Civic ArchitectureThe facades, courts & passages of Westminster

Left:Victorian Urban RoomsPatrick Lynch 2010

Front Cover:Piccadilly 2014Miscellaneous (Unless otherwise stated all photographs are by David Grandorge)

Back Cover: Victoria Street Aerial CollageLynch Architects 2012

Back Cover, Below:Kings Gate & Westminster City HallLynch Architects 20102015

Civic ArchitectureThe facades, courts and passages of Westminster11/11/201404/12/2014

New London Architecture GalleryThe Building Centre Store Street WC1

Photographs by David Grandorge Essays by Peter Carl & Patrick LynchInterviews with Joseph Rykwert & Dalibor Vesely

Published by and copyright ofLynch Architects Ltd 2014

Acknowledgements

This catalogue represents the work of many people involved in Lynch Architectstoo many to mention by name. It also represents ongoing collaborations with David Grandorge, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Timorous Beasties and Hilary Koob-Sassen. Without the patronage of Land Securities we would not have the buildings and public spaces that are depicted in this document. Equally, without the dedication of Lend Lease, the quality of construction that is beginning to be revealed would not be so high. We would also like to acknowledge the craftsmanship of Szerelmey, Careys, Dane and Gartneras well as the effort and care of our many collaborators on the design teams, Pell Frischman, Grontmij, Firefly, Gerald Eve, Vogt, Richard Coleman, etc. The projects have also benefited from the critical contributions of the planning department of Westminster City Council. The exhibition represent a combination of academic research undertaken under the supervision of Professors Peter Carl and Joseph Rykwert, and Dr Helen Mallinson. Some of this work was prepared for the Venice Biennale in 2012, including the interviews with Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely. Wed like to thank Kieran Long and David Chipperfield for inviting us to participate in the search for and articulation of Common Ground. This catalogue is also a visual record of an unusually enjoyable series of conversations held during a very complex strategic design process, and any success is a testament to the support and critical encouragement of the late, and much missed, Francis Golding.

Below:Kings Gate & Westminster City HallLynch Architects 20102015Patrick Lynch 2014

Right:Victoria Street Site PlanLynch Architects 2010

Opposite:Kings GateLynch Architects 20102015Patrick Lynch 2014

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Peter CarlCivic Depth

Everyone is generally in favour of Public Space, but it is not well understood. It tends to connote crowds going about their business or relaxing, very occasionally for protest (e.g. Occupy). These spaces comprise plateaux of granite, parks, streets, shopping malls, transport arrival halls (the last two often combined). Under these conditions, the public is seen as aggregates of individuals, exercising their freedom. To be sure, there is much of life that conforms to this vision of mass-culture, mass-consumerism, and so forth. However, the more this is the case, the more distant is this conception of public space from the political and ceremonial agora, forum or piazza, to which present-day public space is often compared. We should distinguish between the crowd and the public, reserving public for situations with political import.

It is common to oppose public with private; and the use of figure-field plans by architects and planners suggests that public is outdoors and private indoors. Accordingly, urban life is often wrongly understood to prevail between these two modalities. In fact, there is very little of a city that is purely privateperhaps the domestic loo. This is even truer of the cities of less developed countries. We should think in terms of a spectrum of public situations that penetrates the whole of urban life. Firstly, domestic affairs should not be thought of as a refuge from urban conditions, but part of them. Beyond family politics (never simple), we meet our neighbours in living rooms, kitchens, doorways, yards and streets. At a next level of public meeting, we encounter friends, colleagues and new acquaintances at pubs or cafs, at clubs and associations and at places of work (which would range from hair-salon gossip through shop floors and offices to board rooms). At the most ceremonial leveltherefore the most profound in terms of civic self-understanding, at least potentially would fall law courts, parliaments and religious settings. When they are not simply flows of anonymous individuals commuting or shopping (lost in their mobile phones), crowds offer ephemeral moments of intensityrallies, marches, sit-ins, riots, and events like football matches or New Years fireworks. However, it is the deeper institutional structure of public involvements that accounts for the persistent civic ethos. This ethos is not the wandering and relaxing under blue skies usually favoured in the renderings of public space by architects, but proper involvements: conflict, negotiation, accommodation, collaboration. It is therefore necessary to rethink public space as a continuity of different settings; and rather than the bald distinction between private and public, we should think in terms of an urban depth. This is most obvious in the understanding of street, and in particular the High Street. Instead of thinking of it as a canyon between facades, filled with vehicles and crowds, we should imagine it as part of the institutional order of the city, as the seam between the depth of what lies behind the facades.

Victoria Street 2012(Miscellaneous)

Below:Kingsgate House 2010Burnet Tait & Partners 1966 (2012)

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This depth is marked by narrow streets and courtyards, which serve the diversity of lower-rent activities such as ateliers, clinics, colleges, libraries and archives, galleries, travel agents, eateries, specialty shops, churches, mosques, synagogues, dwellings, the semi-legal entities, etc. These are also the settings whose architecture entertains happy and unhappy accidents, as well as material and spatial phenomena that tend toward gardens (there is more garden in Paddington Station than in the lawn of the average housing-estate). On this depth-order a proper urban life depends, meaning a proper spectrum between social life, commercial affairs, political and legal debate and opportunities for reflection.

Reflection may seem to be a fragile or even elitist concern. Aristotle was the first, and is still one of the few to ask, what is the ultimate purpose of a city? He argues that a city grants the possibility of profound understanding of ones collective place in reality (not simply the transaction of goods and prevention of crime). The civic rites and ceremonies, which persisted until quite recently, accomplished the same thing: reconciling history with the cosmic conditions. Aristotle elevates this kind of insight, via tragic drama, to philosophical contemplation; but this is only the most articulate end of a spectrum that has its origins in the primordial spatiality of the civic topography. This depth-order is, at present, virtually powerless against the monofunctional developments (mixed-use is generally a euphemism for shops) and their wind-blown plazas.

The fuss about high-rise proliferation in London is less about the banality of translucent phalloi, an aesthetic problem, than it is about the loss of the depth-structure that gives proper place to, and therefore empowers, the manifold activities too easily generalized as SMEs and affordable housing. Their inclusion in the spatial order of a city is a civic responsibility, which manyif not allinstitutions appear incapable of understanding, preserving or cultivating, despite the advent of localism. Accordingly, it is wholly commendable to see at Victoria Street this sort of understanding emerging from the initiative of Land Securities, Westminster Council and Lynch architects, which is beautifully captured in the photographs of David Grandorge.

Below: Victoria Library Meeting RoomPatrick Lynch 2009

Bottom Left:Victoria Library South Facade AxoLynch Architects 2009

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The Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour 2012E.R. Robson 1883

Palmer Street SW1Elson, Pack and Roberts architects & Richard Seifert 1978

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Burlington House 2012Colen Campbell et al circa 1725

The City of Westminster is home to a number of the most important and impressive buildings in England, and is the setting for most of the rituals and ceremonies that we associate with civic society. The architecture of Westminster represents this civic culture, it also embodies and situates it, and in many ways the City of Westminster is a stage for the drama of civic life. The facades of its buildings act as thresholds for this urban theatre, inviting participation and also indicating, through the presence of sculptures, an ideal of public life. This extreme theatricality is characterised also by porticos that open onto courts, and by passages defined by the silhouettes of towers. You find at once the presence of the background in the faces of the major public buildings on Piccadilly, and also the presence of the foreground in the almost secret-seeming character of the hinterland of Victoria. The contrast between the porous and ornamental character of the buildings in Piccadilly and the impenetrable and mute 1960s facades along Victoria Street is the subject of a series of photographs by David Grandorge made for this exhibition. Some of these images also appeared in Lynch Architects contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2012.

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Burlington House 2014Colen Campbell et al circa 1725

Davids photographs also form part of a film that records an interview with Joseph Rykwert in which he discusses the background to the writing of The Idea of Town in the1950s, and the continued dominance of traffic engineering in the design of new cities today. Dalibor Vesely discusses the introduction of railway engineering into19th century London and Paris, and the continued relevance of ornament and decorum in the creation of civic architecture today. The extreme contrast between the tradition of urbanity represented by the 18th and 19th century buildings and the impoverished character of the city made by the 20th century facades could not be clearer. This rift is something that our projects seek to heal. Civic is the transformation not only of play into structure (laws, rituals, etc); but also the transformation of natural conditions into ornament, i.e. decorum. This is why we can talk of the decorum of people, costumes, buildings and situations, etc. Decorum in architecture concerns, therefore, not only the facade but also the disposition of spatial situations and the relationships between these parts and the whole, the immediate context, ecology, etc.

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The Wolseley 2014William Curtis Green 1927

Civic is a term traditionally associated with Renaissance Florence, and in particular with its use by Hans Baron. Baron uses the term Civic Humanism to define and distinguish between the medieval emphasis upon poverty as grace in Franciscan and Dominican theology, and the proto-modern (Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic) world of Ficino, Bruno, Petrarch and Alberti. Of course we recognise that Petrarch was once a poet, philosopher and gardener, and that Alberti was a priest, philosopher and architect. These factors define the essence of Renaissance Man. Civic Humanism was the expression of this traditionit was possible at this point in history to lead a contemplative and an active life, Alberti argued, to be at once engaged in city life in a generous and imaginative way, without being a slave to committees or to greed. What we now call modern is also defined by this traditiona tradition of belief that Virtue needs material possessions in order to appear dignified and beautiful.1

1 In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, Volume I, Hans Baron, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 2367 (Baron is commenting upon and citing Albertis texts Vita Civile, and Della Famiglia).

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Victoria Street SW1 2012Miscellaneous

This belief leads directly to acknowledging that creating beautiful buildings and civic amenities is virtuousand that mercantile trade is virtuous if it supports these works with finance. In fact, without orientation beyond profit towards virtuous expression in architecture, trade was considered dangerousas wealth leads to the fear of losing it, and to sins that follow on from this fear. Civic Humanism is the rebirth of antique values that promoted the individual and the city they inhabited through the virtue of transforming wealth into beauty. Machiavelli and Erasmus called this the exercise of virtue and organ of virtue. Alberti saw architecture as the professing of virtue, and one role of the architect was the teaching of virtue to patrons. Architecture manifests virtue he believed, re-presenting it as something civic.

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St James Court Hotel 2012Major Charles Pawley 1901

Opposite:Piccadilly 2014Miscellaneous

Clare Guest describes the eloquent character of Figural Cities, in terms of rhetoric and the body of civic virtue: the civic virtues of Florenceits prudence, justice, magnificencecorrespond to Aristotles Ethics, but these virtues have become embodiments of the measure and harmony of virtue. 2 Guest suggests that the 15th century Florentine writer Leonardo Bruni conceived of the city as ornament, since ornament is a mode of virtuous contemplation. In making the connection between ethics and civic virtue, Guest reveals that ornament is an expression of praxis, the essence and praise of civic life. 3

2 Figural Cities, in Rhetoric, Theatre and the Arts of Design: Essays Presented to Roy Eriksen, ed. Clare Guest, Oslo, 2008, p.158.

3 Ibid, p.166.

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The Ritz Hotel 2014Charles Mews & Arthur Davies 1906

In contrast to Florence, Claire Guest claims citing Bruni againTheornamenta of other cities are instantly visible to a traveller, as an outer covering or shell but anyone who goes to the core or marrow (of Florence) will find harmony between the buildings of a city, its parts, furnishings, paintings, streets: the outer walls have not more ornament and magnificence than those within it, nor is one street or another handsome or beautifully kept and refined, but the parts of the whole city are thus.4 Claire Guest indicates that Leonardo Bruni relates the magnificence of ceremonyto the excellence of Florentine festivals and this to its civic virtueand ornament is thus revealed as a mode of ethos.

4 Ibid, p.160.

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New Zealand House 2012RMJM 1959

The city is asserted as a totality, Guest claims, but it is a totality asserted (almost imposed) by rhetoric, which insists on the architectural fabric as ornamentum in relation to its virtues Brunis work shows quite clearly the rhetorical background to Albertis efforts to articulate the union of harmonious body of a building or the city, and the harmonious body of decorum; in each writer rhetorical ornament (concininitas) plays an important role. Fundamental to the union of physical fabric and body of decorum is the understanding of justice as measure as we should see Aristotles discussion (in his Ethics) as essential to Albertis view of proportion as ethical and mathematical As decorum requires that virtue has an outer form of corresponding splendour, so the visual aspect of the city places its virtues before the eyes, as in the funeral oration for Nano Strozzi, which celebrates the city through epideictic eloquence and the magnificent display of things. The splendour of the city is not therefore a mere outer dress for the virtue of its inhabitants, but an excellence which penetrates through every part of the fabric of the city. 5

5 Ibid.

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Air Street W1 2014Richard Norman Shaw 1905

Bialostocki points out that Albertis second nature was a concept (that) enables him to consider architecture as an art of imitation, and that Alberti then tries to establish which laws are being followed by nature as she strives towards perfection. Alberti places nature foremost as a model for representation and natures laws as a guide for what is practical and ideal, calling this a general law of Congruity (concininitas). Alberti translates Aristotles idea of mimesis into his proposition not only of nature as a guide to representation (decorum), but extends this to claim that nature is transformed by imagination and thus renews itself in the artist or architects perfection of nature. Bialostocki distinguishes this from the scholastic tradition, since medieval writers always considered nature as a divine creation superior to human art, stating that Human art could never, until the Renaissance, have been considered as surpassing nature.6

6 Ibid.

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Seaforth Place SW1 2012

One other aspect of decorum is revealed in Bialostockis attention to the Renaissance concern with Natura Naturans. Natura Naturata, is defined as the imitation of created nature, a tradition which the Humanists inherited from the Greeks along with Ovids emphasis upon Metamorphosis. This was a tradition in which artists and farmers engaged together with what Petrarch called cultivation. Cultivation of the natural world was seen in the Renaissance, as an example of divine will (Natura sive Deus). For the Stoics, Bialostocki contends, Nature was identical with life-giving power, something that was also revealed in imitation. Mimesis (as an act of cultivation) revealed mans cultivation, his participation with cosmic order. Natura Naturans is a second concept, that of the imitation of creating nature. Alberti employs this second concept when he calls nature marvellous artificer of things and says, nature itself seems to delight in painting.7

7 The Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity, Jan Bialostocki, in Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in Western Art, Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, Volme II, Princeton University Press,pp. 1930

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The Ritz Hotel 2014Charles Mews & Arthur Davies 1906

Opposite:Francis Street SW1 2012

Alberti formulated a new idea of great importance Bialostocki claims, Nature is perfect as a harmonious whole, but her elements are not, enabling Humanists to see their task as the completion of, and perfection and participation with nature. From the Scholastic idea that man cannot surpass nature, that art is infallible as nature (Grosseteste), arose the idea that the world is a living, animated, and intellectual being, (Ficino). Whilst for Alberti art begins with the imitation of nature, Bialostocki claims that for Leonardo it is replaced by creation based on knowledge of necessity and inherent laws of nature. Bialostockis argument is that whilst Alberti views nature as transformationalas a natural mode of mimesisthe innovations of Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna ignore nature as transformation, seeing it instead as perfect form. Bialostocki defines this as the beginning of Mannerism in art, whereby the history of artworks became the model for artistic inspirationnot naturean order discovered by the searching mind and an analytical eye 8 In other words, Historicist Formalism.

8 Ibid.

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Westminster Abbey 2012West Front by Hawksmoor 1745

The truth is that the concept of decoration needs to be freed from this antithetical relationship to the concept of art based on (personal) experience (Erlebnis); rather, it needs to be grounded in the ontological structure of representation, which we have shown to be the mode of being of the work of art. We have only to remember that the ornamental and decorative originally meant the beautiful as such. It is necessary to recover this ancient insight. Ornament or decoration is determined by its relation to what it decorates, to what carries it. It has no aesthetic import of its own that is thereafter limited by its relation to what it is decorating. Even Kant, who endorsed this opinion, admits in his famous judgment on tattooing that ornament is ornament only when it suits the wearer. It is part of taste not only to judge something to be beautiful per se but also to know where it belongs and where not.9

9 Truth & Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Sheed and Ward, 1960, p. 159.

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Westminster Cathedral 2012J.F. Bentley 1910

Ornament is not primarily something by itself that is then applied to something else but belongs to the self-presentation of its wearer. Ornament too belongs to presentation. But presentation is an event of being; it is representation. An ornament, a decoration, a piece of sculpture set up in a chosen place are representative in the same sense that, say, the church where they are found is itself representative What we mean by representation is, at any rate, universal significance of play. We saw that the ontological significance of representation lies in the fact that reproduction is the original mode of being of the original artwork itself.10

10 Ibid.

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Burlington House 2012Colen Campbell et al circa 1725

Hans-Georg Gadamer claims that sculpture should not be thought of as free from situation: Even the freestanding sculpture on a pedestal is not really removed from the decorative context, but serves to heighten representationally a context of life with which it is decoratively consonant. Gadamer sees the potency and relevance of sculpture to reside not only in its site-specificity, but also in its consonance with a site. He extends this argument to spatial settings to demonstrate that all of the arts are contingent upon witness:Poetry and music, which have the freest mobility and can be read or performed anywhere, are not suited to any space whatever but one that is appropriate: a theatre, concert hall, or church. Here too it is not a question of subsequently finding an external setting for a work that is complete in itself but of obeying the spacecreating personality of the work itself, which has to adapt to what is given as well as to create its own conditions (Think only of the problem of acoustics, which is not only technical but architectural).11

11 Ibid., p. 157.

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Banqueting House 2012Inigo Jones 1622

The young poet and musical child prodigy can attain a perfection without much training and experiencea phenomenon hardly matched in painting, sculpture or architecture... The durability of a poem is produced through condensation, so that it is as though language spoken in utmost density and concentration were poetic in itself. Here, remembrance, Mnmosyn, the mother of the muses, is directly transformed into memory, and the poets means to achieve the transformation is rhythm, through which the poem becomes fixed in the recollection almost by itself. It is this closeness to living recollection that enables the poem to remain, to retain its durability, outside the printed or the written page, and though the quality of a poem may be subject to a variety of standards its memorability will inevitably determine its durability, that is, its chance to be permanently fixed in the recollection of humanity. Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be made, that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.12

12 The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, Chicago, 1958, p. 19670.

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Joseph RykwertIn conversation with Patrick Lynch, London, July 2012

Nobody thought of anthropology and the connection... That was why my book (The Idea of a Town) became an odd one out...

Because architects thought that the only people who could tell them what to do were sociologists.They didnt realise that sociologists can tell them why things are bad but they cant tell them how to get them right.

Well, I thought that one of the fundamental misunderstandings was that people treated the orthogonal, the orthogonally planned Roman city, as a kind of solidified camp, military camp, whereas the truth was that the Roman military camp was a kind of portable city. What the Romans did was when they got to a place they put down Rome. And the Rome they put down was a diagram which was carried on as ritual.

Round the cardo, or the axle, around which the sun turned...You know, the main street is called axle and the cross street was called something divided into twelve; a twelvesome thing, because it was a representation of the passage of the sun through the twelve hours.

That was the way cities were understood, so it fitted. The militaristic idea, the idea that the city was a camp simply made into dwellings fitted the idea of, with traffic engineering and all that, fitted the idea, the way people thought about cities.

The general tone of the times was that traffic must be allowed to flow, and the traffic is the important thing. There was, I remember, a German book called Die Autogerichte Stadt (The Car-oriented City) in which rooftops were turned into roadways and interconnections were roundabouts...

I wouldnt say that they wanted meaningful human habitat; they wanted buildings to be separate objects interconnected by traffic lanes. And the individuality of the building then becomes paramount and, of course, the taller the building the more traffic bound the access is. In fact the people who now govern the access areas of tall buildings are traffic engineers, so they are back in charge, as it were.

All buildings are representative, and they represent to us what we think we are, what we think we value. So, the Shard is a representation of the dominance of capital. I know that Renzo Piano has been going on about how its like a church spire and so on, but actually, it represents the dominance of the capital which built it, the developer and the Qatar royal family who occupy large parts of it, as they occupy One Hyde Park Gate and they occupy, and they now own Harrods; so theyre playing Monopoly with London, as many people have already remarked. They represent, in fact, the power of fossil fuels, if you like...Well, I mean thats where we as architects should come in because there are a lot

Processions in15th century FlorenceLaura Evans 2012

Below: Roman FlorenceLaura Evans 2012

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of people interested in greening the city, and some who arent even architects, but none of them see, have so far, that I have seen, none of them have imagined it in architectonic terms; theyve seen it as, a problem of the greening of the city, but I think its now, its for your generation, to see it in terms of the architecture you produce.

Dalibor VeselyIn conversation with Patrick Lynch, London, July 2012

Theres one (a photograph) from Camden, and theres one from Southwark...When youre there, you get the message, absolutely clear, isnt it? You have a feeling that the trains are going over your head. You are practically underneath, its all there (points upward) but its not here (indicates ground). Here is the market and over that the trains doing their job, going their own speed and so on.

What is interesting about Victoria is that, despite all of these sort of artificial intentions, it has a certain kind of degree of still traditional urbanity. Call it not traditional urbanity, but tradition of urbanity. So, Victoria Street is, at the beginning certainly, it is not as much now, which is sort of interesting as well, less so today; at that time it was still very, very urban. Also, keep in mind that you are in a time when there is a great deal of knowledge of urbanity, with developments in Paris to start with, development even in Vienna. But the Parisian example, of course, was very, very strong. That the Parisians can build a new Paris so quickly, and so well, relatively speaking, was, you know, one had to say, quite successful almost from the very beginning. The Haussmannisation was very successful, relatively speaking. And so there was a kind of precedent, and that would be the pieces that you find in several places in London. For instance, one of them, apart from Victoria, is Kingsway, that goes down to Aldwych. Thats a cut. That was supposed to go further, but didnt go beyond Russell Square, it stops there, in that type of territory. But, at the beginning of it, as you come close to Aldwych you can see there is very, very different; suddenly, a new way of thinking, scale, sense of urbanity and so on. Its quite interesting to compare the late Victorian interventions in London, just with urbanity in mind, and there are many places, you know, you look at the documents from the late 19th Century. For instance, just as an example, Camden Town, where compared with what it is today - it was a town- now its a little bit of a village. There were trams coming around, and a lot of life around the streets; theyre almost like boulevards. A very dense piece of urbanity. It is very interesting, you find segments, just segments, or even fragments, fragments of the 19th Century urbanity even here, just not far from here, down the bottom of Crouch End. Crouch End, as you come down the hill, has this tower, on the right hand side, this kind of little open space which is like a kind of little piazza square.

Camden Town(Miscellaneous)Laura Evans 2012

Below:Victoria Street(Miscellaneous)Laura Evans 2012

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The fragmentation starts much, much earlier; it starts at the point where the sense of situatedness or taking into consideration, in case of individual buildings, where you ignore the context, situatednessthats what people normally refer to as context but you know, its much more specific than context, its situatednessyou end up with individual buildings and gradually, gradually, it comes to the point, in the 19th century particularly, where a large proportion of whats happening in cities is done as infill, you know, people sort of filling gaps, filling bits, pieces here and there, segments. Thats more or less what you find in those cases we mentioned before like Victoria Street and so on. So basically segment; large segment but segment nonetheless, because, you know, you say where it starts and where does it end. Determinate. It doesnt continue. The important thing about that is that we dont probably appreciate enough the fact that until, probably the beginning of the 19th century, as late as that, architecture was not seen, really, as, sort of, enterprise, a kind of ideal, isolated object and pieces. The pieces were always seen as part of something. You built in a particular manner because you are in a particular part of the town. The setting that was already there already predetermined what you can and what you cannot do. You cannot build a particular kind of very large or complex or grandiose building on a periphery somewhere, or in the wrong place, an industrial street or craftsmens street. So, this setting was there, and one can probably see thatup to that timethe formation and what we call architectural territory, architecture is mostly pieces, different pieces, occasionally complexes but architecture is always seen in oscillation with the setting, the situation. What is it part of? So the situation is reflected in the building, the building eventually contributes to the character and identity, nature, whatever, of the particular place, the setting. So the city is far more, kind of, broader and much more primary...

So, in that sense, when the oscillation and the primacy of the setting, the situation, is suppressed or is ignored or is not taken seriously, not taken into consideration at all, youre dealing with buildings, pieces, architecture as sort of object, of sort, but at that point, of course, youre dealing with fragment. And now comes an even more interesting issue and question, that even as a fragment potentially refers to the whole, still refers to some kind of a setting, even when, you know, today people, average designers, do a building they still, sometimes not consciouslyand it doesnt matter if its conscious or notthey do take reference to something which is beyond the scale and scope of the building itself. And what I mean by that is they dont necessarily refer to it as fabric, not referring, you know, beyond the scale of architecture and the scope of architecture, its not just the city in its visible form but the culture of the city and the culture as such, because culture as such practically exists in the cities and around cities. There is no such thing as culture which would not have, at least indirectly, a presence or source in the fabric of the city. Cities are embodiment of culture, primarily.But the notion of block is of course something which is again very flexible and open, but it has been in the cities, working and making a lot of sense, right the way through the late 19th century. Because that would be the place where people would situate theiryou can call it the secondary level of life or the third level of lifeand eventually the very intimate personal life; there would be private gardens occasionally and so on. But from the garden you come to places like even monasteries or institutions like that would be there, libraries, there would be workshops eventually as we said, there would be schools, etc., etc.

Kings Gate CourtLynch Architects 2012

Below:Westminster City Hall & Kings GateLynch Architects 2012

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To tell you the truth, what we have been saying about the appropriate, right, correspondingcall it whatever, location, situatedness of particular things in the structure of the citysituatedness is a question of being proper. And proper, of course, eventually is decorum, and decorum means fits the purpose, something which fits the purpose. Decorum is when youre dressing for a particular event: you can be overdressed, or underdressed, because youre missing the decorum of the event. And its particularly important, you can wear the wrong clothes... and the decorum is subordinated to the overall notion of order; the umbrella over the notion of decorum. What is proper, is order as a whole; how it fits into the overall order of things. And from then on you can also begin to understand or derive the meaning of terms like what is common good? And what is good? Because the good is part of what fits the purpose of the whole, and response to it. So thats where we are with decorum. And decorum is of course subordinated to the notion of order, and orderin the original term for itis kosmos (hence the cosmos). And its interesting that kosmos can be translated into Latin as ornament. Ornate, ornament, order, kosmesis. Because kosmos is ordering. And its still preserved in the current term cosmetics. You order yourself for a particular purpose; you paint your face. You re-order yourself, and so on.

So, eventually, underneath that term, is ornament. Ornament is ordering; Ornament is a language which is mediating between the different levels of reality, eventually, and brings things into coherence and harmony and co-existence, but its an ordering principle, bringing things into overall order. Thats why you ornate, because you are referring to something beyond its own presence. Thats what people dont appreciate anymore in modern terms of ornament, that ornament is not there just to embellish, to make it more interesting. If we say it makes it more interesting, we are to finish the sentence as for what? For a purpose. In order to make it part of a larger whole, to situate it, and therefore make it part of the overall order of things; because its only from the overall order of things that you can understand, or derive, the order of the particular thing.

The Silver Forest for Kings GateRut Blees Luxemburg 2013

Below:Bird Branch for Kings GateTimorous Beasties 2014

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Kingsgate House 2010Burnet Tait & Partners 1966 (2012)

Below:1/500 ModelPipersLynch architects 2011

Our Kings Gate project is based upon a grand conceit that seeks to draw out the latent urbanity of Victoria as a city quarter oriented around a high street. Our aim is to create a situation in which it appears as if we have simply taken away a 20th Century building, enabling once again, connections across Victoria Street. In fact, the subterranean infrastructure of the District and Circle Line has divided north and south Victoria since its formation in the 1860s as a consequence of marsh drainage associated with the construction of the Victoria Embankment. Our project heals this rift, re-creating, as it were, a mythic-historical city of courts and passages.

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Westminster City Hall & Kings GateBurnet Tait & Partners 1966 (2012)& Lynch Architects 201015

Below:1/500 Design ModelPipersLynch Architects 2011

Kings Gate is angled to align with both the front and rear faces of the ground floor colonnade that forms the entrance to city hall, bringing its threshold into play as part of a rhythm of spaces. Westminster City Hall will now appear as a distinct urban figure whose neighbours mediate in part the scale and programmatic differences of a typical city quarter.

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The Zig Zag Building 2014Lynch Architects 201015

Below:Kings Gate CourtyardLynch Architects 2014

Kings Gate is shaded by a filigrant stone screen that cuts solar gain as well as discretely enabling large south-facing domestic balconies to take their place on the street in a civic fashion. The sun moving across the building will reveal its depth. The deep facades control the damaging ffects of the sun to the interior inhabitantsreducing the need for energy to cool them. In casting shadows across the surface of the glass, figures within will be revealed. The deep window reveals are also an attempt to situate the human figure within the facades of large buildings. Our aim is to make architecture that confirms Albertis description of second nature; architecture that elaborates upon and extends the presence of the natural world into everyday life; architecture as mediation between nature and culture, forming the face and ground of the city.

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Kings Gate 2014Lynch Architects 201015

Below:Westminster City SchoolLynch Architects 2014

We have aimed to make architecture that is highly responsive to the rhythms of the seasons, to the daily life of Victoria Street, and which reveals the hidden topography and scale of the city. The hope is for iridescent architecture that is nonetheless silent. This paradox is possible because the silence of embodiment is always to a certain degree a voice of articulation, Vesely reminds us, and it is only under these conditions that we can understand the language and the cultural role of architecture.13

13 Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production, Dalibor Vesely, MIT, 2004, p.106.

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