Tạp chí kiến trúc cảnh quan 2016 by Xây Dựng Hưng Lộc Phước

ARCHITECTURE | DESIGN | ART

BLAVATNIK SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT HERZOG & DE MEURON

OMA | PETER SAVILLE | SNØHETTA | RON ARAD | BEN WHEATLEY

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FORWARD

PLAY

REVIEW

034

084

210

017

COVER STORY

210 – 216

Listen 1

048 – 064

Furniture fairs 2016

Craig Dykers

Forum for change

Stockholm Furniture Fair, Maison&Objet, northmodern, imm cologne

019

Listen 2 Mary Bowman

020

Inside Herzog & de Meuron’s stack of glass volumes at the new Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford is an open, sculptural space designed to foster communication between students

Listen 3 Erik Spiekermann

023

025

026

Creation from Catastrophe: How Architecture Rebuilds Communities

220

Landscape design

Book A Genealogy of Modern Architecture

084 – 094

Brutalism

221

High-Rise film

Exhibition Out There: Our Post-War Art

096 – 114

Art therapy

222

St Peter’s Seminary

Exhibition

116 – 132

Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction

On the drawing board Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s GES2 project, Moscow

Exhibition

The bigger picture

Meet Tham & Videgård Arkitekter

218 – 219

066 – 082

Infographic Oxford University buildings

CONTENTS

In plane sight Airport hotels

028 – 029

MATERIALS FOCUS

228 – 229

The art of repetition

134 – 144

We are Dorothy

Conran after Conran The new head of Conran and Partners

Waugh Thistleton: building with CLT

236 – 242

Archive

031

Retail project

146 – 162

Montblanc store, Hamburg

All the wood’s a stage

July/August 1998

Writers Theatre, Illinois by Studio Gang

033

Interior project

164 – 174

Hendrix flat, London

Art on the go Düsseldorf ’s new underground art

034

Graphics project

176 – 192

New Tate Modern image

Hide and seek Timmerhuis, Rotterdam by OMA

036

Blueprint event

195 – 207

A Blueprint 20/20 event Ron Arad

At home with Blueprint

039

Tate Harmer, space standards, Solidspace and Jaccaud Zein Architects

Interior project Sainsbury’s Digital Lab, London

040 – 041

Curated diary Ben Wheatley

042

Blueprint for the Future James Woudhuysen

HORIZONTAL MEETS VERTICAL

P‘7350 Discover the fascination of a kitchen which stands for what has characterised Poggenpohl and Porsche Design Studio over many years: concentration on the overall line.

info@poggenpohl.com www.poggenpohl.com bcdQW^b ]McW^]fWQR BZRMbR S^ZZ^f www.poggenpohl.com/en/ﬁnd-a-studio/ c^ Ŭ]Q h^da ]RMaRbc bcdQW^͙

ISSUE 345 EDITORIAL

ARCHITECTURE | DESIGN | ART

BLAVATNIK SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT HERZOG & DE MEURON

OMA | PETER SAVILLE | SNØHETTA | RON ARAD | BEN WHEATLEY

MARCH / APRIL 2016

ISSUE 345 / £30

www.designcurial.com

Cover (and back cover) — Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, by Herzog & de Meuron. Photography Paul Raftery.

Concrete and wood loom large in this issue of Blueprint. I’ve long wanted to send someone to photograph the ruins of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland. This beautiful to look at — though by all accounts not very successful — brutally modernist, concrete building was designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and opened in 1966. It was meant to house 100 would-be Roman Catholic priests with a murmur of nuns to look after them, but numbers were already falling for this calling and it was never filled to the full. Added to this was the fact that the building was plagued by design and maintenance issues, including gaps that allowed the biting winds to whistle around the cassocks and a tendency to let water in — not good in a country as deeply moist as Scotland. Less than 20 years after it opened, it was closed (1984) and started to fall into dereliction becoming the playground of graffiti artists and goths wanting to pose on the alter for nefarious photo opportunities. Unfortunately due to this dereliction and in particular the presence of asbestos nobody could go there officially, until now that is. It’s in the process of being reclaimed as an arts venue by environmental arts Group NVA. So as soon as the place was safe, we sent Gareth Gardner up there with his bags packed with thermals and cameras to get the amazing images you’ll see starting on page 96. And talking of glorious brutalist dereliction, in this issue, we also bring you a behind-the-scenes look at the film of JG Ballard’s High-Rise, which opens this March. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley of A Field in England, Sightseers and Kill List fame, who is soon to tackle a remake of Wages of Fear. The film opts for a brutalist-period setting for the plot’s ascent into madness (see page 84). I haven’t seen it yet and will definitely be queuing up for a ticket. And Wheatley has also chosen our curated diary for us this month, which you can see on page 40. From concrete to wood — we have a number of timber projects for you this month, from Studio Gang’s Writers Theatre near Chicago, to a cross-laminated timber residential development in Dalston, London, via holiday retreat in Suffolk that uses the Japanese technique shou sugi ban — torching wood to harden and prolong its life as a building material. Finally, mixing concrete and glass (see the Saen table for Alias page 216) and a fair amount of wood and metal as well, we bring you a round up of all that was new and exciting at the four big winter furniture fairs (see page 210) in the run up to the madness of Milan’s Salone, which we’ll be reporting back to you on in the very next issue. Is it that time of the year again, already? See you all in Bar Basso...

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017

023

033

Listen 1

Infographic

Interior project

Craig Dykers, founding partner of architecture practice Snøhetta, reflects on the term public space and how it is constantly evolving

As we feature Herzog and de Meuron’s new Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, we also map out some of the university’s other modern additions

Jimi Hendrix’s restored Mayfair flat has opened to the public, next door to the former home of another music legend, George Frideric Handel

019

034

Listen 2

025

Graphics project

Mary Bowman, partner at Gustafson Porter, argues that well-designed public spaces with large areas of landscaping can contribute to public health and wellbeing

Meet

Graphic design maestro Peter Saville, has created a new image for Tate Modern ahead of the opening of its new Herzog & de Meuron-designed extension

Cate St Hill gets to know Swedish practice Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, which has just completed a curvaceous new school of architecture in Stockholm

020

036

Listen 3

026

Blueprint event

In the face of worldwide crises, wisdom is knowing when to accept the inevitable and when to stand up against things you can actually change, says Erik Spiekermann

On the drawing board

We will be bringing Ron Arad back to his alma mater, the Architectural Association, for a Blueprint 20/20 on a career defining moment — the creation of the Rover Chair

Herbert Wright chats to Antonio Belvedere, partner at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, about its transformation of the GES2 power station in Moscow for the V-A-C Foundation

039

Interior project 028 – 029

The art of repetition UK studio We are Dorothy, comprising a Brummie, a Scouser and a Manc, has expanded its range of conceptual prints to include lost music venues and football stadiums

Chetwoods Architects has repurposed an unused underground space beneath a London office block to create a digital hub for supermarket giant Sainsbury’s 040 – 041

Curated diary 031

Retail project Designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance has translated the rich aesthetic of luxury pen maker Montblanc into a new European flagship store in Hamburg. Johnny Tucker reports

Ben Wheatley, director of new film High-Rise, picks his top events for spring, including new TV shows, headsets and computer games 042

Blueprint for the Future A co-founder of Blueprint, James Woudhuysen suggests how designers and architects might be impacted as international trade agreements and pacts move to be more exclusionary

Open for entries early April blueprintawards.com Awards night 20 . 10 . 16

LISTEN

Craig Dykers takes on the challenge of deﬁning what ‘public’ and ‘space’ actually mean, and posits that the term ‘public space’, while sounding good, has lost its meaning. Craig Dykers is a founding partner of Snøhetta

CRAIG DYKERS A quarter-century ago we designed the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, with its open, democratic plan. Later we wrestled with the meaning of public space with the sloping terraces of the Oslo Opera. Recently we received the commission to design the new headquarters of Le Monde in Paris just two days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Today we are ﬁnalising the transformation of Times Square and managing a new masterplan for Penn Station in New York. We completed the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, a project challenged by security. The magnitude and pressure of these projects has given us pause amid a maze of conversations about what it means to share our world. In these challenging conversations, words are often tossed about loosely. Words become ‘audibles’ for complicated issues, buzzwords. I call these words taciturn terms ‘taciterms’, uncommunicative but eager to be speciﬁc. It is easy to lop off loose bits of a concept to form a categorical some-such that sounds good to the ear while the meaning is lost. Public space is one of these terms. When we say public somehow we mean humans and when we say space this implies human-made places. Together public and space are generally understood to be in cities, by which we must infer a concentrated human population. The mere

WHAT DO WE REALLY MEAN WHEN WE TRY TO IDENTIFY PUBLIC SPACE? WHEN WE SAY PUBLIC WE MEAN A MÉLANGE, A MULTIPLICITY. WHEN WE SAY SPACE WE MEAN TERRITORY. LET’S STOP CALLING IT PUBLIC SPACE — IT’S A VERY MESSY SPACE, CONSTANTLY EVOLVING

suggestion of public space must immediately raise questions that demand more specificity. Public actually means diverse groups of people. Some of these people may not know each other in any identifiable way. They may not share any cultural, ideological, social, geographic or economic conditions. Within these groups are individuals each with a unique world view, expanding the definition further. The public is not an abstraction or a monolith. There is not a public, there are many publics. Space is a vacuum in the strictest sense. Space cannot be understood unless there is something to define it. Consider that as few as three trees in a field may begin to define an area, but add too many trees and space becomes a thing again, a forest. Space generally means the arrangement of things that legitimise it. But unlike a forest, the arrangements that quantify public space are not random, they are human constructions. Since public space is meant to occur within places of human habitation it will be within the legislative configuration of a city, or something like a city. Cities are driven by invisible things, the rules limiting how spaces can be used or shaped. Cities are about laws as much as they are about spaces. There is no such thing as open space or free space in a city, places always are defined by some form of control.

Law itself has always been spatial. This is most evident in many ancient cities where the total dominion of the law lies within the visible boundary established by city walls, controlled by gates and barriers. Minimal points of access facilitated surveillance of a relatively known population, while enforcement of a penal code might be as simple as discovering on which side of the wall a potentially criminal act occurred. As cities evolved from entities to inter-connected networks of economic and political systems, city boundaries became more porous, requiring new mechanisms of security and surveillance to monitor shifting populations. The challenge of monitoring and controlling space evolved into the more complex issue we face today, which is one of constant circulation, diversity and population turnover within the space itself. So what do we really mean when we try to identify public space? When we say public we mean a mélange, a multiplicity. When we say space we mean territory. Let’s stop calling it public space — it is very messy space. It is constantly evolving. In order to properly manage and design what we call public space we must ﬁrst acknowledge what it truly is and why it is the way it is. This will help us all create better places that more adequately reﬂect what is to be human.

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Mary Bowman argues that public spaces designed around planting can help contribute to public health and wellbeing, as well as playing an important role in carbon storage as an aspect of controlling climate change, and draws on her practice’s projects in London, Singapore and Qatar as examples. Mary Bowman is a partner at Gustafson Porter.

MARY BOWMAN Well-designed public spaces with significant areas of planting contribute to public health and wellbeing. In 2013, the Landscape Institute published a position statement on public health and landscape entitled Creating Healthy Places. It was a call for public-health professionals, planners, architects, landscape architects and the general public to recognise that landscape has an enormous potential to improve our health and wellbeing. Everyone should have access to good-quality green space — especially less privileged communities that often have limited access to private amenity space and public space. The paper identified five principles for the creation of healthy places that: improve air, water and soil quality; overcome health inequalities and promote healthy lifestyles; make people feel comfortable, increasing social interaction and reducing anti-social behaviour, isolation and stress; optimise opportunities for working, learning and development; and create restorative and healing places for physical and mental health conditions. These principles can be applied to both living and working environments. We see more and more office developments incorporating gardens, green terraces and roofs in their public spaces. A good example is Rathbone Square, just off Oxford Street — a new garden square for central London. We wanted the garden, sitting at the heart of a mixed-use development, to be a welcome oasis from bustling Oxford Street, with water features, lawns and shrubs, perennials and trees. Another example of how the incorporation

AMONG THE GENERAL PUBLIC THE AWARENESS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF LANDSCAPE IS CONTINUALLY INCREASING. AS MORE PEOPLE MOVE INTO CITIES, AND OUR WORLD IS PROGRESSIVELY MORE DETACHED FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE, GOOD LANDSCAPE DESIGN FOR CITIES BECOMES MORE IMPORTANT

of extensive greenery and landscape strategies can help to improve the overall habits and quality of life for the building occupants is Marina One, a mixeduse development in Singapore, which features a lush tropical landscape in the ‘Green Heart’ of a 34-storey residential development and 30-storey office towers. The ‘Green Heart’ features a waterfall and reﬂecting pool surrounded by mature trees and tropical foliage. It is a public space where people can enjoy the gardens, attend events and visit the restaurants. Perhaps as a small island state it is easier to control and administer guidance and regulations relating to the natural environment, but Singapore is leading the way in how to ‘green’ a city. Its Urban Redevelopment Authority has developed guidelines for green replacement within new developments to provide areas of relief and greenery in a dense urban environment. Forty per cent of the area must be devoted to planting, and developments must provide communal green spaces at ground and terrace levels for everyone to enjoy. Under the LUSH (Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High Rise) guidelines, developers must replace greenery displaced by buildings or lost to development with greenery elsewhere, including roofs, green walls, terraces and balconies. Such strategies can be adapted for arid climate zones using drought-tolerant planting and native species that reduce the need for irrigation. When it comes to creating desert landscapes in arid climates, increasing the amount of greenery helps to provide shade and reduces heat transmission from hard surfaces while creating a

more comfortable environment for pedestrians. The development we are working on in Doha, Qatar, comprises a 2km-long seafront promenade, four major public spaces, streetscapes and planting along a new light-rail corridor, responding not only to the natural conditions and architectural ambitions, but also to the needs of visitors and the local community. A community park, called the Ravine Park, offers water features and stepped terraces planted with desert plants and trees, which help to cool the park area while creating a place for people to ﬁnd respite from the intense heat. People can enjoy a leisurely stroll along the promenade, where kiosks sell food and refreshments. There is seating on the seafront with its cooling breeze. Playgrounds and exercise stations have been established to encourage healthy living and physical activity. Lighting is a key element of design, particularly in hot climates where nightlife is so important. Pergola structures along the promenade are designed in precast, high-strength concrete and create shadow patterns on the ground at night from the lighting ﬁltering through. Among the general public the awareness of the importance of landscape is continually increasing. As more people move into cities, and our world is progressively more detached from the countryside, good landscape design for cities becomes more important. The UK Government has set a target of an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050, when almost 80 per cent of the population will live in cities.

LISTEN

Do you believe in fate? Various crises around the world have set Erik Spiekermann thinking that there’s nothing much we can do about most things, so the wise thing is to know when to accept the inevitable, but also when to stand up to things that can actually be changed. Erik Spiekermann is a teacher, author, designer and partner at Edenspiekermann

ERIK SPIEKERMANN scenarios which may or may not come true? His fate will be decided by others, one way or another. Giving in to your fate, being fatalistic, has never been accepted as something positive. Fatalism has always been seen as opting out, as a despicable lack of responsibility. Activism is rated much higher, even though most of it turns out to be rhetorical only. Fatalism is seen as characteristic of lazy people, for those who conform easily, send prayers instead of doing something and are generally ready to accept anything from any authority. But how about taking a step back from our situation to see how bad it really is? Or isn’t? After the attacks in Paris last November, TAZ, the alternative newspaper in Germany, published ‘100 Reasons to stay cool’ on its front page. It said: ‘Every year, more people die from swallowing ﬁsh bones than did from terrorist attacks during the past 10 years.’ And also that we have a strong democracy, good laws and funny comedians. ‘Hysterics are bad for heart and circulation,’ concluded TAZ. Humour is good for both. Humour is one of the expressions of a fatalistic attitude. If there is something we cannot change immediately, why not laugh about it? The best jokes

seem to flourish in bad situations. Here in Berlin, I can still laugh at the jokes that helped people in East Germany survive (and ultimately overcome) their repressive regime. Laughing about Hitler was dangerous back during the Nazis’ time, but people did. Just imagine the jokes had Germans known then about his missing testicle? Jokes are not the solution, but a necessary release for anxiety and fear. Anything you can make fun of doesn’t disappear, but becomes bearable, at least for the moment. During the Second World War the American theologist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this as the first verse of a poem: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ Whether we invoke God or just common sense, this seems a good prescription against bad news. Who knows, any day now your village could crack the jackpot, making everybody an instant millionaire. Or you could be run over by a bus. Other than filling out the lotto form and looking both ways when crossing the road, there isn’t much else you can do to challenge your fate in this regard. Wisdom is knowing when to accept the inevitable and when to stand up against things you can actually change.

WHO KNOWS, ANY DAY NOW YOUR VILLAGE COULD CRACK THE JACKPOT, MAKING EVERYONE AN INSTANT MILLIONAIRE. OR YOU COULD BE RUN OVER BY A BUS... THERE ISN’T MUCH YOU CAN DO TO CHALLENGE YOUR FATE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE CARTY

Bad news is never far away these days. The world seems to go from one crisis to the next. Hardly have we heard some details of one event when another gets pushed into the limelight. Most of those crises are beyond our physical and mental horizons; while we can go and give toys and warm drinks to refugees arriving at our train stations, we cannot do much about the politics that put them there in the ﬁrst place. Or, indeed, prevent them from getting to our shores. But the reality behind the refugee crisis has reached us already, in the form of terrorist threats and attacks. What can we do to cope with all this? Avoid crowds, not got to concerts or football matches? Mind our backs on the Tube, at the bus stop, in the supermarket? We know all this wouldn’t help against weirdos with hand grenades, so why don’t we just carry on as though nothing has happened? In Steven Spielberg’s movie Bridge of Spies, the attorney James B Donovan asks his client, Russian spy Rudolf Abel, whether he is at all worried. Abel just shrugs: ‘Would it help?’ He knows there is very little he can do himself to change his situation, so he just accepts the cigarettes offered and enjoys a smoke. What would be the point for him to imagine

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INFOGRAPHIC Oxford University buildings

As we feature Herzog and de Meuron’s new cylindrical-shaped Blavatnik School of Government, dedicated to the study of government and public policy, at Oxford University (see page 48), we look back at some of the University’s other architect-designed buildings, from James Stirling’s technical-fault-plagued Florey Building to Zaha Hadid’s sweeping steel beacon at St Antony’s College

INVESTCORP BUILDING, ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE Zaha Hadid Architects 2015. This shiny £11m beacon, clad in stainless steel, expands the college’s Middle East Centre

WOLFSON AND RAYNE BUILDINGS, ST ANNE’S COLLEGE Howell Killick Partridge & Amis 1964. Listed Grade II, this pre-cast concrete block won an RIBA award in 1966

MATHEMATICAL INSTITUTE Rafael Viñoly Architects 2013. The new 24,400 sq m building sits on the 4ha Radcliffe Observatory Quarter site also masterplanned by Viñoly (in 2005)

BLAVATNIK SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT Herzog and de Meuron 2016. Funded by a £75m donation from oligarch Len Blavatnik, this building comprises a series of shifted discs clad in glass

SOMERVILLE COLLEGE ACCOMMODATION Niall McLaughlin Architects 2011. This scheme draws from surrounding buildings, such as Victorian brick cottages

ILLUSTRATION BY IAN DUTNALL

SIR THOMAS WHITE BUILDING, ST JOHN’S COLLEGE Arup Associates 1976. These 11 pavilions won a Concrete Society Award in 1976, the judges describing it as ‘breathtaking’

ST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE Arne Jacobsen 1962–68. Described by Pevsner as ‘a perfect piece of architecture’, Jacobsen’s college combines the features of a traditional quad with an ordered spatial module

JOWETT WALK STUDENT ACCOMMODATION, BALLIOL COLLEGE MacCormac Jamieson Prichard Architects 1995–2006. Nine pavilions provide an alternative to the quad

WESTON LIBRARY (FORMERLY NEW BODLEIAN LIBRARY) WilkinsonEyre 2015. The recent £80m makeover of the New Bodleian library has opened up public access to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Grade II-listed building

BLUE BOAR QUADRANGLE, CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE Powell & Moya 1968. Grade II*-listed in 2006. Powell & Moya was renowned for its elegant, modern insertions into historic Oxbridge

FLOREY BUILDING, QUEEN’S COLLEGE James Stirling 1971. A risky choice for an Oxford college, James Stirling was asked to create an iconic modern building to bolster the college’s reputation

ST HILDA’S COLLEGE — GARDEN BUILDING The Smithsons 1968–70. This glass building features timber trellis to prevent girls from being too ‘exposed’

AWA R D S N I G HT

30 November 2016 TO E NTE R

fxdesignawards.co.uk E N T RY D E A D LI N E

2016

22 July 2016 Submission enquiries to Anne-Fabienne +44 (0)20 3096 2580 entries@fxdesignawards.co.uk S E AT R E S E RVATI O N S

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MEET Tham & Videgård Arkitekter

WHO Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård; plus 13 staff WHAT Architecture WHERE Stockholm, Sweden WHEN Founded 1999

1 JONAS LINDSTRÖM 2 & 3 ÅKE E:SON LINDMAN

Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård ﬁrst met at architecture school in Stockholm more than 25 years ago, before collaborating on a major competition for a public library in Finland. They didn’t win, but it set in motion a meeting of minds concerned with architecture that is inclusive, tying together extensive research, theoretical details, social issues and the long-term building quality into the design process. From its small studio — or atelier as they like to call it (there’s no admin or receptionists) — Tham & Videgård Arkitekter has developed an array of public, educational and exhibition buildings. The practice’s ﬁrst project to gain attention was the Kalmar Museum of Art in southern Sweden in 2008. This compact, four-storey black cube, punctuated by large, glazed openings offering views across the city park, won the practice a host of accolades and awards, including the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009 and the Kasper Salin, the Swedish Association of Architects’ prestigious award for the best new architecture in Sweden in 2008. The Moderna Museet in Malmö (2009) followed, a vibrant and decidedly modern, perforated, orange extension attached to a defunct, red-brick electricity station. Added to this is an eclectic motley crew of buildings that make up the practice’s current portfolio: a sunshine-yellow nursery school (2010) in Stockholm, a 4m x 4m x 4m mirrored tree-house hotel suspended around a tree trunk in Harads (2010) and a multiple pitched-roof concrete summerhouse (2013) on Stockholm’s archipelago. While not afraid to use a splash of unashamedly bright colour, Tham & Videgård’s architecture, with a typically Swedish concern for context and site,

is at once considered, rigorous and functional. ‘We have a sort of pragmatic approach towards architecture, ﬁnding solutions that solve many things at the same time,’ says Videgård. ‘It’s very much about distillation, reﬁning an idea so it’s buildable but still very strong in its spatial experience. It’s something we look for all the time — what is the most direct answer to the brief?’ At the end of last year Tham & Videgård completed the New School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), which also won the practice another Kasper Salin Prize. A smooth, curvaceous, six-storey building, clad in deep orange Corten steel and inserted into an existing courtyard, it was something of a labour of love for the practice, developed over a period of eight years. ‘We won the competition just before the opening of the Kalmar Museum of Art when we were still a small office; in a way the practice has grown together with this project,’ says Videgård. Focusing on how people move around the space, curved walls

encourage a free flow of circulation and enhance a sense of openness, creating ‘an atmosphere that is less formal and less ordered, more akin to how spaces could interconnect in a landscape than a traditional institutional building,’ explains Tham. Continuing the theme of university buildings for the arts, the practice has also recently finished a new, barrel-arched building for the Krabbesholm School of Art, Architecture and Design (unphotographed at the time of publication) in Skive, Denmark — its first project outside of Sweden — and is currently working on a group of buildings for the University of Gothenburg’s faculty of fine arts. As well as doing two or three private houses every year — ‘we always like to have a mix of scales. It’s nice to have smaller projects because they give us the opportunity to experiment and try things out’ — Tham & Videgård’s focus is now on public buildings and, where possible in the future, beyond Sweden. Says Tham: ‘The interesting thing about working with a public building is that it affects many people, and that influences the character of a city.’ Last year the practice lost out in an invited competition to design a new Bauhaus museum in Berlin, but following a solo exhibition at the Galerie d’Architecture in Paris (2014) as well as a part in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2012), it surely won’t be long before the practice makes its mark on the rest of Europe. CSH 1 – (L-R) Martin Videgård and Bolle Tham 2 – The New School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (2015) 3 – Tellus Nursery School, Stockholm (2010)

ON THE DRAWING BOARD GES2 project, the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow / Renzo Piano Building workshop Situated on the long Moskva River island Balchug and just a kilometre from the Kremlin, the recently decommissioned GES2 power station had powered the Russian capital since 1907. The contemporary art foundation V-A-C has commissioned Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) to repurpose the 2ha site. By 2019 the vast main building will provide some 5,000 sq m of exhibition space, centred on a 100m-long ‘nave’ under a glass roof, rising 20m. A forest will be plante and a piazza created. RPBW partner Antonio Belvedere talks with Herbert Wright about the energy, synergy and details of the project

densiﬁed to constitute a natural screen to hide the new power station. The site will be mostly green, on the west side however, in proximity of the building, there’s a clearing that will become a sculpture garden. On the south-east side, the site will be more minimal, since this is the piazza.

Access will be from the river and the Patriarshy Bridge. But what will guide people entering the great hall? Will the ‘nave’ become a central internal circulation axis? The piazza, on the riverside, will be the urban ‘hinge’. Half outdoor, half indoor, the piazza is conﬁgured as a space with no expression of boundaries inside or outside, a place where people will gather before starting their journey. Yet, from the piazza, people will accede to the nave. The nave is intended to be an urban ‘street’ as well as the spine of the entire space. A ‘connecting web’ is unrolled in the nave. It’s a circulation device made out of stairs, lift and platforms, which intuitively leads the visitors through all that happens inside the building. Are all upper exhibition spaces open to the nave? All activities will be related to the nave, with the upper exhibition spaces being visually open to it. However, an operable glass envelope will isolate this space in order to provide the most appropriate climate conditions — humidity, temperature and light control — needed for the highest conservation requirements. You say that the building will ‘become a cathedral of light’, but won’t PV roof limit that? Also, how will snow effect the light and loading? On the glass roof, a pattern of photovoltaic cells will be inserted into the laminated glass. The cells will be distanced from each other to make daylight pass through. This conﬁguration will provide a shading effect of 70 per cent opacity. The 30 per cent transparency will bring down a great amount of consistent and well-diffused daylight, perfectly appropriate to the uses of the spaces. Possible electricity production amounts to 280MWh/year. Snow on the glass roof will obviously reduce the amount of light coming through, however rarely will the roof be totally obscured by a thick snow 2

What is the separate building on the south-west? This building is what will remain from the demolition of an existing four-storey structure. It’s a brick-vaulted ground ﬂoor over a brick-vaulted basement. It will be used for activities more in relation with the street, to be deﬁned.

pack. The structure should already be able to carry the snow load, thanks to the geometry of the structural trusses. It is the design intent to preserve as much of the original steel structure as possible. Will the 70m-high chimneys boost sustainability? In winter the southern chimney will be heated by the sun, allowing a stack-ventilation effect that blows out the exhaust air. In summer the northern chimney will be used for air intake and the southern one for extraction, when outdoor conditions are suitable for natural ventilation. The most recent design explorations intend to use the ground as a storage of cold. In winter, cold water would be pumped into the ground to a depth of 100m or more to reduce the ground temperature. This cold will be extracted in the summer to cool the building, minimising the energy consumption. Birch trees and their sense of tranquillity are an RPBW hallmark, but here there is a forest! Is it to hide the new power station on the northwest side? The idea of a forest came from a sense of generosity toward the community. It is then shaped and

When you say ‘the experience of the city is unpredictable’, is it Moscow’s mix of small and epic scale and the juxtaposition of state, industrial and normal zones? How does the V-A-C project ﬁt in? It is certainly about all that but also about a very dynamic programme and use of the spaces. The V-A-C project will be an unpredictable place certainly, because somehow the street life is as such. The V-A-C project is widely developed around the concept of synergies. The project starts from those existing local synergies that confer to the site its huge potential, before creating new synergies on the urban, cultural and city life perspectives. How does V-A-C at GES2 compare with the OMA-designed Garage in nearby Gorki Park? It’s quite an interesting place... It’s in a park, ours is embedded in the street. The biggest difference is the scale and conﬁguration. It [Garage] was a restaurant. You can’t compare a restaurant with a power station. We believe the power station will create huge synergies with the city; it will be a major energy. It’s a barycentre, the bridge will connect with the southern half of the city. Our position is situated right on the axis. 3

1 – Rendering of the central nave 2 – Northwest to southeast cross-section through the site, between a new power station and the Moskva River 3 – Antonio Belvedere

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THE ART OF REPETITION We are Dorothy

A Brummie, a Scouser and a Manc walk out of an ad agency... thus was born We are Dorothy — a UK studio producing conceptual prints, products and artworks, which range from the intriguing to the offensively hilarious (did anyone see its retirement clocks during Clerkenwell Design Week in London last year?) Blueprint habitués will be familiar with its series of brutalist (and beyond) building prints — we featured Preston Bus Station a while back. The latest addition to the series is Trellick Tower (‘by popular demand’), so we thought this was a good point to take stock of their oeuvre.

Dorothy is Scouser Jim Quail, Manc Phil Skegg and Brummie Ali Johnson, who explains: ‘Our Lost Destination series of prints was born out of our shared love of concrete and brutalist buildings. We wanted to celebrate what we thought were beautiful buildings, which had once been destinations in their own right, but whose greatness overtime had been largely forgotten, overlooked or immersed in the everyday… and in some cases even demolished.’ The range has grown a little over the years to incorporate other buildings, such as ‘lost’ music venues and football stadiums. The selection of prints

is really based on personal favourites in the studio: ‘I’m originally from Birmingham so fought for Spaghetti Junction, Rotunda and the Ziggurat,’ says Johnson. ‘Being based in Manchester it’s hard not to love the Hacienda (and it was one of Phil’s old haunts). Collectively we love Forton Services and the way this UFO-like structure punctuates the mundane motorway journey up to the Lakes. Similarly Fylingdales — it’s straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyone who’s ever got close to the “golf balls” will understand.’ JT wearedorothy.com

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PROJECT Montblanc, Hamburg / Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance

Luxury pen maker Montblanc has just opened its latest store, its European ﬂagship, in Hamburg, the company’s hometown. Designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance had the task of translating the brand’s detailing and narrative into its latest retail environment, ready for a roll-out through its other stores. Johnny Tucker reports

1 COURTESY NOÉ DUCHAUFOUR-LAWRANCE 2 & 3 COURTESY MONTBLANC

There are 35 steps involved in just the making of the 14ct gold nib of a Montblanc pen — so how do you go about translating that kind of detail and narrative into a retail environment? To begin with, designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance has opened with some broad brush strokes, or to be more precise some broad pen strokes. Sweeping black, high-gloss, lacquered panels — ‘the gesture’ — are a key delineating element of the brand’s new, just-opened European flagship store in Hamburg. A few may question why the flagship has opened in Hamburg, or even why Germany at all. Despite its French-sounding heritage, and Mont Blanc itself being in the Alps between France and Italy (Monte Bianco), the brand is actually German. What’s more, Hamburg is the hometown, with the factory just outside this second-largest city in Germany. Set up in 1906 as the Simplo Filler Pen company, the founders wanted to make the best pens they could. The Montblanc name came along three years later and the snow-cap logo was trademarked in 1913. The name was chosen to identify with Europe’s highest peak. Since then Montblanc has grown into a worldwide brand, now owned by Richemont (which also owns Cartier) and has some 520 stores and franchises around the world. Duchaufour-Lawrance, whose work ranges from retail to restaurant interiors, through furniture for brands such as Bernhardt and Tacchini, to one-offs such as a paper kimono for Procédés Chénel, has been working with Montblanc for three years. He has recently completed a number of high-profile Asian stores, refining the design for this European flagship launch that will become the global blueprint going forward. In all, he’s created 10 stores including this flagship. Since its inception, Montblanc has moved

outwards from pens and now has nine distinct, but related, luxury product categories, which also have to come together in the retail environment, while maintaining their individuality. Continuing the broader pen strokes’ analogy, the lacquer panels play off against white ‘paper’ walls. Duchaufour-Lawrance has also introduced a smoky American walnut to soften the black and white palette and play on the luxury theme. With the bespoke furniture he has created, which has an assured lightness of touch, oozing quality, he has contrasted the wood with satin brass detailing for edging and drawer handles, while the surfaces are a charcoal-grey linoleum. ‘I used the wood to help create a connection with home to promote the customer’s personal relationship with the brand,’ explains Duchaufour-Lawrance. ‘The wood is also about the craftsmanship. It’s a luxury wood without being too much. The brass is also a luxury reference without being too overt.’ So essentially the retail concept is about the large, if subtle, brand statements, then the ﬁne detail, plus the organisation of the product into very speciﬁc areas. The project has also been about distilling this environment, in order to turn it into that kit of parts that can be rolled out across a portfolio of retail environments that vary from the big-city stores, down to very tight footprints. Retail merchandising rules have been developed, such as you must enter through watches, and leather goods must always be visible from the entrance or through a window. It’s all made for an extremely complicated product grid (on retail footprints that generally aren’t very large), that also of course has to

1 – ‘The gesture’, playing with ink and the product grid system 2 & 3 – The Hamburg store will be the blueprint for future retail

take in such factors as how you go about segregating types of customer — a comfortable distance between those coming in for a £10 pen refill and others looking to browse at watches, which start at around a grand and shoot up to some eye-wateringly expensive models. There’s also the psychology of elements, such as stool versus seat. A long, expensive purchase requires a relaxing comfortable seat, yet apparently people who haven’t committed feel more comfortable on a stool — less pressurised. In the next couple of months, DuchaufourLawrance will be handing over the design guidelines and his legacy for the roll-out, that will be applied at a rate of around 60 stores a year. He explains the essence of what he has done: ‘I wanted to talk about the ink and the handwriting and the snowcap — which is such a strong symbol. That’s why I wanted to create “the gesture” in the environment. The essentials are that we always need “the gesture” and a balance between the white and black, because I don’t want to have black stores. The balance is due to the categories normally: for instance in watches we have the black resin, with leather goods it’s white and wood. We usually try to open the stores with the black gesture on the left with that finishing just behind the counter. The ink appears on a screen at the entrance, which is the first time Montblanc has done something like this without it having an advertisement on it.’ In conclusion, the new concept is described by Montblanc thus: ‘The luxury Maison expresses its core values in a new immersive retail experience emphasising fine European craftsmanship, a heritage of sophistication and the pursuit of innovation.’ All good so far; it’s just what it’s calling it that’s a little bit worrying: The Maison Of Fine Lifetime Companions. Is it just me, or does that not sound a lot like an upmarket dating agency?

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PROJECT Hendrix Flat, London / Outside Studios and Haines Phillips Architects

1 BARRIE WENTZELL 2 MICHAEL BOWLES-HANDEL & HENDRIX IN LONDON

It was 48 years ago today, that Jimi Hendrix had a pad to stay. His bedroom’s now restored to style, pretty sure it would’ve made him smile. So let me introduce to you, the place that’s waited all those years... 23 Brook Street, Mayfair. By Herbert Wright

In 1966, Jimi Hendrix left New York for London, seduced it and freaked out guitar gods like Eric Clapton with his wild fluidity. In 1967, his way-out debut album Are You Experienced hit no 2, behind Sgt Pepper, and he blew McCartney and Harrison’s minds when he opened a gig with that song. Then he burned his guitar at Monterrey, and America digged it. Next year, he had a place to mellow out... The top flat Hendrix moved into with girlfriend Kathy Etchingham in July 1968, at £30 a week, is next door to no 25 where George Frideric Handel died in 1759. Both four-storey brick houses were built in Sir Richard Grosvenor’s estate shortly before Handel rented it in 1723 (He paid £35 per year.) It’s said that Hendrix once saw a wigged figure standing in the bathroom, in the attic above the bedroom. The Handel House Museum opened in 2001, with its offices in Hendrix’s flat. Since February, the two houses have become Handel & Hendrix in London. Architecture practice Haines Phillips has adapted the building, returning the visitor entrance from at the back in Lancashire Court to Brook Street, installing a learning studio/recital room on the first floor, upgrading access and bringing the lift to the third floor. Another phase of works, further restoring Handel’s rooms, is to follow. The top of no 23 is where it’s happening right now. Outside Studios, led by creative director Catherine Halcrow, has created a Hendrix museum. A discretely grey, fact-packed multimedia exhibition about him montages photos and text to brilliantly build a picture of the man and his London scene.

In pride of place is the guitar he worked up songs on, an Epiphone FT79 acoustic. A separate Record Room about his vinyl collection includes a wall of album covers — psychedelia meets blues legends with Handel’s Messiah thrown in. Not a digital interface in sight. And then there’s the bedroom... Halcrow, working with photographs, journalists’ reports and Etchingham herself, has recreated it meticulously, taking six weeks to assemble it. The dominant feature is the bed, with a hat and guitar laid there and a fringed Victorian shawl canopied over it. They bought the bed, curtains, carpet and hippyquilt cushions from nearby John Lewis. He enjoyed watching Coronation Street, and there’s a boxy TV set on the floor, as are two rotary-dial telephones, an electric bar heater with fake logs, a BOAC flight bag and LPs stacked against the wall. A chunky new-fangled cassette recorder sits on a low table, next to a handwitten sheet with Purple Haze lyrics under a bottle of Mateus Rosé, and a pack of B&H (a brand also favoured by the Beatles for spliffs down at the Apple offices in Savile Row). Ashtrays abound, as do ostrich feathers, giving the room a twist of the Twenties. His reading material is there, mainly Melody Maker and TV Times, plus some sci-fi paperbacks. The bedroom is as cosy as it is groovily bohemian. For Hendrix this was his ‘oasis of calm’, recalls Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch, who visited him there. But the only authentic relic from 1 – Jimi Hendrix with fruit at 23 Brook Street, 1969 2 – The main room of 23 Brook Street faithfully recreated from pictures from the 1969 photoshoot

its original contents is an oval mirror. Everything else is as close as possible. A teapot came through eBay. Halcrow, when not scouring Camden, Chelsea and Brighton markets, marshalled an army of experts for most things. Robert Opie of the Museum of Brands reproduced products including the period boxes of tissues. The chair is by Bates and Lambourne, bedside objects and peacock screen were adapted by Scenetec, curtains by The Curtain Lady, and WallaceSewell made the bedspread. Halcrow says that the wall hanging was actually ‘recreated digitally by Pat O’Leary environmental graphics and printed by Nicola Killeen Textiles’. And that guitar on the bed is another Epiphone, modern but adapted by Beej Guitar Repairs. Nowadays we have a sort of music-driven retro-FOMO — a fear of missing out, but on a scene that’s long past. Bowie’s death rekindled a nostalgia for Eighties’ Berlin, we pine to be in Seventies’ New York, at Studio 54 (see Ian Schrager in Blueprint 343), or maybe see the birth of punk in CBGB or hip-hop in the Bronx. In the late Sixties, London was where it was at, and the closest we can get to being there may be the Brook Street bedroom — real yet ‘unreal’ in the Sixties’ sense, a ‘far-out’ flashback. Except that the air is silent, smoke-free... and Hendrix has gone. He left the flat in 1969 and OD’d in Notting Hill in September 1970. Just before he died, he wrote: ‘The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye’. Then again, his Voodoo Child lyrics say ‘if I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one — don’t be late’. But first, drop by Brook Street.

PROJECT Tate Modern graphic, London / Peter Saville

Graphic design maestro Peter Saville has been commissioned by Tate Modern to create a new image to represent the about-to-be-unveiled extended and extensively altered institution, Liz Farrelly reports

For graphic designer Peter Saville to take on a commission, now that he collaborates with partner Anna Blessmann on art projects too, the stakes need to be high. Working with Paul Hetherington, and Bill Holding of 3D graphics specialist Morph, Saville has created a new image of the enlarged Tate Modern, scheduled to open in June. In the longer term, Saville’s new marque will be used on screen, in print and on merchandise as part of a refreshed identity for all Tate galleries being designed by graphics consultancy North. The world’s most popular contemporary art museum (by visitor numbers) is undergoing substantial alterations to its fabric and operations and needed an image to herald this change. Such a career highpoint — reifying the reinvention of a world-stage institution — is unflinchingly public and therefore risky. When asked about the project, Saville displays signature tenacity by questioning first principles, or as he put it ‘…the PR-culture syndrome of, “we need an image of something before it exists”.’ That something is not only a substantially altered building, combining a Herzog & de Meuron 10-storey addition, refurbished underground spaces and a suite of new galleries north of the Turbine Hall, but also an expanded emphasis on visitor education and engagement, the internationalisation of the collection and the diversification of displays, across media, material and scale. Saville previously helped Tate Modern director, Chris Dercon, and his team visualise the refurbished ‘Tanks’ as installation and performance galleries by, as he describes it, ‘flooding the space with a “Peter Saville Eighties’ spectrum field”’ to create ‘warm [and] cool curves’, all done in Photoshop. While transforming what could look like an underground car park into a promising environment,

Saville identified a problem unique to visualising galleries, namely the political faux pas of including actual ‘art’, which could imply a future exhibit. Last May Dercon turned to Saville again, for an image that would show Tate Modern as ‘a living space… an evolving building… a new silhouette… and a container for art that reveals the relationship between the spaces, but with no art or people’. With characteristic candour Saville recalls: ‘I couldn’t see how to tick the boxes for all their communication needs and I said, “I’ll need help’,” but added that he was ‘delighted to be asked’. His final word was: ‘I’ll try, and if I like it I’ll show it to you.’ But, as there could be no right or wrong solution to such a complex brief, Saville stipulated that his solution not be changed or compromised: ‘It had to have a sense of freedom or it couldn’t be a “sign” for an art gallery.’ Referring to the idea that semiotic signs aren’t fixed but can shift and change meaning, Saville wanted the image to share the same ‘free-spirited… irresponsible’ attitude of art and be ‘fluid, fluctuating, variable and mobile’. In turn it would mirror the extended functionality of the new Tate Modern, including its potential as a ‘third space’, a place that is neither work, home, nor strictly commercial, but that encourages sociability in the contemporary city. Interestingly, that fluidity is central to Saville and Blessmann’s collaboration, which explores the relational experience of being in a gallery and the interaction between artwork, display, space and viewer, where ‘…everything you do changes minute to minute’. Retaining a sense of freedom in such a highstakes project is an achievement in itself, especially considering the multiple stages it went through. After a site walk-through with Dercon, Saville received a vast amount of ‘incredibly complex structural

data’ from the architects. Working with Morph that data was ‘unpicked [and] radically simplified’ to reveal nine ‘significant elements’ within the proposed structure. Working in Photoshop with Hetherington, the ‘volumes’ and composition were converted into blending colours, but Saville recalls that it felt ‘too static’. Going into 3D the team built a model combining transparency and movement, which added a bonus level of interaction between the transparent volumes; looking through the model, overlapping colours become lighter and richer or darker and denser. There’s logic to the allocation of colour to space with the Turbine Hall at the heart, hence the pinky-red, and the chimney a ‘cerulean blue, because it needed to be’, says Saville. The metaphor of ‘revolution for evolution’ stresses new Tate Modern’s wider aims of connectivity, movement and interaction. It’s not often that a new marque, which combines creative pedigree and the potential to achieve ‘classic’ status, sees the light of day. While setting out to imagine an iconic new landmark Saville has presented a solution that works best in motion, which is surely a prerequisite for a truly 21st-century marque. The ‘views’ are in fact ‘stills’, which also emphasises that visitors will approach from all directions, thanks to new landscaping and access points. Similarly, the idea of a fixed facade or main entrance for such an ‘institution’ is so last century. Whatever scrutiny the art world (surely the most critical of communities) gives Saville’s solution, thanks to social engagement — positively encouraged by museums — the public will have its say too. Certainly, the image’s flexibility could facilitate play. Viewed top down, it’s an architectural plan, or rotating through space it becomes an art mothership. If its playful potential is accessible, then the public will surely take it to heart. 1 – Working in 3D the team built a model that combined transparency and movement 2 – Viewing from the north, south, east and west

EVENT Blueprint 20/20 with Ron Arad

At the beginning of the Eighties Ron Arad created an ‘objet trouvé’ chair that was to prove seminal in how he saw himself and how his career progressed from that point onwards. On 22 March Blueprint editor Johnny Tucker will be in conversation with Ron Arad about the Rover Chair at his alma mater, the Architectural Association. Here Ron Arad sets the scene...

what yet, but I had two chairs there, Rover Chairs. No-one really took the chairs seriously, but on Boxing Day in 1981 I was alone in the studio and some guy knocked on the door (salvaged bus doors you could see through) — I told him we were closed and then he said in a French accent, ‘but I want to buy zees chairs’. ‘Ooh! We are open, come in!’ This guy ordered six(!) of them, and gave me a cheque for 6 x £99. After the New Year, Caroline Thorman, who co-founded One Off with me, sees the cheque and says, ‘Jean Paul Gaultier bought six chairs!’ I didn’t know who he was in 1981. After that, but deﬁnitely not because of that, the Rover Chair became our best seller, by our modest standards. However, I didn’t want to become a secondhand car seat dealer, so I decided to stop the two guys with the van and Sid the car trimmer from Kentish Town from churning them out. We declared the last hundred were being made, and they were bought by some Swedish guy.

I read in Blueprint an article called ‘The Man Who Loved Chairs’ about Vitra man Rolf Fehlbaum, who was pictured with the Rover Chair with the caption ‘Ron Arad is one of the most interesting designers to come from London’ — so I found out I was a designer when I read Blueprint, most interesting... More recently, when I was setting up my retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2008, I was shouted at by the installers when I tried to move my own Rover Chair, the one my cats slept on, and my daughter jumped on, because I wasn’t wearing white gloves!’

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND… When 6pm, 22 March Where Architectural Association, London WC1B Entry Seats will be allocated on a ﬁrst come ﬁrst served basis. Doors open at 5.45pm.

1 – Rover Chair with drawings on the back wall of Moreover, in Chalk Farm, 2007 2 – Ron Arad and two Rover Chairs in Neal Street, Covent Garden, 1985 3 – First sketch of the Rover Chair, 1981, ink on paper

ALL IMAGES COURTESY RON ARAD

Ron Arad: ‘I tried to work for an architecture firm after I finished my studies at the Architectural Association — a little practice in Hampstead. It didn’t take me too long to realise I was not cut out to work for other people. It’s even more difficult after lunch — so one day, I didn’t go back to the office after lunch; instead, I went down Haverstock Hill to a scrapyard behind the Roundhouse. I wanted to find the right car seat to be used for making a domestic piece of furniture — an idea I had been toying with for a while. I knew it shouldn’t just be any old car seat — I had to carefully choose ‘the one’ and the winner was from a Rover 2000: leather, symmetrical, amazing recline mechanism, with four fixing points underneath. The first two I bought were red — I thought they were all red, whereas I later discovered red were rare (nowadays double the price in auctions...). I quit my job. I got myself a studio in Covent Garden, not knowing a studio for

DAYLIGHTING ENERGY EFFICIENCY USER COMFORT

©Krischerfotografie Kö-Bogen Düsseldorf | Studio Daniel Libeskind

www.okalux.com

PROJECT Sainsbury’s Digital Lab / Chetwoods Architects

Maintaining a happy and productive workforce of digital creatives is one thing, but housing them in the basement is another. Sainsbury’s Digital Lab manages to do just that, thanks to a unique, collaborative design by Chetwoods Architects that repurposed unused underground space beneath a London office block. Herbert Wright digs out the story

1 DAVID CHURCHILL

A new digital underground has taken root in Holborn Circus, but it’s far from the darknet. Sure, there’s a lot of young people absorbed in computer screens, but they’re spread across a bright space with industrial chic and colour, working for supermarket giant Sainsbury’s. What’s remarkable is that this Sainsbury’s Digital Lab was a dead subterranean cavern until its transformation by London-based architecture practice Chetwoods. Furthermore, its environment can compete with hip, new, urban digital hubs, like those mushrooming in nearby Old Street, to attract talented workers. ‘The initial brief demanded this,’ says the practice’s chairman Laurie Chetwood, ‘despite [it] being in the basement next to the staff canteen’. The site is the eight-storey Sainsbury’s HQ, characterised by its curving corner glass facade and the full-height atrium. Designed by Foster + Partners and completed in 2000, it inherited an unusually large basement from the Daily Mirror Building (1961), an 11-storey slab previously on the site. Architect Sir Owen Williams had engineered its basement 10.67m deep to accommodate the printing hall and foundry. Sainsbury’s Digital Lab uses just 4.4m of that depth immediately below street level, but makes it split-level with a partially suspended mezzanine (engineered by GDP) on which gangways connect hexagonal ﬂoor cells, and plastic insulates the light steelwork against activity-activated rattling. Hexagons are a major motif in the Lab — they shape the lighting

and overhead ventilation pipe configurations — and hark back to Chetwoods’ original concept of the workspace as a hive and a garden. With 854 sq m of floor space and another 136 sq m on the mezzanine, the Lab’s capacity is 120 fixed workplaces, plus break-out areas and observation platforms. The initial impression is that it’s big, but sight-lines are broken by short wall-screens defining largely open work cells and doubling as whiteboards, and original concrete columns. Although busy and complex, it’s calm, with an ambient buzz from interaction and movement. There is some desktop clutter, but photos and paper piles are absent. Photographic green landscape murals on peripheral walls temper the containment, but even without them it would feel a lot more open than a basement. Light plays a crucial role in this atmosphere. Sun pipes were considered, but as Clive White, Sainsbury’s key account manager, explains, that ‘didn’t make sense in terms of value engineering’. All lighting is LED, and light washing the ceiling from dynamic lumieres actually changes over the day, with ‘warm white representing the sunrise and sunset and a crisp white representing midday’. In addition, there’s a linear skylight set in the Holborn pavement, under which is tucked an arc of office ‘studios’, glazed off from the main area. A quietly dramatic element is an open staircase in oak descending from the mezzanine to the heart of the floor, with big sit-down steps either side. Its

suggestion of an amphitheatre was enough for it not to be classified as stairs, thus avoiding mandatory bannisters. Comfy high-backed seating around its foot creates a meeting area-cum-chillout zone, and the two-tone furniture colouring (the raised backs are lighter) contributes to the sense of light in the space. In the space-squeezed city, taking desks underground should trend, and a look is emerging. Architecture practice Make’s contemporaneous basement car-park conversion for its own offices also has an industrial aesthetic jazzed up with colour. But the Digital Lab is also about activity-based working, a counter-territorial concept where you work where you want (or can) and leave everything in a locker. When Jay Chiat first implemented it in his American ad agency in 1993, it was a disaster (workers accessed crucial filing cabinets stuffed into their cars), but it’s come a long way since. It increases productivity and the hot-desking element leverages floor area. Sainsbury’s Digital Lab looks like fun, and even though Chetwood admits ‘the data is not available yet’ productivity gains look certain. Designing flexible space into Microsoft Research’s Cambridge building (2012) provided useful experience. After its visionary design of 1 km-high Phoenix Towers in Wuhan, China, it brings Chetwoods’ skills not just back down to Earth, but into it. 1 – The open staircase with its sit-down spaces either side of the main treads descends into the new basement work space

CURATED DIARY Ben Wheatley

THE NICE GUYS

ICON FILM DISTRIBUTION In cinemas 20 May I don’t know much about this ﬁlm beyond the trailer, but I don’t feel I need to. For starters it’s written and directed by Shane Black, a ﬁlmmaker of legend in many ways. I’m a big fan of his scripts for The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Funny, clever, violent and mainstream, he writes within Hollywood tropes but tweaks and turbo-charges them. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang saw him direct and breathe new life into the detective genre. The Nice Guys looks like a return to that style, a mismatched-buddy violent comedy. iconmovies.co.uk 1

VINYL

HBO From 14 February I was reading the Ladybird book of The Midlife Crisis that features a man in his forties who starts to collect vinyl. I scowled as I looked over to my shiny new record player. They are right of course. It is a sickness. Last week I found myself and a friend listening to Assault on Precinct 13 really loud; I haven’t just sat and listened to music on its own for years. I was lucky enough to see a preview of Martin Scorsese’s new TV show Vinyl. It’s like a lost ﬁlm between Mean Streets and Goodfellas. The equation is different though, less crime, more drugs, more rock ’n’ roll. hbo.com/vinyl

OCULUS RIFT

Release date 28 March I’ve been thinking about this since reading Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in 1992: a headset that allows you to literally sink into another world. I experienced the Samsung version of a VR visor built out of a mobile phone at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was the ﬁrst time in a long time that I’ve felt like I was in the future. This technology will change image-based media forever. oculus.com

1 ICON FILM DISTRIBUTION 2 COURTESY OF HBO 3 COURTESY OCULUS 5 COURTESY RUST 6 PHOTO: BARNABY HINDLE © CASS SCULPTURE FOUNDATION, EVA ROTHSCHILD, 2013

Ben Wheatley is the award-winning British director of Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England and High-Rise (see page 84), which opens this March. In 2014 Wheatley directed the first two episodes of the eighth series of Doctor Who, and forthcoming projects include his first American feature film Freakshift and the sci-fi TV series Silk Road, which he created for HBO. He is currently in post-production on the feature film Free Fire, executiveproduced by Martin Scorsese, and will next embark on a remake of HenriGeorges Clouzot’s classic Wages of Fear

4 UNEASY LISTENING: AN EVENING WITH CLINT MANSELL

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON 24 March I’m a big fan of Clint’s music and I was lucky enough to work with him on the soundtrack for my new ﬁlm High-Rise. He’s touring with a selection of his scores at the moment; big favourites from Requiem for a Dream and Moon will be rubbing shoulders with newer pieces. I caught his last tour at the Barbican and it was great. It’s worth it alone for Clint’s one-ﬁnger keyboard technique and his bashful commentary. Hear the themes big and loud! southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson

RUST

FACEPUNCH STUDIOS Available now Rust is a computer game. You wake up on a beach naked clutching a rock and have to survive in a wilderness. You chop down trees and forage for food, then you meet the real danger: other people. I’ve been playing this for a year or so, but it qualiﬁes for this article because Rust is always being updated, always new. It’s a humanity simulator, you meet real strangers from the wilds of the web and they decide to kill you or help you. It’s emergent gaming at its best, like Minecraft’s psychotic brother. There’s no real winning, just being. playrust.com 4

CASS SCULPTURE FOUNDATION

GOODWOOD, CHICHESTER I live in Brighton and work in London. The prospect of going into town to see an exhibition ﬁlls me with dread; what I do enjoy immensely is a trip to the Cass Sculpture Foundation. It’s set in a wood that houses a changing collection of large modern pieces, a sort of Jurassic Park for art. You push through some bushes and ﬁnd an abstract bronze squatting in a clearing, see something glinting through the leaves and stumble upon a gently chiming collection of steel and glass. The whole experience is very Secret Garden, I’ve rarely seen anyone in there... in fact I don’t know why I am telling you. sculpture.org.uk

BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE

Is internationalism about to become a thing of the past in architecture and design practice, as trade agreements and pacts move to be more exclusionary? A co-founder of Blueprint, James Woudhuysen now speaks to and writes for an international audience on the future of innovation

JAMES WOUDHUYSEN Of course, supply chains for product and building components remain as far-flung as ever, and tendencies toward ‘reshoring’ — bringing back parts of manufacturing from offshore locations — are still vigorously debated, with eggheads at AT Kearney sceptical and the Boston Consulting Group bullish. Yet there are other, more subterranean trends. Disputes have long moved on from the imposition of tariffs and quotas to the demand that inward investors make things with high levels of local content — so much so that among petrol-driven cars those with the most American-sourced components are today made by Toyota. And new, if qualified, kinds of autarchy have emerged. Yes, Apple hardware goes on being mostly manufactured in China; but now China is heading toward the USA in its relative independence from export markets. On top of this, multilateral trade agreements wither, while bilateral arrangements multiply. Moreover, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are strongly protectionist. The USA, Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim countries agreed the TTP in October 2015, but opponents or a world slump could easily frustrate ratification. The putative USA-EU TTIP could meet the same fate. Both are bastard children, chaotically born to exclude China, which since 2009 has been the world’s largest exporter of goods. The two partnerships reveal that, in tomorrow’s bigger-than-ever trade blocs, standards — around sustainability, media correctness and preventive

measures in health and safety — will be used to exclude unwanted imports from non-partnering nations (on top of China, think India). And tensions abound inside the TTIP: the EU worries about the USA taking too many risks in food and pharmaceuticals, while the USA could ﬁne Volkswagen up to $48bn for its iffy vehicle emissions. Designers and architects, wake up! Tracking the provenance of your ingredients, raw materials and labour supply will be more common: one Royal College of Art student has already pioneered a mobile phone app to do just this to supermarket produce. Clearly, food labelling will grow more complex. There’s more. Design professionals will need to know more international law, and should expect truly swingeing reprisals when, overseas, a product is recalled or a building collapses. Design for state-owned exporters will be trickier. It will be harder to move around the planet, and more national prejudice will infect those global conference calls. No doubt, too, an ascendant Africa will be given the China treatment, just as Brussels meddles with democratically elected governments in eastern Europe. In 1932, when the Depression brought about beggar-thy-neighbour policies in international trade and currencies, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson deﬁned the International Style in architecture. Naturally, tomorrow’s world economy will see no simple replay of the Thirties; but who will now come forward to uphold internationalism in architecture and design?

IT WILL BE HARDER TO MOVE AROUND THE PLANET, AND MORE NATIONAL PREJUDICE WILL INFECT THOSE GLOBAL CONFERENCE CALLS. NO DOUBT TOO, AN ASCENDANT AFRICA WILL BE GIVEN THE CHINA TREATMENT...

CHRIS RENTON

Especially since the Eighties, design and architecture have been international in character. My old employer Fitch took over the Ohio product design firm RichardsonSmith back in 1988; just a few years later, Foster Associates won the job to design Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. Today big design and architecture firms not only work all over the world, but have at least a few offices across Europe, China and elsewhere. The globalisation of design practice also dominates multinationals. Samsung’s 1,600 designers work in London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Delhi, Tokyo and Milan, as well as in a Gensler-designed studio in San Francisco (the company will also open Virtual Reality film production in New York City). Now that the Edward Snowden furore has subsided, the Balkanisation of the internet seems set on hold, even if China, Turkey and other countries still censor foreign content on the web. What then could stop the practice of design and architecture crossing borders still further? More than a Brexit or a Grexit from the EU might suggest; and more, too, than might be implied by Brussels versus Washington spats over the taxing (or not) of Google and other American tech firms. There have always been frictions in world trade — around Intellectual Property and around visas for immigrant designers. But since 2008, world trade has been rising at only 80 per cent of the rate of world GDP growth — a turnaround on the pattern of the previous two decades, even if some suggest that trade will grow faster than world output in 2016.

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096 – 114

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Forum for change

Art therapy

Art on the go

The centrepiece of Herzog & de Meuron’s latest building, the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, is a grand, cylindrical atrium modelled on parliament buildings across the world

We sent photographer Gareth Gardner up north to Cardross in Scotland to capture the modernist ruin of St Peter’s Seminary, soon to be brought back to life as a new arts venue

Young architecture practice netzwerkarchitekten has collaborated with six artists to transform six underground stations on Dusseldorf ’s Wehrhahn line, and there’s not an ad in sight

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116 – 132

176 – 192

The bigger picture

In plane sight

Hide and seek

Architects and landscape designers are increasingly finding the benefits of working closely together to create embedded public spaces in our cities. We meet three teams that are leading the way

Hotels at big-city airports are using top leisure facilities, gourmet restaurants and show-stopping lobbies to wow travellers and even attract locals

The latest redevelopment in Rotterdam is OMA’s Timmerhuis, a floating cloud of steel and glass that conceals itself in the fabric of the city. Johnny Tucker takes a tour with Reinier de Graaf

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Conran after Conran

195 – 207

Brutalism

Anthea Gerrie chats to the new top man at Conran and Partners, Tim Bowder-Ridger, about the future of the practice now that Sir Terence Conran has stepped down as chairman

At home with Blueprint

Filmmaker Ben Wheatley has brought the brutality of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise to life in a new star-studded film out on 11 March. Will Wiles takes a closer look at how the film was made

146 – 162

All the wood’s a stage American practice Studio Gang’s new Writers Theatre in a small town in Illinois puts wood centre stage and thrusts the audience up close to the performers. Herbert Wright reports

This issue’s residential focus features a one-off house clad in charred larch by Tate Harmer and a new development by Solidspace and Jaccaud Zein Architects that utilises a split-section instead of an open-plan. Also, 10 esteemed architects and housebuilders share their opinions on the UK’s new space standards

PLAY

FORUM FOR CHANGE Words Cate St Hill Photography Paul Raftery

Herzog & de Meuron’s latest building, a wedding cake-like stack of glass volumes, is home to Oxford University’s first School of Government. Funded by Britain’s richest man, Leonard Blavatnik, its centrepiece is a grand cylindrical void designed to foster collaboration and interaction between future world leaders

Passersby of the new Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, with a quick glance, may only see its imposing stack of modern glass volumes — a strange UFO landed among the picturesque, honey-hued, neoclassical buildings surrounding it — ignorant to the monumental space concealed inside that bores through its seven storeys. Here sinuous balconies twist their way up the cylindrical void, connecting one slightly offset floor to another, as if a sculptor had chiselled away and carved out a beehive. Looking up, smaller light wells cut through the thick bands of concrete, while additional, tightly coiled, spiral staircases break up the rhythm and ringed light fittings repeat the circular motif. The £30m School of Government has the feel of a grand civic building, perhaps a huge library or even a concert hall, not quite a university building and unlike anything else in the sedate stone surroundings of Oxford. For its architect, Basel-based practice Herzog & de Meuron, the circular shape references government and parliamentary buildings across the world and ideas of exchange, congregation and communication. They are also values central to the young school’s mission of improving public policy. Founded in 2010, with a £75m donation from the Ukrainian-born Leonard

Blavatnik, Britain’s richest man, it teaches the practice of government and leadership through degree programmes and short courses as well as carrying out research into issues facing policymakers across the world. Its new purpose-built home, the latest department in the University of Oxford, started on site in September 2013, with the first students moving in in December last year. With 9,800 sq m of floor space, it has the capacity to host more than 550 students, faculty and guests. ‘This is a very global school,’ says dean of the school, Ngaire Woods, of its current cohort of 130 students from 77 countries. ‘Of course government and making government better means working with other people and learning how to get information from other people quickly. What we wanted was a building that brought people together into a heart, in which people can see each other and call on each other.’ Designed from the inside out to foster collaboration and interaction among students and staff, the central space, or Forum as Herzog & de Meuron prefers to call it, links teaching spaces, research areas, meeting rooms and break-out spaces. People can capture glimpses of one another working across levels, while natural lights floods in from above and the sides.

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Forum / Informal break-out Lecture theatre Seminar room Main entrance Research centres Offices and meeting rooms Study room and offices Junior common room Senior common room External terrace Internal courtyard Window on the world

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1 (previous page) – The new Blavatnik School of Government acts as a gateway to the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, still in development to the east

2 (opposite page, top) – Circles are broken up with a rectangular form on the ﬁrst ﬂoor, positioning the building towards the street side of the campus

3 (opposite page, bottom) – The double-skinned facade, comprising an internal glazed wall and an external frameless screen, was inspired by Bodleian Library’s Divinity School

4 – Ascan Mergenthaler, senior partner at practice Herzog & de Meuron

5 – Jacques Herzog

‘Togetherness is so inherent in the design,’ says Ascan Mergenthaler, Herzog & de Meuron partner in charge of the project. ‘Very often in a school you go up some stairs, down a corridor and there’s your office third door on the right, and you hide in it. That’s not possible here, you cannot avoid bumping into people, and even if you have your own office you still have this exposure to the central space.’ The starting point for the design was even closer to home — the manicured quads that are a feature of every Oxford University college. ‘The instinct was a courtyard building with a natural park-like spot in the centre. But the programme was so big and the site relatively small that we couldn’t leave that kind of space open. The courtyard became an internalised space,’ says Jacques Herzog. ‘There are very few cities where you have such a strong topological given, which is of course very impressive as a historic site. But as an architect in such a place, it’s something you have to look at very carefully; it’s dangerous to stick to it too much and be tempted to copy things.’ Initially the Forum’s open, hollow shape was ‘even more of a tribute to parliament,’ notes Herzog. ‘We had many designs where this central space was really made to be an auditorium.

But we preferred to play that down so it’s more of an informal space. That’s certainly where the client had an important part in the discussion: How do you really use it? How do you programme it? To which degree does architecture preconceive that and freeze that as a form, or let it open for change and transformation? Between a Miesian box and a totally organic form there is a big gap and many possibilities, and I think this building is somewhere in the middle.’ At its lowest level, the building houses two lecture theatres (seating 160 and 80 people) and flexible seminar rooms that can be joined together for teaching. A sweeping staircase down to this Forum space fans out to form deep wooden steps for informal gatherings and events. A cafe for students is located on the ground floor, along with the reception, above which are group working rooms and spaces for research programmes. Looking out on to the street from the first floor is a ‘window to the world’ — the largest, double-glazed, single pane of glass in Europe — that frames the stone portico of the Oxford University Press building opposite. It is clad in dark-stained oak, with in-built benches to provide a cosy nook for chance meetings. Further up the building, the second level is occupied by

6 (previous page) – The central atrium space, or Forum, features balconies to provide views across ﬂoors and to help connect people

7 – The double-layered facade acts as an acoustic barrier and thermal buffer zone

8 – The common room on the top ﬂoor offers views across Oxford and the countryside beyond

9 – The ﬁrst ﬂoor features a ‘window to the world’, the largest double-glazed single pane of glass in Europe

10 – The third-floor level is glazed, mimicking the form of the exterior facade and reflecting the ringed light fittings

Lev

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Main entrance Rear entrance Reception Restaurant Servery Kitchen Forum / Informal break-out

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Exchange area Multimedia room Teaching / Formal break-out Research centres

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Lev

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1 Study room 2 External courtyard 3 Offices

1 Study room 2 Junior common room 3 External terrace

1 Benefactorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rooms 2 Senior common room

Lev

Level B2

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Forum / Informal break-out Lecture theatre Seminar room Green room Kitchen Bike storage

1 Plant room

quieter areas and meeting rooms, topped with a third, glass-clad level for offices and reading rooms. Individual, private offices are divided by glass walls, with linear corridors providing circulation around the ring-shaped floor. Small internal courtyards cut through to the outdoor terrace on the fourth level, while two floors of student and faculty common rooms, with views across Oxford, crown the building. Says Mergenthaler: ‘We tried to create a universe of super diverse spaces, from acoustically sealed teaching rooms to very informal possibilities, yet they all share a very strong connection to the central Forum. Teaching is not just one to one anymore, it’s about exchange, talking with each other, and I think this building allows for that.’ Rich, tactile materials also play an important part in creating a warm and inviting interior, where it’s clear no expense has been spared. Floors are made of multilayered, engineered European oak, while sections of the Forum are wrapped in a mid-century-style, dark-stained oak panelling, an echo of the genteel, wood-panelled common rooms frequented by Oxford dons elsewhere in the university. In the interior details, there’s also an element of Alvar Aalto’s mastery of wood, in the way he clad walls and ceilings with thin batons and

screens, to soften sounds and invite you to touch the material. The spacing of the panelling that wraps around the lecture theatres, for example, opens up in sections to provide a visual connection with the Forum. ‘We’ve introduced subtle changes in terms of profiling the wood, staining it and so on, which has to do with what the space is about. It creates a sense of cohesiveness; it’s not a collage of many different things — there’s an underlying common sense to it,’ says Mergenthaler. Additional aggregates have also been added to the exposed concrete, cast in-situ, to make it warmer and more akin to the blonde limestone of Oxford. Says Herzog: ‘The concrete is more like sculpted stone, the surfaces are very smooth — it never looks aggressive in this building. I think it’s important that you have the impression of the materials speaking to you and making you feel comfortable.’ Externally, the school is presented as a series of shifted, glass-clad discs. Pure geometric circles are broken up by a jaunty rectangular form on the first level that positions and engages the building towards the main thoroughfare of Walton Street to the west and away from the 4ha campus of Radcliffe Observatory Quarter behind. Sold to the university in 2003, the former site

11 (previous page) – The Forum opens up at the lower levels, with a spiral staircase and deep steps for informal gatherings

12 (opposite page) – The rich material palette includes exposed concrete and dark-stained oak panelling

13 – The glazed third ﬂoor offers a quieter space for research and individual offices

14 (previous page) – Looking down into the central Forum space from one of the balconies

of Oxford’s first hospital, the Radcliffe Infirmary, bordered by the residential Jericho area, is being transformed into a new academic quarter with a planned humanities faculty, the new Mathematical Institute, library and local health centre. Originally masterplanned by Rafael Viñoly Architects in 2005, the £1.25bn scheme has since been taken over and modified by Niall McLaughlin Architects, which completed student housing for Somerville College on the site in 2011. Herzog & de Meuron’s School of Government sits at the south-west corner, with Somerville College to the south and an empty site awaiting development to the east. The circular shape acts as a gateway to the entire campus, says Mergenthaler: ‘It’s the first building you meet on the campus. It’s very important that the building is inviting and you can flow around it instead of it blocking the campus.’ The shifting floors create overhangs and terraces, which step down from the back of the building, protecting the surprisingly classical and quaint wooden entrance doors. It’s Herzog & de Meuron’s take on the ostentatious wooden gates that conceal colleges from the outside street. ‘We thought it wasn’t adequate to have just a revolving door or something really modern. It’s also the moment you first

15 – The Blavatnik School of Government hopes to make better government and inspire future world leaders

touch the building and we felt it was important to give it a certain significance.’ A double-skinned facade, comprising an internal doubleglazed curtain wall and an external frameless glass screen supported by pre-cast concrete bands, creates an opaque, impenetrable exterior that reflects the sky and buildings around it. The slender proportions of the glass panels nod to the panelled frontage of the Old Bodleian Library’s Divinity School, with elements of James Gibbs’ Radcliffe Camera building and the Sheldonian Theatre. ‘This skin-like quality is what we like so much about historic buildings. We could never achieve the same quality; there was certainly an intention to go away from something in order to be perhaps even closer,’ explains Herzog. Just like many Oxford colleges, the sacred inner sanctum is protected, a world only for a privileged few. At the Blavatnik School of Government, the sense of transparency and openness inside is not quite making the same signals to the outside. It’s inward-looking and impervious, a shiny new beacon for the next generation of political leaders and a statement of the university’s pre-eminence. After all, of the 55 Prime Ministers to date, Oxford has spawned 27 of them, and 12 more than Cambridge.

THE BIGGER PICTURE Words Veronica Simpson

Architecture and landscape professionals are increasingly working closely together, joining forces to make the most of a structure and its setting, or of an entire piece of city. For both small practices and large, the benefits of this joined-up thinking are clear for all to see

Something has changed in the once disparate worlds of architecture and landscape design. A shifting of professional tectonic plates, perhaps, has brought about a greater appreciation of the role of urban landscaping in the knitting together of diverse buildings and neighbourhoods. Architects and their landscaping counterparts are increasingly working closely within masterplanning teams to create new pieces of city that work culturally, socially, ecologically and aesthetically. The game has changed, says Paul Lincoln, deputy chief executive of the Landscape Institute, partly thanks to the success of high-profile and glamorous schemes such as the Olympic Park. Commissioned by landscape architect John Hopkins, who had a vision for how the landscape and the buildings would work together, James Corner’s Field Operations and Dutch planting guru Piet Oudolf (the High Line team) were brought in to create the perfect wild/urban setting for the occasionally brilliant buildings. But the global push towards urbanisation and regeneration has also played its part, as has the disappearance of public money to fund new open and shared spaces. Much of the world’s most interesting new public space is actually private space — such as developer Argent’s generous allocation of parks, fountains and plazas at its King’s Cross site. Developers are realising ‘that public space is what people need and where identity comes from’ says Adriaan Geuze, director of Rotterdam-based architecture and landscape practice West8. ‘It’s not only worth the money, it’s where you make the money. Developers strongly believe that the landscape is key for commercial success.’ Increasing pressure on our planetary resources, and the growing risk of severe flooding, has created additional demand for the skills of those who can shape both soft and hard infrastructure, weaving resilience into the docks, floodplains and estuaries that are most at risk. Interest in biodiversity and planting have never been greater. ‘Ten years ago, no architect had ever looked at my work,’ Piet Oudolf told me a while back. ‘First the building was important and landscape was mostly hard landscaping, and most architects did everything themselves.’ Working more collaboratively than ever before has brought

a new quality of invitation and animation to the best pieces of our towns and cities. Says Oudolf: ‘The dynamic landscape that is from the past 10 years [is due to greater] interest in gardens or spaces that draw people in or let people be part of the city or show the seasonality.’ To illustrate the way in which landscape and architecture professionals of all kinds are now collaborating, from small-scale urban parks to major infrastructure projects, we interview two long-standing partnerships of very different scales, as well as West 8’s director Adriaan Geuze, who sees building and landscape ideally as one continuous journey of drama, narrative and delight. KNOX BHAVAN WITH LAND USE CONSULTANTS

Land Use Consultants (LUC), one of the UK’s major landscaping practices, has collaborated closely with small practice Knox Bhavan, in a relationship that goes back some 16 years. It started when they found themselves working simultaneously but for two different clients on the restoration of Russell Square in central London. LUC was renewing the planting for the Russell Square Association and landowner Bedford Estates, and Knox Bhavan had been commissioned by Camden Council to create a new cafe on the site of an old park-keeper’s hut. Funding for the park — as with all their joint projects subsequently — came through the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Sasha Bhavan reminisces: ‘It was 1996 and the HLF said we’re not going to give money for the landscape unless you do something about that awful building.’ Adrian Wikeley, LUC director, adds: ‘The Duchess of Bedford wanted a Reptonesque conservatory, because Repton was the original designer of the square and had done loads of work for [her family’s] ancestors at Woburn.’ Adds Bhavan: ‘It became very clear that the best thing to do was to get together and work together and it was very successful.’ What Knox Bhavan devised was a light, wood and glass pavilion, nestled into the top corner of the site offering vistas out on to the park. From that point on, they have collaborated on many different pitches for park projects where buildings were required, from community facilities to play spaces and multiple award-winning cafes.

1 (previous page) – Aerial view of The Hive, in Worcester, worked on collaboratively by Grant Associates and Feilden Clegg Bradley and aimed at being a fully integrated public and university library

2 – The cafe in Russell Square, London is a project by Knox Bhavan Architects with Land Use Consultants

3 (opposite page) – The Velo cafe in The Level Park, Brighton and planting, by Knox Bhavan Architects with Land Use Consultants, won a Civic Trust Award

1 SIMON KIRWAN

INCREASING PRESSURE ON OUR PLANETARY RESOURCES, AND THE GROWING RISK OF SEVERE FLOODING, HAS CREATED ADDITIONAL DEMAND FOR THE SKILLS OF THOSE WHO CAN SHAPE BOTH SOFT AND HARD INFRASTRUCTURE, WEAVING IN RESILIENCE

The relationship has clearly been beneficial to both parties. For Knox Bhavan it has given it opportunities to work on much larger schemes than a practice its size (seven staff ) would normally have access to. For LUC, the inclusion of Knox Bhavan’s craftsman-like buildings has both helped LUC to win pitches as well as bring a holistic sensibility to the placement, orientation, materials and programming of the building within its setting. But for Wikeley the appeal was also pragmatic. He says: ‘We just liked working together and we needed a good architect with a good pedigree and [getting] direct access to the principal or director was a plus point for us. We didn’t have many working relationships with smaller practices. We work a lot with Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Foster + Partners, and Grimshaw, and they’re not going to be interested in something as small as a cafe.’ The sharing of sensibilities and objectives between the two practices has undoubtedly contributed to the quality of the resulting schemes. And this has, in turn, garnered great publicity and PR as well as user and peer feedback. Knox Bhavan’s characteristic attention to detail with materials, light, finishes — even in the most mundane spaces, such as toilets — scores points every time. For example, the second scheme it completed within an LUC scheme, Myatt’s Fields Park cafe, was described as ‘a gem of a building’ by the HLF’s inspectors. ‘The loos were quite sensational,’ recalls Wikeley. ‘I don’t know what they look like now but they were unbelievably beautiful when we went round with the HLF. Everyone was speechless.’ Bhavan adds: ‘That is the important thing for us: every building counts; every building is special.’ One of the partnership’s most recent projects, 2013’s The Level in Brighton, won a Civic Trust award, despite the budget and brief calling for little more than ‘a shed,’ according to Bhavan: ‘Just floor, walls, ceilings.’ Its solution? Says Bhavan: ‘The structure becomes part of the decoration. If you need the structure, why not make it beautiful? We have tried to create the thinnest structure you can have, which is more elegant. We insisted that the structural timbers were Douglas fir. The contractor said they should be glulam, but the warmth you get from Douglas Fir makes such a difference.

‘Then there’s the roof and perimeters. We allowed the building to be open to the landscape and completely permeable. But then in the middle of the section, you have a pitched roof.’ To stop that central area from feeling gloomy ‘we put a roof light all the way down, inserted into the most minimal structure possible, so you don’t get a boxy frame. And we put mirrors on the interior of the roof structure so the light is reflected. It makes a beautiful roof, with nicely detailed joints. On the south side, we have made a brise soleil to shade the building from hot sun in the summer, while in the winter the sun can come straight into the building. The north side has the same features but with glass instead of wood, to let more light in. Even the loos are nice — we take care in getting the detailing all the way through, for example making the planking align around the doors.’ It is often hardest to make an impact with these small urban parks, compared to new landscaping says Wikeley: ‘None of them are greenfield sites; all have been designed by someone else. So you are trying to make the best of what was done previously, complying with HLF issues, which are always quite complex, while delivering something that’s the best thing you can achieve for the budget. In one respect it’s all a bit compromised. But the end result shouldn’t appear to be.’ Care and coordination over thresholds — ensuring that materials or paving complement or even carry on through the building — makes all the difference over that perception of quality, says Bhavan, and the sense that the building is conversing with its surroundings: ‘If you take The Level for example, it’s a rectangle and each side is facing a different activity and a change in the spirit of the place. One side is the thoroughfare. The back side looks on to the road. The other side faces greenery, playspace and parents hanging around with children. And the far end, which is kind of dramatic, looks out on to the landscape engaging with what’s going on across the park. The building is definitely orientated in relation to what we know is happening with the land.’ Ultimately, says Bhavan: ‘What we try to do is dissolve the building into the setting…[so] the visitor just feels they are in the landscape and in the park.’

4 JIM STEPHENSON

THE SHARING OF SENSIBILITIES AND OBJECTIVES BETWEEN THE TWO PRACTICES HAS UNDOUBTEDLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE QUALITY OF THE RESULTING SCHEMES

4 (opposite page) – At The Level, Brighton. Despite having a budget and brief for the Velo cafe that called for little more than ‘a shed’, the practices aimed to dissolve the building into the setting

5 – The toilets are part of the cafe development in The Level Park, Brighton

GRANT ASSOCIATES AND FEILDEN CLEGG BRADLEY STUDIOS

It’s fairly clear after conversing with Andrew Grant and Peter Clegg that collaboration comes naturally to both of them. Says Grant: ‘All the best projects we’ve worked on have evolved through trust and collaboration. That’s our starting point really, and when that doesn’t work then you have a different product. It may be successful at one level but doesn’t have the same breadth of appeal.’ During the 19 years that Grant Associates has existed, ‘we have built up a very good network of people we regularly work with’, says Grant. He rattles off a list of highly regarded UK practices, including Hopkins Architects, FCBS, Cullinan Studio, Bennetts Associates, WilkinsonEyre, Grimshaw, and masterplanning work with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Studio Egret West. Some of these schemes are at a phenomenal scale — such as Singapore’s vast, tropical Gardens By The Bay, an outdoor playground festooned with futuristic greenhouses, which Grant evolved with WilkinsonEyre. Collaboration hasn’t always come naturally to the architecture profession, he says: ‘And I think there are still architects out there who have very strong, traditional views: “I’m the architect and everyone has to fall in line”… it doesn’t take the best advantage of everyone.’ Collaboration is decidedly in the air now, Grant and Clegg agree, citing pioneering research that architect Andrew Wright (Andrew Wright Associates) has been conducting into integrated design, interrogating the normal traditions of construction. Through this he is evolving new ways for engineers, contractors, landscape designers and architects to work together more strategically, by placing specific skills in service of better outcomes rather than according to the perception of whose responsibility lies where. ‘The reality is that we need to change the way we do things,’ says Grant. Clegg adds: ‘It’s interesting that Andrew and I have been working together for years but we hit the headlines with our collaboration with Accordia, and that kicked the whole thing off.’ Accordia was a Stirling prize-winning residential scheme (2008) that FCBS and Grant Associates worked on together with Alison Brooks Architects and Maccreanor Lavington. An assortment of handsome, low-carbon, modern, family houses without gardens were programmed into a landscape that reinforced community

connection and shared resources. The underpinning idea was to have residents feel like they were ‘living in a garden’ with each outdoor space having a theme — for example, a ‘Kitchen Garden’, a ‘Long Walk’ and the ‘Central Lawn’. A network of paths is defined by walls, hedges and boundaries, enhanced with mature trees and new planting. Circulation is via a series of ‘mews streets’ for shared use between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. And throughout the landscape, coloured and textured surface treatments complement the architectural materials. The landscaping clearly extends and enhances the cultural and social programming of the architecture. But as a landmark single building in a distinctive setting, the most striking collaboration has to be Worcester’s The Hive. A partnership between Worcester County Council and the University of Worcester, the aim was to create a fully integrated public and university library. Says Clegg: ‘It had a fantastic brief... it was really interesting in terms of challenging what a library was. It’s for children as well as elderly people and university students, and sits on the city archive. It had an exceptional environmental brief — BREAAM excellent and it got Outstanding in the end. It was very carefully considered in terms of technical considerations and it was a great site. The topography was fascinating.’ Situated between the medieval city centre and the riverside, it was conceived as a ‘social landscape’, offering horizontal and vertical connections to all users via a series of ramps. Its undulating levels and angled planes were inspired by the nearby Malvern Hills. Says Grant: ‘It was a project you could really get your teeth into, an amazingly rich programme of uses. From my perspective, it was flood plain, with incredibly complex level changes in an amazing historic setting. It was ecologically interesting, with incredible narratives you could draw on for the landscape — particularly things like the children’s spaces — to create really interesting space for different user groups.’ Clegg adds: ‘It seemed to me that it was one of these exquisite bits of collaboration in lots of ways, because we brought in our friend Max Fordham and it was immediately engaged with the idea of doing something that had natural ventilation and lighting drawn from pyramids. We brought in our friend Neil Thomas, a radical engineer who worked on the Earth Centre with us. He convinced our clients the contractors half

6 – Sketch showing a cross-section with landscaping for the Central Belt at Accordia 7 (above) – Built form blends with landscaping at the Stirling Prize-winning residential scheme Accordia, in Cambridge

6 GRANT ASSOCIATES

8 – Circulation at Accordia is shared here via cycle and pedestrian paths

way through the building project that it was cheaper to do all of these pyramidal forms in timber rather than steel and concrete. It is very nice when you have people you trust and know who can come in at the right time. It was a very good collaboration all round.’ Having worked together for so long — their partnership started in 1994 — are there instances where one of them has changed the other party’s minds completely as a result of a conversation or insight? Grant says: ‘Accordia was an interesting one. It wasn’t radical, but there was a plan for the site that had been sketched out when we got involved and it was more about the scale of that place, the proportions, the relationship to existing trees and views, and we were able to shift the plan round to have a greater diversity of types of open space.’ Says Clegg to Grant: ‘You had a huge impact on that one. And it was Keith [Bradley] who recognised the value of that and the idea of creating a community of buildings united by a garden; houses in a shared garden. I don’t think we could have done it without the strength of [your] ideas and the strength of the concept of different types of space.’ Clegg points to another strand of work the pair often collaborate on, which is university masterplanning, from Manchester to Bath to the still evolving masterplanning of Sheffield. As the pair discuss this scheme, it becomes clear that when FCB was invited to handle the masterplan, its first instinct was to devote a large amount of space and budget to landscaping. Clegg elaborates: ‘The client said to us, “I get all these students who don’t want to come here because we haven’t got enough trees. Everyone wants to go to Nottingham, because they’ve got these parks.”… The landscape is very important… and it just seemed to us that it was more 50:50 landscape and buildings. In terms of masterplanning, there’s a real creative role for practices like Grant’s.’ Grant concludes: ‘In the period we’re talking about I think the agenda for landscape has become richer in terms of what people are looking for, particularly in urban areas. There is the sustainability issue of urban drainage. And how do you use landscaping to address this idea of wellbeing and health? We can bring to bear something about food production, biodiversity, how you orientate buildings and how you create the variety of urban spaces that will attract significant user groups.’ 9 – University masterplanning is another strand of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Grant Associates’ collaborations, with much attention given to landscaping. Here Sheffield University is shown

10 (right) – The Hive, a project by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Grant Associates, was conceived for clients Worcester County Council and Worcester University as a social landscape

10 HUFTON+CROW

WEST 8

West 8 is one of Holland’s most celebrated design consultancies, combining the disciplines of architecture and landscaping in-house to ensure a more integrated kind of place-making. This sensibility and sensitivity to both structure and setting has been vital in the creation of new public spaces, from London’s Jubilee Gardens (2012) to Hong Kong’s rapidly evolving destination, West Kowloon Cultural District Park. But few spaces better demonstrate West 8’s approach than Rotterdam Centraal station. Truly a collaboration between West8 founder and director Adriaan Geuze and two architect friends, ( Jan Benthem of Benthem Crouwel and Marcel Blom of MVSA), the trio set up a standalone company, TeamCS, in 2004, in addition to their main practices, in order to collectively resolve the problems that had come to afflict this now vibrant Dutch city’s main transport hub, and to stitch the station back into the fabric of the city. Geuze starts every project with a thorough analysis of the political, economic and cultural reality of the site. In the early 2000s the situation for Rotterdam Centraal could hardly have been worse. Once a handsome-enough modernist station, with clear vistas through its curving concourse on to the city centre, by the Eighties it had become visually and culturally messy. Pedestrians had to cross an assortment of cycle, bus, road and tram lanes to get to its main entrance, the interior of which was stuffed with shops and kiosks, obscuring the once-clear front elevation and that crucial welcome into the city. Far worse, culturally, had been the decision to locate a methadone-dispensing clinic at one end, to combat the city’s then severe drug problem. The police had officially declared it a ‘no-go zone’ at night. An ill-advised scheme by Will Allsop in the early Nineties, proposing a station in the form of three champagne glass-structures — at a time when Rotterdam’s social and economic problems were reminiscent of modern day Detroit — was chosen as the Social Democrat party as its campaign emblem for the local elections. The electorate vigorously booted its proposals out. As Geuze says: ‘The design was considered the maximum bombastic statement of cynicism. The city required a station that really fits Rotterdam.’ It was at this point that Geuze invited his friends to make a team

and resolve this crucial site with something uplifting, poetic and fit for the dynamic future the city aspired to. ‘We first of all analysed public realm. We put bus linkage at the left, all the trams at the right and the middle is the welcome for the traveller, where people are allowed to walk into the city without any hindrance,’ says Geuze. This welcoming facade now opens on to a large plaza, culminating in an esplanade down to the main city thoroughfare. Previously, the entrance on to the wide, trafficdominated main boulevard had, as Geuze puts it, ‘a reputation of being totally sterile, windblown, no plinth, no shops.’ The gesture that now dominates this site is the stainless-steel-clad cone of the building. An iconic element, the proportions of this folded steel roof are calculated to connect the human scale of the passengers to the statuesque proportions of the tower blocks scattered around the site. The angle of the cone points to the heart of the city, inviting travellers into its spacious, uncluttered concourse while its ‘skirts’ lift on either side to form portals for, respectively, bus or tram users. This concourse sits directly above the subway train system, so the cone had to be engineered to sit on top of three existing structural pillars, without disrupting transport flows at any point. The underside of the cone is clad in agricultural-style timber panelling. The timber slats are untreated and of different thicknesses so that the surface appears slightly irregular, offering a texture and patina that will get richer as it ages. It also offers a tranquil acoustic, in contrast to more typical stone, steel and glass transport concourses. This calmness is enhanced by a huge video screen attached to one of the roof planes, linked to a webcam at Rotterdam’s docks, for the serene ugliness of passing container ships and crane activity to beam down on to the passengers, reminding them of the city’s great economic asset and industrial heritage. Geuze says that even with the stainless-steel tiles on the exterior, the construction team were asked to leave some softness and variation so that, rather than being smooth and precise, the steel surface undulates and ripples; dazzling on a sunny day, it also reflects the dappled grey intensity of a moody winter sky. Although station platforms had to remain unchanged — and in operation throughout — a vast, glass roof now bathes passengers

11 – Aerial view of the Park Pergola Maximapark, in Utrecht, by West8. The 6m-high open pergola surrounds a green courtyard in the park

12 – Ivy is already growing up the pergola at Maximapark, Utrecht, by West 8

13 (opposite, top) – Solar panels create a shadowforming roof over train platforms at West 8’s Centraal Station, Rotterdam

14 – The clock and the station’s name have been retained but repositioned at the entrance to the Rotterdam station

15 (overleaf) – The main entrance to West 8’s Rotterdam Centraal rail station is now fronted by a cycle, bus, tram and car-free plaza for a safer and welcoming vista for arriving passengers

11 YOUR CAPTAIN LUCHTFOTOGRAFIE 15 JANNES LINDERS

16 – West 8 has created an exotically landscaped Cultural Boulevard for the West Kowloon Cultural District Park in Hong Kong

in daylight. To harness energy, the 250m-long roof structure incorporates 130,000 solar cells, which cover the total roof area of 28,000 sq m. But the arrangement of these semi-transparent panels allows the varied patterning of the solar cells to throw a fascinating shadowplay on to the platforms and passengers, like tropical leaf patterning in a greenhouse. Says Geuze: ‘The roof is made from the lowest-budget catalogue product from the glasshouse industries. But the print of the solar-shade pattern makes them beautiful.’ Texture, lighting, choreography, all of these have been honed and refined by Geuze and his team to the point where the experience of passing through the station is like journeying through a continuous landscape, connecting all the rises and falls, the delights and surprises that a walk through an ideal garden might evoke. For the concourse, dramatic beams of daylight are directed on to pedestrians via long skylight slashes. These slashes are topped with geometric rooflights whose contours have been lined with mirror panels to concentrate shafts of light down on to passengers. For his inspiration, Geuze directs me to a Rembrandt painting: a scene thick with chiaroscuro, where sunlight splashes on the face of a girl and the gold uniform of a soldier. Lighting was the crucial element, says Geuze, in avoiding that typical, clinical terminal look — ‘everything stainless steel, granite, everywhere 1100 lux because that’s the maximum for efficiency, like a German airport or Heathrow. We thought that will never do. It became our allergy. We were fighting against the terminal concept. So we thought: let’s make it open to the light. How can we over-illuminate the arrival to the platforms then invite people to walk into the half shade of the concourse, with beams of light smashing on to the granite, and then the bright light when they walk into the city. We [wanted to] dramatise the ritual walk of the commuter who has maybe grabbed a coffee and then is rushing from home to school or work. We wanted the station to be an uplifting part of this ritual: dancing, walking from the half-light into the beam light of the hall and the contra light of the city.’ Finding a way to make the station meet the very different characters of the north and south sides was also a priority. The north side looks on to a largely low-rise, domestic neighbourhood, with a 19th-century street grid. Here, the station is low level and

semi-transparent, with greenery along its perimeter that once planting is established should also reflect greenery through the glazing back into the train shed. A tunnel that users from the north used to access the station entrance has been switched for an elliptical, 15m-wide cyclist and pedestrian viaduct, regularly punctuated with circular, frosted-brick-glazed rooflights that reveal the choreography of commuters above. ‘Daylight is everywhere,’ says Geuze. ‘It was even brought below ground: a new floor light was punched through between the train tracks so that daylight can filter down along the subway concourse.’ There is much going on at and beneath the surface to leave the area around the station clear of clutter, achieving a continuous public space; from the use of the same regionally typical red granite floor tiles across all exterior and interior spaces, including the train platforms, to placing a garage for 750 cars underneath the esplanade, along with a park for 5,200 bicycles. Say Geuze: ‘If you solve parking for bicycles in the Netherlands you get a clean station area. In Amsterdam, there’s around 30,000 bicycles parked in a circle around the station, chained to every lamp post and bench. We also introduced a conveyor where the cyclist could go under the plaza and bike into the station.’ The final touches were to bring some continuity between the old and the new. Geuze and his colleagues wanted to retain the old station clock and the iconic modernist typography of the station’s name, which used to be at the top of the building. Now it sits lower down on the glass facade, closer to human level. Two concrete sculptures that used to flank the old station — nicknamed ‘the cookies’, perhaps because of their biscuit-like finish — have been reinstated, adorning train platforms 1 and 14. Also, Geuze proposed that a common motif permeate the building, from roof joints through pillars to handrail fixings: a Y shape inspired by the concrete supports of the Zeeland bridge near to where Geuze grew up, and which he crossed many times. The Y becomes a ‘leitmotif’ through the building and beyond, he says, including the Y-shaped trees he has planted on the esplanade (London Plane trees). In this way, he says, there is a character that permeates the whole environment. ‘Things are not neutral, they are in your face. They do something with you. They overwhelm, they manipulate.’

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BRUTALISM Words Will Wiles

Turning the works of JG Ballard into film has been a suprisingly rare thing occurence, especially so when you consider in what high regard his output is held. Now filmmaker Ben Wheatley has taken on 1975â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High-Rise and it opens in UK cinemas on 11 March

JG Ballard has never found a comfortable place in the cinema. Since his death in 2009, Ballard’s critical and popular reputation has never looked more secure: his complete works have recently been handsomely republished with shining new introductions by the two generations of British authors who bear the stamp of his influence. But where are the films from those 19 novels and scores of short stories? Steven Spielberg adapted Empire of the Sun (1984), but in the process an outlying novel became more Spielberg than Ballard. David Cronenberg did sturdy, faithful work adapting the controversial Crash (1973) in 1996, to the sound of one hand clapping. (Let’s not ponder where the other hand was.) Beyond these, little but arthouse excursions. The idea has arisen that Ballard is somehow unfilmable. It’s nonsense — Ballard’s work is steeped in the moving image — but myths like this arise when even a novel like High-Rise can’t make it into celluloid. Arguably Ballard’s most famous book, High-Rise concerns a new London tower block with 2,000 residents, an expression of brute architectural idealism and social engineering. The block almost immediately declines into savagery and tribal warfare, but the transgressive twist Ballard gives to the story is that the residents appear to prefer it that way. Published in 1975, High-Rise perfectly captured the moment utopian modernism ran aground, and it’s long been regarded as the lead candidate for feature-film treatment. But the rights have trickled through the hands of a number of directors over the decades — Nicholas Roeg, Bruce Robinson, Vicenzo Natali — and nothing came to pass. When it was announced that the latest in that unhappy succession was the British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, Ballard’s

fans were cautiously optimistic. Wheatley’s back-catalogue had a good mix of Ballardian characteristics: sinister, streaked with violence, home to a dissenting strain of Englishness, over-arched by midnight humour. And he knew Ballard. ‘I first read High-Rise as a kid, when I was about 16, 17,’ Wheatley says. We meet on the top floor of Studio Canal’s poky Soho office — the stern angles of William Blake House peer over his shoulder throughout the interview. ‘The feeling from Ballard was that there was this kind of radiation coming off him, like he was dangerous, scary, quite the thing to read. Initially his phrasing is so cold and so odd that he can take anything and make it feel alien. Where other science-fiction writers are shooting off in space ships, he’s looking at car crashes.’ Wheatley’s High-Rise — written by Amy Jump, and starring Tom Hiddlestone, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss — should finally put to rest the notion that Ballard can’t be filmed. It’s a exquisite, mesmerising film with the better qualities of a nightmare. And it’s one of the most consummately architectural films of recent years. Its setting, an immense tower block in London’s Docklands, first of a planned group of five around an ornamental lake, has a malign charisma that defies easy description, but which reaches into every unsettling scene. Part of this power is its blunt anachronism. It’s a 2016 film of a 1975 book, but set in a time that is neither. ‘From Ballard’s point of view, the late-Seventies didn’t exist, so we had kind of a free rein to make it like a bubble that the film exists in, but didn’t happen,’ Wheatley says — 1980 as if the Seventies went on being the Seventies, and didn’t get steered into a ditch by postmodernism and Margaret Thatcher, the same bubble of post-

1 (previous page) – Empire Design’s ﬁlm poster for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise minus the text

2 – The period-style High Rise home owner’s manual

3 – Scenes from the ﬁlm starring Tom Hiddlestone and Jeremy Irons

4 (following page) – Storyboards convey the tower block declining into savagery

1 EMPIRE DESIGN 2 MICHAEL EATON 3 (IMAGES WITH ACTORS) AIDAN MONAGHAN, (OTHER IMAGES) STUDIOCANAL 4 BEN WHEATLEY

5 5 – Graphic design by Michael Eaton for the ﬁlm ranges from record sleeves, through cigarette packets to the home owner pamphlets on page 88 6 – High-Rise’s tower block slants at an uncomfortable angle, giving a sense of foreboding

Seventies that contains A Clockwork Orange. As a result there’s a kind of glowing hyper-reality to it — a period faithfulness that rejects easy pop-cultural reference. ‘We didn’t want to get stuck in fetishising Seventies’ design — we were always trying to pick stuff slightly to the left of it. There are classic bits in it, but there’s no bubble TV [or] Watney’s party barrel… To go to the past like that should put you into an alien space, not into a comfortable childhood space.’ For the architecture of the tower itself, Wheatley and production designer Mark Tildesley toured Britain’s dwindling stock of brutalist buildings — the South Bank, Barbican, Trellick Tower and Alexandra Road in London, as well as John Madin’s (now demolished) Central Library in Birmingham. ‘The problem I’ve had with stuff in the past,’ Wheatley says, ‘is that when you let an art department loose on a period reconstruction, they go a bit crazy, and they lose the proportions of things. And the Seventies is quite small. When you go around the Barbican… it’s like the Fifties when you go inside. Everything’s really tiny. The same with the Trellick as well.’ Having been rebuffed from shooting in a number of locations — including the Birmingham library — Wheatley and Tildesley found a sports centre in the Northern Irish seaside town of Bangor. ‘It was next to a police station, but in a poor area,’ Wheatley says. ‘So it had never been gussied up in the Eighties, but also it had never been vandalised.’ This gave them one of the tower’s most important locations, a swimming pool, and period-appropriate corridors and offices. Within the sports centre they built the rest of the sets, using it as a reference point. They quickly encountered an architectural conundrum.

The tower has all the facilities its residents might need under one roof, including pool, gym, supermarket, luxurious penthouses and cramped affordable flats. How could this all be made to feel like a single coherent place? The solution they devised is ingenious: an intrusive structural system of diagonal bracing. These macho slanting supports are visible in almost every shot within the tower, and they give rise to its single most obvious and memorable feature: a raked top that gives the uppermost storeys a nerve-wracking overhang. ‘We had this idea that the building was very unsympathetic to the people in it,’ Wheatley says. Even in the better flats, kitchens are uncomfortably squeezed in around the slanting columns and useless negative space is formed. Meanwhile the overhang serves the plot: on one side, balconies ascend like a ziggurat, disrupting residents’ privacy; on the other, there’s a drop waiting like a diving board for someone to take the plunge. The fate of the occupants of the building is ingrained in its form, an architectural ID. Structure as destiny. As the building’s psychosis starts to take hold, the slant even expresses itself beyond the tower’s walls — for instance in the tipped-over box files in the office of Laing, Tom Hiddlestone’s character. For the internal concrete surfaces, Tildesley developed ‘a sort of rippled cross-breed’ of the bush-hammered Barbican concrete and the South Bank’s formwork. ‘We did that in a sort of plaster sheet and applied it like wallpaper, says Tildesley. Similarly careful is Michael Eaton’s graphic design, visible throughout the film — particularly in the cheerful dystopia of the supermarket, where every product, from cornflakes to paint, shares the same packaging language. Again, the fundamental

5&6 MICHAEL EATON

effort was simplicity, unity and an eye for period — only a couple of typefaces, sourced in part from the Bangor sports centre, and used for everything. The structural unity of the high rise gave the crew scope for some clever tricks in set design. A regular problem in filmmaking is that films are often not shot in chronological or plot order and instead jump back and forward through the script. For a film like High-Rise, where the whole environment progressively goes to hell, this poses an acute challenge: sets must be trashed, then restored, possibly over and again. ‘We didn’t have a huge budget, so we had to think quite cleverly on our feet,’ says Tildesley. ‘So we actually made building blocks that could be moved quite quickly.’ With these modular elements ‘we could ruin flats and put them back together again, and expand flats and then make them into smaller flats’. One layout was made to serve as two flats by simply mirroring the film. ‘We had to make sure all the numbers were reversed, anything like that, and then we literally flipped the film, so rather than being a left-handed flat it’s a right-handed one.’ Above all these permutations and recombinations comes a splendid surrealist joke: the penthouse is occupied by Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, played by Jeremy Irons. This is a roughly in-keeping assemblage of mirrored surfaces and shag-pile sofa pits, but set in a formal garden worthy of Versailles, the domain of Royal’s wife (Keeley Hawes). This gives Wheatley scope for some characteristically dreamlike touches: a white horse wandering his halls, a minimalist studio in a half-timbered Marie Antoinette barn, conical concrete air-con vents amid the trim lawns steaming like B-movie craters. Royal

has the penthouse in the book, but this garden is all Wheatley, and a wonderful addition to the mythology. One last detail to the film’s aesthetic — although it’s one that does not appear in the film itself — is a witty trailer, written by Wheatley himself, structured as an advert for apartments in the building. It bears some resemblance to the opening sequence of David Cronenberg’s first film, Shivers (1975), in which parasites in the water supply of a Canadian tower block turn its residents into orgiastic killers. Shivers has what Ballard expert Dr Simon Sellars calls an ‘eerie symbiosis’ with High-Rise: deeply similar in concept and mood, they were written at exactly the same time, completely separately. Was Wheatley tipping his hat to High-Rise’s long-lost twin? Surprisingly, the answer turns out to be no. Though he knows Shivers well, the inspiration was closer to home: a real advert made by housebuilder Redrow for apartments in east London, which attracted a barrage of online mockery last year for its sinister tone and apparent acknowledgement that you have to be a moneyed City sociopath in order to afford a flat in London. ‘We were thinking “God, this is hysterical, this is the trailer for High-Rise, pretty much”, so we re-imagined that,’ Wheatley says. But it’s also a way to put across the basic premise of the film without simply stringing together plot points, in the manner of too many modern trailers. What’s more, it does a great job of selling the polished, seductive world that Wheatley, Tildesley and the rest of the team have created. ‘I liked the Twitter comments, people saying “Oh my God, I was going to move in there, I like this Seventiesthemed tower block — but then it went weird…”’ And he laughs.

7 STUDIOCANAL

7 – The tower blocks in High-Rise, arranged around an ornamental lake and yet to complete, have a sinister charisma

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ART THERAPY Words and photography Gareth Gardner

Finally made safe after decades of decay, St Peterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Seminary, designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, is about to begin the next stage of its extraordinary life. Gareth Gardner explores Scotlandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iconic modernist ruin

As the commuter train from Glasgow pulls into Cardross station, it’s a dreek winter’s day. Clouds obscure views over the Clyde, the air is loaded with moisture. A taxi then heads into the countryside, the ride terminating at a gap in the trees, the start of a well-worn driveway. The journey proceeds on foot, circumventing vast puddles, pursuing a route through mysterious woodland, across steep gorges and over the rushing waters of Kilmahew and Wallacetown burns. After crossing a semi-derelict gothic bridge, the parapet fragments smothered in graffiti, the lane curves sharply left. And there it is, suddenly emerging from woodland, the hulking structure of Scotland’s most celebrated modernist building. Water is everywhere, cascading off surrounding embankments, gathering inside the former chapel creating a formal pond while turning the inner quadrangle into a sodden quagmire. The arresting ruin of St Peter’s Seminary looks nothing more than the abandoned relic of contemporary civilisation in a dystopian near-future, about to be discovered by the characters of a Margaret Atwood novel. Of course, that’s exactly what it is. Our present is a future not envisioned for this priest training college when it was designed in the early Sixties by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of architecture practice Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. Now, after coming perilously close to being lost forever, the former religious institution is reopening as a secular arts venue. During nine nights in March visitors will walk the same route through the 60ha site. They will safely be able to explore the ruins, transformed with a series of light installations, projections and a choral soundscape by composer Rory Boyle. The Hinterland event, produced by Glasgow-based arts organisation NVA, is the official launch event of Scotland’s Festival of Architecture 2016 and also marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the seminary. There’s no doubt that news of the reopening has aroused the passions of latter-day modernists and brutalists around the

world. Thanks to its story of decay, dereliction and discovery, St Peter’s Seminary has attained almost mythical status. The seminary’s original plan consisted of three modernist blocks constructed around the Victorian Kilmahew House, surrounded by landscaped gardens and ancient woodland. The main building contained key elements, including chapel, sanctuary, crypt, sacristy and student accommodation within a distinctive ziggurat design. This stepping-back section allowed internal balcony corridors, serving a matrix of cells with distinctive barrel-vaulted ceilings, to overlook the chapel and refectory below. A separate teaching block featured upper-storey classrooms dramatically cantilevering over the library below. There was a separate convent building for the nuns, and the baronial Kilmahew House was integrated as professorial accommodation. The design was hugely influenced by the work of Le Corbusier, in particular the Convent of La Tourette near Lyon. ‘St Peter’s is one of the most important modern buildings in Scotland, and also one of the most directly Le Corbusian in its influences. There is a direct and vital link to Corb in Scotland, more than anything managed in England,’ explains Twentieth Century Society director Catherine Croft. Yet even on completion it was already doomed to failure. Despite its modern forms, St Peter’s was already a throwback. The secularisation of society was prompting a steep decline in the number of those entering the priesthood, and the building was never filled to its capacity of 100 students. ‘They had this fabulous location and a beautiful building, but it was all at the wrong moment,’ says Croft. ‘Not only was there a big fall-off in people wanting to be novice priests, but this building was about siting them in the countryside where they could commune with God in nature, rather than deal with a growing concern for inner-city social issues.’

2 1 (previous page) – The ﬂoor of the former chapel was ﬂooded during the wet winter 2 – Despite years of decay, the reinforced concrete frame and precast cladding remains surprisingly sound 3 (opposite page) – A small community of sisters, serving the trainee priests, lived in their own convent block

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4 (previous page) – The ﬁrst-ﬂoor classrooms of the teaching block dramatically cantilevered over the library

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5 – The original entrance was across a moat

6 (opposite page) – A vast amount of debris has been removed in preparation for the ﬁrst visitors to the Hinterland event

A papal decree underlined this change of approach, explains John Allan, consultant for Avanti Architects, who will be presenting a paper on the project at DoCoMoMo’s 14th International Conference later this year. ‘Added to various technical shortcomings in the building construction, these factors meant that its days were numbered even before completion,’ Allan says. The building was beset by functional problems, causing disputes between architect, engineer and client. It was freezing cold in winter, leaked profusely and was draughty. Maintenance costs spiralled while the priests shivered in increasingly bitter conditions. ‘We have interviewed lots of priests who were there in the Sixties. It would have made a monastic life look comfortable,’ says NVA creative director Angus Farquhar. Since its closure as a seminary and deconsecration in 1980 — just 14 years after it opened — it was used as a drug rehab centre before being abandoned entirely in the late Eighties. A fire fatally damaged Kilmahew House in 1995 and it was demolished. Over the past 25 years — far longer than the building was ever put to its intended use — the remaining derelict structures have enjoyed a half-life as a nexus for alternative culture. ‘It became the quintessential postwar romantic ruin; it decayed rather beautifully,’ Croft says. Concrete was smothered in graffiti, the advancing dereliction captured by urban-exploration photographers. It was a popular hang-out for goths, the location for music videos, and a place of pilgrimage for architecture students who were unafraid to crawl under the boundary fence. Concerns that the building was being desecrated and used for the black arts prompted the Roman Catholic Diocese to have the sanctuary altar jackhammered. ‘There was the idea that it had this mysterious life after dark, a gothic horror,’ Croft says. The altar’s broken pieces now lie arranged around its cruciform base, one of the few identifiable fragments of the building’s religious past. As the state of the building further deteriorated, attracting

the attention of both the Twentieth Century Society and the World Monuments Fund, various plans were proposed for its rehabilitation. In 2008, developer Urban Splash, working with architect Gareth Hoskins, advanced a scheme to transform it into a mixed-use housing and leisure scheme. This was abandoned in 2011, with the Archdiocese of Glasgow announcing that no commercial scheme would be viable for the site. Meanwhile NVA, an organisation with a reputation for creating large-scale public artworks and happenings, had been working on its own plans, harnessing a mix of public and private funds to partially restore the building as a cultural venue. It was given the site the same year that Urban Splash withdrew. ‘The Church realised that we were the last chance for this building,’ claims Farquhar. NVA drew up a 20-year masterplan, working with Avanti Architects, NORD Architecture and ERZ Landscape Architects, drawing inspiration from such projects as Berlin’s Neues Museum, aiming to retain the spirit of ruin. The overall approach is democratic and multifaceted, encompassing education, public involvement, art and performance while providing an insight into the architecture and the people who lived and worked there. Manifold initiatives range from restoring the estate’s Victorian walled gardens with the assistance of local residents, to creating a new Agora-style people’s assembly. Says Farquhar: ‘It will be a place to generate ideas as well as see art, a place to come and participate and be challenged.’ There is the inevitable debate about how best to go about restoration, a common thread through projects as diverse as the Neues Museum, the nearby Mackintosh Library at Glasgow School of Art, and Clandon Park in Surrey. ‘The restoration asks lots of big questions, about whether its new productive afterlife can be as rich as its period of decay. A large part of the myth surrounding the building was that it was derelict,’ Croft says. There was excitement in it being discovered, the thrill of trespass.

10 7 (previous page) – Looking down into the sanctuary, the shattered fragments of the altar are clearly visible 8 (opposite page, top) – The processional ramp leading up into the chapel is now a showcase for street art 9 (opposite page, bottom) – With all the glazing lost, the former library has a very direct relationship with the surrounding woodland 10 – A few of the glulam beams spanning the sanctuary remain. There are plans to restore the timber roof structure and rebuild the lantern on top

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11 (opposite page) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The famous barrel vaults of the main building are set to be dramatically lit during the Hinterland event

12 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The ziggurat arrangement of the upper ďŹ&#x201A;oors meant that the internal corridors serving the cells upstairs had views over the chapel and refectory below

13 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; It is worth visiting just to see the huge variety of graffiti that adorns almost every surface

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14 (opposite page) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Contractors have spent a sodden winter making the building safe for visitors, including the installation of semi-permanent parapet rails

‘There’s the feeling that by clearing it up, do we lose the romance? The last thing we want is it to become the presentation of a monastery by the Ministry of Works, with neatly clipped lawns and concrete strips marking where walls used to be.’ Farquhar promises that the end result will ‘resist becoming institutionalised’. He is also in no doubt that those who advocate leaving the buildings to gently decay are wrong. This winter, emergency fundraising was required to save almost 100 barrel vaults from collapse. ‘There is a lack of recognition of just how dangerous the building was; there were accidents waiting to happen,’ he says. It is also unlikely that remains of the building would have outlasted the next decade, Farquhar believes. ‘We couldn’t allow it to drift on. That option didn’t exist.’ There was also a great deal of hazardous asbestos to deal with, the subject of its own major fundraising effort. ‘It was truly everywhere and coating every surface. It really was bad,’ Farquhar says. ‘We felt it was our moral responsibility to get it clean and get the asbestos out.’ For the opening of Hinterland, rhododendrons infesting the site have been uprooted and a deep layer of debris removed from the buildings, revealing new perspectives on the architecture. ‘It has revealed an incredible sharpness of line,’ Farquhar observes. ‘The quality of the concrete is amazing. They really knew how to pour concrete in Scotland.’ Experts have given the concrete a clean bill of health. ‘While almost all of the building’s “soft tissue”, such as timber, plasterwork, glazing and finishes, has been lost or damaged beyond retrieval, the basic structural carcass and characteristic concrete cladding is surprisingly sound,’ says Allan. Those construction workers busy making the building safe for visitors express polarised views of the building. Some have grown to love its uncompromising forms, others remain steadfast in their loathing, reinforced by working there through a long and arduous

winter, one of the wettest on record. Farquhar relishes that this can be a difficult building to love. ‘I like the fact that lots of people hate this building, it’s a strong emotion.’ Unpicking the ideology behind the architecture, exploring what makes it aesthetically challenging, these are all themes that can be harnessed in NVA’s programme for the building. ‘St Peter’s is a useful vehicle to bring these ideas to the fore. It invites you to think,’ says Farquhar. Croft sees its rehabilitation as reflecting changing attitudes to brutalist architecture, at a time when many key examples have been lost while others are fatally threatened, such as Robin Hood Gardens in East London. ‘St Peter’s is an important barometer,’ she says. Hinterland will provide a tantalising teaser of the building’s future. The next phase of works, due to start this autumn for completion in 2018, will see further consolidation of the site and the creation of a series of indoor, outdoor and semi-enclosed spaces for performance, art, learning and visitor hospitality. The juxtaposition of restored elements, new interventions and those left in ruin will transform St Peter’s into a building in dialogue with itself. At the heart of the plans is transformation of the chapel/ sanctuary into a 600-capacity venue. A few of the glulam beams spanning the sanctuary remain, some scorched by fire. They originally supported a distinctive ziggurat rooflight, now entirely lost, which theatrically cast ever-changing shadows on the sanctuary’s curved rear wall. ‘It would have been a truly ineffable, spiritual experience,’ says Farquhar. He sees this part of the building as his holy grail, to be restored into a wind-and-watertight space. Allan explains that sufficient documentation of the original pyramidal glazed lantern remains to enable its reconstruction. ‘This feature is crucial to the recovery of the dramatic effects of light and shadow that enlivened the chapel interior,’ he adds. Farquhar will learn whether the next batch of funding bids are successful midway through Hinterland’s run. As a result, ‘the event will either be a huge celebration or a funeral,’ he says.

15 15 – Graffiti in the crypt, located underneath the sanctuary

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IN PLANE SIGHT Words Anthea Gerrie

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Hotels at big-city airports are no longer modelled on being a stop-over for early or very late fliers. Now they aim to be destinations in themselves, setting out to lure in local residents looking for leisure activities, good restaurants and entertainments, as well as tempting â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;passing trafficâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to stay a little while longer...

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As jet travel became an aspirational pursuit in the late Fifties, airports had a moment. Families would drive out simply to enjoy the novelty of a meal or drink overlooking the runway, buying into the buzz of flight without actually being in the jet set. But could an airport hotel ever be a sexy enough proposition in its own right to attract locals and even stop city-break travellers in their tracks? Conrad Hilton certainly thought so when he built the world’s first in 1959, adding a pool, restaurant and private drinking club in the hope visitors to San Francisco might linger awhile and spend some of their holiday budget with him en route to Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown. Since those heady days, Conrad’s vision, at first vindicated by admirers of his sleek, modernist boxes at New Orleans and Atlanta airports that followed hard on the heels of San Francisco, was quickly diluted. As they became the province of corporate commuters, airport hotels evolved into bare-bones boxes devoid of any impetus to entertain — what Tom Ito of Genso, which has helped reinvent the genre, calls: ‘Odd ducks of the four-star set... offering little to do and nothing worth remembering.’ But Hilton the company, with an unmatched portfolio of nearly 400 airport properties, refused to give up. Pledging to reclaim Conrad’s vision of the pulling power of architecture by introducing a 50-strong, worldwide, in-house design team, it is bent on transforming runway hostelries into objects of desire for the 21st century. And it is not alone — Hyatt wows travellers arriving at Seoul’s Incheon airport with sinuous curves mimicking the yin and yang of the South Korean flag, the eagle-winged Westin at Denver thrills with dramatically framed vistas of the Rockies, while Pullman has opened a palace beside Delhi’s runway with a ballroom designed to attract 1,500-strong

1 (previous page), 2 & 3 – The Hilton at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam set out with the ambition to be a distinctive and innovative lifestyle hotel

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1, 2 +3 HUFTON+CROW

4 (previous page) – The view down through the centrally placed atrium at the Hilton, Schiphol Airport 5 – An area to relax with a drink at the Hilton 6 – An outward-facing guest room offers a unique diamond-paned view

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4 COURTESY HILTON HOTELS + MECANOO 5 + 6 HUFTON+CROW

7 & 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Next to the runway at Delhi Airport, Pullman has opened a palace of a hotel, with the facilities to accommodate wedding parties for up to 1,500 people staying for three days

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wedding parties booking in for three days at a time. Meanwhile a grandiose 800-room complex, complete with wine museum, is on the drawing board close to Paris-Charles de Gaulle. Conrad would be proud to see the company he founded leading the way: ‘We saw a change 10 years ago in airports becoming much more than somewhere you go just to take an aeroplane,’ says Hilton’s senior vice president of development Patrick Fitzgibbon. He notes that just as Conrad cannily leased land at dozens of airport terminals half a century ago, Hilton, working in partnership with airport owners, has secured a presence at each of Europe’s seven busiest hubs. Following Hilton’s hotel at Squaire at Frankfurt, which opened in 2011, and its 2015 rebranding of Helmut Jahn’s iconic design for Munich, the company has just opened a spaceship of a hotel hovering over Amsterdam’s Schiphol offering a unique diamond-paned view of the world. Ellen van de Wal, lead architect on the project for Mecanoo, describes this parttransparent, part-opaque glass cladding as ‘a kind of snakeskin with a dual function — it expresses the dynamic of the building as well as hiding the repetitious horizontals of the floors behind’. Dramatic architecture was not only desirable but essential, says Jeroen Hattink, Hilton project director at Schiphol Real Estate, who explains: ‘We really needed an icon for the Schiphol business district to reflect its importance as home of multinationals like Microsoft and Samsung as well as a world trade centre. ‘Schiphol and Hilton shared an ambition for a distinctive and innovative lifestyle hotel at the airport. We needed more than just guest rooms, given several thousand local employees in need of a new good restaurant on their doorstep and a meeting place for the community, which was quite special.

9 + 10 GENSLER 11 DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

9 (left) & 11 – Designed by Gensler, the Westin at Denver’s airport has an eagle-winged proﬁle 10 – The hotel’s top-ﬂoor pool offers views of the Rockies

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12 – The Grand Hyatt Incheon, at Seoul’s airport, is on the doorstep of two of the South Korean capital’s beaches

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13 – An elegant curving staircase and deep chandelier graces the Grand Hyatt Incheon

12 - 15 COURTESY HYATT

14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The reception area references the shape of the abalone shell, for which Seoul is famous

15 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Huge windows in the guest rooms offer expansive views at the Grand Hyatt Incheon

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16 EUROLUFTBILD.DE

‘Our hopes have been fulfilled by the initial reaction — people walk in, look up at the 42m-high atrium, which is pretty unusual for the Netherlands, and are really quite amazed.’ Hilton will be hoping for a slew of accolades of the kind that has put a feather in its cap with The Squaire, the winner of design awards three years running. Just as the brief for Schiphol was to imbue a distinct sense of Dutchness — achieved with Delft tiles in the restaurant and restrooms, wrought-iron lobby screens that echo the curves of Amsterdam’s canals, and lace doilies printed on to guestroom tables, according to Constantina Tsoutsikou of Gallery HBA who did the interiors — Frankfurt Hilton called for an expression of modern Germany via a sense of Vorsprung durch Technik, according to Peter Joehnk, managing director of JOI-Design, which won the commission in an international competition. ‘[Hilton’s] director of architecture wanted to see “German engineering” in the interiors within a futuristic architectural envelope, and we developed a concept that uses the vocabulary of the high-tech surroundings yet also provides cosy oases within the commotion,’ Joehnk explains. He cites two design innovations — a pair of sculptural, sinuous, bronze mesh wings that extend protectively over the lobby, reducing the volume while allowing natural light to filter through from a seven-storey atrium, and the Globe, a shimmering curved building-within-a-building accommodating ballroom and meeting spaces. From the autobahn it looks more like a gigantic nightclub, with its eye-popping cladding of mirrored glass mosaics. But knowing that travellers arrive with a level of stress that cannot be soothed by visuals alone, JOI seduces guests with

16 (left) – The Hilton at Frankfurt Airport, with interiors by JOI-Design. It is part of The Squaire – a mixed-use development by JSK 17 & 18 – Squaire Hilton interiors sit within a futuristic architectural envelope

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19 – The Hilton at Munich Airport is getting a major extension and refurbishment following the building’s acquisition from Kempinski

soft-touch, leather-clad wardrobes and wingback chairs designed to ‘curve gently around the shoulders, creating a nurturing ambience’, while a sense of nature and stillness is introduced with artwork. Joehnk believes it’s still business efficiency driving traffic to airport hotels: ‘The Squaire has been nicknamed New Work City — it has its own postcode, shops, restaurant, health club, offices and railway station as well as the airport and two hotels.’ But Munich, voted the world’s best airport by skytrax, also attracts locals, thanks to highly innovative owners who have introduced amenities, including a micro-brewery and an artificial surf reef that pops up on airport premises every summer. The Helmut Jahn-designed hotel is so stunning it has already been listed, and while Hilton didn’t commission the design, it is planning to knock travellers’ socks off with a major extension and refurbishment having taken it over from Kempinski. The Grand Hyatt Incheon, on the doorstep of two of Seoul’s beaches, also focuses on locals, according to the hotel’s Ellie Kim, who reports: ‘Families visit with their kids for weekend breaks, and we design packages for them incorporating children’s activities.’ The hotel also targets Seoul’s party people with special bar and restaurant nights. A karaoke bar supplements an exceptional five-restaurant offering on which, unlikely as it sounds, the Wine Spectator has bestowed its prestigious Award of Excellence for the last five years in a row. Opened in late 2014, the hotel was designed by Gensler, which has picked up many gongs for airport terminals as well as for the hotels which service them. Within weeks of opening in November, Gensler’s latest hotel, whose soaring eagle wings

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threaten to take flight over Denver International Airport, had won its first awards. ‘This hotel was really about creating special moments that convey a sense of place,’ says Gensler’s Tom Ito, citing a function space outside the ballroom that directly overlooks the commuter rail tracks the site straddles: ‘People like to see trains coming in and out, just like they like to see planes taking off and landing. ‘And it’s very important to convey a sense of place in airport hotels — in Incheon we did it by echoing in the reception area the shapes of the abalone shells for which Seoul is famous; in Denver we put in a raised lobby with dynamite views of the Rocky Mountains, which are also overlooked by the top-floor pool.’ The latter is an example of what Gensler colleague Kap Malik describes as an amenity an airport hotel can offer that can’t be had anywhere else — in the case of Denver ‘a place to swim flanked by floor-to-ceiling views of both city and mountain top.’ There is also a ‘grand plaza’ linking airport and terminal, whose seamless indoor-outdoor architecture has pulling power of its own, according to Ito: ‘Denver people are coming out for a drink just because it’s a nice place to be.’ Creating an emotional connection to the site is key to the successful reinvention of this neglected genre because, as Ito puts it: ‘Create a powerfully designed airport hotel that pampers/amuses/surprises travellers and has the potential of luring locals too, and you suddenly have a new kind of bird — and a paradise of sorts, even if it is out in the boondocks, where airports tend to be.’ Indeed, the kind of paradise such properties evoked 60 years ago, when driving out to Heathrow or Ringway for a cuppa was considered a great Sunday afternoon’s entertainment.

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CONRAN AFTER CONRAN Words Anthea Gerrie

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The boss is gone, long live the boss! There’s a new face at the helm of Conran and Partners, and while the name Tim Bowder-Ridger doesn’t have the instant recogition of Terence Conran, he has already headed up projects that have made the practice a major player in world architecture — one of its latest being Futako Tamagawa, the new neighbourhood in Tokyo

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For the second time in 25 years I am in a lavish riverside penthouse, buttonholing the top man at Conran and Partners in his den, and the two encounters could not be more different. Gone, almost unthinkably, from the company bearing his name is the blue-shirted autocrat who reshaped the taste of post-war Britain before launching a design practice bent on turning London into a dining destination. Sir Terence Conran, who stepped down as chairman in 2014, and no longer holds an executive role in the partnership, fussed over every minute detail of how we should live, sleep and eat, both in our own homes and on the town. When we met in the early Nineties he dispensed his wisdom like the oracle — this was an audience rather than an interview. In today’s top floor flat — no longer the Butler’s Wharf pad with the capital’s best view but the less showy replacement that became a meeting room for Conran and Partners when the eponymous boss moved out — the chap who bounds up the stairs favours jeans and polo-neck, a highly amiable young architect bursting with a vision to transform the planet rather than his

immediate surroundings. He may not have the household name that remains synonymous with British design, but Tim Bowder-Ridger has helmed projects of a scope and ambition that have made Conran and Partners a major player on the world-architecture map and brought it 20 per cent annual growth in the short time since he took the reins. This has also heralded a sea change in focus. Reinventing London as a hospitality hotspot, the company’s preoccupation during the Terence Conran era, is one thing, creating its most recent achievement, Futako Tamagawa — an entire 20ha neighbourhood for Tokyo — quite another. Although such grandiose schemes are in the company’s DNA — Sir Terence’s founding partner of the original design practice, Fred Roche, is after all the man who built Milton Keynes. And get this — the firm best known for its interior architecture didn’t even get to do the interiors in the largest development Tokyo has seen in a decade. Not that this thrilled the practice: ‘The gap in ownership of a divided project is not ideal — it can

1 (previous page) – Futako Tamagawa, the largest development Tokyo has seen in the last ten years

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2 – Tim Bowder-Ridger is the new helm of Conran and Partners, with Sir Terence Conran stepping down as chairman in 2014

3 (opposite page) – The 20ha Tokyo scheme includes a new park as well as office buildings, a hotel and three residential towers

1, 3 FUTAKO TAMAGAWA BY EDMUND SUMNER 2 JIM STEPHENSON

CONRAN HISTORY

2007 Custom House, Copenhagen

1980 Practice is founded as Conran Roche.

Key projects: The master planning of Butler’s Wharf along with the architecture of a number of the buildings, including the Design Museum, LSE student accommodation, Saffron Wharf and the main river-facing warehouses.

ANDERS HVIID

Chaired by Terence Conran, managed by Fred Roche with Stuart Mosscrop as director of architecture.

LUKE HAYES

2003 Roppongi Hills, Tokyo

2008 Boundary Hotel, London

1987 Bibendum, Michelin House

1988 Fred Roche retires PAUL RAESIDE

1993 Company name changes to CD Partnership. Keith Hobbs joins the business with an interior design focus.

2011 Hotel Icon, Hong Kong

Key projects: Quaglinos, Mezzo

1998 Company name changes to Conran and Partners Richard Doone becomes managing director Key projects: Guastavinos in New York, Bluebird Garage in Chelsea, Great Eastern Hotel in the City of London.

2003 Key projects: Roppongi Hills for Mori Building Company in Tokyo, Niki Club East in Nasu, Japan

2004 ALI BEKMAN

Key projects: Park Hotel Bangalore, Plateau

2006 Key projects: Mandarin Grill + Bar, Hong Kong; Park Hotel Delhi; Embassy Court Brighton

2014 Parle, Istanbul

2007 Key projects: Custom House Copenhagen, Salford Quays, Skylon Royal Festival Hall

2008 Key project: Boundary Hotel

2010 Richard Doone steps down to consultancy role (Japanese projects) Tim Bowder-Ridger takes over as managing director (joined company in 1997)

2011 Key project: Hotel Icon Hong Kong

2012 Key projects: Old Bengal Warehouse, Park Hotel Kolkata, South Place Hotel

2014 Terence Conran steps down as chairman Key projects: One Tower Bridge, The Guest House Vienna, Parle Istanbul

2015 Centre Point, London

Completion of Futako Tamagawa in Tokyo, completion of German Gymnasium, 100th restaurant and bar worldwide, Centre Point — work begins on site

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2015 German Gymnasium, London

MARCUS PEEL

2015

be fatal, leading to one side having no care for the other,’ sighs Bowder-Ridger. ‘But we do work on either side of a business divided down the middle between architects and interior designers, and right now we are 60–70 per cent architecture.’ Yet if not the Britishness of its interior design, it was what Brits could bring to the development in terms of conceiving a neighbourhood and landscaping it that won Conran and Partners the competition for Futako Tamagawa over competitors including Cesar Pelli, KPF and Kengo Kuma, believes BowderRidger: ‘Landscaping is one of Britain’s greatest traditions, and working with a people who send each other pictures of the countryside in blossom every spring brings out the deep shared values between our two nations,’ he says. ‘You can’t lose with people who value those sort of things. However urban the project they’re working on, they’re always trying to bring it back to that forest-covered mountain.’ Conran and Partners played to this reverence for nature in the new development on the edge of Tokyo. ‘We knew we

needed to connect our hard interventions to this green site along a canal that used to be home to market gardens,’ says BowderRidger of a scheme which includes a new park as well as an office building, retail galleria, cinema complex, TV studio, hotel, three residential towers and two low-rise companions providing 1,000 apartments in total. It was the culmination of more than 15 years’ work in the country; Japan’s love affair with Conran and Partners grew from a contract for a single Conran shop in Fukuoka that was so successful the owner commissioned the partnership to design first a club, then a huge residential project in Roppongi Hills in 2003: ‘Our brief there was to bring in the essence of Britishness — understated, Savile Row-style comfort.’ Bowder-Ridger says the practice revelled in a building environment where good-mannered collaboration is the norm: ‘This business can be so confrontational, but Japanese contractors will do their utmost to fulfil the architect’s vision and respect a schedule.’ Nevertheless, they came up against a culture

4 FUTAKO TAMAGAWA BY EDMUND SUMNER

4 – The buildings and park are spread along the south-west edge of the city, adjacent to the Tama River

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clash: ‘One of our struggles was to stop the landlords forever tidying up and trimming Dan Pearson’s natural landscaping, with trees doing what they want to do. We also discovered that patination is not part of the Japanese vocabulary; they’ll varnish a floor to look lacquered forever, not gently oiled to weather over the years. And there’s a conundrum; at its best, Japanese architecture is all about the materials, but at the other end of the spectrum they’ll use fake wood.’ Now the company is under the spotlight in London, where Conran and Partners has two new, tall, slim buildings ‘falling lightly to the ground’ — Bowder-Ridger’s particular passion — on the drawing board, with details to be announced later this year. Meanwhile, the practice hopes to attract Asian investors with a home-based showcase spearheaded by the audacious transformation of one of London’s least-loved landmarks into an unlikely luxury apartment block. Centre Point, hopelessly marooned in a traffic gyratory and empty for decades before finally filling up with the offices it was designed to house, is set

for a reincarnation showcased by the dazzling new entrance plaza the building has cried out for since its creation. ‘Richard Seifert was a great architect, but what he didn’t do well was designing ground plane — engaging buildings with the street,’ says Bowder-Ridger. ‘You couldn’t enter at ground level; it had these grand, baroque staircases, but for so long they were only used for rough sleepers to shelter under.’ The rough sleepers have been closed out since construction began (completion is due in 2017) and the building, fitted with two full floors of amenity space including swimming pool, club room and concierge desk beneath the 82 apartments, is expected to prove an irresistible draw thanks to its incomparable location (see Blueprint 340). ‘London was the creative centre of the universe in the Sixties when the building was completed, and it is still a supreme creative hub today. Centre Point is 10 minutes’ walk from Soho and the Royal Opera House, slap in the middle of a protected viewing corridor, so its panoramas will never be interrupted,’ says Bowder-Ridger of a building with

5 – A promenade weaves in between the buildings, providing shelter in places and deﬁning the journey through the site to the park

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6 (opposite page) – The mammoth Futako Tamagawa scheme also includes a cinema complex, retail units and a TV studio

5, 6 FUTAKO TAMAGAWA BY EDMUND SUMNER

5m-wide windows throughout, designed to attract younger buyers untainted by its history as a white elephant. All that forever-filthy glazing of old is being replaced, and the original foyer terrazzo, inlaid with strips of Carrera marble, restored and replicated within the interiors. The honeycomb-textured exterior will sparkle post-cleaning, thanks to marble granules within the concrete, showcasing the quirky grandeur of the skyscraper that Paolozzi called Britain’s first pop-art building. We can also expect much more building from scratch from Conran and Partners than interior architecture, says the new MD, who is an architect rather than a furniture designer like his predecessor. Supervising a team of 70, he confesses to a very different management style: ‘You can’t do what was OK 30 years ago,’ he says diplomatically. ‘This business can be a bit of a blame game; it attracts a lot of negativity, and I think you have to look for people’s strengths in the first instance. ‘We recognise the importance of architectural education and support our people through their professional exams and

give them loads of study leave. We believe in growing from below, and acknowledge that we have to get bigger to make room for them. I’d be comfortable if we were twice the size, though I don’t want us to become a beast.’ But can Bowder-Ridger, who cut his Conran teeth in hospitality — myhotel Bloomsbury followed by dozens of restaurants, of which London’s German Gymnasium is its 100th (see Blueprint 344) — and somehow manages to get out of the office in time to pursue his passion for dressage four times a week, really operate with a free hand, while Terence Conran remains prime shareholder? He says that the big man is still looking over his shoulder. ‘Terence is not a gentle man,’ he says frankly. ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If he reads about something I’ve said and agrees, he’ll call me up. And if I say something with which he disagrees, he’ll call me up twice!’ But his predecessor did give the new man at the top a salient piece of advice he has never forgotten: ‘Always design with the end-user in mind, instead of, as so many of us are inclined to do, for other architects.’

7 – The elegant towers are interspersed with calming natural elements such as these pools

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7 FUTAKO TAMAGAWA BY EDMUND SUMNER

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ALL THE WOOD’S A STAGE Words Herbert Wright

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Timber is enjoying a renaissance as a contemporary building material, but the USA has been slow to catch up on innovations in Europe and Japan. Enter Studio Gang, one of the United Statesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; leading practices. At the new Writers Theatre in a small town in Illinois, it has given timber a stage and pushed its performance to new levels

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1 (previous page) – The Lobby and Gallery (left) are connected by a book-lined passage to the Black Box Theatre (right)

The Glencoe that’s not in the Scottish Highlands lies 30km north of Chicago, on the same side of Lake Michigan. It’s a town of 9,000 whose mock-Tudor facades and leafiness would suggest a British suburb if the streets weren’t so wide and on grids. Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects’ principal Jeanne Gang describes it as ‘a very quaint village’, yet it draws cultural sophisticates from the big city to take a train or drive up Interstate 94 for something rather special. Since it was founded in 1992, The Writers Theatre has delivered just that — quality drama that brings the audience right up close to the performers. The Washington Post named it as one of the six best regional theatres in the whole USA. This February, the company moved into its new $28m Studio Gang-designed 3,345 sq m building. From a competition field of 30, the practice was commissioned in 2012 and construction started in 2014. ‘After all the long effort, it’s so nice to have it finally built!’ says Gang. The audience should feel the same way, too, and not just about the drama — there’s the distinctly contemporary new theatre complex itself. It’s tailored to its audience and locale, but it tells the whole of the USA that timber is back. The theatre building is box volumes that include two

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

2 (opposite page) – The Gallery offers an experience almost like a canopy walk — and brings you close to the off-vertical batons in its screens

dedicated theatre spaces and a green-roofed rehearsal room, which mass together and rise discreetly to no higher than 10.7m, about as high as anything in Glencoe goes. The most striking element is the signature upper-level gallery. It not only looks down through glass to the transparent lobby below, but also commands views out across the town through an extraordinary open screen. The gallery’s square passage is cantilevered out from the ground floor, as far as 3m on one side. The structure is defined by a timber Vierendeel truss, but the exterior screen is far lighter. Between the horizontal frame beams are tensionstrung, thin, full-height batons of stained Port Orford cedar at varying angles to the vertical, which end with ‘cat’s paws’ that grip into the beams. No bolts were used. The screen has two layers, offset to improve lateral stability. Port Orford cedar, also used in pencils, was chosen because of its performance and resistance to rot, and although not FSC certified it is required by American laws to be replanted after harvesting. ‘I really wanted this screen to be working structurally,’ says Gang. To overcome scepticism about its viability, she called France-based, British lightweight-structure engineer Peter Heppel, who has worked with masters from Frei Otto to Renzo Piano: ‘I thought he was the perfect person to give everyone

Lobby Lobby seating Concessions Library Black Box Theatre Grand Gallery Walk Green roof Rehearsal room Event terrace Donor lounge

5 3 4

2 4

1 & 2 STEVE HALL © HEDRICH BLESSING

150

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confidence and come in to this specific thing. He worked with me on the [tensioned] marble curtains I did early on [for a show in 2004 at the National Building Museum, Washington DC], and the opening roof of the Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre’ (in Rockford, Illinois — see Blueprint November 2003). A section of Glencoe’s screen was tested at Trillium Dell Timberworks, in a rig that literally tried to pull it apart. The gallery has something of Cristián Undurraga’s diagridsided open passages of pine around Chile’s pavilion at the Milan Expo (Blueprint 340), although his elements were far thicker and regular, and the varying baton angles even echo the trend for apparently random angles of exterior elements in, say, OMA’s CCTV HQ or Herzog & de Meuron’s Beijing Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium. Of course, in Glencoe the scale is modest to match the setting, and the more charming for it. After sunset, the gallery shines light out through the batons, and by day the experience of being on it is like walking on air, or perhaps a canopy walk. The lobby below, a few steps up from the street, is an airy double-height space that fills with daylight. It is the Writers Theatre’s hub and offers a choice of directions to go — to the cloakroom and lift, or the doors to the main theatre, or a corridor leading to the smaller theatre. All of those involve ticketing, but

the lobby itself has free offerings. Two banks of terraced seating sit on the floor, providing for performance in the lobby itself (the plans illustrate that with a piano), or maybe meeting or just hanging out. It should draw the community in. The main auditorium holds 250 and is a steel structure with a concrete back wall. It is lined with bricks, reused from the 1938 building previously on site, the Women’s Library Club, where the Writers Theatre had performed to packed houses but with only 108 seats. The bricks form zigzags, partially latticed with alternative brick gaps, and they play an acoustic role. Intimacy with the performance was the driving design objective with this space. The artistic director and co-founder is Michael Halberstam (Nottingham-born, which probably explains why this is ‘theatre’ rather than ‘theater’), and he insisted on intimacy. Three banks of seats draw around a thrust stage, bringing the performance virtually into the audience. The spatial strategy brings to mind Hans Scharoun’s pioneering Berlin Philharmonie (1963), but Gang talks rather of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis opened the same year, designed by Ralph Rapson and its thrust stage by Tanya Moiseiwitsch A Guthrie designed by Jean Nouvel has since replaced it. From the lobby, a wood-clad corridor extends, lined with

Ground Floor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Entry Lobby Lobby seating Box Office Concessions Coat Check Library 250-seat theatre Black Box Theatre Rehearsal room Theatre back-of-house Green roof Performer’s suite Loading

14 9

6 3

2 4

3, 4, 5 & 6 STEVE HALL © HEDRICH BLESSING

3 (previous spread) – The Gallery and entrance have a pastoral setting but actually face the townscape on this side

4 – The main theatre seats 250 and brings the audience up close to the performance

5 – They might be talking about roles — those bricks behind them play acoustic and aesthetic ones

6 – Below the Gallery Walk and behind the tribune in the lobby the corridor cuts between the rehearsal room and main theatre

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books and with windows on one side, half-suggesting a colonnade. It leads to the smaller, 99-capacity performance space, fittingly referred to as the Black Box Theatre. This is a more experimental space within black hanging panels that can be moved to make it smaller. A rehearsal room by the lobby potentially offers yet another performance space. And there is also a room for Writers Theatre’s donors (in Europe, that would be the Members’ Room). The exterior around and behind the lobby and gallery are of wood or concrete, according to the different volumes that form the whole. The rectangular site fits snuggly into parkland but faces the town, and a corner is left as open green space beside the lobby. Jeanne Gang says Glencoe ‘needed more pedestrian activities, people to walk and get out of their cars, and something that would activate the park and the streetscape’. This theatre in the park, by also speaking to the townscape, does just that. Studio Gang includes the Writers Theatre among its ‘bird-friendly’ projects. Gang herself may seem bird-obsessed — the unbuilt Ford Calumet Environmental Center for a nature reserve took nest-making as its model. It included open observation decks that shared the openness and tensile screens

of the Writers Theatre, although not with wooden batons. Birds are a serious issue when a billion are killed annually by buildings in the USA. ‘In cities by water we have migratory birds. We have to understand how birds see,’ says Gang. ‘We have to think about our biodiversity.’ Studio Gang’s most famous project yet, the 262m-high, 84-storey Aqua Tower (2010), put the practice at the top level of those defining Chicago’s exhilarating skyline, along with the likes of SOM and Adrian Smith — but it was also the first bird-friendly skyscraper. As for wood, the USA has begun to follow Europe and Japan in bringing it into contemporary architecture. The reappraisal of this ancient building medium was boosted by its appearance at the 2015 Chicago Architectural Biennial (Blueprint 343) with Ultramoderne’s low and exposed Miesian lakeside canopy, and David Adjaye’s contemplative Horizons installation at his show at the Chicago Art Institute. ‘I like working with wood,’ says Gang. ‘It embodies carbon, it looks rustic.’ Along with her starting point of research and effort to reach out to communities (whether human or avian), she says that one of the common threads in her work is that ‘I try to bring out the quality of the material’. At the Writers Theatre, the Gallery Walk brings it out from the building. The achievement should be marvelled at far beyond Glencoe.

First Floor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Lobby seating 250-seat Theatre Black Box Theatre below Gallery Grand Gallery Walk Event terrace Donor lounge Offices Green roof

1 9

7 (previous spread) – Two tribunes are placed in the lobby, creating a third but less formal performance space

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8 (opposite page) – The Gallery Walk cantilevers from the entrance volume. The ‘cat’s paw’ joinery of its batons is visible

9 (following spread) – The way light shines through the gallery at night has been compared to a lantern

dimensions are a lot smaller. It allows the performance to be three-dimensional. In terms of connecting to the community, Michael Halbersam and I were thinking of the Old Vic in London. It has a new library and cafe and people really use it as a gathering space. We wanted to capture that kind of energy at Writers. We would be calling each other from all over the world during the design process. We did a full-scale mock-up using string and tape in this gymnasium that we borrowed for the day. That was pivotal, because we ended up shortening the tongue of thrust after that.

JEANNE GANG Studio Gang principal and founder Jeanne Gang talked with Herbert Wright about wood, Writers Theatre ... and what’s coming up in New York Blueprint: Has the USA been slow to take up wood as a contemporary construction material, compared to Europe and Japan? JG: We probably have more wooden structures in this country than anywhere else on the planet. There was huge progress early on, with ideas like the balloon frame and that kind of construction, especially in Chicago where that was developed. The steel industry came along and because it’s located in places like Chicago and the Midwest that became such a dominant mode of building, because it was made right here. I’ve always been a huge fan of wood because of its renewable qualities, the fact that it is so good in texture, and the possibilities. When we started to introduce wood in structures, it was challenging because the [building] codes don’t even allow for it any more, except in certain residential constructions… It was hard to get the data for structures, so we were forced to prove in tests that the wood could actually perform. Blueprint: Why was the Port Orford cedar chosen at the Writers Theatre? JG: It’s structural and performance-driven because Port Orford cedar has good resistance to rot and it weathers; you don’t have to seal in any way. There’s very few knots, it has good structural qualities and it’s long-lasting. Blueprint: It was American-sourced, but some

embedded energy is from transporting it... JG: Not only that, but there are many industrial processes that go into it. [But] it was low-carbon. With the Arcus Center, Kalamazoo College [Michigan] that we did last year, we figured that [wood] took more carbon out of the atmosphere than it put in. A tree is always absorbing carbon in its lifetime, and in this particular application, very little work is done to the wood — it dries naturally — and we put it directly into the wall. It was abundant and nearby. It was white cedar. Blueprint: How did the Writers Theatre approach the issue of audience intimacy? JG: The 99-seat space is really a black box, and the intimacy is however you decide to stage that particular space. Where we really designed in the intimacy was in the 250-seat space. In the old theatre, people sat literally with their feet on the stage, and they felt so connected to the performers. The artistic director Michael Halberstam really wanted to maintain that; it was crucial to the success of the product to maintain intimacy. Blueprint: Did any other theatre spaces inform your thinking about the Writers Theatre? JG: Yes, the thrust stage. The first one was really the Guthrie [Theater, Minneapolis] and that’s a touchstone. But of course we wanted to make it more particular to the Writers Theatre, so the

Blueprint: Blueprint covered your Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre in 2003. Did anything echo down the years from it to the Writers Theatre? JG: The thing that I feel strongly about the Starlight Theatre is the connection to the community. They needed something that would create a regional draw and something spectacular. It’s a very car-orientated condition there, the people needed something to bring them together, to create community life. Live performance is perfect for that. We wanted the theatre to be a draw in itself. The roof opens up kinetically. People still come out early to see the roof open, then the director closes it when they begin the performance. So when I was doing the Writers Theatre I tried to understand the community and what was needed there. Blueprint: What up-coming Studio Gang project is exciting you most? JG: Well, I’m excited about all of our projects! The project with so many dimensions to it is the Gilder Center for Science and Education at the American Museum of Natural History [in New York]. It’s fascinating because it’s a campus of 25 existing buildings — some historic, some not — where we’re iterating a new wing into the campus, but at the same time clarifying the circulation. It also connects with nature and science and art and education. Blueprint: Will we see a Studio Gang project in Europe, maybe even the UK? JG: I certainly hope so! Some of our work connects with nature in urban areas, and we’ve been doing tall buildings and buildings that are sensitive to their site. London being at the forefront, it would be the perfect place to do something.

STUDIO GANG PROJECTS

2003 – The Bengt Sjostrom Theatre in Rockford, Illinois has a roof that opens like an origami piece

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2010 – Chicago’s sublimely terraced Aqua Tower is the ﬁrst bird-friendly skyscraper. Studio Gang’s Vista Tower will soon rise nearby

2014 – The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Michigan has carbonnegative walls

The shape of things to come – The Gilder Center at New York’s Museum of Natural History, like the Aqua Tower, has forms inspired by geology

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ART ON THE GO Words Yolanda Zappaterra

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At just 3.4km long and with only six stations, DĂźsseldorfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new Wehrhahn underground line may be small, but it stands out for being the first artistic initiative of its kind in Germany, inseparably linking art and architecture and banning ads

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1 – Architecture practice netzwerkarchitekten. It won the competition to design six stations for Düsseldorf’s new Wehrhahn underground line

The recent reopening of Tottenham Court Road station’s Central Line, with its ‘as you were’ Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics as decoration, will have disappointed public art fans who may have expected more from an organisation that has impressed in the past with its innovative approach to art on the Underground. TfL has promised that the iconic Paolozzi mosaics will eventually be joined by complementary artworks, but you can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed. It didn’t have to be this way, as a new line that’s just opened in Düsseldorf proves. Picking up on a tradition of integrating art into transport architecture that stretches back decades — from the Fifties’ Stockholm metro initiative that has seen an evolving programme of art on the city’s 70 miles of underground lines to TfL’s Art on the Underground project — Düsseldorf’s civil servants took a bold step in 2001 when they developed the Wehrhahn line. It has just six stations and is a mere 3.4km long, but it was decided that its diminutive scale would not constrain its ambitious objective of being the first artistic initiative of its kind in Germany — one that would inseparably bind art and architecture. An EU-wide competition was held to find six architects to collaborate with six artists to design and develop six stations that celebrated the city’s long heritage of contemporary art, one that has seen its Kunstakademie Düsseldorf nurture the talents of such international artists as Gerhard Richter, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. In the event, it went to just one architecture practice: netzwerkarchitekten. Despite having no experience in the construction of subway stations, but with the award-winning Gasometer Oberhausen pedestrian bridge in its short portfolio, this young studio from Darmstadt, working with Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alumnus Heike Klussmann, won the two-stage, EU-wide competition for all six stations. It in turn held its own competition and found five other artists connected with the city: Ursula Damm, Ralf Brög, Thomas Stricker, Manuel Franke, and Enne Haehnle, all past students of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and all delivering artworks as diverse as they are conceptually expansive. ‘It was important for us to choose ideas that dealt with the architectural space in any way. We did not want to have a sculpture added to a completed space. Every one of the artists does this in a special way,’ say Philipp Schiffer and Markus Schwieger of netzwerkarchitekten. Fast-forward 15 years, and at the time of writing the Wehrhahn line is set to open with, remarkably, no advertising in any of the stations across the entire line, a decision made at its inception. It’s just one positive aspect of a forward-thinking collaboration between planners, city engineers, architects and artists that has seen challenges as opportunities, beginning with the material that would underpin the design ethos of the whole project. This is artist Heike Klussmann’s idea of a ‘continuum’ that links all the stations, a concept that takes in the physical material — concrete — through to platforms as spaces along a tube being stretched or expanded. For Klussmann and netzwerkarchitekten it was important that these spaces and the tunnels connecting them be unified, and so a series of irregularly flowing concrete panels — beginning with

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a small rhombus and continuing with different-sized and shaped panels to create a 3D effect — connect the entire line and act as the bedrock for the direction of the project and individual stations. Key to the stations’ concept was their being designed as ‘3D incisions allowing daylight to come down as far as possible, with broad sightlines leading into the spaces, creating a strong sense of clarity and orientation for the passengers. These incisions are the space for the artwork. During the whole planning process the conceptual idea of the continuum and the incisions was... the central theme of the project,’ recalls Schiffer. ‘The different geometries, colours and material of these connections make every station unique and help passengers orientate themselves.’ Once you have this idea of ‘incisions’ and ‘expanded space’ it’s easy to read them as exactly that, largely because of their soaring, airy dimensions, clever filtering of daylight down to platform levels and the very obvious and diverse intervention or manipulation of the individual spaces by the six artists. ‘The art was brought into the fundamental architectural concept as an intervention that enlivens a predetermined entrance space, but the aim was not to produce overall coherence, where the autonomy of the artwork is reduced to such an extent that it becomes applied art,’ says Schiffer. That it doesn’t is a testament to the collaborative abilities of all involved, one that was further challenged by the fact that, to secure funding, production costs for the artwork had to be defined as belonging to the architectural design remit. This was addressed early on by deciding that much of the artistic design for the stations would form a natural part of the stations’ surfaces. In Klussman’s concrete panels for example, the art is created by the special geometries of the gaps between the panels. ‘The gaps become the artwork,’ says Klussmann. And in Kirchplatz station, where the sculptural forms of Enne Haehnle’s bright orange poetic texts wind through the space, white metal panels have been designed to look like oversized sheets of suggested of text on paper. In others, such as Schadowstrasse and Benrather, screens for Ursula Damm’s interactive video installation and Thomas Stricker’s spaceship designs were more costly, but are still ‘a very small amount in view of the overall costs of this very big infrastructural project,’ point out the architects. Are they pleased with the outcome? A week before the line opens, they seem to be. ‘Everything is about the spatial experience, or evokes questions concerning the perception of public space, including language, communication and interaction. The station design at the platform level, along with the tunnel bore concept of the continuum, offers one direction. The links to urban space above ground via the intersections offer another, with different geometries, colours and materials, depending on the artwork, making every station unique,’ says Schiffer. Combined, he believes that each part of the system gives passengers hints that fix its different elements in the mind and help orientation in the urban context in a memorable combination of architecture and art. Let’s hope that the Crossrail project, when it’s completed in 2018, is at least as half as interesting.

2 SCHADOWSTRASSE

1 PEMPELFORTER STRASSE

1 2 3 4

KIRCHPLATZ

THE WEHRHAHN LINE

HEINRICH-HEINE ALLEE

GRAF ADOLF PLATZ (GAP)

5 BENRATHER STRASSE

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HEIKE KLUSSMANN PEMPELFORTER STRASSE –

Heike Klussman’s practice is heavily focused on geometrics, which is reflected in her concept for Pempelforter station. Bold monochrome ribbons thread their way across the walls, ceilings and floors of the station and follow the directional dynamics of the space’s edges, breaking up to play not only with the geometry of the architecture, but also with traditional motifs of colour as guiding systems in public spaces. ‘Using a binary system that could, if you took it to its logical conclusion, just end up as grey space, the stark black-and-white lines reflect movement and wayfinding,’ says Klussman.

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2 – Artist Heike Klussmann and Netzwerkarchitekten worked together to develop her concept of a ‘continuum’ to artistically link the stations

3 – Heike Klussmann looks at the scheme plan for one of the stations along the new Wehrhahn line

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URSULA DAMM SCHADOWSTRASSE – Ursula Damm’s interactive installation consists of several parts, aimed at aiding passengers ‘experience the city as a place they own so that they can start to imagine how it could adapt to their needs and vision of their city,’ says the artist. At its heart is a large LED screen, which interprets the movements of passers-by above ground and, via a software application coded by Felix Bonowski, generates patterns based on the movement of these pedestrians. They are projected on to blue glass walls at concourse level and interpreted as a sound piece by Yunchul Kim beneath it, at platform level. ‘The idea was that the integration into the architectural space happens on a conceptual level,’ says Damm, whose objective for the piece was a sustainable discourse. ‘The facts that the piece is visible to so many people, and that it will last for a long time, are important,’ she adds. ‘You should not understand the work at first view; it should constantly trigger new thoughts and visions in passengers.’

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RALF BRÖG HEINRICH-HEINE ALLEE – Through three entrances and corridors of Heinrich-Heine Allee, Ralf Brög has visually and acoustically designed three ‘venues’ — a theatre, laboratory and auditorium — that will host a changing programme of sound-based works, beginning with pieces from director Kevin Rittberger, composer Stefan Schneider, musician Kurt Dahlke, and musician/ artist Jörn Stoya. ‘The sound will be very specific to each space and very experiential,’ says Brög. ‘It will be impossible to duplicate in any other environment, and will provide a real challenge to its composers, who will have to create something that will be experienced as fragments over a long period of time by its audience,’ he adds. ‘I like the idea of sound as a material. It’s an important element of architecture as people move through a space, and the sound pieces will hopefully address that in different ways; for example, altering one’s pace might enable travellers to experience the sound with different rhythms,’ he says. Visually, the three spaces are clearly distinct from each other through the use of coloured ceramics and sculptures that reference music and sound through time. ‘I started with no visual or aesthetic idea, just knew that I wanted to complement the audio aspects with a strong, defined visual component,’ he explains. ‘I hope the uniqueness of the environments inspires musicians, artists and composers to create surprising and outstanding pieces of sound art, which will form a rich repertoire for these spaces. This programme should contribute to the passengers’ awareness of space... make them aware of the potential of art as an enriching quality of our everyday life and catalyse curiosity and critical discourse.’ 171

THOMAS STRICKER BENRATHER STRASSE – The playful idea of an underground station as a space station will surely capture the imagination and hearts of passengers young and old, set as it is in a universe where ‘panoramic windows’ (blocks of LED screens) offer views of planets and stars to evoke the sense of tranquility and weightlessness of space. The sense of a futuristic space station is further heightened by embossed stainless-steel walls, but it will be the original NASA images — not just of planets and stars, but also the odd meteorite whizzing by — that will probably keep people enthralled in this arresting interior space.

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MANUEL FRANKE GRAF ADOLF PLATZ (GAP) – To descend via escalator into GAP is like losing yourself on a hazy summer’s day in one of those ponds covered in bright green algae; the effect is calming but also unsettling. What lies beneath? In Franke’s case, silkscreened patterns overlaid in a grid of luminous glass panels that flow down through the space like some verdant stream accompanying the passenger along their path — ‘connecting the upper street level with the underground train level via a kind of unexpected undertow,’ explains Franke. The project’s long gestation and the geography of the station, which is intersected by two rivers, helped Franke develop the piece, enabling him to explore in detail not just his fascination with the minerals and colours that comprise the earth’s core but also marry old artistic processes with new techniques on 1,000 sq m of shock-resistant glass, a material he’d not worked with before. 173

ENNE HAEHNLE KIRCHPLATZ – Poetic texts as sculpture are the theme of Enne Haehnle’s Spur X at Kirchplatz station, where steel-forged lettering clad in bright orange plastic tubing flows down from three entrances to the concourse level before continuing down to platform level. The texts are loosely related to the layout of the station and tell stories of communities and commons. ‘My first ideas emerged from the wish to create something three-dimensional that would accompany and emphasise the architectural qualities of the station. My impulse was to develop a piece not bound to the surface, but rather extending into the space of the station,’ explains Haehnle. Legible as text only from certain perspectives, the tubing creates a game between abstraction and legibility that changes as passengers change positions and perspectives. ‘The workmen who’ve been here in the past 18 months while we’ve been putting the piece up have often expressed frustration at the inability to decipher the words,’ she says.

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HIDE AND SEEK Words Johnny Tucker

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Almost as soon as the bombs that all but obliterated Rotterdam had stopped falling, the redevelopment of the city began and it’s been going on ever since. The latest addition is the Timmerhuis — a ‘floating cloud of steel and glass’ by OMA, that seems to hide itself in the fabric of the city

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In May 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam so heavily that its historic centre was all but completely destroyed — around 1,000 people died and 85,000 more were left homeless. With threats to do the same again elsewhere, the Germans subsequently took over this dock town and the rest of the Netherlands. As a result of the Nazis’ occupation, Allied forces bombed the strategically important dock areas and on at least one occasion missed the target and hit residential areas, causing more massive damage and loss of life. Rotterdam was so thoroughly decimated that reconstruction actually began during the war. From the outset it appears to have been seen as an opportunity to start afresh and redesign the city, with any remaining historic buildings that could have been restored, instead being demolished. Unsurprisingly, not a huge amount was finished during the war, and when peace finally came, fresh plans were put in place that saw a new kind of urban development — one familiar to those who know post-war urban renewal attitudes. The city centre was given over to offices, shops and roads. The latter connected it to the suburban areas where the people were to live. At the very heart of this post-war reconstruction planning was the Stadstimmerhuis building, built in 1950. This is where all the planning and overseeing was done from and it is this building,

radically extended laterally and vertically, that is the latest offering from Rotterdam-based, global architecture practice OMA. In many ways Timmerhuis, as it is now known, brings the story of post-war urban planning full circle as it seeks to overthrow the old centre/suburb demarcations once and for all and bring everything back together in one place: government, culture, shopping, dining and living in one building in the heart of the city. Most recently in Rotterdam, OMA created the De Rotterdam, a building on a vast scale by the river (also including local government functions), which nonetheless has a lightness of touch and humour in the way it plays with the vast cuboid volumes it employs (see Blueprint 331 cover story). Timmerhuis is on an altogether different scale. For one, unlike De Rotterdam — which can be seen from miles around — this building doesn’t really add to the skyline, you only ever get glimpses of it as views along streets. It has, nevertheless, been designed as a large, cohesive, pixelated mass that OMA describes as ‘a floating cloud of steel and glass’. Cloud is an apt analogy as it is perhaps only the seagulls screeching overhead that will ever see it in its entirety and get to appreciate the form fully. ‘This is a building in a very dense context,’ explains OMA partner Reinier de Graaf. ‘This is a building that you don’t see. You only see it when you get very near to it, but even when you

Cross section Office in the original building Museum Rotterdam Public access through the building Cafe Boardroom space in attic The bottom of the suspended cloud Residential pixelation from here above

1 (previous page) – A bird’s-eye view of the pixelated residential part of the Timmerhuis scheme

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2 – OMA partner Reinier de Graaf, who describes Timmerhuis as ‘a ﬂoating cloud of steel and glass’

3 (opposite page) – The building plays hide and seek, with views of it only opening up as you get near

1, 3 OSSIP VAN DUIVENBODE 2 EKATERINA IZMESTIEVA

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

4 (previous page) – OMA’s steel and glass structure hugs the original Fifties’ building delineated by the use of brick

get very near to it, you never see all of it at once. So this is a composition that, in a way, deliberately plays hide and seek with the city. It’s always exposing itself as a fragment, in glimpses. Because it is in a very different situation in the city, it needs a very different attitude from De Rotterdam.’ It’s a complicated building that clings on to the original L-shaped structure of the Fifties, somewhat like the froth of a spittlebug on a twig. This froth is the pixelation. From above you would — if you could — see that it looks like a low-res, 8-bit, building that in many ways owes a debt not only to a certain recent trend in aesthetics (witness similar outpourings such as fellow Dutch practice MVRDV’s Cloud towers in Seoul and Sou Fujimoto’s Serpentine Pavilion), but also to the work of the metabolists. The post-war metabolism movement, initiated by Japanese architects such as Kenzo Tange and Kisho Kurokawa, emerged during a time of massive growth and change to cities in Japan coping with an economic surge and large increases in population. The links with post-war Rotterdam are there to be seen, and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas went further with his 2011 project Japan: Metabolism Talks, citing the metabolists’ importance and the success of their modularity ideas, something that is a key feature of the pixelated pods that form the residential part of Timmerhuis. Even visually OMA seems to be quoting from this

5 – Local government offices sit in the base of the cloud, rising up to the level of the top of the original building, with residential taking over above that point

group: where De Rotterdam appears to gently nod in the direction of Kenzo Tange’s Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Tower, Timmerhuis turns to squarely address the Nakagin Capsule Tower building by Kurokawa. ‘People did pixels in 2015, but this was designed in 2009. It was a theme we had experimented with a lot,’ explains de Graaf. ‘We invented this as a language I think in 2000, on a number of Asian projects. What we liked about it was a number of things: flexibility in terms of image — if you add, subtract or change anything the superficial viewer will not notice change. It’s an aesthetic that works on the aesthetics of accidental randomness, for want of a better phrase. The composition can endure changes without feeling that the building massively changed in terms of shape — the language is not compromised and any building in this day and age changes while you’re designing it in terms of its size and programme. Working as an architect in a market economy almost means working with programmes that are unstable. ‘Another thing is you can build it in a modular fashion, and we knew in this particular case that the contractor would also be the developer of the apartments. It’s a particular policy that we have here in Rotterdam, that they delegate the development and selling of the apartments to contractors, therefore the contractor in parts during this development was also our client and partner.

4 SEBASTIAN VAN DAMME HISTORIC SHOTS OMA

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REBUILDING ROTTERDAM AFTER MAY 1940

1932

1940 Rubble clearing and reconstruction begins under the auspices of director Willem Witteveen of the City Building Control Department

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1946 Cornelis van Traa’s Basic Plan for the Reconstruction of Rotterdam is adopted by the City Council

1950 Three banks open: Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij by C Elffers and AA van Nieuwenhuyzen; Amsterdamsche Bank/ Incassobank by the Kraaijvanger brothers; and Twentsche Bank by A van der Steur, B Hooijkaas Bzn, and B van Veen

1951 New residential neighbourhoods, such as northern Kleinpolder and Overschie are developed by Lotte Stam-Beese Ter Meulen store by Van den Broek and Bakema opens

1953 Groothandelsgebouw by Van Tijen en Maaskant opens. It is then the largest building in the Netherlands The ﬁrst pedestrianised shopping area in Europe — the Lijnbaan — by Van den Broek and Bakema opens

1955 Rotterdam hosts Expo E55 Thalia Cinema opens designed by an architecture practice headed by JPL Hendriks, with W van der Sluys and LA van den Bosch

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1956 The new De Bijenkorf store designed by Marcel Breuer opens

1957 Opening of the new Rotterdam Centraal Station by architect Sybold van Ravesteyn

1960 The 180m-high Euromast by architect HA Maaskant opens Willem Marinus Dudok’s De Bijenkorf building, which opened in 1930, is demolished in preparatory work for the new Metro

1966 De Doelen, the first cultural building to be built after the war, opens and is seen as the final piece in the reconstruction of Rotterdam. The Netherlands first Metro system opens in Rotterdam

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REDEFINING ROTTERDAM AFTER 1980

1987

1981 The new Willemsbrug bridge by C Veerling opens

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1983 The new Municipal Library designed by Hans Boot of Van den Broek and Bakema opens Cube Houses by Piet Blom completed

1992 De Kunsthal exhibition venue designed by Rem Koolhaas at OMA opens

1993 The Netherlands Architecture Institute is established in Rotterdam

1996 The Erasmus Bridge by Ben van Berkel opens

2000 The KPN Tower by Renzo Piano opens

2001 The Nieuwe Luxor Theatre by Bolles+Wilson opens. The World Port Centre by Norman Foster opens

2005 Montevideo Tower by Francine Houben of Mecanoo opens Shipping and Transport College by architects Jan Willem Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk opens

2007 Designated city of Architecture 2007 The boundary of the area devastated during the bombing of 1940 is visualised by 128 spotlights projecting the demarcation line in the night sky over Rotterdam

2008 De Brug by JHK Architecten and West 8 opens

2010 New Orleans residential tower by ﾃ」aro Siza opens Two office towers by Odile Decq, Benoit Cornette and Dam en Partners Architecten open and are the tallest buildings in the Netherlands

2013 De Rotterdam by OMA opens

2014 Centraal Station by Benthem Crouwel Architects, MVSA and West 8 opens Markthal by MVRDV Architects opens

2015 Timmerhuis by OMA opens

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6 – The building’s pixelated steel structure allows for a ﬂexibility and modularity during construction

‘In a traditional architect-contractor relationship, it’s trench warfare. We try to build a good building, they try to build a cheap building and you have to meet somewhere in the middle — it’s a constant battle. Here that relationship was different because they had an interest in the quality too, so it was much more of a partnership than an oppositional relationship. Because we knew we’d work so closely with the contractor we decided to design it in a modular way that could be built fast. The buildability of the system was a conceptual ingredient in the process.’ In all, 84 apartments, all with ‘ample patios’, make up the bulk of the frothy pixelated cloud from floors six to the top at 14. But they are by no means the whole story. The new building clings on to the old and integrates with it from the fourth floor down to the ground. Two large atriums deviate from the normal void and are instead are filled with criss-crossing, structural, white steel. This takes the load of the building and allows the cloud to float and not touch the ground. It also allows for column free-spaces at ground level where you are in predominantly double- and triple-height spaces with the cloud, in effect, hovering above you. This means that where the new building does come to earth it does so with a dramatically light and elegant touch. ‘I saw the film All the President’s Men, about the Watergate

7 – Floor plans of Timmerhuis, starting at the publicly orientated ground level and ending in residential

affair, and in that you have these news rooms with endlessly deep American office floors and all these open-plan offices that go on into the distance — I always liked that,’ enthuses de Graaf, adding, ‘and so in that sense, I love buildings without atriums, but you can’t build them simply because our regulations require you to give everyone a certain exposure to daylight. So there were always going to be two atriums, but what we did was not interrupt the structure in them; we continued the structure of the building into the atriums, because it helped with overall performance with the structure. ‘So by keeping steel in the atriums it meant that we saved a lot of steel elsewhere in the building. I also like the spectacle because the atrium is one place where you can celebrate the structure and see the structural principles. I remember in 2014, when the building had no walls just the steel structure, it was so beautiful, I almost dreaded that the whole thing had to be finished. The atriums in the interior are a nice fragment of that spectacle so it’s one of the things I like a lot.’ In the lower levels of the building are the city government offices and the ground level was meant to be a place where all the city’s residents could access the city’s services while seeing the municipality at work above it in the offices. Unfortunately this didn’t come to fruition and you get a palpable sense of

6 OMA HISTORIC SHOTS OMA

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8, 9, 10, 11 SEBASTIAN VAN DAMME

8 & 10 – The conﬂux of the new and old: on the interior, the white walls are where you enter new building

9 – One of the street views that opens up, this one is from the main Coolsingel thoroughfare in Rotterdam

11 – A meeting area in the new building. OMA has also designed the interiors. This space uses bamboo ﬂooring

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12 SEBASTIAN VAN DAMME

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12 & 14 – The Museum Rotterdam was never part of the original plan, but OMA’s de Graaf believes it is the best substitute it could have hoped for 13 – An example of the lightness of touch that the building has when it reaches the ground. Seen from inside the museum

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frustration from de Graaf: ‘The original concept was pretty much what’s been built I have to say, although of course things did change as they do with any building you do. Part of it was meant to be a big public reception space on the ground floor which they called the City Shop, which was meant to house a lot of counters where people could renew their passports, get licences and the like. ‘We heard about halfway through that this wasn’t going to happen and of course it was a shock. This was the whole reason to have the building floating, the whole architecture was based on accommodating that very important function. We looked together with the client for another tenant which could follow through on the same public ambitions as the City Shop and we found Museum Rotterdam. As you can imagine there was a bit of turbulence in the process — and in that sense we were very lucky to find the museum. It is the best function we could have found for the city. But, when the City Shop went it was clearly a key moment in whole thing.’ This missing City Shop is a loss to the building programme. But the museum, being about the city and offering better access to the space in terms of opening hours, doesn’t seem like second best, even if it means the integration of the old and new buildings is now even more disjointed. The relationship between them is an odd one, feeling more parasitic than symbiotic. The old building seems to now be subservient to the new. All of the plant has been put inside it, the interiors are muted with grey

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floors, but explode into life in the new. Even the exterior ornament on the two inward-looking faces of the old building are now enclosed inside and serve the new building. ‘It’s a very opportunistic relationship,’ says de Graaf. ‘The old building has monument status largely because of the role it played in the history of Rotterdam. We used it where we could. Its exterior facade became an interior facade, so you see old brick in the interior space, which I think is nice because our building is very industrial. There’s very little ornament in the whole thing, and then you get this ornament for free. It is a quote from history. ‘Then the other thing we did is we converted half the attic to boardrooms so that we celebrated the old building, and the other half we turned into a plant room so we could ban all plant from the new building, which means that it almost looks ridiculously empty. So the monument simply works for the new building, which I think is a very healthy relationship. We’ve done this before in our projects. Letting the old work for the new is also an interesting form of preservation, because then you give it a real function in the present rather than just artificially celebrating it as a historical piece.’ The original Stadstimmerhuis was very much a building of its time — as is the Timmerhuis, reflecting changes in urbanplanning attitudes and lifestyles. Despite its quality and the grand gestures of the cloud, this is a fairly modest statement from OMA — a building that like its physical reality will probably only be glimpsed in future discussions of the practice’s output.

14 OSSIP VAN DUIVENBODE

15 – OMA’s Timmerhuis, with MVRDV’s Markthal behind it to the left

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The age-old Japanese technique of shou sugi ban, in which wood is torched to make it sturdy and durable, was used to link Charred House, by architect Tate Harmer to the local Suffolk timber-frame vernacular. It is nevertheless, a very modern home nestled among trees Words by Cate St Hill

KILIAN O’SULLIVAN

from outhouse to modern house

Left – Charred House aims to be a clear sculptural object in a beautiful garden setting

Set low in among the trees in the tranquil, leafy grounds of a grade II-listed country house, close to the Heritage Coast in Yoxford, Suffolk, Charred House is a quiet holiday retreat that connects deeply with the landscape. In the tradition of rural log cabins, quiet country lodges and outhouses, the single-storey, charcoal-black form makes its mark with a subtle incline of the roof and an expanse of glazing that marks it out as a modern addition in this rustic setting. Its East London-based architect Tate Harmer, a practice that specialises in timber-technology construction and low-energy homes, is used to designing buildings that bring architecture and nature together, from a treehouse office shown at last year’s London Festival of Architecture to a series of interventions at the Eden Project. ‘We’ve learned a lot about working in sensitive landscapes without affecting them, and how you tie the landscape design with the architecture design so they work as one,’ says Jerry Tate, partner at Tate Harmer. After experimenting with different forms, and having them ﬁt within the constraints of a conservation area dotted with mature trees, the practice decided on an unobstrusive, non-linear form for Charred House that helped it blend in with the surroundings. ‘This is a good example of the language we’ve been developing, where it’s not necessarily an orthogonal block but it’s not an organic shape either. We wanted it to be quite a clear sculptural object in this beautiful garden setting; an abstract form that changes as you walk around it, that seems to have the right kind of formal appearance to sit in a landscape without being too dominant,’ adds Tate. The 132 sq m, timber-framed house is clad in strips of charred larch sourced from Japan, which use the age-old Japanese technique called shou sugi ban, involving torching the wood in a hot oven to produce a robust, durable material that is unlikely to grey or dull over time. It also makes the building envelope more low maintenance, without the need to seal or top up the stain every few years. ‘It’s a lovely material,’ enthuses Tate. ‘We were very keen to try and tie in with the Suffolk vernacular of timber-frame buildings that are quite often stained black. The truth is when you 197

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Above left – The main living space opens out on to the landscape with large sliding doors Above right – The practice decided on an unobstrusive, non-linear form that helped the house blend in with the surroundings Left – ‘Cut-outs’ help ﬁll the rooms with daylight Below left – Bedrooms are focused on the sheltered north-facing side of the Charred House

KILIAN O’SULLIVAN

see a sample of charred larch against something stained black, the charred larch is much more visceral, it has this fantastic surface quality. We were trying to make a sculpture in the garden, so one of the most important things was the texture.’ The inside spaces have been organised to maximise southfacing views and garden access. The main living space opens out on to the landscape with large sliding glass doors, while the more sheltered northern side houses the secondary spaces and bedrooms. A series of ‘cut-outs’ to the building’s exterior fill the rooms with daylight and provide the main bedroom with its own courtyard. ‘The interior is almost monastically simple,’ says Tate of its heated polished concrete floors and white walls. ‘It’s really a very robust, simply finished building, which is about looking out in many ways. Even at the very end of the corridor we have a full-height window, and part of the richness of being in that space is looking out at a lovely historic brick wall at the end.’ Prefabricated and assembled on site, each component was tailored to fit in the tight plot of land without causing damage to the surrounding greenery. Although not passive-house certified — single-storey houses rarely are because of the ratio of external envelope to floor area — the design was input into passive-house software to ensure it was thermally efficient. South-facing triple glazing aids solar gain in the winter, while a mechanically ventilated heat-recovery system brings fresh air in without letting heat escape. The low-energy home also has a solar thermal hot-water system and rainwater recycling on the roof. ‘We would expect there to be no primary heating requirement at all because all the hot water would be supplied by the solar thermal system, and the building fabric will have a lot of passive solar gain. It always takes our clients a good while to work out not to turn the heating on!’ says Tate. From one angle, looking back at the house from the garden, the black form seems to hide behind the bushy foliage, partly obscured from view. A humble, subtle addition, its quiet presence conceals the light, airy refuge inside.

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A new nationwide minimum space guideline for new-build homes has been brought in by the Government, which might mitigate some of the worst abuses. Ten architects, housebuilders and developers give their views on the new move...

space standards for homes Hari Phillips The UK’s continuing housing crisis, spiralling rents and too few homes has meant smaller and smaller parcels of space coming on to the market, from studio flats that require the occupant to sleep on a shelf to shoe-box bedrooms under stairs. According to the RIBA, more than half of new homes being built today are not big enough to meet the purchaser’s needs. RIBA research found that the average three-bedroom home in London is now 25 sq m bigger than in Yorkshire, meaning that some Yorkshire families are missing out on the equivalent of a double bedroom and a family living room. Last October the Government brought in a long-awaited, Nationally Described Space Standard, guiding housebuilders and architects on the minimum internal area for new homes, bringing the rest of the country in line with London, which since 2011 has had its own standard. Previously there had only been the Parker Morris, brought in for new social-housing projects after the 1961 report Homes for Today and Tomorrow, and dropped in the Eighties. Based on the number of bedrooms and occupants, the new rules apply to every new home, from affordable mass housing to one-off projects. Under the standard, a one-bedroom flat should be a minimum of 39 sq m, while a three-bed, five-person home has to be 93 sq m. In two-bedroom homes one must be a double, with a minimum floor area of 11.5 sq m, plus a single a minimum of 7.5 sq m. Yet the new space standard is optional and any knock-on effects might not be seen immediately. To adopt minimum standards, local authorities must first carry out an impact assessment to demonstrate local need and viability. They also need to carry out a full local plan review, including public consultation. In its recent HomeWise campaign, the RIBA suggests that the best solution would be to embed the new standard within Building Regulations, calling for every new home across the country to be covered. But what has been the response from the architecture community to the new standard? Has the Government gone far enough, and will it really have any impact? We asked architects, housebuilders and developers for their thoughts and opinions… 200

Transforming quality of life by delivering outstanding homes is at the heart of Bell Phillips’ ethos, and so we welcome measures that seek to raise the quality of housing. But size isn’t everything, however, and space standards reduce the concept of quality to a very limited metric. My concern is that this focus dominates discussions on housing quality at the expense of other important factors: views, light, volume, usability, ﬂexibility, lifestyle, innovation, creativity. Increasingly, meetings with planning officers resemble a meeting with one’s accountant — people pour over detailed spreadsheets to assess ‘compliance’. This draconian, design-by-numbers’ approach means that in certain situations architects are forced to make poor design decisions or are restricted in their aspirations in order to make the numbers work. In my view, the quality of housing should be considered in a holistic way that considers size among other issues, and this assessment should be embedded within the planning process. In an ideal world planning officers would have the education, intelligence and experience to make proper value judgments about what constitutes good-quality housing. Perhaps it is this lack of faith in the system that pushes us towards the blunt instrument of minimum space standards. Hari Phillips director, Bell Phillips Architects

DAVID VINTINER

Russell Curtis

Alex Ely

Meredith Bowles

The Government’s attempts to streamline housing standards are welcome and long overdue. The principle of making compliance with technical standards the responsibility of building control is sensible, but its conflation with planning policy is a bewildering move. A clearer separation of duties would have been more sensible, particularly with regards to requirements for wheelchair-user housing under the new Part M that, confusingly, is implemented at the request of local planning policy. Only time will tell how this gets enforced on more complex schemes, and it will be interesting to see how the industry works to find an efficient way through the statutory approvals process. Concerns remain regarding some of the more prescriptive requirements that limit a creative approach to challenging sites, but more fundamentally it’s difficult to see why minimum space standards shouldn’t be mandatory within the Building Regulations rather than an ‘optional extra’ determined at the local planning level. People don’t vary in size according to their whereabouts in the country, so there’s no reason why space standards should either. I just don’t buy the suggestion that a small increase in area suddenly tips previously viable schemes into financial oblivion. Efficiencies in design, procurement and delivery can more than offset the cost of a few additional square metres, so arguments against mandatory minimum areas therefore appear spurious and miserly.

Good architecture must be generated by ideas beyond the practical and the technical, but at Mæ we nonetheless recognise that there is a role for legislation when speculation and the liberty of the market work against the interests of the common good. Writing the Mayor of London’s Housing Design Guide was an absorbing commission for Mæ and became the subject of much debate. It introduced mandatory requirements for all housing developments in Greater London and became the benchmark for the Nationally Described Space Standard. There is much resistance to legislating space standards on the basis that it will impact on viability. But viability is what we chose it to be and regulation is collectively made in the interests of creating a civilised society. Well-planned, generously lit and spacious homes are as important in delivering sustainability as urban design and building performance. In a dysfunctional market space standards help protect against the worst, they are simple and unequivocal unlike so much legislation, and they give certainty to the home buyer, the authority as well as the developer and their architects. It is only a pity that the Government has left the decision to adopt the Nationally Described Space Standard to individual local authorities.

It’s about time there was a requirement for new houses to be built to given space standards. We all know that the size of properties has fallen over the years, which is one reason that older properties remain valued. Despite progress, new houses are often smaller, pokier, with smaller windows. So what’s the problem with the Nationally Described Space Standard? Well, it’s not mandatory for one. It has loopholes that allow certain developments off the hook. And while Nationally Described, the guidelines are locally implemented. I get why there is agitation from the industry at the RIBA’s sabre-rattling, with soundbites that pit industry against the profession when we would do better to work together. And I get why it’s hard to insist on a one-size-ﬁts-all approach, but this could be overcome with some thought. We have taken the needs of people with disabilities seriously. Space to accommodate wheelchairs has, bit by bit, found its way into legislation, and has transformed the lives of many people — not just those with disabilities but those with children or shopping bags too. Isn’t it time to think about the rest of the population? Meredith Bowles director, Mole Architects

Alex Ely principal, Mæ

Russell Curtis director, RCKa

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NAT PRIEM

Andrew Matthews

Luke Tozer

Ben Adams

While housing quality is in part related to adequate space standards, the application of a one-size-ﬁtsall policy, applied through the Building Regulations, fails to recognise the very difficult challenges that face housing providers in different parts of the UK. It’s understandable for policy makers to wish to protect future residents from unscrupulous developers that might see relaxed standards as an opportunity to build sub-standard accommodation and maximise proﬁt, but it’s quite another if the same policy makes it unviable for housing associations to deliver much-needed, affordable housing in the poorer parts of the country. It seems to me that such a policy can in some cases be counterproductive. We are currently helping housing associations deliver family housing in the North to space standards that are below the national space standards’ target. But through creative design and innovative site layouts we believe we can help unlock muchneeded, affordable housing in a socially responsible way on otherwise unviable sites. Good residential design is not just about space standards.

The current space standards provide a good baseline for all new dwellings, are clear and easily understood. Space above these minimum standards should be provided for everyone to live in and enjoy. It is akin to a basic human right. It should be provided above these minimums universally by a well-functioning housing market. Currently it clearly is not. Although the standards themselves are OK, it is the implementation on a voluntary basis and the decision of each local authority that is the Achilles’ heel. The market responds best to legislation and regulation where it is imposed nationally, rather than where it is voluntary and localised. They will only have impact if they are adopted by local authorities. But sadly in an era when they are all facing severe budget cuts, it seems unlikely that all or many local authorities will have the resources or skills to implement the change. Space standards are easily quantiﬁable, obligatory and nationwide. If you couldn’t get a Building Regulations Completion certiﬁcate — hence mortgage — unless you had met them then everyone would suddenly be building to them. This also solves the resources and skills’ gap in local authorities, as Building Regulations can be administered by the private sector through Approved Inspectors.

A set of space standards for all is a great idea, and making them simple to understand and implement is essential. The London Plan enshrines such standards for that city, sets planning policy at the city-wide level, and is understood by consultants, clients and other stakeholders. Voluntary space standards will easily be overridden by market forces and so the standards need to be mandatory, but who will police them? Can we expect planning officers or Approved Inspectors to get the tape measure out when large apartment buildings are ﬁnished, or will we see scandal after scandal as the press exposes yet another building with rooms that are too small? I suspect the planning system could be a better guardian than Building Control as the overall scale of a building is unlikely to change much once consented, and therefore the rooms inside should add up to the right amount of space in total. Then there is the potential downside to mandatory space standards: we face a national housing crisis because homes generally are too expensive, and larger ones will be more so. There are two ways we might combat this: by persuading a UK government to invest in new affordable housing, or by decoupling house prices from land values by leasing land rather than owning it. We explored the second idea in proposals to New London Architecture for the Disco Housing Trust, in which homes are rented or leased from a trust that builds genuinely affordable homes on borrowed land. Space standards are critically important, but form one part of a larger and escalating housing crisis with conﬂicting pressures.

Andrew Matthews founding director, Proctor and Matthews

Luke Tozer director, Pitman Tozer Architects

Ben Adams founding director, Ben Adams Architects 202

TIMOTHY SOAR

Martyn Evans

Daisy Froud

Sarah Wigglesworth

What is important to understand is why we are talking about space standards at all. Our simple ambition as housebuilders should be to create beautiful, inspiring, useful and practical places for people to live in. In that regard, to borrow a phrase, size isn’t everything. In the myriad responses to the housing crisis there are some very creative ideas out in the market right now. Companies like The Collective, working on an innovative co-living brand that takes the student accommodation model and up-scales it for young professionals, is offering a solution that might deliver well-designed affordability in a complete rethink of how we live. More and more developers will be testing out the idea of micro ﬂats. Pocket Living is developing apartments at the very lower end of the guidelines, at around 38 sq m, but I have seen proposals for individual living spaces, augmented by very beautiful communal living, at sub-30 sq m. The idea here is that the distinction between affordable and… what…? Non-affordable (?) becomes academic. It’s ALL affordable. To move the debate along we have to ask questions of the role that planning regulations play in the delivery of affordable, inspiring homes. When does regulation simply get in the way of designers and developers driving innovation?

I welcome the standards, but as a remedial measure it’s like an emergency dressing applied to a gaping wound. A pressing problem has been addressed, but the same painful underlying logic will continue to drive procurement — that of housing as an investment commodity. Setting aside whether standards will be implemented where they are most needed, due to the possibility of opting out if they affect ‘viability’, and to the failure to incorporate them into Building Regulations, it’s unclear how much they can actually achieve in terms of quality. Even the London Housing Design Guide, which is more in the spirit of Parker Morris, with its qualitative focus on ‘social encounters’ and real ‘usability’, tends to get applied unthinkingly as a target rather than a minimum standard. There’s a nice bit of research done by UCL for CABE in 2010 on the history of space standards. It discusses Italy, where development culture prizes long-term usability and adaptability. When legal minimums were introduced in 1975 these were conﬁdently set lower than the average home size, merely introduced to eradicate bad practice in a market that was otherwise functioning well. Introducing properly enforced UK space standards may prove a step in the right direction, but it would be great to see some other ‘Italian’ features actively promoted here by any government that really wants to provide better housing for its citizens, such as support for smaller local housebuilders and continuing reduction of the appeal of ‘buy-to-let.’

It’s depressing that we have to have a debate over space standards at all. Generous space provision should be a fundamental requirement — not an opt-in — of all new housing regardless of tenure. It’s utterly depressing to observe the Government propose the rebuilding of so-called ‘sink estates’ on the one hand, while encouraging the construction of thousands of poor-quality new homes as part of a dubious long-term plan, and doing absolutely nothing to break that cycle of failure. At the root of it all is the monetisation of housing in pursuit of an ideological dream of mass ownership. Add to this the appeasement of volume builders, whose price for delivering the Government’s Starter Homes has been minimal regulation and huge subsidies. It doesn’t have to be this way. We are working with PegasusLife on a new retirement development, where generous space standards are just the start of an inspired brief from an informed client that prioritises wellbeing, health and social lives for its residents. I am also working with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, together with Sheffield City Council and local housing providers to research how the design of houses and neighbourhoods can facilitate mobility and wellbeing. Holistic thinkers are out there — it’s time we forced the rest to step up to the mark.

Martyn Evans creative director, U+I

Sarah Wigglesworth director, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects

Daisy Froud independent community engagement strategist 203

Forget about open-plan living, it’s all about the split section and flexible homes that work with the occupier and maximise the use of space, as Jaccaud Zein Architects’ and design-led developer Solidspace’s new residential development in Shoreditch attests to Words by Cate St Hill

walk the walk Above – A diagram showing Solidspace’s split section, used in every one of its projects to maximise space and create double-height voids

HÉLÈNE BINET

Left – Swiss practice Jaccaud Zein Architects worked with Solidspace to create the two brick-clad blocks on Shepherdess Walk in Shoreditch

While many housebuilders, driven by proﬁt, are cramming shoebox apartments into tall, generic blocks, playing a numbers’ game to build quickly and cut costs, developer Solidspace is on a mission to create well-designed homes built to last. It might not seem like much to ask, but then in view of the limited supply and choice of new housing, and a market dominated by big-volume developers, it’s no wonder that, according to an RIBA Future Homes survey, 75 per cent of us would not want to live in a new-build home if given the choice. Solidspace has carved itself a niche, promoting development as an art form and creative process that views housing as more than just a commodity. ‘We have this philosophy called buy-to-live, not buy-to-let,’ says Gus Zogolovitch, who heads up the company with his architect father Roger. ‘We believe that there is a growing number of people who want a new-build but don’t want what’s being offered by other developers. Our philosophy is all about trying to sell places that people actually want to live in. We want to create housing that is designed and loved, and built to age well.’ That means injecting projects with care, thought and attention, putting the occupier centre-stage and utilising every bit of space with its characteristic split-section form, used in each one of its projects in collaboration with some of the best architects out there. Its latest residential development in Shepherdess Walk, a stone’s throw from Old Street roundabout, combines Swiss precision with the trademarked Solidspace DNA design concept. Designed in collaboration with Geneva-based Jaccaud Zein Architects, the project comprises three terraced houses and ﬁve apartments split between two brick-clad buildings. Familiar with working on underused and overlooked gap sites in London, Solidspace and Jaccaud Zein Architects found the plot in 2011 after looking at a dozen alternatives. ‘We never understood how you could get work in London; it seemed very mysterious to us coming from Switzerland,’ says architect Jean-Paul Jaccaud. ‘We thought the best way to get to work was to somehow generate it ourselves. We looked around for investors and went around cap in hand.’ Through a friend they met Roger and Gus,

keen enthusiasts for alternative models of self-build and custombuild. Adds Jaccaud: ‘We felt a bit like babes in a wood doing a development in London. It felt a little bit irresponsible without someone there to hold our hand through the whole thing.’ On the site of a Seventies’ building, the project draws inspiration from the continuous Georgian terraces it faces. A contemporary interpretation of the terraced house is reinstated on Shepherdess Walk, the four-storey homes are subtly delineated only by the lines of black rainwater pipes and individual doors. The brick facade gently folds to open up to an adjacent park opposite, before folding again on to Wenlock Street to avoid a sharp, awkward corner at the road junction. As the streetscape on Wenlock Street gets higher, with bigger post-war housing blocks, the apartment building rises up in scale beyond the houses, separated by a low wall concealing the houses’ back gardens. Tying the two buildings together is a thick band of concrete cornicing that caps the brickwork. Both buildings are clad in a brick sourced from Belgium that was chosen to reflect the patination of the terraced facades opposite and blend the development into its context. Barely perceptible to the eye, slight variations in the pointing of the brickwork give the facades a gently aged appeal. Says Zogolovitch: ‘It has this really timeless quality about it; it looks like its been here forever. Often new buildings can slightly look like an alien has landed so it’s nice to feel that this finishes off the corner so much better than the building that was there. That’s what good architecture, good design and good development is all about.’ No expense was spared on the material finishes, from very deep window reveals to give a sense of weight and presence to the buildings, to solid-brass balustrading to the windows and tactile walnut details inside. ‘When Jean-Paul said let’s go for solid-brass balustrading I had a bit of an intake of breath, but you need that level of attention and detail if you want these things to last 150–200 years,’ says Zogolovitch. ‘You’ve heard of the terms slow travel, slow food, slow cooking? I now refer to this as slow development, because 205

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HÉLÈNE BINET

the reality is these things take time; what we haven’t done is take a ready meal and stuck it in the microwave. At Solidspace we like to craft things and think about it.’ Inside, both the houses and apartments use Solidspace’s split-section form. The houses have three half-levels of living space clustered around a double-height space as well as four bedrooms, a small back garden and a roof terrace. Balconies overlooking the double-height space provide links and views across and above, while large windows allow light to flood from one space to another. The split section allows for different ceiling heights — taller on the lower levels, decreasing in height as you go up the building — and because stairs connect the levels, there is no need for corridors, saving much-needed space for where it really matters. ‘Each level is not actually a very big space, but it does so much to give you a sense of volume and generosity. There’s no sense of enclosure or it being small,’ notes Jaccaud. The apartments, meanwhile, vary in size from one-bedroom to four-bedroom flats (of course, they’re not actually flats…), with the split-section configuration allowing for maximum flexibility. Whole rooms and floors can be divided off, whether it’s for an elderly relative coming to stay, teenagers in need of their own space, an Airbnb rental or work-from-home studio. Each apartment even has three front doors connected to the communal stairwell and separate entry phones for multiple access and complete autonomy from the rest of the flat. Explains Zogolovitch: ‘One of the key things we try to think about is how people actually live these days. It seems so strange that we carry on insisting that our homes should be based around a Victorian floor plate. We now have flexible lives that have different working patterns, more freelances, people working from home, and I think that’s what we’re trying to accommodate.’ While open-plan living is going out of fashion, architects now use the term ‘broken plan’ to describe homes that can adapt to suit the needs of families and provide quiet areas for independence and privacy. Solidspace’s split section is leading the way.

Opposite page – The split-section form is used in both the houses and apartments, with the houses having three half-levels of living space and balconies overlooking the doubleheight spaces Above, left – Rooms can be easily divided off as a family grows and changes Above, right – The living spaces are connected by stairs, doing away with the need for corridors Right – This roof-top dwelling has its own patio area

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MATERIALS FOCUS

Furniture fairs 2016

Book — A Genealogy of Modern Architecture

228 – 229

We bring you our top picks and designers to watch from four shows this spring: Stockholm Furniture Fair, Maison&Objet, northmodern and imm cologne

Kenneth Frampton’s latest book, following decades of teaching, is based on a course in which students were asked to methodically compare two buildings of similar type 221

London-based practice Waugh Thistleton sings the praises of cross-laminated timber (CLT), a carbon-neutral form of construction it now uses in three-quarters of its projects

Exhibition — Out There: Our Post-War Art

236 – 242

218 – 219

Exhibition — Creation from Catastrophe: How Architecture Rebuilds Communities The Royal Institute of British Architects’ latest exhibition looks at ways that cities and communities have recovered from disasters, from the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire to today’s grass-roots community schemes

Historic England’s exhibition at London’s Somerset House provides a timely call-to-action to help save the nation’s sculptures and public art, finds Herbert Wright 222

Exhibition — Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction New York and Oregon-based architect Brad Cloepfil has mounted an exhibition at Denver Art Museum of intriguing objects he created as tools of architectural investigation

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Waugh Thistleton: building with CLT

Archive While in this issue we feature examples of where architects and landscape designers have worked as one, we also look back to Blueprint No 152 of 1998, when Dutch practices such as West 8 were already forging ahead

REVIEW

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2016 Furniture Fairs: Stockholm Furniture Fair, Maison&Objet, northmodern, imm cologne

Blueprint sent three people to the four key furniture fairs so far this year, to bring you the best of the new pieces on offer. We start in Sweden and go to Germany, via France and Denmark 1

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Exhibition

Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair 9–13 February Review by Cate St Hill

For ﬁve days in February, 40,000 visitors descend on Stockholmsmässan’s 70,000 sq m in search of the best Scandinavian design, and a respite from the snow outside. We were without snow this year, but there was no end of natural, Nordic materials and harmonious, functional designs. Catching the eye with exquisite craftsmanship, design duo Färg & Blanche presented the Julius chair for

family-owned Swedish brand Gärsnäs. The duo has been experimenting with ‘wood tailoring’ for several years now, stitching sheets of timber together with a sewing machine, a creative technique that won the Best Product award at the fair in 2014. This time, following intensive research to get the process suitable for mass production, padded fabric has been sewn on to the wood to create modular, curved shields for both a chair and sofa. With no glue holding the pieces together, they can be easily separated and recycled at the end of the product’s life. The Bollo chair by Andreas Engesvik for Fogia amusingly takes its name from the Norwegian designer’s favourite dish, spaghetti bolognese.

The voluptuous upholstery, attached to a thin wire frame, gives the chair a curvaceous, ﬂeshy form — especially the salmon-pink version — complete with love-handle-esque armrests. Another unusual form, standing out from other typical Scandinavian designs with their clean lines and smooth volumes (they all start to look the same after a while), was Massproductions’ Spark lounger. Inspired by a traditional Swedish kicksled, the steel construction and canvas seat balances on two elegant wooden runners, seemingly ready to take off at any moment. Also playing a balancing act is Christina Liljenberg Halstrøm’s two-legged Georg desk for Danish company Skagerak. Leaning against

a wall, the discrete, minimalist design neatly fits into the smallest of spaces, even corridors. Jaime Hayon’s Palette Desk for &tradition, meanwhile, makes much more of a statement with its suspended sense of movement. Inspired by Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures, the elongated beanshaped desk sits on thin powder coated steel tubes, with a playful, spinning plate-like tier available in marble or satin polished brass. Says Hayon: ‘When I first saw them [Calder’s mobiles] I was almost mesmerised. My Palette Desk is an homage to this supremely simple concept of poetry in motion. As I see it, a desk is where we are supposed to sit still and make decisions. And yet, it is also where we find distractions.’ 2

On the lighting front, the pick of the bunch has to be London-based studio Industrial Facility’s w152 Busby lamp for Wästberg. Looking a little like a stick man wearing a beanie, the lamp features a ﬂat base with three USB outlets to charge multiple tablets, mobiles and computers. It can be freestanding, by the bed or on the desk for example, or wall-mounted and ﬁtted into a surface — clever and cute. It was Wästberg’s w164 Alto lamp by Dirk Winkel, a tall uplighter that can be dimmed using a disc on the cylindrical base, that won the Fair’s Best Product award. Away from the more pragmatic concerns of mass production, Greenhouse offered a stage for young, unestablished designers and

design schools to let their imaginations run wild. There was Plantscape by Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov, a modernist concrete jungle inspired by postSoviet architecture that offers a home for plants in between modular building blocks and ventilation shafts. Croatian furniture designer Luka Jelušić and artist Mladen Ivančić presented An Imaginary Heritage, an intriguing collection of wood and ceramic objects representing food rituals, including an outdoor barrel for smoking ﬁsh and gathering people together. Elsewhere, taking inspiration from Canadian landscape and culture — though it could easily have been Scandinavia — Winnipegbased designer Thom Fougere

showed a calm, pared-back collection of furniture, including a vegetabletanned saddle leather chair and a three-legged, solid-ash bar cart. For Scandinavians — who make up around 80 per cent of the exhibitors on show — it’s all about creating useful, everyday objects, designed to last and age well. They may not design things to look fancy or to show off like the Italians or French might do, but you will find the comfiest armchairs, the neatest desks and the handiest light fittings.

1 – Julius chair by Färg & Blanche for Gärsnäs 2 – Plantscape by Maxim Scherbakov 3 – Spark lounger by Massproductions 4 – w152 Busby light by Industrial Facility for Wästberg 5 – Bollo chair by Andreas Engesvik for Fogia

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Exhibition

Maison&Objet Paris 22–26 January Review by Johnny Tucker

Brought in to create a light for Lasvit, Brazil’s Campana Brothers were so taken with the fungus they saw growing on a glass-blowing mould at the manufacturer’s facility that they ended up creating a second light to their own brief. The ﬁrst pieces they produced were the exuberant Candy collection of a chandelier and table light — glass looking like boiled sweets. The second, unscripted piece, Fungo, is a wooden chandelier oozing glass, with a kind of left-ﬁeld elegance. ‘Our main purpose is to create a shock between the formal rigidity of the chandelier’s wooden structure and the pieces of glass that seem to spontaneously germinate from the wood,’ says Humberto Campana. Stellar Works presented itself inside a steampunkish metal cage designed by current creative director Neri&Hu. One of the standouts of the show, Stella Works added more than 20 pieces to its range including Neri&Hu’s Ming tables and chairs and Dowry collection of cabinets. There was also a collection from Yabu Pushelberg exploring ‘modern masculinity’, including a very strong chaise among other pieces. On the droller end of design, the UK’s innermost and Italy’s Seletti, continued doing what they do, very well. Among the innermost highlights

were the YoyWall light and the industrial up-and-down lighter, Bolt, designed by Steve Jones, which looks like a girder poking out of the wall. Seletti’s highlights included a hook-up with fashion brand Diesel Living to produce what it humbly says is ‘a visionary and poetic tableware collection inspired by the universe’. And also doing what he does best, Jake Phipps continues to mine his pixilated/geode seam, this time producing new pieces for his Stellar Oval collection, including a low table and mirror. Away from the furniture launches, Kartell made its first foray into the fragrance market, though it still concentrates on its core plastic creativity with a series of sculptural room perfumers, colour-coded to their scents. And finally the Arita 400 project loomed literally large at the show. Arita is an area in Japan famous for producing fine porcelain and has been doing so for 400 years. This is being celebrated in Arita 400, where a host of household names have been asked to work in the material. Four welcoming features in the outer walkways, by Kengo Kuma, Kitano Takeshi, Kashiwa Sato and Ken Okuyuma, were complemented by a large stand in the main design-led hall, with eight porcelain houses showing their visions for the future.

1 & 2 – Fungo (below) and Candy Sphere by the Campana Brothers for Lasvit 3 – Bolt by Steve Jones for innermost 4 – Stellar Oval low table by Jake Phipps 5 – Kartell fragrances 6 – The Diesel Living collection by Seletti 7 – James by Yabu Pushelberg for Stella Works

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Exhibition

northmodern Copenhagen 13–15 January Review by Gareth Gardner

Contemporary Denmark isn’t all about brutal murders whose investigators wear iconic knitwear. The flipside is a reputation for laid-back friendliness, an atmosphere pervading northmodern in Copenhagen. The design show aims to be ‘sharply curated’, yet the ambience is so genial it’s easy to forget you are visiting a trade fair. In its third edition, the latest show was split into several components, including two decent-sized halls of furniture and satellite spaces featuring, among other things, student work, handmade crafts and sustainable design. Possibly the biggest challenge facing the twice-yearly show’s latest outing was that it kicked off a winter extravaganza of design fairs including the behemoths imm cologne and Maison&Objet in Paris, not to forget Scandi rival the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair. In contrast, northmodern’s relatively diminutive size is very much in its favour, as is the consistent high quality of its exhibitors. The influence of Dutch modernism was felt everywhere, with more timber than you could shake a stick at. The results included the reconfigurable KK Daybed system from By KlipKlap and Noyer’s beautiful tables, seemingly hewn from solid walnut tree trunks and sawn into angular shapes with copper connections. Other notable Scandi offerings included Handvärk’s dining table with a slender frame topped with marble tiles, Menu’s equally spindly midcentury-style Afternoon Bench, and Ferm Living’s stackable Herman chair, designed by Aarhus-based Herman Studio. Blå Station’s Couronne ‘easy to place’ table picked up a vibe harking back to the manufacturer’s roots in the Eighties. As well as a smorgasbord of furniture, there was also a feast of lighting products to gorge on. Rewired, an offspring of Danish hotel-lighting specialist Frandsen Project, showcased its growing range, including pendants originally created in the Fifties by architecture practice

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Fries & Moltke, as well as the similarly modernist vibe of its Droid floor lamp. More flamboyant in their appearance were Droobski’s pleated pendant shades, each painstakingly hand-folded by owner Morten Droob. While most exhibitors were from Denmark, there was decent representation from further afield. Vienna-based chmara.rosinke demonstrated conceptual pieces alongside the more practical ‘cucina futurista’ range, including chairs fabricated from bent metal tubes and dining tables seamlessly combining timber and marble. A Belgian group stand combined art pieces such as Observer by Jonas Van Put, which places an Arne Jacobsen Butterflychair perilously atop a 5.2m-tall tower, with more practical offerings including Detroit lamps by Pierre Coddens in colours straight from the set of Miami Vice. Further lighting inspiration came from Studio Truly Truly, established in the Netherlands by Australian design duo Joel and Kate Booy. Its Levity light combines an LED source inside a woven textile exterior, its form dictated by gravity’s pull. Spanish manufacturer Parachilna unveiled its versatile B15 lamp, designed by Jordi Veciana, made from aluminium with an extruded glass diffuser, which can be hung either horizontally or vertically. There were enough exclusive product launches and exhibitors not showing elsewhere to make northmodern a worthwhile trip. This is likely to further improve in 2017 with a shift to one show a year, accompanied by a greater focus on the contract furniture market. And while located towards the edge of the city, northmodern’s venue the Bella Center is set to become the heart of a new mixed-use neighbourhood. It’s also next to a metro station, with a zippy 10-minute journey to the city centre. So there is ample reason to combine a visit to the show with a stroll around Copenhagen’s friendly streets, with barely a dismembered corpse in sight.

1 – KK Daybed from By KlipKlap 2 – DOMU lampshade by Droobski 3 – Droid ﬂoor lamp by Rewired 4 – Detroit light by Pierre Coddens 5 – B15 lamp by Jordi Veciana for Parachilna 6 – Conference table by Noyer 7 – cf2.0 chair by chmara.rosinke 8 – northmodern’s relaxed environment at Copenhagen’s Bella Center

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Exhibition

imm cologne 18–24 January Review by Johnny Tucker

imm continued its Das Haus central feature this year with German designer Sebastian Herkner at the reigns. Transparency was the cornerstone for the circular scheme, though it wasn’t as intriguing and provocative as last year’s offering from Neri+Hu (see Maison&Objet review on page 212). Barcelona outﬁt Mobles 114 showed Eugeni Quitllet’s chunky Tube chair, which although officially launched at the end of last year, was deﬁnitely worth a second look. Maison&Objet thought so too, with a focus on the designer’s work. In the vein of metal chairing Pedrali’s outdoor lounge chair addition to the Nolita range by Simone Mandelli and Antonio Pagliarulo also stood out from the crowd. Like a number of exhibitors Ercol was showing at both fairs and on its stand it was the extremely minimal

and perhaps least Ercolian Pero Desk, by Matthew Hilton that really caught the eye, with its simple and elegant lines. It’s part of a collection of three pieces. Minimalist Karimoku, by contrast produced something slightly more Ercolian with its Castor sofa, that references Le Corbusier’s LC2. For sheer exuberance of form it was Italy’s Alias and The Netherland’s Leolux to the fore. Gabriele & Oscar Buratti created the superbly bulbous concrete and glass Saen table for Alias, while Christian Werner was the creative force behind Leolux’s excellent Guadalupe modular sofa. Also particularly strong on form, and somewhat reminiscent of the work of Gio Ponti, was the reissue of the Votteler chair designed by Arno Votteler in 1956 for Walter Knoll and updated with some interesting new fabric choices. 1 – Lounge chair for the Nolita range by Simone Mandelli and Antonio Pagliarulo for Pedrali 2 – Guadalupe by Christian Werner for Leolux 3 – Saen by Gabriele & Oscar Buratti for Alias 4 – Pero Desk by Matthew Hilton for Ercol 5 – Castor sofa from Karimoku 6 – Votteler chair by Arno Votteler reissued by Walter Knoll

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7-8 JUNE 2016

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Exhibition

Creation from Catastrophe: How Architecture Rebuilds Communities RIBA Gallery, London Until 24 April Review by Cate St Hill

It seems almost every day that Mother Nature thrashes our world with a horrific new disaster, whether it’s howling hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, floods or freezes. But, with destruction and devastation comes an opportunity for architects and communities to start again, learn from the past and rethink how we can live more harmoniously with nature, instead of fighting against it. The Royal Institute of British Architects’ latest thought-provoking exhibition, Creation from Catastrophe, looks at a selection of eclectic projects from the 17th century to the present day that have radically reimagined and rebuilt whole cities and vulnerable communities. Starting with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, this admirably ambitious show weaves 2

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a swift path from 18th-century Lisbon, through visions for 19th-century Chicago and the metabolists in Japan, to contemporary responses from the likes of OMA, Shigeru Ban and ELEMENTAL. Although naturally limited by the small space of the one-room gallery — the display only really skims the surface of responses to catastrophic events — the exhibition has a lot to say. Divided into two parts, the 10 projects on show illustrate a shift from a top-down approach of grand, ideological masterplans spearheaded by one powerful individual, to a more cathartic, collaborative way of building that puts people ﬁrst and works with nature. The constraints of the compact gallery have been expertly dealt with by Aberrant Architecture, which has created an immersive environment that picks up on the tension between top-down and bottom-up responses. Three sequential spaces are linked by a ramped passageway, journeying up from a clean, white acrylic-clad space to a warm, enveloping, natural cork-clad room at the back that looks over the material on show. From the ﬁve original plans for rebuilding London in the aftermath of the Great Fire (350 years ago this

1 OMA 2 RIBA COLLECTIONS 3 NLE 4 SHIGERU BAN, VOLUNTARY ARCHITECTS’ NETWORK 5 HERITAGE FOUNDATION OF PAKISTAN 6 RIBA COLLECTIONS

year), the exhibition moves abroad to Lisbon. Following an earthquake that almost entirely destroyed the city in 1755, the powers that be took the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, replacing the medieval street plan with a grid of regal avenues and squares. A large model of a Pombalino wooden-framed building, still used in training by the Lisbon fire service, shows one of the earliest examples of seismically protected constructions in Europe. Opposite, images from after Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871 depict the remarkable transformation of a city from ruins and rubble to innovative stable structures and fireproof metal frames, leading the way for the first skyscrapers and the city it is today. A big leap forward from past to present, and several of the contemporary projects, many ongoing or in progress, stand out for their socially minded, participatory approach that aims to empower communities and bring people

Though naturally constrained by the small space of the gallery — expertly dealt with by Aberrant Architecture — the show has a lot to say

together. Indeed, the whole exhibition could have been based on these few projects alone. One such example is man-of-themoment and Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena and his practice ELEMENTAL’s plans for Constitución, a city on the west coast of Chile exposed to frequent flooding, earthquakes and occasional tsunamis. Instead of building flood defences between the estuary and the city, the team, in consultation with the community, took the bold decision to relocate more than 100 families and replace them with a dense, green forest on the riverfront to absorb water and create some much-needed public space. It is under construction and due to be completed in 2017. Elsewhere, Pakistan’s first female architect Yasmeen Lari works with architecture students to pass on knowledge and skills to local residents so they can build their own homes. Lari has built more than 45,000 relief structures in flooded areas of Pakistan to date, including several women’s centres and free schools. Constructed from mud walls and strong bamboo cross-bracing systems, not only are these more resilient to natural disasters and don’t rely on outside building supplies, they also provide a long-term legacy of skills for local craftsmen. Also working directly with the community and building on local knowledge, Lagos-based architecture practice NLÉ has developed ecological building systems for areas of Nigeria prone to flooding and slum clearances that break up communities. Built by local people using wood off-cuts and locally grown bamboo, the Makoko Floating School (2013), for example, provides a community space for slum dwellers: it can float on water with more than 100 people on board. What all these contemporary projects have in common is that they

put human need at the centre of the design process. Instead of resisting or ﬁghting a losing battle against disasters, they embrace nature and give communities an open, welcoming space to come together, meet, support one another and rebuild their lives. It represents not just a shift in disaster response, but also a wider trend in the architecture profession towards collaborative design that educates, engages people and enriches communities. This exhibition should provide inspiration for the next generation of architects, which has the power to instigate change and in some small way make amends for both nature and man-made devastation. 6

1 – Ideas for rebuilding Hoboken, New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy 2 – Sir Christopher Wren’s Plan for Rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666 3 – Makoko Floating School, Lagos, Nigeria by NLÉ 4 – Housing for 2015 Nepal earthquake victims by Shigeru Ban 5 – Women’s Centre, Darya Khan, Pakistan, designed by Yasmeen Lari 6 – Post Chicago ﬁre, high rise — Reliance Building by Atwood, Burnham & Co, North State Street, Chicago 1890–95

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Book

A Genealogy of Modern Architecture Kenneth Frampton (Editor, Ashley Simone) Lars Müller, €40 Review by Thomas Wensing

A Genealogy of Modern Architecture is the latest book by Kenneth Frampton and the fruit of decades of teaching activity and gestation. The class on which this book is based was originally more succinctly called Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, and was taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University from 2004 to 2008. I attended this class in 2004 and I have fond memories of it, and I have attempted to teach a similar course myself, but was naturally not able to achieve the same level of depth and resolution with my students. The syllabus in 2004 explained that the seminar had a long history: ‘It is difficult to decide whether this seminar is timely or untimely. It is in fact a seminar that I gave in this school almost continuously for some 20 years before deciding that it had perhaps outlived its usefulness.’ It is rooted in an even earlier course, taught in the mid-Sixties at Princeton University, and reading between the lines one can surmise that it was suspended in the Eighties, the era when postmodernism reigned supreme. The course was always intended to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and it took some experimenting before it evolved into a class in which students were asked to methodically compare two buildings of similar type according to a ﬁxed set of analytical parameters. The 14 comparisons of some 28 buildings that make up most of the book are divided into programmatic categories: Houses and Pavilions; Housing; Office Buildings; Civic Buildings; Concert Halls; Museums; and Stadia, and are laid down in 1

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diagrams, photographic and orthographic representations, and in written text. The choice of categories reﬂects a deep belief in the democratising capacity of architecture, which is to say its ability to create so called ‘space of public appearance’, environments in which people can actively take part in society and become full citizens. It needs no explanation that the process of further democratisation is forever ongoing and that, in spite of the rise of new communication technology, the place for activism is still the street. Naturally, Frampton is no Guy Debord, but an activist undercurrent towards a more humane society and the way in which this should be materialised is, in my mind, the true essence of the book. It is no coincidence that Frampton has an almost lifelong fascination for the book The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt, and by his own admission that the concept of hierarchically analysing space from public to semi-public, to private and ancillary or service space was taken from both Arendt and Louis Kahn. In addition to colour-coding the hierarchical organisation in plan and section, the students were asked to look at the intended goal route/s — which is to explain what a subject would encounter when travelling the route architecturale through the site

The analyses are richest... and indeed exciting, when modernist works of different persuasion are set against each other and building — to analyse the membrane and structure and to make connections to inspirations of the work, the so-called ‘connotational analysis’. The overall pedagogical intent is clearly heuristic, by which I mean that students are equipped with an analytical framework that will anchor their design ability and allow them to more effectively form judgements and solve problems in their design process. In this sense a positive reference can be made to the 1978 book Modern Housing Prototypes by Roger Sherwood, which similarly expresses the conviction that architecture can and should be studied systematically, if not scientiﬁcally, by way of comparison of the resolution of analogical design problems in comparable precedents. I think an even more romantic analogy can be made in that the methodology reminds us of the way in which presentations were made at the CIAM conferences, thus rooting the book ﬁrmly in the modern movement. The analyses are richest, most compelling, and indeed exciting, when modernist works of different persuasion are set against each other.

The comparison of the Schröder House by Rietveld to Maison Cook by Le Corbusier, and the Casa del Fascio by Terragni to the Gothenburg Law Courts of Asplund come to mind, or neo-plasticism versus purism and fascism versus social democracy. The introductions which precede the projects are divided into three sections: a synoptic account of the modern movement; a so-called philosophical excursus that grounds the works in the context of both phenomenology and Arendt’s The Human Condition; and a detailed explanation of the analytical methodology employed. Over the past few years the scope of the pedagogical project has focused more on a phenomenological architectural agenda, and yet at the same time the ambition has grown for the book to be intended to be read as a ‘genealogy of modern architecture.’ I feel that this aspect of the book should be treated with some caution, given the limited selection of canonical works under consideration. In an earlier book, Labour, Work and Architecture, Frampton acknowledges that he has an inclination towards operative criticism, which is to say that he largely supports the architects and works under consideration, so that his architectural criticism has the tendency to lean towards an appraisal. Given Frampton’s preferences and convictions, as expressed in his book on tectonics and in his championing of Critical Regionalism, as much is said by way of omission as in the analyses themselves. So it comes as no surprise that Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto get ample coverage, while Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Frank Lloyd Wright are mostly absent. In the ﬁnal analysis — pardon the pun — I thus felt that a more evenly balanced selection would have been in order, but that an excellent method has now been handed down for teachers and students everywhere to complete Frampton’s genealogy.

1 – Compare and contrast, from the book

Exhibition

Out There: Our Post-War Art Somerset House, London Until 10 April Review by Herbert Wright

Contemporary public sculptures beam into the city, present a fleeting look-at-me spectacle, invite a selfie peeping over your shoulder, then often move on. The sculptures that appeared in the heady, idealistic years after 1945 seem very different — far more contemplative, less staggering, more permanent. Indeed, though very unlike today’s eye-candy, the curious forms of post-war works deliberately contrasted with the rectilinear volumes and spaces of the brave new modernist Britain. Furthermore, as the exhibition Out There highlights, much of it was temporary too, because it has been destroyed or stolen. Out There is Historic England’s first major exhibition since rebranding made history of its English Heritage name. Curator Sarah Gaventa revealed that she had just five months to prepare it, making her run around so much that it was ‘the curatorial equivalent of being in a Benny Hill show’. Nevertheless, she’s brought together an extraordinary collection of works, photos, film, maquettes, catalogues and press clippings, even trawling eBay as a source. Her survey, particularly of the earlier part of the 1945-1985 period, is deftly divided into didactic sections. We start with Brave New Art, taking us back to when artists, many of them Jewish émigrés, emerged from arcane art circles to display their work in daylight for everyone to enjoy. The first London County Council-sponsored Open Air Sculpture Show in 1948 drew a crowd of 100,000. Hugh Casson insisted that art was woven into the Festival of

1 HARLOW MUSEUM 3 HISTORIC ENGLAND

Britain. It sported 30 sculptures and 50 murals, included Powell & Moya’s Skylon. That was trashed in 1952 on Churchill’s orders, and most of the rest was lost. In the Fifties, Harlow went so big on public art that the show gives the new town its own room. The town’s architect, Frank Gibberd (who designed Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Heathrow’s lost brick terminals) said his civic centre should have ‘the finest works of art, like Florence and other splendid cities’. Strangely, on a 1956 film clip on show, he comes across as slightly shifty, not meeting the interviewer’s eyes, yet jolly British at the same time. Still, there’s no doubting the legacy — a veritable who’s-who of British sculptors embellished Harlow, including Lynn Chadwick, Gerda Rubinstein and Barbara Hepworth (just as art was reportraying women as mother figures). Hepworth’s two-storey Contrapuntal Forms (1951) tower like sentinals up close to housing. Willi Soukop’s gentle Donkey (1955) and Elisabeth Frink’s nervy Boar (1970) brought animal spirit into Harlow, while Ralph Brown’s Meat Porters (1959) brought a carcass to centre stage in Market Square. Gibberd’s Water Gardens has seven extraordinary 1963 murals by masterful William Mitchell, with a Picasso-meets-Aztec sun-god energy. Today Harlow has 65 sculptures, but six more have been stolen, some melted for black-market metal. London’s commercial buildings have long-mounted sculptures, but post-war conceptual forms were a far cry from earlier figures. An exhibition treat is a Fifties’ model of Basil Spence’s Thorn House, complete with an early version of Geoffrey Clarke’s Spirit of Electricity mounted on the 61m-high skyscraper, as well as a maquette and sketch of it. This fantastic 1961 bronze of filaments and crescent skewered on a 23.5m-long spine still hangs, but on the fridgewhite Orion House now there.

Historic England has listed 41 post-war public artworks up to 1985, but the show has half a wall about lost and destroyed works Spence often commissioned art for his building designs, but his Hampstead Civic Centre, at Swiss Cottage, London, has been lost, along with the blocky, brutalist yet dynamic floating walls of Sun Terrace (1964) by Mitchell, who talks about his lost masterpiece on film. Almost gonners, but restored for the show, are two other examples of what Gaventa calls Sculpitecture — architectural relief murals favoured in the Sixties. One is Trevor Tennant’s New Horizons (1963), an almost geological wall which long lurked behind a Welwyn Garden City hospital vending machine. The 1972 City Sculpture project, backed by a tobacco firm, peppered big works nationwide. There’s a model of Liliane Lijn’s beautiful White Koan, one of her trademark revolving cones but 6m high, which graced Plymouth (later moved to Warwick University). The groans of its whirring motors, she once told me, meant ‘it had a voice!’ The 5.5m-high King Kong by Nicholas Munro in Birmingham presaged the pop-sensationalist works of more recent times.

Several fascinating stories are unearthed, such as that of the CIA-sponsored Unknown Political Prisoner sculpture competition (1952) and the recent battle of councils and campaigners for Henry Moore’s Old Flo (1957-8). The wanton destruction of Barry Flanagan’s Piece For the City (1972) by Cambridge students backed by a philistine vicar, for me, chillingly pre-echoes Islamic State and Palmyra. Historic England has recently listed 41 post-war public artworks up to 1985, but the show has half a wall of panels about lost and destroyed works. There’s many more out there. In an age when a fresh Banksy mural can be lifted overnight, we’re reminded that vandals and thieves have always stalked art, and that England’s post-war public legacy is vulnerable. Out There brilliantly reassesses it, and issues a timely call: Save Our Sculptures! 3

1 – Girl in Harlow with Donkey by Willi Soukop (1955) 2 – Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman, aka ‘Old Flo’ (1957-8) at London’s Stifford Estate. It’s now in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 3 – An Eduardo Paolozzi mural at Tottenham Court Road station, prior to Crossrail works, four ﬁfths of which survived

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Exhibition

Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction

Showing architecture in a gallery is never easy. Drawings of unbuilt works leave many viewers cold. Photographs might as well be in books. Scale models are difficult to understand. And full-size mock-ups are expensive. Brad Cloepfil, the 59-year-old New York and Oregon-based architect, has mounted an architecture show that focuses not on drawings or photographs or scale-models or full-size mock-ups. Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction is rather a display of objects created by Cloepfil as tools of architectural investigation. Though they helped him design buildings, including several highly regarded American museums, they aren’t direct representations of buildings. And though they make inventive use of wood, porcelain, resin, concrete, brass, gold leaf and other materials, Cloepfil says they aren’t tests of those materials. Rather, he says, ‘They are tests of ideas.’ Cloepfil says he never intended to make the objects public, but that he yielded to requests from clients and curators. At their urging, he designed ingenious display cases for the objects — ‘toolchests for architectural tools’ is how he puts it — and installed the cases in a kind of armature, slender steel frames that he calls thresholds. These support the boxes but more importantly seem to define the space from which to view them. They bear a strong resemblance to the work of Fred Sandback, who in the Seventies and Eighties became known for using string to define surfaces and volumes. Born in Portland and coming to New York to study in the Seventies, Cloepfil found himself enthralled by Sandback and other minimalist artists. 2

Indeed, his work tends to draw on their work as well as the natural and man-made forms — ranging from basalt cliffs to ‘wigwam burners’ — of his native Pacific Northwest. Cloepfil founded his firm, Allied Works Architecture, in Portland in the Nineties; he later opened an office in New York. But it is in Denver that he is something of a hero, having given the Colorado capital perhaps its most significant contemporary building. It is also one of the most remarkable single-artist museums in the world. The Clyfford Still Museum, which opened in 2011, houses the work of the abstract expressionist painter, who was also influenced by the forms of the Northwest. Still’s work compares favourably to, and in some cases presaged, that of Motherwell, Rothko and Johns. But Still kept most of his work in storage; that made him a relative unknown but ensured that someday his astonishing body of work could be seen in one building. Denver beat other American cities vying for the museum, and then Cloepfil beat

Cloepfil says he never intended to make the objects public, but that he yielded to requests from clients and curators better-known architects such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Chipperfield for the chance to design it. Dean Sobel, the director of the Clyfford Still Museum, was one of those who urged Cloepfil to show the objects in Case Work. Sobel curated the exhibition, though it isn’t in his museum (which can only show works by Still). Rather, it is a short way off in the Denver Art Museum’s North Building, an odd, castle-like structure by Gio Ponti (1971). (An even odder addition, by Daniel Libeskind, arrived on the scene in 2006.) One piece in Case Work evokes the Clyfford Still Museum. A perforated block of charcoal, it was carried by Cloepfil to his meeting with the museum’s architect selection committee in 2006. The committee had already stipulated that competitors couldn’t present architectural models. Cloepfil explained that what he was carrying wasn’t a model — but rather an object meant to capture his sense of the building as ‘a dark, heavy object that light would penetrate’. (At the time, he hoped to make the building out of obsidian.) The committee sent him out of the room, deliberated, and then allowed him

1 – Installation shot at the Denver Art Museum 2 – Toolbox 02 displaying studies for the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, the Dutchess County Estate Guest House, the Clyfford Still Museum and the Musée National de Beaux-Arts du Québec 3 – Conceptual study for the National Music Centre using modelling concrete and salvaged brass instruments

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to show his charcoal block. It worked. Other pieces in the show relate to Allied Works’ buildings now under construction. A series of ceramic loops (‘it’s great that someone in my studio can operate a kiln’) represent his ideas for how a veterans’ memorial in Ohio would rise out of the ground. Another work, made of concrete cast over pieces of salvaged musical instruments, embodies his ideas for the National Music Centre of Canada, which will open in Calgary later this year. Case Work will move from Denver to Portland and then, most likely, to New York — a city where Cloepfil hasn’t succeeded quite the way he has in Denver. His Museum of Arts and Design, a renovation of an eccentric Edward Durrell Stone building, received a withering New York Times review when it opened in 2008. And last year, he was bested by Chipperfield in the competition to design a new wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are objects in Case Work created for that contest, and for other competitions Cloepfil didn’t win, which is one reason he says the exhibition is ‘a show of tears for me’. But if those buildings will never be realised, the objects Cloepfil created to evoke them now have a life of their own.

1 STEPHAN ALESSI 2 ARTHUR HITCHCOCK 3 ALLIED WORKS ARCHITECTURE

Denver Art Museum, until 17 April Portland Art Museum, 4 June — 4 September Review by Fred A Bernstein

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