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."