the road to ruin (pt. 2)

seems it's time for a lot of follow-up posts. here's some recent news from the AJ about St. Peter's Seminary. there's also a link to the brochure from the Scottish exhibition at the Venice biennale on the right hand side of the article.

I will try to come up with some original content soon.

the glasgow school (pt. 2)

I'm finally back to leading a normal life, going to sleep at normal and socially acceptable hours. still all I can offer you is yet another link to a Rowan Moore* piece: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/feb/25/mackintosh-glasgow-school-art-extension

I think the article does raise some important questions, especially as to if a new strong architectural statement just across the street from the GSA is what will benefit the existing building and context. the buildings on the site today are no masterpieces, but they're hardly horrible either (well, the GKC staff common room might actually be), they're just that kind of background buildings which make up most of our cities. and to me that seems just about right. of course you can argue that a new building for the school should have as prominent a place in the city as the existing one, but will anyone actually benefit from two buildings having some kind of architectural shoot-out across Renfrew Street? even if it's a fairly low key shoot-out? I dread to think what would have been the result had Zaha Hadid had her chance to build there.

I used to think that the only thing planners should influence when it comes to a new building is the maximum height and volume as materials, massing and expression should be left to each building's architect or their client. but this time the client is the owner of the most important building in the vicinity and for that reason maybe they should reconsider.

having said that, the school seems to have paid great attention when selecting architect: short-listing competent firms that aren't the ones they would have chosen were they only out to make a statement. maybe the problem is in the programme, maybe they're trying to cram too much onto too small a site? it would hardly be the first time that has happened. I was once involved in an extension for a Swedish college where the city had decided the foot-print, height and number of floors after a competition. still the client constantly asked us to try to cram more and more accommodation into the set volume leading to the loss of any decent intermediate spaces so that what was an atrium ended up as mean corridors receiving no natural light.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm so hesitant about Holl's proposal, it might just be the glass. I mean, I love the glass of the Diener & Diener college in Malmö, so it's not glass per se, but something about an all-glass building just seem alien to the site. a little too delicate and crisp. and it won't be glass as a membrane, as on the main elevation of the Mack, but rather glass as a sharp, angled object.

ok, maybe this post amounted to some more than merely posting a link, let's see how long I might be able to keep this up for...

update 21/3: the extension passed the planning committee

* he's become one of my favourite writers of architectural criticism. to paraphrase an old movie: he had me at "If bright colours always cheered you up, then entering the blue-and-yellow cabin of a Ryanair jet would be like swallowing a bottle of happy pills. It isn't." incidentally I read that piece just days after first visiting the Mack.

I'm so tired

the blog is currently on a competition hiatus, slightly longer than I had planned for but I'll soon be back, hopefully with some new insights. I'm afraid chances are they'll only concern things such as Finnish lakes and thoughts on how to place an elevator in a museum.

in the meantime here's yet another excellent article from the Observer, this time about Adolf Loos, and we can't really have too many of those now, can we? (I'm sorry I can't even find time to put in any additional links, but I've read quite a few good posts on Loos over at Fantastic Journal so I'd direct you that way for any further reading; oh and to Beatriz Colomina, of course)

a house is not a home

here's a slideshow of the Melnikov House, courtesy of the Observer, and here are some ruminations on architecture and change featuring said house from Fantastic Journal.

itchycoo park

I like brutalism.

a good few architects like brutalism.

some non-architects like brutalism.

a huge amount of people use the word concrete in a derogatory way. for the sake of the argument I'll assume these people don't like brutalism, probably not even the brick brutalism of Klas Anshelm, GKC or Bernt Nyberg.

how is the architect supposed to relate to the views of the public?

how do you avoid making a bland populist design? should you avoid making a populist design? as whatever you do will be the part of the daily lives of thousands of people, what responsibility do you, as an architect, have to those people?

some of these problems were dwelt upon a long time ago, as far back as in the 18th century but that time in writings on landscaping. there is a quote from sir Uvedale Price in Nikolaus Pevsner's Visual Planning and the Picturesque which quite clearly explains the difference between landscaping on the one hand and food and drinking on the other, but it could as well be used to discuss the differences between architecture on the one hand and art or music on the other:

'it can hardly be doubted, that what answers to the beautiful in the sense of tasting, has smootheness and sweetness for its basis, with such a degree of stimulus as enlivens, but does not overbalance those qualities; such, for instance, as in the most delicious fruits and liquors. take away the stimulus, they become insipid; increase it so as to overbalance those qualities, they then gain a peculiarity of flavour, are eagerly sought after by those who have acquired a relish for them, but they are generally less adapted to the general palate. this corresponds exactly with the picturesque; but if the stimulus be encreased [sic] beyond that point, none but depraved and vitiated palates will endure, what would be so justly termed deformity in objects of sight.'

and that cuts straight to the heart of the matter, the issue of architecture's ubiquitiouness, how it is impossible to escape. it is no problem to me – a meagre whisky drinker at the best of times – if the person sitting next to me on the tube likes to drink whisky that tastes like pouring an entire fishing village down your throat, because I won't have to experience it myself. and for those amongst us who like our buildings a little rougher, a little more elemental, I guess we might be seen as having 'acquired a relish' for this. and once we're hooked we just go deeper and deeper until finding the ultimate trip: usually a stage involving Lewerentz's flower kiosk, or in partciularly bad cases Anshelm's extension to Lewerentz's last flat. but at times it can be wise to remember Price's words and try to put a restrain on ourselves. maybe try to be a little more populist and not let the roughness be all encompassing. because as beautiful as those buildings can be to the person looking for that kind of thing just as overpowering can they be to the person coming there just looking for a book, or to get a medical examination.

I know we should design buildings able to stand for hundreds of years, and that during that time taste changes and they may become cherished by thousands – however rough or smooth they are – but I'd say that as a rule of thumb the closer a building is to everyday life the less challenging it should be. and the further removed from the matters of living and the closer it is to ritual and memory the rougher it can be. thus the only sorts of buildings entirely in the realm of architecture in the views of Adolf Loos – the monument and the tomb – can be as rough and uncompromising as the architect feels like.

come to think of it, if you subscribe to that view the Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would pretty much be the perfect monument. too bad the rest of Mies' work seems to be monuments too, and smooth ones at that ...

bricks and mortar

after a visit to Lund last weekend I suddenly realised the striking similarities between Klas Anshelm's Town hall (1964) and Giancarlo De Carlo's Magistero (1976) in Urbino. having known about both buildings for years and having been very fascinated by De Carlo's since I first saw drawings of it I can't see why it took me this long to realise. even though De Carlo did have contact with Lund through ILAUD in the 80s I haven't found any information suggesting he was aware of Anshelm's building while designing the Magistero.

first and foremost they're both large brutalist buildings in the context of a medieval town* and secondly they're organised in a very similar way: the plan is one huge expanse into which multi-storey bodies housing specific programmes are set leaving the rest of the plan for circulation. in both cases the shapes for the main functions are clearly visible from outside, thus hinting at the functions inside. for his building De Carlo chose to work with non-directional plan shapes like circles and semi-circles while Anshelm deploys the directional mandorla shape for his two most important rooms – the assembly hall and the audtorium. in one way you could make an analogue comparison between the open floor plates of the buildings and the 'western' modernist idea of endless free-flowing space in city planning. in this comparison the multi-storey volumes are seen as buildings.**

as well as similarities there are, of course, some major differences, especially in how these buildings relate to the surrounding city. De Carlo's project is built inside an old monastery where the existing brick perimeter walls are retained and thus camouflage the building when seen from the surrounding streets. in Lund Anshelm actually demolished buildings around the existing Town Hall and put a free-standing triangular building in their place. although the triangular shape doesn't align with the geometry of the surroundings it is very appropriate – creating some very nicely proportioned interstitial spaces when you walk around it – and doesn't feel like it ruptures the streetscape.

to the east of Anshelm's building there is a narrow office-building, separated from the Town Hall by a pedestrian path, which is also part of the original scheme and that Anshelm built against an existing firewall. while this side adapts to the constraints of the site the other two work to both separate the new building from the existing Town Hall and to act as a backdrop to the classical building when seen from a distance.

apart from being beautiful pieces of architecture in and of themselves I would say that both buildings serve to show alternative ways for modern buildings to relate to their surroundings without resorting to explicit mimicking. in the case of the Magistero you could claim that its camouflaging is a way of cheating but I would see it ass more of a trojan-horse manoeuvre in that it manages to slip radically modern accommodation into a sensitive medieval context without compromising either context or programme, and there are some modern windows and doors visible from the street that hint at the transformation of the space behind the walls. in the case of the Town Hall it neither simply adapts to the existing street-pattern nor is integrated in the building mass of a bigger city block, instead it is a free-standing volume – in full accordance with modernist dogma – but placed in such a way that it actually improves the existing streets and patterns of movement.


ps. I apologise for the lack of good drawings etc. but at the present all my books are in storage so those pdf:s are what I managed to find online.

* the similarities between brutalism and medieval architecture crept up just a while back in a comment to a post Owen Hatherley did on Southampton. see also the chapter on Scottish tower houses in Andrea Deplaze's Constructing Architecture where he compares their general layout and Louis Kahn's Phillips Exeter Academy Library.

** this 'western' conception of space was the main theme for Gunnar Asplund's inaugural lecture as professor at KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm. a concept Asplund found in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.

two sisters (pt. 2)

O'Donnell + Tuomey and Bjarke Ingels seem to have more in common than I at first would have thought...