South London Gallery 2

Tuning

This weekend I ended up trailing a web of architecture blogs across the net, some of the well known (like pruned, bldgblog, sit down man, you're a bloody tradegy, archdaily) and lots of new (to me) ones (entschwindet und vergeht, some landscapes, strange harvest). There is a great mix of stuff, from the brilliant to the mediocre. For a moment I got quite overwhelmed in that special internet way - partly by the sheer quantity of what is being produced daily, and partly because a lot of blogs are almost like rolling news channels - daily even hourly links and images of the latest buildings and projects being produced across the world. And they all seem to cross reference one another, and have enough daily traffic to make it worth carrying ads. But the overwhelmed feeling in fact turned out to be a useful way of refocusing my thoughts.

I am not writing a world architecture update blog. I am writing a very personal series of observations and thoughts about places I have visited or know well. I cherish the everyday, the unknown, the un-new, the un-shiny, with a particular interest in architecture from the second half of the 20th century. I love to know about what's new and exciting but I think a building that has been in use for a couple of years is far more interesting than one that opened last week. I want to see how it is used, where it is getting worn, if the occupants have altered things. Sometimes I walk past something fifty times before I work out what it is I want to say about it. I feel as if I might go on to develop a manifesto for 'slow architecture'. Though there probably exists one already somewhere... In the accelerated world of architecture blogging and the incessant barrage of images that accompany it I defend to the end the slow and the small and the unnoticed!

South London Gallery

Another post about a place I visited a while ago. It's a tactic I like, visit somewhere and then mull it over for a while. Let the experience sink in, and write about what I still remember a month or two or even a year or two later.

The South London Gallery has occupied a purpose built Victorian building since 1891. The main gallery space is very fine - a tall and long roof lit rectangle, it is a well proportioned and reassuring classic gallery space. This summer 6a architects completed works enabling the gallery to expand and evolve. They refurbished an adjacent and previously derelict Georgian terrace house to contain a cafe, exhibition spaces and an apartment for an artist in residence. And they built two extensions. One directly adjoining the refurbished house and the existing gallery - a tall room that works on both a domestic scale and a gallery space scale. The second extension is beyond a garden or courtyard depending on which way you approach. It is a simple squarish space, roof lit like the main gallery. Wide pivoting wall panels allow the space to open onto the courtyard.

The two extensions are clad in fibre cement panels. And this ubiquitous material has been used really cleverly. It has been cut into panels of about 40x60cm and these have been fixed like big shingles - overlapping one another. There are two colours, a brown and a grey in very similar dark tone, equally but slightly irregularly interspersed. I think this works brilliantly. Partly down to the scale - they are bigger than classic shingles, but smaller than standard fibre cement panels. Cutting this materiel down to a smaller size would be fiddly and fussy, making shingles bigger than these and you might start to dilute the texture that the overlapping generates. The overall effect is of the 'strangely familiar' sort - shingles, but different, fibre cement panels, but used differently... And the subtle play of colour between the grey brown and the brown grey is great. Used alone these sober colours might seem dull, but used together they resonate against one another, creating a rich and warm facade.

I read somewhere that the architects had said the project was entirely made using the kind of basic everyday materiels that one could buy in B&Q. If this is true to the last detail I can't be sure, but it is an unpretentious attitude I like. In the description of the project on their website they mention that the existing main gallery space is 'impressive in scale but invisible from the street' and the sense of surprise one has upon entering it. I think what they have achieved in their extension carries some of the same quality. On first appearances it is a very muted and low key project, but the clever use of volume, light, materiality and detail gradually reveals itself. I hope to go back soon, I'm sure I didn't notice everything the first time round. (More photos will be posted later).

Legs

As you walk out of Lyon Part-Dieu station heading into town, you go past the Lyon Municipal Library, designed by Jacques Perrin-Fayolle en 1972. A vast and windowless tower like a giant silo sits on some very shapely concrete legs. The tower is clad in small rectangular ceramic tiles, brown and black alternating like a chequerboard. From afar they look like rows and rows of books.

Lyon

09.10.10

Anger in Ambroise

I took this photo in the summer of 2003. It is in the rue St Ambroise in the 11th arrondissement. At the time I lived very nearby and often walked past this apartment building, it fascinated me. One simple form - a folded surface - wall to floor to wall to roof and back to wall - repeated many times across the facade - but each one spaced apart from the next. The form itself contains a series of different spaces. And then a whole series of other spaces are created between them.

It is a deep and occupiable facade. A series of spaces rather than an edge or a surface. It is a facade of nooks and crannies and person sized hidey holes, viewing platforms, sitting spaces, planting places. It is as if each flat has pushed through the facade to create an enclosed and private balcony.

So it is a building I always admired, and photographed frequently. But I never knew who designed it, I once Googled the address to no avail. And then a few weeks ago I went to a talk at the Pavillon d'Arsenal about an architect named Roger Anger. His name meant nothing to me, but he sounded interesting - a Parisian architect who had built a lot of housing in the 50s and 60s, and then was appointed chief architect of Auroville - a utopian new city in the south of India. It was a revelation - here was the apartment building in the rue St Ambroise, and another building I had always found interesting on the rue des Pyrenees - because it looks totally different depending on which direction you approach it from. The talk was given by an Indian architect Anupama Kundoo, who worked with Anger for several years. She said that one of his chief concerns was to find ways to counteract what he called 'the dictatorship of the curtain wall'. He was critical of the vast and smooth surfaces that enveloped a lot of modern architecture - above all because these surfaces don't operate at a human scale. Buildings become vast and solid impenetrable blocks, humans tiny and powerless next to them. He thought buildings should always work with the human scale.

Rooflight

La Maison du Brésil
Cité Universitaire, Paris 14è
16.09.2010

La Tourette +

Le Couvent de la Tourette
Eveux, near Lyon
09-10.10.2010

Ursula Goldfinger's Balfron Tower Diary and Notes

Article published in the Autumn 2010 issue of the 20th Century Society magazine.

La Tourette

photos top to bottom: church; south facade; dining room; windows being restored; view of the chapel from the roof.

The Couvent de la Tourette, near Lyon, is one of Le Corbusier's great iconic buildings. It was inaugurated in October 1960 - exactly 50 years ago. It was originally planned as a place of study and residence for up to 80 Dominican friars, where they would spend four or five years training before moving on to other priories. Today it is home to ten friars, seven of whom were in residence the weekend we stayed. The spare rooms provide accommodation for visitors. Largely made up of the architecturally curious and those in search of an environment where they can truly disconnect from everyday life. On the Saturday night we stayed there were probably around 20 guests.

We each slept in a cell. 1m83 wide. Each cell has a wash basin, a small wardrobe and shelves, a bed and a desk. And a deep balcony. The floor is black lino and the walls and ceiling are very roughly plastered and painted white. You can sleep, contemplate, read, write. A notice on the door asks you not to eat, drink or converse in the cell.

On Sunday morning at 8, before breakfast, we joined the friars for 'les laudes' - a short service of chanted hymns and psalms. It was magical. The church is a vast and resonant concrete cavern. Perhaps 18m high, around 40m long and 10m wide. The four sheer walls connected by the strata lines where the concrete was poured layer after layer. Bright coloured light filters through horizontal slits - these slope upwards through the massive walls, so that the window itself is not visible, just the painted surface inside the opening that reflects the light. The chanting of the seven friars filled the space completely. We tried to imagine how it must have sounded when there were 70 or 80 of them. It is a space that I found slightly oppressive initially - the concrete is almost overwhelming, the geometry of the space, particularly the north end, is not entirely comfortable - but when the friars sing it all makes sense. The volume, the material and the voices just work together.

The building was undergoing renovation when we were there. Half was finished, a quarter was more or less finished but still under scaffolding, and the remaining quarter - the church - had yet to be begun. Three states visible together. One end crisp white render contrasting with the pale clean exposed concrete. The middle under wraps, new double glazing panes lined up in the corridor. The other end looking slightly grubby, the render and the concrete hard to distinguish from one another.

It would be nice to see the whole once all the work is finished, but it was great to visit in a semi building site state. And just as authentic. The iconic buildings of modernism have become precious artefacts. Listed and revered, studied and interpreted. Great efforts are taken to return these buildings to their imagined original state. Methods to clean and repair the concrete, to restore original paint colours are laboriously researched and tested. Theses are written, papers published. Renovation works may take years. In 2010 la Tourette is no longer just a convent, it is also an important piece of architectural heritage. I found it interesting to witness the processes involved in maintaining this status.

One of the most striking things about the building is its materiality - it is tactile, physical, visceral, quite rough in places. And the forms are wild - the strict repetition of the cells and the corridors is set against the steep slope of the irregular pyramid roof of the small chapel, that seems to float in the courtyard. The vast oblong of the church sits between two chapels that bring light deep into the crypt, one is a sinuous bunker, with great funnels, the other a modest rectangle, with diamond shaped lightwells crashing diagonally into its roof. The glazed facades are articulated by an irregular rhythm of concrete vertical elements, a pattern developed by Le Corbusier's friend, composer and engineer, Iannis Xenakis. (The pair collaborated throughout the project, Le Corbusier was preoccupied with his work in Chandigarh, and left Xenakis in charge on site. Execution drawings we found in a plan chest were signed by Xenakis.) The rich and rough materiality and the experimental irregular forms are so striking because they go against the way Le Corbusiser's architecture was so often presented by tutors when I was studying. For years at school we learnt about his five points of architecture and modular studies, and great emphasis was placed on the whiteness, the cleanness, the pureness, the mechanical, the machine age, the uniformity, the prefabrication. Well all that seems to miss the point after 24 hours spent in La Tourette.

The final thing I want to mention is the acoustic quality of the building, already touched upon in the church. Throughout the building silence rules. One has to keep silent at all times, apart from the communal meals in the dining room. We found ourselves whispering the whole time, even outside. It is a place of study, reflection, meditation. But at the same time it is incredibly noisy. It is a giant resonance box. You hear every footstep, every door being closed, every key turning. What would be a tiny sound in a modern acoustically insulated building, becomes a huge rattling sound in this building.

Le Couvent de la Tourette
Eveux, near Lyon
09-10.10.2010

orange lozenge

Having passed through the orange lozenge there are two smaller orange lozenges, one on the left and one on the right, containing glazed doors, and a wider lozenge shaped passage continues into a courtyard. (Where another orange lozenge awaits). The building is a 12 storey block of flats, cicra 1970something.

What a fantastic entrance sequence.
Into an open mouth without so much as activating an automatic door. Like in any building at some point one has to tap a code, turn a key, push a door. But here those actions seem secondary. The open orange lozenge defines the entry. Rather than going through a door to get into a space one goes through a space to get to a door.

20 quai de la Marne 75019

11.07.10

Stones of Menace

Images from the Stones of Menace event here and here:

Box Nests

A couple of months ago, just days before Spring finally sprang, I saw this lovely piece of bird architecture in Kings Wood in Kent. It is the most engaging of three animal/bird residences in a small enclave in the woods called Super Kingdom, by artists Londonfieldworks. They describe the project as 'a sculptural installation of animal 'show homes'... inspired by reports of anomalous animal behaviour in nature as a response to a shifting environment'. They talk about an interesting web of ideas to do with urban encroachment and displaced ecologies, and the purposeful reintroduction of species (re-wilding) and assisted migration - all considered in the context of Kings Wood, a working woodland managed for timber production, recreation and conservation, and the wider environment of nearby Ashford and its ever multiplying Barratt Homes. Slightly puzzlingly the artists also mention being inspired by despots palaces, this particular structure is called the Mussolini Bird House (adjacent are the Caecescu and Stalin bird houses), an unnecessary connection - there seems to be plenty to think about already.

So there are lots of ideas behind it, but they are not the reason that I stopped and took a photo as I read about them afterwards. Here are my reasons:

1. I like the way the tree looks as if it is wearing a jumper.
2. I like that some of the boxes are really tiny, more insect sized than bird sized.
3. I like the way that lots of rectilinear boxes have been put together to form something extremely un-rectilinear.
4. I like imagining that it is fully occupied, tweeting and rustling.

Shed Nests

Wobbly planks, loosely attached to one another perch amongst the steel struts and tubes of the Pompidou Centre's façade. Like giant nests for some as yet unevolved breed of enormous bird.

I first noticed them from afar, across the plaza. Strange messy blips interrupting the familiar primary coloured rectilinear facade that isn't a facade. Yet they also had an unsurprising quality, as if they were quite normal.

Things accumulate. Dust, old newspapers, leaves, people, pigeons. All trying to find a quiet corner. The city could be understood as a giant machine containing a thousand different mechanisms to counteract the incessant accumulation of stuff. Street sweepers, bin men, window cleaners, little anti-pigeon spikes on statues and ledges, signs warning of fines for bill posters, little metal studs on horizontal surfaces to dissuade homeless people from settling down, buses and metro trains to keep everyone moving.

These wooden structures are commissioned artworks, so they are not going to be cleared away until their official art work installation period is up. We know that they have been carefully planned and constructed. But how nice to play the game and imagine that they really are strange nests or cocoons for a mysterious urban creature, or sheds hastily constructed by claustrophobic Parisians living in tiny flats.

Tadashi Kawamata

'Huts' au Centre Pompidou

10 avril - 23 août 2010

Garden

rue Poulet, 75018
05.06.2010

House

Rue Clavel 75019
30.05.2010

Blue + Yellow

Bassin de la Villette, 75019

30.05.2010

Stones of Menace

On Saturday June 26 (2-6pm) I will be participating in a one day art event about Brutalist architecture. I will be reading a short text about the modernist sculptural structure the Apollo Pavilion by Victor Pasmore, and showing a series of images I took last year of the dilapidated concrete play spaces at the foot of Balfron Tower.

Blurb from the website below:

The architecture of New Brutalism has some severe critics, one of the most famous being the Prince of Wales whose speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated Brutalism, calling many of the structures "piles of concrete". In contrast, John Ruskin faulted Palladianism in his book The Stones Of Venice (1850) for the “screamingly harmonious” quality of its designs.

Such debates about architectural aesthetics usually go hand in hand with convictions about architectures’ ideological foundation and social function. Whilst the austere architecture of New Brutalism is often vilified as producing social neglect rather than securing the vibrant community life envisioned by its architects, contemporary art is almost required to ‘stir things up’ through expressing discontent and exercising criticism.

This show will explore polemical perspectives on architecture and art and open up a debate on the role of culture as a source of conflict and criticism. The exhibition will display art work that reflects on the relationship between art and architecture and its social and physical context or on issues around creative expressions of violence and social discontent.

The event will take place in the main space of St Pauls Bow Common, a New Brutalist church from the late 1950's and showcase work by architects, artists and members of the local community.

St Paul's Bow Common, Burdett Road, E3

Transformation.

This is the Tour Bois-le-Pretre in the 17th arrondissement, Paris. It was built in 1959, given a new facade + insulation in the 1980s, and is currently being renovated by French architects Frederic Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. You can see the top left of the facade the windows and panels have been replaced by full height glazing (with a temporary garde-corps). Once all the facade has been replaced prefabricated winter-gardens with balconies will be installed for every flat. Everyone is staying put during the works. 93% of the residents support the project (the architects were disappointed it wasn't 100% but there's always a few dissenters). The figure is interesting though, having read countless times in the great Robin Hood Garden debate that the majority of residents (80% usually) wanted the building demolished. I guess it depends upon what they are offered.

Demolition.

They should dynamite that building. It's so ugly.

So said the woman standing near me at the lookout at the top of the Parc de Belleville. She was referring to the building on the left of this photo. A block of social housing. Built in the 1960s or 70s. Full of family homes, where children have grown up, where parents have become grandparents, where people have argued, laughed, cried, loved. Homes full of old photos, favourite toys, carefully chosen curtains and wallpaper.

But you can't see all that from the outside. From the outside you see a tall grey block. With a repetitive facade. You know it is social housing. You subconsciously think of the social problems that are often connected to social housing. And in this particular case, the rectangular grey blocks interrupt the picturesque Parisian panorama. A five storey high pale sandy grey panorama. The Eiffel Tower and the dome of the Pantheon (and the tour Montparnasse) silhouettes in the distance.

Would the view be more beautiful without the buildings on the left?
Who decides what is ugly and what is beautiful?
Can ugliness alone ever be reason enough to demolish something?

There are programs in place to demolish similar buildings in cities all across Europe. Thirty four demolitions are already planned in Glasgow alone over the next decade. The reasons are complex. But it is a phenomenon that stems from the fact that 60s and 70s social housing blocks are deemed ugly. They have been stigmatised. Turned into an image that signifies crime, fear and social breakdown.

But we have to learn to look at them differently. To look at them from the inside out. Last week I interviewed the architect Frederic Druot. He has collaborated with Lacaton+Vassal on the study PLUS, establishing a method by which such buildings can be renovated. They currently have a project on site, the renovation of the Tour Bois-le-Pretre in Paris. They photographed the interior of every flat. When they present the project to people, and show some of these images, people are shocked - it suddenly hits home that these deeply personal interior spaces are what has been threatened with demolition - rather than an abstract and distant concrete block.

I have a lot more to say about this subject. Treat this as an introduction. It is one of the big subjects of the moment. Post-war social housing has come to an age where it is demanding attention. Repair, renovate, transform. Restore, preserve, conserve. Demolish.

Demolition is the easy option. Easy for the planners, the developers, the money men, the decision makers. Not so easy for the displaced residents. Demolition doesn't require us to engage with these buildings, to re-imagine them, to use what works well and transform the rest.

Gorilla Station

El Gran Chufle
An abandoned railway
A new moon
An occupied house
The Lords of Altamont


15.05.2010
1 avenue Corentin Cariou, 75019

the Future

There is a street not far from here (a bit up the hill, towards Télégraphe) called rue de l'Avenir - street of the Future (or perhaps Future Street). It sounds so promising, so full of anticipation and optimism.

It slopes up from the rue Pixérécourt, flanked on either side by turn of the century apartment blocks. One yellow and red stripy brick. One pale Paris stone.

Then abruptly, after barely more than twenty metres, the buildings are cut and the street crashes against a taciturn facade of white render and square windows. Like a curtain drawn across a stage. The name suddenly seems wistful. Future street is a dead end street, and not much longer than a bus.

Looking on Google maps later on, it is clear. The future arrived in the shape of new apartment blocks. Efficient square blocks, with neat apartments tightly arranged around a central core, not a square metre wasted. They work to their own square and fair logic, and do not yield to the existing irregular pattern of streets and buildings.

city portrait 02

city portrait 01

Bitumen Lamb

Bitumen Lamb (or slightly more elegantly - Le Gigot Bitume) is a French building site tradition, a kind of cousin to the topping out ceremony, where a tree is often hoisted up onto the highest point of a newly completed structure.

In France there is none of this messing around, it is straight to the important business of lunch. I arrived on site (a secondary school refurb/extension in the western suburbs of Paris) just as the champagne aperitif was being served. We were shortly taken outside, to see our lunch being prepared. The charcoaly smell of fresh bitumen was overpowering. I have always quite liked the smell of roadworks, but never really in a way that gets my appetite going. Anyway, lunch was apparently in the bottom of the boiling and steaming bitumen mixer. To much cheering our chefs lifted a wire basket out, placed it on the ground and dowsed the five or six black parcels in it with cold water. Then it gets a bit like pass the parcel. The black bitumen rock is tapped on the ground like a boiled egg to break it open. Underneath are layers of brown paper, and once these are peeled back, layers of silver foil, and finally, a delicious joint of lamb, roasted with tomatoes and onion. Slightly disappointingly, I couldn't detect any background notes of bitumen in the meat.

Jardin Austère

Last Sunday was a day of crystal clear skies and a bitingly cold wind. Looking out of the window on the train out to Versailles everything looked bleached under the brilliant sunshine, as on a hot summer day.

It was a perfect day to see the gardens. Their naturally austere and rectilinear nature is exaggerated to an extreme state of at this time of year. It is a garden, made of things that we think of as 'nature' - trees, grass, other plants, water. Yet it doesn't really feel like a garden, more like some strange abstract world of planes and lines. A giant minimalist sculpture.

The fountains are off, their pools empty, their sculptures petrified.

The statues are wrapped up in fabric and tied with string, as if Christo had been by.

The unwavering hedges are sparse and brittle - made of twigs and dried curled up brown leaves.

The trees are bare. The plane trees make tree shaped drawings against the sky with their silver barks. The other trees remain neatly cut into long oblongs. Grey and brown, and some, if seen from the right angle, a deep red.


Le Jardin de Versailles
Sunday March 7th 2010

EuroPlaques

Versailles
07.03.10

argh!

Plaster casts of gargoyles.
Cité de l'architecture
Paris 75016

space with undesignated use

Here is a curious space. On the roof of a shopping centre in the predominantly Chinese and south Asian neighbourhood of Olympiades (13th arondissement) a space of about 5 by 10 metres is delineated by a low wall. So low I'm not sure it qualifies as a wall. It has a clear entrance, carefully positioned to bring one in to the space diagonally.

Perhaps it is a space that was supposed to become another Vietnamese restaurant, or a shop selling brightly coloured plastic kitchenware, flourescent pink fake lotus flowers, and those ornamental cats with a waving arm.

At the moment it is a space for doing whatever you want (within the realms of what is acceptable to do in any public space).

above and below

Quartier des Olympiades, 75013.
20.02.2010

street poem

passage de la boule blanche white ball passage cour du bel air bel air courtyard passage du chantier building site passage cour du nom de jesus jesus' name courtyard cour de l'etoile d'or golden star courtyard cour des trois freres three brothers courtyard cour de la maison brulee burnt house courtyard cour de l'ours bear courtyard passage de la bonne graine good grain passage cour du saint esprit spirit saint courtyard passage de la main d'or golden hand passage

passages and courtyards along the rue du faubourg st antoine, 75011/12 M bastille / ledru rollin

The Fishmonger House

This house is just around the corner from the 1980's house, in the rue de la Mare. It struck me as a sort of distant cousin - another curious part mosaic facade expressing a collision of ideas.

Even in its original state as a fishmongers there is something a little odd, the mosaic fish are ordinary goldfish, rather than appetising salmon, trout or sea bass. Domestic goldfish. As if the facade was already prepared to become a house.

The transition from fishmongers to house looks like a disjointed process. First it stopped being a fishmongers and the shopfront was blocked up. Then it became a house, and instead of using the wide original opening, a standard window, like the windows above, was just punched through the new wall. A window sitting uncomfortably in a window.

rue de la Mare, 75020
07.02.2010

Passage du Plateau

This is the passage du Plateau.

It is 105m long and a little over 1m wide. The narrowest measurement I took was 103cm (at the rue du Plateau end), and the widest 123cm (quite near the middle).

There are fourteen doors and gates to houses and flats along it. Six on one side and eight on the other.

If you pass someone you have to slow down, or slightly turn your shoulders, or not mind brushing up against them. Or all three at once.

Passage du Plateau, 75019
06.02.2010

London Peripherique

Can a road define a city?

Paris is notoriously squeezed within the confines of its peripherique. Thirty four kilometres of six to ten lane motorway. Thirty six years old. Hidden in a tunnel in the wealthy west. Its red and white stripes of traffic exposed for all to enjoy in the poorer east. Twin towers, shiny towers, towers with names, the Eiffel tower seen from all sides, all sizes. Approximately 2 million people live within the peripherique. Beyond it lie the banlieues - the suburbs. Are they not Paris too? No. They are the banlieues. They are separate.

London is also circled by a motorway, but it is way out beyond the edge of the suburbs, a tarmac ring running through the 'green belt', the zone of golf courses, farmland, stately homes, go-karting tracks, glittering shopping centres, Victorian asylums, woodland, industrial estates, and airports (see London Orbital by Iain Sinclair, Granta 2002, for a detailed exploration, on foot, of the M25 environs). The green of the green belt merges into suburb, densifies to grey, it is all London. London is a collection, an association, a series of towns and in between places.

2010

the 1980's house

This house is about halfway along the rue des Envierges in the twentieth arrondissement. I walk along this street quite often, it leads to the lookout at the top of the parc de Belleville, via a great boulangerie. A favourite Sunday afternoon walk. This house always caught my eye. The 1980's house. It is an awkward collision of normal terraced house with willful colourful geometry. Ordinary tiled roof, chimney, drain pipe, front door and garage door : bright yellow diagonal stripes crashing into a nearly normal window, separating bathroom tile facade from crazy mosaic tile facade. It is not beautiful, but it is curious, and it has gradually endeared me.

rue des Envierges, 75020
17.01.2010

(or as sophie said, the aladdin sane house!)