O'Donnell + Tuomey lecture | Architecture on Stage

[Applause] from the ground up from the inside out before getting into the lecture proper I'm just going to do a bit of a detour a prologue which I hope will in some way explain the title of the lecture it's one of those sad stories of a competition lost which most of you are probably familiar with in this case the competition was for a new master plan for University College Dublin and for us this was really important because this is the University in which we've been involved for more than 40 years as students as tutors and now as professors and the competition was to design a master plan to completely reconfigure the campus doubling the amount of accommodation reorganizing all the traffic and the new spaces in the campus and very particularly to design a new building for the school of architecture and engineering within that new master plan and for us it was a kind of opportunity of a lifetime to think about our own campus and our own school and particularly we were the only Irish architects on an international shortlist so we really felt we were playing for the home team and we had to go for this one so we assembled an international team including our colleagues allies and Morrison and max forums and Harvey's landscape from New York and many others and together we really went for this competition we carried out very extensive analysis of the existing campus its geometries its history its buildings its landscapes and having done that analysis we came up with a first move which was to make a big sloping promenade which went from the sorry from the existing heart of the campus down to the entrance bridge and using the campus geometries then we widened that promenade to make a big bow shaped space the front square of UCD and the site for the School of Architecture which the brief specifically said had to be a landmark visible from the road and from the city so this is our new School of Architecture in this new leakin decorated entrance with new timber bridge and other structures and we made a master plan which was really about urbanization we were turning the campus into a little town and to do this we built on the footprints and the landscapes associated with three quite fine historic houses within the campus and these became the Centers for new neighborhoods around which we built all the accommodation and developed ideas about phasing and strategy and we used our new urbanization to tie up the kind of ragged edges of the old 1970s campus which somehow didn't have a proper form and also on our team to young practices who we invited in which were platon bio and superposition who are graduates of UCD school of architecture indeed students of ours now making names of themselves in Hong Kong and Berlin and we asked them to look at the whole master plan and to think about a kind of other layer of architectural infrastructure of bridges and walkways and links and pavilions to provide a sort of second more intimate way of moving around this campus that was based more on a pedestrian human interaction rather than on big infrastructure and we used water there's a lot of existing hidden waterways and we dug some of those up and proposed for example when the beautiful world garden has been cut by a road in the campus we reinstated the world garden using water and we used that historic moment as a centre for a new academic cluster and by building up by really densifying a building high buildings in the campus we had this feeling that existing beautiful historic gardens and the woodlands would be allowed to play a better role in the campus than they are at the moment in a kind of scattered and unorganized layout superposition and platon bio designed a beautiful little pavilion cafe performance space in the corner of that water garden and the whole master plan make this newly urbanized world facing out over the RSC with the School of Architecture rising out of its centre but also kind of dug in to the landscape of the new promenade that we're proposing and the building is designed to be seen from all sides and indeed his approach from a number of directions which works with a slope on the site so it's composed of a concrete base with the big entrance ramp public-service illa T's like foyer a cafe opening into the big work yard in the middle all the studios and laboratories and then on the top hovering hovering above the roof garden a new research center and library and the idea was that the cores are the structure we wanted we were thinking about a school of architecture being like a sort of demonstration to students of the amazing capacities of contemporary concrete construction to make big cantilevers and for the cores to hold up the building so it's a kind of self-evident structure and then it's also dug into the ground as I said and at the bottom we have the landscape ramp the courtyards of workshops the fab labs all the things that you need in contemporary schools of architecture and the Fourier space is the place of learning of debate of discussion of making and also a place where installations and experiments can be exhibited and in this drawing we've shown dilma doctrines and installation from Ireland's Pavilion in Venice in 2016 the studios would open out onto these mid-level Roof Gardens so they're kind of indoor/outdoor studios and all parts of the building have a view out over the RSC and the campus it's an interactive section a section where there are big voids between the studios basis so everything is connected they open into gardens and then above everything is a research center and the lecture theatre so it's a kind of and it's a building it's a building in a kind of a symmetrical equilibrium at last and concrete building hovering in the campus with the work of the studios on view from everywhere it's a building that will be translucent and transparent in the daytime translucent at night I kind of lit up beacon in the heart of the campus or that was what we thought but then we got the assessor's report on the competition and it was very short and the only main point in relation to our non winning entry was your building is not a landmark so we said okay we thought actually it was a landmark well further feedback came verbal feedback where we were told that they were really looking for a building that was designed from the outside in and we had made a big mistake of designing our building from the inside out so we thought actually you're right we did and that's what we meant to do and that's what we always mean to do so we decided then to call this lecture from the ground up from the inside out I'm just going to read a short text explaining that concept when we speak about the ground we mean the entire territory of the project the given ground from which ideas emerge the place the people the culture the site the wider context these are the conditions that form the question to be answered in the architectural project a good building begins with some inner order often with the embodiment of a social idea the architectural design evolves from the inside out growing into form like an organism an operative mechanism ready for work it's formal composition results from the arrangement of working parts an insight is a more complex term than simple interior containment it means being at the heart of something in the know it's about understanding client intentions combining the spirit of the enterprise with the useful life of the building it means living the project getting it under your skin and then translating it working it out in the design so a project that we completed in 2007 a house in the outskirts of Dublin which we call the sleeping giant is probably a very clear embodiment of our idea of designing from the ground up it's on a sprawling very three-dimensional site down below a road with a lot of rocky outcrops a distant view of the sea and a very strong press these granite rocks so we designed the house in a kind of conversation with the landscape making the house itself in a way a kind of outcrop that relates to the granite on the site and we started both of us working together John making these sketch something that is like a cross between a plan and a description of the brief and this is where the sleeping giant and name came from so John made this drawing of a kind of big lazy giant slumbering sprawled out over the site with three legs because there were three little girls in the family the stomach the breasts the brain looking out towards the sea and the sunshine shining onto his lazy back at the same time I was making a series of sketches of the rocks on the landscape and in a way these started as observations of kind of clothes noticing and then they gradually realized that they were not really an actual description of the site they were a kind of interpretation of how we might build on the site and then we worked a lot in model because it's such a strong three-dimensional context and in a way we felt here we were experimenting for us with a new way of thinking about space and movement that grew up out of the ideas this very three dimensional topography and we proposed a concrete roof which is like a big canopy of chamfered cantered concrete shapes it's a kind of cross between a cave and a tent hovering over this house and the site the house that the plan of the house in a way wraps itself around the one flat area the kind of lawn in the middle and then wraps its way around to look at the sea and come back towards the road and the rooms and we were trying to think about a kind of intuitive way in the middle there's a fireplace in the stairs which is the concrete structure around which the roofs are supported and then there's held up when little columns and then around that the rooms open out and make their way out to the views into the rocky outcrop and to usable spaces sort of rotating around that Center and the we were very interested in the idea of bringing the landscape in and the house out so as well as being from the ground up definitely also has that's designed from the inside out and because the road is so much higher than the has the roof and the form of the roof is really important and the sense of the whole house as this kind of built landscape was something that was very much on our minds and the year or two later we were we won the competition to do the Student Center for the LSE here in London and probably the work we done on that house was a kind of research into a different way of thinking than we had employed before in this case the flight site was flat but very compressed and very tight and with the triangular geometry and a lot of narrow streets coming down and the brief was complex with lots of different uses and we wanted to make a building which had a kind of singularity that felt like one thing for reasons to do with rights to lights and other pressures we had to make the building narrower at the top than at the bottom so instead of stepping it we'd sloped and candidate to make it feel like a big house for students a kind of mountain of brick in the middle of London and it rises above the surrounding streets as this clearly identifiable object and at the time as the competition we were already thinking about brick and I made these studies thinking about sometimes the brick is solid but sometimes it's pulled apart and perforated to let light through because there are spaces in the building like the prayer Center or the gym that don't really want people looking in and so our work really became about making this what we called a brick mountain a big solid brick building but which is not really solid because it let's right through and in developing that over the following years we we had to draw and design the geometry of every brick and there are over a hundred special bricks and all of them were drawn in three dimensions but the thing about these bricks are handmade bricks and each brick is cast in a wooden mould anyway so to make a different shape brick it just means making a different shape wooden mould and while we were in the process of developing the detail design we brought the project as part of our installation to the 2012 Biennale in Venice and we used it as a way of exploring more the development of the geometry of the brickwork but also thinking about solid and void and form and space and movement and anyway Venice had always been in our minds in the beginning of this project when we were making the first sketch plans we had a really strong memory of this space outside the Pensione a Accademia in Venice which has an amazing sense of these red buildings converging and in fact they sort of feel like they're moving past each other we know that they're not moving but we sort of feel that the spatial dynamic between them suggested and we were trying in the élysée project to bring some of that sense of movement because the site had all these little lanes that converge and this the students are moving from all of these other parts of the campus into their Student Center so we thought about the shape of the building really being a response to the forces at work on the site so where the Lane comes up the building pulls back to make it covered outdoor space where students can gather before going in and then the staircase because the site is so small the stairs is like a public Lane like a route that moves up through the building passing windows that look out to courtyards doubling back on itself sometimes overlooking all of the spaces wrapping around the lift shaft which is like a kind of M steak a totem pole in the middle of the building sometimes looking back out to the street under the canopy and when we designed the building in the competition because of the sight being so confined we designed the building really as a series of perspectives because it's always seen through narrow streets and in this case and framing the new canopy which we were proposing which is built in steel and in timber and glass and then we were asked to make the landscape outside so the building comes from the inside out we made a new street with street furniture and the complexity of the briefs can be seen in this section where it's got a disco club down in the basement and we brought daylight and views down from the street and down from the back and then there's a series of very varied and different accommodation going all the way up through the building the idea of the perforated brick and the big windows was that at night the building would be kind of on display to the world around it would be kind of a lantern displaying the life of the student body within yeah Ellis said we're 30 years in practice and for 20 of those years we've been building at University College Cork maybe for 25 of those years we've been designing it University College Cork so tonight we thought we might just show you some of the new work that's on site there and we might relate it to some of the work we've done there um in with regard to the theme that Sheila is Outland we're trying to keep to the topic of ground up inside out um what a slate you see there are three buildings in a row I just want to talk about if you can call a bridge a building but the real thing is that the cliff the limestone cliff that the old University stands on the cliff runs in a in a sweep around a bend in the river so we have one two three and in a way those buildings are thought of as part of the configuration of that landscape sweep and we started on on the lower ground down by the river on the imprint of what you can see there as a former tennis court and we've moved along to bridge the river and now we're building on the other side of the quadrangle but the character of this site in the university is such a strongly riverine hidden world kind of character because the topography is so strong and the rocks are so exposed and the trees are so lofty so the first building we made on the site was Glucksman gallery and that building tries to raise itself up to be at the bottom of the cliff top of the university but to create a kind of cavern or or courtyard or hollowed out space in and then the part that's raised up is enjoying its freedom in the trees it's turning in the trees it's looking up and down river one of the most important parts of this product is the hollowed-out hollowed-out core of the inside of the building it's a structural core but it has the effect that when you cross under the building you can see up into it you can and people inside because there's no reflection on glass when it's unlit the people inside can see clearly the people passing by so in your at kind of midpoint in that section as you cross from the Civic space of the university down towards the river this building well I building was designed twenty years ago but it has this feeling of of being ready somehow for something else to happen it feels alert on its site I think and it has a grounded limestone solid profane kind of plinth and then it has a celestial dreamy boat in the trees but the space we were trying to make and the space were continuing to try to make at the university is the space in between the space that creates a new public realm up on the galleries you can you can look to the left you can look to the right you can so to speak almost step outside the building to find landmarks in the distance and just to stand back and look at the building nowadays and in the trees the building begins to weather into the into the trees themselves so we just more recently finished this little tiny single-span structure and I thought we could show you that tonight it's a continuation of what I was discussing with the Glucksman because you know there is these looping paths that were part of and these diagonal views so we didn't want to cross the bridge without tying those paths into another or not so you got to cross the bridge at a kind of skew and that will connect the city the north side of the city better with a compass but because the bridge has to be lifted above a floodplain level because you might have once heard that the university spectacularly flooded including our brand-new buildings um so the river authority kept moving the bridge up higher which meant we have to make a little leg to get onto it and you see that made in concrete and you see the timber bridge spanning it's a it's a 27 meter long single laminated beam structure landing on these flood proof buttresses that allow the river in spate to run through and at the landing end it's a tipping down like a cantilever with two little moorhens legs that dip into the water from the top from the University courtyard you look down onto this wooden thing in the landscape but from the pedestrian point of view as you cross from the city you now see up into a new prospect of the university itself on its cliff top I mean this university is built in the 1850s it's built by the architect Dean of Dean and Woodward who went on to build the Natural History Museum in Oxford and what's so wonderful for us as architects to understand is that Dean not only built this university but he chose the site for the university all the client asked him is to find a place to build a university and apparently Road out of cork on his horse and found a cliff we are now building on the other side of his quadrangle up against the oldest building in the college the buildings from the early 1850s which were the medical school and anatomical labs which had to be kept separate from the main university from for medical reasons and that's now going to become a student hub a kind of new center for student activity in the very center of the historic compass but you can see that if this is the old building and this is our new arm that holds a what we call a Market Hall we've had to make a you've had to drill a hole through the historic fabric we've had to open a big public archway through and I'm just gonna try to outline the principles of that project which is currently on site and which is if you like our new baby we're making a public space that works between the old quadrangle and what's called the Windell building which you see here the Windell was the first building built to dean's design and it was built in phases first this house then oddly enough this house and then this house and then two more buildings and what we're doing precariously maybe under that chimney is we're taking all of that away and and on the back where time has added in appropriate extensions we're taking all of those away and inside the structure we're trying to reveal as much of the grandeur of the Victorian structure as we can and then in layers on top of this unsuspecting slumbering building we're cutting a colossal hole through it we're adding a curvilinear kind of seawall to it to hold in the hordes of students and then we're adding a lantern at the top which is for the student facing facilities on one great room for the college at the top so you know it's a it's a plugged in it's the part that the building didn't have it's a plot that the students need and it has this there's there's the there's the cut and there's the chimney which is still there today and and there's the great window that will look out back to the and you can see that what we're trying to do is thread a kind of journey through this project for the students who are in their societies and in their student unions and in their meeting spaces and then a whole lot of what we call market space for the unplanned activities that characterize student life and that's I just wanted to show you these couple of photos that we took last week of the building as the props come down and the concrete work of the Market Hall gets revealed it has its bridged across and you can see the triangular roof lights that will come down from the roof gardens overhead and it will be a big a big gathering space a new kind of space within the old university up top it has simple little collective facilities you know administrative facilities for the students to run their own enterprise and importantly for us the new work has to sit together knit together with the old so that because the new building will one day be old and the old and the new have to have to belong to each other so the stone mullions of the neo-gothic architecture get carried out in the stone millions of of our of our contemporary extension but if you keep your eye on the trees on the left of this beautifully landscaped you know beautifully situated sight and just turn to face outwards across those trees to the stack top city of what's called sunday as well on the opposite side of the river we've just finished two houses you can see them here for professors medical professors who themselves would once have been trained in the building that we've just torn the bejesus out of some reason they want to live opposite the university where they work they they are in a supervisory position on the other side of the river and the retired doctor professor live towards the rear of the site and the current doctor professor family live slightly pushed out you can see how extreme that slope on the site is our biggest worry wasn't not that this house would fall down but that it would slide down there's a lot of anchoring this way well it's a I mean in our terms it's a little tower house and it has this prospect that from every part of the house you look back towards the university to which you know to which they belong and now at the top of the house that parents have a suite of rooms that between sleeping and sitting around and at the bottom of the house the children have play rooms and play spaces and sleeping accommodation interconnected and in the middle that the family meet for tea so they joined the they joined the landscape they joined the kind of stacked up landscape of houses that south-facing that that have this splendid location in the in the marvelously luxuriant landscape of cork that Sheila is going to tell you a bit more of that so this small house was finished 20 years ago so you can see that the tower has has always been on our minds we've always been interested in the idea of a house as a tower but also Hilton's which I suppose a lot of architects think about a lot so maybe this is a very small house just over 100 square metres built in a small town in the middle of Ireland called Navin and this is in the back garden behind a restaurant that the clients were running and there was a level change on the site of one story so we designed a two part house and this is looking from the living room at the bedroom Tower which is a three storey tower with one room on each floor and the stairs up to the high garden so it's designed as a living room on one side with that kind of cave like roof opening across this courtyard and up past a little Tower and you know sometimes when you're designing all the work you have it's a small house but you're pretending that it's a whole town and it's a hill town and that's what keeps you going and just around the time we finished that house in 1998 shortly after that we were commissioned to do a project in Cork again in the really steep part of Cork for a girls school called st. Angelus college which is the it's behind the wall on the right and that picture the kind of reddish wall which is a mixture of sand stone and brick and in behind that wall is a girls school which is in a series of buildings has been there for about 120 years combination of historic buildings and sheds on this really steep hill and we were commissioned and you see the dates on the drawing 1999 to 2016 I think it's probably our longest project ever it took 17 years from initials and Commission to completing the building but just before we look at that if you look on the left is very striking blue has on the same hill and in behind that blue house is another school it's a boys school Christian brothers and when we finished st. Angelus in 2016 the people around the Christian Brothers school told they'd like one of those as well so actually Provost the first time ever they just running us up and said would you like to do a project for us also directly across the road from st. Angelus music okay so this project is for a smaller it's for a new set of buildings for science and a library and a canteen built on this amazing hill brick buildings with courtyards and landscape get in front of the blue house and that's just going for planning at the moment but back in st. Angelus if you again the blue house is at the Landmark going way back into the west of cork looking across the city with the blue house in the background and st. Angelus College is this collection of buildings here this is the completed school with our new we've made three new buildings a science block an arts block which goes from one storey down to four and a sports hall which is under this ball court and then we made significant additions and changes to the other buildings one of the really striking things about the site which is the area in pick titan color here is there was although it is bounded by three parts of streets there's only one place you can enter the building and that's from this one point and st. Patrick's Hill because that's the only place for the level inside the site matches a level of the street so from the beginning we knew that for construction and for the future lives that was the only way to get in to the school so our starting point was to analyze all of this to take away all these temporary buildings and it's not so great building here and to keep these three historic buildings on the site and then this really was a chance to make a hill town because they needed a lot of new accommodation and the site was already quite full and one of the principles we set out at the beginning in this very early sketch was that you should be able to move there's an 18 meter level change from the top of the site to the bottom of East which is an orchard here down to a new space outside a sports hall here and we had the idea that you should be able to move through the site without going indoors through a series of courts and gardens and staircases but that also you should be able to move through the school without going outdoors so we were trying to make a kind of wrapped over inside-outside project and we used light or timber elements to make these staircases or to make a new walkway on this building on the on the opposite side of the project and then seen from the south looking up you can really see the sense that it is like a sort of Hilton piled up on the hill and the sports the ball court which is surrounded by a big fence often you're there and you see these girls almost raised up in the air playing their ball games in front of the science block with new buildings concealed behind the old here for the side condition as I said was that it was a kind of enclosed site and the biggest challenge was how to fit a big sports hall onto this side so we there was only one place it could go which was at the bottom of the site here by removing a lot of temporary buildings so we sort of dug that in at the bottom and made new ground on its roof for the ball court and then we built back from there up the site so this is the one entrance from the public world into really the middle it's the middle level in section and implant so you come in through the middle through a path which brings you under an archway in the building to look out over the city and below you is sports hall and above you the other buildings wrapping behind this old house and the the views to the city were really important that there was moments such before you go in the door you can look out the left and see the city here and here are the new buildings making that series of outdoor spaces that you can move through down through the site and this diagram in a way explains the whole project the top drawing is existing buildings of white ones are the ones we're keeping this is a kind of new landscape we sat on with the entrance at the middle of huge Forum stairs and other set of stairs and then a series of courts between old and new buildings which connect everything and then buildings and landscape together making our little core Coney in Hilton and where possible we kept the gaps between buildings as narrow as possible so as you go up the stairs you really feel like you are in the old city and you're going under a bridge and eventually you arrive at the very top of the site with this orchard garden which the art room is the top room in the school so it looks out this way into the orchard garden and that way over the city and from the orchard you look out past the science block with its extract hood for the fumes and on the right is this art room which is it looks like a single story building but if you keep moving down that building it becomes four stories quite soon at the other end and that art room has roof lights and views out and the building is made of it's a concrete frame structure with concrete block and very solid timber windows with different kinds of opening lights which gave a kind of weight and and warmth through the structure and then the stairs from there moves down between old walls and new walls right down past views of the city to the very bottom of the site where the concrete structure of the Sports Hall is with highlights coming in with sunshine and views out to the city at high level where they can now play full games of basketball the only score sports the school excelled at before was Table Tennis so now they can do ball games and then that space there's a that's used for drama also so it's an outside performance space with the dining then this big flight of steps which connects the old buildings and the new which you can see here in the ennovation with a old building behind and on the day of the opening of the school that the classic beginning of year school photo was 500 girls in green arrayed on these steps Sheila explained at the beginning why we call this lecture what we did and I suppose those two chapters based in Cork are all about work that comes from the ground up because of the remarkable typography of that hilly city and I'm going to talk now about projects that are worked their way up from the inside out as a kind of second aspect of that corollary but as Sheila was telling you this story about losing the competition in Dublin I taught differently about the title and realized that we had been ground up and turned inside out by the by the whole procedure so starting - this is Irish dancing this is the Irish language Culture Center and Darien this is what passes for Irish dancing at a party nowadays and and they're upside down but we were trying to make a kind of medieval courtyard we were trying to make a negative space that felt like a tower had been pulled out of the space because this site is so strongly characterized by being confined on on all its sides you cannot see out on any side except towards the street and unfortunately on the street side there's a electricity power substation that can't be moved so you can only get in a little bit from the street so we started here in this project really to try to think about it as if it was born inside itself you know as if it began on the inside as if it didn't even know it was in town and to try to pull the light down into the scheme and then to open the building up to itself to its own inner life because it's a multi-level multi layer culture centre and the working out of the plan is that is that it's 50 55 meters deep I think and 15 meters wide and everybody wants to get to the performance venue space that's deep but the back of the plan and then they all have to escape out in a fire and our courtyard that I'm talking about is here in the middle and the immovable substation is here so there's a lot of effort to get all the people in and out so the zigzag structure that you see outlined in red is to try to bring some of that corkscrewed energy eventually to the facade but to stay with the inside we were working on this courtyard on trying to find a form for this courtyard extracting it out you know like a like a solid form and we brought that piece that kind of positive negative you know cast to the space we brought it to Venice for the 2008 B&R Li and you could come up to it I put your head into it and it would play music at you and it would run a daily cycle of light through the 24 hours day a kind of digitally programmed laptop computer kind of music affair to anticipate the future vitality of an Arts Center and I think we're interested you know I think we're interested to say that the things that architects do which are not only build buildings but the kind of things that you'd think about when you're thinking about building buildings are also deeply part of the work we don't want to make a difference between a sketch and the installation and the actually built building I mean I know they're different in practical terms but in terms of what's going on inside your head it's all the same in the same way that time in your life is all happening now in your head so in this case we wanted this building to feel like it was its own ruin and that when the elements of its attachments you know necessary elements of staircases and bridges and walkways were attached they would feel like they were clamped onto a kind of pre-existing form of the contemporary building itself the building has its own history and this was useful to us I think this was useful to us when we came to deal with a much more complicated and a much more extreme situation in Budapest but with very similar combining site configurations we're trying to squeeze the areas of overlap in areas of movement between the old and the new and to look for kind of pocket spaces that can be found in in those conditions we haven't been to budapest before and at the time that we visited it had this opening up feeling of a of a city discovering its own character and we were really interested to find that between the famous chain bridge and the Basilica that our university clients that we were working for were in this mixed-up urban block kind of right buying in the center of the old town in the middle of a World Heritage Site and one of Sheila's first sketches was to try to make the case for permeability for the city and the university to become better integrated and introduced to each other and that we could pull on pull on the fact that it was so closely related towards the Danube and that imagine you know you could build a new building that faces right down onto the Danube so when people are passing by on their music trips from Vienna they can see this Central European University right right in front of them well a lot of this project started out speaking from the inside out a lot of this project started out with trying to take this tangle of six seven nineteenth very early 20th century but mainly 19th century buildings and open them up to each other through their party walls and open them out to the city from Street to Street from corner to block and in one case we were able to remove in two cases we were able to remove 1960s buildings that had been sort of Dom Lee filled in and we were able to knock him down and and to speak back to the you know the landscape of balconies and bridges and bay windows and cornices and the whole lively language of Budapest Budapest characteristics the planning laws and Budapest have changed and this is regard this site is regarded as a World Heritage Site and there are no new buildings built within half a mile or so of this site so making a new building in this situation was already a complicated and tricky business but the planning laws have changed to say that that you cannot have any more projections out onto the street so a lot of new buildings now in Budapest are flat because they build to their building line and they can't they're not allowed extend beyond you know so that's illegal if you like and that would not no longer allowed and that's no longer allowed so when we were in discussion with the planners and because we had tried this before in dairy we proposed the reverse that we would sacrifice space to the street and our room for our projections if you like would go inwards not outwards and so we developed this design and argued its way through the monument authority and the UNESCO projects and all the various planning restrictions and having insisted that it would be made out of local stone and that its composition you know which we anticipated with some house the Budapest character we finally fought our way through to the quarry which is about 20 miles out of town where every stone building in Budapest has been quarried since the time of the Romans and we found out early enough that quarry looked exactly like the building we were now proposing it was as if our building had already been extracted from the quarry and marvelous quarry man came up and said which which part you like best and we picked this bit and they took our photograph on and then they say okay this bit and then the man moved the stone yeah I like the thickness of the stone because it has a lot of holes in it and if you use it really really thick then those holes are not a threat to its structure but they communicate a kind of solidity and those stones then have to be lifted and then one day the building that we're building will look you know like the building 150 years earlier that's across the street and our new white stone building will will one day you know recognize and speak back to its neighbors um I guess we were trying to feel that the interior t-that containment of the streets and Budapest could could this building could wake itself up to be aware of that and one of the pleasures of this project was working with the stonemasons and the craftsmen who could who could we simply said there would be no mitered corners no junctions like that every angle would be solid and then they understood that so well so starting on the other side from the inside that was a detour to the quarry but I you know the product that the buildings are all divided from each other by by unbreakable firewalls and we were asked to make in the competition stage we were asked to make a proposal to restructure this university to give it a new configuration and we proposed that there wasn't really any need for a new configuration the configuration was already existing and all that really needed to happen is it just needed to connect with itself so we got to know or research or find out about so many sequential courtyard buildings in the city of Budapest this this one here is called a house of seven courts that's that's what it looked like when we went there first it's now Europe's party central but in those days it was quiet and we made a kind of- model positive model of all the courtyards that were existing in all the courtyards that we were proposing and proposed to the university that the big idea of their college would be represented by a social space of courtyards and we had already I think drawn on this inspiration from matta-clark when we were thinking about how to make the facades of the LSE matter Clark you might know was attacked this Parisian block that was taken down for the construction of the Pompidou Center for the public space in front of the Pompidou Center but just before they took it down he went at it with a conical intersect and what what strikes me so strongly about this because matta-clark was once an architect at least as a student he but what strikes me so strongly is about the image of this is that it says to us at least that the historical fabric can stand a little bit of excavation and the contemporary talk can intersect with the given ground so when we came to look at Budapest we proposed that we could quarry out we could hollow out the whole project from within from treating the existing as solid and then finding ways of you know what upper levels or lower levels are coming right through the buildings we could just find like tunneling ways of connecting the building to itself and into its new life which in practice proved to be a an amazing experience of precarious experience so the five buildings that were there you know we tried to connect each one of them in a different way to connect them at the high level to connect them at a low level to connect to the protected structure to knock down the unprotected structure to introduce new courtyards and to make it all kind of busy and that means that you make some sudden and dramatic differences to buildings that have been lying asleep for a long time and in order to make those courtyards active we made them into temperate zones comes in between zones so that professors can sit in their offices taking fresh air from the courtyards the students can gather in collective spaces inside in a conditioned environment where the environment in Budapest changes from minus 20 in the winter to plus 40 in the summer so we're kind of inventing a breathing machine to allow this building to reduce energy and then to thread passageways and bridge ways through it so that you explore within the historic fabric you explore interest assists you know you you cross bridges that say it over between teaching rooms and offices and then those bridges cross voids between inside and outside and then eventually you work your way to the top whereas a sumptuous roof garden spread across the top of old and new structures and when we took this photograph we were so enchanted by that we could see the Hungarian Parliament among the many magnificent skyline aspects of Budapest what we hadn't been thinking about is the Hungarian Parliament could see us so just to bring you on a short journey thinking about Alice's journeys you start outside on the street the building sets back from the street you can see down into the auditorium you can thread your way through this surrendered space under these piers and break your way into the collective space so everything is made and you know that's one block of stone that's one block of stone and it's sort of Peters out but you see the auditorium you see the entry you walk into a volume between the old walls and the new walls you find a elliptical concrete stair that cork screws you up to the public cafe and if you remember the red bridge crossing the historical refurbishment and that red bridge ends in this red window that looks out into the courtyards of the new academic library it can't cross because the library is is silent so it's more of a pared on a bridge I suppose but you see it in plan here with it where the bridges are crossing the space and arriving at this viewing point and if you stand on that viewing point and look across you see deep into the layers of the library opposite and the library itself is organized around a top lit courtyard six storey library with 500 students sitting in absolute silence what I want it because they're all PhD students and masters students and they don't talk to each other but when we did our surveys with the students we asked them where they'd like the student bar and this is a campus for 2,000 students and they said bar we came here to study but what I love about this and what I think is one if I think maybe we invented one thing in the Glucksman which is that hollowed-out courtyard this looks like a stairs to you but what this stairs does by the way it's lined is that it means that the absolute silence the pin-drop silence of the library is open to the cafe outside with no door so you you it's like entering through your ear hole you enter through a twisted labyrinth on stairs and eventually go out to the cafe and that is enough with to keep up absolute acoustic isolation between spaces which is interesting I think and then at the front it overlaps itself it overlooks itself and eventually the students can see like we wanted them to see to the Danube and the ships going by so I I mean a lot of this project is invisible in a way photographically because it's about new and old and it's about overlap but prominently visible is the facade and the relationship of the upper library and the lower auditorium and the public space to the streetscape space and the invitation that the building makes to the city to come on in to enter you know to for the university to pour out to the city and for the city to flow into the university and we thought we were making a comm urbane academic welcoming building for a calm or baying City until or bang abolish the university because he says now hungary is an illiberal democracy and notions of liberality like academic freedom and topics like Medieval Studies and Gender Studies have no place in a university environment so unless this rule has changed this university has had a short life so and this Canaletto painting a Capriccio with Palladian buildings is a painting we've looked at probably over the years and we and i suppose having talked earlier about losing competitions it's M it's a painting by Canaletto that imagines collects a group of buildings designed by Pilate and some built some not built and makes a kind of new imaginary Phoenician landscape from them so on the right is the Basilica in Vicenza and the palazzo key riccati but behind is Pilate as competition entry unsuccessful for the Rialto Bridge and Canaletto has situated them all in time together as if they old did exist in this place and we find we have a few times made installations in Venice at the Biennale and this year again we were invited by Grafton architects to and make an installation in their free space Biennale and in a way we were thinking about Canaletto and but the idea of a kind of Capriccio and also maybe about using an opportunity like this to get over the loss of a competition by giving us a different life which would be its final life but would be a kind of built life so we had the idea that we would make an installation which is a little building in its own right but which brings together two projects both and the title is folding landscape east and west and these two projects are very different in scale and in location and the first one is a competition for a grand opera house in Shanghai and we had never been to China we never thought much about working in China before we were invited to this competition and then we just got very interested in the idea first of all it was really really big building and for us just to design a building of 120,000 square meters with three big performance faces seemed like a really interesting challenge and then to try and think about how things stand at the moment in China and how we might make a contemporary piece of architecture in the context on the one hand of the modern skyline in Shanghai which is probably very and particularly insistent on the idea of lit up buildings reflected in the river but when we went to look at the city and look at the site which is just outside the city and the Expo site we also got interested in the old quarters of Shanghai and this beautiful painting of the Chinese quarter of this tradition of how cities were built with these amazing brick walls again on the edge of that river and then these light structures on top looking out over the river and the landscape beyond so we had the idea that in some way our project would be a combination of the sort of lit of bright spaces but also thinking about the walls and the containment and the material quality of traditional Chinese architecture so we designed what we called a city for opera which is a collection of these three different performance spaces in a kind of walled enclosure which is reflected in the river and then which has two ways of moving through it publicly on the ground floor you can move through big porticos into an enormous set of toys and open spaces which we told us being as well as being like an opera house a bit like a railway station there were lots of other facilities libraries museums cafes in the building but we also wanted people to be able to walk over the roof of those 4ei spaces to have a landscape on the roof and then to have the high forms of the Opera House and the concert hall projecting into that roof space the site of course was triangular as at that some periods in our life we seem to only ever have to work on triangular sites so this one was and we were working in plan and section just thinking about a kind of triangulated structure with big concrete brick clad piers and holding up these v-shaped concrete roof structures which stepped down it's stick down into the space but which provide room on the roof for planting full-size trees by having this depth and the concrete so we were making kind of over an underworld a world underneath with these big brick bricks floored and world spaces and then you can see up through the high level windows onto the roof garden and then the cantered concrete forms reflect the light into the space and three performance places are like three boats moved moored into the side of this river the wine poo and then if you walk over the roof you see there raised up light scoops which bring daylight and down into the foyer spaces with this viewing tower over the city and then in the section of the building this is the second has the smaller accounts are told and on the roof of that we have an external performance space here which is roofed as part of the garden and then this is the second conference space so if you look at that section we brought that section and we built it into our installation in Venice at a scale of one to ten and so all of the parts the building are there and you can experience it but it's one to ten and the other projects which we were weaving into the same broad installation is a much smaller project in the West of Ireland and roundstone connemara a research center for the university in goal way built at the end of this beautiful pier in the village of round stone with the house which you see here as the starting point of the project and the idea of our building was that would that would be a set of new buildings working with the old has some new platforms that brought you up around the house and Alfred the view over the sea and the buildings made in concrete grow out of this little cliff and the concrete has seashells and sea stones in it and it makes a series of spaces which wrap around the old has which is the house of Tim Robinson who's a wonderful person who's sitting in the audience here tonight and him is Tim and Mairead his wife have lived for more than forty years in the West of Ireland he went there is an English man went to Ireland as an artist and mathematician and then got interested in the landscape and in map making and in writing so he's written wonderful amazing books that have read ascribe their own landscape back to us and he's drawn these fantastic maps as the West of Ireland which record everything and every little pier and the names of places so they're a kind of historic record as well as a map so when Tim lefse has to university and go away he asked us to think about what might happen to it and we brought a group of students to make a map of the house which would have the level of information and intensity that his maps of the landscape have so the students recorded the bedspread on their badge the bird table at the end of the bed at the books on the shelves which is a way of for us of a kind of intense clothes noticing about this place and then we started working on the project making sketches thinking about how the new buildings would relate to the old then we went on holidays in the middle of this process and brought some stuff with us to think and I made these sketches of little stones we found on the Greek island with different kinds of stones that are sculpted in different ways by nature and sometimes it's hard to say exactly in what way these studies are part of the work that we do but I know they are part of the work that we do and you couldn't directly place them in the sequence of a design process but thinking about form and life and nature is definitely a part of how we work and we were working on this holiday place so we started trying to make models using the things we had with us so a pencil sharpener is a lift shaft and a stone is a little stair tower and a bunch of pencils represents the writer studios so we were trying to think three dimensionally while we were away from the office and then that comes back and is transformed into a design which is now at a stage where fundraising is happening so this unlike the competition this is not built but we hope it will be built and we're making particularly this gathering space for exhibitions and for conversation in this beautiful location between the garden and the house of the robinsons and that we built at a scale of one to two as part of our installation on the western side of our little installation in the corridor eeeh and to make this to transform those two projects into something else which is a piece of art architecture in his own right we responded to the brief which was to work with the core Turia Building to work with its natural its existing materials with the natural light and which the windows that you were opened up for the first time so our proposal was to make a staircase which would bring you up so you could look out the windows of the core area out to Venice beyond and this staircase in a way would be moving between this different scales these two projects and we made models when we studied it but in a way it's a it's something else it's also like a Greek Chapel it's a mountain Chapel and Greek of white painted structure brought down to the ground with steps and benches and thresholds which allow you to stop and rest as you move in or out and then you can move around it past Shanghai into a low ceiling the exhibition space roof lit from above like a little chapel which has the drawings of the two projects and has a piece of gold leaf reflecting light onto a stone from the West of Ireland in a niche which brings you back around to this arrival point with the bench in the seats and then which gives people this opportunity to walk up and have a new experience of looking at a window in Venice so back to London our first billion that we managed to build in London our second attempt to build the same building was to convert the warehouse structure in Soho for the photographer's gallery and what had been so interesting about that project and I think what we tried to taught that we tried to carry through in our transformation of the existing building was the possibility of making something that operated vertically in an extremely squeezed condition of a laneway intersection at the back of Oxford Street so in our original design for the project we had tried to jolt the parts of the building apart in order to yield a bit of ground on the lower floor to widen the street and then to create an overhang on the upper level - as a quid pro quo for having surrendered something to the public territory to make larger galleries and and all of this was I think kind of stewing in our minds because we had made a site visit on the first day of this project to the roof of the existing building and on that this photograph was taken that day and we saw at this this crack in Oxford Street and you can see up topics Tavistock Street running on a fair day you can see - Primrose Hill maybe but we were amazed that you know Oxford Street is flat completely flat Romilly Street is about two meters down from there and the only access to it from there is through this funny little split that does it's as if something shifted in the city and maybe a geological shift and the city moved and what we were proposing in our design was at the very moment that Oxford Street tectonically separated in to its plates the gallery of the photographer's gallery sympathetically shift and that was the context report in the planning submission and you know when we came back to the project after the project changed its character and the new building project was postponed or abandoned and the project became about reworking the existing we just held on to this thought that what about that what about that view so the whole project is trying to hold on to this idea that there is a there's a way of seeing through the city from on high like through a periscope and then when you see the building from the city that you're aware that somewhere up there there are people you know people with interested in cameras people interested in lenses people interested in viewpoints and people looking closely at photographs and that the image of the city skyline itself so the solution to the transformation of the existing building was to stack it high and make this periscope and also then to coat the coat the historic fabric in a new camera case of insulated black material and working from the ground up of this we took away all of the heavy base of the former warehouse to reveal its inner steel structure and thus to with a lot of hand working Tirat so to kind of reground building in the in the public space so that the street corner would have this aspiration to become a kind of Nighthawks at the diner place what's so interesting to us now when we go back because we went back last week to visit and it's that the neighborhood is being changed into a kind of outdoor photography gallery so the dreams that you have about buildings coming out onto a public space they can come true we wanted to speak a little bit about collaboration and at the moment and for the last few years we have been collaborating with Alison Morrison with Bob Alice of Alison Morrison and his colleagues and with architect Oriya from Girona just north of Barcelona on a on a major project in in East London the now called East Bank but when we started the project which was a different brief and a different project but the same site it had apparently unpronounceable or limp a couple of which we had no sooner learned to say than it was gone we're working though I think for us this is a hugely significant work in our life work because we're working for the lld see the London legacy Development Company Corporation but we're working for them on a utterly civic-minded project I think the plan for the project is to create public space and public community and to bring the city the kind of urbanized city to bring it right to the edge of the park a beautifully utilized public park which is part of the legacy of the London Olympics but the first project which you may have seen or heard out here in London it it was the basis that we worked out this idea of a kind of stepping stone of public spaces between public institutions and stacked up residential which in the end would allow for the civic interest development of the site and the project I don't mean to say it was stopped I suppose it was paused or restructured because of a number of things changes to the brief restrictions about heights of planning revisions of intention but the purpose of the project is is remains strong and remains true and out of this work Sheila and I have been commissioned to make two buildings one for Sadler's Wells Dance Theatre and another for a new museum for the V&A which we're going to show you now but before I do I just want to talk about you know what's also in your mind and what doesn't leave your mind so you know project stop but thoughts continue partly stay turn and in this case you know in the first iteration of our project for the VNA we were trying to open the museum out because it had archive content and it had collections and it it was a kind of open access interactive museum project on a very large scale and we had found this tiny little box in the museum's collection which is a incense smelling box so we were trying to open the drawers of the museum and and make especially make the public space work deep into the center of the structure of the museum so it's not so much that the building is cantilevered as much as it has been hollowed out it's been hollowed out to allow new pockets of public space so I I mean this is typical or normal in an architect's life that some projects get shelved or some projects get delayed or some projects get repurposed and we're kind of happy unhappy if you know what I mean that the most happy aspect of it is we are building a new museum for the VNA and I'm gonna show you that shortly but when it is gone it doesn't quite leave your mind and speaking of collaboration we also are in the habit of collaborating with others not only with architects and we have a long-standing collaboration with Joseph Walsh who's a master craftsman who works in the south of Ireland but works all over the world so I was talking to Joseph about this unfinished museum being hewn out of a solid block so we said why don't why don't we why don't we do it you know why don't we actually try so we got in a block of alabaster from some remote quarry in Italy and one of Joseph's master craftsmen took out his chisel and started work on this big block of stone I mean this block of stone weighs 350 kilos or something and working from our drawings he he he just worked away at it on you know to try to find space to try to cut out the public space and to hollow out hue out the body of the unfinished Museum and I don't know what we're gonna do with it nobody can lift it it's extremely interesting at what and if you Stan you know if you china light from behind it because it's alabaster it it has this translucent solidity which I'm sure will will prove useful some point in our lives um we weren't we didn't spend you know two years doing that but we did spend some time doing that and you know I'm inflicting this on you but um I want to bring you back to the deep reality to that practical reality to the optimistic reality of what we're doing together with Alison Morrison and architect Oriya at east bank now now as Ellis said now entering into into the planning system and it has this spectacular sight because the park that lies between the stadium and the rivers of the channels of the river Lee is already itself a truly public space and all we're trying to do is to bring the city forward to the park and you know this this site has a kind of history it has an industrial history this is where the stadium is these are the channels of the Lee these are the train tracks with still in place this is the grain that crosses the site that we intend to keep so you know for a long time people have been sitting in trains looking out of this landscape and not too many years away four years away this girl will see a new place that that we are making together and it's a it's a jagged skyline it's a it's a Upper West Side New York to Central Park urban composition between residential and institutional and between the residential and the institutional aspects of it Sheila and I have been studying three conditions one further Sadler's Wells Dance Theatre one for a residential building as part of a complex of residential and one in the center for the museum at the center of the scheme for the VNA I'm working with Allison Morrison on the configuration of how to make a place a kind of neighborhood out of mid-rise residential developments but that would complement each other in some compositional way we got to work on the building that's called the prowl which faces towards Hackney Wick and has a kind of terracing setback that of a three-story scale like like the Victorian mansion blocks and that comes to ground in a in a civic way that sort of yields its ground at the at the River Edge and makes a new point of introduction from the pedestrian contacts to Hackney Wick and it's all planned around it it's like a pencil in its configuration you know it ends up as a by the time it retract to its form it ends up like a hexagon in the sky with a central core and six apartments around the core and every apartment dual aspect and all the apartments looking out across this because it's at this pivot point where two parks meet and the rivers diverge a spectacular place I imagine to live and it's this project it's this residential quarter that allows this culture residential quarter to come into existence so I'm going to talk about the new theater we're designing for satyrs Wells which is located on the f10 bridge as it's called the bridge that comes from Westfield over to the Olympic Park and so Sadler's the new theater is here the Aquatic Centre from everybody knows is here so we're facing that and this building then occupies a kind of three-sided corner it has three facades and there the bridge is at a level about two storeys above the river side below so the site all the time is dealing with this two level of two-story level change so the arrangement of the building's just seeing it simply in relation to the Aquatic Center is that the public always arrived at this level on foot it's a pedestrian level but it's where the public will enter the building the road below is where the get in and the backstage and the stage are and then there's a set of terraces and Studios which look out over the roof of the Aquatic Center to the park beyond oh it right I mean it's a really interesting brief because it's not just a theater for contemporary dance but it also has six studios so it's a kind of Academy for choreography but also for hip-hop and it's a place where local groups and young people will be encouraged to come as well as professional dancers and then the dance theater itself is a flexible space with a very big stage for 500 people so we were trying to think what was a kind of form of this building because interestingly a dance all these spaces are completely defined not just in their area but in their dimension and in their geometry they are rectangular spaces at an studio is twelve by fourteen and not any other size so it's like a set of parts which are then trying to put together and think how they relate to each other so we started thinking about these diagrams that are made of choreo choreographic diagrams about how people move their feet and the kind of rhythm of stepping and we had the idea that somehow the building would have on the waterside three of its studios which saw to its roots expressing themselves facing out this way and then you turn the corner past the circulation and the other studio face out that way so we're trying to get a kind of rhythm movement into a building which is also responding very much to the industrial character of the past of this site it's a brick building it's using brick and clay in different ways and also responding to Sadler's Wells desire that this building really would be a kind of ready for work robust not in any way a kind of luxurious from elaborate building that it should feel that anyone would feel comfortable coming in and it feels welcoming and open so we're trying to make this kind of language that has a strength it's a suppose it's kind of an elaborated ordinariness that we're looking for and and the section shows you that relationship I described that that the public arriving at this level the Phi a and they come straight in one of the foyers down this very steep break to the theater with very high flight hour with one big studio on top of the audience and then this Terrace which is a public Terrace looking out over the M the Aquatic Center and the idea that we had is that the the auditorium is in the kind of and at the northeast corner of the site here which is where the road with that the lower level gives get in so it kind of holds solid corner there and then the foyer which we think about more like a kind of living room it wraps around two sides of that and has a very open expression on to the bridge and on to the waterfront and then people come in and all of the service elements like borrowers and toilets and backs back of house stuff is crusted onto the rectangular auditorium which gives you them this sort of snaking space which you come in one end when you move through and come out the other end in we hope a kind of lively space that keeps you moving so the the project as it has evolved is that you come in here there's entrances the auditorium an interval bar and the circulation kind of moderates the space into a set of different spaces with community down from the corner cafe and bar opening out in the southwest onto the terrace and then as you move up the building the studios are very simply laid out over the foyer with a double height space in the middle for socializing between the studios and then it's a very top three Studios face the water a big studio faces the other way so it's a very sort of geometrically organized clan and section expressing its use we hope in a lively way that that somehow people will feel what the building is fara when they come into it and they will feel this sense of its expression that relates to the past but also is about itself it's a it's a contemporary building in brick it's a building that lights up at night because it's very much a nighttime building and then it works its way around from the more open corner to the view on to the f10 bridge which is a kind of side elevation of the building where you see the circulation and the studios and then around to the side where it's more solid for the fly tourism where the brick walls are containing the audience and the auditorium and we were trying to think about how do we make a language of architecture which deals with the solidity in the lack of windows that there is required to be in this kind of building so we were on a visit to Rome and looking at the Iranian walls which art is amazing well we realize they just have a series of slight errors at regular intervals along the Iranian walls we thought okay well that's what you do you take the brick I'm where possible you sculptors are you shapers to do with responding to the functions that happen inside the building so we started to think as much as we could in places where it needed to happen that we would set back at the nth corner entrance and Korbel the brickwork back here as a chimney that brings air down into the stage wood Korbel out at this point at the wall that defines the stairs from the public realm below to above is a kind of crinkled brick wall so we're what we're doing is developing a kind of language of brick and clay all these in the same plane that there are tiles studio roofs and walls are clad in big clay tiles the brick walls in places the brick step out to give you a kind of shadowed and articulation the louvers or clay louver is made of the same clay and then where the stage-door is this chimney that comes down and turns into a pitched roof so we're we're we're working with the kind of expression and trying to actually make I suppose a positive of the fact that the building is a vague brick solid and then on the other side facing out to the river where it opens out there's a canopy which gives you a sheltered space where you can have drinks outside or people can collect after before a show to discuss the show and this canopy is made in concrete as is the structure of the building very heavy concrete beams hold up the dance studios which then can I have to make this canopy which through which light comes down to give you the sheltered space outside the cafe or where the double height space is over on the way up to the studios that that gives us a terrace outside the studio overlooking the park and over looking back into the foyer so we're trying to work with this right-angled geometry to make a kind of world of heavy concrete and brick which expresses what's going on in this building and which at night is lit up to give a kind of life to this corner of the Stratford Waterfront now known as East Bank just I'm going to tell you about the building we're making at the middle of the scheme this site here for the DNA which is the building down at Waterfront level standing on on waterfront Square but that also is connected to the podium level the cheetah was just discussing where Sadler's Wells stands and where Alison Larsen are designing studios for the BBC and a new College for the London College of Fashion in-between so we're we're we're making between us a kind of culture education public event spaces but the V&A is an interesting public building in in the context because every level of it is accessible to the public one two three four five stories of the building are for public for public enjoyment and then those stories of the building open out to look across the river landscape across the park towards the structures either from the Olympics or now the football stadium and and entertainment structure the sculpture structure so how does start to think about how to make a museum like this and a site like this and where do thoughts begin in our case we went to see a magnificent exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland of a collection of Vermeer paintings Irish National Gallery has one crucial Vermeer painting but this exhibition had a number and we were gazing you know with pride or possessiveness at the letter-writing woman and admiring her you know as you can't help to admire her and and Sheila said to me we were just looking closely at it and Sheila said imagine imagine living inside out sleeve would not be amazing so IIIi I listen to what she talks about and I to draw the I tried to draw the space of the woman's sleeve i I just tried to think about it as as a as a structure as a place and I mean I either but we weren't thinking about museums I mean we were just thinking about sleeves but shortly after that I went I went to see an extraordinary exhibition of the VNA of Balenciaga of Balenciaga fashion I mean you're gonna think I'm interested in frocks here but I'm not so much but I was absolutely amazed by the by the by the by the form and rigor of the of the attitude that Balenciaga brought to how he brings a structure of a dress of a frock from the support of the shoulders down to the ground and in in the analysis of this exquisite exhibition at the V&A the curators were discussing the Japanese concept of math the concept of the space in between you know the the the the kind of pocket space between the figure and the final form and yes I guess this reminded us of Vermeer but in the middle of the Balenciaga exhibition they had a photograph taken by Nick Phase II the next one of his x-ray photographs of one of Balenciaga z' ambitious frocks and what the x-ray showed is that behind the form behind a figurative form of what drops to the ground and gets caught away from the ground and hangs from the shoulder that there's a lot of structure going on somehow this image this kind of image of the the the skirt and the structure and the life behind the structure helped us to imagine how to conceptualize the essentially interior conditions that are required for curatorial and and object object preservation that goes on in a museum so the dark space let's call it inside the museum a necessary structure that that holds up the colossal loading of a museum structure and then how to make how to make sense out of all of that in its layers so if that's a if that's a kind of very you know inside your head kind of way of thinking about it it's interesting to look now just today at what the engineers are drawing because you know they're also so to speak x-ray in structure and this is the steel work and the concrete work that is necessary to hold these heavy heavy weight heavy loading floors up and it's interesting to see how all the services that are necessary to provide the air and and environmental stability well you know if you overlay that onto that and think of all of these systems that pass through the core and all of the services that distribute you know it turns out that the x-ray concept is crucial concept to understanding how this thing is organized how its organized is that trucks come in with the artworks from carpenters road and people enter from the waterfront square so there's a kind of double aspect about how this building is approached and then at the upper level at the level that Sheila was just showing you in the continuation of the public realm there's the important entrance right into the middle of the museum and abridged the architect aurea's pedestrian bridge is arriving from the across here from the International office quarter and where the British Council will be so this is a cross road scheme and it's a pivotal scheme at the at the crossroads point of the whole public realm of this new place and we're trying to make it so that the inner core they're kind of base core stable environment of the museum is absolutely what it ought to be and then there's a kind of crust around it and in the crust around the core is that are found pockets where the people can be in connection between internalized conditions and the outside world because we want the people in the museum to see the people on the square and we want the people on the square to feel that they're invited in and part of the community of exchange between the museum and the public space and you can see that these studies that were making about movement through in those pocket spaces and that those systems of movement the maneuvering through that through this difference between the rigid core and the flowing cloak will provide a journey for the visitors that will make sense between leaving the public space and arriving at the at the terrace that looks out over the long distance view so can you can you see here how its structured and how the spaces are kept calm and then how the people are are moving through the skin or through the cloak and then when it's gets its coat put on it's it's it's a it's a horizontally striated concrete skin precast concrete skin in big pieces and and then those pieces have lines drawn on them to make them [Music] book book book page you know off each other so that one side belongs to the other and then the and then the scheme is cut to the ground so that when you enter or when you come out from the cafe or look out from the galleries or stand on the terrace that you're standing in relation to this formation and one of the fascinating things I just put this up to show you how intricate it becomes is when you take all that surface and develop it I shows that somebody can analyze how to fabricate it in in high-tech prefabrication technology that it resembles as much as anything else a pattern for a tailor's pattern or you know a pattern for a jacket you would make at home which brings me to a thought I had before I ever thought I would be making a museum for the V&A and I was watching this film I don't know 20 years ago that the inventors made by Yohji Yamamoto I think it was when we were first going to Tokyo and there's this beautiful film mixture between digital and film that vendors made about Yamamoto it's called notebooks on cities and clothes and there's a great sequence in it where yo G is down on the floor on these hunkers people are passing him scissors and and he's cutting away at he's cutting away at the dresses before they go out on the catwalk you know he's just just making sure it's right and you know which is like what we worked with cardboard models in the office like this all the time and I wrote about this at the time when I was publishing her first thoughts about this discussion between them vendors and Yohji Yamamoto about identity and vendors told yogi in this sequence in the movie that when he put on his first Yamamoto jacket and his first Yamamoto shirt that he kind of felt different in them he says they were new and old at the same time in the mirror I saw me of course I can't do his job an accent properly only better than me before I had the strangest sensation I was wearing yes I had no other words for I was wearing the shirt itself and the jacket itself and in them I was myself protected like a knight in armor so I think we have this idea that that the coat that closes that clothes the V&A might become to the VNA's that jacket itself and that the public might feel by the prismatic structure of this scheme the public might feel provoked and invited to come on in to come on in and explore what lies within and then from within to celebrate the feeling of the prospect that lies beyond done ahead of them that concludes our talk on from the ground up and from the inside out thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you could we have the house lights up so we can see people thank you what a spectacular talk we have about eight minutes left I think so we get surfed out so I'm kind of keen to really throw it straight open to the floor if there are questions and I can I see some hands we have firming mics both up of the upper level and down here am I being polite our best one here oh it's oh wait for the mic please so any other hands and one over there okay sorry if it's a bit of personal question I was just wondering would you recommend working with your partner in mixing home and work life in hindsight about what to do but I think that for us I mean I made some reference to things that we do were on holidays which are completely different work than the work we will be doing sitting at our laptops we do not bring our laptops on holidays so we find for us it works that because you know we're both walking up a mountain in Greece and we see a little chapel in a wall and you know we get completely distracted and diverted by that and it's something that we share so it becomes the learn the life work boundary is kind of blurred well maybe architecture is that kind of profession anyway where everything you do is experienced in a space or a place so the nature of those places and affects your life and you think about things at the same time so from that point of view yeah I think it's I mean it works very well it has worked for us well I don't know we both the couple's catalogue we have another chance to see the exhibition um we work together I mean we work in conversation we haven't run out of conversation yet I don't as both educators and creators of educational spaces what do you think is the biggest lesson for while future generations and specifically future architects and how much do we build upon the old and how much do we create the new I think that for us it just happened that the very the first public project that we made was the Irish Film Center in Dublin which was about 30 years ago almost 30 years ago and that was the transformation of a historic effect a collection of nine historic buildings slightly different ages so we were required obviously to completely get involved and embedded in the idea of thinking about the relationship between old and new and we made this project which kind of weaves through the old buildings and restore ISM and has a conversation between new and old and I think that because that was our first big project that what we have found since then is that the way that we worked on that is it's the same way we work even if the project is for a new building because it's never because no property there's almost nowhere on the planet that's completely new and most of our work is urban so I think that we are really interested in the relationship between you and I would were really interested in the idea that you know we're living in the continuous present that there isn't really a difference between the new and the old and that it's really important if you're making a new building that you are adding to an old building that the new work doesn't embarrass the old building or make it look shabby or so I think we're not really interested in making something that's like a shiny contrast with the older somehow we think you should know what's old and new but that there is an kind of sympathy between them and that they've together they make one different transformed thing and not sure if that was exactly a question but well it was a question about olden wasn't that a question about old and new thank you for us it was a question about education space and maybe you're thinking about architectural education but knew it it's true that new things are only new for a short time and and they have a tendency to get old if you're lucky I mean it as an architect if you're lucky but old it's important to remember that old things hold their newness too you know and you have to approach thinking from a point of view of architectural education you have to approach an old building when you meet it with the understanding that it once was new itself and represents an idea represents a thought represents a kind of original force of its own and that that thought isn't very embodied in that structure and it belongs in that structure so what architects do is they transfer the thoughts that are in their heads into the structures that are built and made and the thought that thought survives so when we're talking about civic generosity or I don't know what you know simple thoughts get transferred and the pro and the structures radiate those thoughts I think when you're making educational spaces you've got to make spaces for people to overlap and meet and converse with each other you know the real learning happens outside the classroom and nowadays the real definition of discipline is at the crossing over points between disciplines so I mean the reason we're showing you the conversations we have of a stonemason or the creative relationship we have with a joiner or the intellectual relationship we have with a painter is because we become our idea of our selves as architects becomes kind of clearer in the conversation with someone who is a painter or with someone who's a carver maybe more clear than they are when we're talking to each other as architects I know we're only talking to each other as architects but but where we're very interested in in in extending the boundaries of the conversation about it architecture into the public world and I think in education buildings the most interesting education buildings are the ones that open up the divisions between disciplines to make them friendly to each other it was a wonderful evening and please everybody join me in wishing John and Sheila a very happiest happy 30th [Applause]

Channel: Architecture Foundation

Views: 2,486

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: Architecture, The Architecture Foundation, London, Urbanism, Design

Id: Cro3VvXGTEI

Length: 104min 38sec (6278 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018