Buenos Aires Balconies

Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 23.12.10

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.

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

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

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.

EuroPlaques

Versailles
07.03.10

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

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!)

the wall

behind the wall are bright lights
disco lights
behind the wall is music
shouting
behind the wall is an ice rink
a swimming pool
behind the wall are people gliding sliding wobbling laughing
in goggles and swimming costumes

in front of the wall the street is bathed in flat streetlamp light that manages to be both orange and grey at the same time

in front of the wall are several people, looking closely at the wall
maybe at the world behind the wall, but also at the wall itself

it is a very thick wall, sturdy and strong

it is also light and delicate, a kind of fuzz of a wall

(La Piscine-Patinoire Pailleron, 30 rue Edouard Pailleron, 75019 / Marc Mimram Architecte / 03 october 2009 / la nuit blanche)