Caruso St John 25 Year Anniversary Lecture

evening how soon after accepting their invitation to introduce tonight's speakers I began to realize that it wasn't an altogether straightforward task many of you most of you perhaps in the room have a very strong understanding of the trajectory of their career over the past 25 years for those of you who don't well over the course of what Adam assures me was going to be a five-hour lecturer you're gonna have plenty of opportunity to find out so what can I say that's not kind of surplus to requirements well I think there was perhaps one thing which is to offer you some recollection of the time in the mid 18th century when I first got to know Adam and Peter actually it was in 1995 when I first moved to London in order that Peter might enjoy the questionable pleasure of teaching me for their two years of my diploma somewhat frustratingly it soon became apparent that many of my fellow students were quite brilliant Jonathan Hendry Emily Richards McCaw britches Steph MacDonald of 6a and Sylvia elmire of almost vesta which is some of my contemporaries who went on to establish significant practices a brilliant architect I was not but that didn't stop Peter making an heroic effort to make me a better one sue Peters wife once mentioned to me that he'd been awake at 3 o'clock in the morning the previous night worrying about my projects which rather concentrated the mind there were voices of encouragement from elsewhere too I remember on one occasion Peter Smithson coming to give us a crit he concluded the day by telling us that our projects all terribly municipal but it wasn't actually our problem it was our tutors Peter ensue we're living then as they do now then our house that they'd built I believe substantially with their own hands while living with their three children on site in an ice-cream van the house was also pretty compact the children sleeping quarters to perform of a series of shelves which were closed off each night by a curtain and the relator substantially remodeled the house with the aid of some professional builders but that first iteration had a certain kind of gimmick rack charm in an effort to conceal water damage I think I remember sue had painted the compassion of gigantic diamonds across the plywood ceiling of the main living area something which Peter would note glumly invariably proved visitors favorite feature of the house just across the railway tracks at Highbury Adam had recently taken up residence at Swan yard the kind of fearsomely severe bachelor pad and watch in which one imagines Nietzschean Superman might choose to live unsuspecting visitors were liable to be smacked in the face before entering his for reasons of tectonic purity the front door opened outwards into the narrow street inside one encountered a notable absence of paint windows something the recurring theme and Caritas in translator outfit and handrails Adam spared was two stories up reached by a ladder and gave onto a comprar CIPA this drop which I I was imagined must have somewhat cramped his social life Swann yard and their house fished often Lincolnshire had it can announced Caruso's engine his architects of unusual originality and purpose having that first year that I got to know them I think it's fair to say but they were still struggling to discover what kind of architects they wanted to be that struggling part related to the difficulty of maintaining an exacting tectonic rigor on low-cost projects like the Stratford advice arcade which they were then building with Mark really but I think they were also struggling to define their own position in relation to the architects that they were inspired by in London Toni threatened Florian bagel and the Smithson's all cast long shadows but they were also deeply interested in a number of architects working on the continent something which was still kind of unusual in what was then a really quite parochial British architecture scene two European architects in particular that were strong influences her took in the mirin or might readily guess their can a preoccupation with the rhetorical capacity of construction and with making Architecture from a close reading of context both continue to inform adwin Peters practice but coolhouse was also a central figure in their discussions perhaps the project affairs where our amaze influenced most strongly and evidence is the entry they made that year in the Yokohama port terminal competition made the shortlist but I think both Adam and Peter recognized that it represented a wrong turn at the end of my first year Peter invited me and my friend and fellow student Dan Jones down to Kent to visit a barn conversion that they were then completing it's lovely house but again I think they felt rather conflicted about the results I remember some sunday supplement photographs with daffodils on the dining room table being a source of particular anguish on the way back to the station in the back of the builder's fan the remember Peter expressing his enthusiasm for the tile hung agricultural buildings that kind of peppered the count landscape something that came back to me a few months later when I saw the project that they'd spent the summer working on their entry in the competition for the new art gallery at Warsaw during those months dan who was considerably more adept with the tip of yoohoo than I was was drafted in to make the one 250 model and over that summer he'd report back on progress the monumentality of the scheme was certainly unexpected given a Don Peters earlier work and it evidently took took them a while to come to terms with its implications I remember Dan describing a long conversation in the office about whether there should be a clock on the top of the tower a discussion which Adam had brought to a close by advising that clocks for fashion and then a few weeks into the new term they got the call from Peter Jenkinson I think back that they'd won the competition never generous to his students Peter invited a number of us round to his house that night to celebrate and I remembered it's a really magical evening Peter's eldest caddy that delightedly been liberated from her shelf David Chipperfield who had been on the jury called to pass on his congratulations I remember getting into a protracted argument with Adam about which line above the mothers of invention was the best crayon of a question that we're still kind of at some odds about and he also mentioned that they had recently made an important office decision they would not be purchasing a copy of SML XL well Peter never did make a great architect of me but what I learnt in those years about how to read and talk about architecture went on to define my life in innumerable ways I'm fantastically grateful but for that experience and for the privilege of witnessing these two remarkable architects make those difficult early steps in their creative journey they were my heroes when I was 22 and that's not changed thank you very much Ellis that was very nice and thank you to the RBA for inviting us to speak and thank you everyone for coming I can see in the audience our office and a lot of our consultants and some of our old clients and some of our new clients quite a lot of students that we would have taught over the last 15 years at London met and other friends and thank you all very much for coming it's really nice that you're here it does seem like a special event for both of us to have survived working together this alone so we planned a different kind of lecture we want to show this evening a very wide range of work sort of anthology of our work and if it goes on for a long time you'll have to take that up with my partner and Alice asked me to say that at the end there'll be a couple of questions from the audience so something that we're quite proud of is that we think there's a quite a diversity in the work of the practice we have done and still do small projects and interiors as well as larger projects we do actually quite a wide range of different types of buildings in addition to the galleries that we are known for and also our architecture tends to look very different in different situations and that diversity I think comes from the various interests that we both bring to our conversations architectures that we like places that we like things that are open in books when we work on the table so he's arranged the lecture phonetically around these interests and there are eight of them I'm going to talk about some of them Adam is going to talk about others using projects to illustrate those interests and the first interest is London being of a certain age of course what we're really talking about is London in the early 90s when we started our practice at that time there was more of a range in the city there was more emptiness as well as fullness there was slack there were ruins in the middle of the city as well as Canary Wharf under construction London's distinctive loose organic arrangement of ordinary things felt more exaggerated it's a city that's quite ugly it's not pretty it's not consistent there's perhaps a certain enjoyable melancholy and in that we were encouraged by the work of other architects and artists and filmmakers and we also photographed buildings around London places that we liked such as this warehouse in Clarke and well we like because it was a very fulsome building but also seemed to be have rather a lot of it missing and I think London at this time gave us a taste for ambiguity for projects that were both new and existing construction together sort of imagining of London as a kind of coral reef in which things were had accumulated over a long period of time you didn't have to start from scratch you didn't even have to finish that you were participating in something that was ongoing this is a classic photograph by Helen Binet of the back of Adam's studio in Swan yard with his roof light sticking above this is the interior of Swan yard where we had our office after moving from my house for a while with the old walls and some new walls without the paint like sort of working within the brushstrokes of a painting this is the square in front of the main entrance of the new art gallery in Walsall square designed by Richard Wentworth with the pub in the distance by Jonathan and Steven certain dates are on the right-hand side out of sight the old Woolworths or you're trying to make a sort of credible square out of very disparate things and different scales of the sort of spirit that were familiar with in British cities and I think that taste for mixing the new and the old really became a theme then this is for example our project for the maxi competition in Rome where we kept more of the existing buildings the factories the barracks and we added new buildings that looked also rather like factories to try and make a composition where there was a very diverse set of spaces which felt like a good place to install their collection of post 1960s Contemporary Art and then more recently just recently we've completed this gallery in Vauxhall for in the Newport Street gallery just next to the railway south of Waterloo and in this project we were starting with existing buildings magnificent Victorian scenery painting studios incredibly high spaces and we added two new buildings either end to make a row of buildings all of which appeared to be standing proudly facing the street and it was important that these buildings were different this is the model of the gallery showing the three existing buildings in the middle with the new buildings on the left and the right we added a new floor across all the buildings to divide the building the existing buildings that used to be 13 meters high into two high gallery spaces and this project isn't about conservation the existing buildings have been radically altered it's about folding the existing buildings in with the new in order to make something much more complex so when you arrive at the building on the street rather unusually with the new building on the left and in the far right you see the whole array of the gallery spaces and it's full scope laid out in front of you we went to some efforts to try and match the new brickwork with the old brickwork which was of course an impossible stock task because the existing brickwork is itself several kinds of brick but it was in the end important that they were subtly different when you're trying to balance the new and the old you need a bit of a difference but not much and then I think from the railway the building is trying to be both normal and rhetorical it's trying to be part of the normal world and at the same time be something slightly special I like to think it has a little bit of a sense of humor about it which subliminally I believe comes partly from the client and then when you go into the gallery obviously the physical presence of those old buildings had to be put back we have to make good art space but that sense of the buildings is kept because it's like a little encyclopedia of different gallery spaces here on the ground floor a gallery with a small facet in the corner and upstairs different galleries with different timber roofs and here a new gallery with a different kind of roof it felt important here and much more interesting that all the galleries although they were in some way similar all the galleries have slightly different shapes and makes it much more interesting to walk around and also make sense of the existing fragments and then the stairs in the building are also very important because they make the building feel as if it is public and not just a conversion of industrial buildings and the walls of the stairs are made with brick it's about restating the idea of brick that is covered in the gallery spaces the stairs of different shapes triangular oval close to circular the balustrade details are very carefully made recessed into the wall in order to try and keep the solidity and weight of the wall intact and then the stairs themselves are very wide with large wells because you're walking up eight meters between the floors you need a generosity in that route and then when you get to the top floor of the offices the new city is laid out in front of you I mean in the same way that London was a constant source for our early work there were certain architects who were equally a presence when we were thinking about how to make our first projects and one of those architects was Sigrid labyrinths I remember the first time I saw labyrinths I don't know if Peter heard about leverets at the a a perhaps but it was a issue of quad Aran which arrived in the office when I was working for Florian bagel and on the cover of the corn was Florence Halfmoon theater and it was a survey of European architecture at that time a double issue there was a rather famous photograph by Phil Sayer on the cover of the theater and in that issue there was an article about lever ins I can't remember if it was just I think it was an excerpt from the young allene book I think and then I remember we I got a did Florian it was his idea we called up Peter Salter to come for a crit so we could talk some more about leg rents because he'd heard about lever ins from dismissals so it was a kind of convoluted thing but that was the first time I'd ever heard of lever ants and certainly when Peter and I started and some of the first projects we did involved brick which I can remember saying that one thing I'll never do is build the building out of brick it's such a shitty materials wet and imprecise and ubiquitous but then I guess we realized we didn't have a choice and maybe the ubiquity of brick in northern European and specifically in British building culture that actually offered an enormous an enormous potential at subverting ones expectations of what you do with brick you know what the brick that I was reacting against was a lousy brick of a developer's bungalow house builders bungalow let's say but in the example of leverets who was using brick not at all in a didactic way because although this brick is load-bearing the bonding is it's a running bond there's a lot of mortar the thickness of the brick is really left quite ambiguous so this is a photo by Helen of Bjork Hagen with the birch trees and then another photograph also by Helen of the side facade of this modest but for us super important early project and fished off this house on the flat landscape of Lincolnshire and our clients are right there great and so here in a much more modest way and in a way that befits the construction of a house rather than the construction of a church we tried to use the idea of a veneer of brick to make something which on the one hand related to their builders bungalows which actually most of fish stuffed is built with but also had a certain tension and presence and that's the kind of side view where you can see where we did everything possible to subvert the thickness of the brick which is only a half brick because it's a veneer but we subvert it it in the way we made the windows in the way the brick turned the corner so you never it was like a piece of wallpaper of fabric that was stretched over the volume of the building a few layers later we kind of we picked up the idea of making a house in brick a slightly larger house in West London which is this project and you could say this project really is our full-blooded omage to lever ins and maybe after this project Prinze faded a bit for us but here we did a load-bearing brick building a house which is a slightly crazy thing to do although in the end the site was so difficult and so landlocked that brick was actually the only material we could use because we couldn't get a crane on the site so the idea of a unit of construction that you can hold in your hand actually was quite practical but that's not why we chose it and we really tried to make a house where all of the horizontals were brick they actually are structures but they're not didactic they're not the bonding unlike Newport Street where we did use a Flemish blonde bond because that's what the existing buildings had and that brick is also load-bearing it's holding itself up in the brick house where arguably the brick is doing more work you can't really tell whether it's doing work or not but we drew every brick there are very few cut bricks there's funny cheating moments on the corners but you can't really tell it really is this homage to labyrinth but filtered through a kind of London brick culture as well I think and then finally a project a few years before the brick house in Kalmar in Sweden where we restructured the cathedral square of this town which was very important in the 16th century and where we really made a kind of zero energy project where we removed all of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century pave years they were very beautiful and all made of stone and we tried to return the square to something that was more primitive that was more resonant with these field stones which the oldest part of the square was made with and using very large out of mid 19th century I think these huge stones called cat skulls moving them from one place in the square to another like moving a facade we were able to make spaces and then by introducing precast concrete elements we were able to make smooth ways and then even underground fountains and so using the theme of these stones which are very particular to this place and I think highly informed by the example of leverage about taking something to a almost ridiculous degree and seeing where it will take you and whether you could make something that just with its material intensity would have would have a identity abstraction this is what I never allow my students to do I always tell them there's enough abstraction in the world as soon as you make it drawing you're abstracting something so I'm not interested in you telling me about things being abstract versions of other things however if you look as we've had to to make this lecture of their work I would say there's two instances or two ways in which abstraction you can't avoid abstraction I think if you're an architect but two ways that we've typically used abstraction the work first is just as a pure formal mechanism I mean when you make a drawing it is an abstraction of something you know no matter how fantastic a drawing of a space that Peter can make and does make it's still an abstraction of the space you're talking about but also I think what makes a kind of abstract leap when when looks at painting or other disciplines of art in order to find what you want to make in an architectural project so for example this Robert Ryman wall piece there was a Ryman show at the Tate in the early 90s when we were working on Swan Yard I think I saw it first and Peter went when the catalog was there by our desk and it had a direct relationship to how this facade turned out I mean it's not to claim any authority that we were looking at the Ryman to make the facade it was just the Ryman facade was one of the things that we wanted this facade to be like drawing I really like it's just about the steel assembly and it was like the Ryman painting formerly I would say this idea of these veils these translucent and transparent and opaque veils being draped over the wall in the case of the Ryman's but also the way this new facade was clipped onto the rather shitty facade of Swan yard and the way had to negotiate the kind of surrounding features of the muse and that also I think conceptually has a connection to a that particular kind of Ryman piece has to negotiate the wall it's an installation even though it's a largely two-dimensional piece of work but I also think that the Raymond and other artists from that period sort of late seventies early eighties American art were what allowed us to look at the interior of Swan yard and decide that actually you could keep it the way it was and I remember having breakfast at this table or we we used to work along that table and you see that smudge of mortar which you know we didn't do that but no special it's not a kind of special work of craftsmanship but looking at that smudge and seeing a kind of figure with its arm like this and this kind of mess of masonry and mortar it's kind of like watching clouds and I think you see that kind of the picturesque potential of this messy construction you see it because one is thinking through the filter of conceptual art let's say so these existing walls but also things like this billowing plasterboard volume that rose up to make the first and second storey of the building which Peter Lee mentioned which you know we were really thinking about the right thinking about Rothko's thinking about matta-clark and trying not trying being being happy that through that work through looking at that art we were able to discover ways we were able to discover what it was we wanted our architecture to show there's another time than we need to use abstraction and that's when we have to work on a site where either we feel desperate you know where the context no longer gives the cues of being in the city center anymore I just wanted to show quickly three recent competitions in Switzerland that were like that so one is the second competition we did in Lausanne the long building is a competition from a few years ago that we lost in berthsy Vega one and then there was a second one we came in second in the first competition and third in the second competition a little bit annoying and in the second competition the context was even more problematic because we had this very abstract first museum that was about to start construction so what was already a difficult context had become even more abstracted by this first museum and the second competition was for two more museums and we struggled a lot with this project and in the end we made something that was on the one hand just an expression of the two museum's inside and maybe a kind of very very dumb version of the kind of infrastructural or industrial building that you might have on this flat railway lands but something that's for us strangely functionalist looking although isn't actually that it's not about function so much in the interior and if another project also by the railway tracks this is an Oerlikon even a more desperate site a competition for a high-rise where there almost was no land to come off near the tracks and then there were in edible restrictions in terms of the railway lines and the line of the Train so having to make something which has nothing to do with Milan and Chicago and all of the things that we normally rely on to make say a commercial office building and rather having really to just work on the problem of the cantilevers of the building going this way in that way and then trying to make something that's really quite abstract to make the form have a strength I mean we didn't win that competition either and then this is accomplished we did win just very recently which is in the medical campus in Basel with a very difficult master plan incline Basel where you can see the scale of klein basel and all of a sudden they're going to build these enormous new lab buildings and hospital buildings and it was a real struggle working on it and in the end we made something that really was rather autonomous which has a few small urban gestures which i think is main reason we won the competition I actually because the other competitors didn't make those small urban gestures but in the end the building is somehow try to express being a laboratory building being about hygiene and these processes and this machinery okay you'll probably notice that some of these titles are contradicting each other and that really doesn't matter the point is that you you choose them so I'm going to talk about the north and it was so it was Ruskin that said that the Gothic is the true architecture of Northern Europe but that it's coarser darker more rugged spirit was better suited to our character and our landscape and our climate and his point was that classicism belonged in the sunnier Mediterranean and I remember when Adam and I first met while we were working at Arif associates Philipp Dowson used to like talking to us because he interviewed both of us and we were the youngest people in the office and he used to tell us something rather similar to the effect that facades should never be flat they must have depth because you need lots of shadow because the weather in Britain is so dull so in situations where it has made sense we've tried to make facades that are coarse and deep and made with masonry the kind of architecture that you find in the Gothic that you find in medieval and early Renaissance country houses in expressionist architecture and even in industrial structures so this is the model that we made for the competition for the new art gallery in Walsall where we thought of the gallery as a building rather like a kind of country house quite literally like half of Hardwick Hall a kind of building in which it had both very grand and intimate rooms winding staircases and roof terraces like Hardwick Hall the building was one of the earliest lottery funded regional galleries and we thought of it as a sort of Palace of the people for Warsaw where you could go up into the building and look out over their estate in one direction you could look out over the center of town in the other direction over this magnificent Industrial Estate where lots of people either would have worked where their families would have worked and the building had a stepped top where the cafe was located which turned the building into this more kinks like sinks like affirmative building that faced towards the town but it was also about making the top of the building a little bit more awkward a little bit more strange so that it didn't distance itself from these other industrial buildings that were standing next to it and the surface of the building was covered in these large terracotta tiles the windows were also randomly distributed placed according to where they were required inside making a kind of all-over pattern rather like the feathers of a bird and inside the building was relatively dark and richly colored in concrete and timber and black concrete we're looking here at the stair that's leading up to the permanent exhibition galleries on the first floor here the large hall in the center of the collection galleries which was lined in timber and then one of the smaller galleries around the perimeter with a window that's looking out over the canal and there on the right is a small painting by Constable that Peter Jenkinson the director and the keeper Joe digger would have deliberately mounted low on the wall for the schoolchildren and the visitors in wheelchairs and then a temporary exhibition gallery space with a ceiling made with ribs of precast concrete to feel like the timber ceiling in a medieval Hall and then more recently a competition that we made in Basel for an aquarium as part of basel zoo the building was to be located in the top right there at the end of the zoo which was a series of gardens along a small river that was going through at a low level through the city ending in the right where quite a high flyover Road crossed the river and we made the aquarium in this very tall concrete structure like a kind of group of cylindrical chambers like tanks where the walls were perforated to allow a filtered light into the various levels of the aquarium there are larger windows at the top for the penguin pool and at the bottom you can see the buildings being carved a way to make these chamber like spaces where you went into the building where before you entered you were under this curved canopy which was covered with mosaics of aquatic scenes this is one of those classic bunch much competitions that I think we've got rather carried away enjoying it so much it wasn't it wasn't the most practical of projects now I wasn't very surprised we didn't win that one and then there's this building that we're making in Bremen the new headquarters for the Braemar Landis Bank in Bremen in northern Germany this is a site plan which shows the building on the Cathedral Square it's standing next to some rather beautiful early Renaissance buildings and the Cathedral and the building is going to provide new offices for the banks 500 staff right in the middle of the city on a site that the bank has occupied for the last 150 years and here we're making a building that refers to the Plinko brick architecture of German Expressionism from the 1920s and 30s of northern Germany which in itself has its roots in gothic and early Renaissance architecture of northern Germany with its distinctive broad proportions stepped top and very rich surface building stand on this square where there's a daily food and vegetable market and the doorway on the left is the entrance to the bank branch this is a plan of the ground floor of the bank on the right hand corner is the entrance to the bank branch and then in the center there's a courtyard where the staff walk through into the courtyard and on into the entrance of the offices this is the plan of the office level above for those of you might recognize the shape of the courtyard from a project by Levenson stockholm and the can see how the offices are arranged around the courtyard in the center with a smooth facade and the outside of the building where the offices face out to the city has a much rougher surface incorporating on the left-hand side the retained facade of the original Bank building from 1873 this is the drawing of the interior of the bank branch which is a two storey space looking out to the cathedral and the Town Hall on the corner the inner surface of the bank branch will be lined with a white brick and you're looking here at the interior of the main entrance door to the branch which is built in brick and the facade which is made with a dark clinker brick with ribs at the 2.6 meter centers that are required for the division of the offices that are rid that the piers are ribbed like a Gothic cathedral and between the ribs there are Bay's of different depths and there's an intermediate brick appear which is made in the lighter brick woven into the darker brick the left-hand side the brick arch entrance a branch and the step top with its cladding of terracotta this is a plan roaring from the package of drawings that we made for the brick tender describing different conditions of the external wall which is a load-bearing brick wall held back by the concrete frame of the building the wider Bay's at the base and the bottom right leading up to the more undulating brick bays in the top left and the terracotta facade in the top left a drawing of the facade showing the recessed brick archway to the branch and the step top and that the building is mainly complete and will be completed next year this is the interior of the courtyard which has a much simpler render facade and the top floor is the cafe and restaurant for the staff this is a sample of one of the bays of the office elevation with the ribbed pairs the undulating Bay's below the precast sill of the window and then the lighter brick intermediate pier this has been made requiring quite a large number of specials in brick as you can imagine also testing the skills of some extremely good Bremen bricklayers and these are photographs of the building under construction showing the wall going up standing there on a very sinuous lintel over the entrance to the underground carpark looking up through the scaffolding at the underside of one of the bays over the windows and there unfortunately a very poor photograph of the timber scaffolding that is supporting the brickwork that's been built over the arch of the bank branch entrance okay and then I'm going to continue with another theme to talk about the city centers of Chicago in Milan and we're talking specifically here about Chicago in the second half of the 19th century and Milan approximately 1915 to 1965 sort of 50-year periods in which there was an amazing consensus in how to make the center of the city a kind of way of building in which in many ways the buildings were very consistent they had sheer masonry facades that were rising directly from the back of the pavement they had a lot of surface articulation they were interested in and ornament they were made in a choice a range of styles and they were always about making a special face to the street with very little actually to do with the program of the building could have been an office building or an apartment building it could be a hotel it could be a public building we're looking here for example at Adler & Sullivan's auditorium building on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago so it's a bit of a theme for us that this is something that you just can't do you can't make streets like this with buildings of steel and glass so we like to make facades generally in masonry this is a an image from an exhibition of our work that we had at the AAA about 10 years ago you can see the fireplace there showing a model of an office building that we made for argent at Kings Cross perhaps the first time when we started to use ornament in our projects although on the left there there's a facade detail of the museum of childhood and in this building the facade was going to be made with a deeply recessed elevation with green piers of precast concrete on the side faces of which were to be an impressed pattern of them a floral pattern of an alley Renaissance Venetian church santa maria dei miracoli and then this is knotting in contemporary where the facades are made also in green precast concrete which are standing around the galleries and the lower floors with a kind of deep scalloped with the upper levels the roof lights and the plan rooms clad in a scalloped gold anodizing and the building is in a way making reference to its location next to the lace market which is standing behind the building there this very dense collection of factory buildings Victorian factory buildings with very decorated elevations that made lace when in the late 19th century Nottingham was the center the world center of lace making and here the facades which are deeply scalloped precast concrete with cappings of gold anodizing are wrapping around the building like a curtain you can see here the precast pieces in the yard of the factory where the surface of the pre casting has an impressed pattern of lace that we chose from the selection available and here the facade with its lace pattern hanging in the wall around the entrance canopy meaning to the front of the building and then a project that we've finished a couple of years ago in Zurich commercial project which is part of the master plan to redevelop land to the south of the main railway station in Zurich with the Swiss National Railways the SBB acting as the developer and it's a project that we made in collaboration with the Zurich office bas art and verkehr it's a building that has shops on the ground floor offices in the middle floors and apartments in these two towers on the right hand side and you can see that the towers because their apartments have pitched roofs in copper and even chimneys because the apartments have fireplaces this is the south-facing corner of the building at the junction of a diagonal street which goes through the new development and an existing Street on the right you can see how in the distance on the right the new buildings follow a rather consistent maximum height and we decided to make our building lower along the street and then higher on the corner in order to make the building have a more figurative proportion I think it resembles a an office building from the 1950s in Milan rising sheer from the pavement but made here with a facade of precast concrete rather than stone you can see the facade has a system of piers and lintels that are made in a light precast and then reveals and piers and in fields that are made in a darker green precast with all sorts of textures extremely rough rough smooth and polished you're looking here on the left at the entrance to the apartments on the right and arcade for a cafe these are the shop fronts where the around the reveal of the opening is a he's a molding made with polished concrete with curved corners in black here's a detail of the polished concrete in green and black and finally the very large rough lintel over the underground car park entrance okay so Peter talked about the north but we're also interested in the south or at least we're very aware of the legacy of southern of Grayson of Rome and I guess my dream is that one day we could actually do projects that use the orders in a rather straight way but we don't know how to do it yet like we're not old and experienced enough yet but we'll get there so I mean I think the example or the presence of Greece and of Rome is relevant to every architect no it's a two and a half thousand year story of architecture and even longer because if you think about archaic Doric temples there were archaic tower temples from six and seven hundred BC and it's quite an extraordinary thing to be part of a discipline where there were ideas but forward such a long time ago that have consistently come back again and again in waves and been reinterpreted by further generations and it's only really the 20th century and they've been reinterpreted by amazing Arctic's in the 20th century for instance by leverets by a splint by i can't think who else but other architects too but of course uniquely with a kind of conventional modernism it became more difficult to reconsider what it was that was so compelling about a Doric temple for instance like I think that there's something tiny there's something very deeply held in these forms something very deeply held like a secret or a core about European culture that's held within these forms and to me it's not that's like it's not a nationalist thing it's a kind of this is one of the things that in the West we truly share these forms so it's actually kind of very open narrative the narrative of classicism there's also Roman architecture which we know more about the interiors of Roman architecture its interior from Pompeii or Herculaneum I'm not sure I can't remember and I just want to show some projects where perhaps we haven't done yet a full-blown Corinthian order but projects where we have to engage with the spirit of Greece and Rome in different ways and I think in a series of interiors we've come closer and closer to engaging more and more and a more and more simple and straightforward way with these traditions first thing which is explicitly about Greece it's actually a exhibition design that we did in the davines at the Tate for an exhibition of neoclassical of English neoclassical sculpture so this is a kind of very English the show a very English art but English arts it was made for and collected by kind of people who were in a way buying into a certain that's the word validation or an authority by collecting these objects many of these collectors also collected objects from antiquity but those antique objects perhaps wouldn't be portraying subject matter people from the 18th and the 19th century for instance busts were actually contemporary busts but made in a classical manner and our project to install these works and we didn't have a huge amount of time or money to make this exhibition but it's in the end I think it was a real kind of a powerful installation I think what we were picking up on was the quite English romantic interpretation of classicism you know that classicism is not only something about kind of canons and sets of rules but it also is the foundation for a very English picturesque picturesque tradition that we see in our in English landscapes and in this sculpture and that was something that we were trying to remake in this exhibition perhaps a slightly more pure Greek experience that we've had as the work that we've done over a number of years of down in college a cambridge and an amazing campus designed by William Wilkins really his most intact neo Greek project I think one of the English projects that comes English architecture projects have comes closest to say the spirit of what Schinkel was doing at the same time in Prussia kind of very refined and light classicism and a project which in the end it was the beginning of the project but then it was the last part of his project to remake to restore but also remake the dining hall this is the lot the kind of ante room of the dining hall with the sculpture of Wilkins over there which we moved here and then the hall itself some of which was a restoration project so the detail that we found in the entablature the restoration work we did to the sky glial pilasters other things were very speculative like the colors that we applied working with Stephen chambers for the walls and for the ceiling which we had no evidence of what they were and then perhaps even more speculatively the furniture and the lighting which we didn't do in the manner of Schinkel although we looked a lot at shingles furniture because it just would have been too heavy and in a way too difficult in terms of its atmosphere instead looking at hospitals furniture for the stockholm city library as a hundred year later iteration neoclassicism and as a way of making furniture which is more appropriate to a dining hall in a contemporary college but a hall that was made in a neo greek manor another interior kind of amazing project we had the opportunity to do to make three interiors at the sonne museum to four galleries and an entrance an entrance foyer a space and a some furniture for a hallway which was just restored by by Judy in Arabic Julie American sorry so we made this furniture the idea was to make the galleries into kind of cabinet galleries and the way we install the furniture into sones architecture is very much exactly the way Sohn did so very tightly fitting the furniture in between chimney breaths and chimneys and and doors and windows something which we had some discussions with the english heritage about but in the end they were they understood why we were doing it and it's all reversible so we weren't damaging anything and then designing furniture that really looked very carefully at the furniture that sewn and designed and the materials at Sonja's like mahogany which is not a material I think we would otherwise ever use and then finding FSC mahogany which we could do in some cases but in other cases we had to use walnuts and things like that but trying to make furniture that I think for most of the visitors of these rooms they wouldn't really notice was not by sone but it isn't by sone and technologically this furniture is extremely high-tech and very heavy and full of all kinds of mechanical equipment so how did you incorporate all of those things which you're not really interested in seeing in furniture that doesn't kind of overwhelm the delicacy of sones Regency interiors in the bookshop in the shop the furniture could be a bit lighter because it didn't have the same environmental role to play and then maybe my favorite piece this kind of sight writing desk that we made in the entranceway where there's a book where you can sign your name made in mahogany highly figured walnut and Corian and I think it was one of the first combinations of hardwood and chorion which is something we've done more than once an engagement with Rome in another way I kind of with the church and the Rococo interior is kind of Roman but it's a kind of baroque and Rococo Roman this is the Cathedral st. gallen where we made a project to make a permanent altar after there had been a temporary altar for 45 years after vatican ii in the mid sixties so there was a temporary altar and then the cathedral decided for the anniversary of saying goddesses tripped from Ireland to Switzerland eight hundred years ago they would make a permanent chancel and we made this project unfortunately we were a year late but anyways this is the cathedral which is a kind of intact mid to late 18th century building completely intact and restored and then this was our Chancellor which was an attempt to make something with the elliptical geometries of the rock architecture but also something which would bring the space of the dome down to the ground and you can see would push forward into the seating of the nave so somehow the congregation and the place where the service is celebrated would be brought together in the language of the geometry of Rococo architecture and we made the project in in situ and in precast terrazzo and I believe the Mason who worked on it or Schmidt is here it was a kind of real labor of love and a slightly dangerous proposition we had 17 weeks on sites to build this so there was no room for mistakes we looked at doing it all in precast but it was impossible so it's made in since you which means you have to get it right and because it's in a Rococo Cathedral which is in a world heritage which is a world heritage site it actually has to be perfect and we had to learn many things to make this project we had to learn how to make ornament like this we had to then figure out how to make this ornament three dimensionally within a an elliptical geometry which is constantly changing and longest length it was a very ambitious project formally and technically but we managed we did it we made a new crucifix for the consecration which is kind of based on it's a Greek cross and it has symbols of the Apostles and of Christ from one of the early Bibles that are in the illuminated Bibles that are in this the very famous Rococo library of st. Gallen detail of the steps of the altar which has an inlaid piece of thusis marble which is four meters long and then the same marble was used to make the aggregate which is in the Torah so the precast and the to trot so all of the aggregate was made by our mason and the baptismal font which is also inlaid with the highly reflective double curved stainless steel basin and then a kind of another less less to the word holy that's not the word I'm thinking of but a kind of more day-to-day classicism our work at Tate Britain which is a classical building but you could say is not the greatest classical building in the world it's a kind of very late Victorian building verging on the Edwardian its exterior has expected moments of pomposity the fact that the architecture isn't so great I think contributes to the fact that the galleries are actually very very good they're a little bit reduced and they actually work very well for all sorts of art and our project at Tate Britain which hopefully will carry on but we've done the first phase up with really two in his full away as possible engage with the architecture that we were presented with and shifted from feeling pompous and a bit faded to something where possible felt magnificent or in other places we would add something which would give it just a little bit more energy because I mean we're not that interested in pompous architecture we try to avoid it and so in the reception space this is really a space which we were stored where we made new lighting and new furniture and where we really just wanted you know where we thought the architecture if it was just levered into the right position with a few interventions could become something quite magnificent in the rotunda where we made this major intervention of this new stair and floor we had to kind of rise to the occasion and here you could say there's a kind of not attention but an energy that comes from this new stair this new floor this new decorative motif which is based on motifs that exists in the building already but done in the larger scale in a new way and I think it does bring an energy to this rotunda space even though it's a incredibly incorrect thing to do in a classical Rotonda making this hole in the middle of the Rotonda is really not this not what you're meant to do and we desperately looked for precedents for it and we couldn't find them they don't exist because it's incorrect so sometimes you have to go against you know because we tried to be historically literate at least but you know English heritage who were a fantastic partner in a way on this project they understood that there were compelling reasons to do with how the building worked - for once and for all make a gesture which said that the lower level of the tate is a public level which it has been for 40 years and by making this intervention you you kind of formalize that even though it's not correct according to classicism and then this stair coming down into this more crypt like space at the lower level which you could say is the real invention that we reiterate we restated the return at the lower level so instead of being a very confusing labyrinth which it always has been because it wasn't designed to be a public space the return that carries through to the lowest level and it also organizes the spaces that are around it feels a bit legends I think what we were doing here and then in the galleries I think a lot of people wouldn't know what we did others and clean them even though almost everything in that photograph is new so it was a project where the interventions were always trying to be consistent with the architecture we found but we're sometimes very very radical in the amount of material but rather invisible in terms of the apparent change and sometimes more strategic but with the greater change okay art and practice a lot of the work that we do is to do with making spaces for arts especially in this country and I just wanted to talk about two things in relation to that Peter at the beginning of this talk was talking about London and we've I've also I talked a bit about some artists that we were looking at I think when we started our practice the example of contemporary art practice from the late 60s to work that was being done when we started our practice as 1990 was a huge example to us an example about how you could look at the apparent ugliness of the contemporary city the problematic relationship of contemporary production to just our environment into society and how you could turn those things into very productive images very productive work so that's one thing and early on we did lots of projects which vary directly stole things from artists like Robert Smithson Gordon matta-clark Richard Serra people like that Joseph Boyce we talked a lot about those artists and we didn't talk about them to show off we talked about them because we really saw in their work a way of engaging in a really productive way with especially early 1990s London that we were surrounded by which at the time seemed needed a huge effort of imagination to engage with but actually one can be very nostalgic about that time now if one thinks about 2015 London which seems to have less potential the other thing though with art practice and maybe the more direct reason that we find ourselves being to do arts buildings for art is a kind of real love of going to see art of going to places where art is installed in a way that can be moving where you really affect it in a very direct physical way this is there's no longer exists which is a bit tragic this is Holland phone öykü instant Schaffhausen this amazing private collection which was installed in these textile factory buildings and this is this voice installation and I think the spaces that we've made for art always are trying to achieve that reciprocity between the art and the space in order to make the most powerful experience possible and in that I think we've been influenced by people like David Sylvester filtered through let's say Nick Shirota there's a kind of tradition of how you make an exhibition that an exhibition is made to prioritize one's experience of the art it's not the only way of making exhibitions and it's maybe even a bit of an old-fashioned way now I realize that but nonetheless I think it's quite a productive way this is a very early project it's a competition entry that we did and it's a kind of us making a project which is like one of a Robert Smithson smear to place displacements it's kind of trying to use glass and mirrors as a mirror to the context of the project it was just like if we would also go into the music site Peter's house with big mirrors and take photographs of the sky you know because it's obvious we could do that too and just see what would happen we've done a lot of exhibition designs and I think they're a really good way to assess what galleries are like and when we do exhibition designs generally were brought in to mediate somehow between the art and a curatorial narrative and the space so this is exhibition turner in Venice that we did at 8:00 in the Lin burries downstairs and we always try and make the galleries were working in look their best you know it's not our policy to show how bad they are and the Lin Breezer you could say that's ambivalent people's attitude fiddling breeze and we try to make them look as good as they could and to use the lighting system which isn't used that often in a productive way we've also worked with artists to support installing their work in particular Thomas demand and this was in a way that the project that we were always going to do with Thomas which is to do a project a kind of mid career retrospective in the National Gallery in Berlin a show that was called National Gallery and here were obviously having to make the Mies building fit for showing Thomas's 2-dimensional work but we're also making an exhibition design that's about Mies about his idea about hanging drapery within the gallery about this kind of continuous flow of space but also doing things which undermine the symmetry and the kind of quite difficult qualities of that space first for a lot of art so building like you can see here building fake extensions to the Mies oak cabins that frame the entrance when you come out and making the whole building more asymmetrical and using six kilometers of fabric in the process which is quite special and then our experience is when we're doing public art projects like the Tate or like nodding and contemporary actually one is given quite a one can do quite a lot because I think the role that public art spaces have is to make a space that is distinctive which is characteristic of say the Tate Tate bridge modern nottingham contemporary and that the ceiling the floor doesn't have to be equally suitable for all art but it should have some qualities which if the curatorial problem is program is good start to become kind of characteristics that are associated with the space and we talked a lot about that in terms of the ceiling and nodding in contemporary and that you know after a while and i think alex has curated this or directed and curated this amazing five years of shows there that the legacy of those shows and the photographs of those shows with that ceiling with the floor with these strangely shaped rooms that whole image becomes one thing you know and it becomes part of what it means to install a show at nottingham contemporary i think that's interesting and in this project it was an opportunity to sort of understand that a little bit more about how the spaces that you make have a kind of cultural implication to the institution not as important I think is the curatorial culture but they can support a certain correct oriole narrative in an institution and then on another kind of side making commercial art galleries which is quite different you know although one we still try to make absolutely the best spaces that we can for art I think commercial galleries are they're more conservative in terms of the gallery space you make because not because they're selling spaces I don't think but because a lot of the shows are living artists they all have different opinions and for a gallery like a go Xion who have very powerful artists it's very important that all of their artists are happy and so it's a consistent discussion we have working with Gaga's in that this artist and that artists have to be happy so these are the galleries we've done for Gregorian gallery who are guess our best clients because we've been working for 16 years with them and we've done all of these galleries all but one is still open only head and Street which is that one in the middle on this side it's no longer who goes in gallery and it's been an amazing experience to work you know and when we first did the first gallery to head in street we were a bit scared about what it would be like but actually it's always been completely productive and the more work you do together the more productive it becomes and I think what we've managed to do with their gallery with the galleries we've done for gogo scene is yes they're less specific than the public art spaces we've made but we've always managed to make them specific nonetheless so the first gallery in heaven Street which is just off Regent Street we resisted and there wasn't a huge discussion about it we resisted making a concrete floor for instance because we were nowhere near any warehouses and the gallery wasn't very big so we argued that we should make a terrazzo floor there and the gallery understood why we would do that and it was as long as the terrazzo didn't look retro and didn't look like a joke they were up for it so that's the first gallery I'm not showing you all the galleries don't worry and this is the gallery we did in central Rome in an old bank building from the beginning of the 20th century and there you could say that the shape of this space which wasn't obvious it would work as an art space but it has but also the floor and Pietro Serena and the whole way you enter the gallery is extremely connected to one's experience of entering interiors in Rome and so even within the kind of gallery that has to be good for site Twombly and Chris burden and Richard right now you can still do things that are quite specific which I guess is what we always try to do gallery just over Shawn's alizée in Paris and then finally we did do a gallery with concrete floors the space in Britannia Street which is an industrial building a municipal garage and then a gallery which is finished in Mayfair which has I think the most beautiful timber floor we've ever managed to do at some cost sort of emotional and financial but it's really beautiful and it's a floor like all the others which will get better and better as it ages because it has such a kind of intense capacity in its material to age okay this is the last point typology Peter and I I think we've been really lucky the projects that we've got to do and the clients we've got to work with but we've always really what we want to do is work in the city and work work yeah within the tradition of architecture in the city with pieces of city and we've got to do that more recently and for us making a project in the city is about connecting to the idea of topologies and I mean this is a beautiful image of Rossi's tetra del mundo coming into port in Venice but it's not just about the Rossy project here it's about the Rossy project in relation to Venice yeah and the idea and the idea that Rossi was making a very very serious discourse about the role of typology and of history and the permanence was in the city and within the architectural discourse but he also made objects that had a kind of lightness and an artistic content actually which had nothing to do with that which had everything to do with his personal impetus as an artist as a form maker and that's something that were interested in that typology isn't a doctrine it's not didactic it's something you need to know about and you need to feel but there's also enormous freedom and how you can handle topologies in your projects the first project I will say is not that urban it's again it's this little brick house that we did in fish soft and I would say it's the first time it's the first new building we did so it was the first time we had an opportunity to make something that had a typological content and for us it was at once the last bungalow in the village but it was meant to be more than that it was meant to be a bungalow whose volume and the handling of the volume somehow was strange you understood that it wasn't just like the other bungalows that the scale of the volume but also the relationship with the windows and the elements like the bay window in the roof and the porch all of those things were not quite as they should be so that it could relate to the bungalows but it also could relate to the landscape it was facing out to to the church to the agricultural buildings to the side so that's the carport the porch and then you would go in and it completely it was a surprise so instead of being a building with the cellular pan and small rooms you actually went in and it was more like a poor-man's Palladian villa yeah it was a modest modest house but a house that had a very unexpected surface of space and a volume and of connection to its site and of course that interior is not completely separate from the exterior it's connected that's why these windows have a slightly strange scale that's why we thought that this skin this brick skin will feel as if it was stretched a little bit you tightly around the volume of this house I'm gonna choke to more urban projects one which is completely new and one which is completely within an existing context so this is a project that we've just made the planning application for in Antwerp in the old dock area and it's a project which is within the site of an old convent which had a master plan made by rap and rap and then we were invited by rap and rap and rap and the developer to make a competition for one quarter of the site and it was really like a student project in the best sense of the world there was for architects making this competition together we were the big architects in this scheme which was good so we got to do the big l-shaped building which in a way is like the cloister of the project and then rapid rap biven bow and Ono made two little villas each to complete the block which defines a courtyard in the center which is part of the public space of the city going through and we won the competition and yeah we're working on it now and what was wonderful about this project it is like a student project in that it's really a project that's completely a very good master plan which was really interpreting the history of the site and the contemporary condition of the site in a very intelligent way and then we were able to take a quarter of the master plan and then propose things that were completely in that spirit of each of the type each of the buildings being a type of urban building and the developer being happy to go along with that because as long as we had the right areas and the construction costs were correct which we hope they are he would make he would make the money that he needs to so you end up with these Street elevations which were incredibly very Dortch are completely in keeping with the surrounding buildings the buildings of the surrounding air but of course there are kind of exaggerated and slightly too exuberant version of the buildings that are there which are a little bit sad in some cases and then you come into the block and you have this collective space which is what the master plan and actually the whole city plan in that area is about and yes you just have this space which is a shared space shared between these small apartment villas and our bigger apartment building with ateliers and workshops on the ground floor the last project I want to show which is we never thought of as an Aldo Rossi project but it really is turned out to be one and I think it makes a full circle to what Peter was talking about at the beginning about London it's his project in Lille that we're working on which will be finished in six months and it's a project and this is a drawing we did at the competition and the the first row of purplish buildings are our new buildings and then behind is this FC Bay steel factory this enormous steel factory which was closed down in the 1970s and which will become a new urban quarter in Lille and our project was to do ELISA gastronomy a cooking school in part of the existing factory and in these new buildings whoops so this is the view of this Celtic fief the surrounding workers area which at the end of each Street I mean it's sort of like northern England isn't it with some amazing manufacturing of course all of this workers housing was built for people who worked in this steel factory and the incredible halls of the factory and our school is within three of these halls this is the site and you can see the extent of the and then the long thing is the passaggio veil so that becomes a kind of public space which is actually this space app Asajj this is our project and it was a invited competition only one French architect was invited their breasts were Flemish US and Dutch and we were the only people who made a scheme that was about the existing factory which was such an obvious thing to do but nobody else did it it's a bit like in Bremen where we were there only people who did a brick building which you would have thought was obvious in Bremen to do a brick building but nobody else did one so sometimes being obvious is a good strategy and it's not that we're keeping so much of the existing building because we're the lycée is we're keeping the existing halls as a shell but we're building new buildings within them but it's that we're keeping the the spatial structure of the factory and then we extend it in our new buildings and that obviously becomes an incredibly rich series of interior and exterior spaces for this rather large school and I think we won because our project worked the best occasionally we do competition entries that are like that but it was also I think politically the politicians could understand that we were really validating and using this this powerful symbol of Leal's industrial heritage in the making of a new important institution for them but also the only public part or the major public part of this new quarter and so I think symbolically it was very very clear why this was a good thing to do it's the plan I don't need to go through that so these are some views we did so this is the entry into the site from this side straight ahead is the passage and to the side is a gem which is shared between the city and and the school and then this is looking in the other direction a yard which is between on the left the existing and the new sheds have the school and on the right is the gym and then the student residence the antenna and then the the apartments for the teachers in kind of three smaller versions of the big production sheds this is the passage which has on one side the lycée and then in the heart of the lycée is this amazing garden which is designed by Pascale cookie and between the new buildings are also Gardens so all of the circulation spaces of the lease say look into this garden so this is the project a month or two ago and we really were trying to make a French project so there's no fancy details and lots of standard products but all of our contractors think it's a totally crazy English building but interestingly there's a lot of the subcontractors are incredibly proud of the project and they're showing lots of people around already the main material is this red concrete which is shot blasted and the colour it has a color enhancer which hasn't been put on yet and the colour of the concrete is very close to the existing brick of the sheds and then they're these colourful roofs that we're putting on and so this is that view that I showed you the new buildings in the old buildings and you can see these viaducts which are going across so all of the rainwater is collected and goes into a kouf which will be used to water the gardens of the whole catch a so there's a kind of water collection idea to do it it's meant to be very environmental the whole Zac we'll see if they manage it and you can see there these polychrome striped roofs and on the gym roof which is the biggest roof we made this mega scale corrugated steel roof with standard colors but obviously alternated in a way that's not the most efficient way but it has this incredible graphic even optical call it in it was totally amazing when this went in because we have a model in the office of this roof and then the roof went on and it's identical you know it's one of these things where it's exactly the same but it's full scale so this is one of the sheds a new shed because there were two smaller sheds which we demolished and we do we're doing twins of the big sheds and this is next to a brick shed and you can see the viaduct that connects the apartments to the school and then there's a pipes that will eventually get to the cave the space between the students housing and the teachers housing which will be an amazing planted garden behind these garden walls detail of the yellow curtain walling the back street of the lycée which is not red it's is this quite powerful gray concrete wall and the loading yard there's huge amounts of light it's a school for 1,200 kids with I can't drum how many thirty kitchens or something so there's a huge amount of food going in and out of this building so this is a loading yard where the roofing comes down to make a covered yard and and to make the facades the floors which are we're designed to be precast but it's French so it's all in situ meter and a half deep beams with holes in it for the services to go through a view into the passaggio just starting to be repainted so all of the existing steel work is painted the faded the colors so we scanned all the colors before we had to strip all the paint to get rid of the lead and then we will repaint all of the steelwork the colors it was before we stripped it so the color of old paints and that's largely being done and the view from the surroundings where you go down to small streets and these buildings in a way mediate between the scale of the houses and then the scale is a factory we said there would be two questions aloud but they're they're not mandatory London London when you first started you spoke of the potential of London and its openness and potential all those things what the hell do you do now is there a response do you think I mean I said it's it's I mean of course it's you can have a nostalgia for when we started practicing you know and the Tories were last in power you know but obviously a lot of the potential has been seemingly used up hasn't it and used up in a way that isn't necessarily how you would have dreamt about the potential being realized so it's difficult I guess where as architects were always optimist because we think that architecture is a positive act but it's difficult to know what one does and you know even where our offices gets has been built up and you know working in other cities you see where this very similar pressures are at play you see how you can be a little bit more strategic about things and end up with a little bit more you know and and given the pressures in London you could end up with a lot more actually because you know the same yeah so it's easy to be depressed about God you kind of rather glossed over the issue of the division between the buildings with ornaments and those without and I think it is a divisive issue that you know it's not coincidental that the two projects of yours that have been Stelling prize-nominated earth among the ones which are most readily digestible is modern architecture and I just wanted to ask about really the the source how seriously you should you take the sources of decoration that you're using remember when we were teaching together in blackboard in 2003 for you were looking at ornament really for the first time with the students at bath and they were all asking themselves what should be the source of the ornament that we might use him should be DNA should be fractals what is the you know appropriate response now and when you've used ornamented it's often to decide a couple of examples either these of the lace in relation to the lace market and Nottingham the use of can be Islamic patterns in relation to wiles knowledge of Islamic architecture at the Museum of Childhood and there's are these just fuel for a form of response how seriously should we take those references back to I can water affect the anecdotal ideas of history I don't think there's any kind of ultimately very important way or particular source or any kind of direction that we're heading towards I mean to me the project's the earlier projects and the later projects are not so different and it's all about looking around you the things that you find there and and playing with it and trying to bring it together into something that is never a direct reference to anything but is something that is ambiguously connected to a number of things so that it has a relationship to a number of realities and I suppose I think that the steps that we made in making the gallery in Walsall a public building that used concrete in a very sensuous way and made quite literal references to historic buildings and that building had leather clad handrails I think it was actually quite a handful for other architects to take at the time it was a felt like a bit of a step and that the the projects we've made subsequently that use ornament are that to me it's totally connected that we're trying to make specific connections to architectures that we think are relevant yeah I mean to me the ornament material and a kind of formal connection to the situation of the project they're all connected they're not different it's not like you do the project and then you go now it's time for the ornament you know and we're gonna put it on I gave a lecture to my students last week showing four projects I think we showed all four of them where we used ornament and I showed how for us how important it was that the material the way you made the facade of nodding and let's say and then the scale and the atmosphere of the ornament how those things were one thing and that the final way in which that ornament was done and the way it was scaled and the way we actually managed to cast it into the concrete that was a kind of one year process and st. Gallen was the same so you could say that the theme it's quite direct because we live in a time where very complex iconographies are not so widely shared you know so you want to make quite a direct connection but then I think the way it gains at complexity is that you make it in a way where the construction of the thing and the image of the thing they become one and that's the difference between we didn't talk about this but we both went to school in postmodern times and I think we both postmodern classical times and I think we both hugely benefited from that that idea you know if we had we gone to school five years earlier we wouldn't have had our eyes open to the possibility of the history of architecture that you could engage with it but perhaps that first flourish of using history again the problem was that the ornament was too separated from the actual construction of the thing and I'm not talking about being earnest or honest or anything but it's actually just about the energy you get when you make something and whether it's hanging the tiles in Walsall or make the brick wall and fish soft or making a precast facade in Nottingham there's an equivalence between all of those and it's just part of the material that you're you're making architecture with and if you look at two and a half thousand years of architecture its tiny period when people didn't think of ornament and the way you dealt with the surface as being a very important issue in making architecture I would say it's a very short aberration and so then it doesn't seem so strange to questions that was it

Channel: Caruso St John

Views: 11,047

Rating: 4.9603958 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Wedhb2irmlA

Length: 106min 27sec (6387 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2016