…a restoration @ the Strawberry Hill house in Twickenham

I do not particularly like visiting heritage houses. Of course I recognise that  history of architecture is recorded through buildings like Strawberry Hill house. Still most of them represent an extreme accumulation of wealth and the rigid class systems that created them. As already mentioned it goes without saying that their era’s architectural style lives on through them and in that way they are incredibly important. Strawberry Hill in particular is doubly significant being the very first of its kind.

Strawberry Hill house, view from the gardens

Horace Walpole who created it, bought this land and the cottage that was already there in 1749 and in the following years he reinvented the house completely. It seems that Walpole was deeply fascinated with all that was dark gloomy and medieval and he dreamed of building a Gothic castle. In a way he truly did so as most gothic buildings had no fixed plans to begin with but developed gradually because of various problems that hindered their construction or due to the availability or not of funds. Thus, he proceeded to strip the originally small cottage he bought to its structural elements and along with two of his friends, John Chute and Richard Bentley, who named themselves “The Committee on taste”, started transforming and expanding the house into a gothic ‘castle’. Finally they filled it with a large collection of furniture and art works

The entrance hall of the house

After Walpole’s death the house passed to his cousin and eventually it was inherited by the Waldegrave family. Slowly all of his fortune was spent and every single collection item was sold in an auction. The house and land were also sold, to St. Mary’s college in 1923 and only recently they were restored and re-opened to the public. The importance of Strawberry Hill house is not exactly related to its quality as an architectural achievement. It is more associated with the fact that it signalled the beginning of Gothic revival. Until that time Gothic architecture was only a reminder of the Middle ages but Walpole with his obsession of Gothic ‘gloomth’ (his term) without realising it, started a ‘trend’ that slowly took the place of Neoclassical style that was prominent until then.

Left :The house from the street/ Right picture: the entrance with the symmetrical drainage pipes

My visit to Strawberry Hill was interesting even though the place actually photographs better than it looks from up-close. Before even entering it I felt there was something wrong about it. Standing in front of its entrance, an employee shortly introduced us to the house’s history. A man who was apparently a heritage-house enthusiast, asked why this part of the building was painted white when the rest of it had a grey colour. The attendant explained that it was always white, still somehow we all had the impression that it wasn’t. While this conversation was taking place I looked up and saw two drainage pipes over the entrance door that also looked totally wrong, with a cheap air about them. Regardless of the fact that many people were involved in this refurbishment and a lot of money was spent on it, details like this one made me wonder about good restoration and how it is achieved.

Left: The Great Parlour / Middle: Walpole’s bedroom / Right: The library

A similar example was the entrance hall’s wallpaper which actually had a cartoon-like aesthetic. Unfortunately the efforts to make it look like the original fell short and it was rather Disneyland-like.  The same goes for the gilded ceiling of the Gallery where the ribs were made of papier-mâché as the attendants very happily admitted. All the rooms were restored and polished to superficial perfection and everything looked brand new as if it was built yesterday. However the house was so empty that looked weird. There was literally nothing inside these rooms. They were clean and lifeless like a theatre set without actors. It really left me wishing I had visited it when it was dark and raggedy, reflecting more accurately the decline of its past glory.

Left: The Gallery with the golden papier-mâché ceiling / Middle: The Tribune, the room where Walpole kept his treasures / Right: The library

Instead of furniture each space was occupied by an overly enthusiastic attendant who was ready to jump up and start narrating Walpole‘s achievement as if they were related to him by blood. All attendants had many elaborate details to share about the use of each room and its objects that were sadly nowhere to be seen.This rather overwhelming chattiness was basically the only service that justified the 8.40£ ticket that felt too expensive for what the visit had to offer.

Fireplaces. Top left: in Walpole’s bedroom / Top right : in the Library / Bottom left : In the Round room / Bottom right : in the Great North Bedchamber

The whole experience brought to my mind another restoration, that of Stoa of Attalos in Athens. The building was one of the most impressive stoae of Athens and was constructed orgininally around 150 BC. It was destroyed in AD 267 and remained a ruin until 1950 when it was restored by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The fact that it was refurbished to its exact original state has raised many questions throughout the years amongst architects and archaeologists who consider this a violation of the monument. The materials used came from contemporary factories hence they are too uniform and modern in order to recreate its original image.

Stoa of Attalos in Athens Greece built from 159 BC to 138 BC and restored by the American School of Classical studies in Athens. Another example of a building being refurbished to its original state

The last decades many things have changed as far as architectural conservation theories and ethics are concerned. Hence the attempt to imitate historical buildings’ original state is largely frowned upon. The discussion around preservation of historic architecture is very long and still inconclusive. Often the zeal to save a building from deterioration leads to irreversible mistakes. Considering that historic buildings exist as vessels of memory it makes one wonder if polishing them to this extreme degree serves the very purpose of preserving them in the first place. Ultimately the image of the past that they are supposed to transmit into the future is rather illusive.

Strawberry Hill houses website here

Wikipedia page of Strawberry hill house here

More about Horace Walpole in wikipedia here

Find out more about Gothic Revival architecture here

… a Piranesi drawing @ Piranesi’s Paestum at the Soane Museum

Left: Piranesi Paestum print / Right : Piranesi

Piranesi  was famous already in his time and he continued to be all the way through to our age. He is especially known among architects who have been fascinated with his etchings for the last 200 years. Sir John Soane admired Piranesi too but he also had the privilege to meet him before he died, when he travelled to Italy at a quite young age. Later on, when Soane became an architect and eventually a professor of architecture he purchased 15 of the Paestum drawings. He extensively used them to illustrate the lectures he gave to his students at the Royal Academy of Arts and he also built a special room in his house with an interesting sliding-panel structure to fit all of them together in the same space.

Two of the final Piranesi Paestum prints

At my first visit to the Soane museum a few years ago I did not even know what to expect when I entered that special room. The door closed behind me and a man with white gloves started his apparently usual drill of moving around the panels in order to reveal the drawings that were hidden underneath. The  room was packed with visitors that seemed more curious about the mechanism than the actual exhibit.  Quite predictably (considering I am an architect) I was totally surprised and overcome with joy when I realised that I was faced with Piranesi originals! Unfortunately I had only a little time to look at them, since  the gloved man was swift in his moves and also quite soon rushed us out for the next group of visitors to come in.

Piranesi study drawing for the Paestum prints

The Paestum drawings were made as preparatory studies for the prints Piranesi made with the same subject. It is rather impressive they were saved as he was notoriously known to destroy all his studies in order to create the illusion that he was infallible. Piranesi wanted people to think that he was so uniquely gifted that he made the prints spontaneously and to perfection. Soane owned 15 drawings from this series which have been reunited with two more brought here from Paris and Amsterdam for this exhibition.

However it should be mentioned that the actual Paestum temples are also truly special for many reasons. They are in Italy but they have Hellenic origin which means that they were created by Greek colonists in the 6^th century BC. However they are not representative of neither Greek nor Roman architecture. It seems that their style lays somewhere in the middle and their enormous Doric columns would ultimately be consider disproportionate by most Greeks and Romans.

The Paestum temples as they are today

Another interesting fact about them is that they were not discovered before the mid-18^th century. Because of that and also due to the stone they are made of they demonstrate rather peculiar signs of natural erosion. Piranesi was fascinated by them and he managed to grasp their quite unique atmosphere in the way that only he was able to.

The exhibition captions placed under each drawing reveal interesting information like the fact that the figures in front of the temples were added posthumously by other artist’s or Piranesi’s son, which only makes sense as they do look rather odd. We also find out that the drawings are full of ‘mistakes’ as far as the geometrical accuracy of the perspective views and the positioning of the vanishing points. However to me this piece of information was truly unimportant because the geometric accuracy seems trivial in evaluating a work of art’s value. Most Piranesi lovers adore his work because of the out-of-this-world quality that it has and not its precision.

Piranesi Prisons

The mystic ‘air’ that his famous Prison etchings have is evident in these drawing as well. Especially the ones least refined with the rough layers of chalk and almost harsh watercolour washes are the most impressive because the artist’s true spirit and dark vision come through and truly grasp the viewer.

Piranesi might have been a self-obsessed perfectionist of an artist but he was also a huge before-of-his-time talent which makes him both classic but interestingly enough, always relevant. Soane was also very notorious in his hoarder-like accumulation of art-works and historical artefacts that shocks the museum-visitor that does not know much about him. The particularity of both is present in this exhibition which is definitely worth visiting.

Thomas Lawrence portrait of Sir John Soane via Wikimedia / Views of Soane Museum as it is today (bottom pic via Smithsonianmag.com)

The exhibition will be on until the 18th of May and it is free. See more at the Soane museum website here

Read more about Piranesi here

Read more about Sir John Soane here

…a photograph @ Geraldo de Barros exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery

It was when I was still a student that I first started to figure out why I found architecture so appealing and beautiful. It was because of its combination of art with science. Science counterbalanced art’s arbitrary vagueness and art gave meaning to science’s dry strictness. Naturally I was not always successful in balancing the two but I nevertheless respected them equally. The last few decades however, aesthetics have been much more favoured and in the words of Franco LaCecla from his book ‘Against Architecture’, architects are increasingly ‘selling’ themselves as public artists. It seems that the mystic bond of art and science is broken, or at least severely damaged.

Geraldo de Barros, Fotoformas, 1948-50

So a new sort of over-designed architecture has emerged and it is one that seems to lack substance. Or is it that consciously the majority of architects choose to turn a blind eye to both practicality and social issues and instead obsess in a neurotic manner over colour palettes and high-tech finishes? Whatever the reason it is impressive that we increasingly overestimate aesthetics but still manage to let architectural art gradually slip further and further away. Of course discussing architecture as art is rather dangerous as it is highly subjective. Especially since there are so many other factors involved in its evaluation, like functionality, social and political impact and so forth.

Geraldo de Barros, Fotoformas, 1948-50

Regardless of architecture’s complexity and multifaceted nature there is no doubt that it is an art and besides its ability to affect people’s lives in a very literal way, it can also have a strong emotional impact on them as well.

Again in my student years I remember coming across Le Corbusier’s famous quote:

“You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.
But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: “This is beautiful.” That is Architecture. Art enters in“.

 What Le Corbusier describes here is something that happens secretly and its mechanism is not easy to grasp nor copy. It is fleeting and vague but also strong and pervasive.

Geraldo de Barros, Fotoformas, 1948-50

 The photographs that Geraldo De Barros took throughout his career somehow manage to sum up  everything that moves me about architecture. Geometry, axes and vectors and the casting of shadows. Penetrating magnifications of seemingly irrelevant structural details. The human scale. The vastness of nature and the way that architecture manages to tame it by providing cosy shelters.

Of course it is people who are emotional not buildings, but people live their lives in buildings and they get attached to their surroundings because this is the way they dwell, by getting emotionally involved. Years ago I read a book that explains that this is due to crypto-religious tendencies*. Our primitiveness reveals itself each time a space acquires special meaning by association to our own personal life-story. Spaces get appropriated symbolically, a street corner is scary to me because it will forever remind me of a bike accident I had there and a particular cafe will seem sad as it will always be the place where a lover broke up with me etc. Regardless of the fact that I partly agree with this theory, I cannot disregard the fact that it diminishes architecture’s ability to evoke emotional responses on its own, which I most definitely believe in as well.

Geraldo de Barros, Sombras, 1996-98

Geraldo de Barros somehow manages to distil the essence of this bond between people and spaces without being graphic by referring to specific stories. This is why his photographs are truly poetic. A poet shares an image that resonates with feeling but rarely reveals the exact information that brings on the emotion. De Barros is considered a very important artist in Brazil though unfortunately he is not that known in the rest of the world. However he lived in Europe at the beginning of his career and he was very much influenced by that era’s artistic schools and movements. This is evident throughout his work, especially some of the Fotoformas reminded me a lot of Bauhaus photos of buildings or Moholy-Nagy’s photograms. The photographs on display at Photographers’ Gallery are either produced at the very beginning or the very end of his career as in the middle he was not that interested in photography. Apparently for quite a few years he was a successful industrial designer and he owned his own furniture company.

Geraldo de Barros, Sombras, 1996-98

 Looking through someone’s lens is as close as one can get to looking though their eyes. De Barros saw space and understood its geometry as intensely as he understood its symbolic possibilities. I believe he was moved by spaces the same way that architects are. He communicates his understanding of the world by using an architectural language that is stripped of mundane elements and thus is elevated to a higher level. The images resonate like music, they tremble and shake with feeling and beauty.

Geraldo de Barros, top left untitled from Fotoformas and bottom right Self-portrait from Fotoformas 1948-50 / top right and bottom left Sombras, 1996-98

*Mircae Eliade (1959), The sacred and the profane, London: Harcourt

The exhibition will be on at The Photographers’ Gallery until the 7th of April.

See more about it at the Gallery’s website here

Geraldo de Barros website here

… a prototype @ Prototyping Architecture exhibition at the Building Centre

Amanda Levete Architects’ entrance to the V&A Museum for London Design week 2011. Photo top left: part of the structure from the exhibition / All other photos :writer’s pictures from the actual exhibit in 2011

A prototype (in Greek πρωτότυπο: πρώτο=first, τύπος=type) is the first of its kind, something that is designed in order for copies to be modelled after it. Hence it is rather obvious that prototyping is a creative but also a very ambitious business too. In this exhibition of architectural prototypes at the Building Centre what I found most interesting was that creativity does not only characterise artists. Engineers, inventors and researchers are creative in a way that at times puts artists to shame. The exhibits also prove that structural parts and building methods that emerge as solutions to particular problems on building sites, or are invented in order to reduce cost and save energy can produce truly innovative forms too.

Protocell Mesh by Peter Beesley.

I am almost positive that designers were involved in the aesthetic refinement of the actual products. However what I observed and to my opinion makes the exhibits exceptional is that aesthetic is not always the goal but emerges almost as a by-product. What is on the foreground is scientific experimentation

Top photos:Bones tubes by Barkow Leibinger / Bottom photos : Concrete formworks by Anne-Marie Manelius

Successful design is often ergonomic and highly practical. After all people have always been attracted to this sort of innovation, the kind that makes their life easier and simultaneously introduces a change in what they have been taking for granted in their environment. This is what actually attracts crowds to World fairs and design-award exhibitions, anything that is fresh, unexpected but also practical.

All of the prototypes on display are innovative, however some of them are more experimental and less practical than others which ultimately renders them rather decorative.

Like the Protocell mesh¹ that was created as a university project and is a strange collaboration of a scaffolding meshwork canopy that incorporates carbon-capturing air-filters. The timber wave structure² that was built to ornament the entrance of V&A museum for 2011 London Design week similarly was not created to solve some practical problem but was very impressive nonetheless.  It is an exercise on how to create a 3d timber structure with non- symmetrical parts. Similarly the ‘Bones’ tubes³  were designed to embellish architectural façades while shading them.

Top photos : Autarki 1:1 by Jesper Nielsenand and Nikolaj Callisen Friis / Bottom photos : Loblloly house by Kieran Timberlake

However there are exhibits that might not catch the visitor’s eye immediately as they seem more technical and not that impressive design-wise, like for example ‘Autarki 1:1′⁴ or the Loblolly house⁵ where actual sections of each house have been brought to London and are included in the exhibition. When one looks closer into them, ‘Autarki’ is a unique experiment on totally self-sustainable house design and the Loblolly house is a building system where all components are organised off-site and are then bolted together so they can be taken apart and reused as parts in case the house is demolished. The house is also energy efficient.

The ‘Fabric formwork’⁶ is also relatively unimpressive at first glance but completely revolutionary as an invention. Being able to use a fabric to mould concrete might be responsible for the production of truly innovative architectural forms.

Then there are the ‘sci-fi’ exhibits like the organic-looking titanium structural components with futuristic names like Nematox II⁷ or the additive manufactured violin⁸.Those are interesting mostly because of the additive manufactured technology which in other words is 3D printing.

Top left photo : Nematox II by Holger Strauss / Middle photo : Additive manufacture violin by Manufacturing Research Division, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham / Bottom left and top and bottom right : Zoid by Yves Ebnöther

Finally there are products that fall into the middle of the pragmatic/science-fiction spectrum and their complexity refers to the assembly method of ordinary parts. For example Trada pavilion⁹ where everyday ‘boring’ materials like flat timber panels and hinges are put together following an algorithm to produce a stiff free-standing structure. Also Zoid¹⁰ which is a stool that is computer-generated product of parametric design that is made from a single sheet of metal which can be folded by hand following the prototyped drawing. Fab pod¹¹ is a system of hyperboloid surfaces that has been developed in order to improve sound-pollution in open plan offices.

Top and bottom left photos and middle top photo : Trada pavilion by Ramboll Computational design / Middle bottom and top right photo Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Famillia researched by Mark Burry / Bottom right Fab pod by Sial

Last but most definitely not least, the exhibition includes a 130 year old structural problem that has puzzled many engineers: Gaudi’s Sagrada Famillia that was left unfinished because of the architect’s untimely death. Modelling and interpretation of the church has restarted since the digital era and research regardless of the problems faced due to lack of an original study-model, seems much more promising lately.

To conclude, I do recommend the Prototyping Architecture exhibition which will be on until the 15^th of March.

1.By Peter Beesley. See more about it on his website here or watch a video about it here

2.By Amande Levete Architects AL_A website here

3.By Barkow Leibinger website here

4.By Jesper Nielsenand and Nikolaj Callisen Friis see more of it here and here

5.By Kieran Timberlake his website entry the house here and watch a video about the house here

6.By Anne-Marie Manelius read more about it here

7.By Holger Strauss at Delf Technical University read more about additive manufacturing here

8.Researched by Manufacturing Research Division, Faculty of Engineering, University of

    Nottingham. Read more about it here

9.By Ramboll Computational design. See it here and read more about it here

10.By Yves Ebnöther. Find it at his website here

11.By Sial, Royal Melbourne institute of Technology. Find it here

12.By Antoni Gaudi and continuing research by Mark Burry. Read about his research here

…advertising @ The Emirates Cable car at Greenwich peninsula and the Royal Docks by Wilkinson Eyre Architects

After last summer there has been an addition to London’s skyline, the ‘Emirates cable car’. It  connects Royal Victoria Docks with Greenwhich peninsula and it was designed by Wilkinson Eyre architects in cooperation with Expedition Engineering.

Left picture:boarding the cable car/Top right:Cable car on the London tube map/Bottom right picture:book flights on the cable car’s website

The cable car bridges 1.1 kilometres and it is 90 metres high. The project took two years to be completed and costed 60 million pounds 36m of which were sponsored by Emirates Airlines to advertise their brand. In doing so the company’s name is currently associated with London’s iconic tube map (Check D8 part of the map). In fact Emirates airlines’ promotion is not at all indirect, but actually quite direct since at the bottom of the cable car’s website page there is a link where one might book airline tickets. Additionally the people who work at the cable car, wear flight-attendant clothes and when a passenger buys a ticket, it is for a one-way or a return ‘flight’.

Top left: Entrance at Royal Docks /All other pictures: right before boarding the cable car

Critics have compared the Cable car to London Eye which is actually the tourist attraction with the most visitors per year in London and was similarly partially sponsored by an airline company for advertising reasons: British Airways. Regardless of this particular similarity, the comparison is not exactly fair as London Eye is a massive Ferris wheel with a diameter of 120 meters, hence totally different in form and function to the cable car. Additionally it is situated in Waterloo which is in the centre thus the views it offers are impressive simply because of its location.

Nevertheless Emirates cable car is quite intriguing from an architectural point of view. Its giant pylons and the entrance/exit buildings are rather elegantly designed and crisply detailed. Still the whole project should be examined from many angles and not strictly from a design point of view, in order to be evaluated accurately. Compared to London Eye it has the advantage of transition from one place to another, since its passengers cross the river. However the point of the crossing has been considered as less than ideal by some people. For example this disappointed visitor reports in Trip Advisor that it connects “nothing with nothing” (press link) as the only thing that ones sees from the air are car parks. I believe that this person is too harsh in his critique. Personally I found the experience pleasing because of the very roughness of the area’s character. As far as how needed the cable car was in that particular position, maybe someone who works around there would be more appropriate to ask. Still I believe that the force behind its making was rather the business agreement between the powerful companies that were involved in the project, than the convenience of the people who work in the area.

Top left: The Crystal building for Siemens by Wilkinson Eyre architects / Top right: view of the City Airport / Bottom left:The O2

After all it takes 10′ to cross the river with the cable car and 5′ during rush hour and the ticket for each flight is £3.20 on the oyster card. If seen as a one-off experience it is obviously quite cheap but as a means of everyday transportation is very expensive, especially since it is not included on any travel card, daily or weekly. As an architectural attraction though I believe that it is worth the visit because one can enjoy the view from a relatively high altitude, crossing the river at a non-touristic part of London.

I was there on a gloomy day and I took a ‘one-way flight’ from  Royal Docks to Greenwich peninsula catching views of the O2, Canary Wharf, the Thames Barrier and City airport. At the beginning of the ride I noticed a building at the Royal Docks side of the river, close to the cable car’s entrance building. Researching it after my visit, I found out that it was another new Wilkinson Eyre building, the Crystal that was finished on September 2012. The building was financed by Siemens to house an educational exhibition on sustainability and energy and its form attempts to resemble a crystal, hence the name. Similar shapes are used also in the landscaping of its surroundings. I have to say that I found it interesting that the same architectural firm managed to nail two major projects right next to each other. My walk around the Royal Docks seemed to turn into a ‘Wilkinson Eyre’ architectural walk.

Top left: The O2 / Top right: Getting close to the pylon / Bottom both: Descending

Finally on Greenwich peninsula right next to the O2 is the two-year-old Ravensbourne College headquarters, designed by Foreign Office Architects that was a hugely influential architectural practice for the 90′s. This building, unfortunately was its swan song as soon after its conclusion the founding members of the architectural practice parted their ways. The college’s headquarters received loads of publicity on 2010 when the construction was finished because of its graphic aesthetic namely the tiles that were used to cover its façades. It has been said by some critics that the pattern of the tiles has a Bauhaus quality and even though I believe that it is an interesting building I do not agree with this opinion.

In general I recommend the cable car ride because of the breathtaking views that it offers especially for anyone who is interested in architecture. However there are many things that  I found quite unsettling. Firstly the fact that one is faced with the polished trendiness that formerly industrial areas are destined to be ‘regenerated’ into. Then, there are the actual reasons behind the building of this project which I believe are questionable. The cable car has a peculiar semi-touristic-attraction/semi-public-transportation status and basically was created to advertise an airline company and be a lucrative business itself. Naturally one can choose to see all that and contemplate, or just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Left picture: Next to the O2 to the left Ravensbourne College central building (2010) by Foreign Office Architects/ Right picture: view of Revensnourne College building from the ground

Read about the Royal Docks history here

The Cable car’s official website page here

…an industrial relic @ the Tate Tanks by Herzog & De Meuron

Tate Modern is the busiest modern-art gallery in the world with 5 million visitors per year hence it is no surprise it is expanding. In fact it has been for a while now and there is a small architectural exhibition on its lower level, in front of the cloakroom with scale models, drawings etc, documenting it. In the past it had caught my eye briefly but I never paid that much attention to it as the project’s completion seemed to fade into the distant future. Well, 2016 is not that far away any more and actually the first part of the extension was delivered to the public six months ago.

Exhibition of Tate Modern’s new building by Herzog & De Meuron to be finished in 2016,Top picture left: the new building/Right: part of its facade / Bottom right scale model of the whole building. Old-Tate Modern and pyramid-like extension behind it

The Tate Tanks are currently entered from the turbine hall. The visitor has to go through not one but two screens that frame an intermediate space which attempts to incorporate characteristics from both the existing building and the new one that will be placed on top of the tanks. Unfortunately this entrance-hall fails to successfully connect the two spaces and ends up feeling rather awkward. A plain glass screen on turbine hall’s side-wall seems a peculiar non-entrance for what the architects claim to be an event of a building.

Left photo:entrance to the tanks from the turbine hall/ Middle photo: Second glass screen / Right photo: Between the two screens an the awkward entrance space

Still there is much more that seems weird in this space’s layout. To start, two qualities that seem to clash are found here, that of a space that existed previously but had a different use (the original oil tanks), and that of the footprint of a building that has not been built yet. So, it is quite difficult to evaluate the Tanks because both qualities they incorporate compete with each other having not been manipulated very carefully.  In fact the original tanks are still right there. The concrete walls are bare revealing the way they were moulded. There are numbers marking the different levels of oil that was contained and traces of bolts and rods possibly needed when the tanks functioned as containers. There are even little scribbles on the walls, construction notes made by the surveyors or the builders. This architectural realism is a very deliberate choice that aims to maintain the raw aesthetic that is so fashionable in design nowadays.

Rough aesthetics,mouldy walls, marks from previous use and construction notes by builders on the walls of the Tate tanks

I partly enjoyed this candid approach because it reminded me of how I preferred my rough work-models to the carefully-cut final ones for the buildings I designed in university. This love of rough aesthetics is really not that much of a novelty though, as it is shared by most architects. Thus the Tanks’ style is almost a wink to all designers and ultimately seems a tiny bit pretentious. Especially since it looks as though the architects hardly intervened apart from the polished floor, and the ventilation and light fittings.

The Tanks entrance and central hall. Blue buckets collecting water dripping from the roof in various places

Then there are the new tilted columns that most probably are there to support the building that will be erected exactly above the Tanks. Having seen the scale-model of the new edifice, these columns obviously derive from its angular geometry and they are designed in this way to reflect its aesthetic. Regardless of the pretentiousness that I detected in the general lack of architectural intervention, I rather liked the feeling that the Tanks evoke as a space. However I totally disliked the way that the new building looks on paper. To me it looks ugly. A twisted form that aspires to be contemporary and exciting by juxtaposing the iconic industrial building but only sits next to it like a foreign object. Furthermore the attempt to relate to the soon-to-be-old Tate Modern by the use of a similar red brick is rather superficial. Even though I sound quite harsh, I write all that with a hint of doubt as I cannot put my finger on it before visiting the actual finished product. Who knows, maybe I am unfair and when the new building is finished it will comprise a balanced whole along with the tanks and the old building. it all remains to be seen.

The actual galleries

However, going back to the ‘architectural realism’ that has been chosen for the Tanks I believe it goes a bit too far for yet another reason. Walking through the galleries I saw that the walls were quite mouldy, in fact there were visible drops of water running on them. To be more blunt there were actually a number of buckets collecting the water falling from the ceiling in various places and signs ‘mind the wet floors’ everywhere. What struck me as odd was that it was not raining at all outside. Looking at the texture of the concrete walls that documents the erosion of decades of exposure to moisture, I could not but wonder if this a mistake caused by inadequate insulation or an eagerness to be true to the tanks’ original state that ironically backfired.

Top left: the old columns / Top right: water dripping from the roof / Bottom left: old and new columns / Bottom right: diagonal new columns that will support the new building to be built above the Tanks

Learn more about the new Tate Modern building here and here

…hubris @ ‘Against Architecture’, a book by Franco La Cecla and The Shard a building at London Bridge by Renzo Piano

The minute I came across this book I knew I had to read it. Being an architect who does not currently practice architecture, I had many reasons to identify with it. Especially when I realised that one of its recurring themes was how neglected is architecture’s political and social impact in favour of aesthetics, I knew that the author had won me over. According to LaCecla this occurred gradually. After the war the architects “played their trump card as “reformers of society”, as “engineers of the human soul”¹, only to find out that this sort of patronising through architecture does not work. The failure of ideologies and the rise of capitalism provided the fertile ground for marketing and branding to flourish upon thus architectural practice changed dramatically for the worst.

To quote the author: “architects still carry a lot of weight; they are able with this weight to provoke a great deal of damage through ignorance and incompetence, and above all through the strange conviction that the first thing cities need is an important “signature” that will propel them into the world of fashion.” ²

Front and back cover of Against Architecture by Franco La Cecla

As he mentions in another part of the book the true problem concerning architecture is that it can effectively promote co-citizenship but hardly any of the famous practising architects is addressing this issue. Architectural students in universities today are not offered the “tools to observe analyse and decipher the social impact of the built projects they design”³ hence they are not trained on how cities work and they end up being “adolescent hobbyists who are selling themselves as public artists.”⁴

LaCecla did not become an architect but still managed to remain in the field as a consultant and a critic in several international architectural competitions. In sharing his experiences he does not hesitate to be extremely outspoken and blunt about many of the so-called star-architects that crossed his path. What he has to say about them is far from politically correct like when he mentions that Koolhaas’s intelligent realism “uses the misery of the world just to demonstrate how up-to-date he is, how really ahead of everyone else”⁵ or that “Frank Gehry goes into his studio, screws a sheet of paper into a ball and says to his faithful CAD implementers: I want that. Thus architecture is vaporized”^6. Those eloquent examples reveal much truth about the architectural world nowadays and give clues to how “branding” got to be “just another excuse for power’s concentration at the top.”⁷

 I think it is rather obvious that I enjoyed immensely reading this book and I recommend it wholeheartedly. It is straightforward, wonderfully easy to read and not at all patronising or pretentious. However there is something within it that I am totally opposed to.

Left:The Shard a year ago / The Shard last night (both photos by the writer)

La Cecla apparently is a close friend and colleague of Renzo Piano. He mentions him a number of times, basically presenting him as one of the few famous architects in the world with a social agenda. In several chapters he praises him mentioning that he has worked closely with him as his consultant and that he believes that Piano is basically the only architect he knows who is not interested in expanding his brand more than he cares about the communities that he affects with his work.

This is where I disagree with La Cecla completely and I will change the subject a bit to state why. Seeing The Shard taking over London’s skyline, scarring irreversibly London Bridge and Southwark and declaring its superiority as the tallest building in Europe, I truly do not believe that Piano’s architectural values are at all what La Cecla makes them out to be. The Shard is a scale-less sleek mountain of a building and its form chooses not to reveal anything about the luxurious apartments and the 5 star hotel that the consortium of Qatari investors that financed it, paid Renzo Piano to design inside it. In most of the interviews that Piano has given, he declares he wanted to create a beautiful building that would dissolve into the air and would offer 360 views from its top to the public. To my opinion this is a load of absurd promotional nonsense. Especially since the tickets for a few minutes of view-watching are already being sold for 25£ each, it is obvious that they are hardly accessible to the public. This massive building totally disregards or rather violates the neighbourhood it is built on thus all the good things that La Cecla has to say about its architect and his previous projects, as far as I am concerned, vanish into thin air. The Shard to me looks just evil and it reminds me too much of Sauron’s eye from Lord of the Rings where all malice springs from.

Left the Shard with the full moon over it      Right: Lord of the Rings, The Eye of Sauron from where all evil springs from

Its position is too conspicuous, if it were in the City or at Canary Wharf in the company of other tall evil buildings it would be more acceptable. But standing smugly on its own, dominating London and gentrifying London Bridge to the point that it dissolves its previous distinct sense of place, it is truly inexcusable.

Going briefly back to the book to conclude, my objection concerning Piano and the Shard does not diminish its value. I still believe that “Against Architecture” is worth reading but as every other book it should be read with a critical engaging mind in order to draw accurate conclusions.

Quotes

Franco La Cecla(2012), Against Architecture, San Fransisco: PM Press

1. Page 45  /  2. Page50   /  3.Page 116  /   4.Page 10  /   5. Page 24  /  6. Page 30  /  7. Page 29

Read architects’ and critics’ views about the Shard in this AR article here