Posts Tagged Observer
Architecture review: St Benedict’s school, Ealing: Buschow Henley Architects
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 16, 2009
An architect frustrated by government thinking on school design has brought to fruition a remarkable riposte
We shape our environments and then they shape us. This is specially true of schools; the influence the architecture of school buildings has on developing minds is surely incalculable.
So what should a school actually be like? I asked Simon Henley, architect of a remarkable new school building in Ealing, west London. Henley, author of a cultishly wonderful book called The Architecture of Parking and a partner in the firm Buschow Henley, is a mild-mannered individual, but his criticism of government policy is lacerating.
In Henley's view, current thinking will create a generation of glazed morons with no more discipline than you need to change channels.
"The government wants schools to look like shops with big graphics and bright colours. They are frightened by tradition, frightened of the idea that children should even be a little intimidated by school. I'm not afraid of ethics and tradition. I like institutions. Institutions are good!"
So three years ago, Henley cold-called one of the oldest institutions of them all, the Benedictine monks of the gloriously incongruous Ealing Abbey, founded in this pleasant west London suburb in 1897 by renegades from Downside Abbey, near Bath. The result is the dignified, severe and intelligent cloisters he has added to the sprawling St Benedict's school. This 1902 establishment now gains two new assembly halls, chapel, music rooms, language lab and new public entrances. But it gains something more intangible as well: an exemplary building which binds together the whole.
Henley is hypercritical of the current obsession with superficial glitz and infantile shape-making which affects architecture. Instead, he is more concerned with thinking about the plan. Of course, this is more difficult than rushing up a coruscating CGI and since clients are notoriously incapable of actually reading one, a great plan is no way to win the showy competitions which, alas, dominate architectural culture. But Henley's clients were different. They were the 14 elderly Benedictines he visited throughout the design and construction. As mortality dwindled them during the process, he was taken by the transience of life and the relative permanence of buildings. Do such fine thoughts ever interrupt playtime at the DES?
Henley admires the way institutional architecture affects mood and morals, much as Le Corbusier admired the Cistercian abbey at Le Thoronet. So in Ealing, the centre of the cloisters is one smaller hall set inside a larger one.
The structure is a cage of high-finish, but unapologetically naked, glass-reinforced concrete which reflects monastic modules. The "bars" of the cage are separated by doors which, when deployed, almost double the space. Resting on top of the halls' coffered ceiling you can see a fragment of a yellow ground plan. This is the chapel which sits boldly exposed at roof level. An uncompromising box, inside it is a play-off between the coloration of late Rothko and a cardinal's chasuble. The sole, but ample, light source is an X-shaped skylight. Outside the chapel are the music rooms. Engineered timber is used here to create a different feel.
The small sum of £6.2m would not buy you an average oligarch's bathroom, but the ambitions of St Benedict's are less modest than its budget. It is a very clear demonstration of how design is, most of all, a matter of thinking. That concentration on the plan gave the architect a focus for ingenious conceptual organisation which disguises awkward changes of level on the site (St Benedict's is at once a two- and a three-storey building).
When I met Henley, he had just taken his own students (he teaches part-time at Oxford Brookes university) to see Louis Kahn's library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. This subtle, but immensely powerful, building opened in 1972; its heroic spaces and amazing strength bring to mind notions of sanctity and perfection. Henley said it moved him to tears, but not of the bad sort. It would be good to have more crying in schools.
Architecture review: Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy at the Royal Academy, London W1
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 1, 2009
Palladio was the greatest architect ever. Obviously, no sensible methodology exists to test, still less to prove, this assertion, but his influence has been profound and enduring. Through his disciple, Inigo Jones, he determined the course of English architecture for three centuries. Even today, the sort of spiffy American realtors who advertise in Country Life describe any dire Miami McMansion with a classical portico and the odd volute as "Palladian". How to account for this? A new exhibition at the Royal Academy, the first in London for more than 30 years, prompts the question, although I am not certain it provides the answers.
The exhibition just misses the 500th birthday of Andrea della Gondola, born in Padua, 1508. Just as the birth dates of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were propitious for a career in computers (as Malcolm Gladwell noted in his recent book Outliers), 1508 was a good year for an ambitious architect to be born. It was exactly the right place and moment to have absorbed the beginning of the Renaissance, but with scope aplenty still to come for new commissions and bold statements before the rinascimento lost its energy and became strangulated as mannerism.
The event that translated della Gondola from apprentice provincial stonemason to world-class architect happened in his late twenties when working on a villa for Gian Giorgio Trissino, one of Vicenza's intellectuals. The client absorbed him into his academy of scholars and writers, told him to start studying Vitruvius, the Roman architect, and gave him the nom d'artiste "Palladio". This was the name of an angelic messenger in Trissino's epic poem Italia liberata dai Goti (Italy Freed From the Goths; it is, by all accounts, unreadable, but we cannot be sure because so few have tried). So, young "Palladio" was sent on a mission to classicise.
The results over the next 40 or so years were new civic buildings in Vicenza, the glorious churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore in Venice, but most of all the stupendous series of villas - original, timeless, amazingly beautiful - he built for the gentleman farmers of the Veneto. Just to recite their names and locations is to enter into a reverie of educated paganism: Lonedo, Maser, Fanzolo, Piombino, Dese, Malcontenta, Poiana Maggiore, Finale di Agugliaro, Vancimuglio, Villa Rotonda, Bertesina, Quinto, Lisiera, Caldogno, Montecchio. These designs have been endlessly copied all over the world.
So how does the Royal Academy help us understand this most influential of architects? There are marvellous treasures on display: you enter, and if you have a mind for these things, stand in wonder at a fragment of Palladio's masterpiece publication I Quattro Libri dell'architettura. It sits before an El Greco portrait, slightly audaciously said to be of Palladio; it certainly reminds us that this was the age of Michelangelo, when the idea of swaggering, autonomous artistic genius was born.
Throughout the exhibition are fine wooden models and superb drawings, many by Palladio's hand, and their nervous, informal urgency lets us see just how he used pencils, pen and paper to think. There are subsidiary pleasures too, including Van Dyck's exquisite Chatsworth drawing of Inigo Jones.
But there are big problems with architecture exhibitions, especially in the forbidding rooms of the Royal Academy, even when the designer of the installation is as distinguished an architect as Eric Parry. How to evoke and interpret the power of vast structures in an enclosed space? These problems are not wholly avoided. Architecture, as Le Corbusier said, is "the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in light". Alas, not a lot of the latter comes across, but we do get a lot of the learned game. Essentially, this is a scholarly collection of drawings. Nothing wrong with that, but an interpretive, creative opportunity has been missed.
If you abandoned the costive preoccupations of the art historians who tend to "curate" exhibitions, you could perhaps form a clearer understanding of Palladio and his achievements. And to do this would be real object lesson. He was interested in "decorum" or what was suitable in private building. He believed in the "genius loci", the fundamental significance of place. "Virtu" involved a vision of cities as living cultures with a moral character of their own, but, most important, he wanted to work "all'antica". This did not mean slavish imitation of antiquities, but getting back to the fundamental purism of what Roman builders achieved.
Palladio published a pair of guidebooks about Rome in the 1540s. They were synoptic and populist, hence revealing of his later achievements. But they were imaginative, too; when he was in Rome, large areas of the city were still buried under rubble. His account of Roman antiquities involved a deal of imaginative reconstruction which he eventually synthesised into his architecture. The smells, power, danger and sex of the past stimulated him.
Additionally, his great villas of the Veneto might have been beautiful, but they were also designed as working farms. There may be limits to the decorum of the Royal Academy, but it is surely a pity to make no attempt to evoke the reality of Palladian architecture.
A lot has changed in architecture since the Palladio exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1975. We have had the silliness of postmodernism, the sobriety of neomodernism, celebrity high-tech and CGI-driven zoomorphism. Maybe now the farmyard mysticism and dignity of Palladio will have new relevance as we all move into earth-bermed, passive eco-caves to sit out the global money crisis.
I bumped into Robert Adam, Britain's leading "traditional" architect, at the Royal Academy, carefully taking notes. I asked him what Norman Foster could learn from all of this. Adam said: "Fuck all!" Maybe, but what Palladio teaches us is that great architecture always involves a sense of order and a sense of place. For Palladio, classicism was the means, not the end. Indeed, some of his early designs on show here are completely without decoration, relying on mathematics and taste alone for their effect.
Unlike his followers, Palladio never copied and that, I think, is one of the true tests of greatness.
Ed Vulliamy: How dare they do this to my Liverpool
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 23, 2009
The threat to some of the city's most beautiful buildings is typical of our disregard for history
Back in Liverpool last Saturday night - after quite a game at Old Trafford (Man Utd 1, Liverpool 4) - I decided to take a walk around some of the buildings precious to years living on Merseyside. I thought it might be tough, having seen the "regeneration" of Liverpool 1, the once Victorian city centre, into a construction site and shopping centre.
It was a shock to find my favourite greasy spoon and a fine secondhand bookshop clinging to Lime Street station demolished to make way for the sanitised "Gateway", while the glorious view along the tracks under the great arch of Victorian iron is about to be wrecked by a protruding, big, bent-finger thing. But one can retreat from this folly to various places - including Hope Street.
"Hope Street is," says Hilary Burrage, who chairs the Hope Street Association, "either the Left Bank or the Acropolis, depending on how we feel - bohemia, but with more institutions of learning, culture and medicine than any street in Europe." Until now.
How to describe a lifetime of memories on Hope Street, one of Europe's great boulevards, connecting the eccentrically massive gothic Anglican cathedral with the 1960s Catholic one? Hope Street was an elegant bridge preceding and spanning the century it took to build the former edifice and the five years it took to build the modern cathedral. There were nights in a dive called Casablanca, adapted to become the "Casa", fixed up and managed by sacked dockers after the strike of 1995-8.
There were Liverpool Philharmonic nights with Charles Groves and at the Everyman Theatre with its famous bistro. The monumental Philharmonic Rooms have the most ornate marble urinals in Europe, and down an alley called Rice Street you'll find Ye Cracke, one of the best little pubs in the world.
But the main thing was the street itself, rich with history, but edgy, funny and fun, tatty and splendid, to which tourists flock, not least to see the finest of its great buildings between the cathedrals: Liverpool College of Art, constructed between 1892 and 1910, where my mother (Shirley Hughes, the doyenne of children's book illustration) learned her craft and John Lennon studied. I loved seeing students on the steps, chatting with a fag between painty fingers. My mother remembers especially the singular, diffuse light in the life-drawing room.
So I went to pay my usual homage. The art college was empty. Through the windows of so much past diligence, exuberance and colour, just a deep, hollow nothing. "Acquired by the Maghull Group", said the board on the railing. "Invest. Develop. Construct."
I had been to Turin the previous weekend. There is history between these cities, after the death of 39 Italian fans before the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel stadium in 1985. I was at Heysel and love both great teams as deeply as I do the cities they represent.
Yet how differently each city's history is regarded by those holding purse and power. To say that visiting Turin is like going back to 1910 is to appreciate that the city has not lost its strength of aesthetic identity to postmodern mediocrity. Venerable buildings retain their usage, renovated when necessary, so that the centre is robustly fin-de-siècle and the peeling but lovely arcades and apartments around Piazza dell'Indipendenza are being restored for affordable housing. The Verdi music conservatory looks like the day it opened in 1866.
Unlike the shell of Liverpool art college, listed Grade II by English Heritage. It has been sold in a package of four buildings by their owner, John Moores University, to the Maghull Group. Maghull's proposal reads: "The former art college, attended by John Lennon, will be converted into a 48-bed, 5-star boutique hotel. Alternative proposals for the building are for a high-quality residential refurbishment to provide 19 two- and three-bedroom apartments." Similar plans are posted for the also listed Hahnemann Building.
Maghull's "Hope Street Portfolio" has been mired in controversy because the Josephine Butler building is to be demolished to create underground parking plus overground retail and office space and luxury residential apartments. Maghull sparked outrage by hacking off the building's stone facade.
The sum Maghull paid John Moores is secret. Vice-chancellor Professor Michael Brown has referred to "the hysteria that has been generated" over Maghull's plan. But the most hysterical outburst came from Michael Hanlon, Maghull's founding director, after he received an email from Philip Coppell, a Beatles tour guide, which read: "Please leave Liverpool alone, as you are only in it for the money and I hope that the present credit crunch bankrupts your company and this obscene development never sees the light of day." Mr Hanlon recalled meeting "a whole raft of local consultation groups, many of which consist of time-wasting wankers like you who seem to think they are experts in heritage ... if you don't like our proposals then that's hard lines for you so why don't you fuck off".
Mr Hanlon does not specify who the other time-wasters were, but one may have been councillor Steve Mumby who said: "Sometimes it is better to do nothing than to mess these places up for ever." Or he could have been thinking of Save Our City, whose director, Florence Gerston, says: "Liverpool is losing its soul, its architecture systematically eroded by people with no sense of history."
With the recession, the development is now on hold. The university says it is leasing the art college back. A conversation with Mr Hanlon reveals that John Moores is also renting back two more buildings it owned, so that John Moores will pay Maghull for three buildings it sold them. Mr Hanlon resents his company being "a political football" over Hope Street and has a fair point.
For this is not about Maghull: Hope Street is an allegory for Liverpool. And Liverpool is an allegory for Britain. There is something singularly British about the attitude of local authorities and the developers they favour to our once-great industrial cities. The hopelessness on Hope Street signifies a relinquishing of a civic sense of history and long-term future in pursuit of what Mumby calls "the quick buck now".
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