South London Gallery 2

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:

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

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

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

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

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.

punk choreography in retro futuristic city

Last night we took the lilac coloured metro line (number 8) all the way to the final station, Creteil-Prefecture (those e's are missing accents but I am writing with an english keyboard). It is eight stops beyond the official limit of Paris, the peripherique. I will save the topic of the peripherique for a later post, all I want to highlight here is that we were in the 'banlieues' - the suburbs, not in Paris. From the metro station we followed signs to the Maison des Arts. Across a car park and into a shopping centre. Along the internal streets, shops closing, the last shoppers heading to the car park. Out through door 26. Onto a raised pedestrian walkway, past a Chinese restaurant. It is dark, and very cold for mid October. This central part of Creteil appears to have been entirely built in the 1960's and 70's. It is a dense ensemble of apartment blocks and civic buildings, knitted together by high level walkways and plazas. The Maison des Arts is on the place Salvador Allende (good name, Chilean connection), whose wavy black, white and red striped paving brings to mind Bridget Riley's paintings. It is beautiful. A shimmering graphic pattern, across which dark figures are making their way to the arts house, to see the new dance piece by the Michael Clark Company.

six dancers wear dark blue, two wear white :::::: they are moving from right to left across the stage, walking, slowly, legs stretched out, kicking out in front :::::: the blue figures disappear and the white pair remain :::::: the blue figures reappear on the right and continue across the stage again :::::: a shaft of white light moves slowly across the stage from right to left

White Light / White Heat by the Velvet Underground :::::: loud, louder than you could ever have it at home, so loud so that you listen to it differently :::::: the stage is bare, a black floor and a white backdrop :::::: on the left of the stage a dancer wearing brilliant shiny silver leggings appears, she runs a jerky strutting run, she runs a tight circle and disappears :::::: then the same on the right hand side of the stage :::::: then more dancers in the same metallic leggings, running, strutting, the stage is full :::::: white light reflects off their legs, white light dances across the stage

later on / the white screen has turned orange, the orange light reflects off the black floor :::::: dancers in bright orange :::::: Aladdin Sane by David Bowie ::::::: a vigorous dance, energy accumulates :::::: until one male dancer is left on the stage, suddenly the music changes :::::: The Jean Genie :::::: and the orange screen snaps to turquoise :::::: the lone orange figure against the glowing turquoise is an image that is seared into my consciousness

These are tiny extracts from the two dance pieces we saw. The first was Swamp from 1986, and the second was come, been and gone, Michael Clark's newest piece. This latest piece is a hommage to the 'holy trinity' of rock music - Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Hommage isn't quite the right word, it takes the music as a starting point and develops something new and quite exhilarating. Previously unknown or unheard layers, melodies, sounds are extracted from these familiar songs, they are explored and excavated, their insides and hidden corners revealed. Partly because we are listening to the recording super loud on a very high quality theatre PA, partly because the dancers pick out sounds and melodies and dance them.


MICHAEL CLARK COMPANY / SWAMP / come, been and gone

17.10.2009 CRETEIL Maison des Arts

On tour for the next year or so. Go see...

http://www.michaelclarkcompany.com/

splendid regards

Journées de Patrimoine/Open House/Dias del Patrimonio/European Heritage Days

Last weekend 19 20 September. Indian summer sunshine. European Curiousity Days, European Nosy Days. An international pouring over of pdf print out guides; picking out of buildings; working out of routes; sprucing up of courtyards and hallways; queueing and squeezing; peering and listening.

We wanted to keep it simple and stay in the neighbourhood. A staircase leads from our street rue de l'Ermitage down to the rue des Cascades and at the bottom when you turn right there is a small stone building with a pitched roof made of the same pale sandstone. Four years previously this building was open and we had a memorable visit. Inside is a small channel of water, gently stepping down under one's feet. A tunnel big enough to crawl along disppears up the hillside. It is lined with candles, their light reflected by small stream. It is a magical world beneath the hill we live on. Always there underneath our route to the boulangerie, to the metro, to the supermarket or the bus stop. We are high up up here, approaching the summit of the hill of Menilmontant (the highest hill in Paris) and the geology - layers of chalk and clay, has created two 'nappes' of water - natural underground reservoirs. Since the 12th century this water has been captured and channelled, initially for drinking, to supply a nearby hospital, and then to supply the fountains of Paris. This building is one of several. Known as 'regards', they are simply places where the water could be inspected. Today there is still a small trickle, as the geology remains the same and the water still comes naturally from the ground. But most of the channels and aqueducts have been assimilated into the sewer system. The buildings are classed as historic monuments and are cared for by a loving association - 'Les Sources du Nord'.

This year we wanted to see the 'Regard de la Lanterne', the grandest of all the regards, at the Place des Fetes on the top of the hill. We had to queue for a while, during which time we were entertained and educated by a very entertaining and informative Monsieur. The Regard de la Lanterne is where three channels of water from the nappe feed into a small basin which in turn feeds the aqueduct of Belleville - the principal channel in the system. Again, the function of this building was nothing more than to allow for inspection of the waters and channels. As our guide drily emphasised, if such a system was built today, then nothing more than a 50mm pipe would carry the water, with a small box for inspection, all hidden away. But this system was built in another era when things were done differently. There was more grandeur and more ceremony. There was a desire to celebrate technology. People wore big hats and cloaks and the buildings they built had to accomodate them properly.
So intead of a pipe and a box, there is a cylindrical stone building with a dome. Inside one steps onto a double staircase that curves around the pool of water under the lantern of the dome. It is splendid and beautiful.