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