my last post made me reread
Neave Brown's article
The Form of Housing (
Architectural Design,
September -76). this in turn had me thinking about two recent housing
projects which might, in different ways, be said to relate to Brown's
theories as expressed in that article and in his housing at
Fleet Road and
Alexandra Road in London.
first I should probably acknowledge that
Douglas Murphy has already
pointed out the similarities between
BIG:s
8 House and the
Smithsons' concept of streets in the sky.
I've mentioned one of the projects – the 8 House in Ørestad, Copenhagen – and the other is
O'Donnell + Tuomey's
Timberyard
in Dublin. what these two projects – if very different in scale – have
in common is the wish to relate the single dwelling to the surrounding
city at the same time as it's relating to all the other dwellings that
make up the project.
in his article Brown argues against the
free-standing British post-war housing and its tabula-rasa approach to
the surrounding city and for housing that acknowledges its context
and adapts to existing street patterns. he thought that the concept of
streets in the sky was a step in the right direction but that it wasn't
going far enough, there were still '
a no-man's land'
separating the different buildings and the city. according to him
housing is characterised less by the differences between different types
than by what they have in common and he wants to give back to housing '
the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue'.
this was something he found in the traditional British terraced house.
unfortunately that model could no longer handle the demands of modern
society so it couldn't just be replicated, instead there had to be
innovation to give these qualities to mass housing.
Brown claims that '
it is the architect's job to structure the environment, incorporating in a single
form all the concepts that have a claim to inclusion. to make a
perceptible order requires more than an assembly of parts, more than the
recognition of meaningful relationships by the tactical arranging of
the pieces. it requires the integration of all the pieces into a single
gesture in which unity and interdependence can be recognized at whatever
level they are perceived'.
like Brown's own Alexandra
Road both the 8 House and Timberyard excel at this integration of pieces
into a single gesture. unfortunately things aren't as straight forward
as they were back in Brown's day, no longer content with just being part
of a collective we all want to be individuals. so when in Alexandra
Road different kinds of apartments hide behind almost identical
elevations both O'D+T and BIG go out of their way to make monolithic
buildings in just a few materials but whose plan shape and more detailed
massing create a diversity within that unity. to differentiate further
both buildings, just as Alexandra Road, employ a sectional layering of
different types of apartments. in the case of Timberyard it constitutes
of both maisonettes and one-storey apartments and the layers in the
vastly bigger 8 House are -from ground up: commercial space and offices,
row houses along a pedestrian/cycle path, apartments and finally
maisonettes entered off another outdoor path (for a further explanation
from the architects watch
this film).
the
main part of accommodation at Alexandra Road stretches along a
pedestrian path between the community centre in the east and Abbey Road
in the west. to the sides of this brick-clad path the dwellings are
stacked in two artificial ridges of concrete and glass, the northern
eight storeys high and the southern four. all apartments are provided
with outdoor space in form of a terraces and in some cases this terrace
also functions as a front yard from which you reach the entrance.
Timberyard
is located on Cork Street in central Dublin. that street has recently
been lined with fairly hideous and blandly modern apartment schemes with
retail space on the ground floors, the less that's said about them the
better. O'D+T opted to refuse the retail space asked for by the planners
and instead chose to let as many apartments as possible be entered
directly off the ground. to be honest I must say I kind of miss the
commercial element, not the hangar-like spaces from further up the road,
but a small office or shop facing Cork Street could have been quite
nice.
just as Alexandra Road is built along a pedestrian path so
is Timberyard focused on a semi-private courtyard set in brick
(coincidentally the same material as the path in Alexandra Road). it is
off this courtyard that most dwellings are entered and it is here that
the communal space is located. to make the transition between public and
private space less brutal all private entrances on the ground floor are
set back slightly and the entrances provided with external benches.
towards Cork Street the building line is pulled back somewhat with
planters keeping the line of the footpath and a narrower path between
the planters and the entrances to the apartments.
the
8 House is an aluminium-clad block at the very extreme of the new
Ørestad area of Copenhagen. at the moment it's even more remote than
what is intended as the economic crisis of recent years have slowed down
construction. this means that it and a neighbour are the only
buildings within a couple of hundred meters. having said that the
building makes the most of its edge condition with slopes and different
heights that aim to provide as many apartments as possible with views
out over the adjoining nature reserve.
as the lowest floors are
taken up by commercial space and offices the different apartments can't
have as direct a connection to the ground as in Timberyard or Alexandra
Road but the architects have instead extended paths from the ground up
on top of the offices and the so called row-houses are entered off these
paths through a small front yard. the same applies for the maisonettes
on the top two floors. just as in Timberyard this is done in the hope
that it will create a feeling of community amongst the inhabitants.
in-between these row-houses and the maisonettes are several floors of
apartments clustered around stair shafts. that these are
entered from the street on the ground floor should help to counter the
risk of the surrounding streets becoming dead as soon as the businesses
close for the day.
comparing
the two schemes I can't help but to think that Timberyard is the more
successful. one of my problems with the 8 House is that even though it's
mostly built up right to the edge of the pavement the width of the road
coupled with a canal before reaching the closest neighbour make for a
very un-urban streetscape which I find unfortunate. having said that
it's hardly the architects' fault and achieving the gritty urban
character of a thousand-year-old part of the city in a yet-unfinished
district on virgin land is obviously hard.
the 8 House does boldly continue
the intentions of Alexandra Road, though, and on such a heroic scale
it's hard not be impressed. it is also much better urbanistically than
any of the previous PLOT/BIG projects in Ørestad, eschewing the piloti
of the VM Houses and the Mountain Dwellings, but there is still
something slightly odd about how it touches down. I'm not sure why, it
might just be that the vertical aluminium fins prevent any diagonal
views to the interior which makes the building feel more closed up than
it actually is. Timberyard on the other hand feels like the end result
of serious contemplation about a specific city and what can be done to
fit modern accommodation into it without entirely rupturing the
atmosphere of the place. there are still things that are problematic
about it but it surely is a type of accommodation more suited to Dublin
than any of the other new buildings along the rest of Cork Street.
official site for the 8 House
Alexandra Road on Modern Architecture London
acknowledgements:
photos of the 8 House by SEIER+SEIER
it seems there are, once again, plans to do something about Gillespie, Kidd & Coia's St. Peter's Seminary in Cardross.
