The plan of the Graduate centre (top) indicates how it has to be read as an addition to the existing complex, one that deliberately seeks to integrate itself into the University’s circulation routing whilst maintaining a discrete identity and pstrong, idiosyncratic presence on the street. The Orion link apparently comes from Libeskind standing on the site and casually looking up at the night sky – and he accidentlay noticed Orion and thought ‘Well, I am in North London — perhaps this Orion thing is significant’. Whether you read this in terms of marketing hype or a neo-mythical sentiment in the guise of something far more rational hardly detracts from the reality that the affective charge at issue stirs just beneath the symbolic surface of architecture. It is fascinating to see how everyone grasps at the narrative on offer.
Once upon a time two architects found an industrial site adjacent to one of London’s main rail lines. Later, they found the money to demolish and start work on a dream house and studio — calling in the builders to work from a small model and the TV crews to record it all. That anything was realised at all — and that it has distinctive merits — is remarkable. The house / studio was apparently always intended to be as much political as ‘green’: a feminist statement of protest against ‘patriarchal’ values ostensibly driving a high-tech agenda and prompting a programme of ‘as-found’ materials that are easily handled. Such possibly naive, pseudohippy, urban-farmer ambitions are, of course, a rich psychological field and easily criticised, but this might be to miss the daring and bravery of what has been done. In essence, the scheme is a T-shaped plan, with the office part along the rail lines, defending itself against the rattling express trains by cement-filled bags. However, it is raised up on concrete stilts, so that the criterion of protecting the inner garden area is distinctly undermined.