OMA in Shenzhen

There's a brilliant review in this month's Architectural Review of the new stock exchange building in Shenzhen, written by Austin Williams.  He seems to be an interesting and outspoken character and although I've not seen this building, much of what he writes rings true with most of OMA's recent work.  In many respects it seems like a dumb building, lacking the overt expression of power and optimism (real or pretend) of its peers, apart from the elevated podium which appears a diagramatic, rather than architectural move.

We always tell students a diagram alone doesn't make architecture, but here the diagram is the architecture, mainly because the diagram is so architecturally provocative.  The statements Koolhaas makes about this building are typically diversionary: giving over the ground plane to public space (which means what in China, exactly?) could be achieved in so many simpler ways; but of course the real architectural issues being played with lie elsewhere and as usual Koolhaas will probably talk about them at another time, maybe in relation to another building.  It is this 'dumbness' in which the sophistication of the work lies.  Unlike any other globally-known architectural practice I can think of, OMA respond to the utterly bizarre and alien postmodern contexts in which their buildings are located and occupied.  That they manage to make an architecture linking at once the ironic, divisive and unpredictable dynamics of contemporary capitalism with physical materials, structural and functional performance for real clients is an extraordinary achievement and it seems best realised yet in this building. Like most radical movements, this architecture will only properly be understood in the future, with the benefit of hindsight.  Now, most people argue about whether its any good or not.  This is totally beside the point.  As with postmodern society, good or bad doesn't come in to it. 

The Smithsons in Norfolk

A weekend spent in Norfolk is always a great way to unwind, but as usual there's always a busman's holiday element to any break, so we went slightly out of the way to visit Hunstanton school.  Designed by the Smithsons and completed in 1951 its a stunning building.  The photos don't really do it justice, but I'll show a couple anyway.

There is something pivotal about this building in the way it manages to carry the rigour and rationality of Modernism with the subtle scale and softening of the edges that was characteristic of the late '40s and early '50s.  Having seen photos before, I expected it to feel truly brutal and unforgiving, but the black glass surprisingly has the opposite effect; giving a lightness and playfulness to it, especially in the setting sun.  The grid is absolutely rigid and resolved, but within it, the different scale and function of spaces seem to hang perfectly (as far as I could see through the windows, anyway).  Of course I'm sure its problematic as a modern school, with all that single glazing, but for a building that is 65 years old, it feels remarkably fresh.  When set against some of the well-regarded Modernist schools one finds in London and elsewhere, it suggests that something was lost in what came after.  Our more recent crop of academies seem to have generally either been desperately shortchanged by the procurement process, or lack both the simplicity and the subtleties of this building.  

The Smithsons always had that playful subversive undertow to their work, but to see it applied so masterfully here, it even embarrasses their own later work, in my view.  

'Telepresence'

Today I attended a Cisco 'Telepresence' meeting, thanks to an invitation from Social Life to join a discussion about innovation in the regeneration of a housing suburb of Malmo in Sweden.  I've used videolink conferencing facilities before, but this was definitely a step up.  High-definition cameras pick up the attendees, who sit round similarly shaped tables, with similar backgrounds.  The Screens are arranged as an extension of the table and the cameras are voice-activated.  The link is absolutely instantaneous with no perceptible lag.  It does actually feel like you are in the same room, to the extent that you can hear if people are whispering to each other.

People joined from Brussels, Seoul, New York, Chicago, Malmo and London and it was an interesting debate, though I think more ideas were expressed than fully explored, but there will be follow-ups.  The criticism of these things is normally that you don't feel like you've actually met the other people, which is necessary to develop a kind of professional bond, that then allows you to work effectively at a distance.  With high-definition cameras and zero lag, it does actually feel like you've met, though.  If I'm right, then this has pretty big implications for the future.  At the moment, the main problem is there is only one Cisco office with these facilities in each city and several people had to travel right across town to make the meeting.  Obviously its easier than flying to Malmo, but when this technology proliferates, it will really change things.  Broadband capacity is presumably the limiting factor, but when that improves, maybe we'll never need to leave the house again, to meet, go to school, or down the pub?

Sustainability and the city

introductory text to our MAASD course, 2013/14

Sustainability is an under-theorised notion.  The Brundtland definition of sustainable development, proposed and internationally adopted in 1987 contained inherent antagonisms, that continue to play out today: which human needs (or desires) should be met?  Whose future should be protected?  are sustainability and development (as currently realised) mutually inclusive or exclusive?  The scientific method is giving us greater insights into the likelihood, impacts and proximity of risks we face and whilst it has also delivered technical solutions, our societal capability to apply these appears to be frustrated by the very processes that produce them.  Einstein said that you don't solve problems using the same thinking that created them; he also said, 'the environment is everything except me.'  Via sustainability, we have reduced the environment of 'everything' to 'everything physical' , thus excluding the role of human relations from the discussion. Science and technology are only produced through human relations, however and this disjunction lies at the heart of the environmental conundrum.  

Some of the authors in the reading list propose that the problem of sustainability is primarily a social, not a technical one.  In their view a sustainable world is not only also a socially just world; social justice is a precondition of it.  (Un)fortunately, the (post)modern processes identified by Berman and Beck have already set to work on the under-theorised notion of sustainability, hollowing it out, so that the terminology has become a set of empty symbols, devoid of meaning; yet at the same time these processes continue in powerful, reflexive modes according to Beck.  Modernity may yet provide the radical energy to re-invent the world.  This leaves us the challenge of identifying  the roots of sustainability, as a fundamentally Modern process.  If we go back to the city at the turn of the century and follow Simmel, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, we gain an insight into the Modern processes at work on society as it rapidly shifted from the rural to the urban.  We understand the city as a mental construct, as much as it is a physical one and we trace the roots of these antagonistic forces that continue to shape all of our lives.  If as Lefebvre proposes, the city is a social product, then a sustainable city requires first a sustainable society.  The immediately apparent inequalities of the city lie in stark contrast to this vision.  Minton's writing identifies this contradiction within contemporary urban development and in doing so, only through words, makes it tangible and possible to challenge through architecture and design.

During the first semester, we will focus on this theoretical reasoning, sharpening our critical tools and building our understanding of the history and etymology of an under-theorised idea.  Observation is key and we will learn to look again at the city around us.  Locke's twin modes of engagement with the world: sensation and reflection, will be separated once more so that they can usefully inform one another.  The skill of writing will be developed, so that in 5,000 words, a final report will build the basis for intervention in the city, to be undertaken in Semester B. 

Roland Karthaus, Alan Chandler & Anna Minton

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.