Private public/ public private

I'm visiting Bart's hospital at the moment.  Established in 1123 (yes, you read that right) and now a PFI hospital.  The diagram of a hospital filling a whole city block (incidentally the only hospital which is also a parish) has obvious issues of overlapping public courtyard space with heavy servicing.  The recent Carillion facelift (ongoing) doesn't seem particularly concerned with resolving these, but accepts them as given conditions.  Smithfield market nearby has similar issues,  but there they strangely feel positive,  because the meat market porters are less intimidating than ambulances and delivery trucks and they still use the old red telephone boxes.

Hospitals are weird places though.  Bart's is owned by the aforementioned PFI contractor,  who also runs it,  but is leased back to the state over a long period.  So is it public,  or private?  Who knows, but I've never understood why hospitals don't stop just about anybody wandering in.  I can make my visits right to the bedside without anyone ever asking what I'm doing.  In fact if you actually need to get some information you have to keep pestering people,  because everyone is so busy.  It would be an interesting experiment to climb into an empty bed,  hook yourself up to the wiring and see how long it takes someone to realise you're not a patient.  As an idea though,  an NHS hospital being a graduated extension of the public realm seems an interesting architectural thesis, yet to be properly realised,  maybe. 

When I go to collect lunch (hospital food is intended to discourage malingering) I wander through nearby paternoster square.  This travesty of a public space has clear design ambitions to be an extension of the public realm,  but of course it's private property; But then, so are many semi-public spaces: churchyards to pick an obvious example. Here its the aggressive, desperate and utterly crap attempt to create a European style square that really depresses me.  Many public spaces are incoherent, but few are so coherently bad. The in-your-face management regime is just another heavy-handed nail in the coffin. 

The City of London remains an amazing place, though, in spite of the Corporation of London's seemingly unstoppable mission to turn it into Canary Wharf.  Walk a little further and you find the most remarkable, unique and beautiful private realms open to, and well-used by the public: Ely Place, the Inns of court and the most famous, but never disappointing Temple.  

Last year we had fun on the MAASD course at UEL with Anna Minton, testing the limits of these spaces and trying to delve into this relationship between physical architecture and the ownership and management of space.  This year Anna joins us as a Reader in Architecture and I'm looking forward to digging a little deeper. 

The Homewood

I rent my office space from good friends McDowell+Benedetti and they kindly invited me on their office trip yesterday.  We visited the Homewood, Patrick Gwynne's Modernist house, designed when he was only 24.  Its a National Trust property, set in a fabulous garden and has been lovingly restored by Avanti Architects.  Excellent guided tour; highly recommended visit.  Afterwards, we walked through Claremont Gardens, to Claremont Fan Court school, where M+B have been patiently trying to unpick the problem of a contemporary school's requirements, in a Grade I listed building, in a Grade I listed landscape for more than a decade, then back to Baltic restaurant in Waterloo for dinner.  Thanks for a great day out, guys.

The Homewood was apparently a labour of love for Gwynne and superficially appears as a straightforward exercise in Modernism; nonetheless the building is emblematic of British Architecture's unconvincing adoption of Modernist principles.  It's immaculately detailed and resolved; but it's a bricolage of Modernist invention and traditional, sometimes vernacular elements.  The residential accommodation floats at first floor level, with the approach elevation designed as a facsimile of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, supported on ubiquitous piloti.  Turn the corner, though and the concrete slab is supported on expressed, concrete downstand beams, painted brown (as timber?), resting on brickwork columns.  The brick modules are tightly controlled and nothing is left to chance, yet this contradiction of free-floating and loadbearing structural languages is typical of the lack of conviction.  Internally, these contradictions continue: its not just the curvilinear elements that the guide points out to us as a kind of softening of the harshness of Modernism; its at every scale, in the architraves and balustrades, light fittings and so on.  I know, you're thinking Alvar Aalto, but it doesn't hang together like Aalto; this is not a clever use of brickwork gymnastics and curved edges to show how Modernism can become materially crafted; Gwynne just hedged his bets.  There are some stunning moments: the main room upstairs is like a Bond villain's pad (in a good way), the windows are beautifully composed and inventively made; my favourite is the terrace, which somehow feels magically light.  The only real bum note is the enamel painting on the main elevation, by one of Gwynne's friends; clearly stretching their relationship.  

Gwyne was an undeniably gifted Architect and in his own house, he created a kind of masterpiece.  There's nothing wrong with the building; its very British and it just indicates to me a deeply unresolved point about British Architecture: we have never really been Modern.  

Gwynne is one of those Architects that you think you know, but you're not sure why.  He designed the restaurant on the Serpentine and the 'mushrooming' (as our NT guide described them) forms became a kind of leitmotif for his work, as seen at the Theatre Royal in York.  Gothic, anyone?

Sustainability and the crisis of architectural education

This piece in the AJ by Austin Williams is pretty forthright about sustainability in education.  My initial response is that I agree with him, but then it would be hard to defend teaching a Master's course called Architecture: Sustainability and Design as I do.

On reflection, the underlying point he makes is right: higher education (some would say all education) should be about arming people with the critical tools to be able to investigate and thereby understand the world around them.  At a time when we seem to be shifting towards the acquisition of knowledge as fact, rather than epistemology (ie. the construction of knowledge), Architectural education in the UK stands firm (for the moment) as an awkward proponent of the latter.  He is also right that sustainability is a misanthropic orthodoxy that has become difficult to critique and this is what makes it dangerous; actually most dangerous to its own ambitions.  It is abundantly clear that in every arena of life, the measures undertaken in the name of sustainability are falling woefully short of their originating objectives (at least as stated - if the ambition is read as 'sell more product' then most are doing pretty well).  Its not about rejecting the notion of sustainability per se, (though maybe it should be about rejecting the shop-soiled word), its about applying our critical skills to try and rescue the idea from itself.

Architectural education appears to be undergoing an existential crisis at the moment; there are not enough jobs for architectural graduates and many of the jobs that do exist won't make use of the (literally) constructively critical skills that we as educators spend five years instilling in them.  Unsurprisingly, people are asking what its all for.  For me, this isn't really about the 'trout farms on mars' argument (that is whether students should be designing realistic buildings).  Architectural education is becoming increasingly unique in producing graduates who can take on the most difficult problems of the real world; combining deep critique with creative design skills to open up entirely new possibilities.  Radicalism has always been an important aspect of architectural endeavour and although this has sometimes had unintended consequences, it lies at the heart of the challenge of sustainability.

So, we should teach sustainability; not as a set of facts, but as a subject for critical inquiry.  We shouldn't undermine architectural education because there aren't enough jobs with the right title; architecture graduates should go and do other jobs, because their critical skills are more widely and desperately needed than ever.  Both apprehension and reflection (great RSA Animate video on this here) are necessary to understand the world and to act meaningfully within it and an Architect is one of the very few remaining professionals who is trained to do both, together.