone.

KEY

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kitchen mufti-purpose hall school entrance education room office staffroom framing workshop

10m

LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX Colchester 1991

The existing University Library is a six-story concrete and glass structure which is part of a consistent architectural language employed in the development of this new campus in the 1960s. The proposed extension to the west of the existing buildin g utilizes the same architectural vocabu lary, but wit h subtle modifications . The floors of the new extension are separated from the existing library by a tall, skylit space rising the full height of the building which provides the location for a new vertical circulation core. At ground level, the main circu lation and staff desk is repositioned at this new center of gravity between the library and the extension. The ground f loor of the extension is a double height space housing catalogues, microfilm readers and the reference collection. Library offices and a conference room are tucked under a mezzanine which provides study areas overlooking the main space. Like the existing library, the typical floors of the stacks above are large, uninterrupted spaces in which flexibility and efficiency are maximized by locating all subsidiary elements- elevators, escape stairs, toilets and services risers - at the perimeter. Th e extension differs from the library in the form and distribution of reader spaces. A clear distinction is made between the open plan arrangement of tables and chairs looking northeast towards the lakes and the more enclosed, individual carrels contained within the southwest facing elevation.

Typical floor plan

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First floor plan

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new entrance canopy

security desk 3 short loan co/ledton 4 circulation desk 5 reference 6 reading tables 7 informal seating

8 void 9 services riser 70 librarian 11

secretary

12 seminar room 13 book stacks ,-----c___

Ground floor plan

20m

The substance and simplicity of the original library are the model for the new interior. The structure of the new building is of reinforced concrete with cast in place columns and beams and precast floor slabs. On the southwest elevation, a lattice of

concrete piers provides enclosure and shading to the individual study carrels. As in the existing library, the interior of the extension is composed largely of fair-faced concrete and glass, with wood paneling in both the offices and the carrels. Externally, increased standards of insulation and environmental performance make it inappropriate to replicate the construction of the original building. The extension is therefore faced with an insulated metal cladding system with integrated double glazing and opening lights. The external envelope inflects toward the original building and is designed to minimize, and potentially eliminate, the need for mechanical ventilation or air conditioning to the library floors. While the northeast elevation is fully glazed, areas of glazing on the southwest facade are reduced to a minimum- thereby substantially reducing the amount of solar gain -and concentrated at high level to maximize reflected natura/l ight and crossventilation. Smaller windows at desk level allow for additional individually controlled ventilation as well as views out to the campus.

Cross section

Northwest elevation

Northeast elevation

Southwest elevation

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MORRISON HOUSE London 1992

Surrounded by mature trees and with a southerly aspect, the house occupies a small , irregular site in a conservation area. The north facade facing the street is relatively closed, punctured only by a projecting stucco entrance porch and the staircase

window. In contrast, the south facade opens generously onto a small courtyard garden. The front porch, formally part of the white plastered interior, extends forward to an oak and metal trellis and forms a brick paved outside room. A similar paved court forms a larger terrace in the garden into wh ich a room-sized space is inscribed. The terraces establish a plinth for a simple, robust brick facade which envelopes the white interior. The facade, composed of two layers, is informal to the front, but more ordered to the garden. Set within the masonry is a secondary, more delicate, layer of oak and metal. The volume of the house is modeled at the gable to reveal a shallow balcony under an overhanging roof which extends to complete the form . Inside, a careful hierarchy of doors and screens enables the living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor to be used as discrete entities or opened up to form a single space. Above the bedrooms on the upper floor, a skylit attic studio runs the entire length of t he house.

Sedion maquette

First floor plan

Ground floor plan

KEY

entrance 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

foyer hall study living dining k1tchen

garage utility

shower

sauna terrace

fawn 14 master bedroom 15 bedroom

North elevation

West elevation

South elevation

East elevation

STEPHEN BULL'S BISTRO & BAR London

1992

The site is an existing building on St. John Street on the fringe of the City financial district and Smithfield Market. The Georgian front portion of the building is narrow and deep. Separate access to offices above and below ground level leaves only four meters of street frontage for the restaurant itself. A Victorian warehouse extension, more generous in both plan and section , is connected to the rear of the building. The design emphasizes contrast between the existing building and the new insertions, as well as between the narrow, low and deep space adjacent to the street, and the large, high volume at the rear of the building. â&#x20AC;˘ Entrance facade

In keeping with the character of the street, the Georgian shopfront fascia and pilasters have been retained. The new glass entrance door to the restaurant is set back behind a gridded metal gate which provides continuity with the scale and general appearance of the St. John Street elevations and creates a transpare nt barrier beyond which a modern interior can exist without contradiction. The only hint of what lies within is the neon restaurant sign in Bull's own handwriting. The external vestibu le opens into a long, low entrance passageway and bar leading to the new restaurant at the rear. In contrast with the passage, the generous floor-to-ceiling height of the Victorian warehouse is further emphasized by the removal of a large part of the upper floor, creating a double height volume with gallery seating. A bridge connects the gallery to the upper level kitchen and office. A curved terracotta-colored wall at the far end of the entrance axis deflects circulation towards t he gallery stair and screens restrooms behind .

Bridge to upper gallery

Existing wall linings in the restaurant interior have been stripped back to expose the brick carcass into which the restaurant- a new plaster boxhas been inserted. The space is inward looking, its smooth walls punched w ith openings to reveal brightly painted original brickwork behind, lit from etched glass windows at the upper level. Panels of the new plaster are accentuated in softer colors- saffron yellow to give warmth to the entrance passage, and sky blue to fill the double-height volume with reflected light. Movement from the street to the rear of the building is emphasized by the red sandstone floor of the entrance passage an d bar which gives way to an oak block floor in the restaurant. The abstraction of the space is intentional and is complemented by minimalist detailing including a cantilevered folded plate steel stair and elliptical stainless steel coat rails. The gallery railing of painted steel, stainless steel and maple-veneered plywood serves a number of functions: balustrade, modesty screen and shelf for bags, briefcases and umbrellas.

Upper gallery

Upper gallery from below

Cantelivered steel stair

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ADMIRAL COURT Blandford Street London 1992

Blandford Street forms one side of a major urban block in a conservation area in central London . The terraced houses on the street, constructed at the end

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of the 18th century, all adopted the same architectural conventions, building heights and constructional vocabulary: a rusticated base faced with stucco supported a stock brick facade with paired sash windows which diminish in size on the

upper floors. Ground level shopfronts were inserted during the 19th century. Despite their similarity, the individual houses were almost certainly erected by different builders, and the variations in plot size and floor levels gave the street an interesting diversity and rhythm. In contrast to the consistent vocabulary of the street facades , the rear elevations were ad hoc assemblies, changing in design from house to house and altered in a piecemeal fashion through the years .

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The scheme combines new construction with partial retention of the existing terrace to create a street of shops at ground and basement levels with four floors of apartments above. The two end houses have been retained and refurbished. Between them, the street facade has been kept and tied to a new reinforced concrete frame structure on piled foundations. A new fourth floor over all of the properties is contained within a steel framed mansard roof. The dwellings are reached via a passage leading to a York stone paved entrance court to the rear which is shared by the residents and users of the new office building at the center of the block.There are two groups of apartments, each with a common lobby, elevator and stair, new elements introduced as part of the reconstruction. The new plan of the dwellings is threaded through the original party walls. The spacing of the party walls in the front half of the building and the concrete frame at the rear do not correspond; the two systems slip and adjust to each other along the fault line of the apartment halls. The blend of old and new is carried through into the interior detailing. The front rooms facing the street are traditionally detailed with plaster cornices and paneled joinery, while the rear rooms with flush detailing are clearly new and modern. The interiors are unified by white walls and joinery and hardwood floors throughout.

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entrance passage shop basement 3 living room kitchen entrance to unit above bedroom

Fourth floor

Third floor

First/second floor

Blandford Street

Ground floor

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passage courtyard shops entrance lobby living room 6 bedroom / study

On the Blandford Street facade, the details of brickwork, stucco, shopfronts, windows and metalwork have been carefully developed in accordance with the strict requirements of the conservation area. In contrast to the street elevation, the new courtyard facade is a cavity wall construction of brickwork, stucco and stone in a mix of traditional and contemporary details and materials. Replacing the ad hoc backs of the original houses is a carefully composed facade to the entrance court which combines a formal central stucco elevation framed by the new stair towers with an informal, picturesque treatment of the ends of the terrace where the new building adjoins the retained backs of the end houses. The symmetrical three-bay composition of the stucco portion of the courtyard facade is inflected by the passageway in the central bay which is tapered, both to conform to the different disciplines of the two facades and to reduce its perceived length by opening onto the courtyard. Likewise, while the fenestration of the outer bays is identical, the windows of the central bay are arranged asymmetrically. The stucco is eroded to reveal Portland stone at ground level and in vertical slots on the facade, both to make the vertical and horizontal tripartite organization of the facade explicit and to imply that, if the whole of the stucco were removed, a complete stone facade would be revealed.

The fenestration of the rear facade reflects the hierarchy of the plan. Oak framed windows for the servant spaces- kitchens and bathrooms- are punched openings in the solid wall. The metal framed windows of the living/dining rooms and studies are much larger, reducing the wall to frame on the lower floors and suppressing the wall completely in favor of a continuous horizontal clerestory at roof level. The ambiguity between old and new is also expressed in the roof where the traditional mansard profile along the street with party wall upstands and chimneys contrasts with the shallow, uninterrupted pitch at the rear with a deep overhanging eaves. ~

Street facade after conversion

Detail of entrance

Views of courtyard facade

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Helsinki, Finland

1993

The site is a triangular piece of land between the Railway Station to the east, the Town Hall to the west, and Finlandia Hall to the north. The public entrance to the new museum is situated on the southern boundary of the site adjacent to a statue of Marshall Mannerheim and approached through a new landscaped square. However, the main facade of the building faces Mannerheimintie to the west, allowing the museum to take its place as one of the series of major public buildings that addresses this important route into the city.

KEY

railway station Town Hall

Finfandia Hall

The facade to Mannerheimintie is a long and gently curving wall which is pierced to reveal the entrance courtyard to the museum, the cafe with its terrace, and, in the distance, the main enclosure of the exhibition spaces. The configuration of the wall is a response both to the adjustment in the alignment of the street and to the orientation of the Town Hall, and as such contrasts with the galleries whose orthogonal geometry is extrapolated from the main urban grid. The formal distinction between galleries and ancillary accommodation is also derived from the difference in the nature of the spaces these two components of the museum require . While the entrance and ancillary areas are defined and specific, the galleries- in their role as showcases for contemporary art- have a need for flexibility and an obligation to avoid the over-formal and the over-precious. The galleries, therefore, become a series of tall, undivided, toplit, loft-like spaces. The contrasting nature of the spaces is reflected in their construction : the galleries are a steel framed structure with metal panel cladding, while the entrance and ancillary spaces are reinforced concrete clad with granite and white-painted stucco .

Ground floor plan

Basement plan

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entrance court foyer

6 gallery foyer 7 permanent display

cafe

terrace shop

9 workshop 10 paper art and video

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temporary exhibition

auditorium

12 education 13 storage 14 goods/servicing

20m

HAYWARD GALLERY London 1994

The temporary pavilion is used for a variety of purposes including cafe, education workshop and corporate entertaining by sponsors of exhibitions. Located on one of the existing rooftop sculpture courts of the Hayward, it is connected to the adjacent main galleries by an existing concrete portal. Proposed as an alternative to a rented marquee, the building was erected in just 28 days and has an anticipated life of 18 months. However, it is likely this wi ll be exceeded considerably. The structure of the pavilion consists of pairs of regularized structural grade timber columns and cantilevered primary and secondary beams. The columns are wrapped with rope at hand and shou lder level to present a smooth surface to the touch. The external envelope consists of two lay~rs of orientedstrand board fixed either side of braced timber studwork. The strand board is exposed internally and varnished, its rich honey color emphasized by uplighting bracketed off the columns. Externally, the end elevations are clad with a rainscreen of red oxide stained timber battens. The long north elevation which faces the River Thames is comprised of pairs of external door blanks fixed to the expressed structure to produce double height fins. When opened, the doors frame a panoramic view of the river and the city.

View from Waterloo Bridge

SOUTH BANK CENTER London 1994

In 1994, an invited international competition was held for a new master plan for the South Bank Center. The principle objectives of this proposal are to reintegrate the South Bank Center with the city t hat surrounds it, to provide the Center with a strong sense of unity and to develop the fu ll potential of the buildings on the site. As built for the Festival of Britain, the Royal Festival Hall was entered from either side . When it was extended in the early 1960s, the orientation of the building was redirected firmly towards the River Thames, while its connection to Belvedere Road was underplayed . The status of the street was further diminished by the introduction of raised pedestrian walkways as

Existing site

Overview of proposa l

part of the construction of the Hayward Gallery and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. These concrete structures give little sense of route or orientation , visually isolate the South Bank Centre from its immediate surroundings and take pedestrian activity away from street level , relegating the street to a maze of service entrances. Their legacy, however, is a group of buildings whose public foyers are all planned at first floor level.

At podium level, the connection would take the form of a major new public space overlooked by all of the existin g buildings. It would be the heart of the South Bank Center, a great open-air vestibule leading to each of the individual buildings. At ground level it would take the form of an enclosed shared foyer. A new main entrance to the Royal Festival Hall - and the center as a whole- would be re-established on Belvedere Road .

Rather than work agai nst t his defining

The appearance of the Hayward Gal lery and the

characteristic of the site, the proposal replaces the walkways with a single, uninterrupted

the insertion of a new armature of metal and

Queen Elizabeth Hall are to be transformed by

pedestrian podium, or piano nobile, fully

glass. Within this spine is a new two-story

occupying the space between the buildings .

entrance hall for the Hayward Gallery which provides substantial additional space for a new

Approached by generous staircases from Belvedere Road to the sout h and the river walk to the north, the podium wou ld allow direct connections among the buildings on the site for the first time.

gallery and a shop. The spine also connects to a new public cafe to be located on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, a position which affords panoramic views of the city.

The foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, presently inward looking and encrusted with an impenetrable layer of cloakrooms and toilet rooms, is to be reconfigured. Support accommodation is to be moved to the level below, enabling the foyer to look out directly to both the river and the Festival Hall.

Entrance forecourt on Belvedere Road

Royal Festival Hall

Reinforcing the relationship of buildings to the street and returning pedestrians to street level is important

in re-establishing the normal conventions and conditions of urban life on the site. Considering the broader context, Belvedere Road has the potential to become a key component in the infrastructure of central London, providing a direct connection between the Houses of Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral. Seen in this way, the South Bank Center no longer appears as a marginal off-shoot of the city, but as an integral and privileged part of it. In order to reinforce this idea, any strategy for the South Bank should include Belvedere Road itself- improvement of road surfaces and pedestrian pavements, new avenues of trees and new lighting- emphasizing its continuity and its value as a primary route in the city.

new lower foyer and terrace

â&#x20AC;˘ Sedion looking north

Hayward Gallery

SARUM HALL SCHOOL London

1995

This preparatory school for girls 3 - 11 years of age includes classrooms together with a library and rooms for art, music and science. A school hall/gymnasium, a dining room and kitchen, and staff offices are also provided together with outdoor play spaces. The site is a double plot of land on Eton Avenue, a treelined residential street in North London. Existing houses along the street, including the one which was demolished to make way for the new school, were built in the late 19th century in either Arts and Crafts or Queen Anne style. The context is largely defined by the vocabulary of materials- brick, slate, tile and stucco- as well as the conventional forms arising from the traditional construction of load-bearing walls and pitched roofs. What makes Eton Avenue particu larly interesting, however, is the variety of elevation treatments, and specifically the diversity of elements brought together in the elevation of a single house: entrances, staircases, north light studio windows and projecting dormers all compete for attention.

View of school hall from the street

â&#x20AC;˘ View from Eton Avenue

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North elevation

KEY

10m entrance court entrance hall

offices school hall/gymnasium

dining room

kitchen musiC room

classroom playground 10 tennis court

Ground floor plan

South elevation

Working within this tradition, the repetitive elements of the classrooms are placed at the rear of the site, while the unique shared facilitiesgymnasium, dining room, art and science roomsare concentrated along the street. By fenestrating each room in a way which is particular to its use and position within the building, a rich and varied elevation results. Also within this elevation is the main entrance which, like those of the neighboring houses, is comprised of a porch, canopy and gateposts to the street.

KEY

art room

soence room 3

void over school hall

library

classroom

First floor plan

Large openings in the surface of the primary exterior material - handmade red brick- reveal an inner layer of white stucco enclosing and expressing the main interior spaces. The brick building responds to the demands of the public context, while the inner white building addresses the particular program

Entrance on Eton Avenue

requirements of the school. The pitched slate roof is articulated with finely detailed gables, eaves, and ridge . Cutouts in the roof plane accommodate such elements as the art room north light, the gymnasium lantern and the chimney. The windows , which vary considerably in scale, are framed in a combination of hardwood and metal set flush with the plane of the white stucco. The playground at the rear of the site is framed by the building. The gymnasium and classrooms open onto a raised terrace at the perimeter which overlooks the games area below. A generous flight of steps provides both access to the playground and informal seating for spectators.

Art room

Entry hall

Gymnasium

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PIERHEAD Liverpool 1995

The site is a long swathe of land between the river

Paved areas are finished with York stone flags,

Mersey and three landmark Edwardian buildings-

granite setts and reconstituted Portland stone slabs.

The Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool -which have become symbols

Existing setts discovered under the tarmac were taken up, sorted, recut into smaller stones and relaid

of Liverpool's maritime tradition and of the prosperity it created. The space in front of the three buildings has never fully matched their grandeur.

in a fan pattern. This recycling project became a vehicle for the apprenticeship of young local labor by

Although the site was historically important as the embarkation point for trans-Atlantic liners, by the 1980s, the Mersey ferry was the only remaining clue to its maritime past. A bus station built in the 1960s almost entirely obstructed views to and from the river, and the great space became a dilapidated concrete and tarmac car park. In addition to turning its back to the water, there were no effective pedestrian links to the city's commercial center to the east or to the docks south and north of the pierhead. Intended to act as a focus for the regeneration of Liverpool's dock/ands, the design re-establishes connections between the pierhead, the city and the docks with a new park, a major green space in the heart of the city. The park is 300 meters long and 60 meters wide. The bus terminal and all associated parking have been removed from the site. New pedestrian paths both extend the grid of east-west streets to the waterfront and provide north-south connections between the docks along an avenue of trees in front of the three landmark buildings and a footpath at the water's edge. In the center of the new park in front of the Cunard Building, a paved square has been created which provides a generous area for public events and allows for pedestrian circulation to and from the ferry terminal.

Aerial view of square

German-trained craftsmen and has produced work of exceptionally high quality. New streetlights, benches, shelters, and litter bins have been specially designed for the site. Existing statues have been retained and restored. New monuments are planned for the park; the first to be realized is a bandstand dedicated to the seamen who lost their lives in the Second World War. This major new civic space provides an appropriate setting for the landmark buildings, a focus for re-emerging riverside activity in Liverpool and a stimulus for further restoration of the docklands.

BRITISH EMBASSY Dublin

1995

The new building was commissioned to enable the Embassy- especially those departments dealing regularly with the public- to function . more effectively both administratively and representationally. Located in a leafy suburb of Dublin, the site faces Merrion Road where a number of other embassies are located in former houses surrounded by gardens. At the rear is the Royal Dublin Society showground at Simmonscourt. Set back from Merrion Road, the Embassy is designed as a series of interconnecting buildings grouped around an inner courtyard. This cloisterlike space provides a central focus for all the activities of the Embassy in an arrangement which recalls the form of many of Dublin's major public buildings as well as the city's grand houses with gardens and stable yards. All of the main social spaces of the Embassy- the inner hall, the conference room and the staff canteen - face onto the courtyard.

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1 gatehouse 2 forecourt 3

courtyard

4 garden 5 VIP parking 6 staff parking

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5 wa1ting 6 inner hall 7 con ference room 8 forecourt 9 bridge over reflecting pool 10 courtyard 11 garden

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The individual buildings around the courtyard vary in height from one to three stories, with the highest and principal block facing onto Merrion Road. This building accommodates all of the main elements of the Embassy and establishes its primary facade onto the street. Low single story wings enclose the courtyard on the south and define the rear service yard and car park. In keeping with Dublin's architectural convention, stone cladding on the principal block signals the formal and public, while red brick outbuildings connote privacy and domesticity. Similarly, while the boundary wall and gatehouse on Merrion Road are faced with granite, simple red brick garden walls enclose the rear of the site.

Detail of Merrion Road facade

Inner hall Consular entrance

The public entrance to the new building is from Merrion Road, while a separate staff and service entrance and parking have been provided at the rear via a shared access road within the showground . The proximity of the main public entrance and the private staff entrance from the courtyard enables all members of the Embassy as well as visitors to pass through the inner hall, a major double height space overlooking the central courtyard . The provision of such a space, noticeably lacking in the existing Embassy, and implicit rather than explicit in the client's requirements for the new building, creates a focus for life within the building, like the traditional hall and staircase of a country house. Staff entrance from car park

Staff entrance seen from courtyard

A clear distinction is made between the two entrances in the Merrion Road facade. The Embassy entrance is frontal , positioned centrally in the symmetrical five-bay section of the elevation and punctuated by a chimney stack and coat of arms. The more informal entrance for consular enquires is in the asymmetrical three-bay extension of the facade and is reached via a stone bridge over a reflecting pool. The door itself is tucked within a recess in the facade . The internal organization of the Embassy is represented in the Merrion Road facade through its tripartite division into base, piano nobile, and attic. Small punched openings at ground level contrast with the large, highly articulated windows of the principal floor above. The attic is defined by a continuous clerestory window which makes the roof appear to float free of the walls below. Detail of bridge

The buildings are in-situ concrete construction with either brick or stone cladding. The main building is clad in bush-hammered Wicklow granite set within a grid of polyester powder coated aluminum rails . Horizontally, the paired rails delineate floor and ceiling levels; vertically, like pilasters, they define the structural bays and give support to the roof. The roof is faced in natural slate, composed as individual panels set within detailed metal surround.

a finely North elevation

At piano nobile level, each bay of the Merrion Road facade contains a single large window set centrally within the grid. Here the external plane of granite is eroded to reveal an inner metal layer containing containing large fixed windows and narrow vertical ventilation grilles controlled by manually operated internal shutters. The ventilation panels are watertight and secure even when wide open, allowing the buildingwith a maximum plan depth of 8 meters- to be naturally ventilated. The panels can be left open in summer for night-time cooling, thus utilizing the thermal properties of the heavy concrete construction to temper the daytime environment of the buildings. The landscape is articulated by subtle manipulation of the ground surface and responses to the logic of the building facades. The building stands on a continuous horizontal plane of Portland stone which is eroded to reveal water, grass, gravel or planting.

â&#x20AC;˘ Bridge and reflecting pool â&#x20AC;˘ East elevation and section through courtyard

NUNNERY SQUARE Sheffield 1995

The scheme is intended to act as a catalyst to stimulate redevelopment of a vast corridor of derelict land, the remains of Sheffield's once-thriving steel industry. Although close to the town center and overlooked by a high rise public housing estate, the 11-acre site is without immediate neighbors- an elongated island squeezed between Sheffield Parkway to the south and rai lway lines to the north. Vehicular access is from the Parkway, and a station for Sheffield's new tramway system is proposed at the east end of the site. Unlike many business parks which might be characterized as a series of ad hoc pavilions in a rural or suburban setting, Nunnery Square as an inner city development is more urban in approach. Rather than occupy picturesque locations in a landscape setting, the buildings enclose the landscape, creating a space that is both formal and peaceful.

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The heart of the scheme is the landscape. The

The first phase includes both the square and the

garden is composed of three parts: a formal lawn, a

of the long rectangular space. By its position at the center of the site, the new square defines three discrete development parcels. The buildings face the

smallest of the three buildings planned for the site which provides 25,000 square feet of space on three floors. The simple plan is enclosed by a skin of cladding which reflects the internal 1.5 meter planning grid, the structure and the floors. In contrast, a highly articulated cage of metalwork is wrapped around the

square and have formal forecourts which comprise part of the new landscape. Extending away from the square are the more private domains of the individual buildings, each with its own identity and independence. Parking, largely hidden from the

building to provide access for window cleaning and support for solar control screens. This external layer subtly articulates the facade by distinguishing between the colonnaded base and balcony walkways above. An attic is provided by the roof level plant

containing screen of pleached limes to the south and a row of horse chestnuts across the open north side

square itself, occupies in a more informal way the

enclosure. All in white, the cladding and metalwork

residual landscape between the center of the scheme and the site perimeter.

effect a multi-layered surface which is both explicit in its description of itself and appropriately subordinate as a backdrop to the formal garden. The building is steel frame construction with concrete slabs on corrugated steel deck. The building envelope is a standard aluminum curtain wall system with the bottom portion of each fullheight glazed panel fritted. The purpose-made brise-soleil structure is painted steel with galvanized mesh grating. The entrance lobby is clad internally and externally with oak and Portland stone . The entrance forecourt of the building is paved with granite setts, as is the entrance threshold to the development from the parkway.

Avenue of pleached lime trees

Detail at corner

New offices seen from central/awn

Detail of west facade

NEWNHAM COLLEGE Cambridge

1995

Unlike its medieval counterparts, this late 19th

integration of the new building within the college

century college is a series of large houses linked by covered walkways around the perimeter of a generous garden . The original buildings were designed over a period of 40 years by a single architect, Basil Champneys, and are variations upon a theme of red brick and white-painted joinery.

and the desire expressed by the graduate students for a degree of independence. During the day, the lane is open to the public, and at night it is

Recent buildings have not maintained this precedent. The site was a neglected area of planting, tarmac car park and garages adjacent to the college entrance and sandwiched between a 1960s dormitory and the adjacent college. A single linear building paral lel to the eastern boundary of the site emulates the organization of the original co llege buildings, forming the enclosure to a new graduate garden . The building may be approached from the graduate garden within the college or from a new pedestrian lane to the east. In this way a balance has been sought between the

KEY

1 entrance forecourt 2 porter's lodge

3 bicycle sheds

4 parking 5 graduate garden 6 pedestrian lane

secured by gates. The new building strengthens the main college entrances from Sidgwick Avenue to the north and Newnham Walk to the south by clarifying the definition of external spaces that preface the visitor's arrival at the college. The gable end of the new building together with the garden wall and railings that secure the southern boundary of the graduate garden provide visual containment to the approach from Newnham Walk, while on Sidgwick Avenue a clear hierarchy of external spaces- car park, walkway between bicycle sheds and entrance forecourt- provides a new structure to the thresho ld of the college. The reconfigured forecourt is compact, focussing directly on the porter's lodge.

New pedestrian lane

KEY

entrance passage bedroom living room common room

laundry

storage

The long, pitched-roof building that houses the new accommodation is divided into five units, each containing two one-bedroom apartments and a student 'house' which consists of eight study bedrooms, a common room and kitchen, and shared bathrooms. The apartments are at ground level; the student house is on the two floors above. Front doors to both the apartments and the student house are all located at ground level within a passage which provides a link between the graduate garden and the pedestrian lane. Second floor plan

First floor plan

Gable end at Newnham Walk

Ground floor plan

While the plan of the student rooms is arranged symmetrically about the central axis of the building, a distinction is made in the articulation of the east and west facades. The facade overlooking the lane reads as a continuous horizontal two-story wall pierced only at ground level by the entrances to the passages. Above the wall, the roof is pierced by single dormer windows related to each study bedroom. In contrast, facing the graduate garden, the continuity of the wall is broken and the accommodation is expressed as a series of brick pavilions of bedrooms alternating with the white-painted timber screens of the common rooms. Above the pavilions, the dormers are grouped in pairs to emphasize verticality. The difference between the two elevations acknowledges the distinction between the public world of the lane and the private world of the garden , between outside and inside, and bet ween back and front in the same manner as the original college buildings. What is restrained and small scale on the outer facade is rendered more expansive and flamboyant within, creating an appropriate backdrop to the landscape of the garden. The building adopts the materials- red brick, white-painted joinery, clay tilesof the existing buildings, but interprets them in a new way. In lieu of the additive detail of the original buildings, detail is reductive with the brick skin being carved away to reveal a white building within.

East elevation facing lane

.. Detail of lane facade â&#x20AC;˘ Detail of garden facade â&#x20AC;˘ Carden facade

STUDENTS' UNION University of Southampton

1995

The project is situated on a campus designed in the 1950's by Sir Basil Spence which consists of Miesian blocks set orthogonally in the landscape. The existing student union is a fine steel and glass pavilion at the heart of the campus which houses a cafeteria, sports hall and offices. The new extension is a free-standing addition to the student union designed to absorb expanded retail facilities . Located to t he 路side of the existing building, the extension helps to define a plaza in front of the union and a new bicycle route between the buildings. A portico extends out into the plaza to provide a sheltered meeting place. The ground floor of the bu ilding is fully occupied

~~---~- :::::::::

by the student union shop. The upper floor, reached by stairs at either end of the building, has three small rental units facing onto a generous gallery overlooking a campus green. Opening roof lights, adjustable shutters, and concrete paving slabs give the gallery the feeling

I I

of an outdoor space.

~~~-~~~~~~~~~~::: I I

t:::::~:::::::

The long side elevations of the building are of brick. The front and rear facades are of stucco and wood which are slightly recessed to emphasize the planar rather than vorumetric character of the masonry. The asymmetry of the

Ground floor KEY

portico

2 Students ' Union Shop 3 gallery

4 shop 5 office

First floor

plan is reflected in the details of the front and rear facades.

Detail of shutters

Upper gallery

PEOPLE'S PALACE Royal Festival Hall London 1995

Surprisingly, given its panoramic view over the River Thames, neither the 1951 original restaurant nor the 1964 enlargement was particularly successful. Subsequent attempts were made to adjust the space, resulting in insertions which contradicted its main attribute- a lofty vo lume stretching 36 meters along the river. The scheme takes advantage of the panorama of the river and inflects the space of the restaurant towards it. The restaurant once again is connected both spatially and architecturally with the foyer and auditorium at the heart of the building. The principal intervention is a curved plaster canopy springing from the rear wall of the restaurant. The canopy extends in plan to make dramatic 4 meter-high portal entrances to the big dining room and fans out in section to emphasize the generosity of the volume. Its symmetry about the central axis of the auditorium focuses on the raised bar and stage area at the rear of the space. The composition, materials and detail of this assembly are all drawn from references within the original building. A line of new spun aluminum pendant lights just inside the glazed curtain wall reinforces the gesture of the canopy opening towards the river. Detail of bar

Royal Festival Hall, 1951

0 I I

( L______

~,( :r:xJr [-:- ~~

'll

Elevation of unfolded plaster screen and ceiling canopy

REGENT STREET London 1995

This master plan is intended both to maximize the

By concentrating large scale office and retail uses on

economic potential the site and to increase public activity at ground level, thereby effecting a major improvement in the quality of the public realm for an

major streets, and placing smaller scale hotel, residential and retail uses on secondary streets, each new building can take on a form and character

important site in the city.

compatible with its neighbors. The elevation of the hotel can be simply treated as a brick facade with

The scheme divides the site into six discrete development parcels which combine new construction with restoration and reconstruction.

punched windows, its scale, rhythm and material sympathetic to the essentially domestic character of Brewer Street.

Between the buildings at either end of the crescent shaped site which are to be renovated, only the facade to Regent Street is retained. Behind this facade, two new five-story office buildings are proposed, each with a central atrium at first floor level. Ground and mezzanine floors are allocated to retail use, with additional retail, storage and servicing at basement levels. Between the office buildings, an existing retail arcade is retained and reconfigured. A new 200-bedroom hotel is proposed for the block to the east of the Regent Street crescent. The ground level is again given over to retail uses, and the main reception and public spaces of the hotel open onto an atrium at mezzanine level. The entrance to the hotel is from a small new square at the northwest corner of the site. The southern end of the site near

In contrast, the elevations of the new office buildings are largely contained within the new arcade where they can respond to the scale and grandeur of the buildings on Regent Street, interpreting the qualities of the existing facades in a modern vocabulary of metal, glass and Portland stone. The new elevations share a common basis in the hierarchy of the existing Regent Street facades, emulating the two-story base of the Edwardian buildings and recognizing the line of the main cornice.

Piccadilly Circus provides public access to a leisure and entertainment complex at basement level. Finally, the parcel on Brewer Street is allocated to residential and retail use.

retained facade and buildings on Regent Street

arcade

.. Proposed arcade with shops at ground level and offices above

offices public square hotel 6

residen tial

CONTEMPORARY APPLIED ARTS London 1996

The CAA is England's leading independent art association which represents craftsmen in ceramics , textiles, furniture, metalwork and glass. A flexible gallery space for temporary one-person or group exhibitions was required together with a gallery/shop for showing and selling the work of CAA members. Administrative offices, a meeting room and storage were also to be provided . The new gallery occupies ground and basement levels in an eighteenth century listed building on a lively street in central London. A nineteenth century top lit extension occupies the rear of the site and is accessible from a mews. Upon entering the gallery, visitors find themselves in a single space which extends th e full depth of the site and down into the basement. By opening up a double-height volume at the center of the plan , deep sight lines are established from the fully glazed shopfront to the rear of the gallery on both levels and space is created within the void for the display of tapestries or large objects.

Detail of handrail

Ground floor plan

The existing ground floor, several steps above street level , has been lowered at the entrance to provide level access from the street and to ease movement between the upper and lower gallery levels. From this reception area, a ram路p leads up to the brightly daylit main gallery space at the rear of the ground floor which is intended for changing exhibitions. From the same point, a broad concrete staircase leads down to the richly illuminated

KEY

entrance reception bridge void

exhibition space gallery/shop

;ewe/ry display administration/offices

meeting room 10 storage 11 void above

basement gallery which is lined with wall units for the display of smaller objects. The staircase itself doubles as a series of plinths for display. Staff offices, reserve collection storage and a meeting room are situated around the perimeter of the lower level gallery. The meeting room is fully glazed to the street, looking out to a well with pebble floor which is generously daylit through galvanized metal grating at street level.

Basement plan

--------

Ground floor gallery

Basement shop

"""j:"l":

ABBEY MILLS London

1997

This pumping station is intended to be the visible manifestation of a major engineering project which

The major part of the pumping station is below ground. Incoming low level culverts pump sewage

is of crucial importance to the services infrastructure for London 's future . The site is a

to be discharged at high level. The extruded symmetrical section is shaped by a reinforced

wasteland adjacent to existing listed buildings

concrete substructure which creates a level

which are outstanding examples of Victorian architecture and engineering. The existing pumping

platform at ground level for pumping equipment and an upper level central spine for diesel

station, built in 1869, will be retained as a backup for storm pumping. The area is regarded by the Local Authority as being of exceptional visual importance. The land surrounding the new pumping station is to be converted to meadowland .

generators and electrical switchgear. Air intakes and extracts for the generators are taken through the roof. Upper level catwalks provide access to equipment and the control room, means of escape and a touring circuit for visitors.

Despite the building's prosaic function, the steel superstructure is conceived as a thing of beauty and not merely an expression of the state-of-the-art technology it embod ies. The cathedral-like space is

LJ J L

Cross sedion

10m

23 meters high, 29 meters wide and 57 meters long. While the building may seem lavish, the superstructure accounts for only eight percent of the total budget. Steel portal frames at six meter centers along the side aisles support gallery catwalks, ventilation platforms and continuous gantry cranes for equipment maintenance. The raised central spine has similar frames with gantry cranes to serve the generators. Bowstring roof beams span between the inner and outer portals. The building is clad with metal panels and secure screens of metal louvers which express the geometry and rhythms of the steel structure within. The central raised apex of the roof provides continuous through ventilation at high level , and louvered walls provide ventilation at low level. Intake and extract cowlings and exhaust flues from th e generators pierce the roof and are an external expression of the asymmetry of the plan . By day, the cladding gives the impression of a solid silver casting struck from a single mold. At night, interior uplighting transforms the building into a delicate, luminous enclosure.

West elevation

POSTSCRIPT Joseph Rykwert

Getting a really good building bu ilt is much like orchestrating a symphony, and then getting each instrument to do its bit at the right pitch and at the right moment in performance. Of course the first idea must be spectacularly good and may already be implicit in a spontaneous sketch, but the actual process can be a weary business. No wonder Vitruvius (who knew all about it) thought that you managed building through "the constant and wearisome practice of the hand shaping material to a desired end." As I look at the work of Allies and Morrison, I am impressed by the way their buildings are indeed like a good performance of an orchestral score: everything seems to be in the right place. All effects have been attuned to the whole. Even a strident note, where it is needed, is appropriate. Yet the strident is what the daily papers, even the architectural press, look for in the work of the younger architects, eager as they are to label new arrivals and give them a place in the current, rather confusing, stylistic spectrum. With Allies and Morrison such labeling is virtually impossible, and that seems to me one of their strengths. They accept the formal achievements of modernity as offering the most sensible ways to provide shelter for modern ways of living and of doing business, as well as of making sense of new materials and methods of construction. They therefore do not need to yield at all to recent stylistic flurries.

It seems consistent with their approach to treat the limits of a commission not as an irksome or constraining hindrance but as an element in the design. The People 's Palace restaurant makes a virtue of setting its elegant shell comfortably in the casing of the Festival Hall - and making sense of that situation for the first time by opening the dining room to the panorama of the river and the South Bank promenade.

must 'represent' something of what goes on in the interior while- as is almost always the case in modern construction- remaining independent of the main structural frame. This requires a kind of counterpoint between structure and surface which is played out in terms of material and linear pattern . In the Dublin Embassy, layers of different material

Even an interior project like the People's Palace (and I think this is true of their other interiors as well) can

-brick, granite, metal sheet, glass- all contribute to play out the contrast between the formalities

take on an urban dimension -which is not a matter of fitting into a context, but of making a contribution to enriching the urban fabric. In this sense, their project for Regent Street is a useful counterpoint to the restaurants- an interior on the scale of an urban block.

of official representation and the informalities of accessibility in a building where security must be a prime consideration. This kind of sgraffito offers exciting possibilities in the very different situation

Turning Glasshouse Street (which cuts as a chord behind John Nash's curve of the quadrant of Regent Street) into an atrium-arcade returns Regent Street to some of its originators ' intentions, the enclosed shopping street providing an admirable social focu s, a leisured enclave which London has sadly lacked .

be the product of this articulation . It is their most testing and most promising project yet.

It will also be a splendid test of Allies and Morrison's method, for the interior street will be 'read' as twin facades and the making of public space will depend almost entirely upon their articulation. What these

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of numerous books including: On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in

of Glasshouse Street, where the space will in fact

architects have shown in their previous work is an

Architectural History, 1981; The Idea of A Town:

ability to use the surface, the elevation, as an image or

The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy

metaphor of the section of the building. They make the assumption , unusual nowadays, that the exterior

and the Ancient World, 1988; and The Dancing Column : On Order in Architecture , 1996.

CHRONOLOGY

Reading Enterprise: Malthouse Conversion of brewery to an arts center.

1985

Manor Farm, Farn ingham , Kent Village housing.

Rosyth Church Invited competition.

,,''

",.,."

,, 1986

1986

1987

Hollybank, Chorleywood , Hertsfordshire Extension to CFA Voysey house.

Aston Triangle, Birmingham University center. 2nd place, open competition.

RIBA Gallery, London Limited competition.

1987

1988

Felsted School , Essex Dining hall. 2nd place, invited competition.

Sainsbury 's Supermarket 1st place, open ideas competition.

Royal Victoria Docks

1988

Thamesmead 1st place, invited competition.

British Ambassador's Residence, Moscow, USSR 2nd place, limited competition.

Emerson Valley, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire Village housing.

1988

1989

Canary Wharf, London Office building.

Brown House, Amersham, Buckinghamshire Private house.

CEGB vent shaft and cafe.

Hyde Park Pavilion, London

Limited competition.

1989

1990

Edinburgh Penguin Enclosure Co mpetition.

The Mound, Edinburgh Public square. 1st place, open competition.

Princess Dock, Liverpool Competition.

1990

Christ Church , Corpus Christi, Oxford Student housing.

Commonwealth Institute, London Ma;or additions. Limited competition.

Clove Building, London Conversion of warehouse to office and retail.

1990

Ashland Place, London Office building.

British Museum Forecourt, London Heinz Callery, exhibition.

Center Point, London Public space and refurbishment of office tower.

1990

1991

Minories, London Office building.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London Pavilion. 2nd place, open competition.

Scott Howard, London Office building and showroom.

1991

Whitechapel , London Office building.

University of Essex, Colchester Extension to existing library.

Science Park, Oxford Parking structure.

1991

1992

Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Student housing. Invited competition.

Morrison House, Blackheath , London Private house.

Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar, London Restaurant.

1992

Bishopsgate, Spitalfields, London Office building.

Whitby & Bird Offices, London Office refurbishment.

Penrhyndeudraeth , Wales Business park. 2nd place open competition.

100 r

1992

Arts Center, Loughborough, Leicestershire Open competition.

Garrick Street, London Urban housing and retail.

Glasgow Tower, St. Enoch's Square Observation tower. 3rd place, open competition.

1992

1993

Ashland Place, London Conversion of glassworks to offices.

Admiral Court, London Urban housing and retail.

New London House, London Refurbishment of twelve-story office tower.

1993

1994

National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland 4th place, open competition.

Thames Foot Bridge Open competition.

Crossrail , Hanover Square, London Underground station.

101

1994

Hayward Gallery, South Bank Center, London Temporary pavilion.

Royal Festival Hall, London Education workshop.

South Bank Center, London Masterplan. 2nd p lace, invited competition.

1994

1995

Dollar Bay, London Docklands Urban housing. 2nd place, invited competition.

Sarum Hall School, London Girls preparatory school.

British Embassy Dublin, Eire new embassy building. 1st place, invited competition.

1995

Pierhead , Liverpool Public landscape. 1st place, invited competition.

Nunnery Square, Sheffield Office building and business park.

Newnham College, Cambridge Student housing. 1st place, invited competition.

102

1995

Fitzwi l liam Museum, Cambridge Extension to existing building. Invited competition.

US Navy, London Entrance lobby.

Botolph Lane, London Office building.

1995

Sheffield City Center M asterplan for urban regeneration .

Derby Road, Watford Office building.

Students' Union University of Southampton Extension to Student Union .

Il J

lLJI

I '

1995

People's Palace, Royal Festival Hall, London Restaurant in existing building.

Inhabited Bridge, River Thames, London Exhibition proposal.

British Embassy, Berlin Embassy building. Limited competition.

1995

1996

Regent Street, London Masterp lan for redevelopment. 1st place, invited competition.

McNei I Street & Ballater Street, Glasgow Urban housing, open competition.

Bisley, London Furniture showroom.

1996

18-19 Hanover Square, London Office building and crossrail station.

Contemporary Applied Arts, London Craft gallery and shop.

Norwich Cathedral Visitors center, invited competition.

1996

1997

Performing Arts Center, Bristol Limited competition.

Thames Marker, Richmond, London Visitors' pavilion, limited competition.

Abbey Mills, Stratford, London Pumping station, 1st place, invited competition.

104

1997

Science and Engineering Library, University of Edinburgh Competition.

The Hague, Netherlands Office building, 1st place, invited competition.

South Hill Park Arts center, 1st place, invited competition.

1997

Tate Gallery, Millbank, london New entrance and public landscape.

Goldsmiths College, University of london Information services center.

Soho Square, london Office building refurbishment.

l' I i

, ~

1998

Royal Institute of British Architects, london New bookshop.

Hackney, london Technology and learning centre.

THE OFFICE

106

Bob Allies and Graham Morrison met while working in the office of Martin Richardson in 1978, and first collaborated in 1981 . The practice was established in 1984, following their success in the competition for the redesign of the public space at the Mound , Edinburgh . This commission also led to Paul Appleton joining the office as the first employee in 1984. Joanna Green, David Amarasekera and Robert Maxwell joined in 1986, creating a key group of four associates who have since played a fundamental role in the direction and development of the practice .

Bob Allies received the Diploma of Architecture from the University of Edinburgh in 1977 and worked in the practices of Peter Collymore, Martin Richardson, Michael Brawne and Michael Glickman . In 1981 he was awarded the Rome Scholarship and worked on two studies, one of Bernini 's Scale Regia at the Vatican and the other of Guilio Romano's Palazzo del Te . He was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, 198387; George Simpson Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, 1994-95; and is currently visiting professor at the University of Bath. He is a member of the editorial board of Architectural Research Quarterly. Graham Morrison completed his training at the University of Cambridge in 1975. He worked in Finland in 1972 in the office of Keijo Petaja, and subsequently in England for Cambridge Design, Eric Lyons Cunningham Partnership, Martin Richardson and YRM Architects. He taught at North East London Polytechnic from 1980-82. In 1991 he was elected as a national member of the RIBA Council, chairing the exhibition committee from 1992-94 and helping to establish the RIBA Architecture Center. He is currently a director of the RIBA Journal, and a member of the architectural advisory panel of the Arts Council of England.

Kevin Allsop Hatice Arabaci Steven Archer

Sarah Jackson Sian Jones Salla Laurikka Alison Licsik Martin Markrow Terry McCarthy Glen Millar Deborah Miller Catherine Milligan Kathleen Morrison Adrian Morrow George Novakovic Benedict O'Looney John Pardey Elizabeth Parr Mark Pearson Diana Periton

Harriet Bagnall Tina Bird Deborah Bookman Wendy Boyd Lucy Britton Neil Campbell lain Carson Julian Cowie Grainne Crooks Marianne Davys Miranda Doyle

Chris Proctor Thomas Reinke Steven Ryan loana Sandi Susan Sears-Carter George Stowell Hugh Strange Kevin Sugden Ria Summerhayes Paul Summerlin Edward Taylor

Chris Evans Philip Faure Kate Fitchie

Michael Taylor Steve Taylor Honor Thomson

Sarah Fussell Penny Gardiner Tim Godsmark

Philip Toms Mark Way Joanna Weddell

Andrew Green Michael Greville Laurie Hallows Sheila Hammond lan Hill

Megan Williams Simon Williams Gunn Joseph Witchell Robert Wood Ron Yee

Associates David Amarasekera Paul Appleton Chris Bearman Joanna Green Annette LeCuyer Tim Makower Robert Maxwell Robert Payne Jo Saunders Pauline Stockmans lan Sutherland

Staff

107

EXHIBITIONS

108

1984 Six Young Architects, Heinz Gallery,

RIBA ,

London. Recent Projects.

1991 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London. Three City Office Buildings, London ; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

1985 40 Under 40,

RIBA Gallery, London. The Mound, Edinburgh.

1987 40 Under 40,

RIBA Gallery, London.

1992 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London. Sarum Hall School , London; British Embassy, Dublin.

Sainsburys. Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London . Hollybank, Chorleywood; Aston University Centre, Birmingham; RIBA Gallery Extension, London.

Allies and Morrision, University of Manchester School of Architecture. Recent Projects. City Changes, Architecture Foundation, London . Spitalfields, London.

1988 Royal Fine Arts Commission for Scotland: Exhibition, Edinburgh . The Mound, Edinburgh. Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London. Sainsburys; Brushfield Street, Spitalfields, London.

1989 Rediscovering the Public Realm, Heinz Gallery, RIBA, London.

1993 Art of the Process,

RIBA Gallery, London. Morrison House, London.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London . CEGB Pavilions , Hyde Park, London; Thames Footbridge Competition. City Changes, Barcelona, San Paolo, Prague. Spitalfields, London.

British Museum Forecourt.

1994 New British Architecture, Architectural Institute Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London. HM Ambassadors Residence, Moscow;

of Japan, Tokyo . Recent Projects.

Admiral Court, London.

1995 Allies and Morrison Retrospective, Matthew 1990 Salon International de L'architecture, Paris .

Architecture Gallery, Edinburgh.

The Clove Building, London.

1996 Venice Biennale. Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London .

Science and Engineering Library, University of

Christ Church/Corpus Christi, Oxford

Edinburgh. Bridging the City, Royal Academy, London. Inhabited Bridge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1983

"The Mound Competition ." Prospect 18 (Summer, 1983) pp. i-iv. The Mound, Edinburgh. Bob Allies. "Order, Orthodoxy and the Orders." Architectural Review (June, 1983) pp. 59-65.

109 1989 Martin Spring. "Profile: Young Practices: Bob Allies and Graham Morrison." Building (18 August, 1989) pp. 24-25. General/practice. 1990 Deyan Sudjic and Peter Murray. "Rediscovering the Public Realm." Blueprint, supplement (28 March, 1990). British Museum Forecourt.

ian Latham. "Winners Picked for Piazza at Clive As let. "New Pavilion at Dulwich." Country Life (13 September, 1990) pp. 178-179. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Edinburgh Mound ." Building Design (19/26 August, 1983) p. 24. 1984 Colin Amery. "Six Young Architects." RIB A Transactions 3, no. 1 (5, 1984) pp. 52-56.

"Urbaner Dialog." Leonardo 6 (October/November, 1990) pp. 34-30 .

General/practice.

The Clove Building. 1987 Dan Cruickshank. "Past Sympathies." Architects' Journal (28 January, 1987) pp . 14-17. Hollybank, Chorleywood .

1991

"Ideas for a Supermarket." Architectural Review (June, 1987) pp. 75-86. Sainsbury's Supermarket.

Peter Davey, eta/. "Special issue: Working Places: Problems and Opportunities." Architectural Review (March, 1991) pp . 46-49. The Clove Building. Martin Richardson . "Allies & Morrison: The Pleasure of Abstraction." Architecture Today (May, 1991) pp . 40-42, 45-46. Scott Howard .

1988 Mark Swenarton . "Winning Ways." Building Design (12 February, 1988) pp. 18-23. General/practice . Peter Davey, Dan Cruickshank, eta/.

Clare Melhuish. "Class Distinction; Architects: Allies & Morrison ." Building Design

"Special Issue: Working With Old Buildings."

(11 October, 1991) p. 18. General/practice.

Architectural Review (April, 1988)

pp. 22-84. The Clove Building.

1992

"Shelled and Cored ." Architecture Today (May, 1992) pp. 44-45 . Ashland Place.

1989 Brian Edwards. "Sense of the Civic." Building Design (7 July, 1989) pp. 20-21 . General/practice .

David Redhead. "Modern Cuisine." Blueprint (June , 1992) pp. 30-31. Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar.

110

Liz Clare. "Palate's Palette." Designers' Journal (July/ August, 1992) pp. 36-39 . Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar. Chris Bearman. "Three Recent Buildings." Arkkitechti, Vol. 89, no. 7/8 (July/ August, 1992) pp. 84-91. Scott Howard, Stephen

Bull's Bistro & Bar, and Ashland Place.

1994 Peter Murray and Robert Maxwell. Contemporary British Architects: Recent Proiects from the Architectural Room of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. (Prestel, Munich, 1994) p. 182. General. Jochen Wittmann. "Architeckturpreise in England." Deutsche Bauzeitschrift (February, 1994) pp. 18-19. Admiral Court.

Colin Davies. "Sleight of Hand." Architectural Review (November, 1992)

"En Trompe-l'oeil : La Galerie Scott Howard."

pp. 64-67. Admiral Court, Blandford Street.

Techniques & Architecture (February/March, 1994) pp.116-117.

Carl Gardner. "Bull's Smithfield Bistro." RIBA Journal (November, 1992) pp. 46-48. Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar. "Scott Howard Building. Furniture Showrooms in London." Bauwelt (6 November, 1992) p. 2383.

Roland Jesse, eta/. " Sanierung, Erganzung, Umnutzung (Refurbishment, Rehabilitation)." Special issue, Detail (October/November, 1994) pp. 579-634. Admiral Court. Deborah Singmaster. "Extending the Hayward." Architects' Journal (17 November,

Florence Michel. "Hotels and Restaurants."

1994) p. 9. Hayward Gallery Pavilion.

Architecture lnterieure Cree November/December. 1992) pp. 84-121.

John Welsh. Modern House. (Phaidon,

Stephen Bull's Bistro & Bar.

London, 1995) p. 240. Morrison House.

Architectural Design in Practice. (RIBA,

1995 Lilli Thurn and Taxis. "Besondere Orte (Special Places) ." Baumeister (March, 1995)

London, 1993) p. 71. Morrison House.

pp. 11-36. Hayward Gallery Pavilion .

John Welsh. "Turn of the Century." Building

John Welsh. "Park Life." RIBA Journal (June, 1995) pp. 38-45. Nunnery Square, Sheffield .

1993 Louise Rogers, ed. The Art of Process:

Design (15 January, 1993) pp. 2, 12-13.

Glasgow Tower. Marcus Field, eta/. "Stripping Back to the Frame." Architects' Journal (1 December, 1993) pp. 29-39. New London House.

Penny McGuire . "Palace Coup." Architectural Review (September, 1995) pp. 27-31. People's Palace.

Anthony Mcintyre. "Layers of Mean ing: Sarum Hall School. " Architecture Today (September, 1995) pp. 36-38, 41 .

" Arkkitechtina Euroopassa lso-Britannia." Finnish Architectural Review {2/3, 1996) pp .

John O 'Reilly. "New British Embassy, Dublin. " Irish Architect (October, 1995) pp . 28-34.

"The Architecture of Information ," Catalog for the Venice Biennale 1996: VI International Exhibition of Architecture (British Council, 1996). Science and Engineering Library, University of Edinburgh .

" Allies & Morrison ." Architects' Journal (23 November, 1995) pp. 38-41 . General / practice. Demetrios Matheou . " Modern M anners." Architects' Journal (23 November, 1995) pp. 28-29. General / practice . Shane de Blacam . "A Diplomatic Solution ." Architects ' Journal (23 November, 1995) p. 43-52 . British Embassy, Dublin .

1996 M arcus Field . "The Craft of Gallery Design." Architects' Journal (February, 1996) pp. 26 -27. Contemporary Applied Arts. Peter Davey, eta/. " Work Studies." Architectural Review (April , 1996) pp. 4-5, 27-67 . British Embassy. Dublin . Beatrice Loyer. "lnterieur: Les Bars (Interior: Bars) ." Techniques & Architecture (April/May, 1996) pp. 98-10. People's Palace. Naomi Stungo. " Shop Assistance." RIBA Journal (May, 1996) pp. 42-47. Students'

Union Shops, University of Southampton .

114-115. British Embassy, Dublin .

111

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

112

This monograph has been prepared to accompany an exhibition of the work of Allies and Morrison which will be shown at a number of venues in the United States and Europe.

Photographs Peter Cook: pages 10, 18, 20, 21, 33, 35, 36, 38 BL, 40, 44, 45, 61 T, 62 , 64, 66, 67 , 68, 69,

The twelve years of work presented in the exhibition and monograph has depended on the contributions of a large number

70, 71 , 72 , 73 , 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81,82,86, 87, 89, 96 TC, 98 TR BR, 99 CC TR, 100 CL CC CR, 101 CR LL LC LR, 102 CR LL, 103 TR CC. Charlotte Wood : 11, 48, 49, 58, 59, 97 cc,

of people in addition to the staff at Allies and Morrison. In particular, these include structural engineers Whitby & Bird and Price & Myers; services engineers Max Fordham and Partners; quantity surveyors Davis Langdon and Everest; landscape architects Livingston Eyre; photographer Peter Cook; and model makers Kandor and Richard Armiger. Allies and Morrison are also grateful for the collaboration enjoyed with clients including: William Alexander, Mark Bertram, Stephen Bull, Graham Field, Mike Griffiths, Shane Guy, Christopher Howes, Vinay Kapoor, Christopher Lacey, Mary La-Trobe Bateman, Joseph Levin, Alan Liebowitz, Stuart Lipton, Richard Loftus, Roger Madelin, Roger Manion, Maria Morris, Stuart Mosscrop, Onora O'Neill, David Pennington , Paul Reeves, Rollin Schlicht, Andrew Sebire, Ed Simons, Sandra Smith Gordon and Nicholas Snowman. A debt of thanks is owed to all those who contributed in the preparation of this publication and exhibition. The Dean, faculty and staff of the College of Architecture+ Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and the College of Architecture+ Planning at the University of Tennessee have given their support, as have others in the wider university community. In particular, Professor Dean Almy in Tennessee and Dr. John Godfrey of the International

101 TL TC cc, 102 cc, 107. Dennis Gilbert: 37, 38 T BR, 83, 99 TC. Andrew Putler: 23 BL, 90, 93 , 102 LC, 103 TL ML LL. Allies and Morrison : 18, 28, 41 , 42, 61 8, 91, 99 TL BC, 102 TL, 106. Chris Edgecombe: 32 B, 98 CR, 99 BL. Kingsbury Marzolf: 14 T. Jim Scrivens: 14 B. Matti Karjanoja: 46. Eamonn O'Mahony: 50. Lothian Regional Council: 97 B

Models Kandor: 16, 50, 90, 93, 98 CR, 99 BL, 103 CL LL. Allies and Morrison: 23 BL, 28, 99 TL, 102 TL BC. Chris Bearman: 46. Network: 103 TL Credits Page 17 TR Courtesy of Sir Norman Foster and Partners. 23 TR Tea trolley 900 by Alvar Aalto, 1936. Courtesy of the manufacturer Artek oy ab , Etelii.esplanadi 18, Helsinki, Finland. 46-47 Project carried out in association with Bearman Makipentti ,

Institute of the University of Michigan have both been especially

Helsinki. 51 Robert Cameron. 82 B Phaidon

helpful. The project has also been supported by the British Council.

Press Ltd., London; from Royal Festival Hall

Special thanks are due to Dennis Smith who was responsible for the design and supervised the production of this publication in Ann Arbor and Sarah Fussell of Allies and Morrison who coordinated production work in London; and to lan Sutherland , Tim Makower, Deborah Miller, Kevin Allsop and Chris Bearman for their contribution to the drawings that constitute a major part of the exhibition.

by John McKean . 85 Robert Cameron . Exhibition printing courtesy of Sarkpoint Reprographics Limited, London .

The Work of Michael