Caruso St John: Yesterday and Today - In conversation with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Ellis Woodman

um hello everyone um my name is ellis whitman i'm the director of the architecture foundation and um i am one half of your uh two-headed host for this evening uh the other being uh nana piyama fosu uh who is um teaching at the architectural association and at the university of kingston and a recent graduate of the af's um new architectural writers program um and you'll have seen i think some of the events that she was a part of um last month um as the one of the graduating cohort of um the nor writers um but my enormous pleasure tonight uh to welcome you to the caruso sentient jubilee um or i think it's kind of maybe the pearl wedding i think with the characters after 30 years um and uh we've got about a thousand people have registered uh for tonight so they're gonna be quite a lot like an already seeking of over 400 people in the room um and i'm kind of very conscious that um probably quite a lot of them weren't even born uh or um in the time period that we're you know in 1990 kind of the period at which uh um adam and peter established their practice um and i thought maybe rather than give you a potted history of of the the of crucial sentence work which i suspect many people here are well acquainted with it might be more useful for me just to say a little about the kind of circumstances in which the the practice was established um because i think it's probably fair to say that um 1990 uh was not the most propitious moment in which to establish an architecture firm perhaps even the worst moment to do so since maybe the great depression of 1929 of uh um certainly the uk was in a state of recession at the time um but i think there was not to compound those that problem there was um certainly the sense in which modern architecture was very much on the back foot after um a decade in which it had been kind of at the um the subject of consis consistent attack from the prince of wales and kind of forces ranged around him um and of course there was no public work whatsoever um kind of after the the um you know the election of the thatcher government in 1979 it really brought to an end the whole kind of project of post-war reconstruction and what modern architecture that was being built in the uk was really at the scale of shop interiors of the kind that practices like stanton williams or david shipperfield um began to um be working on at the beginning of their careers um and i think for me it's kind of interesting that the the we're kind of partnering tonight on this event in that the architect's foundation's history is almost exactly coincident with crucial engines um we're celebrating our 30th anniversary next year and the af and uh cruiser syndrome is kind of early history quite heavily intertwined so i mean i first learned about the present the existence of careers ascension as a practice through the publication of their entry in the birmingham foyer competition of 1992 um you know subsequently they were featured in this exhibition which i think basically in the economist building uh new british architecture uh just content practices with all um emotionally being trained in britain in the 1980s adam evidently kept a bit quiet about his history in order to get it and uh get in under the the fence um and then late to the the future southwark uh initiative which gave rise to the um the bankside uh signage um project was another sort of af initiative and i think there's one can see that um uh they were the crucial engine and the af were very culturally aligned at that moment particularly i think around an interest in um reconnecting with um an architecture culture of the continent and um yeah what looks of british architecture in the 1980s it was overwhelmingly defined in terms of high-tech or post-modern classicism and there was this interesting moment in the early 90s when there was a new generation emerging which were very actively looking to what was happening on continental europe and the af was quite instrumental i think in putting on lectures and exhibitions around that territory um so i kind of give this history really as much as anything to just offer a word of encouragement to the the people who are in the room who are kind of um you know maybe starting out in in their careers and uh because i think we are living it through at the moment a kind of a period which is equally um challenging and in very different ways um but it's i think the early 90s did prove to be a moment of a fantastic sort of invention and uh transformation of british architecture culture and we have to have kind of optimism that the the years we've got immediately ahead of us are going to you know prove uh similarly vital i'm going to hand over to nana to introduce the two films that we're gonna uh be showing to kind of kick off uh this evening and then we're going to reconvene for some questions um and we're very much hoping that there'll be questions from the audience which you can pitch into the q a box um i'd say because we have a lot of people maybe we'll restrict questions to people under 30 so that we can uh uh we can we think we can get some um some kind of new perspectives on the work nana over to you thank you thanks very much and firstly thank you to the af to ellis and peter and adam for having me joining this um conversation it's a real pleasure um ellis has talked a bit about his introduction to corrections work and reflecting on that now i i started architectural school in 2010 and cruiser singeans brickhouse was one of the first projects that i sort of studied as a president and i remember making and i won't show you whatever a slightly uh crude model of the brick house to try and work out spaces how the roof form kind of has developed and how it brings light into the building so for me i feel um i feel very privileged to have this conversation with you as a kind of student of your work and really getting to engage with an architectural culture by kind of pouring over your projects and books and magazines but also visiting them and so it's a real pleasure to have this um opportunity to be in conversation with you and reflecting on a practice that spans long before i was born and so tonight we'll be watching and we'll be viewing two films by the practice and the first is the swiss life arena in zurich in switzerland which was won in competition in 2012 and the commission is to organize the partnership between um the umc lions hockey club and provides a new a new 12 000 seats arena and which will be home to the club and in this fit building where we watch um adam tibor adriana and michael and visiting the sites and watching the projects under construction and taking us through a kind of journey in the story about the project but also a real interesting the making of architecture so i won't spoil it too much by giving it all away so perhaps we can delve into the film the site is rather special it's kind of like the last site of the city and then beyond here there's um allotment gardens and and the density really reduces quite a lot um and it's then between a big big railway tracks that go into the main station and the big motorway but actually lyric eric despite the presence of that infrastructure it's still quite a nice place with trees but because we're just at the edge of the city it seems relevant that we make something that does feel public so behind us you can see 180 meters yeah so this is the long side of the building 170 meters long and you can see on both of the long side taking west and east there are these arcades and the arcades are a place where people will gather get their tickets if they don't have them and then either go into the employee at the lower level or go up these big big steps to a quite amazing outdoor space which we'll visit later where they can enter into the foyers of the upper level of the tribune in the competition it was a pre-cast facade but for a number of reasons we changed that to institutes of the whole building is made an institute concrete but in the competition already we had this idea that concrete facade would be like a drapery so the longer slides you could see they're like these and then the short the sides which are not that short they're 80 liters or 110 meters they also have this this aspect of being woven i think the reason that we want it because we turn actually the main hole uh from one alongside to the other side so about 90 degrees which allowed us slightly because the side is very small you still can see that here that it actually ends where the orange and so that to do that was the advantage that we didn't get the big terrors on one side on the other side the train is all with the scope you can are along the long side of the ice field i think that circuit change of the green action or a taste learning i think that offered a lot of the arcade etc all these elements are very archaic and very romantic i think normally the sports typical like north american sports building the the field is almost like an interior which is within a shed and exactly what you're saying by spanning the main room from side to side from west to east this arcade is somehow implicated in the in the way the structure works but also the fact that you get up to the terrace and you have a huge space where you can stick a lot of people yeah we would not fit on the side yeah because it's so too narrow and that's i think that's really good and then like a pulse okay you see in into the hole yeah and you see out on the other side again and when you're up on the terrace you're on a long side of the of the big arena space because it's turned um yeah that would i remember we talked a lot about it because of course there was a test planning as is often the case in swiss competitions which had it the other way around which had a lot of inefficiency because by turning it you had too much space around it and it was just sort of calculated and we were the only people who did it actually right but we did it better we did it better it gave us the chance to have this figure yeah yeah in in section and uh along the long course because you have to lower parts in the really high cost which gets higher and higher as it was in the project which just made it better yeah actually yeah powerful and strong that was the other thing that we talked a lot about that it would have a figure it's such a big building and even if it's you know 24 meters to the higher it's now it's higher that that it wouldn't look tall if it was one height it would just look like a lump and by suppressing the ends that were the crucifixer the very best the best seat but you can also see how the facade of the big room kind of continues some of the seams of the facade in the same material and it's kind of making also the identity of the interior [Music] the lions currently rents time in the hollow stadium which is a multi-use arena and they're really not they're not at the top of the pecking order so very frustrating for them but they get bumped for other events they also don't have their training uh facilities there and they have quite poor training a lot of teams from youth to professionals women men and so obviously building this arena is about them being able to maximize the economic efficiency of the pro club and it also means that they have all of these facilities for their whole their whole network of clubs so this is one of the courtyards [Music] then we have here the two stairs going up internally into the vip boxes with this separate balcony and it's just a connection between two facilities opposite it's the main stance with the big sand going up on the second level and the lower tribune is all the way around the building and then there's this asymmetry so the upper seats are taller on the other side and then the equivalent on this side is the business club in the vip and the capacity of the main rink is 12 000. and these cutouts are between the standing elements and is there natural light so but the idea is that they're bringing some gentle light in at the two ends of the arena i mean what's interesting on the floor of the arena now you can see the shuttering with the rubber liners and tibor how many um just how many types of liners and how many were there in situ concrete we had 59 different types of lines yeah and in total it's 3142 i think so how many times can each one be used yeah around 10 times 20 times and there was a big process of rationalizing wasn't there right to i think in the beginning we had about around 80 different types and then we literally on the long side yeah all the corners are very special how many monoblocks are there oh you asked questions no because i remember there were so many a lot it's a lot here we have um 14 or 16 monoblocks on this and then we have from the south we have even two more plant rooms but this is the main comment yeah into the 6. his father's law firm had season tickets for the canadians behind the canadian bench that was like the best seats because the canadians are there you hear the coach shouting at the players and you're you know you're the people who your fans are right there again the announcer that was i remember in the forum that was a really special guy and of course in montreal it's always in french and in english huh very nice to meet you and you know you're very very important in the process okay [Music] so this is what you don't do on a construction site so this is the the emphasis um whereas tibor just mentioned we did so many versions of how this weaving would work looking quite seriously at how drapery works and also in terms of the number of molds and everything trying to get the tile into work in terms of the shuttering and the casting and yeah so what it looks like it's like a drapery that's across the whole facade i mean it's the full height you can see down there and then where these windows are inserted and the drapery has to kind of it's pushed around around the windows and then these big horizontal openings are the openings into the upper foyer and then you go down to the uh upper upper seat seats but this space is going to be incredible um so there'll be two big openings and then there'll be kind of pergola structures so that if it's raining or too sunny you get some protection and by turning the direction of the big room we gain the space because we didn't need all of the volume and but it was quite an early idea you know that when we saw we could do it and also with these big stairs we really thought it was something worth doing and i guess we did debate a little bit which side will be but this is clearly the right side for it to be on because in a way you're more in the city on this side of the building to the south oh no not today right now to the malta it's also the main axis there was a lot of design work um which had to be done in 3d because it was completely about the relationship with what you saw in elevation and the depth and the depth is limited limit to how deep we can make the facade for economic if not for any other reasons um so it was done in rhino and then we did milling of models which we still have in the office and then we did the first three meter high prototype which was done by marty who's because if foreign didn't have somebody who's totally organized to do the concrete the program would just completely collapse i think even if many businesses are in concrete there are no many companies who can do it about the size but i think much more about the complexity because in the end you can say it looks simple because it's now of course concrete wall but it's quite difficult to just even do the ones without the window that they get very good quality and diesel it's also deeply because of the back and then when it gets tighter that you actually can liberate the whole thing floor flow through the shuttering and so we did the three meter sample and it was really good and then a 14 meter sample which in a way marty wanted to do because they were worried about the horizontal joints being in plane which and and actually the 14 meter one was even better than the three-meter one yeah i mean it's the technical thing of doing the point but it is quite complex because it's all in situ so all the things that we spent weeks or months resolving like the way the long facade hits the short facade all what yeah you're wondering if you spent long enough on it see what they are not done yet they're not done yet one corner you can see it's very nice oh yeah yeah we did so many versions because there was no perfect solution you know but the crazy thing is that it really a lot of work for the concrete but actually was only the heart because after that when the casting company and marty when they came to the project it was still a lot to do together with them just that it works out for them inside how they start how they can control the quality etc that was for us also very but luckily very interesting they were organized about that can you imagine working with a contractor who would be saying that's a bit difficult which sometimes happens it would be i mean if you have a really good interactor as a partner you learn so much and in the end it always in the end it's improving the project because you have this confidence that you can actually do what you design absolutely [Music] so these are for these what would you call them pergolas they're very very big [Music] [Music] we have the perfect weather and the sun is in the perfect place isn't it that's that window is the movement joint test the test next week no this is really good so that's um the first film um and there's lots to discuss there so i'm really excited to delve in but before we do that we're going to watch the second film which is um um adam and peter's first project um first build um first new build new building project and it was for a private house in um in fishers off in lincolnshire and it's a it's a a small house but actually has holds quite a lot of ideas in it and i think ideas have become recurring in their in their practice as they go on so um without spoiling too much we can um go ahead and watch it and i think that the really interesting thing here is this revisiting one's first kind of major project 30 years on and um kind of reflecting on that and seeing how the architecture has been adapted and by its inhabitants and how they use the building and really this idea for me that you know the the building being complete is just one half of the story actually it's very my new part of the story and actually the life of the building beyond that is really worth thinking about and so i think this film is really grateful for doing that and showing that i understand this house is quite important to you well it is the first house that adam and i built our first new building we built it more than 25 years ago but it's also special because the owners of the house lynn jenkins who's a craftsman and her husband john who's a doctor have lived in it for 25 years and they've built up around the house this beautiful garden okay that's beautiful [Music] all right i'll see you around we go round [Music] he's out in the garden somewhere [Music] [Applause] i think he's very shy about appearing in any recordable event but um i'll just say for the record that the real secret of success was under planting initially leaving lots of space right and then nature has done the business and that that really has been because we haven't had to take anything out yeah it's it's just not become too overgrown at all so it's been good it's been good and and the other really sort of uh lovely thing about it is that lots of friends present and we've passed on but presented us with trees and so we have memories of a lot of these trees have friendship memories which um quite special and personal [Music] there wasn't any slanting here at all none of these trees none of these trees none of these hedges was all completely opened mm-hmm and um you were allowed they had there was planned permission with the purchase for a house and field is open [Music] it gives you a really nice frame it frames the house first so when we um designed it [Applause] uh we had to design it for a pretty low budget i think the budget was about a hundred thousand pounds it actually cost a hundred and six thousand pounds because the carport was extra that was six thousand quid i didn't detail the it has this compact square plan about 11 meters square i think the total floor area of the house is about 150 square meters and it's the idea is that it's uh the pitch roof of the house makes this vault yeah like a dome over the center of the living room which is a hall and then the smaller rooms and houses are arranged around the pool so it's very compact and efficient for its use of space and um i thought it was important that uh it looked like a house we'd made a house our first buildings had quite a big decision what should it look like we thought to make a house with a flat roof would just make it stand out too much from this place and uh we thought it was best to do something that felt like it belonged to the place but then it has many aspects to it that make it feel different from the place details the shape of the building a bit strange but of course it wouldn't feel strange if it wasn't at the same time working with things that you're familiar with so it has a pitched roof like all the other houses in the village it's built in brick but actually the shape of the roof is um faceted to make this dome and the arrangement of the windows it's also rather strange difficult to see whether it's a single-story house or a two-story house a bit like a child's drawing of the house that's great so i like the fact that it's um it's a bit ambiguous what it is there are it resembles things but your reading of it changes as you look at it a bit unsettling i can remember adam because he's from canada there's a kind of north american tradition of building houses with timber stud work oh yes that's what he wanted to do i had no idea what he was talking about okay um but nevertheless we tried it and of course local builders had no idea about this form of construction either and we thought it would be cheaper quicker but the builders didn't agree and when the project first came back with the first cost calculation that was a pretty dramatic moment when we almost lost the commission oh no and we had to change the construction back to uh block work county wall insulated capital construction i think now you would build a house out of timber yeah those kind of environmental sustainability questions were hardly in the air 30 years ago and we weren't talking about that so i think you would build it differently but in terms of the way the house works i think it's how was it working with young people and adam and their first build project also knowing they were that best and quite inexperienced accurate they didn't come across although what they showed us was the work of masters that they appreciated and so we just have confidence because of how they were saying good hands yeah yeah peter was very strong regarding what he wanted and what we wanted and he was able to defend his position with the local planners and the very sort of restricted view of the rural lincolnshire planning departments and handled them extremely well um with a sort of iron fisting velvet glove type approach um [Music] so there's strength combined strength [Music] what i can remember is uh it was very exciting but also there was quite a lot of uncertainty we didn't we didn't really know whether what we were doing was interesting um and uh and so um i can remember we rolled the drawings up and went to see tony threaten in his office and showed him the project because we wanted somebody to tell us whether it was interesting or not and he was he was very he was encouraging and that was helpful um but it was a time when we were we weren't we were kind of trying to work out what we wanted to do yeah so in our competitions you can see how the things we're interested in develop and in our early projects earliest projects there was a lot of influence from oma cool house projects that we thought were really special at the time but eventually we got to a point where we thought well everyone else is interested in this we we this isn't this isn't what we want to do so we decided to sort of march off in the other direction and make architecture that was more interested in thinking carefully about the physical nature of construction making an architecture that was coming from looking at found things and real places more about i suppose a continuity in architectural culture that we liked in panchiri and in rossi um not the kind of dilemma in when local planning was very restrictive very conservative i mean i just tell you i was outside planting one of those eucalypts as a sapling and an elderly gentleman came by on his push bike and he stopped and he looked at the house and he said what's that then and i said oh it's a house i've lived here 50 years and i've seen nothing like it and he just rolled off and this is what you're up against so i mean that's absolutely what happened and i thought oh that's good he's learned something not wishing to be patronising yeah so when uh how did that come to happen how did this recycle to land here it was serendipitous um we made it uh contrary to the wildflower meadow beyond and i just got so fed up going up and down your house of the shots and i sort of just started doing this with the ride on mower and um [Music] here it is this is life originally you did it with a push mode yeah and so there was we had a lot more spirals because of the width of the occurring but then as ages crept up you've got a ride on we've now bought a beast that will mow anything and it's got a wider cut than any of the others so there are fewer arms to the spiral but you know there is there's still this sort of galactic motif and apparently a friend of mine um who was coming to visit said oh don't you know your spirals visible on google earth really it is actually we checked it is we checked i've i've been blaming the squirrels for pulling up my plants and hiding their acorns and things in and eating the bulbs but i found one plant pot with a walnut that they planted for winter and this is the tree that i hope well i won't probably see the walnuts because they do take a long time but anyway that's how this garden has evolved the sun um two very beautiful films um so nana and i've got some questions um um but we also really want to have questions from the uh 627 people in the room uh so uh do pitch the pitch them in the in the the q a and we'll we'll come to you kind of at the end um but peter adam and maybe initially i i'd just like to ask really about your relationship to swiss architecture because i think that the fish topped is clearly the work of a young practice that's looking very intently at the work coming out of switzerland in the previous decade um and i see sort of there's a relationship i might draw the project like synthetic and dimmer photographic studio um in the slightly gorky morphology and use of kind of very refined detailing of industrial materials and these large windows kind of flush to the wall surface i'd wonder first if you could say something about what you were finding in swiss architecture at the time you were making a house like fish daft and then now that you are a kind of prominent architect in the swiss architecture scene how has that relationship changed did we know you were do you see yourself as an exotic presence in switzerland or to what extent do you do you feel part of that territory i think you'd be you're both going to unmute yourselves do you want to answer peter no no you answered i'm the professor in switzerland um [Music] of course i mean peter mentioned we were looking at oma a lot and it wasn't really before we were looking at oma and we were looking at lots of things at the same time and um you know i remember i was invited to do seminars with the ma students at the aaa about cool house and uh delirious new york and things like that but yeah we were very interested in herzog de moran and deaner but also caesar and it's what you said at the beginning i think the foundation but before the foundation 9h was this kind of very uh important but uh not not you know not widely attended or read uh magazine and venue occasionally there were lectures um and we were fascinated by that because it was for us it was an alternative to the very professional almost i mean commercial but not just about making money but the idea that an architect was efficient uh resonant with the ambitions of their clients that's what uh the generation before us was really talking a lot about you know the high-tech people and even the second generation high-tech people who were doing a kind of neo-modernism and for us this example of european of continental practice was that architects were writing about architecture not only their own architecture but about architecture that was important for them [Music] and that was really important for us because we were looking for another way of practicing and also this idea and it was you know timing was a bit lucky we started teaching when we started our practice i mean peter actually taught a little bit before and we did competitions you know and um that's not what everyone did that wasn't the typical way that you started a practice in britain or in london there were other ways and it remained a kind of anomalous way of thinking about a practice for a long time and it it did us really well there's a point at which it kind of it it had limits as well you know because in britain at least to do big projects that's not how you get big projects you get big projects by meeting with people and having a network it's not something peter and i are very good at um and then from switzerland i mean maybe mikel wants to say something but we're a little bit exotic but we're not that exotic i mean what would you say mikhail mikael you have to mute yourself yes yes [Music] well i think we well not my not me personally but i think the office is still a bit exotic and uh outside of the swiss scene although we have many projects or we are also well connected but i think the position where we come from or where you come from from london is still something which is uh exciting in our project and i feel it still remains as a something left of where you come from where the office come comes from yeah the way we talk about architecture and the way and you know we did before when we were like two years ago when we started to embark on this new website which was you know launched last week um we did a kind of market research in our own way and an interesting thing amongst the swiss clients was how we were constantly surprising them with what we came up with and that's not very swiss i mean swiss architecture still maybe not in the generation or two generations after us but in our generation it's still very much about following a line and kind of having the concept and then the design coming out of the concept and our work is not it's not so clear to i mean i think our work still is conceptual but uh the relationship between concept and form is often very mysterious even to us and so our clients really picked that up and i think they enjoyed that sense of being surprised by what we would come up with i mean the other way we engage with architecture now is that you know peter and i and now i've taught in switzerland now for more than a decade and so i have a generation of students now who uh some of you know i've taught them some of them worked for us they're starting their own offices and so that's another way and of course in this country peter's still teaching here and before that we both did you know in some ways that's that's for me the proudest the thing i'm proudest of is that by making this huge commitment to teaching we've always taught and in a kind of very full way but also the people who've gone through our practice that that has you know those are like shoots that then in their own ways starts to change the architecture scene not that those people are clones of us because that would not be a good thing but that the way of thinking in the way of working uh that our students have and the people who came through our office that something of that is uh perpetuated and and that is something that i'm you know that's the biggest thing that we can do in a way that's about really trying to form a culture i think this um question about um kind of the culture of making architecture and the the kind of um common themes are really apparent across the films we've seen even though they're radically of different scale these projects but it is really interesting to see how the concerns about the kind of physical nature of construction or of continuity or the kind of everyday and the found in place are kind of embedded in your work even from the um fishtop house um those qualities are shared even the kind of large-scale infrastructural projects such as the arena and and i think that it's really interesting that you talked a bit about the kind of earlier works in this um culture of teacher teaching practice and competitions because there's an idea of kind of developing a kind of sensibility about the image of of your architecture and i think that that's a particular strength in in the practice's work and it's also really rooted in this idea of translation and that's something i find really um compelling about the work and you can see it even from a you know a rural house to a large infrastructure project even just comparing across the two films but also actually in the wider um sort of um body of work of the practice and i i find this um these ideas really interesting but i want to explore a bit about how you you also said something about the kind of surprises in your work which are also something i think are real delights and how you sort of maneuver that how do you sort of move beyond the image and and you know resist being controlled or even seduced by it but actually rather seek out the common ideas and this idea of working with the kind of translation and in your work and perhaps also what does that look like in light of 30 years of practice and the next 30 not the next 30. so perhaps i'll put it to peter first you're asking there about translation yeah translation and kind of i guess about common themes and translation um and the idea of the image within your practice um i suppose what i recognize in what you're saying is is about um [Music] uh the kind of quality that i think the buildings have which is uh of in some senses um having a kind of normality in some senses they follow conventions and they you recognize things in them in some ways familiar and then hopefully there's always another sense in which it's um undercut and surprise and you're surprised and that i suppose is the kind of idea for me a translation that you're you're um in the process of of making it into something else you're you're both using what you were working with before and you've managed to make something different by the way in which you've changed it and so and sometimes it's to do with the detail um yeah i mean no i mean you know like we talk a lot about references although not all of our projects have explicit references but certainly with the teaching you know this idea that if you because i think with teaching using references is very references is a very um productive didactic method you know because if nothing else the students learn about the reference that you've given them so at least they learned something but the idea is that if you have a reference and then you make a project there's never any danger that your thing is somehow going to be a copy in a bad way because the reference usually isn't for the same kind of building and it might not be for the same scale of building and it's certainly from another time like even if it's a recent reference but certainly if it's a reference from the 19th century so there's so many transformations that have to be undertaken to make the reference into a piece of contemporary architecture that there's absolutely no danger that uh somehow you're going cheats by copying a that your ego will be subjugated in the reference like you don't need to worry about expressing yourself in architecture you can't help but express yourself so you can forget about that as a agenda you know and it's this this idea that if you do things in in good faith you know if you kind of follow the logic and the the line that the discussion uh takes you in the direction that the discussion takes you in um the transformation will always happen and the good thing about thinking about references and analogies is that it informs the big picture but it also can inform details so like at fischeruft we thought a lot about the suburban houses in fishtop but also the sugden house and venturi projects but then the construction you know which was a bit of a disappointment as peter uh explained it and he did know what timber stud work was uh that was just a joke just to be clear um but you know the windows are looking at leverage you know and those references don't necessarily go together but it's because of the references that you choose to combine that's the other way that you make it into your own work and i think when we did it we had a particular reason for doing it but i think now this idea of using references and sampling things i think it's a and you know of course in hip-hop music it that's how you make that music and it's the most influential music of the latter part of the 20th century and it informs all music in the 21st century but if you listen to someone like arthur jaffa talking about his films you know he's talking about filmmaking in particular him well no well he's saying that you know african-american film making will be what african-american music was to the 20th century it'll be in the 21st century but he takes all of these images that are important to him but he knows are important to the people he's talking to in his work and he's ordering them and he's altering them and i think that that is one way of making sense and giving value to this saturation this over saturation of images and information that we find ourselves swimming in today so it's that's not something we thought about 30 years ago but i do think we were you know it became more and more apparent as we worked as we worked through things and and i do think it's uh it's something that has hopefully allowed our work to remain contemporary you know and not become frozen in a in an idea or a mentality of 30 or 20 years ago i think it's really interesting that you talk about this idea of doing things in good faith and the kind of qualification of images these days you know you can go on instagram and type in a hashtag there you are and this kind of idea of how you kind of manage the essence of the idea that you're you're working with and i think um for me it's always it took me quite a long time as a student to really understand that the kind of ways in which to kind of use references and buildings and actually it's more about the essence of the thing that you're you're kind of investigating rather than than the image of it and i think that there's a really um interesting um connection between between these things and i think i'd like to put this question also in some ways to the other members of the office present and how perhaps these references um help you articulate a conversation between um between a project team or or the ideas and how you take and perhaps an initial idea and sort of share it in a kind of visual language in the ways that you work so if anyone i mean like tibor do you want to talk about having to find the flaxman draw the trunk yeah that was quite this thing um no i mean adam one day and we were talking a lot about uh fabrics and um woven stuff and and and uh and early on there was i think this idea still from the competition i i think um that the whole arena was something about like the theater like the theater of the 21st century might be the arena and um there lies the idea of the of the of the of the fabric itself and so one day um after trying out so many versions of of the facade i think we were searching for uh a way how to how to deal with doing something like with this limited depth in a way that we only have six centimeters of depth to port spray a woven fabric and so adam came up with um bringing these drawings of uh flexman to the office and said yeah take a close look at these and and so we studied these and we studied um all sorts of uh ways how to um how to translate this idea of the of the of the fabric into the facade which is i mean flex one was one of these um there was also this idea of the inside out column that you also described in the in the film um and this idea of i mean there was something you sent us from actually from your teaching from eth where you had this um yeah this book about um the fluting of the parthenon right yeah uh but i think it's it's it's a lot of try and error and and trying out uh a lot and then coming up with new ideas i think the as i understand the reference is not in the beginning but during the process and so you you take these and then you apply and then you try out again and then you do models and you do 3d printing and you do 3d models and you do visuals and whatever and so um it's i think it's also the mix of the media that brings us to the next to the next reference [Music] perhaps i mean one of the most con consistent conceptual models um i think both of the projects you showed kind of relate to it in your work is is this idea of the tent um i think you could talk about the the house in lincolnshire in those terms and and the arena uh but also maybe the brick house or nautical contemporary uh and all of these are very explicitly heavy buildings but they have a certain kind of morphology uh where they're at a tautness that the the the wall surface and the roof surface have a um an equivalence and the windows are invariably pushed to the to the outside of that wall surface to sort of maintain uh yeah it's like a tent like enclosure um could you say a little about why that theme particularly has been such a persistent um preoccupation uh maybe i i mean a tent is a sort of fundamental building isn't it and to make a tent in in a landscape i remember a conversation when we were designing lin lin and john's house where we were looking out at the horizon because it's built on the fence and it's very flat and there was this um haystack in the distance and we sort of said it should be a bit like that because the idea of making something that's very compact and that somehow the compactness of it the fact that it it was dense went with the sky and the flatness of the horizon and um and uh building has that quality and then the fact that the windows are uh concealing the thickness of the brick makes it ha makes it look like a veneer and that and then the shape is tent like to me that's that's about trying to use the materials and the details to enhance that sense of the delicacy of making an enclosure and that you're standing there we also you're standing there in in sort of middle of the landscape and yes you're right there's a there's i can think of many examples where you one is trying to work with the surface of the building in order to give it that delicacy so that it's somehow hovering between being dense and at the same time fragile which seems special but i think for the the stadium in zurich i mean we had these references of the tenth of the swedish park but i think there it's i think it's more another idea because it's a building which is very big and has almost no window so the question from the beginning in the competition was actually how do you build for what could be an idea of the building if it's so big such a large volume without something which structure is from the inside or from the function and i think there it was the idea to to make to make the whole volume much more softer and that was actually the the start of this reference that we looked on the tents or on the on this surface and the fabric and then there's something um really interesting in your work just talking about this kind of imagery of the tents um that appears as a kind of strangeness and a kind of ambiguity that is it's really it's quite profound and i think that that sense of kind of um ambiguity or see even slightly strange and in a in a good way that that it sort of you know you you read it differently um every time you see it and it reveals itself to you in kind of moments and that there's something at the fishtop house is clearly articulated through this kind of the building is an image like a child's drawing and there's a kind of when a child makes a house there's a kind of strangeness to it so there's a familiarity which they've learnt by seeing other houses but then they always add additions so the pitch of the roof is really um tall or the windows are slightly you know unproportioned but there's a kind of notion of making new in in in that in the way that a child might draw um a house that i think also your project that the house really picks up on and then at the arena there's this kind of anamorphic form um and i wonder if you could talk a bit about the kind of um the way that the practice works with kind of these ideas of strangeness familiarity and and i guess the image of architecture that that produces yeah i mean it's none of its conscious huh and um i think we did a lot of projects where you know obviously we're interested in construction all different kinds of construction and and you know for at the beginning of our practice you know the idea of using brick that using bricks could somehow be part of a contemporary or even a radical architecture there's that's it's either a really pathetic idea doomed to failure or it's extremely provocative and then as soon as you make that decision you know you want to make sure that the brick like in fishtop the idea was that the brick is like a textile we talked about that and it stretched over the building but even in the brick house where the brick is really a lot of brick and it's holding the house up we did all sorts of experiments where we used english and flemish bond but in the end we just use a running bond we use ties in order to bind the things together so we cut consistently deny the fact that the brick is working so you're aware of the presence of the brick you kind of have a feeling it's probably holding this very heavy looking roof up as well but then we undermine that because it gives it the stranges it makes it uncanny it gives it an energy it also uh you know it also avoids a pomposity you know which i think you know we are interested in using conventions and things from references from tradition but we also were not interested in being pompous and that's really for me that's the real problem of traditional architects traditional architecture today i love classicism we're doing a classical building at downing at the moment and even amongst amazing classical buildings from the early 19th century but also in amongst quinlan terry buildings and you know it's very clear who we want to be more like you know the wilkins not the quinlan terry but what does that mean today so there's also this thing about the vibe that your architecture is giving off the spirit that it's giving up but that said a project like the bremerlandis bank which has a self-supporting brick facade on the cathedral square it's thick and you see the thickness it's sort of writhing and it has a kind of autonomy which when you're there is quite shocking but has a kind of brutality that it's just standing there but it's thick it's not about denying the thickness of anything so that's a different idea um so we don't i think for a long time it was about making a material like a substantial material assembly somehow pictorial and flat but that isn't the case anymore and i think we're also doing projects a few of which are just being finished which are more conventional where because actually the kind of surprise and the energy that i'm talking about uh that we were looking for i think it's more difficult to achieve or maybe it's not as interesting anymore you know now sometimes what's more interesting is just to be more normal and and and that the difference to normality is even subtler maybe or maybe it's just that we're doing buildings that are more boring i'm not sure you know that's we have to see um [Music] i wanted to ask about um i mean as you mentioned fishtoft was your first new building you built project and actually i think i'm right in saying that the first 20 years of your practice you only made four built new buildings um you know that everything else i think was there's there's wall sole and then there's the brick house and nottingham contemporary um so the physic and chesnik okay yeah before about four you're right um but it's um yeah so overwhelmingly your you you build a practice around ideas of reuse which was you know something quite distinct from you know the the nature of architectural careers of celebrated architects kind of in decades previous um i mean so now you're um you have this opportunity quite recently to to make very large new buildings um at a time when we're obviously all questioning the environmental consequences of new building and and um whether whether that the the the the culture of construction that we've embarked on is sustainable how do you see the next 10 years of the practice playing out do you think there'll be a do you see you know in that balance between new construction and the reuse of existing fabric i think uh the question you're asking is um it's a very difficult one and adam should probably talk about it because he often brings this topic up i think um i think uh there is a contradiction if you are critical of the difficulties of capitalism in doing as much commercial work as our office does uh something we often talk about you know there are many things that we try and get a lot of satisfaction of doing in making an office building but fundamentally if you're designing an office building uh the financial restrictions mean that it's it's a it's of uh it's limited more or less to making as good a facade as you can i think there are contradictions and i think the reason that we both teach is because it does allow you to uh work with young people and to dream and to try and change things in the ideas that you have in your teaching things more difficult when you have a practice that has been going for 30 years that has built up a kind of body of work and has interesting people that once were worked with to to make the kind of fundamental change that uh you're talking about but i you know adam should talk about that because it is something that's very close to his to his heart yeah but we have the discussion all the time you know and um yeah i think there should be a moratorium on new construction you know that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do um and let's see while at the same time we we continue to work very hard to build new buildings yeah well we're not going to stop working on the buildings we're doing but we're having you know more and more difficult discussions about what future buildings we want to do what competitions we want to accept to participate in but of course as a you know when you're practicing there's a kind of a level a kind of a reality which you have to recognize but you know it's not it's it's not a good enough answer and i think we need to find a way of answering it the good thing about teaching is that one is much more uh much lighter you know you can change very very quickly what one is what you're teaching um and there's an enormous appetite it seems in london schools but and in zurich it's incredible the difference uh in what the students are interested in it's happened in five years uh a kind of transformation in the expectations of the students but also how demanding they've become they become they used to be you know great students but quite conservative and it's completely turned around and now they're really challenging the faculty and something i've really encouraged and it it's very very challenging but it's also really it's really important because you know i think the classic in switzerland you know you still can imagine having a classic practice where you do competitions and you do housing buildings but i think more of there's some very good students who now don't think that that's what they should be doing that they should be finding alternative ways of being architects in society and i think in the same way that when we started our practice the german part of switzerland was a kind of paradigm for us and i would say the scene is less interesting than it was not because we're there but because of all sorts of things switzerland has been affected by the presence of money etc etc in the same way as everyone it's a little bit more moderated maybe but it's it's suffered from it also but i think in the same way that it was really in the in 1990s say or from the late 80s 1990 really showing a new way of making of practicing architecture i think that might happen again and it's to do with a school which is like a kind of incredibly powerful engine the eth you know which is a very good school but it's also a very big school that's an unusual combination but it's also i think that there's you have direct democracy uh there's a red green government in most swiss cities actually so socialist and green party and i think people are becoming more and more engaged and they're going to start to become more insistent that city policy delivers on some of the some solutions to the you know to the difficulties that we find ourselves in within a very conservative country actually you know it's not that switzerland is a socialist country by any means but the cities have a kind of progressive edge to them so it's interesting talking with the students the seminar week that we did which the af pub you know broadcast the sessions those are mainstream discussions in zurich now and i think they will have an effect on policy in a way that they of course there's loads of people engaged in those questions in london but in terms of the public sector the public sector has no power or capacity to respond to these demands here it's much slower and um yeah we've got another 10 minutes and um and unless you've got another burning question i'd proposing we might open it up to the floor yeah well it was just um it's just a very quick one because i i think part of what adam started to touch on is this conversation across a generation and i think the films really character characterize that by you know going to the to um to view these projects with members of your of your office and i think that there's a real there's a really beautiful conversation across generations and i think even with um your um collaborators that you want to see the projects with but also i think with um your first with um the clients of fish soft and this conversation across by you guys as um young practitioners and them as your as your clients and there's a wonderful moment in the film where lynn says well the shaders work of masters so we you know that convinced us and this idea of kind of the generational conversation and this kind of idea of reference and i thought that was really rich and i guess for me i once posed this question to tibor lorenzo adriana um ever and michael about this um mikhail sorry about this idea of kind of this cross-generational collaboration and conversation that you're part of um as working on the practice keyboard you should talk as a younger member of the office there are younger ones they're younger ones sorry i'm so young please who's the youngest now i mean of course there's this this aspect of generation and conversation of of this conversation of the generation but i think which is even same important is that there's no this conversation of generation but there's the topic and there's the sense and there's the goal where you want to go and then something like from both sides from from each side that comes together and brings them the the future or the present actually the present and from the present and the future and so i think it's um it was always probably you don't go or you don't want to apply to crosses engine if you are not interested in in in topics in in in history in architectural history it's something that is just part of the office and and also this sensitivity and not this having to be too loud of everything but that's not it's not the only thing i think that's both sides have part of it and both sides profit from that and um it's not only being of um i i somehow don't have to feel it i never had the feeling and maybe you have to apologize but it's not like that you have um it's you look it's it has always been like really productive really nice interesting conversation with adam and with peter and so it was not like you know you have like i have other professors where you were like really like okay okay okay and that's what they really really really um estimate i'm really grateful of that that there is this um this generation topic but it's not that important and it's something that you always have to say yeah it's the it's all one always it's more about the conversation than the kind of hierarchy yes it's more it's like really the content and it's what gets out of the content and you don't know where you finish you start and you end somewhere which makes every day interesting actually great we have a sort of related question from someone in the audience from you and hardy um you and i'm gonna unmute you if you want to pitch in i'm going to read it out if i can't hear if i'm not hearing from you um you and asked um can i ask you someone early in a career what memorable important lessons adam and peter learned from their mentors and practice when they were young architects or students um well there were there were many mentors when we were young architects um i mentioned tony threaten uh and uh florian bagel was another person who adam and i had in common because uh adam worked for him and then when he left florian's office i i took his desk space and we both talked with him i mean in terms of lessons from florian he was i suppose uh incredibly influential in the example of uh combining teaching and practice because he had this um office within london met architecture school and he was building teaching and he was building at the same time [Music] and uh just seemed like a really attractive idea that an architect can do both of those things each one helping helping with the other which i guess we did our best to continue yeah thank you um and although i don't think he's quite under thirty i do see we have a question from oliver lutyens uh oliver bubble maker though he said uh are you gonna olive are you there okay he might he might jump in but he the question was do you have an uncharted project that you would be eager to do and why yeah i i saw his i saw oliver's question i mean what i'm what i would like to do and it's it's it seems to be almost impossible because we get close to the situation where we can do this and then events always overtake us somehow is to work in a at a territorial scale with a few other people you know like the ideal would be where there's already buildings with a good client or with the city and to kind of lever all of the energies and the potentials of a site and it could be rural it could be suburban it could be in the city it doesn't make any difference but where you go to a place with a client who understands that that place has all sorts of values and potentials which are unrealized and that you would work together with them in a long you know in a in a over a long period of time to make something amazing you know and it might not require any new construction it might be about thinking of new ways of um occupying these buildings or refurbishing them so they require minimum capital investment in some cases but different strategies and others and like i think i think as a young architect you couldn't do that because you wouldn't have the range of capacities and experience to do it um but now we do definitely have the experience to do it and you know our work at the tate was at a much smaller scale similar to that we unfortunately only did the first phase of that project so that was a project where for a year we just looked at the existing building and tried to understand what qualities it had what potentials it had what things could be left alone what things had to be radically rethought and i think okay at the scale of a museum and our project at the noi pinnacle tech in munich is kind of similar although with a newer building um but i think at the scale of a territory you know not a whole city but a part of a city or a part of a territory i think that's the scale at which some architects at least should be working with good clients with other consultants because i think one would learn so much from that and it wouldn't be about making objects or even leaving one's mark you know it would be really about managing and um yeah managing a kind of territory so that it is able to go from the state it's in now into the future you know because i think that's what the future of architecture is and other other disciplines in spatial in spatial planning it's the most important thing you know and um and of course we try to do that with individual building projects but it's limited what you can do in it because it always feels a little bit like yeah okay we're doing our best but it's not very good you know it's not good enough and uh i guess you know the work we've done at downing which has been for more than 20 years now although we've done quite small projects it feels a little bit like that you know we've we've looked at the whole campus with the client and we've made master plan projects and we've made individual projects and at least it feels like we're working with the client together on something absolutely together that neither the client nor us could work without the other the other person um and that are our are what we want to achieve are so aligned you know that's why we've stuck with each other for 20 years but it's quite rare that that kind of relationship um i think oliver was hoping that he was like a moon moon base i think that's what he was probably hoping for but um well one one more question from the audience and i'm going to read it just because i've had such uh limited success in getting [Music] uh this is very inspiring for this talk my question is what advice would you give to someone just starting their own practice perhaps something you wish you knew 30 years ago at the beginning i i don't i don't regret anything that we did you know like i don't i mean one office often has you know wishes this wishes that but i don't feel we did anything wrong it was super productive the way we embarked on our practice the only thing is that i don't think you could embark on a practice in the same way today it would there's a different there's there's a different situation so you'd have to do it in a different way and i don't know exactly what that way would be i think young people would know that better than i do um but you know all right the idea that we would teach and practice that we would do competitions but we would try to have real projects that we would do all of these things at the same time that was very very productive you know and um [Music] but you know and i don't think it was easy when we started but some aspects of it were probably easier than they would be today i think um peter do you want to pick up anything i i'd say that was uh that was the first fundamental uh good call you made that's probably what that probably was a good move certainly it's a lot easier if there's two of you yeah yeah you shouldn't start on your own in the practice app that's absolutely right that's a kind of really a bad idea at many many levels because it's very good to be able to talk to someone else but i also think it's very good to practice without thinking that your ego and expressing yourself is is important i mean to pick up on what adriana was saying like in the end i don't care where an idea comes from in the office it's not relevant because if you're having this good discussion in the project team ideas come from all sorts of places because of course in the end peter and i and michelle and the other senior people in the uh practice decide but you know if it's my idea or somebody else's idea what difference does it make it makes it's ridiculous and i think in other offices it's different you know um so that's a really good thing about having a partner is that it's it's explicit that there's two of you right at the beginning um thank you everybody um and for the particularly the people who made those fantastic films and we contributed to them uh which is uh i was startled by the production quality which is we had lives of fiora showing us around her park in 100 days studio we were trying to match the quality yes that was just more veritas yeah but um yeah what a wonderful evening um 30th anniversary i guess i guess we'll reconvene in 20 years thank you thank you nana and yeah this will all be up on youtube tomorrow and uh as we've mentioned there is a new christmas engine website uh which uh it was just launched at the weekend uh which has um much expanded content from the previous iteration including a lot about the uh about adam and peter's parallel careers in teaching um which i think is kind of a future resource to be able to see the interaction between between those two lives um and instagram you've got an instagram account yes okay keep watching right and everyone thank you thank you so much thank you bye

Channel: Architecture Foundation

Views: 4,088

Rating: 4.8857141 out of 5

Keywords: Architecture, The Architecture Foundation, London, Urbanism, Design, 100 Day Studio

Id: dpCpl-L7iNg

Length: 95min 41sec (5741 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020