It is not difficult to dismiss Alsop’s work as arbitrary and wilful, gestural and gimmicky — especially when seen in magazines (and it has become increasingly fashionable to criticise his work from such a perspective). However, experience the reality and one is (surely?) immediately struck by an intuition of design intelligence as well as wit and a striving not to be bound to conventions. (Yes, I am aware that I am now in controversial territory.) Of course, the ostensible wackiness of his work courts the danger of fashionability and unfashionability, and it will be interesting to see how Alsop survives and offers relevance to a younger generation.
Here, at Fawood — in a derelict area undergoing demolition and reinvention — the local authority has provided the community with a symbol of caring and hope which, bizarre as it might appear, certainly does the job.
The building — which provides a nursery for three-to-five-year-olds, nursery facilities for autistic and special needs children, and a base for community education workers and consultation services — looks like a simple shed: a lid and a steel mesh wrap, within which Alsop has located a series of architectonic units: mostly three storeys of old containers, but including a yurt. The result is arguably a kid’s paradise of spaces and places blurring the boundary between indoors and outdoors, admits lots of light and keeps the children safe from that nasty world outside.
In one sense the ground plan is within the tradition of the grand living or library room, as perhaps found in a stately home or ministerial office i. e. one
space with lots of sub-scenarios: reception zone, climbing platform, yurt, outdoor eating area (piazza), sandpit, water garden, stage, cycle track, play house, four trees, etc., all bounded by what is sometimes (unkindly) called the cage of steel mesh.
“With a tiny budget, we had to stretch our imaginations,” says Alsop. “We decided to buy the biggest, cheapest and most robust structure we could find, which is effectively a standard portal-frame mass – produced for farm buildings. This has allowed us to cover as much space as possible — in fact, the entire site — for little money, leaving the rest to create spaces that, hopefully, will shape the children’s imagination. They already think of themselves as being at sea when they’re inside the sea containers, and they like to hear stories told inside the yurt, which is a far cosier and more magical space than a conventional classroom can ever be.”
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The ‘piazza’ corner (bottom left of the plan, opposite). |
I would argue this is intelligent architectural design. It’s also artful. But it sports gestures — such as the woven mesh ‘flowers’ on the exterior — guaranteed to upset many architects. However, if a fraction of the architects in London had this man’s daring and inventive wit, its architecture would be a distinctly livelier scene.
(I can already hear the chorus of disagreement!)
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A decorative ‘flower’ on the exterior steel mesh. |
The Fawood Nursery plan is basically a shed populated with internal pavilions that bears a passing resemblance to many an interior office arrangement or, perhaps more appropriately, a native village conglomeration. As a nursery, it is hugely successful and serves as a model of what can be achieved.
As an architecture, it works at every level, from the urban down to the details of its places and spaces (which, of course, could always be improved by a little more money being thrown at them). Clad in glass and used by an ad agency it would be hailed as a revolutionary novelty in work-place design
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Roof view from an upper gallery. The construction is rudely industrial. |
The internal pavilions are simply stacked steel pavilions accessed by spatious galleries. The spaces provided are there to serve an ‘inclusive’ grouping of children of all abilities.
л О A set of Po-Mo private Villas self-consciously 28 recreating the era of John Nash, who
conceived of a Regent’s Park populated by expensive villas. Three of them – the Veneto, the Gothik and the Doric – were built in 1992 and have since been added to by four more (another was going up in late 2005). Located in the north-west corner of Regent’s Park, on the Outer Circle (opposite the American Ambassador’s residence), they are designed by Quinlan and Francis Terry and in a tradition of English eccentricity married to latter-day Establishment values, Post-Modernism’s reactionary undertones, and a good dose of hi-tech carefully hidden away. They supplement the five villas realised by John Nash in the 1820s and straddle the edge of the Regent’s Canal adjacent to Hanover Lodge, providing a conspicuous display of architectural taste that attunes the lifestyles of affluent owners with that of the Ancients who gave us a symbolic classicism.
Perhaps to merely show these villas and suggest they are worth a look is to court ire — these are very fashionably unfashionable buildings. However, whilst they may nostalgically refer back to a bygone era when a decorous architecture might more plausibly pose as bearing pretences to eternal truths, universal harmonies and the like, they nevertheless exhibit real architectural gamesmanship. Despite claims that Terry’s architecture is pompous and not nearly as erudite as he pretends, one suspects that the real debate is about political correctness and the wrath that is poured upon someone who dares to go against the grain of the Zeitgeist as majority opinion conceives it — which is surely all the more reason to go to Regent’s Park, open one’s eyes, see these residences for the rich, and make up one’s own mind. Who knows, you might enjoy them. (There is a more accessible example of Terry’s work at Richmond.)
QQ The London Zoo (Outer Circle, Regent’s 29 Park, NW1), includes The Aviary in London Zoo — attributed to the late Cedric Price, to Lord Snowdon and the also late engineer Frank Newby — is a by-product of enthusiasms for Buckminster Fuller’s geometries and tense gritty structures designed during that era, and is one of the first pieces of acrobatic modern architecture in London. You can see it from the pathway along the Regent’s Canal, north side of the Park (a very pleasant walk from Camden Town to Lords). Given Price’s predilection for saying a lot but turning away from formal issues and building very little, one suspects Newby is the real author here.
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Grimshaw’s contribution at Lords is characteristically acrobatic and well executed. |
The Verity Stand is oldest on the site and remains the most prestigious because of its historical associations and continued use as the principal club house.
It is difficult to reconcile oneself to the idea of the gentlemen of the Marylebone Cricket Club (the MCC, formed in 1787) becoming patrons of contemporary architecture. However, encouraged by an architect- member called Peter Bell, they have given us a number of modern buildings that, in turn, have helped to revitalise the game at Lord’s, home of English cricket. Behind this is the realities of a spectator sport, that is a million miles away from soccer: a summer ball game lasting all day leaving the pitch and stands at Lord’s unused for much of the year, only coming alive as a venue on only 10-12 days a year when international matches are played – also when corporations indulgently entertain valued clients and customers from within their own boxes and less favoured enthusiasts bring luncheon boxes from which to picnic.
And, perhaps most importantly, cricket at Lord’s has — like other sports — become fodder to an international media machine hungry for content.
When completed in 1987, the Mound Stand designed by Michael Hopkins’ office was notable because it offered us an architect pigeon-holed as Hi-tech betraying both contextural sensitivities and an enthusiasm for dealing with a range of low-tech constructions.
Observers were surprised by Hopkins’ acceptance of the existing stand, together with his embrace of its brick arches (and their extension from six in number to a row of 21, all properly built as load-bearing), as well as by the acrobatics of the new overhead structure. They were also suspicious that an inspiration for the scheme was not only technical and instrumental, but the notion that an expansive, white, tensed fabric roof had a symbolic appropriateness to the ambience and traditional sartorial garb of summer cricket.
Just after the Mound Stand, Hopkins also completed the Compton and Edrich Stands that stretch around the east side, beneath the Media Centre. These are simple concrete raked decks that sit upon a more complex arrangement of tubular steel arms.
31 David Morley’s ‘Hub’ sports facility (changing
31 rooms) set within the northern part of Regent’s Park (2005) is described by the architects as a design set within the framework of Nash’s notion of park buildings being ornaments. (One could hardly say less in such a setting.) The building comprises a mound housing changing rooms, above which is a simple, circular cafe with an elegantly structured central roof-light.
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The media centre is rumoured to have been design with a single ‘leg’, but members objected that this obstructed the view of distant trees from the Verity Stand… and so it has two legs. |
Cricket has no need of summer at David Morley’s Indoor Cricket School (1994), an exhilarating interior of green plastic carpet, white finishes, masses of daylight filtered from above, huge powered doors that open in summer, and lots of eager kids properly kitted out for their practice sessions. The entry side incorporates its own viewing terrace and seating, looking over the Nursery Ground.
Morley also designed the 275 sq. m. single-storey Lord’s Cricket Shop next door (1996), with inflated roofing panels made of continuously pressurised, translucent ETFE foil cushions. Beside this sits a third Morley design: a simple, but elegant, 1200 sq. m.. two-storey office building for the Test and County Cricket Board (1996) with an exterior dominated by large ‘light-shelves’ which push daylight into the interiors.
Opposite the Mound Stand sits the Grand Stand by Nicholas Grimshaw (1998). His team offers the same basic arrangement as Hopkins, but eschews the tensed fabric motif and provides the structural acrobatics we have come to expect from this firm in the form of a two-storey spine truss and two 50m span roof trusses supported on three columns. It has many structural similarities to the Mound Stand and, like it, was constructed in two winter phases so as not to disrupt the summer games.
It is a splendid design, a sophisticated and elegant structure that is well detailed and built (better, in these terms, than the Mound Stand), but misses the emotional connection Hopkins touched upon and Grimshaw would probably dismiss as sentimental design motivation – what John Pringle, the job architect on the Mound Stand, describes as ‘a five-day boat cruise’, complete with upper promenade and steerage class passengers.
The most interesting building at Lord’s is the newest: the NatWest Media Centre (1999) designed by Future Systems – architects with a name reeking of 1960’s technological optimism who are into designing ‘things’ (complete with obligatory rounded corners) and who marry retro and progressive postures into a single and skilled post-modern stance. Propped upon two concrete access towers, the structure accommodates special desks plus alcoholic support from a bar at the rear and characteristically an inhabited architectural blob with the exotic, sensuous, other-world quality of Hi-tech engineering (racing cars and yachts, combat aircraft, etc.), from which it borrows its forms and techniques. Taking the form of a ‘semi-monocoque’ aluminium yacht construction poised high above ground at the east end of the luscious green field, the Centre reads as a UFO dropping in for the splendid sights offered through its massive 40m front window. This is carefully raked so as to avoid reflections back onto the field and so that the media people can easily see out and be fed ‘ambient sound’; however, the BBC considered an air-conditioned box as an affront to their commentating history and insisted on a small openable window for themselves so that they could actually hear the crack of leather on willow (a distinctly Heath-Robinson affair; see photo on right).
In fact, most journalists appear to dislike the place. The Independent’s columnist comments, ‘You cannot feel the match: the mikes don’t work properly and you don’t get a proper sense of what’s happening. And it’s so very bright that you can’t see your laptop. We just need windows that open and better tellies (for the replays).
And The Times’ man says, “There’s a bank of televisons above our heads and for the second half of the day you’re looking into the sun and can’t see them” Being high up in a glass-faced, westward-oriented pod is clearly not their idea of fun.
The Media Centre is constructed from 26, prefabricated aluminium sections of 3-4mm thick plate, shipped to site and welded together. CAD and numerically controlled machines were crucial to analysis and the fabrication carried out by yacht builders. The structure – acting as a semi- monocoque of ribs and skin – is supported on two concrete stair/ lift towers clad in GRP panels (the architects originally wanted one, but members said this would spoil their view of existing trees).
The top half rests on these towers, with the bottom half bracketed off concrete ring beams. Internally, the accommodation is principally a raked bank of journalists’ benches and an upper, mezzanine level of small rooms (one being for the BBC, with its openable window that is, apparently, rarely used). The rear part accommodates the all too necessary bar. The internal mezzanine floor is hung from the roof and the 9m high raking glass front (made of 12mm laminated glass plus an annealed glass layer and designed so as to be both safe and not dazzle players) rests into the floor but is supported by the mezzanine, requiring carefully designed movement joints. The powder blue interior is argued to result from the need to avoid any distractions to players; to say it is impractical would be an understatement. In a gesture of ‘60’s mannerism, doors are formed as hatches, complete with curved corners. The engineers were Ove Arup.
Overall, Lord’s has become capitalised and globalised, part of a telecommunicating cultural stream of commercialised contemporary sport whose only parallel is possibly the manner in which the City of London manages to marry history, tradition and modernity. If the Media Centre, for example, were simply an instance of advanced engineering techniques transferred to the sexy form of a building it would be less interesting. However, as an unconscious embodiment of so many contemporary cultural streams, this object comes alive and, for a while, will speak to us and echo dreams which increasingly seem to end up focused upon the playing field.
The Mound Stand remains the most interesting of the contemporary stands and has been used as a model for Grimshaw’s stand on the north side.
The Mound Stand sits above an existing stand of 1899.This has been retained, but its load-bearing brick piers have been extended (using reclaimed bricks from a demolition site). The additional seating at the upper level is held up on six columns at 18m centres, giving minimal disturbance to the existing structure as well as views of the game. Below the open upper deck sits a structural box incorporating some storage and service facilities. below that is a mezzanine housing private boxes. The translucent fabric roof is a PVC coated glass-fibre weave with an additional PVDF flouropolymer topcoat. The Stand is a simple construction and, by 2005, it was looking rather tired and in need of renewal (happening over the ‘05 winter) but it’s still an excellent building to visit.
Ron Arad has to be one of London’s best designers: 32 an architect who prefers customers (for his chairs and other products) rather than clients (who end up having to be nursed) and a man whose work is inherently rhetorical yet (ostensibly) devoid of any intent to impress for the sake of it – a rare characteristic that applies to his studio as well as his product designs and craftsmanship. The studio is the conversion of an old warehouse tucked in a mews and has a positively Dickensian approach guaranteed to put off the casual visitor to the Fagan-like character hiding away up there behind the peeling paint.
But it is worth the effort of climbing the decrepit access stair to see the way the studio has been formed in a marvellously whimsical yet wilful manner, the wavy wood floor and the superb furniture in the showroom. (One Off Studio, 62 Chalk farm Road, NW1; Tube: Chalk Farm)