Roman Bath - Strand Lane

Following on from the statement below I have begun to look at King's College and the surrounding area. On College land, within the parish of St Clement Danes sits a Roman Bath. Neglected, it is more likely Tudor but is classed as Roman in Dickens' David Copperfield. Of interest to me was the location of the baths within King's, how the College has evolved and expanded, the excessive civic pride of Reverend William Pennington-Bickford, and the future of the parish. I have drawn the bath and made a model of explore the phenomenological aspects of the space. 


The year's research so far is building to a project within King's Quadrangle as a means to reassert a public space, give the University a civic role, design a new School of Law, avoid the typological destruction of Somerset House's Eastern Wing, and provide a more coherent link from church to Quadrangle to the Thames. All of this has the intention of making the good quality spaces that people want to inhabit. 


See: http://www.strandlines.net/story/romans-bathing-strand-lane-bath
For more information on the Bath. I feel no need to reproduce the excellent research that Michael Trapp has done on the subject.

From top to bottom: Plan, model photograph, Section, and another model photograph

Project Blurb

‘It is not always easy, but it is always revealing to discover that behind the directly visible order of the city and its conventional representations (morphology, typology, figure-ground plans, etc), there is not a chaos but an order of a different kind, more profound and more permanent than the visible order itself.’

Dalibor Vesely

If a city enshrines the dreams and fears of its’ citizens, then what does London say about us? That it was two cities and numerous villages and towns, drawn together by trade, religion, and changes in taste during the 17^th century, bombed then ruined by road engineering? One thing is clear, that London is full of public buildings but lacking in communicative space. There are no grand squares or piazzas; instead marooned buildings stand trapped on traffic islands.

             The area to the east of Waterloo Bridge, west of Middle and Inner Temple, south of Lincolns Inn Fields is rich in civic institutions and public buildings. Deprived of their relationship to the Thames and strangled by road engineering, these isolated fragments fail to fulfil any sort of civic purpose or cultural meaning.

         The task at hand is to renew these existing fragments by tying them into a coherent hierarchical spatial sequence connected by public spaces. Other programs, when relevant and appropriate, will be incorporated as a part of the strategy. The proposal will allow for a return the forgotten and latent meanings of human situations such as death, birth, friendship, and public encounters. The likelihood is that the forum or agora or several similar spaces, return as the centre of civic life. Traditionally these spaces and their buildings have given meaning to the personal, social, political, commercial, and cultural life of the city. At the heart of the strategy is the desire to establish a dialogue between the present form of culture and those possibilities forgotten or dormant in the depths of tradition, alive in memories and residual beyond the fragments that exist. In order to avoid the meaninglessness of the modern city, it is not necessary to search for some ideal order of the past and paste this into the present. Instead we can start with the given reality of the existing city and unearth a residuum of tradition and myth sufficient to support a reinterpretation of the status quo. 

St Peter's Church. Klippan

Two trains, one ferry and thirty minutes sleep: the pilgrimage to Klippan. I've some words on the building too but thats for in a few days time. Not a review of any kind but just a glimpse into the experience. Only a couple of photographs: bad camera, and no tripod. I recommend Sandy Wilson on the building though:

Aristotle in The Poetics, assigns unique significance to the ability to invent metaphor: 'The greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others and it is also a sign of genius since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar.' Lewerentz possessed this unteachable gift to a marked degree. We will see, for instance, how, in St Peter's, a painfully evolved solution to the need for central support- a 'technical' assembly of raw steel sections into a column and crossbeam, which thrusts into the centre of the Church- irresistibly recalls the central symbols of both the New and Old Testaments: the tree of knowledge and the cross of redemption.


Architectural Reflections

Top image from: http://arch.et.bme.hu/kep/Image744.jpg
Others are my own

Malmö Eastern Cemetery

Sigurd Lewerentz worked on the Malmo Eastern Cemetery from 1916 until 1969. The site shows the development of his architectural thought and the presence of something beyond style. TS Eliot might refer to it as tradition.


The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead , but what is already living. 

The 1969 Flower shop. His final building. Tough stuff. 

 

The Belvedere which deals with the topography of the entrance coming up, rooting itself in the earth and then resulting in the ridge which runs across the site.

Various details that interested me from the chapels of St Knut and St Gertrude, 1943.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Following on from the photographs some words:


The building is formed of an enfilade sequence of rooms set into the original villa's landscape. This composition sequence has its roots in the villa's circulation. Most rooms are galleries but with some notable exceptions: a theatre and a cafe with hearth. A mixture of artificial, side and top light is used dependant upon the room and the artworks present. The gallery's relationship with nature is informal and unforced. Sitting within the landscape, the building seeks to reveal but not disturb. Hence the line which divides art and culture is carefully articulated through glass. Major galleries are linked by spaces which are typologically similar to a corridor. However whilst linking independent spaces, these corridors exhibit small-scale paintings and sculptures and continue the theme of enfilade. Hence typologically they sit between cloister, gallery and corridor Winding through the landscape, connecting separate elements, the use of a floor to ceiling glass wall allows us simultaneously to engage visually, imagine ourselves outside in that space and protect us from the harsh reality of a Danish winter. Moving through the museum the horizon is revealed at specific moments by the architects as a desire to not overburden the potency of the art within. These views through to the park or lake are oblique as a means to soften the full-frontal force of them. Load-bearing timber columns and mullions and trees emphasise their verticality to the sky as a counterpoint the horizon.

Structural brick with timber beams supporting the roof within the top lit galleries which tend to contain sculpture. The effect of this is to emphasise the delicacy and lightness of light and the stoniness of stone. In galleries the topography of the site is mimicked in a vertical enfilade sequence from half a level to another. This sequence is linked by a short-run staircase situating the rooms within a space of public appearance via the movement of the body through the spaces.

In the park itself, broken leaves lie on the floor of a worn path down a slope  through a Richard Serra sculpture and onto the beach and sea. As the body moves down towards the sea, the only constant is the unrelenting horizon which at night is revealed by lights as Sweden.

Louisiana Museum

First part of my recent trip abroad. There will be a few photo series, then some words about a couple of the buildings. Below are images of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Fantastic art gallery and sculptured grounds. 


See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Museum_of_Modern_Art

backlog

Since the end of September term has commenced and unit choices have been made. The focus of Unit 2's attention is the Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars to Chelsea, and its effect on the cities and villages which now constitute London. Alun, Biba and Patrick are much more eloquent on what the Unit intends to achieve:

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/architecture/courses/postgraduate/units/unit2/201112.cfm

As a start we separated into groups, each to study an existing building along the Embankment. From east to west these were: The Temple and Inns of Court, The Royal Courts of Justice, Somerset House, The Adelphi, The Banqueting House, Westminster Abbey and Chelsea Hospital. As a group of three we began to look at the Royal Courts in a variety of ways and at various scales.

Immediately it was recognised that there were several key topics for exploration. First was the rigid organisation of the plan form which separated the building into lightwells and purely functional fragments. Functional in terms of their involvement with the courts as a ritual, or the physical manifestation of civil law in Britain. Judges, jury, barristers and the public were separated by corridors, halls and foyers which lead to the same place - the courtroom. This room has a vertically structured hierarchy which sites individuals dependent upon their role within the trial. Many architectural commentators have liked the courtroom to theatre. This is both simplistic and and inaccurate. The court is not a space of spectacle but rather one of participation. Michel Foucault's analysis of the mechanisms of discipline and surveillance which evolved from the gallows and dungeon into the  institutions of the State. Within the court the exercise of power is supervised by society a a whole. Foucault makes it clear that there is not a repression of the individual by this analytical partitioning of space. Rather that the individual is carefully fabricated into it, becoming a part of its mechanism. One piece of work we made was a topographical cast of the courtroom which sets up the vertical hierachies. On top of this we built the wood furniature of the courtroom which through joints and decoration sets up the horizons of the enclosed space. The creation of what Arendt calls The Space of Public Appearance is a crucial part of the legislative apparatus in action. This occurs in the courtroom, in the balconies which allow for the appearance of the human figure within the main hall, and the tectonic qualities of the staircases.  

Courtoom Ten at 1:50.  

Other lines of enquiry included the effects and intentions of the sculptural program, the choice of Neo Gothic as the buildings style and for almost all of the Victorian public buildings, the competition and the entries, the appointment of Street- considered the best man at Gothic elevations and hence dealing with the inconsistencies of the plan- despite not winning the competition, the way in which the building deals with the topos - the slope which moves from Lincoln's Inn to Temple, the effects of the Courts upon the mythos of the city and its insertion at the junction between the jurisdiction of the cities of Westminster and London and its proximity between the various Inns of Court. 


All of this is tied into the abstract of our unit brief:




Human experience of Being is not simply of the material ‘real world’. A city is not simply a collection of built objects of course, and all of the institutions along the Embankment embody and house profound ideals about the nature of society and situate each of these amongst the conflicting demands of the others. Neither the law, religion, capital, government nor high culture can dominate each other in a democracy; and the deep reciprocity between these various modes of serious play forms the basis of the pragmatic and poetic character of urban life. Architecture is the most visible and material manifestation of the tension between these characteristics; as designers the pleasure for us lies in the difficulty of the task, between fear and desire.

Stirling aftermath

The exhibition James Stirling: Notes from the Archive has just closed at Tate Britain.  Visiting for five months, it now moves onto the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart before returning home to the CCA in Montreal. This is not a posthumous review but instead a reflection on the exhibition, and the events surrounding it.

This exhibition was markedly different from most others in Britain. Stirling is not a canonical architect in the same way as the recent blockbusters: Palladio and Le Corbusier.  Nor is he simplistic, sexy, or polemic. Relevant could be added to this list. Professor Neil Jackson commented at the recently that Stirling has become as easily forgotten by a younger generation as his generation forgot Edwin Lutyens. Stirling is unusual because there is not the combination of rhetoric and form hand-in-hand. 

In recent years the stylistic battle, and a new found curiosity of postmodernism have been evolving.  The later is gathering momentum. Immediately following Stirling at the V&A is one of Autumn 2011’s main shows, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion. Stirling’s oeuvre shows us that there is no easy, and lazy, distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. It is absurd and wrong to see architecture as a teleological process within which one formal language succeeds another. The history of Postmodernism, just like Modernism, was constructed as a mechanism for the practice of architecture in a contemporary context. After a period of empty formalistic pluralism, where better than in Postmodernism for architects to find comfort and justification.

Thirdly, there is a lack of a critical appreciation of architecture. A university-organized mock critique involving Stirling’s partner Michael Wilford presenting the Neue Staatsgalerie was distressing. Three different groups were involved. Firstly either his friends and colleagues who have seen him shunned for a while. Secondly those who were educated whilst he was alive, before the OMA phenomenon took hold of most schools. The second group organized the thing, whilst the first group chaired it. In the crowd sat fifty students who were baffled by the whole thing. Later, in the pub, it emerged that few of them had ever been taught about Stirling’s work. One 4th year student asked Michael Wilford: "What the upside-down axonometrics were all about?". This should be opposed to the reports of London summer shows which announced a resurgence of axonometric drawings. There was also the strange sight of Wilford discussing the work with little regard to it being the work of a collection of people. Only Jim himself was celebrated as genius. A few weeks later this was followed by a Tate Britain symposium which traded mostly on influences and anecdotes rather than talk about the work.

A few positive things have come from the exhibition. Anthony Vidler’s book and potential further research in Montreal. It could be hoped that the prominent positioning of an unfashionable architect in such a gallery could help develop a critical understanding of architecture. The direction of Penelope Curtis at Tate Britain can do much good. However it is clear that reassertion of Vittorio Greggotti’s words upon Stirling’s death in 1992 were more accurate  than we first realized: "from now on everything will be more difficult."

Marsh View

“Re-imagining the villa is a task for each generation”

 Marsh View is a house in Burnham Norton, north Norfolk, designed by Lynch architects and completed in 2003 for a mother and daughter; one a sculptor and the other a textile designer. Due to a change of ownership in 2007 a studio and carport were added. A 1950s bungalow from a developer’s pattern book originally occupied the site. Most of the bungalow was demolished, with its’ plot setting the footprint of the new composition. Two walls were retained with new windows installed. None of this restricts the project. Differences and similarities between old and new are celebrated; the joints between the new structure and the two remaining bungalow walls are expressed. This is a part of a strategy to utilize the tactile and tectonic qualities of the building’s materials and their construction within a coherent spatial whole.

Above: Marsh View from the adjacent fields

The plan is elegantly composed, responsive to the movement of the sun and the nature of human activity. From the garden one enters through the hall, moves into the kitchen, then a breakfast room, before either leaving the interior and escaping the house or turning right and entering a dining room or ascending a set of stairs to a pair of first floor bedrooms. The en-suite master bedroom is discreetly situated in the corner of the dining room.  With diagram as it’s generator, the plan is formed in such a way as a network of relationships between people and spaces, exterior and interior. Each room is prepared suitably - in terms of space, composition, and orientation - for activity, mundane or profound. At the end of the house is the main room. This space borders the garden on four sides and has at one end a 7.5m high chimney with an oculus above. This enfilade sequence of rooms within the landscape connects the house to a lineage from Raphael’s Villa Madama to Aalto’s Villa Mairea. We are reminded of the words of Patrick Lynch’s tutor at Cambridge, Dalibor Vesely, that the villa is not just a built form which recurs over time but a key component of the way in which modern society operates. 

Above: Plan showing geometric relationship of house to car port and studio

Marsh View is a villa in the most typical sense. It is defined by its social elements; it is at once a studio and a weekend bolthole. The house’s structure is formed of horizontal and vertical plywood elements that allude at once to a canonical past whilst echoing the local architectural vernacular and the earth around and underneath Marsh View. Over time the building will weather, decay and blur even further into the landscape, reuniting the villa’s mythical harmonic position with rural life. This architectural lineage is not a mere quotation or ironic pastiche, and is instead reinterpreted suitably for present day inhabitation. There is a pointed rejection of Andrea Palladio’s position, which merely tacked a facade from antiquity onto a vernacular building in order to legitimize a changing social order. Instead vernacular forms are explored typologically in order to unveil something much deeper and create what the architects have described as “a sense of the past and the present infused within each other”.

Above: Site model

Each room is a fluid composition of rituals that blur distinctions between the exterior and interior worlds. The villa by the very nature of its type seeks to connect itself to the garden and create a sense of continuity between outside and inside. This physical connection ensures that rather than rejecting the seasons and passing of time, Marsh View celebrates human participation with nature, and its potential transformation into theatricality and festival. There is space within this house for a politely restrained dinner party or for a teenage son and friends to blow off some post-exam steam. This is a house that allows one to explore the world, our bodies, and the relationships in between; reminded that the world is something lived through rather than thought about. Large openings and folding doors connect rather than reject the house to the landscape. The house holds dialectic with nature, showing that it is simultaneously of nature and opposed to it. In this regard, perhaps the house holds more of a debt to Aalto’s 1952 Experimental House than the canonical Villa Mairea. Both Marsh View and the Experimental House rise up alone from the landscape, with their imperfect facades and carefully directed views. For both projects, the hearth is a centrepiece. Aalto situates it sunken outside in a courtyard, whereas for Lynch it is set internally on a plinth. For both architects the central gathering point of the house is the hearth’s fire and warmth that it brings.

Above: Photograph showing relationship between the garden and house

There is something surreal about the chimney. Not that it appears out of place. Rather the opposite is true. Instead it plays on the role of buildings and the human figure to act as guides to scale on a rural horizon. This occurs in Lynch architects’ more recent projects and in the work of artists such as Bernd and Hila Becher and Giorgio de Chirico. The dark stained wood exterior and horizontal expression of materials results in an awkward perception of the building’s scale. Yet simultaneously it entwines the house to the landscape. The oculus sets up that most irreproachable human situation of hearth, armchair and view. This is a clear nod to Alvaro Siza and the situated qualities of his private houses. Late afternoon and evening sun fall across this space, allowing for the location of time and place. Beyond the marsh is the horizon and through the oculus is the sky. Mirroring the human condition: the inevitability of death and continuity of life.

Above: Main room with chimney / oculus

Typologically Marsh View exaggerates the formal elements of a house- human scale brick walls, chimney, pitched roof - in order to gain a sense of recollection and grounding from the harshlandscape. These elements form interior spaces that accept and celebrate life. As Aldo Rossi suggested, here architecture is determined by the hour and the event. This is not to be confused with functionalism. There is no reduction of type to image as seen in the worst of Robert Venturi’s work. Instead Lynch architects explore the common emotional resonance of type and the expression of these formal qualities socially in order to make a home.