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.