Posts Tagged Interviews
Iannis Xenakis: sites and sounds
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 18, 2011
A student of both Messiaen and Le Corbusier, Xenakis combined his two passions to conceive a new musical language. Christopher Fox looks at a singular creative mind
Death is a difficult career move in the arts. Without the living presence of the artist – whether that presence was compelling, tiresome, benign or objectionable – their work changes its meaning and there's nothing they can do about it. Dull work is no longer redeemed by the artist's charming personality, it's just dull and it gets forgotten. But some work takes on a life of its own, something I realised this summer when the Jack Quartet came to London and played Iannis Xenakis's Tetras at the Wigmore Hall. Too young to have studied the work with Xenakis, who died in 2001, the Jack musicians gave the music a glossy shine I had not heard before. Their Tetras had the same dynamic energy as earlier performances, but it was as if that energy came from a new power source with a leaner, cleaner burn. If it's the mark of a masterpiece that it can sustain this sort of new-generation makeover, then Tetras was confirmed as a masterpiece.
Now it's November and the Huddersfield contemporary music festival is making a major feature of Xenakis's music for the first time since his death. The festival's artistic director Graham McKenzie has also noticed the continuing power of the music. "No other composer seems to generate as much interest in successive generations of listeners as Xenakis," he says. McKenzie is also excited by the way Xenakis's music reaches out beyond the classical concert hall; he sees it as "a rich source for all sorts of diverse artistic practice, from the German noise band Zeitkratzer to dance music and club culture".
It's a bold claim, which matches the boldness of Xenakis's life. Born in 1922 in Romania to Greek parents, he grew up to be fascinated by both the arts and sciences, eventually deciding to study engineering at Athens polytechnic. Like so many people of his generation, Xenakis's life was torn apart by the second world war and in his case the tearing apart was literal and terrible. By October 1944 the German occupation of Greece had ended but there was widespread resistance to the rightwing government that the western allies wanted to install as an eastern bulwark against communism. In Athens, this resistance culminated in a series of mass demonstrations which in December escalated into a vicious armed struggle, with British tanks firing into buildings occupied by the protesters. The building Xenakis was defending was hit and a piece of shrapnel ripped open the left side of his face, permanently blinding him in that eye.
He recovered and completed his engineering qualifications but the oppressive political climate in Greece continued to worsen. As Xenakis later said, for those on the left, the choice was "recantation or the concentration camp". He fled, and by November 1947 had arrived in Paris where, with his engineering diploma in hand, he found a job in an architect's office. No ordinary architect, however; Xenakis's new boss was Le Corbusier. He became part of the team working on projects such as the huge Marseilles public housing scheme, the Unité d'Habitation, where Le Corbusier's modernist convictions about the relationship between form and function found their most extreme expression.
Many composers have day jobs, but not many find a way of connecting the day job with the business of writing music. Le Corbusier knew that Xenakis was composing but was frustrated by his lack of technique and direction, so he suggested a consultation with the leading French modern composer of the day, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen's advice was revelatory. "You have the good fortune of being an architect and having studied special mathematics", he told Xenakis. "Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music."
Over the next few years Xenakis slowly implemented Messiaen's advice. The main Corbusier project on his desk was the Couvent de la Tourette that demanded a complex spatial geometry of intersecting planes and curves. Xenakis realised that his structural calculations could apply to sounds, too. A rising plane could be a sliding string tone, its physical mass translated into the number of violins sliding together. Tones could intersect, curve away from one another: brutalist architecture becoming brutalist music. When the first of these pieces, Metastaseis, was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen festival it caused a scandal; most European modern music in the 1950s was obsessed with the organisation of individual points or groups of sounds. The kinetic force of Metastaseis must have seemed like an alien invasion.
Like Le Corbusier's architecture, Xenakis's music is based on first principles rather than on received ideas about how to do things. Cut holes in a continuous surface, as Le Corbusier did with the Couvent de la Tourette, and not only do the holes let in daylight, but also divide the surface, articulating regular or irregular patterns. This works in music, too. Cut holes in a continuous musical tone and you have a rhythm; cut holes in a tone which is rising or falling and you have both a rhythm and a scale. Cut 12 holes at regular intervals in a tone that slides up an octave and you have the familiar chromatic scale represented by the black and white keys on the piano keyboard.
By the middle of the 20th century arguments about different ways of organising this 12-note scale dominated musical debate. The new orthodoxy in modernist music was that all 12 notes had to be organised into a more or less equal relationship all the time, making music without the gravitational pull of a single central note: atonal music. But architects need to maintain a healthy respect for gravity, and in Xenakis's music instability and irregularity – the default settings of so much mid-20th century modern music – co-exist with passages where a central note or a regular pulse dominate. It's music in which delicate scatterings of sounds can suddenly be supplanted by a shatteringly intense unison or by driving rhythms redolent of some lost east European folk tradition. It's the pull between these opposite forces that makes this music so immediate.
"He created something new," says Irvine Arditti, whose Arditti Quartet worked closely with Xenakis for 20 years. "Anyone can appreciate Xenakis's music without needing to know about the music of the earlier 20th century." He remembers how "in his rehearsals Xenakis was interested not in small details, but in larger shapes and characters of sound".
At the Huddersfield contemporary music festival, the Arditti Quartet will be joined by the pianist Ian Pace, who too enjoys the challenge of finding these "larger shapes and characters" in Xenakis's often very complex scores. In some of them, says Pace, "there is no way every single pitch can be played exactly … there is no way of keeping reiterated quick chords going at both ends of the keyboard and the centre at the same time, even if one plays with one's nose. Ultimately it comes down to what one thinks does most justice to the work's essence and conception." Getting to the "essence" of a piece of music, it's quite an old-fashioned idea, but Xenakis's music is uniquely ancient and modern; a decade after its composer's death it's still full of life.
Works by Xenakis are performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival tonight and on 24, 25 and 27 November. Details: hcmf.co.uk
Saturday interview: Fiona Reynolds, National Trust director general
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2011
National Trust chief Fiona Reynolds believes planning law is the biggest test yet of the government's claim to be green, and is leading the backlash against the plans
I sit in the beer garden of a Cotswold pub – long before it opens – on a perfect autumn morning. Strands of spiders' silk, untethered from their webs, float through the air, visible only for a second when they catch a glint of sunlight. The leaves on the trees look golden in this light, and the fields stretch out in front as far as you can see. Could there be anywhere more beautiful than right here, right now? Count yourself lucky, you think, for England's green and pleasant land. And for its planning laws.
"I know we're sitting in a very privileged part of the countryside now, in terms of landscape," says Dame Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, as she sits down on a picnic bench and tries to get her collie-spaniel cross Lucy to sit too, "but this has all been protected through good planning and the moment you let good planning go, it's lost for ever." Reynolds doesn't have the look of a victorious warrior returning from battle – she is far too measured for that – but she could be allowed a small, self-satisfied smile at the firestorm the National Trust helped inflict on the government's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) consultation. Reynolds took the step – for the first time in her 11 years at the National Trust – of writing to all four million members and asking them to support its campaign against the consultation that could be the biggest change to planning regulation in several decades. Most potentially devastating, the Trust warned, was prioritising economic growth over longterm protection of the countryside when it came to planning decisions. Their petition was signed by more than 200,000 people and David Cameron stepped in and wrote to the National Trust, pledging to protect the "beautiful British landscape." The consultation closed last week, and the months of waiting have begun. "We've just got to hope the government is really listening. I'm passionate about protecting the countryside, and the need to get it right. If you get it wrong what you lose, you lose for ever."
She says she was "hugely impressed" by the response of the National Trust's members. "I think it's one of those things about our nation – and we're a very urban society now – but we do love the countryside, it's something that seems to be part of our character and our sense of what England is. I think people were shocked, particularly that a Conservative-led government should appear not to be passionate about the countryside. It just felt wrong."
The coalition is "so preoccupied with growth and of course we have every sympathy with that, but it's about what kind of growth, what kind of economy, and in a way the recession has given us a chance to think about the quality of what we do. We have 330,000 houses with planning permission that aren't being built because there is no money for mortgages, so the problems in a way are elsewhere. But given that we have a chance to build really well and intelligently – in a way a recession is a time to think positively about that. That's the disappointing thing: they felt they had to press the old 'growth at any cost' button."
The National Trust isn't a campaigning organisation, she says, and isn't about to become one, despite occasional forays onto the battlefield – it objected to the expansion of Stansted airport, for example, and against the government's proposed forests sell-off.
"[Campaigning] is dependent on the issue," she says. "I would not expect us to be doing it all the time. If we became rentaquote, that wouldn't be right. We reserve our voice for something that is really important, absolutely at the heart of our core purpose and touches what we stand for and where we make a difference. This felt like the single most important issue in the time I have been here. I think we should campaign on issues that are central to what we do and I suspect it would be rare, but when we make a contribution it matters. I think this is what this has shown." It is a "caricature", says Reynolds, that the National Trust is against all development. "We recognise we need housing, schools, the physical buildings where these things happen. Our big question is how we do it."
The National Trust is the biggest private landowner and biggest NGO, with an estimated one in 10 voters a member. Reynolds is head of a huge powerbase. Does this make her the most powerful woman in Britain? She laughs. "I wouldn't say that. I'm the luckiest woman in Britain because I have the best job in the country."
Are politicians frightened of her? "I don't know about frightened. I think they are listening, and that's absolutely right. I think the National Trust stepping up on this issue really made them think, and that's a good thing. They did the wrong thing with it by giving it this economic slant. I hope that our intervention will get us to a proper balance between social, environment and economic objectives. They're listening," she adds, "but we're not there yet. We don't know the outcome."
David Cameron's promise that his would be the greenest government ever is met by a small laugh. "I've yet to see it, put it that way. You can only judge a government by what it does. This is a big test and they haven't failed it yet because it was only a draft consultation, but it has to change significantly to deliver what the country needs."
When Reynolds was a child, growing up in Alston in Cumbria, her parents would take her to National Trust properties. She became a member of the organisation while she was still at Cambridge, where she did an MPhil in land economy. "I never thought I would end up running it, but I've always been intrigued by the National Trust. I love the sense of purpose. I love an organisation that has a long view back, but also a long view forward. We say to people we are going to look after places for ever for everyone, and I believe we will."
At 53, Reynolds has been in the job since 2001. "Now I'm suddenly feeling quite old," she says. "It's a bit of a shock, really. When I started, my children were small and now they're growing up." Her husband, a teacher, "did the stay at home bit. I couldn't have done this job as somebody who was also trying to be the number one carer, so I was very lucky that he was willing to do that, because it is very, very hard to be a mother and have a big job, to pursue a career. I know lots of people who found that impossible."
It's perhaps the main reason, she says, why there are so few women at her level. Does she think it is getting easier? "I wouldn't say it's getting easier, but it's becoming more acceptable to have unconventional arrangements at home. But I don't think it's that much better for women. It's that age-old tension – even if you're not physically responsible for the children, you're emotionally thinking 'should I be there?' or 'I'm missing that sports day – again.'"
Reynolds worked at the Council for National Parks, then the Council to Protect Rural England, before spending two years as director of the women's unit at the cabinet office under Tony Blair. When she got the job as director general of the National Trust, she was accused of being one of "Tony's cronies", though she insists she was not on social terms with the then-prime minister. But still, her appointment was controversial. "I was the youngest director general and the first woman, and it would have been surprising if people hadn't gone 'hmm'. But I hope my track record spoke for itself, and now my track record from being there for 11 years – we've done some great things."
Membership – and income – has swelled under her directorship, and the organisation is steadily modernising. She acknowledges "nobody will ever agree with everything the Trust does, I learned that early on. It's not an organisation that in the detail of what we do we can please everybody, and it's impossible to try." For instance, the Trust was accused of "dumbing down" (and "Disney-fying") for its recent efforts to, as Reynolds puts it, "bring houses to life" by dressing guides up and recreating scenes in rooms. "I'm completely unrepentant, because I think our job is to make history appealing and accessible to a new generation who haven't all learned history in school. Provided you are telling the truth and there's an integrity, so you're not simplifying or glossing over difficult stories in order to make something sound nice, I don't think it's dumbing down at all."
But isn't "glossing over difficult stories" what the National Trust became expert at doing? It is only in recent years, for instance, that the National Trust has acknowledged how many of its properties were built on fortunes from slavery. "I think we recognise that we didn't always tell all the stories," she says, adding that it is changing. "If you go to properties now you will see much more about where the fortune came from that built the house, some of the slavery issues. We are prepared to tell the more difficult stories as well."
I've always felt too nose-up-against-the-window in most National Trust houses I've been to, and an unease at the worship of its original aristocratic owners a visit seemed to demand.
"I'm not sure it's worshipping," says Reynolds. "I think it's curiosity. People are really intrigued by it. If you go to the back-to-backs [former slum housing in Birmingham acquired by the National Trust], people are just as enthralled by them. There, for a lot of people, you could think, 'that might well have been me', whereas in a great stately home, you think, 'actually I would probably have been the scullery maid'."
The family membership has swelled, Reynolds points out, which makes the demographic younger. There is still much room for improvement, though. I suspect low-income families are still a rarity – quite aside from the entry prices, it can be impossible to get to many properties on public transport – and Reynolds admits there are few ethnic minority members. "I freely recognise that, and we've been working with properties that are either located in urban areas, or close to large areas of different populations. For example, Wightwick Manor in the west Midlands is surrounded by a huge Sikh and Afro-Caribbean community, and they have been working specifically on how to involve their local community."
Providing people with access to nature still underpins the Trust's original purpose. "We're very concerned about [people decreasing contact with nature]," says Reynolds. "One of our founders, Octavia Hill, said something like 'the need of air, the sight of sky and all things growing seem human needs common to all'. She was saying it's as important to have access to beauty, and the ability to get out into the countryside – that's as important as the roof over your head and something to eat. Which comes back to the planning issue. I've got shelves of books at home about the early-20th-century and the conservation movement beginning, and through the 20s and 30s the Trust was very involved in establishing our planning system. It just felt right that we should be there now defending it."
Our time runs out and Reynolds has to go. My last glimpse of her is in silhouette as she strides across open fields, her dog racing off in front towards the sun.
New homes must be fit for purpose, says leading architect
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2011
The new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Angela Brady, wants to start a conversation on building better new homes
For Angela Brady, good design is a watchword. That means communicating its benefits on television, radio, at workshops for children, on public platforms and, in her new role, to the country at large.
The new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) has a Channel 4 series featuring architecture in six European cities behind her. Right now, her passion is the lamentable design of much of the new housing in England. She does not mince words, labelling buildings passing for detached homes as "Noddy boxes". It is a criticism she heard time and again during this year's party conference fringe meetings which outlined Riba's Case for Space campaign, a drive to persuade house-builders to raise their game as new homes become significantly smaller.
Those Riba events, titled Leaving Legoland, attracted several hundred at the three party conferences. "The strong criticism that came from the audience was: 'We're sick of these volume housebuilders, the Noddy box houses in cul-de-sacs all around the country. We have to drive to improve them. They're not built sustainably. They're tiny, cramped.' And they've got a fair point," says Brady.
"People will say housebuilders have got a monopoly because they've got the land. We're saying there hasn't really been an analysis of how we live, what spaces we need, since 1961. So we're starting the conversation. Let's ask what people want."
That is what Riba is proposing with a Future Homes Commission, comprising experts from a variety of fields. With the average new home in England 8% below the recommended minimum size (which can equate to a bedroom) the institute wants to find out what consumers want and need, then make recommendations to house builders and developers.
When I mention that architecture seems to be an afterthought in many new houses, Brady interjects: "If at all." It's a serious point because, she says, many homes are simply constructed off-the-shelf from manuals; even the once ubiquitous term "architect designed" has been ditched. She thinks it is symptomatic of a "let's get something cheap, cheerful and quick".
But Brady's criticisms go further than house design; she thinks the layout and planning of new estates leaves much to be desired. She spent a year on a working group organised by the former Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment – an organisation, she laments, needlessly scrapped by the government – looking at the country's post-war new towns. "There was some fantastic planning then," she enthuses. "Just compare that with suburban sprawl, ribbon development, these sort of executive cul-de-sacs you've got to drive to and you can't even buy a bottle of milk on the corner."
Better models
Brady adds: "We need to really re-examine the way we live and play, and we need to seek better models for the next 20 years. We've got huge constraints, if you look at the pressure on the environment, and I believe we are the custodians of [that]. People are relying on architects, planners, to come up with the right answers – how to make the green deal, make homes more zero carbon. As architects, we've got so much to offer. Governments ignore that at their peril."
Brady studied architecture in her native Dublin and sought early inspiration in her career with work spells in Denmark, and Toronto, before landing in London. In 1987, she set up an architecture practice with her husband Robin Mallalleu.
Brady is the second female president of Riba and has a record of activism in the organisation. She was a leading light in Architects for Change, promoting the progression of women alongside black and minority ethnic groups. "You can inspire children who would never think of going into architecture that it's a worthwhile career," she says.
In the contest for president, Brady believes that her activism proved the trump card. "One of the reasons I got voted in was because I was the only person pushing diversity in our profession. We're only 18% women and I'd love it if we could push it to 40%." Therein lies a dilemma because women, she says, constitute 37% of students in the country's 44 schools of architecture . Brady says it's not hard to discover why so many women subsequently leave. "They are the main child carers; take a year out, and it's quite hard to get in again."
Another passion is de-mystifying architecture – "taking it to the people" and involving them in the process. She believes the profession needs to broaden its appeal, and evangelise. "This is what's missing, how are we architects going to help deliver the 'localist' agenda of the government?" she enthuses. "That means helping people make local plans, when there isn't the revenue there in the support structure. Communicating with neighbourhood groups, helping them draw up local plans, it's a long-term strategy that we want."
Proper consideration
Why, she asks, plonk houses miles from anywhere without the services to support families? "We want to make sure there is some infrastructure in place before people come and put housing down, to know that housing has been given proper consideration, is going to fit in, and it's not going to be yet more ribbon development."
And why, she wonders, build exclusive estates and properties for one privileged sector of society while housing others in separate enclaves? "If we look to Denmark and Holland, for example, they live as a community coming together without an 'us and them', the rich and the poor. It's much more social," she explains.
Brady is enthralled by the "rich mix" of the capital's culture even after over two decades in London. She is appalled that plans for a cap of £26,000 on the amount of benefits one family can claim a year from 2013 will undermine that mix, driving the lower paid out of the capital. "People have a right to live in the communities where they were born," she says.
That aside, she insists that the compelling case for many more houses should not mean poor design. "We've got a huge housing crisis, a shortage of 250,000 units a year. And there should be more opportunity for better housing. We need to build more sustainably, to cut carbon, it's a matter of convincing the contractors to build for the long-term."
No easy task. She has two years as president to make her mark.
Curriculum vitae
Age 54.
Status Married, two teenage children.
Lives Finsbury Park, north London.
Education Holy Child school, Killiney, County Dublin; Dublin School of Architecture.
Career 1987–present: director, Brady Mallalieu Architects; 1983-86: architecture graduate in London; 1982-83: trainee architect, architectural practice in Toronto; 1981-82: scholarship to study co-housing in Denmark.
Public life 2011: elected Riba president for two-year term; 2010: joins Riba trust board; 2000: founder, Architects for Change group within Riba, campaigning for greater representation for women and ethnic minorities.
Interests Painting, designing glassware.
All that glisters: how Rafael Viñoly built a bling building around a Roman ruin – video
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2011
Architect Rafael Viñoly talks about Firstsite, his newly opened arts centre in Colchester, which has been dubbed the golden banana
Life in a cob eco cabin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 10, 2011
Bill and Rosemary Marshall, near Worcester
My wife and I had recently retired and I chanced upon this building on the internet. I remember calling my wife over and saying: "Look, it's a shed in a field."
The place was called "Cobtun" – "cob" is a primitive but strong building material made of clay, straw, water and earth, and "tun" is the old Saxon word for a dwelling. It was built in 2001 by Birmingham's Associated Architects. The design brief was just nine words long: "Humour, mystery, fantasy, ecological, sustainable, independent, contextual, agricultural, invisible."
The cob wall is 2ft thick and 15ft high, and it has been designed to look even thicker than that. I think the original name for it was "Mycenaean wall", and there's definitely something of a buttress to it. It curves around the house, encloses the flower garden and even makes up some of the inside walls. One of the bedrooms has an earth wall, which is surprisingly nice to the touch: very hard, very tactile; a bit like a piece of Japanese pottery. It doesn't smell, and apart from a couple of spiders, we haven't had any surprise visitors. The rest of the house is very modern: lots of oak-clad timber with a crisp finish.
It definitely has a cheeky sense of humour. Rather unusually, it's a house with 25 sides – and that excludes the annex outside. We had an old corner cabinet that we wanted to bring into our new home, but we soon realised that there was only one 90-degree corner in the whole house.
Cobtun won the 2005 Riba sustainability award. The oak is from Hertfordshire, the wall is made with mud from the meadow, and the cob's stone footing was sourced from the Forest of Dean. The roof is made of corrugated aluminium, with solar tubes for heating water on top. There are lots of dark concrete surfaces inside the house, which store heat from the sun and save us using the radiators. There's a utility room within the cob wall with pulleys for drying clothes – the cob absorbs the moisture in the atmosphere, so there's no need for a tumble dryer. I'd be lying if I said I used to care much about being energy efficient. But this house has changed the way we think.
Life in a modernist flat
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 10, 2011
Alan Lam and Yanki Lee, Golden Lane estate, London
We've lived here for 10 years –first in Great Arthur House and now in a smaller studio flat. The estate was built on a bomb site in phases between 1953 and 1962 to provide accommodation for key workers. Stanley Cohen House was the first building to be completed, in 1957.
The architects, Chamberlin, Bon and Powell, were all tutors at Kingston School of Art and had no prior experience with this kind of project, but then, nor did the council, so they were given a lot of freedom. In the 1950s, people were a lot more optimistic – everyone was starting from scratch.
The flat we moved into first was not in good condition. But we felt positive about making it work. That was where the romantic and the pragmatic met for us. The entire front wall consists of two sliding windows, with a tiled floor, like an internal balcony. That kind of detail makes you realise how well designed it is. You feel protected and also private. It is open, but you're not on show. And it's bright – you feel alive here.
In 2005 we decided to open a gallery called Exhibit in one of the original retail spaces on Goswell Road, because we wanted to explore what makes this estate such a great place. We have restored it back to how it was originally – bare brick and concrete walls, with the front and back walls made of glass. This doesn't suit most contemporary retail needs – the light is too strong and you can't see what's inside from the street. But for our project it works well. We work with artists, designers and the local community. Our recent show, The Golden Oldies, featured portraits of some of the original residents from the 50s who still live here. They remember the estate when it was new and still talk about how amazing it was to have a toilet and a bathroom, central heating ...
Not all high-rise social housing is seen positively, but people here care about the estate. The architects' initial intention was to make an urban village and foster communal life. And they succeeded. We feel so positive in this environment.
Life in a Victorian terrace
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 10, 2011
Anna Odrich, Bonnington Square, London
The first squatters came to Bonnington Square in the early 1980s. At the time, it was owned by the Inner London Education Authority, and had been condemned. As the original tenants moved out, the council gutted the houses, bricked up the windows and put up metal gates. After a few years we formed co-operatives and housing associations and lobbied the council to buy the houses. From my co-operative alone I have seven big boxes of paperwork … Now a 10th of the properties are privately owned while the rest are organised in housing associations with affordable rent.
When I arrived, there were only two houses left, which no one wanted. This house was full of rubbish. All the floorboards, bannisters and doors were missing, the electricity, gas and water pipes were all gone, the ceilings had collapsed and there were two gaping holes in the roof. Those first years were very, very difficult. We salvaged everything. These are standard Victorian houses, so if I found a window in a skip, I knew it would fit somewhere. The window frames were still there, so I just had to figure out how to install the sashes and have the panes replaced.
The walls and ceilings were made of timber with laths – thin flat strips of wood – nailed to the joists and covered in lime plaster. This plaster has a life span – it's like a sponge, it sucks up everything in the air, and gets really dirty. To have it replaced, I stripped down the whole house to the bare laths and washed them – they were filthy with grime and soot. On the third floor, where I have my kitchen and living room, there is wonderful light coming in from both sides, so I decided not to replaster the wall between the two rooms: I think of it as the muscles and sinew of the house.
At the beginning I didn't think fixing up this house would take as long as it has. I moved in 28 years ago and I finally got central heating in 2005. I think of it as a personal odyssey, but I never know if I'm Penelope or Odysseus.
Life in a Georgian home
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 10, 2011
Deon and Louise Plaatjies, The Circus, Bath
We've learned not to mention our address, because it makes people assume we're super wealthy. In fact we were just lucky; about four years ago we were looking for a new place when a good friend of ours was looking for new tenants to look after her flat here.
It's definitely a place built for show: there are always tourists outside taking photos, and in the evenings you can sometimes hear a horse and a carriage driving past outside.
Regency architecture is decorative and ostentatious, which can be both a blessing and a burden. All the buildings on the Circus are Grade-I-listed, so on the outside they haven't been altered much since they were built in the mid-18th century. You aren't allowed satellite dishes or anything like that. The stairs down into the basement have been blocked off, but the original fireplaces and ceiling mouldings are still intact. In our lounge we have the original huge sliding doors. The ceilings are their original height.
These buildings make very good, quiet flats, because they were so well built, out of solid, thick stone. All the bedrooms are at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens. You never hear your neighbours – and I think that's something that has been lost in modern buildings. Even though it's a flat, it feels more like a house.
We're both from South Africa, where things are a lot more spacious than in Britain – inside and out. When you first come to England everything feels so tiny, you almost feel claustrophobic. So these huge rooms brought back that familiar sense of space. The flipside, of course, is being South Africans, we like the heat, so our gas bills tend to be high.
We recently heard that Jane Austen used to take tea with friends in our house. It didn't faze us much, but when my parents heard they went crazy.
Living here has taught us to appreciate this kind of historic building in a new way. As South Africans, we don't really live for the past, but living here has taught us to look at the past in a new way.
Life in a baroque home
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 9, 2011
This 18th-century country house was home to a reclusive family of eccentrics and has been preserved in the state of semi-decline in which it was bequeathed to the National Trust in the 1980s
John Parkinson, Calke Abbey
Calke Abbey was built in 1704 for Sir John Harpur. It was built on the site of a Tudor building, which in turn had been built on the site of a medieval priory. It was never an abbey – the Harpur Crewe family just added that to the name to make it sound grander. I came to work here as a house manager in 1997, and most of my family has grown up here.
I was particularly attracted to the property because of the huge collection of artefacts it houses. Various generations of the Harpur Crewe family were very reclusive. They were true hoarders and collectors and the house is full of natural history specimens, such as taxidermy, minerals and butterflies.
When Vauncey Harpur Crewe died in the 1920s, the family retreated to a small corner of the house and closed the door on the rest. Much of the collection was sold, and a lot of the staff were laid off.
The last occupants of the house were two brothers without any direct family. Due to continuing problems with death duties, the family finally gave the property to the National Trust. The trust took it on as a really good example of a country house in decline, and we've been trying to preserve it in the state we found it in ever since.
The baroque facade of the house has been covered by a later, Greek-revival portico affair. At one point there was a staircase up to the portico, and the main entrance to the house was on the first floor. The original 1704 building is still very much evident in the layout, the size of the rooms and certain details, such as some of the down pipes, which still have the date on them.
We had serious flooding in June 2007 after a sudden heavy rainstorm, which overwhelmed the gullies and downpipes. When subsequent repairs and improvements were made to the drainage of the courtyards, we uncovered some skeletons – their feet were underneath the foundations of the house, so they obviously pre-dated the present house. We decided to leave them in the ground as we found them and divert the drain around them. We covered them up again and left them in peace.
Life in a medieval home
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 9, 2011
Shandy Hall is a good example of a late medieval timber-framed hall, built around 1430
Patrick Wildgust, curator of Shandy Hall
Shandy Hall is a bit like a museum, but charting the house's own history is difficult. The architectural scholar Nikolaus Pevsner reckoned it was built in the 17th century, but he was wrong, probably because he didn't have access to the inside. In fact, the building is a symmetrical, timber-framed hall built around 1430. The roof rafters show signs of the fire that would have been in the centre of the house, and through a hatch in the kitchen you can see the medieval outside wall.
There's more evidence if you look closely. In the old meeting room, there is a wall painting of the sacred monogram: the letters IHS, probably meaning "Iesus Hominem Salvator" ("Jesus, Saviour of Man"). Another one is of a man with a pikestaff and a big plumed hat; probably painted around 1500–1520 and fairly certainly not religious.
The writer Laurence Sterne lived here from 1760 to 1768, but by then the paintings would have been panelled over and he would have never known of the secret story behind his walls. Sterne had already published the first three volumes of The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by the time he was appointed as a permanent curate in the building, now a parsonage. "Shandy" is an old North Yorkshire dialect word for "crack-brained" or odd, and Sterne's friends referred to the house as "Shandy Hall"; the name stuck. The building has since featured in a film about Sterne, Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story, with Stephen Fry playing me.
A 1920s guidebook described Shandy Hall as "sonsy"– a Scottish word meaning good-natured, and that's true. The only problem is practically every level is an addition to the medieval building: for example Sterne built a powder room, overlooked "only by the sun", for a lover who never actually came to live with him. So most of the rooms are a bit odd: it has a lot of steps and low doorways. Even after six years of living here, I clout myself on one of the doorways at least once a month.