the architectural review (2002-2005)-part 1

ART MUSEUM, BERNE, SWITZERLAND

ARCHITECT RENZO PIANO

MONUMENT FOR A MINIATURISTA new museum dedicated to Paul Klee swells seductively into the Swiss landscape.

1The rollercoaster profile of the arched steel members forms the defining image of the new museum.

[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)

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The arcaded streets of the old town of Berne, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have acquired a counterpart in the pedestrian concourse that links the three volumes of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Renzo Piano’s latest showcase for art. An undulating steel structure emerges from three hills to the east of the city, facing over the ringroad and surrounded by fields. It’s a monument that celebrates the work of a brilliant miniaturist; a fusion of architecture and landscape, warmth and precision, structural daring and welcoming interiors. It captures the unique spirit of a native son who made his reputation in Germany, fled Nazi persecution to return home for a final burst of creativity, and is buried close by.

Klee was astonishingly prolific, meticulously recording the 10 000 works he created in his thirty-year career. ‘Not a day without a sketch,’ he noted in his journal, even as he neared his death in 1940. Members of the artist’s family and the Klee Foundation promised to donate their astounding hoard of 4000 paintings and drawings if Berne would provide a dedicated space to show them. The chief sponsors were Professor Maurice Müller, a surgeon who invented the artificial hip, and his wife, Martha, who selected the location and the architect, and insisted that the building be a centre for all the arts and for people of all ages. Piano has created a museum that reaches out to embrace the visitors who stream in from footpaths, city bus, and motorway.

Like so many of his buildings, the Zentrum has a strong, simple diagram that belies the complexity of its design and construction. Piano shifted the site from the one that had first been chosen to address the sunken motorway, mirroring its gentle curve in the glass facade and even in the lines of vents cut into the floors of the galleries. That gives the building a symbolic link to the contemporary world, and to the city that lies beyond, concealed within its river valley. The undulating topography of the adjoining hills inspired the profile of the steel beams, which swoop and soar like a rollercoaster, rising from the earth at the rear to form a trio of imposing arches in front. Each rounded vault encloses a discrete set

of spaces that are linked at the front by a 150m long glazed concourse containing the café, ticketing, shop, and reference area. Extended opening hours encourage visitors to come early or linger in this protected piazza. A changing selection from the permanent collection is displayed in the central pavilion, with a temporary exhibition gallery below. To the north, meeting and restoration areas lead out of the concourse, with a creative workshop for children below, and a subterranean auditorium behind. The south pavilion contains the administrative offices, archives, and seminar rooms, all on the main level.

The 4.2km of steel girders were cut and shaped by computer-controlled machines but then, because each section has a different configuration, the 40km of seams were hand-welded. The arches are slightly inclined at different angles, braced by compression struts, and tied to the roof plate and floor slabs. In contrast to this assembly of unique parts, the concrete floors were constructed as a single structure, without settlement joints. The glass facade is divided into upper and lower sections, which are joined at the 4m roof level of the concourse, and are suspended from girders to avert stress from thermal expansion in the steel roof. The glass is shaded by exterior mesh blinds that extend automatically in response to the intensity of the light, and the high level of insulation minimizes energy consumption.

All of these measures pay off in the galleries and archives, where temperature and humidity must be maintained at constant levels, even though they are seamlessly linked to the busy public concourse. The permanent collection is displayed beneath the curved vault in a 1700sqm room that is divided by suspended flats into a benign labyrinth of interconnecting spaces. Each white screen hovers a couple of centimetres above the oak floor as do the peripheral walls. To achieve the low lighting level required by these sensitive works, illumination is indirect and filtered. Spots cast their beams on the white-boarded ceiling vault, and this glow is diffused by suspended square scrims.

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4To the rear, the vaults merge into the ground. Planting will gradually be established between the ridges to make the transition more seamless.

2The trio of topographic bumps mimics the gentle undulations of the surrounding landscape.

3A serpentine path leads up to the main entrance.



6long section through north pavilion (concourse, cinema, auditorium) long section through middle pavilion (concourse, galleries)

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cross section

site plan

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5The tapering profile of the vaults.6Detail of main facade and inclined steel arches.



1 north pavilion 2 central pavilion 3 south pavilion 4 main entrance 5 concourse 6 information 7 café 8 servery 9 cinema 10 AV rooms 11 restoration workshops 12 permanent collection 13 shop 14 reference section 15 offices and administration 16 temporary galleries 17 auditorium 18 children’s workshop

7Café and information area in the soaring public concourse that unites that trio of vaults and runs along the main facade.



ground floor plan (scale approx 1:750)

lower ground floor

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It’s easy to see in the open geometry of the plan a reference to some of Klee’s compositions, and the skein of slender cables supporting walls, lights, and scrims evokes his spidery penmanship. Piano’s greatest feat is to give these tiny, intense works the space they need to breathe. Such a concentration of invention could easily overwhelm the viewer; here, each work seems to float in its own white void, bathed in a cloud of soft light, achieving an emotional as well as a formal resonance. Works are grouped, not chronologically, but by affinity, so that you can explore the infinite variety of ways in which this master employed line, colour, figurative and abstract imagery; always enigmatic and never repetitive. Toplit stairs and a piston-operated lift that is a work of art in itself carry you down to a room of similar size that presently houses the 366 sketches Klee did in his last fertile year. Here, the works are arranged on a peripheral and inner wall that trace the rectangle defined by slender structural columns. Scattered around both galleries on oak plinths are 40 hand puppets that Klee made around 1920 to amuse his family. Fabricated from the commonplace materials and crudely painted, they have a compelling talismanic quality, revealing the inner child in the artist and in all who connect with his work.

That spirit carries over into the children’s museum, aptly named Creaviva for its emphasis on creative play in a succession of workshops that are open to all ages. The steeply-raked 300-seat auditorium that burrows into the ground behind is a black box lined with curved sound baffles in the same orange hue as the Venetian plaster walls of the outer lobby. Regular performances of chamber music (Klee was an accomplished violinist), dance, and theatre will be interspersed with lectures and readings. All will reflect the versatility of the artist and his friends over four turbulent decades and their enduring legacy.

MICHAEL WEBB

8The curve of the arch runs through the glazed link between volumes.9Main gallery for the permanent Klee collection.10Main gallery is an airy labyrinth of suspended flat panels that subdivide the space. In places, light is diffused by horizontal scrims.11Part of the children’s workshop at



Architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop, GenoaAssociate architectARB Architects, BerneStructural engineersOve Arup & Partners, B + S IngenieureServices engineersOve Arup & Partners, Luco, Enerconom, BeringPhotographsPaul Raftery/VIEW

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The capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, means ‘warm’ due to its sulphursprings. It has attracted travellers and inspired artists, poets andphilosophers for many centuries. The location has shaped its historyand appearance. Having been inhabited since the fifth millennium BC, Georgia has been linked with civilizations of Asia Minor, theAegean and with Greece, Egypt, the Roman and Parthian-SassanianEmpires in the Early Iron Age and the Classical period. At differenttimes it has been occupied by Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols,Turks and Russians.

In the Middle Ages, Georgian kings made Tbilisi the capital of oneof the largest states in the Near East, a crossroads of trade routes and,as described by Marco Polo, a place ‘where they weave cloths of goldand all kinds of very fine silk stuffs’. Though Orthodox Christianitydominated, other religions and nationalities were also respected. Themain Armenian-Gregorian Church in Tbilisi, St George’s Church(above) was built in 1251 by an Armenian merchant. The Persiansseized it in the seventeenth century during their invasion. Burnt downin 1795 during the second Persian invasion and gradually restoredduring the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it keeps its originalform. There is a remarkable fragment of stone cross with an Arabicinscription on the north facade of the church.

Destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, Tbilisi displays an incredibleeclectic combination of Oriental and European styles. In thenineteenth century, the Russian Empire enhanced its presence inGeorgia bringing in Neo-Classical style, features of the Renaissanceand Baroque and Moorish style, together with Art Nouveau andpseudo-Georgian styles which prevailed later. Tbilisi became abourgeois city, its Opera House was ‘if not the best, one of the best inthe world’ (Alexander Dumas). In the twentieth century, Soviet stylesalso influenced the city. The old part consists of winding streets withchurches, workshops, stores, public sulphur baths, courtyards and‘Tbilisi houses’ of two and three floors with lacy wooden balconies,terrace roofing, loggias with stained glass and external ladders ofdifferent forms and materials. Even in decay, Tbilisi hopes andwelcomes. It is a great city. IRINA KALASHNIKOVA

TBILISI IS AN UNDISCOVERED TREASURE. EVEN IN DECAY,

A N D A FT ER M U C H D EST RU C T I O N , T H E G EO RG I A N

CAPIT AL IS ST ILL RICH IN ARCH IT ECT U RAL MO MEN T S.

delight

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ina

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Royal Academy Forum

Robert HewisonRuskin famously said that, ‘the teaching of art is the teaching of all

things’, setting his pupils at the London Working Men’s College the task

of representing, by drawing, a white sphere by shading only. It had to

be done in a particularly Ruskinian way, not as an outline, but by

shading, so that the shape of the sphere emerges as the paper darkens.

The illustrations with this paper are selected from drawings members of

the audience made during the talk.

Ruskin’s commentary on this exercise was, ‘It has been objected that

a circle, or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines

to draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that this study of

the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the

appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a

sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat

surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective;

but in a sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle becomes merely

by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is just as

striking to the learner, whether his circular outlines be true or false. He

is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the

ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to

him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind

is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in

due time, care of itself’.

Ruskin was not trying to turn working men into artists. As he told

them, ‘I have not been trying to teach you draw, only to see’. Clear

sight, accuracy of observation of both image and word, was a mental

discipline that Ruskin taught consistently, and he believed that the best

way both to instil that discipline and test the accuracy of a person’s

perception was through the practice of drawing. He believed, however,

that accurate perception, refined by the practice of drawing, was more

than an exercise for the eye, it was also a facility for the mind. Speaking

at the opening of St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1857, he told

the students that, ‘Drawing enabled them to say what they could not

otherwise say; and ... drawing enabled them to see what they could not

otherwise see. By drawing they actually obtained a power of the eye and

a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other

discipline’.

This remark is significant when we consider recent investigations of

visual cognition , which show that the eye and the brain work

dynamically together, and that vision is active engagement, not passive

reception . Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at London

University, argues in his book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the

Brain that one ‘sees’ with the brain, not the eye, and that what he calls

‘the visual brain’ is involved in a process of comparing and sorting that

amounts to understanding. Ruskin seems to have anticipated this idea

when he wrote that sight was a great deal more than the passive

reception of visual stimuli, it was ‘an absolutely spiritual phenomenon;

accurately, and only to be so defined: and the “Let there be light” is as

much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence as the

ordering of vision’. For Ruskin, to achieve a clarity and nicety of vision,

it was necessary to go back to the beginning and recover what he called

‘the innocence of the eye’.

But, as Zeki’s studies show, people’s eyes are not innocent. Part of the

activity of visualization is the sorting and comparison of remembered

Representation

During Robert Hewison’s talk, the audience was invited to try Ruskin’s exercise of representing a white sphere by shading, without lines. Here are some of the attempts.

From Ruskinian drawing exercises to advanced mathematics – with architecture, paint ing and sculpture inbetween – representat ion of ideas and objects lies at the heart of intellectual endeavour. Edited by Jeremy Melvin.



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Royal Academy Forum

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create allusion and resonance. O n this imaginary field, memories

gather and grow by association and proximity. In Western painting,

the field comes to develop separate spaces: foreground, middle

distance, background. Each has its own defining archetypes of

colour, character, story and form.

We sense the existence of this implicit format most strongly in

Poussin, Claude and the subsequent development of the Picturesque.

This imaginary, and seemingly tacit agreement within pictorial culture

has had such lasting potency that I think of it, certainly in relation to my

own work as an artist, as virtually a death-defying given of apparently

transcendental significance. In modern times it breaks to the surface in

Cézanne, and then in Cubism. In rising to explicitness, however, its

effect is changed fundamentally.

Since the late nineteenth century, these complex features of

compositional memory which dominate the pictorial, relational art of

the West, have been tested. During the twentieth century, aesthetic

characteristics such as formal reduction and singularity, rather than

illusion and metaphor, become pre-eminent. T ruth resides in the

concrete and the objective. Simplicity is synonymous with honesty.

Only the everyday (always the street and never the palace) is authentic.

In the case of the first generation of American abstract painters such

as Rothko and Clifford Still, a grand and brave simplicity is certainly

achieved. But I would argue that their work is still (in mid century) in

touch and dependent on art historical memory and references to the

former model. At such close range (50 years) their aesthetic denials and

adventures retain meaning.

Yet the possibility for creating this web of meaning, allusion, memory

and association did not of course entirely disappear in the twentieth

century. T he pair of exhibitions at T ate Modern on Constantin

Brancusi and Donald Judd early in 2004 shows the contrast. Each finds

the poetic in apparently irreconcilable worlds. Subjective compared to

objective, carved to assembled, refined to raw. It is a division which

runs through twentieth-century art between the associative and the

putative re-presentation of reality. A powerful example of the

persistence of this imaginary field in late twentieth-century art is seen in

the work of the painter Philip Guston. H e, like me, has felt the

images so as to establish a constant version of the things that pass

partially and fleetingly before us. What we have seen influences what

we now see. What we have been taught to see shapes our vision. And as

we see we also feel and think. Ruskin believed that the unconscious, or

semi-conscious ideas that come as we look at things could interfere with

the truth of our perception. In cultural terms, people’s eyes can be

corrupted by conventions of one kind or another, most especially by the

ways in which they are taught to see. That is why Ruskin stood out

against not only the conventional tastes that rejected the fresh visions

first of Turner and then of the Pre-Raphaelites, but all three of the

principal means by which visual perception was formally shaped in the

nineteenth century.

First, he learned to reject the gentlemanly amateur tradition of the

Picturesque, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

watercolour landscape tradition in which he had himself been trained.

Second, he became the implacable enemy of the official, government-

promoted method for training artists and designers, the so-called South

Kensington system managed by the Department of Science and Art.

Third, he was critical of the training of fine artists, as exemplified by

what he called the ‘base system’ for teaching students in the schools of

the Royal Academy, which, he said, ‘destroys the greater number of its

pupils altogether; it hinders and paralyses the greatest’. His reasoning

was important because it went beyond criticizing the framing of

conventional Neo-Classical perception by studying from the antique.

Teaching of art began with training the eye and the hand – but it had

also to develop the mind. No art teaching, said Ruskin, ‘could be of use

to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on something

deeper than all art’.

Sight was intended to lead to insight. Ruskin did not confuse

imitation with representation. He regarded the pleasure derived from

imitation as the most contemptible that can be derived from art,

because mere imitation is mere deception. What Ruskin wanted to get

at was the truth. T ruth in painting, he said, ‘signifies the faithful

statement, either to the mind or the senses, of any fact of nature’. These

‘facts of nature’ could be discovered by diligent visual observation. But,

‘Imitation can only be of something material, but truth has reference to

statements both of the qualities of material things, and of emotions,

impressions and thoughts. There is a moral as well as material truth; a

truth of impression as well as of form, of thought as well as of matter,

and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the more

important of the two’.

Further, ‘Truth may be stated by any signs or symbols which have a

definite signification in the minds of those to whom they are addressed,

although such signs be themselves no image nor likeness of anything.

Whatever can excite in the mind the conception of certain facts, can

give ideas of truth , though it be in no degree the imitation or

resemblance of those facts’.

T rue sight leads to insight, true insight leads to revelation. This

triadic structure corresponds to his theory of the imagination: first what

he called the penetrative imagination saw clearly and deeply, then the

associative imagination brought these perceptions towards unity, while

the contemplative imagination meditated on and expressed the

spiritual, symbolic truths so revealed.

T he whole of R uskin’s ar t theory, in a sense, comes back to

representing the sphere, an exercise in the first order of truth. We

cannot begin to talk about representation, until there is something to

represent, and if we do not know what it is that we wish to represent,

know it physically, through the co-ordination of hand and eye, and

know it morally, through the openness and clarity of our vision, we will

never be able to begin our journey. As Ruskin famously said, ‘The

greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something,

and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds can talk for one who can

think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is

poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one’.

Christopher Le BrunWhen Caspar David Friedrich claimed that, ‘The artist should paint

not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. If

he sees nothing within himself he should also forgo painting what he

sees before him …’, he not only captured the essence of Romanticism;

he also posed a fundamental question with which ar t has been

concerned ever since. If, as Friedrich states, perception and imagination

throw up ‘truths at least as important as objective reality’, the issue is

how to find ideas and techniques for representation which avoid

contingency and randomness, and allow the work of art to establish

significance and meaning.

Representation in art achieves significance (or depth) when it relates

to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that

culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by

substitution. Just as in the forest, great trees depend for their size and

majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and

developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works

which nourishes their potential to convey meaning.

George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of

resonance as the ‘field of prepared echo’. With this image, he vividly

conveys the working of the canon of Western art. It is the agreed

given of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value,

and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density,

high culture is impossible. In such a field new ideas and how they

speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood. An

analogy in the visual arts might be to picture a loose grid, existing in

th r ee spa t ia l d imensions and evolving over t ime. With in it ,

composit ion a l for mulae an d r epea ted pa t ter n s in favour ed

dispositions come to acquire meaning. We see them superimposed

comparatively in our imaginations. The differences and symmetries

Opposite, Christopher LeBrun RA, Aram Nemus Vult,1988-89. Oil on canvas, 271 x 444cm, AstrupFearnley, Museum ofModern Art, Oslo.

Right, Philip Guston, 1913-1980, Dial, 1956.Oil on canvas, 72 x 76in(182.88 x 193.04cm),W hitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York.Purchase 56.44.



the ground to create car parking below a green belt, how ground form,

roof shape and structure ease the flow of air and invite movement of

people. Having a degree of familiarity with Dublin probably helped the

thinking for the Millennium Spire to happen quickly. It was an intuitive

idea which became architectural, sculptural, and structural. I wanted

the stand at Crystal Palace to capture the essential form of the bowl

Joseph Paxton created. It sweeps up to the stage, reflecting sound and

air, like a leaf in the park. The urban scene is full of images that carry

meaning, which may lie, for instance, in a technical effect or perhaps in

memory. A small intervention may alter the balance between images

and profoundly affect their meaning, and it is in sifting and synthesizing

these ideas and influences, helping to understand their repercussions,

that language is so powerful. As words develop into images they pick up

and evolve knowledge.

Roger PenroseI write as a mathematician who finds drawing and other forms of visual

representation immensely helpful. I can think of several different ways

in which such visual imagery can be important in mathematical work.

In the first place, there is the following major division:

• Internal, ie, aids to one’s own mathematical understanding

• External, ie, aids to the conveying of such understanding to others.

There are many different ways to think about mathematics, and there

are considerable differences among mathematicians as to which modes

of thinking come most easily. I think that the main division between

such modes of thinking comes with the visual/ geometric, on one hand

and the verbal/ algebraic/ calculational, on the other. On the whole, the

best mathematicians are good at both modes of thinking, but my

experience has been that with mathematics students, there is much

more difficulty on the geometr ic side than on the

algebraic/ calculational side. As for myself, I find that geometrical

thinking is what comes most naturally, and I often try to convert

mathematical problems into a geometrical form first before I feel happy

about trying to solve them. However, I frequently find difficulties when

trying to convey my understandings to other mathematicians, or

students, if I use too geometrical a formulation, as they tend to be

happier with algebraic/ calculational types of argument.

However, there is a curious paradox here. I am often asked to give

lectures to non-mathematical (or mixed) audiences, and then the

request usually takes the form ‘use lots of pictures, so the audience will

find it easier’. This is generally good advice, and it is certainly the case

that pictures rather than equations are normally much better for

conveying information – even fairly technical information – to lay

audiences. The puzzle is: why is it that professional mathematicians,

and those aspir ing to be professional mathematicians, give the

impression of being more unhappy with visual types of thinking than lay

members of the interested general public? Here I venture, as a solution

to this puzzle, that there is a selection effect, arising from the fact that it

is much harder to examine visual mathematical ability than

calculational or algebraic skills. When I was in my final year as a

mathematics undergraduate, I chose geometrical subjects for my

specialist topics, but I believe that I fared a good deal better on the

algebra papers than on the geometrical ones. The reason was that

although I did not have difficulty in solving the geometrical problems, I

found it to be difficult, and particularly time consuming, to express this

understanding in words, as was necessary. Moreover, in mathematical

arguments, an appropriate degree of rigour is always needed, for

arguments to be acceptable. This is often difficult to express adequately

with geometrical reasoning, even when such reasoning may, in essence,

be perfectly correct. Accordingly, those who rely on geometrical types

compelling pull of this invisible model which suffuses Western art.

Guston’s paintings with their tidal shifts towards and away from

representation , show a gr id-like sensual abstract pain ting

interpenetrating figurative, illustrative pictures. Depictions and

thought-touches seem to emerge from the wealth of the painter’s

memory, giving them an interiority akin to the reflexiveness of

literature. His paintings exist within a mature metaphysical realm for

the projection of emotion and form.

What I am arguing for is a more organized form of subjectivity along

the lines of Caspar David Friedrich’s injunction. It is a Classical and

informed subjectivity, depending on thoughtfulness and reflection, and

its effect is to allow pictures to maintain their elusiveness and privacy

even when their meaning is manifestly present in the public realm.

Ian Ritchie: language to architectural calligraphyMy design process always starts with an idea, and ideas can come from

many sources. Some might be environmental; others are functional,

social or structural, or sculptural in the case of the Jubilee Line vents,

but they exist as ideas without a clear representation. The meaning and

value of an idea lies in language, so I find language a fundamental tool

for exploring ideas. As a student in Liverpool and spending a lot of time

at the Everyman Theatre where the poet Roger McGough opened up

my appreciation of language, I saw how words can investigate rather

than determine an idea. This is a pre-drawing form of representation

which I develop through language. T hrough draughting and

redraughting, words help to concentrate an idea and bring it into focus.

H ow this happens varies. T he outcome might be descriptive or

abstract; sometimes it may depend on metaphor and at other times it is

more literal.

O nce words have given a theme or idea some existence, the next

challenge is to capture it visually. In the past I used models, moulding a

piece of plasticene to find the form, but more often now I use Japanese

or Chinese brushes – the calligraphy of the title. The idea must exist

before I can paint around it , but using different techniques of

representation helps to develop it. Alba di Milano, for example,

originated as a beam of light. Milan’s reputation for making fine cloth

suggested the idea of weaving, so it started to evolve into a cloth of light

woven from fibre optics, which emit light when broken. My first

painting was a black line on a white piece of paper. Using ground on

copper plate, the etching reversed that, turning it into a flash of white

against a black ground.

For White City Shopping Centre I wanted to capture ideas about

shopping that I had described in writing. I had written about how air

might flow through the spaces and the roof modulate sunlight, about

how there could be views and routes to parkland on either side, and

how the effect might reconfigure the relationship between shopping

and the city. An early ink drawing conveys those ideas, initially formed

in words, with a few simple brushstrokes, showing the manipulation of 91 |290 |2

Royal Academy Forum

Four images by Ian Ritchie RA, clockwise from left, The Spire of Dublin (monument for Ireland); White City Shopping Centre; Alba di M ilano; Crystal Palace Concert Platform.

Left , Fig 1; centre, Fig 2; right, Fig 3, The Creator Having Trouble Locating the Right Universeby Roger Penrose, mixed media 29x25cm.



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of my work is the methodology of visually mapping information and the

psychological and emotional dimension that comes out of it.

The Frozen Sea installation began in the word check-mate. Following

its semantic and etymological connections took me through the various

strands of the meanings of words such as check, exchequer, chess,

jeopardy, hazard, and draughts. Having mapped ‘check’ to a level that

satisfied me (about forty terms), I set about the problem of materializing

this map. No map can convey every detail to a reader , as the

information would be overwhelming. I chose to focus only on the

relations between words. T o know if and how words relate, their

relative ages and etymologies have to be known. As my map contained

semantic links, this too would have to be recognized. I chose three rules

to describe the word map in three dimensions: semantic = beside,

etymological = on top of, word age = volume.

For The Frozen Sea I decided to create a study, with desks, chairs, filing

cabinets, a full set of the OED, blackboards and so on. Having gathered

my objects, I ranked them by volume and assigned a word from the

‘check’ word map to each, based on the simple correspondence that the

largest volume should represent the term longest in use, the smallest, the

word that had been in use for the most fleeting moment. H aving

assigned objects to words I arranged them according to my three rules:

objects representing words that related semantically were placed beside

one another; those with an etymological connection were stacked

horizontally. The room became a working study and simultaneously, a

grid with X and Y coordinates.

Richard Long maps his journeys through the landscape in stones

and sticks, objects to hand. I have mapped my journey through the

forest of words in anglepoise lamps and chairs, also with objects to

hand. The Mexican artist Damien O rtega’s recent work Matter and

Spirit places text and materiality in disjunctive conjunction. Michael

Craig-Martin’s 1970s work An Oak T ree looks at the mysterious

chemistry of naming and duality of matter and sign. I situate The Frozen

Sea in relation to these works.

T o return to the experience of the viewer – the installation is

activated when the viewer begins to piece together the logic behind the

study. The work operates as an invitation to the viewer to think through

the process of decision and doubt that has created the form. It is a

detective work. This is a strategy that I employ to activate the work. The

decisive process of seeing is a re-perceiving. As in a conspiracy theory,

things are not what they seem. Every element of the piece has a dual

meaning. The desk is indeed a place where a lexicographer has been at

work, with the fetishization usual in the preserved studies of thinkers

like Darwin. It is also a tool that has been used in the task of working

out, and also directly represents a word in the group being mapped.

The title was chosen to suggest a momentary fixing of a flow of particles.

The arrangement will give way to another as another word is mapped.92 |2

of understanding are a t a disadvantage in examinations, and

consequently they become under represented in the mathematical

community at large. My own experience with visual imagery – and this

applies within both the above categories (internal and external), though

with a somewhat different balance within each – is that it can take many

forms. There are, indeed, various ways in which I have found visual

representations to be immensely valuable. In my own work, either as an

essential aid to mathematical understanding and research, or for

expositional purposes, I can distinguish at least four categories:

(a) Schematic diagrams representing mathematical concepts.

(b) Accurate representation of geometrical configurations.

(c) A precise diagrammatic notation for algebraic calculations.

(d) Cartoons, often whimsical, to illuminate key points.

My notebooks are full of sketches depicting (a), the pictures

frequently represent mathematical structures of higher dimension than

is apparent. The configuration in Fig 1 is a drawing of mine from an

article ‘Mathematics of the Impossible’,* and it illustrates a non-

periodic tiling of the plane from just two different birdlike shapes. The

type of precise geometrical notation that I frequently use, in accordance

with (c), is illustrated in Fig 2, from another notebook of mine. The

(whimsical) cartoon of Fig 3 is one that I have used a number of times in

lectures, and it illustrates the extraordinary precision with which the

universe must have star ted up (at the Big Bang), in order to be

consistent with observation and with the Second Law of

Thermodynamics. I feel honoured that it has been exhibited as part of

the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2004 under the title ‘The

creator having trouble locating the right universe’.

*T he Artful Eye, edited by Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla

Heard, and David Rose, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p326.

Abigail ReynoldsRuskin established a clear line between drawing and comprehension,

arguing that drawing tr iggers looking, and looking leads to

understanding. But Robert Hewison’s discussion of Ruskin suggests

that he saw the entire benefit came in producing a drawing, leaving

open the question of whether seeing a drawing has the same order of

significance. In art, Richter points out, seeing is the decisive act, so how

the artist can enable the viewer to share this central act completely

becomes the vital issue. I am especially interested in how art can

become a tool for thinking, and potentially elevate the viewer’s thought

process over the artist’s. Art should open an avenue for active thought.

H aving made Mount Fear, which represents crime statistics as a

mountain range, I am looking at developing further strategies for

representing the abstract by sculptural and physical modelling. Among

these was my work as artist in residence for the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED is already a representation in at least two senses: its content

represents culture through time, and its aesthetic represents authority.

It is constantly changed and updated, and although it outwardly aspires

only to be descriptive, mapping change in language, its aesthetic of

authority confuses this by being set up as an arbiter of what is and is not

correct. But in shaping the chaos of experience and imposing order, the

OED has points in common with art.

I approached the OED by looking at systems and structures of

meaning in lexicography and art, connecting the experiences of my first

degree in English and my second in Fine Art. T he OED itself is

interested in opening up discussion of the place of lexicography and

dictionary-making in our culture to a wider audience, but I am

especially drawn to it because, as a project, it teeters on the brink of

folly. The hubris of documenting all of language, a moving target, is

almost monumentally absurd, and also heroic. It can never be done.

My year as Artist in Residence at the OED had many joys. T he

simplest of these was, when asked where my studio is, to be able to

respond ‘in the Dictionary’.

O f course, when I say Dictionary, I mean a department of 70

lexicographers, whereas my questioner imagines a set of 20 volumes. I

mean an ongoing daily process; they think of a printed authority.

Suddenly, in this gap, emerges a mental image of me, shrunk like Alice

moving through a world of words. It is a really enjoyable disjunction,

and one which lies at the centre of my approach to creating a visual art

work that responds to the OED.

I started to produce word mappings quite soon after arriving in the

department. Paul Klee, when drawing, would take a line for a walk. I

spend time taking words for walks. Choosing a word, I sniff around it,

following cross-references and other hints in the OED. The word group

grows and is shaped over time as I add and subtract semantic and

etymological links, arranging and re-arranging until a satisfying form

evolves. Words have a shape which can amount to a secret history of

their mutated meanings over time. What I find important in this phase

Royal Academy Forum

Abigail Reynolds, Exchequer 1, photo-collage 2004. Abigail Reynolds, working drawing for The Frozen Sea, 2004.



95 |2

years old. There are three of these complexes in India and while I have

seen only the one in Jaipur, I chose to model the Delhi structure

familiar to me only from incomplete accounts, plans and photographic

records. I was keen to make an idealized version which I think reveals

more of the hubris but also the beauty of these three structures.

After we had made a C AD model of the site, I a t tempted to

deconstruct the buildings by projecting animated views onto a moving

stainless-steel mesh armature and re-filming the result. Most elements

in the buildings are visible, and their essence survives being pulled

across a complex series of curves. I was interested to see how the basic

geometry would withstand this sort of distortion of representation. It

is an example of what I call ‘vertical memory’, where the essence of

compressed experience survives this sort of mangling. This also relates

to our own inability to recall accurately which gives rise to a poetic

sensibility forced to rebuild objects and experiences in our own minds.

If there is a common grammar, each small part might contain the

phraseology for the whole.

When I introduce sound into a work I use Dolby Surround which

defines a pronounced spatial configuration. I do not want a sense of

front or a formal planar way of seeing a building. I want the same

flexibility in experiencing representation that we take for granted in

the experience of the represented.

One of the two films to which this project gave rise has a sequence

in which I overlay blurred and distorted images. This simple act of

blurring curiously introduces a level of sight which for me becomes

more permanen tly embedded than conven t iona l means of

representation. It also shows up a particular problem with pristine

arch itectura l photographs and render ings. T heir apparen tly

inexhaustible detail drawing you closer and closer to the surface, until

the photographic grain interposes itself between you and the building

represented.

Using a different approach to representation raises questions about

the ‘habitability’ of the representation itself; that is, about how it can

invite you past its own sur face. I find simila r problems in

representation with text and while I use text extensively in my work it

is often in a form which acknowledges this difficulty. I spend some

time labouring over the words and have a programme which will then

display them as a fine grid floating apparently within the image like a

fog. While the meaning is still present, it becomes lost in the image,

almost irretrievable, an obscuring tint across the surface of things.

T heir numerous sta ir cases a iming a t the sky in elabora te

calibrations and dishes, the Janta Manta are buildings entirely

determined by light, moonlight, starlight or sunlight. That is why I

chose to render the structures in glass. How the building both depends

on light and arose purely from light sets up all sorts of fascinating

possibilities for its representation.94 |2

Graham Modlen, Office of Zaha Hadid

Drawings by Zaha Hadid’s office are powerful representations of ideas

and possibilities and when I started there I had to fathom out what

they might represent. The drawings I had seen previously for the Hong

Kong Peak project stimulated me to think forward, to wonder that if

you could do that to Hong Kong, what were the possibilities for other

cities? I soon realized that this type of drawing is a process where every-

thing is to be re-imagined, shattered and then put back together again.

It is as if we are asked to suspend belief and to turn the project round

graphically and re-present it. Drawing allows different people to invent

and interpret, and contribute to the process. It is a real studio system.

O ne of Zaha’s earliest commissions was a rooftop conversion in

Halkin Place in Belgravia. The drawings show the flat interior with the

walls blown away and the plan drawn within a floating isometric pro-

jection. Fittings and furniture are sometimes on the floor and some-

times floating. The wall is drawn as if it were a new plane through

which light shines. It has a sort of surreal air to it. But the drawings

also re-imagine the home ground; certain elements become recogniz-

able; you can make out the streets with the familiar duality of a regular

edge to the street and a serrated back edge. The technique of drawing

she inaugurated has become a hallmark of the office. It allows anyone

in the office, whether they know London or not, to reinvent it and show

us how it could be.

By the time of the competition for the Grand Buildings site in the

mid-1980s, the techniques for drawing had evolved into a collective

effort. The project was an opportunity to reinvent or imagine an ide-

alized version of Trafalgar Square. In the drawings the square itself

might be recognizable but what lies behind it has changed. The river

gets lost and there are several strange undulations. Various people in

the team contributed perspectival drawings, representing their ideas

or knowledge of the city but, I think, they were put together with

Zaha’s steadying hand.

In the office are sketch books of drawings by Zaha, which are some-

thing like diaries. They may not refer to any particular project, but

they are forward thoughts and reflections on past ideas. She can pre-

sent them to the studio in a way which launches everybody off, or she

may say, ‘there’s a sketch I did which may ... but you will have to study

it’. We tease out what might relate to the project in discussion. It may

be the silhouette that has some significance, or perhaps one image is

laid over another to fathom out the kernel of the plan. The result is

multi-layered and the original thought may become indistinct.

With computers and copiers we can deal with all sorts of distortions.

We can twist plans, build up layers and distort distances. The intro-

ductory images of the Rome Contemporary Arts Centre were ‘reliefs’

built up from two or three layers of cut card to give depth to the ground

in plan. That then feeds ideas about the roof structure and for walls

which descend and create outdoor spaces.

At the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome, our task was to repre-

sent the workings of the mind through an interaction of architecture,

art and an understanding of neurology. Its form of three overlapping

snake-like shapes resembling curving lasagne layers and forms, was

described as piece of sculpture and exhibitry itself with smaller ele-

ments of sculpture and exhibits inside, something like a Russian doll.

The position of the steel trusses related to circulation patterns and the

dome’s shape; we tickled and pushed it with cantilevers and distortions.

The idea was that people walking along ramps would come across

exhibits that aimed, for example, to play with visual perception, com-

munication and identity. One of the exhibits was a built spatial per-

spectival trick comprising a 4m high sculpture by Gavin Turk which

distorted distances. Another was a computer program which reworked

a photograph of yourself to change gender, race and age.

Our drawing techniques are ways not just of representing, but find-

ing and developing ideas. For example the ‘mid-construction’ views of

Cardiff Bay Opera House were drawn on black paper, but from the

use of white paint, for example, it seemed to me an idea came about

the use of light. In another, earlier project from 1993, based on an ex-

dockland site in Düsseldorf, which combined a radio station, hotel and

media offices, the team made a number of exploratory works including

a mixed, hybrid perspective which was as if wringing a cloth. Out of it

came different views represented in one painterly composition.

Representation is part of the process of thinking.

Paul SchützeWhen I make pieces based on architecture, I aim to document the

exper ience of a building rather than the building itself. Peter

Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals captivated me partly because the

building seems to have its own internal weather systems. Each room

achieves its own micro climate with distinctive temperature, humidity

and tepidity. Some spaces also link with the exterior bringing an

unexpected haptic transparency. Rooms register as much on the skin

as the eye or the ear. There are extraordinary acoustic phenomena

articulated by varieties in scale, materials and ceiling heights. I was

struck by how rich an experience the building would offer to someone

who could not see. While its visual impact is considerable, the

architect has addressed each of the senses extravagantly. Another

fea ture is the way its water sur faces appear as par t of the

compositional mass of the building and yet are occupiable as spaces.

This produces an almost eerie intimacy with the materials and the

structure itself.

The Janta Manta series takes the remarkable structures built as

astronomical observatories under the Mughal Emperor Jai Singh II.

T heir form determined by need, they have a minimal amount of

ornament, but they make an engaging collection of sculptural forms

which seem strangely contemporary despite being several hundred

Royal Academy Forum

Zollhof, Düsseldorf, by Zaha Hadid Architects.

Paul Schütze:From the Garden of Instruments III, 2004. Lightbox, 92 x 128.4cm. Edition of three. Copyright holder: Paul Schütze. Images courtesy of Alan Christea Gallery, London.



W ill AlsopI am always curious that the biggest critics of our architecture are not

member s of the public bu t other a r ch itects. In genera l the

community responds well to our designs as we can show through

visitor numbers, but something we do lies outside the academic

conventions of how to make architecture. Because academics have to

make their way up the university ladder there are more books on

architectural methodology than even architectural history – but they

do not work. No self-respecting architect would follow any of their

principles.

T o me it does not matter where you start. Even digital media

simply offer another design tool; it is quick and can be dangerous, but

not completely different to the pencil or other traditional techniques.

The essential starting point is to de-programme yourself, which is

why we work with local communities, by handing them a pencil or a

paintbrush, and at the same time a glass of wine.

Where you work is an equally important part of the question of

representation. In my own studio (not my office) where I work with

two or three assistants, there is a bar which is sometimes used as a

bar, so there is a social function to the layout. But it divides the space

into a dirty and a clean side, with computers, a fridge and a sofa on

one side, a large plywood wall for stapling or projecting things on the

other. The dialogue this invites between clean and dirty is like the

open discussions that take place in art schools: dialogue happens

almost without its participants realizing. Our layout also allows us to

see th ings and possibly to misinterpret them, which can be as

important in the creative process as understanding.

Here we can recognize reality but also explore its limits. We work

with different scales and techniques of representation . When

architects are usually responsible for the largest artefacts in the

world, it seems strange that they often work at a small scale. The key

is to use the whole body because that gives a relationship between

human scale and the scale of what you want to do.

Continuity is important too, because all our projects are really one

work. An extraordinary concept you might have at the age of 21 is as

valid when you are 56; you just have more wisdom to explore that

concept in other ways, but hopefully with no less vibrancy. It is

important to keep up a process of discovery and invention. O ften I

spend time in the summer on Minorca with Bruce Maclean, not

working on any particular project but doing something else. These

sessions might throw up some interesting shapes, forms or ideas

which could find their way into design projects. We would have to do

further studies to interpret how to build them, but in reality drawing,

making and realization are all aspects of the same process.

Discovery is an important part of our activities. We did not impose

the Ontario College of Art and Design on the community; rather it

came out of the community. We extended the park to the street so

people who live on it can walk straight out into the park, which is now

animated by the lively people who occupy the art school.

O ur project ‘Not the T ate’ for Barking Reach in the T hames

Gateway shows how we use various techniques of representation to

explore the implications of particular starting points. At the moment,

the area is not on the mental map of Londoners and most proposals

for it are overly academic. O ur proposal is to give a series of large

wooden huts over to the London art schools – one of the city’s great

secrets – and curate a landscape of activity with work in, on or

around each hut, fed by plenty of food and drink and free parking.

In Montreal we tried another relationship between starting point

and means of representation. To engage the public we built a 40m

long tube of canvas for public and students to explore what this piece

of Montreal could be. As it starts to break down assumptions, the

design team begins to in teract with the public. In par t it is an

exuberant messing about with paint, but it is also a documented

series of ideas. It helps me to find something outside myself; although

mixed with my cultural baggage it also engenders a sense of shared

ownership of the ideas.

In general, we do not talk about designing buildings but about

discovering what they want to be. That voyage of discovery has to be

a very open process.

96 |2

Royal Academy Forum

Sketch for the School of the Future.

Medical research building, Queen Mary’s College, under construction.



product review

90 | 5

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product review

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31 |1030 |1

Meet me in St Louis, Louis, meet me at the Fair’, sang Judy Garland,and the city is celebrating the centenary of that high point in itsfortunes, even as it struggles – like so many others in the Midwest –to regenerate its battered core. Progress has been made since EeroSaarinen’s Gateway Arch was built on the banks of the Mississippi in1968, and the Grand Center Arts District at the edge of downtownhas recently acquired two small but potent gems: Tadao Ando’sPulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museumby Allied Works Architecture. They occupy neighbouring sites andconduct a lively dialogue across a shared courtyard dominated by aRichard Serra torqued steel sculpture.

What’s remarkable is how well these two radically differentbuildings complement each other visually as well as in purpose. ThePulitzer, which opened two years ago, is a signature work by Ando inthe finest in-situ concrete. It has the air of a spiritual retreat: refined,serene, and inward-looking; a place for solitary contemplation oftwentieth-century masterworks from the Pulitzer collection, which isopen by appointment two days a week. In contrast, Allied Worksprincipal Brad Cloepfil designed the new museum as a flexible shellfor experimentation in the visual arts, and programmes that reach outto the depressed neighbourhood and the general public. Concretewalls are clad in tightly woven stainless-steel mesh, and expansivewindows open up views from street to courtyard. Galleries forchanging exhibitions occupy a quarter of its 2500 sq m; the rest aregiven over to a large performance space, an education centre andcafé, plus upstairs offices and classrooms. The building cost only $6.5million, substantially less than its neighbour.

Thanks to the generosity of Emily Pulitzer and other patrons, theCAM has moved far beyond its modest beginnings in a downtownstorefront, and it selected Allied Works from a shortlist that includedHerzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Zumthor. It was aprescient choice, for Cloepfil has since won acclaim for prestigious

CON T EMPORARY ART MU SEU M,ST LOU IS, M ISSOU RI, USAARCHITECT

ALLIED W ORKS

locat ion plan

2T he museum complex in St Louis’depressed cityscape. Allied W orks’new building (left ) joins Ando’smuseum on the right .3Concrete walls wrapped in stainless-steel mesh are beaut ifully smooth,impassive surfaces.4Expansive windows open up views.2

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33 |1032 |1

1 entrance lobby2 gallery spaces3 education studio4 performance space5 courtyard6 café7 loading8 line of Ando building9 administrative offices

10 resource centre11 classroom

cross sect ion


cross sect ion

first floor plan

5T he internal courtyard.6Detail of mesh-wrapped walls.

CON T EMPORARY ART MU SEU M,ST LOU IS, M ISSOU RI, USAARCHITECT

ALLIED W ORKS

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arts projects in New York, Dallas, and Seattle, all of which arecharacterized by a cool minimalism and sensitivity to aesthetic needs.As he explains: ‘In making space for contemporary art, the architecturemust first serve the artist; not by attempting to render a backgroundfor the art, but by providing the artist with a specific spatial presence,an intentional vacancy that achieves meaning through the art itself.’ Healso spoke of creating ‘a fusion of the city and the arts.’

Cloepfil has pushed the building out to a curved corner that gives it a distinctive prow, and has restored the original street line –in contrast to the Pulitzer, which is pulled back. The contents of thebuilding are revealed though window walls, so that its role as an artcentre is immediately apparent. Concrete walls are sandblasted todematerialize the surface and distinguish it from Ando’s smallmodules. The mesh is set 100-150mm from the walls, unifying thefacade and shading the office and classroom windows. It’s a conceptthat the architect has developed and taken further in the translucent membrane he proposes to wrap around the formerHuntington Hartford Gallery in New York, a marble-clad Venetianpastiche by Edward Durrell Stone, to provide a new home for theMuseum of Contemporary Arts and Design.

Double glass doors open onto the lobby from a setback in the

north facade, and steps lead down from this introductory space tothe galleries. Cloepfil has played with space and light as though theywere liquids, containing and releasing them, allowing visitors to feelthey are swimming through galleries that open up to each other andto outdoor areas that are tightly enclosed by the two buildings. Thereare two levels of wall: 4m high sections at ground level, and a 6m highband that wraps around the upper level in serpentine fashion, tyingthe spaces together. The steel mesh is carried inside in places to addanother layer and a contrasting texture to the white paintedsheetrock on the display walls. Ceiling planes float at different levels,admitting light from clerestories and blocking direct sun. The effect isone of interlocking boxes cut away to leave only a few defining edges.

Paul Ha, the new director of St Louis CAM, made his reputation atWhite Columns, New York’s most adventurous alternative art space. ‘It changes one’s perception of art to see it in a differentsetting,’ he observes, ‘and artists welcome the challenge ofresponding to the energy of place.’ For Cloepfil, the task was ‘tomake spaces that serve the arts and artists, while allowing for a subtle emotional response from the individual. It was imperative tocreate a physical environment that visitors would feel comfortablereturning to again and again.’ MICHAEL WEBB

axonometric of building elements

7Looking through the courtyard.8After the compression of theoutdoor areas, galleries are tall, airy,luminous spaces.9, 10T he building is conceived as aflexible shell for experimentat ion.

ArchitectAllied Works, Portland, USAPhotographsHélène Binet

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM,ST LOUIS, M ISSOU RI, USAARCHITECT

ALLIED W ORKS

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The young French partnership of Florence Lipsky and Pascal Rollet has a reputation for formally sparse but technically and materially inventive buildings that make the most of limited programmes and budgets. Though the pair favour the aesthetic edginess and functional economy of raw or industrial materials, they generally play it straight with modular Miesian structures and disciplined spatial arrangements. Their latest building is a science library for the University of Orleans. Founded in 1961 and now with some 5000 students, the university occupies a peripheral campus sward at some remove from the city centre, linked by a tram line that runs on a north-south axis across town. The site for the library is next to the tram line, in front of one of the four stations that serves the campus.

Emerging from a boskily pastoral setting, the building is a strong, almost graphic presence in the landscape. The taut orthogonality of its form, a long, three-storey box terminated by a full-height colonnade, suggests a scientific triumph of the rational over the romantic, but it has a more quixotic side in its appropriation of materials, handling of light and approach to energy use and environmental control.

The tall concrete colonnade, like a scaled down version of Foster’s Carré d’Art museum, Nîmes (AR July 1993), is a welcoming gesture that celebrates and civilises arrival, while emphasising a route to the lake. A small glass box, which also acts as an informal exhibition space, forms a decompression zone between the blare of the outside world and the

SCIENCE LESSONVeiled in a polycarbonate skin, this science library exploits site, light and materials in the quiet pursuit of passive environmental control.

1

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ORLEANS, FRANCE

ARCHITECT

LIPSKY + ROLLET

1The translucent volume of the new library emerges from its wooded campus setting.2A tall colonnade creates a space for social interaction.



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cross section

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site plan

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000) second floor

first floor roof plan

long section

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1 colonnade 2 entrance hall 3 exhibition space 4 reception 5 reading room 6 book box 7 study zones 8 offices 9 group work spaces 10 multimedia workshop 11 computer room 12 kitchen 13 research room

3The colonnade marks the entrance.4The site lies next to a tram line linking the campus with Orleans city centre.5Windows puncture the translucent polycarbonate skin; glare control is provided by vertical brise soleil.


ARCHITECT

LIPSKY + ROLLET



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silent inner sanctum of the reading room. Areas of clear glazing are punched apparently at random into the translucent polycarbonate skin frame and define views of the landscape from inside at study table height, so students can drift off in contemplative reveries.

In operational terms, the modern university library is less concerned with the inducement of reverie and more with the efficient storage and retrieval of information, in both paper and digital formats. Yet the process of information withdrawal, consultation and return continues to underpin and structure the library as a building type. Lipksy + Rollet articulate this process through a central ‘book box’, a dense core of books surrounded by more fluid study zones arranged round the periphery. The main reading room is a dramatic triple-height space, overlooked and surveyed by perimeter study zones on the floor above, so users can inhabit a more intimate enclave, yet be aware of wider goings on.

The monumental book box is clad in Fincof panels (more commonly employed for concrete formwork), a type of Finnish birch plywood stained with dark phenolic resin. The panels evoke the warm leather of traditional bookbinding and study armchairs but this is faux luxury. The budget necessitated an imaginatively frugal approach to materials, as manifest by the double skin of polycarbonate used to clad the building which combines good insulation levels with light diffusing qualities, so the reading room seems wrapped in a rice paper screen, with readers silhouetted against its translucent walls. South and east facades have vertical, manually operable white polycarbonate louvres to provide additional glare control. Depending on the sun angle and building users, the vertical brise soleil create a changing pattern on the facades.

Though France is not as advanced as Germany in legislating for efficient energy use, the need to keep capital and running costs down proved an important incentive, giving rise to an integrated system of low key, passive environmental control techniques that minimise mechanical systems. The building is naturally ventilated, with fresh air warming and rising up through the main reading room through the stack effect and expelled through vents in the roof. In winter, the main gas-fired heating system of water pipes in the ground floor slab is supplemented by a network of local radiators for smaller cellular spaces. All this is achieved in an undemonstrative yet thoughtful way that chimes with the wider architectural intentions. Without succumbing entirely to the lure of scientific rationalism, Lipsky + Rollet manage to make complex things look elegantly simple and obvious. This is science with soul. C. S.

6

76Study zones on the perimeter.7The monumental book box at the heart of the library clad in plywood panels stained with phenolic resin.8Light diffuses softly through the polycarbonate skin while panels of clear glazing frame external views at study table height.


ARCHITECT

LIPSKY + ROLLET

ArchitectLipksy + Rollet, ParisPhotographsPaul Raftery/VIEW



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Sydney’s Bondi Beach is, rightly,one of the world’s more famouscrescents of sand, but its naturalbeauty is not matched by thearchitecture fronting it andsprawling over its cliff-top flanks. No single carbuncle but a plague of minor boils; a rash of postwar brick and clay-tilehouses that owe everything tothe worst of English suburbia andnothing to the might of the SouthPacific Ocean.

Contemporary architects aregradually making inroads withmore climatically responsivehouses that are replacing thetacky brick boxes. London-basedWalters & Cohen has replacedone such bungalow on the veryedge of the sandstone cliffs to thenorth with a house made up of apair of pavilions in white renderand glass that cling vertiginously80m above the surf. PorousSydney sandstone does not

readily last as an exposedbuilding material in such aweather-beaten location butgeo-technical surveys indicatethat it provides a solid footing tothe concrete structure – alongthis section of the cliffs at least.A walled entrance courtdeliberately conceals thespectacular views, which areonly revealed to the casualvisitor after reaching the L-shaped first-floor living areawrapped on two sides withglazing. Views outwards allowwhale watching, viewsdownwards can reveal shoals offish 80m below, and thoseupwards give advance warning of any approaching electricalstorms that can buffet the house.

In an exercise in deferredgratification, you enter through a solid timber door set in a bladeof masonry some 7.5m high andflanked by equally tall etched

glass panels 250mm wide. Thedouble-height hall beyond is anatrium between seaward andlandward pavilions of thebuilding. Its wedge shapeculminates in a deep internallightwell fronted by a 4.5m x2.5m frameless glass panel.Uplights are set into thepolished concrete floors toavoid the need for lights withinthe soffit high above; none of the first floor’s ceilings areinterrupted by light fixings.

A flight of timber treads iscantilevered off the wall,supported by an internal edgebeam of welded steel angles,some of which return verticallyto form the framework for theglass balustrade. Upstairs, thepanorama awaits.

Concealed at entrance levelon the seaward side is a suite ofrooms with ocean views, twobedrooms and a woodworking

Living on the edgeW alter & Cohen’s house: a threshold between suburbia and the South Pacific.

180m above the South Pacific …2… surrounded by Sydney’ssuburban brick boxes … 3 … W alters & Cohen’s new houseis entered through a walledcourtyard.4Once inside, breathtaking viewsare revealed from within theclerestoried living room …5… and across the rooftop pool.

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W ALT ERS & COH EN

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studio for the client. Steel-framed sliding doors andwindows allow uninterruptedviews, even from the bathroomsthat have bluestone-clad (fromneighbouring Victoria) bathspushed against the glass. Handlesare everywhere minimized orabsent. Full-height doors at thislevel pivot shut to 10mm-widealuminium returns set in the wall.This minimal detailing prescribedby Walters & Cohen and aneatnik client has been clarifiedand executed throughout bylocal practice Collins and Turner(both former Foster and Partnersemployees).

All the timber used, includingthe matchstick screens of thegarage and the double-heightoriel above, is recycled jarrah – a tough Australian hardwood – some of it sourced from an

old wharf from the port ofFremantle in Western Australia.

The oriel serves anotherdouble-height space on thelandward side reached from ahalf-landing and incorporating a mezzanine bedspace – itselfaccessed by a beautifully builtformed-concrete staircase. A small square window givesglimpses back west across the peninsula and SydneyHarbour to the distant CentralBusiness District.

This room, like the whole ofthe upper floor in both pavilions,is surmounted by a clerestory setabove two steel channels back-to-back to conceal perimeterlighting. The steels act as a ring-beam for each pavilion and steeluprights carry the steel roof withits deep-shading eaves. An air-conditioning zone has been

created between the floors butthe combination of under-floorheating for the winter monthsand the cooling breezes pushingover the lip of the cliff suggeststhat mechanical climate controlwill not be necessary.

Although some blinds mayneed to be installed againststrong morning light, the rest ofthe cantilevered upper floor,kitchen, living, dining, study andTV areas, make the most of theuninterrupted gull’s back views.Most of the glass doors open,with only a glass cliff-edgebalustrade (on a curve with asetting-out point some 200m outto sea) between you and thedrop, but opposite the diningarea incorporation of structureinto a masonry panel creates aframed view. This living area isbacked by a waist-high insertion

of jarrah shelves and cupboardsthat runs 7m from the return ofthe staircase balustrade, thenfolds around the study zone andmakes a backdrop to a sunkenTV area. Here the glazing formsa frameless box reflecting thesea and the cliffs by day and themoon by night. The nose of thisbox, seen from the entrancecourtyard, is a subtle indicatorof the axis of splendour to come.

ROBERT BEVAN

ArchitectWalters & CohenExecutive architectCollins and TurnerLandscape architectBarbara SchafferEngineerMurtagh BondPhotographsRichard Glover

H OU SE, SYDN EY, AU ST RALIA

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W ALT ERS & COH EN

sect ion AA through pool

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:325) first floor plan90 |9

6Master bedroom suite.

1 paved forecourt2 double garage3 rear entrance4 laundry5 pool plant room/garden store6 dressing room7 external courtyard8 internal circulation area9 main entrance

10 bedroom11 bathroom12 guest wc13 kitchen14 upper garden15 bridge link16 study17 informal living area18 formal living area19 upper deck area20 pool

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Above: Friday Mosque, Djenné, Mali – biggest mud building in the world and defining image of W estAfrican architecture. Foundat ions are more than 500 years old, though building has often been rebuilt . Right: mosque, Yebe, Mali. St ick-studded mosques of N iger delta region define the unique aesthet ic ofW estern Sudan. T hough wooden posts have pract ical funct ions – as scaffold for re-rendering, structuralsupport , and assist ing in expelling moisture from heart of the wall – the most striking impact is visual.

place[Architecture.Ebook] The Architectural Review - Sellection(2002-2005)


63 |162 |1

T op: N ando Mosque, Mali. Supposedly built by a giantin one night , this highly sculptural mosque is a uniquestructure that borders the magical and fantast ical. Middle: women’s quarters, T angasoko, Burkina Faso.Among the Kassena people, each married woman hasher own quarters in the family compound. Built bymen and decorated by women, they contain livingroom and adjoining kitchen. On her death they areallowed to disintegrate, the land and crumbled earthto be reused by a future generat ion. Bottom: house of the chief of Djenné, Mali. Moroccaninfluenced wooden windows are a recent development.Right: H ogon H ouse, Sanga, Mali. T he most dist inctarchitectural form of the Dogon people, the H ogonH ouse is the home of the tradit ional spiritual leader.

Too often, when people in the West think of

traditional African architecture, they perceive

nothing more than a mud hut; a primitive ver-

nacular half remembered from a Tarzan film.

But why this ignorance of half a continent’s

heritage? Possibly because the great dynastic

civilizations of the region were already in

decline when European colonizers first

exposed these cultures to a wider audience.

Being made of perishable mud, many older

buildings have been lost, unlike the stone or

brick structures of other ancient cultures. Or

possibly this lack of awareness is because the

buildings are just too strange, too foreign to

have been easily appreciated by outsiders.

O ften they are more like huge monolithic

sculptures or ceramic pots than architecture

as we might conventionally think of it. But the

surviving buildings are neither historic monu-

ments in the classic sense, nor are they as cul-

turally remote as they may initially appear.

They share many of the qualities now valued

in Western architectural thinking such as sus-

tainability, sculptural form and community

participation in their conception and making.

T hough part of long held traditions and

ancient cultures, they are also contemporary

structures, serving a current purpose. If they

lost their relevance and were neglected, they

would collapse. In the West, mud is effec-

tively regarded as dirt, yet in rural Africa (as

in so much of the world) it is the most com-

mon of building materials with which every-

body has direct contact. Maintaining and

resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm

of life, and there is an ongoing and active

participation in their continuing existence.

This is not a museum culture.

Superbly formed and highly expressive,

these extraordinary buildings emerge from

the most basic of materials, earth and water,

and in the harshest of conditions. They are

vibrant works of art with their own distinct

and striking aesthetic, skilfully responding to

the qualities of African light and the inher-

ent properties of mud to emphasize shadow,

texture, silhouette, profile and form. During

the course of a year the mud render dries,

the surface is covered in a web of cracks and

then it slowly starts to peel off before being

re-rendered. With each re-rendering, the

shape of a building is subtly altered, so



65 |164 |1

change and movement are ever present. The

material is tactile, warm and vulnerable,

demanding and receiving an engaged rela-

tionship with its users. Often people attempt

to cement render the buildings, but not only

does this destroy them physically, as they rot

from within, but it also destroys their char-

acter. Their uniqueness is their muddiness.

T he future of these buildings is hard to

predict. Mud is such a vulnerable material

and there is an enthusiasm for building in

concrete. Given the means, many would tear

down their mud houses and build cement

block and tin roofed replacements, common

practice in those countries that can afford to

do so. So what will happen when rural

Africans are lifted out of their desperate

poverty? Will there be an understandable

rush to rid themselves of the physical mani-

festations of that harrowing past? It can

already be seen in wealthier countries such

as Ghana and Nigeria where there is virtu-

ally nothing left for future generations to

repair and preserve. Not only the buildings

have gone but also the skills to build them.

It is a gradual process of extinction.

Already the extraordinary upturned jelly

mould houses of the Mousgoum people of

Cameroon are gone, soon those of the

Kassena and Gurensi in Ghana will disap-

pear. The Sakho houses of the Boso in Mali

are all abandoned and in ruins. It is quite

possible that when west Africa emerges from

below the poverty line there will be little of

its built heritage remaining to be appreci-

ated. T he saving grace is probably Islam,

ever expanding and building more mosques,

but even then only in rural parts. In cities,

the mosques funded by Wahabi Saudi funds

are atrocious concrete imitations of a bas-

tardized Middle Eastern style.

In the sparsely populated Sahal plains of

the Western Sudan, traditional built forms

in mud are the most striking representations

of human creativity and a unique part of our

world culture – they should not be forgotten.

JAMES MORRIS

These photographs are taken from Butabu – adobe architecture of West

Africa, James Morris and Suzanne Preston Blier , New York,

Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.

T op: house, Djenné, Mali. Mud rendered walls have tobe resurfaced regularly. As the mud dries it cracks,forming a delicate textured surface. T he gent lymoulded structure behind the wall is a coveredstaircase opening onto the flat roof. T he shape willsubt ly alter each t ime it is re-rendered.Bottom: house, Djenné, Mali. T he blank facade witht iny openings for windows is a t radit ional style for theDjenné house. Domestic act ivity is concentrated inthe open courtyard to the rear.Right: Sanam Mosque, N iger, designed in 1998 byAbou Moussa who travelled hundreds of miles fromYaamaa to this inaccessible region in the north of thecountry. It was built in 45 days by the whole villageand appears to be the largest and most striking recentmud building in N iger.



94 | 9

reviews

95 | 9

Saitama University,

Yokohama, Japan by Riken

Yamamoto and Field Shop,

with its network of roof

terraces and gardens,

from Dwelling on the

Roof, Andrés Martínez,

Barcelona: Editorial

Gustavo Gili, 2005, £25.

Getting up on the roof,

whether to relax, survey

your surroundings or

escape from peril, is a time

honoured human impulse

and this intelligently

observed book combines

a historical survey of

roof appropriation with

contemporary responses

from architects and artists

such as Mathias Klotz,

Kazuyo Sejima, Foreign

Office Architects and

Rachel Whiteread.

SET PIECES

JEAN PROUVÉ COMPLETE WORKS VOLUME 3: 1944-1954 By Peter Sulzer. Basel: Birkhäuser. 2005. €118JEAN PROUVÉ HIGHLIGHTS 1917-44 By Peter Sulzer. Basel: Birkhäuser. 2002. €48

Peter Sulzer designed prefabricated concrete systems before becoming professor for construction at Stuttgart then starting a third career in participation (ARs June 1985, March 1987). His decades’ long study of Jean Prouvé, based on profound admiration for the French pioneer, reflects his process-led attitude. I reported earlier on the first two Prouvé volumes (ARs May 1997, Nov 2000): now we have the third, and a shorter compilation Highlights.

Not until you attempt to study an architect’s work in detail do you realise how little is published, how few drawings reproduced even in large monographs, how few people have actually seen the archives. In popular sources the same drawings tend to appear, and general histories necessarily depend on secondary sources, taking for granted earlier interpretations. Two areas of study suffer particularly: design development where there may be several versions, and technical detail where understanding involves many complex drawings. For Prouvé both are important, for this blacksmith-entrepreneur turned engineer-architect was a great innovator who explored newly developing techniques. His cheap prefabricated houses look unremarkable in exterior photos, but the story develops as you trace how they were made through a gradual progression of prototypes.

Volume 3, covering 1944-54, with some of the most interesting and elegant buildings, runs to 385 pages and is packed with visuals. Presentation is rather archive like: numbered drawings and photos, detailed histories of projects, letters and interviews, even patent documents. Sulzer compiles and describes with great thoroughness, but does not attempt a new master narrative, though many implicit sub-plots emerge. We see what it means when the designer is the maker who also handles the materials. We see the specialist technician contributing to works of others, such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. We see the mistake of the generous patron who initiated paid holidays and awarded himself a meagre salary, when he let the business grow too far, so that the profit-minded took over only to reduce quality to eject him.

This is a timely book, for prefabrication is again on the agenda and being reinvented, sometimes in a state of amnesia. It will also inform the continuing debate on the effects of the machine and the transformation or loss

of craft. The multi-volume set is less a quick read than for dipping and the shelf, as advice to be pondered over, especially by architects and furniture designers considering details. The Highlights in contrast is a lively taster.

PETER BLUNDELL JONES

VOICES OF EXPERIENCE

THE AFTERLIFE OF GARDENS By John Dixon Hunt. London: Reaktion Books. 2005. £25

Are designed gardens and landscapes experienced by the visitor as the designer intended? What is the difference between his/her intent and the ‘received’ experience and does it matter? Why does the designer’s view tend to prevail in narratives of gardens? What culturally determines the design and how different would the perception of a visitor from a different culture or time be (each visitor’s experience constitutes an ‘afterlife’ of the garden)? In this dense academic book, garden historian John Dixon Hunt develops his theory of ‘reception’ through literary analogy, although literary theory is obviously more limiting than the ‘reading’ of a landscape – which involves existential experiences involving all the senses – demands. He hypothesises on the above

questions through lengthy, intricate analyses of ancient historic treatises and assorted writings on gardens.

Mutability reigns throughout. From the visitor’s viewpoint, after all, there is no one fixed experience. To each ‘afterlife’ each individual brings his/her own time, culture, and personal history, and each period brings its own design fashion and viewpoint. For instance, Versailles is used and ‘received’ differently today than it would be in its own period.

These illustrated essays, in some ways reminiscent of those of J. B. Jackson, present a probing wide-ranging discourse about the experiential components of gardens. Embracing the present and the past, extant historical gardens and those of more contemporary pivotal designers (such as Lawrence Halprin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Paolo Burgi and Bernard Lassus) become part of the conversation. Themes debated include cultural triggers, distinctiveness of place, symbolism, drama, imagination and construction of meaning, the word and the visual in the landscape, and movement – both from the viewpoint of the walker and the moving freeway vehicle. Imaginative and innovative contemporary designers’ new approaches, including issues of time, ecology and historical conservation are particularly noteworthy. ELSA LEVISEUR

COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE

SKINS FOR BUILDINGS. THE ARCHITECT’S MATERIALS SAMPLE BOOK Edited by Piet Vollaard, Els Zijlstra. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. 2004. €145

Responding to the growth of interest in materials as a prime site of invention in architecture, this book offers the most comprehensive introduction I have yet seen to the vast range of natural and man-made materials now available for use as building skins. No such account could ever be exhaustive – the varieties of wood and its derivatives could fill a volume approaching this size – but the book’s more than 500 pages are impressive in scope, approach and, thanks to commercial sponsorship, value.

The materials are organised by type. These are introduced by a short text about their history, uses, environmental qualities, and so on, and then each example is allocated a double-page spread, featuring a full-page close-up illustration on the right, and a discussion of the material and its applications on the left. A short table documents key properties – colour, glossiness, translucence, texture, hardness, temperature, odour and acoustic opacity – and the treatment is notable for addressing sensory as well as technical aspects. Each spread is illustrated with one to three built examples of the material in use, and the majority of the chosen buildings are both conspicuously contemporary and, unlike most current trade brochures, of consistently high architectural quality.

Around eight hundred buildings must be illustrated, the overwhelming majority from northern Europe. In part, no doubt, this reflects the knowledge of the Dutch authors, but it is salutary to reflect on the fact that although the book is published only in English, a mere dozen or so of the examples are British, and even fewer from the US. The range and commitment to innovation evident in the Netherlands alone could certainly not be matched here.

This book can be wholeheartedly recommended as a reference for practitioners and school of architecture libraries. But I cannot help worrying that, despite the welcome discussion of tactile and other sensual qualities, its dominant message is of materials as visual ‘surface treatment’, and that as such it risks becoming yet another contribution to the reduction of architecture to a form of exterior design, to the contrivance of visual effects, not the shaping of habitable space.

RICHARD WESTON

TEACHING BY EXAMPLE

MODERN: THE MODERN MOVEMENT IN BRITAINBy Alan Powers. London: Merrell. 2005. £35

A picture in Alan Powers’ Modern: the Modern Movement in Britain captivates the ambiguities of the 1930s. Flanking the great Corbu are haughty Serge Chermayeff, raffish Wells Coates, jeune premier Jim Richards, the Hon God(frey Samuel), and Max Fry who had not yet quite mastered the Corbusian hand-jive. Photographed at the opening of the legendary MARS Group exhibition of 1938, it makes a Modernist iconostasis. We could unpick the implied theology of the Modern Movement in Britain, as Powers struggles manfully to do, or we could just see a bunch of stiff-shirted poseurs, not quite sure whether they gain more glamour from their proximity to Le Corbusier or association with social action suggested by the diagram behind. On reflection we should not be surprised that the decade’s most famous structure is a pool for parading penguins.

That ambiguity between glamour and social action is one of Modernism’s central dilemmas, in some ways as strong now as it was in the 1930s. Powers’ raising of it is, I fear, inadvertent as the thrust of his text is descriptive. His knowledge of the field is wide and it has the virtue of recognising what were once considered backwaters, such as Oliver Hill and Goodhart-Rendel alongside the acknowledged masters, but it is the selection

of examples that creates the interest and opportunities for personal exegesis, as they are presented from a descriptive rather than analytical viewpoint. This format of text-led introduction followed by a longer run of illustrated examples, follows the format of one of the 1930s’ finest books in architecture, F. R. S. Yorke’s The Modern House. So houses by Elisabeth Benjamin, Dora Cosens and (Ms) Justin Blanco White take their bow alongside Highpoint and Isokon and a fine house by cinema specialist Harry Weedon. It also resurrects examples by almost forgotten émigrés like Rudolf Frankel and Fritz Ruhemann, and factories for continental companies like Roche by the Swiss master Rudolf Salvisberg, and Bata by the Czech Vladimir Karfik.

Like Yorke, Powers presents his selection attractively though far from comprehensively, and just as the Modern House showed that Modernism went further than Mies, Corb and Gropius, he adds real evidence to the realisation that the Pevsnerite and Richardsian screens concealed a richer, deeper and broader Modernist culture in Britain during the 1930s. But beyond presenting that evidence attractively though far from comprehensively, this book only offers a starting point for urgently needed further analysis. JEREMY MELVIN

Mexican Embassy, Berlin, by Teodoro González de León, completed in 2000, from his eponymous Complete Works

edited by Miquel Adrià, Mexico City: Arquine + RM, 2004, £55. Known for an architecture that draws inspiration

in equal parts from the tenets of Modernism and the monuments and mystique of Mexico’s pre-Columbian

history, González de León’s oeuvre spans over half a century. In this hefty, well produced tome with dual English/

Spanish text and an introduction by William Curtis, his career is diligently tracked from modest early houses in

the ’40s and ’50s, to more recent projects such as the British Museum’s Mexican Galleries (AR January 1995).

Book reviews from The Architectural Review

can now be seen on our website at

www.arplus.com and the books can be

ordered online, many at special discount.



The Belzec Cemetery continues apowerful tradition of monumentsthat literally build upon the horrorof past events. Instead of shyingaway from the scale of the atrocity– be it a killing field, a battlefield,the site of a massacre or in thiscase the site of a former Nazi deathcamp – such monuments reuseoften vast areas of land in anattempt to freeze history, cast instone the scale of lost life, and tomake something strangely beautifuland moving from something thatderives from absolute evil.Haunting and mysterious, suchplaces use abstract expressionismto capture negative energy andtransform it into something with

new life. Avoiding conventional,religious or morbid symbolism,sculptors, fine artists, poets andarchitects trace lines of meaningwithin the landscape to plot theirstory through space.

Here in 1942, at Belzec, southwest of Tomaszów Lubelski, aformer Nazi work camp wasturned into a six-hectare deathcamp. Almost unfathomably, duringthe 9-month period that year fromMarch to December, over 600 000people were murdered; Jews fromthe south Polish ghettos, Bohemiaand Germany together with Polesaccused of aiding the Jews wereamong the victims. Only twopeople ever escaped.

Following a design competition in1997, sculptors Andrzej Solyga,Zdzislaw Pidek and MarcinRoszczyk set about transformingthe six-hectare site in collaborationwith architects from DDJM. Theirdeveloped competition-winningscheme comprised three elements:the monument, a museum building,and an exhibition.

The dominant form of themonument occupies most of thelarge rectangular site centring onan oblique crevice or path thatdissects the monumental burialground. The path cuts through thegently rising surface of thecemetery, a black ash burial field,within which mass graves are

CEMET ERY, BELZEC, POLAN D

ARCHITECT

DDJM

1T he cemetery museum building sitsdiscretely behind the boundary wall.2Entering through the boundary wallthe axial view is framed through theburial field toward the memorial wall.3The inlaid cast-iron relief, the Square,marks the entrance of the burial field.

ASH ES TO ASH ESArtists and architects collaborate to create a powerful, sobering memorial in Poland.

1 3

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marked as ghost-like territorieswith subtly differentiated grades ofmaterial (blast furnace slag mixedwith cinders and barren soil).Defined at one end by the Square, acast-iron relief set flush in theground which marks the entranceto the burial ground, the pathterminates in a monumental light-hued granite wall; a spatialsequence that engulfs visitors asthey approach the wall, cuttingthrough the burial field that rises toa dwarfing 9m height. Walkingbetween concrete walls, castagainst rough earth as shutteringand topped with buckling steelreinforcement bars, visitorsdisappear into the unknown in asymbolic journey that recalls thedeath of the thousands who were

lost without trace. Passingthresholds that draw lines betweenlife and death, most are reduced tosilence before being confronted bythe imposing granite screen wall. Astructure that in its relief recallsthe blood spilt and the familiarpatina of bullet-peppered walls.Standing opposite this wall,polished concrete niches arecovered with the names of victims.Names also frame the burial field asa low wall forms a horizontal stonefrieze that chronologically listsJewish communes recalling thesequence of transports.

With these powerful layers ofmeaning set within a muted yetdramatic reconstructed landscape,you could very easily miss thecemetery’s museum building. Set in

a low-lying 2m high structure thatforms part of the southernmostboundary wall, the unadornedbunker-like structure cuts into theground to contain, among a seriesof more conventional exhibitionspaces, an empty and hauntingreinforced-concrete Void-Hall; aspace which resonates with theisolation, pain and ultimate death ofmillions of lost souls; and morespecifically the hundreds ofthousands of people who died onthis very site. ROB GREGORY

ArtistsAndrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek, Marcin Roszczyk ArchitectDDJM Biuro Architektoniczne: MarekDunikowski, Piotr Czerwinski, Piotr UherekPhotographsWojciech Krynski 57 |1056 |1

site plan (scale approx 1:2000)

north/south sect ion through burial field

plan of museum

sect ion through museum building

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ARCHITECT

DDJM

1 entrance2 ramp3 museum building4 the Square5 burial ground6 crevice7 stone wall8 niche

4Crevice leading to memorial wall.5N iche opposite memorial wallengraved with names of individualskilled.

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71 | 1070 | 10 71 | 1070 | 10

Ever since John Winter audaciously clad his seminal Highgate house in a skin of weathering steel back in 1969, Cor-ten’s quasi industrial aesthetic of shipyard and factory floor has become globally ubiquitous. According to Neil Jackson, in his entertaining study of the genre in The Modern Steel House, it took seven years for Winter’s little building to slowly acquire the coveted purplish-brown patina of worn-out boiler plating. Now pre-weathered Cor-ten clads the world, from police stations

and parking lots to OMA’s Las Vegas Guggenheim (June 2002). Yet it never quite loses its quality of otherness, as demonstrated by its use in this recent Brussels apartment block. Here the ‘instant’ patina of age and distress still provides a bracing shock of the new and unusual amid wedding cake historicism.

The building lies in Schaerbeek, to the north-east of Brussels city centre, a district populated by many Turkish immigrant families. It occupies a compact, chunky wedge that turns a corner

between Avenue de la Reine and Place Liedts. Cars and trams surge past the prow-like site which is anchored between a couple of existing muscular apartment blocks. To the spirit, if not the letter, architect Mario Garzaniti follows the familiar template of the continental walk-up tenement, though the proportions and internal arrangements are more generous and imaginative than might normally be expected. Two duplex apartments are stacked above a shop at ground level, the floors linked by a narrow

HOUSING, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

ARCHITECT

MARIO GARZANITI

THE JOY OF RUSTClad in a coarse carapace of rusted steel, this housing block is a startling urban presence.

1 Shock of the new.2The cramped corner site.3Cor-ten panels are only 4mm thick.4The new block thrives on contrast.

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communal staircase inserted into an intermediate slot between the new and old buildings. Despite being logements sociaux, the duplexes are quite inventive spatially, making the most of the awkward, wedge-shaped plot. The top floor flat even has a modish sleeping loft overlooking the living space below.

But the most striking aspect of the project is the rusting metal carapace that envelops the building in a coarse caress, as if the hull of an ageing supertanker had somehow careered into the block. Yet the monolithic appearance is slightly deceptive; the Cor-ten panels are only a thin outer skin (a mere 4mm thick) riveted to stainless-steel omega profiles attached to the concrete walls. Flexible bands prevent the risk of galvanic coupling (where one type of metal encourages the rapid corrosion of another) that can occur when Cor-ten and stainless steel come into contact.

Slight disparities in the ochre tones of the panels add a sense of patchwork variety and animation to the overall composition. Cor-ten shutters are incorporated into the facade, filtering light through vertical slits in the manner of a modern mashrabiya. When closed, the shutters lie flush with the panels, giving the block an unsettlingly seamless, hermetic quality.

Clearly this is a building that thrives on contrast (modern Cor-ten and traditional wedding cake) enhanced by the jolting surprise of seeing so visually and culturally challenging a material employed on such an ambitious scale. Yet it is more than just a skin, attested by the generous proportions of the apartments and the way in which light animates the interiors. The gritty boiler plating conceals a sensitive soul. C. S.

ArchitectMario Garzaniti, LiegePhotographsAlain Janssens

HOUSING, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

ARCHITECT

MARIO GARZANITI

5Facade detail.6Light filters through the perforated shutters.7Duplex apartments are quite generously proportioned.8Sleeping loft.

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cross section looking north-eastcross section looking north-west

fourth floorsecond floorground floor plan (scale approx 1:200)

third floorfirst floorsite plan

1 street entrance 2 communal staircase 3 shop 4 flat entrance 5 living 6 dining 7 kitchen 8 internal staircase 9 bedroom 10 sleeping loft

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The Niigata Prefecture is to the east of Japan’s big island Honshu, andruns from the sea to the high central backbone of the country. In themountains, up to five and a half metres of winter snow can settle,literally submerging buildings and the even young trees of themagnificent, scented evergreen forests. To allow the public tointerpret and investigate the natural world, the Matsunoyama Natural History Museum has been set up on the edge of the forestoverlooking mountains and meadow.

Takaharu & Yui Tezuka have made a building that wriggles, snake-likeeast-west through the landscape in a brown, almost smooth rustedsteel skin. Entered from the south, the snake encloses an exhibitiongallery showing natural and artificial worlds, a reception hall,administration, a lecture theatre and, as the snake’s head twists roundfrom east to west, a posh cafeteria called ‘the culinary arts experience’.A rusted steel observation tower terminates the tail to the east, and isclimbed by energetic visitors to obtain magnificent views over foreststo the mountains. At key moments in the plan, notably where the snakechanges direction, great transparent panels are inserted in the skin,offering marvellous views into the forests surrounding the site. Themullionless transparent expanses are so big that they cannot possiblybe called windows; they are almost invisible thresholds betweeninterior and the outside. They reinforce a feeling of heightened reality,enhanced by the strange perspective tricks of the route.

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SN OW BOUN DIn the high backbone of Japan, rusted steel super-strong skin resists winter loads and thermal stresses.

site plan

1, 2Like a deserted industrial site or astrange animal, the museum snakesthrough its clearing between forestand rice field.

MUSEUM OF N AT U RAL

H IST ORY, MAT SU N OYAMA,N I IGAT A, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

T EZU KA ARCH IT ECT S

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ARCHITECT


1 entrance porch2 hall3 reception4 exhibition5 special (butterfly) gallery6 office7 lavatories8 laboratory9 store

10 Kyororo hall11 culinary arts12 stair to offices and staff rest

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sect ion showing principles of heat ing and vent ilat ion

ground floor (scale approx 1:450)

3T adashi Kawamata’s paths and deckrelate interior and nature …4... as do the huge thick acrylic panels.

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ArchitectTezuka Architects: Takaharu Tezuka + Yui TezukaAssociate architectMasahiro Ikeda/MIASProject teamTakaharu Tezuka, Yui Tezuka, Miyoko Fujita,Masafumi Harada, Masahiro Ikeda, Ryuya Maio, Mayumi Miura, Taro Suwa,Takahiro Nakano, Toshio Nishi, Hirofumi Ono, Tomohiro Sato, Makoto Takei, Hiroshi TomikawaMechanical engineerEiji Sato, Kisakatsu Hemmi/ES AssociatesLandscapeShunsuke Hirose/Fudo Keisei JimushoPhotographsKatsuhisa Kida

5Special collect ion.6 Museum is intended to interpretlocal ecology.7 Snow building up.8, 9Cranked plan causes perspect ivalillusions of exploding and shrinkingspace.

In winter, the temperature difference between inside and exterior isoften very great. And pressure from deep snow can be extraordinary(depending on the nature of the snow, how it fell, and how long it hassettled and so on). So the ‘thermally stable’ plates of rusted steel thatform the outer skin are 6mm thick, and are supported on a skeletonof steel I beams. Skin and skeleton are designed to withstandpressures of 1500kg/m2; the equally pressure resistant acrylic panelsare 75mm thick. All steel elements are thoroughly insulated. Inside,there is a skin of plasterboard supported by a lightweight inner steelskeleton. This white skin is separated from the main structure by agenerous cavity that acts as part of the ventilation and heating system.Warm air is injected along grilles in the polished concrete floors andstale air is extracted through slots in the plasterboard at eaves level.Heat is radiated to the interior through floor, walls and ceiling. Insummer, the system can be used to circulate cooling fresh air.

In winter, the museum projects through the snow with its taperingtower acting as a landmark and sign of civilization; it groans withsnow stresses. People look out into the surrounding banks of snow inwhich a surprising amount of life flourishes below the surface. Insummer, the long brown snake slips along the contours of its semi-wild habitat, which is enhanced and intensified by timber paths and adeck by Tadashi Kawamata. From some points of view, the museumseems like a picturesque long-abandoned industrial building, a mineperhaps, in the middle of the countryside. Other aspects in differentseasons reveal a cave, a shelter amid the snow, a lighthouse, awelcoming hut in the forest. And of course always an animal: snake oreven fox. The museum’s complexity of possible readings and spatialevents enhance those of the natural world it sets out to interpret.

VERONICA PEASE

MUSEUM OF N AT U RAL


ARCHITECT


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In a quiet backwater of fi elds and woods on the island of Hirvensalo in the south-west of Finland, St Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel grows from its site – a hillock surrounded by pines and spruces – embracing context and the natural environment.

The chapel is not immediately apparent on approach: following the bend of the road you are suddenly confronted by the elegant copper-clad church, its volume contrasting with its surroundings. It has the appearance of an upturned ship’s hull. The design vocabulary juxtaposes copper and wood, light and shade. The chapel was fi nished earlier this year so the copper is new; eventually its green patina will help the church blend with the surrounding pine trees.

St Henry’s is approached head on, up a gentle dogleg pedestrian ramp to the small foyer lit by natural light at the western entrance. You proceed from here through a passageway to the church proper, from darkness to light; at the far eastern end two side windows the height of the chapel throw light down onto the altar, breathtaking on a sunny day. The architect describes the main hall as the stomach of the fi sh, the fi sh being a symbol of early Christians (fi tting as the church is ecumenical).

Gallery and chapel are one volume, with the gallery at the back, and the chapel proper in the front, with the altar terminating the axis. The benches are removed for art exhibitions and you can view the art while religious ceremonies are being conducted.

The whole interior, bar the glazing around the altar, is of wood, the warm smell of which permeates the space. Seating is simple angular backless benches made of solid, edge-laminated common alder; but this elegant, pared down minimalism could prove inhospitable during long church services. The chapel’s loadbearing structure consists of tapering ribs of laminated pine

ST HENRY’S ECUMENICAL ART CHAPEL, TURKU, FINLAND

ARCHITECT

SANAKSENAHO ARCHITECTS

1The wide windows at the front of the chapel light up the altar. The copper cladding will take on a green patina in time.

This chapel in Turku draws on a long tradition of remarkable Finnish churches in which religion, nature and light come together.

DIVINE LIGHT



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two metres apart. Between these ribs is a curved interior lining of 100mm wide, untreated pine boarding. At the moment this is very light, but with time the tone will deepen to a reddish hue. The pine ribs are lit by spotlights.

The floorboards are 200mm wide, 50mm thick pine planks and run parallel to the axis of the space. These have been waxed to create a clicking sound when walked on, reminiscent of the floors of old churches. The patinated altar is the last public work by academician and sculptor Kain Tapper. In the altar window an artwork by Hannu Konola filters light onto the altar wall.

Matti Senaksenaho continues the distinguished legacy of the Finnish church architecture of Engel, Aalto, Sonck, Bryggman and more recently of Juha Leiviskä in his luminous churches in Myrrmäki and in Männistö (ARs June 1987 and June 1994). JULIA DAWSON

ArchitectSanaksenaho Architects, HelsinkiProject architectMatti SanaksenahoPhotographsJussi Tiainen

2The chapel, rising from its hillock, is reminiscent of an upturned hull, or, more prosaically, an upright iron.3Looking towards the simple altar, illuminated by natural light from side windows.

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ST HENRY’S ECUMENICAL ART CHAPEL, TURKU, FINLAND

ARCHITECT

SANAKSENAHO ARCHITECTS



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The Machine Age was the golden age of metals. Constituting both the means and end to production, machine tools and the goods they produced during the past 150 years fundamentally changed the way we live. Consumer society, for better or worse, was nourished on a diet of metal products ranging from fridges to Fords. In architecture, the steel frame and the enormous tensile capability of steel spawned both high-rise and long-span structures that radically transformed the scale and character of the built environment. The concept of doing more with less emphatically combined aesthetic ideas and industrial efficiency – themes made manifest, perhaps symbolically, in the structures produced in Britain that celebrated the new millennium.

However, the concept of lightness is changing. As Italo Calvino observes, ‘The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with “bits” in a flow of information travelling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.’1 As in all areas of our lives, the processes of design, fabrication and assembly of metal structures and cladding are being dramatically altered by these weightless bits. Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) fired the public imagination of an architecture for the future. However, even though its design and fabrication were made possible by software, the rationale of its construction belonged to the old world of standard rolled steel sections and modular cladding systems. The Experience Music Project (EMP) (AR October 2000), completed just three years later, albeit superficially like Bilbao, was built using very different processes. It belongs to the new order of complex bespoke systems in which every structural and cladding component is unique.

Further evidence of the paradigm shift is provided by Foster’s Swiss Re (AR November 2003), Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediathèque (AR October 2001) and OMA’s Seattle Library (AR August 2004) which, like Bilbao, straddle the boundary between the machine and digital ages, using standard rolled steel sections in variable structures. While in Swiss Re, the system that changes incrementally from floor to floor can be readily perceived and understood, Sendai and Seattle are preoccupied with creating the appearance of instability and replacing overarching rational systems with what Cecil Balmond calls ‘improvised connectivity’.2

Liberating claddingConsidering cladding, in addition to the effect of ‘light’ digital design and fabrication processes, the move from sealed systems to the rainscreen is having a profoundly liberating influence. Instead of the literal opacity of sealed systems with their cumbersome folded seams, top hat sections and gaskets, the open jointed rainscreen with its separate waterproofing membrane behind provides enormous freedoms for designers, which they are exploiting to different conceptual and practical ends.

In the hands of Herzog & de Meuron – whose work has transformed the perception of many materials – metal rainscreens become delicate perforate veils. The copper bands of their early Signal Box 4 Auf dem Wolf – which both become three-dimensional and transform from sealed to perforate through rotation from vertical to horizontal – were ostensibly designed to function as a Faraday cage as well as a visual screen. More recently, the expanded aluminium mesh cladding of the extension to the Walker Art Center (AR January 1989) and the copper cladding of the De Young Museum (p46) have less to do with technical performance and more to do with appearance and perception. Both are carefully judged explorations of the balance between standard panel sizes that conform to the old economy of mass production and complex surface treatments made feasible by digital production. Although the bas relief surface patterns of both buildings initially appear random, each has an underlying system. The Walker’s distinctive wrinkled skin is created by random rotation of a single pattern created by a good old-fashioned metal stamping dye, while the De Young’s patterning – perforated and stamped – oscillates between abstraction and image, having been derived from a dot screened photograph.

Perhaps most provocative in the rich ambivalence between palpable materiality and thin abstraction – perhaps even surface decoration – is OMA’s recent work with metals. On the one hand is their unbuilt proposal for San Francisco Prada, which – in contrast to both the Modernist separation of structure and skin and the current fascination with the multilayered rainscreen – developed a perforate and sealed stainless-steel skin that also worked as a structural diaphragm. Instead of a kit of parts, it was monolithic; instead of repetition, it was a variable system to have been fabricated by CNC (computer numerical controlled) water jets; in place of the desire for thinness as an index of efficiency, it was emphatically thick. On the other hand, in the new concert hall in Porto (AR August 2005), super-thin super-scaled pixellated gold leaf cross-dresses as wood grain on the plywood lining of the auditorium.

In the recent work of Morphosis – notably the Caltrans Headquarters in LA and the Federal Office Building in San Francisco ( both AR July 2005) – the metal wrapper literally takes on a life of its own. Here, the thin scrim is manipulated three-dimensionally with greater freedom than the watertight volumes it veils. Conceived as a ‘metabolic’ skin, it performs as a key component of the buildings’ environmental systems, which are designed to reduce energy consumption and advance sustainability. Thom Mayne notes, ‘In lieu of a conventional mechanical plant, the building actually “wears” the air conditioning like a jacket.’3

With another agenda, the cast bronze facade of the Museum of American Folk Art (AR February 2002), by Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates, uses the same rainscreen principle to create a surface pitted with craters and fissures – unpredictable imperfections from the fabrication process that contrast markedly with the smoothness of Gehry, the controlled patterning of Herzog & de Meuron and, looking to the past, the machined precision of the Seagram Building, a bronze-clad icon just a few blocks away. MAFA’s metal cladding, although perforate, differs in significant ways. With panels ranging from 6 to 16mm in thickness, this bronze skin is neither actually nor apparently light. It was not digitally fabricated but instead was cast at a sculptors’ foundry, aiming to reinstate the imprint of human craft – or what David Pye called the ‘workmanship of risk’ – in contemporary construction.4

These preoccupations are driven by digital design and CNC cutting, stamping and welding, with weightless bits enabling machines to create the appearance of craft, almost without human intervention on the shop floor. In contrast with the formerly arduous process of ‘tooling up’, the A. Zahner Company, which has fabricated metal cladding for both Gehry and Herzog & de Meuron, is fleet-footed, moving rapidly through generations of software as they seek to handle complexity more efficiently. As an example, they note that each of the 3600 unique cladding panels of the EMP required an average of 250 megabytes of data and a design time of 2.5 hours. On more recent Gehry projects, this has been reduced to 30 megabytes and 15 minutes per panel.5 As always in construction, time has cost implications. With constant scrutiny aimed at streamlining process, Henry Ford’s principle of minimising labour is being energetically applied, not only on the shop floor, but also to the human content of CAD-CAM technologies themselves.

This streamlining has been well suited to an economic environment in developed countries that, during the past thirty years, has seen relatively modest increases in metals prices but rapidly escalating costs for labour. Suddenly the equation is changing with the cost of steel, copper and other metals skyrocketing in response to the insatiable appetite of China’s developing economy combined with the effect of both war and weather on the price of oil. Will metals continue to provide fertile territory for the exploration of form, performance and perception, or will global economic pressures render the use of metals in architecture a luxury? ANNETTE LECUYER

1 Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage International, 1988, p8.2 Cecil Balmond. ‘New Structure and the Informal’, Architectural Design, Sept-Oct 1997, p88.3 A Model of Excellence – The New Federal Building, Washington DC: US General Services Administration, p26.4 David Pye. The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp4-8.5 Interview with William Zahner, A. Zahner Company, 2002.

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PRECIOUS METALA new era of bespoke systems of structure and cladding is testing metals and architectural imagination to their limits.

Perforated copper panels enclose the new De Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron in a delicate veil. Photograph: Dennis Gilbert/VIEW.



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1Trapped or tranquil? Or simply a nice garden ornament?

The architect’s design statement reads thus: Conceived as an interior space for self-reflection, Dream House proposes a relationship between an urban tree and an interactive sensitive piece, which transforms the natural element into an introspective human refuge. The refuge emerges from the tree as an illuminated chrysalis, establishing a reflection on the relationship between man and his built and natural environment. The piece proposes new ways of occupying and imagining space. It suggests making use of nature as the main element in creating a dialogue between nature, human beings and man-made space.

Such words are unlikely to have helped or hindered the Jury’s decision. There were no details of how or why it was made, or indeed how you were supposed to get into the space. Any discussion on how you might naturally be inclined to use the space, if fully pursued, may have revealed more about the Jury than would have been appropriate (swinging meaning different things to different people). Needless to say, however, there is an emerging fascination in such projects. This year a number of tree houses were submitted. The only conclusion was that this image drew the Jury’s attention; some finding it horrific – a torture chamber from where screams would never be heard – others seeing it as peaceful and tranquil. Like the structure itself, therefore, the ultimate decision was left hanging in the balance … R. G.

Architectex.studio, BarcelonaProject teamIván Juárez, Patricia MenesesPhotographIván Juárez

HANGING ABOUTPortable refuge, or portable prison? The decision is yours …

HONOURABLE MENTION

TREE HOUSE, HUESCA, SPAIN

ARCHITECT EX.STUDIO



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The second of two projects by Barcelona-based ex.studio was possibly the most eye-catching and unusual of all the premiated submissions. This witty, humorous response to the visual richness of Senegalese culture elicited a warm glow from the judges; indeed, what’s not to like about a glorious technicolour Tambabox?

The savannah region of eastern Senegal may be one of Africa’s poorest, yet it is culturally prosperous, mainly due to the preservation of indigenous crafts and customs, but also because of its geography, which encourages encounters and exchanges with five neighbouring countries, including Gambia and Mali. Tambacounda, the region’s capital, is the setting for ex.studio’s experiment in colour, light, textiles and human curiosity. Inspired by the dazzling diversity of the brightly coloured textiles employed by the Senegalese to make their distinctive boubous (kaftan-like dresses and robes), the wonderfully onomatopoeic Tambabox is a timber-framed cube clad in a patchwork of assorted clashing fabric panels. Some have tailored sleeves attached to them for that essential touch of cross-cultural surrealism.

The vividly coloured textiles filter and regulate the sun’s glare, so that from inside, the taut panels shimmer and pulsate with coloured light like stained-glass windows. At night, lit from inside, the fabric clad structure is transformed into a glowing polychromatic box that contrasts

with the inky darkness of its surroundings. Shadows of visitors are projected and revealed on the kaleidoscopic backdrop. Tambabox combines architecture, sculpture, textiles and tailoring in a simple yet highly lyrical way, transforming the ordinary and the everyday into something gorgeous and extraordinary.

To build and assemble the Tambabox, ex.studio worked with local carpenters and tailors, and the compact structure has an

engaging robustness that seems well suited to its context. The architects’ competition submission slightly spoils this effect by including some portentous (and doubtless lost-in-translation) observations on their African adventure (eg, ‘the textiles that delimit this architecture are murals in which the body is partly transformed becoming part of the linen cloth’), but with such seductive visuals, the judges were happily hooked. C. S.BOX FRESH

HONOURABLE MENTION

TAMBABOX, TAMBACOUNDA, SENEGAL

ARCHITECT

EX.STUDIO

Inspired by the richness of Senegalese textiles, this little fabric clad box seduced the Jury.

1Out of the box – Tambabox in context, with visitors.2Brilliantly coloured fabric panels are suffused with light.3Tambabox in after dark mode.

Architectex-studio, BarcelonaProject teamPatricia Meneses, Iván JuárezPhotographsIván Juárez

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Entitled Balloon Caught, this ingenious urban installation by Tokyo-based architects Satoshi Matsuoka and Yuki Tamura was the outcome of an initiative to re-think and re-animate public space in Vancouver. Participants were asked to explore the spatial and urban potential of an alleyway in Gastown, the city’s oldest district, through an intervention that would allow different forms of occupation through the day. Proposals were also intended as a generator of activity, attracting the public and offering new readings of the city.

From such a solemn programme comes a delightfully whimsical riposte. Translucent, glowing orbs 5m to 9m in diameter are wedged between the buildings in the alley, like runaway balloons or delicate paper lampshades. Festive and seductive, the superscale spheres heighten the spatial experience of the narrow alley. The installation is also efficient, designed to be installed and dismantled in under a day. Lit from within, the inflatable nylon orbs change character from day to night, as the city centre site was constantly accessible and inhabited.

Although only in place for three days in the summer, the urban balloons created a buzz in downtown Vancouver. The opening night party drew a crowd of 700 and subsequent events attracted a mix of designers, artists, planners, tourists, families and flâneurs. Light in touch and spirit, these charming inflatables also gained an honourable mention from the Jury. C. S.

ArchitectSatoshi Matsuoka & Yuki Tamura, Tokyo

HONOURABLE MENTION

URBAN INSTALLATION, VANCOUVER, CANADA

ARCHITECT

SATOSHI MATSUOKA & YUKI TAMURA



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HONOURABLE MENTION

HOUSING, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

ARCHITECTS POOL ARCHITEKTEN

1Generous balconies animate the stern slate-clad facades.2Edge of town context.

SWISS ASSURANCEThis large-scale housing complex reinvigorates a dull building type.

The challenges of large-scale public housing still tend to confound most architects, so it was encouraging to see this assured example from young Swiss practice Pool Architekten. Compared with most of the projects shown here it represents a sizeable commission (for over 100 apartments), and demonstrates the skills of designing and building on a large scale. Jurors were impressed by the scheme’s confi dent execution, if perhaps not so entranced by its quintessentially Swiss rigour.

Commissioned for a local housing cooperative, the development lies on the edge of Zurich, where the suburbs thin and give way to rolling countryside. The site slopes eastwards down from Leimbachstrasse to the river Sihl and forest beyond. To exploit light and views, the two blocks are placed along the west and north edges of the site defi ning a large communal garden. Clad in a reptilian skin of greenish grey slate and partly dug into the slope, the blocks have a topographic quality that abstracts the roll and heave of the surrounding hills. Each block consists of three sub-units which are kinked slightly in plan like a derailed train. Angular roof profi les also break up any potential monotony, as do the generous balconies set at regular intervals into slate-clad facades.

Deft internal planning juggles and organises a range of apartment types. Each sub-block contains three to four fl ats per

fl oor, arranged around a central communal stairwell. Apartments vary in size from one to four bedrooms, with living rooms strategically placed to take advantage of views. A quarter of the apartments are maisonettes, which interlink and overlap the standard fl ats, introducing an element of spatial diversity to what could, on paper, be quite a monotonous and repetitive building type. All fl ats have access to external space in the form of balconies (enclosed by elegantly detailed wire mesh balustrades) or roof terraces. As might be expected in this part of the world, the quality of construction and workmanship was painstaking, adding to the project’s overall sense of dignity and decency. C. S.

Architects Pool Architekten, ZurichProject teamRaphael Frei, Mischa Spoerri, Ana Prikic, Markus Bachmann, Sybille Besson, Hannah DeanPhotographsArazebra, Andrea Helbling

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Generally dictated by function and with an invariable physical prominence, air traffi c control towers tend not to be the most lyrical of structures. This new tower at Vienna’s main Schwechat airport is an admirable exception, and its efforts at recasting a fundamentally dreary building type impressed the jurors.

Around fi ve years ago, as the airport authorities put forward plans for expansion, it became clear that a new control tower would be required to cope with increased air traffi c. Local partnership Zechner & Zechner won an EU-wide competition for the new building. At 109m high, the new 23-storey tower soars over the airport complex, and its prominent location near the main entrance provided an opportunity to nudge the building into more dynamic, urban landmark territory rather than just being a baldly functional stump.

The tower is divided into three parts, each with a different

architectural character, so the overall outcome is a bit like the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpses (where individual artists envisage a different part of a composite body, oblivious of other efforts). The lower six storeys house staff offi ces in a sleek glass cube, together with facilities for controllers supervising airspace movements who do not require direct visual contact with planes. Those who do, occupy a faceted turret which has commanding views over the runways and sharply angular facades to reduce glare. The intermediate shaft is unoccupied (security restrictions prevent the space from being used commercially), but the concrete structure is wrapped in a taut membrane supported by a steel frame. The membrane shifts and twists as it rises between base and turret, giving the entire composition a sculptural quality.

The membrane adds more than just visual variety, however. It also acts as a backdrop for the display

of superscale images fi ltered through three high defi nition digital projectors. Backlighting is provided by lamps attached to the tower shaft and images (mainly soothing visions of skies and the natural world) can be varied through a computer-controlled system.

The tower thus becomes a canvas for flights of imagination, and this unconventional take on how a large vertical surface can be creatively appropriated eventually convinced the judges, despite some reservations about the elegance of the overall form. C. S.

ArchitectZechner & Zechner, ViennaProject teamMartin Zechner, Bernhard SchunackPhotographsThilo Härdtlein

FLIGHT OF IMAGINATION

COMMENDED

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER, VIENNA, AUSTRIA

ARCHITECT

ZECHNER & ZECHNER

An air traffic control tower is elevated into a city landmark through the use of light and images.

cross section ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1500)

1 foyer 2 patio garden 3 offi ces 4 conference room 5 kitchen 6 computer suite 7 rest room 8 changing room 9 observation room 10 control booth11 catwalk

1The tower’s tripartite form reflects its various functions. 2Membrane support structure.3, 4The membrane becomes a backdrop for light projection.

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1 The slightly hermetic concrete exterior. 2A soaring atrium unites the various volumes and functions.3Blood donation suite.

1 entrance 2 waiting area 3 atrium 4 reception 5 cross matching lab 6 blood group lab 7 virology lab 8 doctor’s surgery 9 refreshment room 10 donation suite 11 examination room12 pool 13 WCs 14 auditorium 15 platelets room 16 cold rooms 17 conference room18 canteen 19 offi ces 20 records

Providing services for blood collection, storage and research, Prathama Blood Centre in Ahmedabad, regional capital of Gujarat, attracted the jurors’ attention as an example of a large and quite complex building in the developing world. Designed by local practice Matharoo Associates (whose Kahnian crematorium featured in the 2003 awards cycle, AR December 2003), the blood centre is conceived as a pioneering new type of health building (prathama means ‘fi rst’ in Sanskrit) that combines sophisticated laboratory and testing facilities with an enlightened, humanistic approach.

The centre is the outcome of a competition staged by a charitable trust with the aim of recasting and restaging the act of blood donation in a more inviting public domain, so mitigating the fear and repulsion subconsciously associated with such public spiritedness. The new building can store and process 200 000 units of blood, making it the largest blood bank in India. Donations are entirely voluntary, and the centre’s on-site facilities are backed up by a fl eet of mobile collection units.

Despite the programme’s ambitions, the budget was parsimonious ($200 per sqm, including fi t out and site development). Costs were kept in check by custom designing and locally fabricating internal elements such as doors, windows, modular furniture, partitions and work stations. Even so, Matharoo Associates have succeeded in making a building that has an evident decency and dignity.

A four-storey glass-clad stack of laboratories intersects roughly at right angles with a hermetic concrete volume housing administration and support services. Between these clearly articulated functional elements is a more free-form atrium space, created by stretching and curving the concrete wall. Contained within this concrete skin at ground level are user-friendly enclaves for blood collection (separated from the more clinical blocks), so that people can just wander in and make a donation. To encourage a regular throughput of donors, there are none of the formalities and inhibitions of a formal hospital setting. Helping to soothe nerves, the donation suite overlooks a tranquil refl ecting pool, while within the atrium there are views and glimpses through to the more specialised laboratory spaces, communicating a sense of the building’s gravitas and wider social purpose. C. S.

ArchitectMatharoo Associates, AhmedabadPhotographsCourtesy of the architects


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HONOURABLE MENTION

BLOOD CENTRE, AHMEDABAD, INDIA

ARCHITECT

MATHAROO ASSOCIATES

cross section long section

FIRST BLOOD This blood collection centre, the largest in India, aims to demystify and humanise the process of blood donation.

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DIVIDED VIEWSWhen is a room not a room? The Jury is still out ...

T house – by Sou Fujimoto – was a highly contested choice. The house, which is essentially a single volume space, provides accommodation for a family of four and also serves as a space within which to display the owner’s private collection of contemporary art. Some Jury members thought this was a completely unworkable space to inhabit, with the building’s contorted spaces providing little fl exibility. Assuming that the client was party to the design process, however, raises an equally

pertinent counter-assumption that the space is exactly what they wanted; a unique, bespoke, albeit unorthodox series of tailor-made spaces.

Recalling primitive housing models that arranged private areas around a central core, this home’s eight principal rooms are ordered in a radial manner. Rather than being organised around a centralised hall, however, each space is a sub-division of the single volume, with no spatial hierarchy. Held between a single unifi ed fl oor and ceiling, rooms

are defi ned by lightweight timber walls simply made from 12mm thick plywood fi xed to 45x45mm vertical studs. Each partition has an unfi nished face, articulated by the exposed studs, and a smooth painted face, allowing the architects to set up an alternating arrangement of wooden or white rooms. R.G.

ArchitectSou Fujimoto Architects, TokyoProject teamSou Fujimoto, Yumiko Nogiri, Koji Aoki, Hiroshi KatoPhotographs1,3, Sou Fujimoto; 2, Shinkenchiku-Sha

1, 2By modelling the spaces, this tailor-made home offers an alternative to conventional domestic planning.3From the street, the faceted facade begins to express the complexity of the internal arrangement.

HONOURABLE MENTION

HOUSE, MAEBASHI CITY, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

SOU FUJIMOTO

ARCHITECTS

1 entrance 2 kitchen/living 3 master bedroom 4 study 5 piano room 6 Japanese-style room 7 child’s bed 8 bathroom 9 child’s bed 2 10 parking



Fit-out is a curious architectural medium. Often temporary, materially thin, and stylistically over-egged, it is the more muted and restrained interiors that usually attract recognition. It came as somewhat of a surprise, therefore, that this year’s Jury decided to give this small project, Tides Restaurant, an honourable mention. Little was known about the restaurant’s genre; even less was revealed about the spatial layout. Quite simply, it was the sheer ambition of the ceiling that intrigued the Jury.

In commercial fit-outs, ceilings often suffer great disservice as the forgotten elevation. Services coordination is easily overlooked, and materials rarely deviate from dry lining. Smoke detectors, light-fittings and sprinklers compete in misaligned unresolved grids, despite the fact that when seen through brightly-lit shop windows, free of merchandise, people and clutter, the ceiling is often the most prominent surface. Here then, the designers invested a great deal of time in the consideration of the ceiling,

providing an inverted acoustic topography that helps mediate what they considered to be an inappropriately proportioned space for a small intimate restaurant. With over 120 000 bamboo skewers (cut into three standard lengths), perhaps the only reservation was that this idea could have been taken even further. R.G.

ArchitectLTL Architects, New YorkProject teamPaul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David LewisPhotographsMichael Moran

SHIFTING TIDES

HONOURABLE MENTION

RESTAURANT, NEW YORK, USAARCHITECT

LTL ARCHITECTS

The designers of this New York restaurant sought acoustic softness and spatial intimacy.

1Looking from the kitchen toward the street, Tides Restaurant features a new type of suspended ceiling.



PB | 384 | 12

1A lightweight, bamboo-clad pavilion hovers over a pool.2Bamboo walls filter light and air.3Elongated volume of the entrance lobby.

HONOURABLE MENTION

RESTAURANT, BALI, INDONESIA

ARCHITECT

BUDI PRADONO ARCHITECTS site plan

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BALINESE BAMBOO This hotel restaurant in a Bali tourist resort explores vernacular forms and materials.

Jakarta-based Budi Pradono is a young Indonesian architect who has worked in Australia and Japan (with Kengo Kuma) and studied at Rotterdam’s Berlage Institute. Paradoxically, this cosmopolitan trajectory has led him back to his roots, as evinced by this little restaurant in Bali which draws intelligently on vernacular forms and materials, especially bamboo.

Commissioned to add a restaurant to a tourist villa and spa complex, Pradono evokes the idea of a taring or tetaring, a traditional Balinese temporary ceremonial pavilion. Arranged around a reflecting pool that meanders through the entire complex, the new restaurant has three parts. Two lightweight, permeable bamboo-clad pavilions house dining and drinking, while an elongated rammed earth volume (made of local clay) contains the entrance lobby. This heavier, more impermeable

structure forms a buffer zone between the activity of the restaurant and the tranquillity of the neighbouring villas.

Apart from bamboo’s obvious aesthetic qualities, it has several practical advantages over timber. It is lightweight, very fast growing and construction grade material available in three to ten years, compared with ten to twenty years for timber. Harvesting does not kill the bamboo plant, so there are fewer problems with soil erosion. Here, light magically filters and dapples through vertical screens of bamboo and lightweight hovering roofs. Yet this tropical idyll is also tempered by a guiding sense of refinement. C. S.

ArchitectBudi Pradono Architects, JakartaPhotographsFX Bambang SN



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CLIFFTOP MONOLITH

COMMENDED

HOUSE, COLIUMO PENINSULA, CHILE

ARCHITECT

PEZO VON ELLRICHSHAUSEN ARCHITECTS

1 Cast by hand using the most basic techniques, the concrete house has a primitive allure.2The raw concrete cube clings precipitously to the hillside.3, 4The triple-height living room – spaces are at once quite grand, yet domestic.

ground floor (living) plan (scale approx 1:250)

Poised on a cliff, this simple concrete house boldly confronts nature and the elements.

first floor (kitchen/dining) second floor (bedrooms) roof plan

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1 living room 2 kitchen 3 dining room 4 bedroom 5 terrace

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Encompassing deserts and glaciers in an intoxicating, longitudinal sweep, Chile’s mad geography has been a crucible for a particular kind of Modernism informed by abstraction, climate and nature. Many of the younger generation of South American architects are reconnecting with these currents (Mathias Klotz is an obvious example) to produce strong, distinctive work that resonates with place. Such exploration is also apparent in the work of the young Chilean/Argentinian partnership of Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen who are based in the coastal city of Concepción. Commissioned by a local cultural organisation,

this dramatic cliffside house on the Coliumo Peninsula, was commended for its response to site and the strong, monolithic quality of its architecture.

Some 550km south of Santiago, the Coliumo Peninsula is a breathtaking but remote rural setting populated by farmers, fishermen and the occasional summer tourist. The difficulties of transporting materials and a largely unskilled local labour force limited the scope of the project, but the architects exploit these limitations to create an architecture of great simplicity and power. Poised vertiginously on the edge of the cliff, the house is an elemental concrete cube perforated by large

square openings. Used both as a summer house and informal cultural centre, the building had to be at once domestic and monumental, apparently contradictory propositions which are skilfully resolved.

Service elements such as kitchen, bathroom, storage and staircases are relegated to the perimeter, contained within a 1m wide zone that acts as thermal buffer. This frees up the rest of the house, so the living area, for instance, is a grandly scaled triple-height volume. The house steps down the site, from bedrooms at the top, through kitchen and dining at intermediate level, to the podium of the living area that directly overlooks the cliff and

sea below. The roof also acts as a terrace.

Construction was extremely simple, with in-situ concrete cast by hand in untreated timber frames. Labour was provided by local farmers and fishermen who only had a small concrete mixer and four wheelbarrows at their disposal. In a spirit of inventive economy, the timber shuttering was recycled to make robust sliding panels that screen the service areas and windows when the house is not in use. Yet the engaging roughness of the construction only adds to the building’s primitive allure. C. S.

ArchitectPvE Architects, ConcepciónPhotographsCristóbal Palma



79 | 1278 | 12 79 | 1278 | 12

Even by Scandinavian standards, the Svalbard archipelago is challengingly remote. Over 600km north of the Norwegian mainland, the islands’ glacier-scored landscape is frozen solid to a depth of 500m and temperatures plummet to –50 deg C in winter. The upside of this inhospitability are rich deposits of coal that attracted Russian and Swedish mining operations in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. But with the decline of the coal industry, Svalbard is now looking to encourage a more diverse economy of adventure tourism and scientifi c research.

This centre for atmospheric and environmental research is in Spitzbergen, the largest island in the archipelago (and also the only inhabited one). Designed by Jarmund Vigsnæs, the centre was the outcome of a competition. Having previously built an HQ for the governor of Svalbard, Jarmund Vigsnæs were familiar with the archipelago’s formidable terrain and climate.

Clad in a highly insulated copper skin, the centre is a humped, topographic presence in the bleak landscape. Though fashionably angular, the geometry was modelled on fl ows of wind and snow raking across the site and helps to mitigate snow build-up over doors and windows. To prevent heat from the building melting the permafrost and causing subsidence, the centre sits on an elevated raft with a ventilated airspace underneath it.

As the centre’s users will be spending a great deal of time indoors, they need to feel at ease with their surroundings. The copper skin conceals and protects a pine-lined, humanly-scaled maze of internal streets, offi ces and laboratories that offers spatial incident and variety. Jurors were impressed by the response to such challenging conditions and how the architecture was literally yet creatively shaped by context. C. S.

COMMENDED

RESEARCH CENTRE, SVALBARD, NORWAY

ARCHITECT

JARMUND VIGSNÆS

NORTHERN EXPOSUREIn Norway’s remote north, this research centre responds to challenging conditions.

ArchitectJarmund Vigsnæs, OsloPhotographsNils Petter Dale

1The new research centre is a topographic presence in Spitzbergen’s bleak landscape.2, 3Angular geometry prevents the build-up of snow.4, 5, 6Pine-lined internal spaces have incident and variety. ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1250)long section cross section

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The work of the Shuhei Endo Architecture Institute is very familiar to the AR, and as such with some members of the Jury. While there were reservations that the angular use of profiled metal sheeting in this their latest work was less refined than the previous pioneering continuous curves of their earlier work (ARs April 1997, December 2000), it was still felt that this project was distinctive, well executed and worthy of a commendation.

Earlier Endo work exploited the strength achieved when lengths of corrugated sheeting were lapped and bent into dynamic and structurally integral ribbons; this work is slightly disappointing in that it relies on less sophisticated preformed corner components. Nevertheless, a similar spatial ambiguity drew the Jury’s attention.

Space here is not defined by function. Instead, it is formed as the surface folds to simultaneously define floor, wall, ceiling and roof. The continuity and reversal of the double-faced surface allows the distinction between outside and inside to blur, avoiding abrupt differentiation. Within a homogeneous townscape, openness and enclosure combine. Compared to earlier work, the result here is slightly more bulky; a symptom perhaps of the brief that required increased structural stiffness, providing internal and external decks capable of supporting the load of vehicles for sale. The solution, however, still exhibits an economy of means that is impressive, and detailed scrutiny of the construction sequence reveals just how successfully the structure has been composed to allow an otherwise flimsy, thin, lightweight material to form a composite structure with adequate structural integrity. The question still remains, however, as to just how much further the Shuhei Endo Architecture Institute can continue to exploit their interest in this particular material? R. G.

ArchitectShuhei Endo, Osaka

COMMENDED

CAR SHOWROOM, NAGOYA, AICHI PREFECTURE, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

SHUHEI ENDO

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1,2Within the ramshackle context of Nagoya City, the car showroom is a distinctive composition.3,4,5The folded planes create a variety of internal and external spaces.


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The evangelising premise of the Rural Studio is now well known, yet Sam Mockbee’s brilliant brainchild of extending the study and practice of architecture into a socially responsible context continues to flourish, even after his death (AR February 2002). Now under the direction of Englishman Andrew Freear, Mockbee’s mission goes on. Every quarter, groups of students from Auburn University elect to and live and work off campus in the impoverished counties of western Alabama. Working with the local Department of Human Resources, the students tackle small-scale projects that engage with the unpalatable, neglected

margins of American society. As with all Rural Studio endeavours, architectural involvement goes well beyond the abstract niceties of design into the more challenging and uncharted realms of hands-on building, and sourcing materials, as well as finance, and administration.

Here, a quartet of students designed and built a new pavilion for communal activities in a neglected park in Perry County, the most impoverished county in Alabama. The park was first created in the 1930s, but was closed in 1970 and left untouched for over 30 years, slowly growing into a luscious, mysterious, forgotten landscape. Utterly simple in conception and

execution, the pavilion is tucked in among a lush, hardwood forest of water tupelos and cypress trees near a former picnic area. Shaped like a giant megaphone, it sits boldly in its arboreal setting. A large deck made of local cedar forms a datum for viewing, assembly and performance. The deck is raised some 18in (450mm) off the ground (to resist the regular local floods) and cranks up to create benches and a formal entrance. Set against this main datum is a smaller, more intimate enclave with a love seat. The deck is sheltered by a thin, aluminium-clad roof that soars up to 24ft (7.3m) at its highest point. From a distance, the

COMMENDED

PAVILION, PERRY COUNTY, ALABAMA, USAARCHITECT

RURAL STUDIO

trunk-like columns blend with the trees, so the roof appears to hover lightly above the deck.

The Cedar Pavilion has proved immensely popular, hosting communal gatherings, catfish fries and family reunions, as well as functioning as an open-air classroom for local schools and colleges. Jurors admired the clarity and economy of the architecture and how, in formidable social circumstances, it helped to renew and foster a sense of community. C. S.

ArchitectRural Studio, Auburn, USA Project teamJennifer Bonner, Mary Beth Maness, Nathan Orrison, Anthony TindillPhotographsCourtesy of the architect

1Supported by arboreal columns, the pavilion blends into the forest.2 A megaphone-shaped roof encloses a platform.3The elevated platform resists periodic flooding from the nearby river. ground floor plan (scale approx 1:200) long section cross section

site plan

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3ARBOREAL ARBOURDeep in a forest, this pavilion helps to reinvigorate community life.



71 | 1270 | 3 71 | 1270 | 3

1Clad in Norwegian pine, housing blocks have a formal and material rigour.2External staircase doubles as a terrace in summer.3Trondheim context.4Interior of studio flat in two- storey block.5Monastic rigour of top floor bedroom in main block.6Communal living space in main block.

This imaginative new housing in Trondheim attempts to build on a radical civic spirit.

RADICAL CHIC

1 entrance 2 communal living space 3 bedroom 4 studio fl at

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This housing in Trondheim, Norway’s third largest city, is an imaginative response to the vibrancy and enterprise of the local alternative lifestyle movement. Svartlamoen began life in the eighteenth century as a working-class neighbourhood near the sea front. After the Second World War, it was re-zoned for industrial use, sparking fi erce public protest which consigned the area to developmental limbo. By the 1980s, squatters, artists and entrepreneurs were colonising the redundant building stock and by 2001, the community had such an air of permanence and legitimacy, that the industrialisation plans were scrapped. Instead, Svartlamoen was re-zoned for residential use under the wonderfully nebulous rubric of a ‘semi-autonomous urban ecological experimental area’, which aims to crystallise and build on its original informal spirit.

This project by local partnership Brendeland & Kristoffersen is the

outcome of a competition for low-rent, ecologically conscious housing. Responding to the area’s history of gentle subversiveness, it suggests new possibilities for urban living while displaying an almost Swiss fetish for materiality and formal rigour. The scheme has two separate crisply prismatic apartment blocks of two and fi ve storeys. The smaller block houses six studio fl ats, while the larger block has four storeys of communal fl ats (each for fi ve to six people occupying an entire fl oor) set above ground level shop units. Bedrooms are monastically compact and face north, while communal living and dining spaces overlook a south-facing courtyard. Circulation is external on a broad steel staircase that doubles as an informal terrace in summer.

Timber use was part of the brief, as it is renewable, recyclable and (potentially) a local resource. Assembled on site in just 10 days, the prefabricated structure is spruce, imported from Austria. The

144mm thick exterior walls are loadbearing to provide column-free space and internal partitions are also quite robust (96mm thick), so that furnishings or equipment can be fi xed directly to the walls. Reduced energy consumption was another programme requirement, so external walls have an additional layer of 200mm mineral wool gypsum boards and an outer skin of untreated Norwegian pine.

Compact plans (which encourage communal living) and simple detailing make for an economical solution both in terms of capital and running costs, yet there is no loss of architectural or urban dignity. Unsentimental and functional in a way that recalls Norwegian vernacular farm buildings, the scheme resonates with Svartlamoen’s radical history. C. S.

ArchitectBrendeland & Kristoffersen, TrondheimPhotographs1, 2, Jeroen Musch; 4, 5, 6, Johan Fowelin;3, Geir Brendeland

COMMENDED

HOUSING, TRONDHEIM, NORWAY

ARCHITECT

BRENDELAND & KRISTOFFERSEN

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1The restored building – compact and crumbling, but given new life.2Inserting the new structure.3New and old elements are clearly legible.

PRIZEWINNER SHOWROOM, PFALZ, GERMANY

ARCHITECT

FNP ARCHITEKTEN

North Elevation 1:50East Elevation West Elevation 1:50 South Elevation 1:50

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The wit and economy of thinking that informed this design pleased the judges; it is exemplified in the punning description of what has been achieved, turning a pigsty (Saustall) into a showroom (Schaustall). The tumble-down 1780 structure had seen better times, and was partly destroyed in the Second World War. It was reassembled and added to in the intervening period. The original intention behind the commission was to refurbish the structure and upgrade it as a showroom. However, its physical condition made it difficult to finance a thorough upgrade, and a replacement building of the same

size was not possible on the site, due to its proximity to a street.

The generic solution, which has a long history in architectural approaches to sensitive ruins, was to place a ‘house within a house’, even if the original had been a home for pigs. But how? What should touch what? Could parts of the new structure protect the old, in the way the old walls give extra protection to the new building?

The architect, for reasons of economy and logistics, placed a timber ‘house’, which copied the facade of the original building, inside the stone but without ever touching it, while the showroom

roof protects the existing structure. The arbitrariness of the windows now looks fashionable, based as it is on the functional requirements of the pigs and/or the farmer rather than a jokey translation of ordinariness.

Light, colour and warmth transform the building at night; visitors can pry into the gaps between the structures and wonder how it was all done. The new internal life extends the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. P. F.

ArchitectFischer Naumann Partnerschaft, StuttgartProject teamStefanie Naumann, Martin Naumann

THE ARTIST WITHINFrom pigsty to showroom, this little historic structure is cleverly reborn.



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INFORMAL ORDERWith just three formal variables, this sinuous new settlement works with site and brief.

1On a gently sloping hillside overlooking Hokkaido, the 11 cuboid forms create an apparently informal arrangement of buildings.

This project was a popular choice, with many intricate spatial qualities and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Sea Ranch – Charles Moore’s celebrated 1960s Californian cliff-top settlement, that has since become a model of ordered informality. Beyond this association, however, this contemporary interpretation stood out as an extremely accomplished work. Through an ingenious manipulation of modular plans and elevated forms, the architect has created a settlement with its own

striking identity, embodying the landscape and place-making qualities of Sea Ranch, without merely copying it.

Adopting the contemporary interest in applying a single cladding material to both walls and roof, the buildings are simply articulated in black profiled cladding, producing an overtly contemporary composition that sits comfortably on a south-westerly slope overlooking the sea in Hokkaido in the northernmost mainland of Japan. Providing accommodation for up to twenty mental health patients,

the campus consists of a sinuous cluster of buildings: 11 square units linked by 10 interstitial triangular spaces. Three roof types – flat, mono-pitch and ridge – and three storey heights further articulate each unit’s form, adding complexity to the building’s silhouette as it descends the subtle gradient of the site. The 5.4 x 5.4m units contain cellular accommodation – bedrooms, living rooms and offices – separated by triangular alcoves, entrances and circulation zones. The Jury remained less convinced about the building’s appropriateness

HIGHLY COMMENDED

RESIDENTIAL CARE UNIT, HOKKAIDO, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

SOU FUJIMOTO ARCHITECTS



HIGHLY COMMENDED

RESIDENTIAL CARE UNIT, HOKKAIDO, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

SOU FUJIMOTO ARCHITECTS

2The buildings’ contorted plan form gives westerly views across the city, and into more intimate external enclaves.3Places for casual meeting or semi-public refuge.4In the westernmost accommodation block, three bedrooms provide an alternative to standard rectilinear spaces.

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as a dormitory for the mentally disabled; however, in response to this the architect’s description of the scheme as being ‘suitably ambiguous’ helped them settle on an equally ambiguous decision.

When seeking to create a comfortable home for twenty residents, the designers wanted to create a context that, in a controlled, secure and sensitively handled way, would mimic the diversity and sense of unpredictability of city life. The form generates a wide variety of spaces, of shapes and sizes, gaps, dead-ends, nooks and crannies, creating a series of in-between places where people may be naturally inclined to find refuge. If likened to a city, this arrangement seeks to create alleyways and tiny squares on

every corner, instead of building spaces, corridors and communal areas that recall the anonymous and potentially intimidating effect of wide roads and large public squares.

Domestic dimensions and city-like diversity are therefore combined into a new series of internal spaces, from where views across the coastal conurbation of Hokkaido give the residents a controlled link to their wider context. R.G.

ArchitectSou Fujimoto Architects, TokyoProject teamSou Fujimoto, Yumiko Nogiri, Koji AokiPhotographs1, 4, Dalci Ano2, 3 Sou Fujimoto



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Sophisticated structural design informed a gymnasium building in Tomochi, Japan, symbolising its region.

SPACE FRAMED

The judges were immediately attracted to the apparently free-form structural mesh that produces this small gymnasium building in a town in Kumamoto Prefecture whose chief industry is forestry – the building had to make use of timber as a symbol of its area. On closer inspection there was more to this building than immediately met the eye. The structure is in fact a hybrid of glulam and steel; light gauge steel columns are placed at 1m intervals along the exterior wall, with load transferred to a

grid of 120mm x 120mm cedar members on their inside. A 2m grid of light gauge steel supports the roof, while below, a grid of cedar members is ‘sifted’ at a 45 degree angle, connected to form trusses with a 22m span.

Angling the lower parts of the trusses allowed the designers to produce height where required by transferring load to trusses where a high ceiling was not needed, ie, the two rooms that accompany the gymnasium itself, which house mini-volleyball courts.

While the structure works in a simple and effective way, its design is sophisticated. Despite the apparent free-form nature of the structural timber grid, in fact each element is part of an orthogonal grid in both plan and elevation. However, only one out of every four members in the timber grid line act as trusses; the remaining 75 per cent simply span between the eight main truss lines. By contrast, the shift of the timber and steel grids results in the steel members working as a plane,

PRIZEWINNER

FORESTRY HALL, TOMOCHI, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

TAIRA NISHIZAWA ARCHITECTS

1The building sits on a man-made hill in a mountain context.



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each stressed uniformly, and thus minimising use of material.

The lower parts of the wall are in cedar, but the project is essentially a glazed box (no concrete has been used), located on a man-made hill planned to accommodate a baseball field, parking and a grass park. Of course, the site is surrounded by entirely natural mountains; the architects responded to this hybrid context with a bush-like hybrid of their own.

PAUL FINCH

ArchitectTaira Nishizawa Architects, TokyoStructural engineerArup Japan


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PRIZEWINNER

FORESTRY HALL, TOMOCHI, JAPAN

ARCHITECT

TAIRA NISHIZAWA ARCHITECTS



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Sustrans is the UK’s leading sustainable transport charity, promoting a vision to see the world adopt methods of transport that benefit the health of individuals and the state of the environment. To date they have been extremely successful with award-winning initiatives, including the National Cycle Network, Safe Routes to School, and Bike It. In short, they are far more than a charity for weird cyclists. Commissioning artwork has also been part of their programme, bringing delight and spectacle to their expanding cycle network that in itself has restored, rejuvenated and reopened previously inaccessible parts of our landscape.

The William Cookworthy Bridge, while not pure art, is one such component, providing a valuable link in Clay Trails: part of the Network that includes 15km of paths over the former China Clay works in Cornwall, linking communities and visitors, and providing car-free access to the Eden Project (AR August 2001).

Designed by local architect David Sheppard, the bridge is much more than the metal object that we see. It is part of larger, integrated, sculpted landform, that makes a place within this very specific landscape. An elevated viewing platform acts as a fulcrum between land and bridge, turning the route through almost 90 degrees. The artificial embankment – formed from 10 000 tons of ‘stent’ quarry waste – ascends to the pivot point, recalling the monumental scale of earth movement and sculpting that is characteristic of this area; a place where industry has brought a very specific identity.

The bridge itself appealed to the Jury due to its physical and notional straightforwardness; a quality that is evident in the architect’s description: a simply supported box girder, 25m in span, 2.5m wide and 450mm deep, with a 1.4m high parapet for horses and cyclists. It is beautifully simple, and the distinctive vertical fins, set at 100mm centres, discourage climbing toddlers, and play with the moiré effect, causing the bridge’s visual mass to change when seen in motion. It is a wonderful addition within a unique landscape, and a fitting memorial to the 300th anniversary of the man who founded Cornwall’s China Clay industry, William Cookworthy. R. G.

1The Corten fins produce a subtle moiré effect when seen by passing cyclists, walkers and riders.2The bridge provides an important link in the Sustrans 15km Clay Trails.

site plan

section through earthwork and Bodmin Road

ArchitectDavid Sheppard Architects, Devon with SustransProject teamDavid Sheppard, Colin Sanderson, Simon BallantinePhotographsJoakim Borén

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SHEPPARD’S DELIGHTIn the beautiful Cornish setting, Sustrans’ mission to make the landscape accessible is perfectly served by a new bridge.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

BRIDGE, ST AUSTELL, CORNWALL, UKARCHITECT

DAVID SHEPPARD ARCHITECTS



BRIDGING THE GAPHand built by volunteers, this new structure in China bridges more than a physical gap.

1, 2Bridge provides safe route to school, meeting point and a place for contemplation.3Made largely from local materials, the bridge sits comfortably in the landscape, bearing on the river bed.

plan

HIGHLY COMMENDED

BRIDGE, MAOSI, CHINA

ARCHITECT

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

section

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In the Gansu province of north-west China, the Po River separates the humble village of Maosi into two parts. This has a significant effect on its inhabitants, especially during floods. Crossing the river is an essential ritual of daily life, forming the route for many, including that for children between home and school. When the water rises above ankle depth, the only means of crossing it has been to build a primitive bridge from mud, straw and tree branches – exploiting the limited means available within the Loess Plateau region.

Historically, each year, after the autumn harvest, the villagers

gather materials to rebuild the structure, taking on average 15 days to complete it. Despite this seasonal effort, the summer rain would always return to wash it away. At best, crossing the bridge was precarious, with the children adopting excellent acrobatic skills, balancing as they tiptoed across its narrow and uneven deck; at worst, it was lethal.

A solution came when a number of academics from Hong Kong considered the problem; the end result representing a collaboration between the Chinese University in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Xi’an Jiaotong University. Earlier

this summer, project volunteers travelled to the remote village and built this new bridge by hand in just five days. Sited 1.5m above the river-bed it will be accessible 95 per cent of the year, and is easy to maintain. The 80m long bamboo deck has already survived a freak 4m flood, and an 80 year old villager recently reported that, after 20 years, he could now visit his friends on the other side. R. G.

ArchitectDepartment of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong KongProject teamEdward Ng (project leader), Rollin Collins, Paul Tsang, Lucia Cheung, Kevin Li, Chan Pui Ming, Karen KiangPhotographsChinese University of Hong Kong



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ROLL WITH IT

1,2,3States of play: the bridge is stable in any position, as hydraulic rams push and pull.cross section – rolled out cross section – rolled in

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Good design is not just about good ideas, rolling with it, going with the creative flow; it is also about good execution. Great design comes when both factors combine. Individuals who repeatedly come up with new tactics, those who try to reinvent the wheel and more often than not succeed, are at best inspirational, and at worst downright irritating. In architecture, the prize arguably goes to Herzog and de Meuron, whose recent exhibition (AR July 2005) drew an observer to publicly deride their ‘incessant inventiveness’. In the slightly left-field world of architectural device design, the creative output of the Thomas Heatherwick Studio is equally challenging. You can almost hear the secret thoughts of their

observers saying, ‘now, why didn’t I think of that?’

When asked to design a retractable bridge, Heatherwick was not content to redress existing types: swing bridge, lifting bridge, or rigid retractable. Instead he came up with something completely new. Well almost; no single idea is ever generated in isolation. The closest precedent for this probiscus-like coil is perhaps the military bridge; the type that is rolled out when existing passes have been destroyed or that is used by emergency services in times of natural disaster, to give access for aid or evacuation. Sited in London’s Paddington Basin, this bridge rolls open, by slowly and smoothly unfurling. It mutates from conventional pedestrian platform into a circular sculpture,

that sits comfortably on the canal bank when not required. The structure is pushed and pulled by a series of hydraulic rams set within triangular segments; challenging logic by pulling it open and pushing it closed. As it recoils, each of its eight segments simultaneously lifts, causing it to curl until the ends touch to form a perfect circle.

The studio’s aim was to make function from movement. As such it can be stopped at any point along its journey, whether at the very start, when it looks as though it is hovering, or halfway through its opening path. Delightfully conceived, delightfully resolved, delightfully detailed, and delightfully made; don’t you just

hate it? R. G.

DesignerThomas Heatherwick Studio, London

A new footbridge animates Paddington’s still waters.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

ROLLING BRIDGE, PADDINGTON, LONDON

DESIGNER

THOMAS HEATHERWICK STUDIO

