Thank you all verymuch for coming. I think some of you might
of heard Simon and Hanif make an introduction this
morning for the auction studio that they will be running
in London during the spring semester. I know [inaudible]
and other people have expressed interest
in being part of that. Simon is really an unusual
architect in a way.
Because if I tried to
think of who in the states would be running a
practice, which in some ways might have some similarity to
what Simon and his colleagues do in their practice, I
meant that maybe in some ways there is a connection to a
practice like [inaudible].. But they're really not like
[inaudible] because they're not trying to-- they don't want to
be do development, they don't do design, build. They really are architects
and that's what they do. But as it come up a
little bit this morning, I think it is fair to say that
the way in which they interact with academic institutions,
cultural institutions, developers, and consultants,
other architects there is a way in which
we can understand their practice as
being deeply engaged in the cultural, political
structures of the city.
At the same time, they're
very much in the way a financial model
of an organization, as well the kind of
architectural and design studio. And I think that that's a
very specific kind of niche. In a way, a very
specific position to be working with developers
to [inaudible] the building some important civic
and different projects. And at the same time,
Simon, for example, has talked for a long
time at university college at the Bartlett School,
[inaudible] run a studio.
He has been involved as the-- were you the vice president
for education, or something? The vice president for
education at the RIBA, which is the
equivalent of the AIA. And now he is
basically the chairman of the Architecture
Foundation, which is also the organization
that is involved with cultural and
educational program related to the city of London,
[inaudible] London, and to a much wider community. He has a very large practice
[inaudible] this one. Every time I see the
practice is larger.
So this morning I said a
couple of hundred people. And then [? Henry ?]
Corrected me and said 400. One thing that
you should know is that this practice is obviously
doing work even in [inaudible] but actually Simon also has
part of a practice in Oklahoma, of all places. And I [inaudible] I
said, why in Oklahoma? And then he has a big group
of people working in a city called Bristol,
which I didn't know.
And I know Simon
really quite well but I didn't know why would
he have an office in London and then an hour away in
Bristol have a very large group of people also working there. The point being that there
are structure of opportunity, of friendship, of
affiliation, which he has also been able to build on to create
new patterns of practice. I think today there
is the question of what is the
[inaudible] possibility of the architect [inaudible]. But also, what is
organization structure by which you achieve these
goals of trying to [inaudible] and deliver buildings.
And this offers a very
productive, very positive way to at least address this. Not for everybody,
but I think it is a very particular and
very important model. So please welcome Simon
Allford, who will not only show some great buildings
but also, hopefully, he will talk about how to
get [inaudible] as well. Simon.
[Applause] Good evening. It's very nice to be here. [? Moise ?] Made a point
about practice education. I mean to us, it's
always been architecture.
We were students when the four
partners who formed the firm met. We studied together
at the Bartlett. We had a project, which
we called The Fifth Man. And The Fifth Man was really
about an idea of collaboration but collaboration
with an edge, as in it wasn't about
swapping notes and working on the same project.
We were working individually
but coming together and kind of collaging our own ideas
together in an urban project. And we were always very
keen because we came out of an academic background
that what we did was as powerful as it could be. So even now, our model
is relatively simple. I lead a studio of
about 200 architects.
Another of my partners leads a
studio of about 150 architects. Two other partners are
responsible for what I call designing
the practice, which is thinking about
people's careers, financial structures,
investment in kind of technologies and research,
and all these kinds of things. And it's all about-- it's all design. It's all design exercise.
It isn't really that different. They are designing
the office in the way we might be designing projects. But we were four when we began. And I think in the
early days we thought we'd never be more than four.
It was pretty tricky. We've become 400. We don't mind if we're
200, as long as it's a slow descent to 200. And we used to say
when we were four, well, we didn't need
more than 10 or 15 or 20.
So in the end, we
forgot about size and we just talked
about projects. And the kind of simple
rule we came up with is we make money to
make architecture. We don't make architecture
to make money. Not to say that
architects aren't-- it's a business.
But the business
is kind of designed to allow us to do the
things we wanted to do when we were young students. And that is to engage in
the making of buildings, in the constructing of ideas. And that's, in a sense,
what we are talked about. Having talked for many
years, and looking forward to teaching a studio
in London, architecture exists wherever you
want to make it.
It's not the sole
preserve of architects. In fact, one of the things
we're doing now in London is, amongst many other
things, allowing practices to start training people again. Practices used to take
responsibility to train people. That all stopped in post-1958.
There was a big conference. That all stopped. It's not to say that
academia is not a great place to train people but
if practices don't get involved in training people
then practices become dumb. They become machines for
turning out buildings and not architecture.
So there's always another model. And that's what interests us. Can you fade the lights now? Thank you. So I'm going talk about
some of the key ideas that have driven our thinking.
This was The Fifth Man, which
is us our diploma project. This was cutting edge
technology in 1984. It was the Xerox. But it was all about the idea
of components in the city, buildings being kind of the
thing we were interested in, and then the idea of
plots and scales and sizes.
It was kind of collage play
on a Mondrian painting. But it was a broader
boogie-woogie. But it was really about the
idea that the everyday context of the city is
what fascinated us. And we made two statements.
"First, it is in the field
everyday building rather than public building that
modern architecture has failed the city." So that was something we said as
students we were interested in. And the second thing was "that
functional program alone," not along, "is not sufficient
to generate an architecture." So those are two things
that we were speculating as you do laying
out your manifesto when you're 21, 22,
that we dug up recently. That we thought,
actually, funnily enough, maybe we haven't
been thinking enough because they're the kind
of things we're still actually pursuing now. And this is a book.
25 Years later we formed
a publishing company. We decided to gather the
research that was going on in the office and communicate
lectures and things we're interested in. And this was really this idea
about the ordinary buildings of the city. And it's not a new idea.
It's not our idea. This is Gandhi's illustration
of [? Soan's ?] Complete works. Interesting, it was a
drawing for The Royal Academy because it highlights
one of the tensions that has intrigued us most. And that is the idea about
architecture as buildings, and architecture as city and
aggregations of buildings and the spaces in between.
And the tension between
the fact that we make buildings for clients,
public and private clients. We talk about the
journey through them. But for most
people, architecture is something you only
see from the outside. It is the stage
set for the city.
And this is The Naked
City by Guy Debord. It is the idea
about, actually, we all construct our own
vision of the city. We all have our own
psychic geography. And that is important in the
life of our conversation.
Our city has always been London. But when we go elsewhere we're
always exporting and importing and exchanging ideas. And in a sense, Guy
Debord leads neatly to say someone like
Kevin Lynch, and the fact that we all see the
world quite differently. So if you construct
buildings, it's a question of how
do you construct ideas and people to have a
shared territory to allow something to become coherent.
Yet at the same time, allow
the unknown, the uncertain. This is Kahn,
understanding the city in terms of the car, a
problem that I think, redefined many American cities. An optimistic image by Kahn. Think about the idea
of castles, gateways, and rethinking
the American city.
This is Gillray. This is the bank marches. This is another kind
of way about thinking about architecture. It's thinking about people,
life, and regulation.
And it's a thing we always
say about buildings, is when we talk about
them being finished, the moment their finished
is actually when they start. We finish them but life
takes over at that point. And that's an
interesting tension. And the people who
use those buildings are not necessarily people that
you've been commissioned by.
They're not necessarily
people you know. And they will start
to use and adapt that building like they adapt
the city in different ways. So we work in a very
preserved world. We don't work here in
an Italian hill town, we work in central London.
But central London is not
unlike an Italian hill town. Again, back to the idea about
use and change over time. There are 10,000 buildings
in the city of Westminster, which is one of the
two cities of London. All of which are listed,
none of which can change, and all of which
were commissioned for purposes for which they're
not being currently used.
So that's always
been a tension to us. A client comes along and
asks us to design a building to a program they have. But we're always thinking,
well, they're not the user. The user will start to
imagine it differently.
And it's very, very likely,
as we repurpose buildings, that the buildings will actually
be used in different ways. And of course, the other
great debate in London is there's the
historical fabric. Actually the city's
San Gimignano. And there's this
debate about the new and the old and the
skyline and change.
And probably in the last 40
or 50 years, we're in an era now where people talk much
more about the historical state of the place we are
in and the context. We are all influenced
by context, whatever that context may be. But there's a very powerful
force on us in London of constraint. There are virtual fields.
You cannot enter a certain
place because it's a virtual protected zone because
[? It's in ?] St. Paul's. There'll be archeology,
there'll be legal constraints. So actually, constraint, I
think, Charles Eames said it, without problems
there's no design.
And constraint is
certainly something that defines the way
we make architecture. But I actually
think it's positive. Constraint is the thing
that if you don't have it you can't need to invent it. This is Osbert Lancaster,
the Saul Steinberg of England, London.
He invented a town
called Draynflete. This is London Night and Day. It's about how people
live their lives. What's interesting
is, although he was intrigued by architecture,
wrote numerous cartoon books about it, he was always seeing
how the public saw architecture rather than how
the architects saw it and the kind of
disconnect, not to deny the import of our discourse.
But it's quite an
intriguing read to see that kind of
alternative view of what we do. So this tension, if you
run an office of 400 people and you're being commissioned
to make buildings, there's always this
idea about, well, so that's the clients
brief but this building might outlast that client. So what are the rules
that we are going to use to make architecture? And it's not to say we
should be making black boxes where anything can happen. There's this kind
of endless tension.
If you make a building
where anything can happen, nothing happens. So you have to make specific
as well as generic moves. In a very strange way, a
lot of what we do this-- is Jean Prouve, the
great metal worker. But a lot of what
we do is actually employing technologies.
But we're also
employing components. We are assembling
buildings as components, in a way not unlike
cars might be assembled. That's not a serious problem. Again, it's something you
either embrace or engage with or are disappointed by.
But the reality is
most of our buildings and their elevations
come from another country on the back of a lorry. That may not be
something-- that may be something that disappoints
you, the loss of craft, but this 21st century
industrial construction. Again, this idea of used,
opposite ideologies. This is the Casa del Fascio
by Giuseppe Terragni in Como before the war.
After the war it was
the Casa del Popolo. The culture changed from
fascism to communism. The politics changed. The building outlasted
its dubious origins.
So a lot of the work we do
is in the world of offices. This is the great office,
The Uffizi for the Medici family in Florence. It incorporated a court,
a military system, an administrative system,
a residential system. It incorporated a public
route in the site itself.
It also incorporated a private
payment promenade for popes to move between. So it highlighted
the idea that we are making buildings in the city. Those buildings define space. And it's the face
of everyday life that's actually bringing out-- when we get back to
visit our buildings, the pleasure, in a way,
is not that they've messed the building up.
It's the fact that
they've actually engaged with it all, taking
control and rethought it. And that the architecture,
as in the case here, is robust enough to
both cater for that and actually celebrate it. This is the Nolli plan, I
think, where the great debates-- Really, I share this because
public space is obviously known to us in the city. When knowledge of this
plan of Rome, 1748, the churches were
the public rooms.
Where are our public rooms now? Are they libraries,
are the schools? Security means those
buildings are closed up. So can we bring public
space into buildings? I share this because
it's the Bradbury building in Los Angeles. I can't remember it
looks like on the outside but it has a memorable
internal space. It's been used in more films
than in any building I know.
And it's the idea about the
inside world of the building. And the fact that it happens
to have offices around it is irrelevant. It's again, this idea
that it's created a mirror of Nolli's idea of
public space within a building. And then this image
of Bucky Fuller is the idea of the big idea.
Architects are always trying
to think of the big idea. And there is this endless
tension between the smaller idea, the reality of
a single building, and then the kind of bigger
idea here of a early idea of environmental design. The big idea when
we were studying was that the internet was
going to change the world. I think it may have changed
the world in some good ways and in some very bad ways.
And we're kind of trapped
into iPhones and technologies. But there's also this idea
that, certainly in the UK, people said people
would disappear and live in rural Wales and wouldn't
go to a place like London. In fact what's happened is
the kind of machine center will isolate us into
a kind of cyber world. And actually physical
kind of engage is increasingly important.
This is Petra and the
idea of containment. And again, the idea of-- actually, the pleasure of
the city is the uncertainty. The idea that Manhattan's
a regular grid. London's an unplanned
city, they say.
It's actually a
very planned city. It's just been planned
by different people over different times. But in a way, the
ad hoc juxtaposition of buildings and
spaces in London is what allows very, very
different things that go on. It's not to say it's better.
It's just different
to Manhattan. And in a sense,
architecture, I think what we're always thinking
about is how do you play with the generic, which
is the grid [inaudible],, it Manhattan, and the
specific, which is the kind of uncertain
collision of events that's London, and exploit that
within your architecture. This is Hogarth. This is called
Midnight Conversations.
I was with a very
eminent architect on an architectural
tour of buildings. We're in a rather rubbishy
marquee that had a tent lining. He's built all over the world. And he turned around to me
and said, that's problem.
He goes, you can only do
so much with architecture. What he was really
saying was this place we were in hadn't been
designed but it worked. That is not to say we
should be designing things. But it kind of
suggests that maybe we should be thinking about
the limits of architecture.
Cedric Price had a story
that we worked for the couple on a building for three months. They wanted an extension. And after three
months, he said, look, you don't need an extension
you need a divorce. And the point about
that was really to say, a great school of
architecture is helped by being in a great building.
But probably more important
is the culture of the students and the culture of the staff. Architecture can do so much. I'm fascinated by it,
but it can do so much. So universal use is
something that we talk about in the
projects we're doing.
And that is the idea
that the irrelevance of planning constraints to
talk about particular uses. And we started to think of
this as a very simple way that we drew up for an
exhibition we are doing. It's about a field,
it's about a constraint. It's about the idea that
the architecture we make is the theater of life.
It's the physical frame. It might last for 50. If it lasts 50 years
it will 100 years. Then there are these
stage sets, which is the temporary
projects of life that might last 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
And then there are props,
reconfigurable components of people's life. When you design an apartment
block for 400 people, as we do, you're not considering
their props. You're making the
theater for their life. The stage set might
be the fact that you might have a swimming
pool or a running track or a garden on the roof.
But it's the idea about how
much do you want to control? So what I'll now
show you is a series of projects that talk about
the journey, the idea of how do you get the other side. What are the things that
drive your thinking? I will start by
really reflecting on some of the early projects
we did and the ideas. And then later on,
I'll talk about some of the projects we're
doing now and the forces that inform those ideas. The first project we
did, the classic project, was a house and a garden.
It was a very, very
tight controlled vessel, as we saw it, for life. Upside down. So there are windows
on the floor. So it's kind of
very, very specific, a generic bound-like volume.
There are very specific
elevations tacked. It was a swimming pool. It had some living
accommodation. We've recently
reworked this house.
It's now a living room. And everybody walks in and says,
how interesting that you put all the windows on the floor. We have to explain that
wasn't the driving idea. But it also shows that the
driving idea as the generic isn't actually enough.
And the specific,
if it is delightful, can allow you to
do something else. This is Casper, which is early
social housing for a Quaker research organization
called Joseph Rowntree. It stands for city
apartments, single people, affordable rents. We did this project with Hanif.
It was very, very,
very low cost. So it was equivalent
to $50,000 a unit, which in England was nothing. [? Hanife ?] And I came
up with this simple idea of the social space
in the building was most important thing. And we would pull
the corridor apart and address the critique of
modern post-war housing, which is always the streets
in the sky that failed, and create an internal courtyard
that was the social space.
You never walked under
someone, you saw through it. There was light, there
was a social space, there was a garden
at the bottom, there's a roof at the top. Very, very simple project. Very, very simple
organizing idea.
But when you have a
small housing project perhaps simplicity
is the best way. This was an early
competition we won for a new model of
sustainable schools. It's not a word I hate. I like.
We talk now about
environment design and building performance. But it was really
thinking about how a school in a rural community
could become the social space. It was a very, very
particular brief. There was no money to innovate.
So what we worked on
was if we actually designed a tighter,
more efficient school we could reinvest
the kind of money that we were losing in
building less volume and think more imaginatively
about how the building could be used out of hours. A very, very simple, naturally
ventilated, highly insulated building. And a simple organizing
device of a Plimsoll line that anchors it to the low lying
East Anglian and landscape. It's often a device
that caters for the fact that in the design
process we knew, with the uncertain client,
we had things we'd change.
That black line can
absorb the changing brief of different rooms, different
windows, different engagements. So a very hard, practical
idea is shaping. And then wherever possible,
to create something extra from this tight brief. External, sheltered space.
That led to another competition
we won, which was the brief was to design 18 bus stands. And there was a
highway's engineer map of this city center and
where you pick up buses. Our competition to
win the idea was to gather those-- to redesign
the highway structure-- gather those buses underneath
a single 120 meter by 80 meter elliptical
concrete roof and then create a
new public square. On the basic idea that bus
travel for the less wealthy in the area should have a
certain civic importance and dignity.
And that are our
job, in a way, was to liberate the project was
to actually rethink the brief. And then there was this
idea that the buses even aren't regulated. The quality of environmental
pollution from those buses is not controlled. But the architect could at
least give a certain dignity to the place.
Recognize that the
everyday life of the city could become an important
kind of social space. And even now, revisiting
this project 50 years on, it has been smashed
to bits in many ways. But the space is there. This building's been kind
of heavily brutalized.
But in a sense it doesn't
matter because the organizing device exists, the social space
exists, and the rest of it is life. And as Luca [? Busier ?]
Said, life is always right. Early again, another
competition winning scheme was this idea of
a prefabrication. People talk about
in the new world we'll be prefabricating
or printing now.
This was for Peabody. And this was social housing. And the idea was to
use the discipline of the prefabrication to develop
a different kind of housing layout so that we weren't
designing houses and making prefabricated
modules, we started with prefabricated modules and
developing the idea of housing. And the idea that you could
incorporate everything into the building.
And then the idea that the
social space, the streets in the sky, a bit like
Casper, were a different way of thinking about it. And we're allowing
people to adapt and take over and transform and
engage with their own space. So if buildings
were always being-- our buildings are
going to be adapted. To us, when I began, the idea of
working on historical buildings was of less interest.
But increasingly, in a way,
the moment we get given a site, one's thinking much
more about what have we got, what can we do? It might be a clear site,
in which case, there are invisible constraints. Or in this case, this is a
site that a client bought. It's five different
buildings, a series of warehouses, none aligned. But in a way, it's an
architectural version of the map of London.
Nothing's been planned and
there's a kind of chaos and a set of conflicts. But you can harness that. So the simple rule
we made here, again, taking the constraint of
an economic blip in 2000, was to say that everything
we did was minimal impact. And you either found
within the building or recycled from somewhere else.
So the building itself was a
series of collisions over time. This is the entrance. This is the shipping container
we bought for 300 pounds. These are the American postal
boxes we bought for $12.
Just a series of
elements coming together. But then, wherever
possible, exploit the fact that there was an
industrial roof, there was a lightweight
north light system. We could strip that off, take
technology from sports centers, and make a removable roof. And then, as the building
became more successful-- we have been working on this
building nonstop for 15 years-- we could add a swimming
pool, a series of gardens, and a series of other elements.
So a building that
a client was going to tear down that we were
doing a meanwhile use for has now become too valuable
for them to pull it down, which is quite an
interesting idea about what I would call long-term,
environmentally smart thinking. The rarity is the
frame of this building was fundamentally good. The skin has been upgraded. But actually, the
frame was good, the collisions, the
incidents were interesting.
And therefore, the opportunity
to make architecture in another kind of way existed. We talked about big ideas. This is the Barbican. This was a very
big idea in London.
After the war, heavily
bombed city center. We'll build a new cultural
center for the city. Concert hall, art galleries,
library, restaurants. But the big brave idea at the
time is that no one in London would walk on the street.
Everyone would walk either
at first floor on decks right across London or they
would arrive underground by car. So what you had was a
3,000-person concert hall with no front doors. So the project we were
working on for 15 years has actually been to
rethink a big idea. So there's the heroic
brutalism of the Barbican.
There's the new
entrances we've cut. This is the kind of art
project we developed. This is still a
vehicular entrance because it's the only
way we can get trucks in. But it's become
a people entrance with occasional vehicles
rather than vehicles with people fighting
to get through.
This is the idea of choice. And again, the idea
about freedoms. This building allowed
anyone to go anywhere. And as a result, no one could
navigate that building at all.
So our master plan was really
to reduce choice and make sure people picked up a set of
single decisions at each stage as they moved
through the building. And then the artistic
idea at the time was that the art would
be spread throughout. And then because as
a reaction to that, and I think we might swing
away, but the reaction to that was to turn it
back into white box galleries within the building. Building is really
important to us.
And the discipline of making
and learning from that. And this is one of
our early projects in terms of tall buildings. It's a residential building with
an interlocking section using a Dutch tunnel
form construction. And an office building here
on the World Heritage site that is [? Located at the ?]
Liverpool waterfront.
A very, very tough
project, really difficult to work through. I think we're only
seven or eight people when we did this project. A huge learning curve. But again, the constraint
and the discipline of making architecture
has definitely continued to inform
everything we do.
This is a similarly
tough project. This is the edge of London. There's London as we know
it in the background. That's the city.
This is Barking, a
former fishing port. It's a London borough. But it's very distinct,
it's very impoverished. It's failed since Ford failed.
This was really about
making a series of buildings around its old civic center. And then making a
mature, new public space. In this case, collaborating
with Muf landscape architects. And then the idea that we
would [inaudible] the building and we'd bring social
spaces into it.
We'd create a new library, we'd
creates some new high rise. Very, very simple,
low cost building. We'd create some new
residential and a hotel. Projects spin across
time to each other.
Again, the disparate of making. This is Adelaide
Wharf, which was an interesting
government-promoted idea that we needed to provide
housing in London. We've always needed to
provide housing in London. If you read the post-war
reports, they'll say, 4 million new houses required
over the next 20 years.
If you read the reports
now they'll say, 4 million houses required
over the next 20 years. There must be a secret
network of living going on in London
because you don't find people sleeping rough. There is a black
market that exists as a subculture
of accommodation. But Adelaide Wharf is about
building private, social, and what they call
intermediate, which is a mix all in the same block
around the same social space.
Again, working with Hanif. It's on the canal in
Hackney, which was then a kind of tough place that's now
a kind of rather wealthy place as the city spreads out. And the discipline
here was to not do what we did at
[inaudible],, which was to use prefabricated modules. But to see if
everything could be made using industrial systems.
So even that the
reinforced concrete frame is a standardized
rollout construction. The batteries were made
in the north of England. The facade was made
in Czechoslovakia. Everything is an assemblage.
But then to make it very
specific to its site, its waterside site building. And then, because the
facades can carry no load, the whole thing is
hung from the roof. Structurally
inefficient, but again, allows us to take through a
method of making to establish a method of architecture. And the kind of-- this is one of the entrances
into the shared courtyards-- the discipline we
gave to ourselves beyond the prefabrication, was
in every apartment should have twice the external area that
would normally be allowed, which meant you get these
12 square meter balconies.
And the idea was that this
was a proper garden, a yard, a front yard or a
backyard, in the sky. And that it was the
social face overlooking the park of these developments. Rather amusingly, Dustin
Hoffman and Dame Judi Dench-- then there was a film made built
around this particular project, which is about a love
affair across the balconies. So even in the prosaic,
industrialized construction of making housing, there
is poetry to be found by others in what you've done.
This was for a client
we had worked for. The benefit of
surviving as a practice. It is a client that we'd
worked for many years on a series of industrial
buildings by motorways but in central London. And when he wanted to build
a new building, what we knew is he runs a fashion business.
That there was a
kind of visual chaos. That what he really needed was
a large, multilayered warehouse for people to do things. But at the same time he's
a kind of visionary guy and he's building a very
large art collection. And the opposite to what
happened at the Barbican, here art is dispersed
throughout the building as the subliminal visual
and cultural messaging, communication to the staff
about the thinking that's underpinning what they
might be doing in design.
It's in central West London. There's Mary Testino's
studio in the foreground. It's a very simple
industrial shed. But is had eight floors.
It's a series of
tight spaces we're trying to make contrast
with the loose large space of the motorway. And then internally,
we developed this idea of a bespoke, handmade
frame, contrasting to all the work we've
done in prefabrication but using the
skill of the maker, the chippy, the former chippy. And then a very simple idea
that Hanif's team came up with. The structure would basically
state the same width.
You'd just play with the
way you position form work. And as you moved
up the building, the structure would get lighter. So the structure would actually
express its load patterns. It's cheaper not to
express the load patterns, but as we felt, with
stripped architecture away completely
with the building, and it was pure structure.
The structure is the
architecture of the building. So here you see
within the building, it's two what you'd call,
we'd call 15 meters-- you would call
50-foot floor plates-- pulled apart, not unlike
that Caspar housing project. But again, a similar idea of
circulation through the middle. A series of staircases.
This is the Carsten Holler. One of the art pieces. And then the idea of
the visual connection. It's one of the biggest
challenges on this project.
Again, the idea of
detail and research. And the more you
make, the more you are able to push constraints. This is a single fire envelope. So we didn't have to
subdivide the building up.
We could allowed the atrium to
be the air return for the air conditioning. And it could also
deal with fire. And then here you see the
visual chaos of the floor. And then the art
embedded and scattered throughout the project.
And then this is what
we knew would happen. And in a way that's fine because
the architecture is there and life is going on. This is a similar kind
of idea for a school, or low cost school. At the time, a friend of mine,
he was a furniture designer.
He put on an exhibition
called Mommy, why is modern architecture so gray? And when we went
to this site there were these series of
quite heroically detailed brutalist social
housing elements. And our natural reaction at
the time, maybe from the fact that when we'd been
short of money, the degradation of these
buildings was quite alarming. So we decided to revert
to an ancient material. So this is glazed terra cotta.
Use saturated color and
contrast as a new way of inserting a building
into this urban landscape. And then, you see in the
background the towers. And then this idea of
actually the permanence of the educational
facility contrasted with the much more
ephemeral sports facility, which will
change and weather in a different kind of way. The informal and the informal.
Again like the
earlier school, one of the biggest parts
of the project, again, reinventing the brief, was
to make the school work out of hours. Schools work for
about 20% of the time. Most of the time they're empty. Think of holidays.
Think of the short school hour. So the idea was to make
this building a community facility to extend well
beyond the school hours. And then it's a
simple, robust building imprinting on the concrete. No artistic collaborations
here but working with the graphic designer.
And then working
with the children to engage that first
generation of children in the kind of design. This is a multicultural-- there
is 102 languages spoken here. The idea that the global
connectivity of London, the fact that I think
60% of the children English was a second language. This idea of actually
celebrating they're engagement in the
making of the building.
This is Alan Bennett,
the playwright. Medical buildings are probably
the most difficult to work with in any country. They're driven by kind of
a very tough set of rules. The first one we did was
a child care facility.
And we worked with Jackie
Poncelet, the artist, on the basic idea that if
we turned the public space into an art project the natural
tendency of a national health service to institutionalize
and make everything miserable would be actually
controlled by art. And then that ran
into this project, which was a competition we
won for a new mini hospital. It's 50, 60,000 feet. A simple idea about-- actually, we just
set a basic rule.
There are mature
trees on the site. We would build this building
and not damage or remove any. It led to a very complicated
foundation system. But then the
building breaks down.
And then the trees become
the environmental filter and bring light
into the building. There's a garden that opens up. There's a street through it. And the different layers, as
the building gets more private, are all visually connected.
And the most basic
tasks are continuously about looking through and
seeing and breaking down that fear of 21st
century medicine. Art galleries, this
is the ultimate. People get very intrigued
by art projects. This is a project we worked
with Charles Saatchi on.
Very clear brief to us. He was in a listed building. He said, I do not want to
be in a listed building. We worked for five years
to find him a warehouse or some other element to be in.
And five years later, we
found a listed building in the middle of London. It was a former school that
became an orphanage that was then used by the Army. And was being turned
into an office block. Very, very simple building,
which we then took, gutted, and made a simple
series of white spaces.
The only distinguishing
thing about this building, apart from the
difficult technology inserted in these spaces
into the found structure, was the idea that the
entire circulation system, unlike many galleries, would be
through the galleries itself. And it's very much an
idea of architecture as the background to
his collection, which you will notice is very
minimal in its presentation. This was actually a double
height office space. In fact, Hanif was
doing this as an office when we got involved
and actually take up various floors within in.
And then again,
re appropriating. This is Richard Wilson's
art, a very specific piece he'd made in the
previous gallery that was then reconfigured. This is a two millimeter
viscous oil reflective surface reconfigured into the basement. This idea of use and
reuse, and then the idea of a Nolli plan
and public space.
This is an office building. We extended it, we reworked it. And then we had this
idea of pushing security further and further
back into building so that the atrium that
we'd created in what was a pretty formal courtyard. So we doubled the
amount of building on the site, but
almost invisibly, would then became a
public room within that would make the offices valuable
but also engage with the city.
And then this idea of
endless visual connection. And again, this idea
that in a sense, it's our tribute to
the Bradbury building. Architecturally
different, but it's an idea of a promenade
of public circulation through a private
building ending up on a public roof terrace. The idea of making money
to make architecture means you balance and play
with the scales of projects you're working with.
This is a hospice in London. Again, a little competition win. Very tricky project
because we wanted to take, deintstitutionalize
this and make it almost feel like a
very large house. But the guidelines
are all about germs.
Bear in mind that people are
very weak after serious cancer treatments and they're
terminally ill. But it was really
very much about trying to pick up on the domestic
scale of the area, bring natural materials
into the house. But the small business of
bringing bricks with mortar into a house, a hospice,
required someone for about three or
four months to prove that this was not a germ trap. It's a tiny thing
but it's the idea about detail in architecture
driving what you do.
This is another
school, but this time for the Olympic
village, which is a proto Stalinist
construction in East London. We were involved in
the master planning. But when it became too
Stalinist we pulled out. And we made the
only public building on the site, which
is pivotal in that it was addressing old Leytonstone
and the new Olympic village.
And that really informs
its design idea, which is this simple circular drum. It also references
the fact that our work on studying in the residential
plan the great London estates, we don't build churches anymore. The school is the
marker building. It's a simple drum.
That the [inaudible] to do with
a natural ventilation system that's dealing with acoustics. And then this is the
idea, again, the school becoming a public building. And then accepting the fact
that the school will take over the life of the interiors. And then working with a
talented landscape architect on the idea of
play and engagement and a kind green
space that contrasted with the harder of
spaces around them.
And then working with
Hanif, on the whole project. But also this idea of a
bridge as a simple expression of an entrance into place. And also the idea of expressing
the stress and tension and spanning potential
of the structure. I talked about stage sets.
This is London's
greatest stage set. It's Regent Street,
an extraordinary place in that it was built
really for these buildings. And these very grand facades
were only eight-foot-thick. So they were one-room-thick
grand facades of great palazzos replacing
John Nash's original design.
So what's happened
over the last 15 years is all of Regent Street,
which still looks like this, has been completely
rebuilt behind. We worked on two buildings
and three public spaces. I think you see the odd element
of new building coming through. And then in side streets, this
is Keith Tyson's Turner prize winning artist.
And then here is this idea of
highly valuable real estate, naturally ventilated office
building, triple glazed skin. Very expensive way
of making a building. But this is a very, very
valuable part of London. And the client is
called the Crown Estate.
So ultimately, the
money goes to government but it used to be
owned by the Queen. They've owned the
land since 1066. So if they can't make a long
term play on architecture no one can. What's interesting in London
is the artistic program.
This is [inaudible]
Smith gate into his little secret courtyard. This is Allison Wilding, the
artist, in a piece she made called Shimmy, that was
responding to the spaces we'd made with the courtyards. So this idea of the artistic
architectural and urban program, and the fact
that all the clients we're working with here
have a long term engagement with architecture. They are the people
who will retain the building after we finished.
Whereas those who build and
sell have a completely different view. And of course, that means
you rethink Regent Street. It becomes almost like a
public park on the roof. You get a slightly
surreal vestigial like apartment on the top.
This was a key project
for us because it was about building low cost
schools where we were not working for client we were
working for contractor. And those of you know
who work with contractors will know that's about the
worst place you can be. So their interest is
efficiency without necessarily any delight. But we've worked
with them enough researching precast
systems to develop a simple, four-panel
type that would go over six buildings over a
10-year construction period in a phased
redevelopment to the school while the school
stayed in place.
So plenty of constraints. But actually, the simplicity
of the idea, obviously kind of referencing Marcel
Breuer, the simplicity of the idea of
rotating these panels, creating simple cut
throughs, creating a kind of architectural
relationship between these
buildings, thinking about the idea of campus,
accepting that we had to build one while shuffling the
students into another, all those disciplines actually
forced everyone in the team, and eventually the schools
as a client, who came aboard halfway through, to think
much more imaginatively. And we obviously retained
certain buildings. We created certain new
buildings that had relationships those retained buildings.
And then this idea
about actually how do you find a poetry in
the system of construction? And then, actually
again learning in a sense from Regent Street
about the idea of stage sets, internally, the facades
are just a game. They are just an
abstract pattern. And internally you'll find
double height volumes, triple height volumes, and
strange relationships within. A much more public
function is a library.
We are in the one
today in Cambridge. And this is the idea of
actually looking at the area and looking at
polychromatic brickwork. Taking ourselves out
of our comfort zone and experimenting with
bonds and patterns and focusing again
a client, contractor on thinking about
a way of making. And persuading them to
do this with this idea that if you make good
brickwork and you get rid of finishes you can
actually reduce time on site.
And it's time not materials
that are costing money. And then that runs
through the interiors. And then this idea of
social space and engagement, and the idea, of course,
that a public room is for all kinds of people
to sleep and relax and use in different kinds of ways. Google, a client of ours, we're
working with them in London and in Berlin and elsewhere.
It's here, they've
always loved the image of being a dynamic
business, but actually what they do is actually
very, very static. It all has an image
of response and change because actually it
tends to be an image. So this project was really
about stripping a building back to its shell, creating a
series of pieces of furniture, creating a promenade that dealt
with a disconnect of an atrium in a building they found
themselves in that none of us had designed or thought was
particularly of great merit. And then making sure that this
journey through the building, like the journey
through the city, like the journey through
the Bradbury building, was actually a kind
of an urban journey.
And then it was about
developing a simple idea that where does
architecture exist in the world of interiors? To us it existed in an
idea about CNC routers and demountable rooms that could
be taken down and reconfigured by the individuals
who worked there. Rather than the appearance of
change, this is real change. So we designed a
simple room that took about a year to perfect. And the idea is
we ordered 200 up from a large joinery company.
We could all order
one cassette up via CNC router for a
very small business. We called it project Jack. It's an idea of a demountable,
easily handleable components. And then the idea of Jack run
throughout all the elements we installed in the
building, all the furniture.
So idea of taking
architectural down to a much more detail level. And this, in a way, was
an exercise in the idea of rather than theater or stage
set but in the idea of props. There's the kind of
classic obvious symbol of the off-the-shelf
sleeping pod that I don't think that
anyone's ever used. Reuse again in Liverpool.
A theater, no budget. Quite a find, 1920s building. We created a colored-induced
street frontage that didn't exist. Stripped the building
back to its minimum.
And again, in its
Jack-like idea, inserted a series of
pieces of furniture. And then really just
got back the idea of what we call a zero
finishes building, which again is a lesson that
feeds into our new buildings. And then of course,
this is the kind of architecture imitating art. This is an Edward Hopper
Nighthawks like shot, but with a slightly
less glamorous Casino in the background.
By contrast, but
at the same time, we are working
New Scotland Yard, which is a highly complex,
secure government building. Next to Norman Shaw's buildings,
this is Wallace Green. And this is pure
architectural technology. This is structure-free
bomb proof glass.
I think it's about
four inches thick. So what we're trying to do is
make a very public building from a very secure site. It was launched
on the day of they tackled Westminster Bridge. The eternal flame is
an important symbol of the challenge of security.
In a way, this is the
most extreme version. All buildings have this kind
of fear of public engagement. But the more we can
persuade people to actually open their building up the
more successful they become. If a building's enjoyed by
the public in the wider sense it becomes part
of the city and it becomes successful in
many, many different terms.
The other projects I'm
going to talk about really are about actually removing
and remaking in London. This was a challenge
to us to pull down three listed buildings and
make a new market building. We can see it has
a glass vitrine, a kind of triple glazed
city sandwich with retail, with offices, and
with residential. And we had the challenge
of sculpting the glass.
And actually, the
more we sculpted it the more it became
reflective, the more it became opaque and
contrasted, obviously not internally but externally. And then obviously, there
was this strange idea about flamboyance and
could we make a corner. And about reflecting the
changing grids of the building. And then this is
the core itself, which became a light sculpture
we worked on in-house with a lighting specialist.
This is the building
at Christmas. The idea is that in a sense, to
get out of our own constraints, our slightly tight
architectural world. This is another city
sandwich, as I would call it. So this is a school, an office,
1,100 apartments, a studio, and a local sports
center down the road from Big Ben and
Westminster Abbey.
And then the simple
idea here was to abstract the 1,100 rooms
into a series of slits into a large
sculptural insertion, a kind of spun
top, that reflected the incoherent urban
language of the place. In all of the buildings
we've been working on very coherent places. This is an incoherent place. And each building in a sense
is trying to make its own mark.
This was a simple idea of
whatever is happening within, the building was
legible within the city. And that in fact-- this is the promenade
going through the city. This is the school, which
actually has 800 students. This is the communal
spaces on the roof, again, open for the
public of the building.
So that's the five different
groups who work there. And then is the idea
of the individual slots being very anonymous
on the outside but being very specific
in how they capture views. This project is, again,
the biggest reuse project we've done. It's a million and a half
square foot in Amsterdam.
Competition we won 10 years ago. It's slow architecture. There was an existing 1960s
building, 200 meters long. Our competition winning
idea was actually to remove space from the
site, to cut a large hole.
Because we felt the
building blocked off one half of the
city from another and it disconnected
university from the city. So by inserting a
60-meter concrete being, we propped up the building
and removed 40,000 feet below and allowed the canal
to flow back through. And suddenly, it is
a university campus. But it's now a
university campus.
This is in construction. When we won the competition, we
said to the client, none of you will be here when we
finish this building because we know the
turnover in universities is relatively quick. Not here, obviously. So we've had four
different clients in the course of the project.
But it hasn't really mattered. Who's going to be in this
building hasn't really mattered because what we were
doing through these moves was connecting it to the city. Then through these
series of devices, this is what we call the
cut and then the bridge, we are creating
the kind of network of social spaces
within the building regardless of who
would be in there. And then the idea of the outside
is a simple, neutral veil.
But then these social spaces
within are clear and coherent. And actually, who's
been in who's coming out has continuously changed. In fact, the building's
only just completed itself. Saturated color
in certain points, restraint in other areas.
We couldn't replace
the lift so we added extra stairs we refer
to as the cut and many [? Atrias. ?] And
instead of moving along a 200-meter floor
zone you cluster around vertical elements. So it always creates a series
of houses within the building. And then we had this idea of the
seven 300-person lecture halls of docking in the basement.
And then ever walking
on top of them and then traveling down through. So the building became almost
like a multilayered liner within the city. And they bring their
art into the project. This is Barbara Brookman.
And then this is the
idea of a passage that we created in a place
that was previously a void. So again, learning
from the Barbican, you're suddenly making
an inaccessible [? 60 ?] System that was like the
Barbican's first floor entry only, reengaging
it with the city. So I'll end really by
just talking about-- Those are projects,
they're ideas that reflected the conversations
we had as students. They're ideas that we've bounced
off other projects over time.
There's always this idea about
learning from your own mistakes but also learning
from your own lessons. And talked in a little more
detail across three or four projects about the
idea of making. This is our office. There's 12 model makers
continuously making models for our purposes.
But a lot of it being
one-to-ones and prototyping. Because what we do is we
find the construction process is too slow. So wherever possible we try
to get ahead of that process. This is the White
Collar Factory, which Hanif has moved into.
We started this project in 2008. As the client said,
there's a famous line of Winston Churchill's in the
First World War, gentlemen, we have no money,
we have to think. The problem of 2008,
obviously globally, was quite significant. And that was rather useful.
So instead of saying
what they wanted they started to say, well,
what do you think we should do? And we went through
this idea of actually what was an office building? And the key drivers
about generosity, robustness, efficiency of
system, the universality and the potential of
it, the passive systems. I mean, our buildings
have become incredibly complicated with incredibly
cumbersome technologies that no one actually
uses properly. And then we came up
with some simple ideas. It's rocket science because
it's contradicting all the stuff that's gone before.
But if you have tall
ceilings, heat rises. Where the space you
occupy works better. If you get rid of
air conditioning, naturally ventilate but make
your thermal mass actually active rather than passive,
so we have cold water pipes, cast to the slab. The whole thing is
radiating [inaudible] Rather than shade the facade we
actually don't let the sun in.
We create deep plan
because we know that this kind of shallow
space doesn't work. And we use a concrete
structure for everything, which works on a
theory of convergence that we're interested
in, which is that, in a way, when we make
a building like this nothing can be taken away. There is no redundancy. And nothing need to be added.
It doesn't mean you may not
want to put delight and detail in but it's about an
economy and eradicating finishes and the
layers of clutter that arrive in an architectural
construction. We treat it as a
research project. For two years we worked
on the idealized building. We knew we'd never build
this idealized building but it was a structural and
architectural and environmental testing system.
We then arrived
on site in London where this idea of
efficiency becomes something quite different. The core moves,
the walls change. The building is articulated
in different ways. But the fundamental
moves are still there because we know that site
and constraint is always going to be part of
making architecture.
The environmental
strategy remains. The building that moves to
a particular place, which is silicon roundabout
in Old Street. There's a taller building. There's five other buildings,
three new ones, two retained.
We worked through
a series of models. And because we worked with
the same plant for 20 years we persuaded them to build a 1
and 1/2 million pound mock up, jacked up 20 meters
in the air to test the way you make the building. But actually,
economically, if you're building 200 million pounds
worth of construction, this kind of thing
is incredibly useful. This was then actually used
not really for marketing but for testing the
environmental performance of the building.
This was really
the story about-- the positive story about
engaging with CO2, carbon. And therefore, we could make
this very complex, tight site in London and make this new
half a million square foot suite of buildings that are-- their leads platinum, their
[inaudible] outstanding. I think those measures
are useful checks but they're not the driver. It's a very solid building but
actually quite light within.
It has this kind of
light filtering system, but also allows for
natural ventilation and takes the wind
and the edges off it. It exposes it's
making at the ground. The system above is an
industrial facade system. But detail comes in the building
in terms of the castings and how we make the concrete.
How actually the system
breaks down, where the core engages with the wall. And then the idea
of interior space, this idea of convergence. So the structure is the
finish, is the space. We use a kind of
timber form work to articulate certain walls.
The client has become a very
big fan of architecture. We buy Jean Prouve's low
cost industrial facades for 70,000 pounds of pop
from an art gallery in Paris, which is a rather ironic comment
on Prouve's work in making architecture affordable. And then we work on very simple
ideas about easy accessibility, visibility, raw floor plates,
the occupation of floor plates with jack-like systems. The idea of detail and light.
And the standard notion in
London is just give me glass when it's irrelevant. Actually, framing
views is better. Then actually, the
industrial system that is ventilating this
building providing fresh air when the natural
ventilation can't be used is part of the veins, in
a way, of the building. The facade, the detail,
the framing of view, the engagement with London.
And then actually, if
you're spending money in a different kind of
way, you can liberate the way think of the building. So the ground floor is a
public space for the city. There's an outdoor
public space on the roof. There's a club for
the building users.
And again, this
idea of convergence. That's the building in the city. When it was launched
last week all people wanted to talk about
was a running track. But that's a removable train
where the building maintenance unit goes.
So it's doing lots of things. And that really
is what intrigues us is putting suites of
buildings together now. And this is Camden Town. Mixed use is a palette
of different materials.
Already this client is changing
this from a market building into an office building. And then this
complexity of making an industrial infrastructure and
railway lines running through is kind of beneficially
changing the way we think about aggregating buildings. And then here is this
idea about universal space with a 12-meter-deep
basement in a bottom down, top up construction. The last two
projects I will show are really about reuse
but on a much bigger scale and what it can
mean to the city.
So this is Gin Lane. This is Gin Lane, Beer Alley. That's Hawksmoor Church. This is Bloomsbury in London.
That's the same spire
you can see there, here. And that's Senate
House in the background and the British Museum beyond. It was an industrial building
built with great generosity for a system we no longer
use, called the Post. It has an underground railway
line that links it to London.
We have to keep that
open because it's used for data and cable transfers. It's a rather anonymous but
quite intriguing building. But what distinguishes
it and is unique is it has six-meter or 19-foot
floor to ceiling heights. So our design idea was to retain
this kind of magnificent suite of found objects and spaces
and reinsert it into the city.
Create an industrial-scaled
new facade to clear out the
unnecessary components, put new cores
through the building. This is the lacquered steel,
the stainless steel trims and the heroic scale and facade. This is typical floor plate. And then there's an
interesting idea in London that the strange
brief for this site is half a million square
foot of office space, and 50 social housing units,
and a public roof garden.
It's kind of weird and absurd. But what happens is you get
McKinsey's on the top wherein the people can
look in the windows and see what they're doing. And then you've got the
social housing tenants right underneath them. So it's that kind of a
strange juxtaposition.
And again, this idea
of a layered city and bringing public
space through the city, and then creating
this public garden and shuffleboard and
track within the city. And then the making of it
is consuming 20 architects for the next three years. And the retention
of the structure is a kind of absurdity. But we knew, the moment
you took it down you'd never get the volume back.
So we've persuaded the clients
through various devices, also on the basis that
there is something about the uniqueness of
the specific of having one-acre floor plates on
a volume and scale that's not known. The last project I'm
going to talk about is a thing about slow
architecture and time. So if we finish, the life
of the building starts. This is the timeline
of a project that we started in
2006, late 2006.
Here, 10 years on, we are a year
and a half of starting on site. It's right in the
middle of London, the junction of Tottenham
Court Road and Oxford Street. There was a theater
on the site, I think, called Crossrail came along
and Crossrail's infrastructure. And what happens
is when you make infrastructure is you lose
the buildings above where you come out of the infrastructure.
This is what we're doing. It's eye of a needle stuff
there's a new theater, a new office building. This is the site now. What we have, it is what I
call it industrial watchmaking, you have a vibrating fan with
120 decibel noise coming out and a new 600-seat auditorium
within four inches of that.
So it's very, very precise and
very, very, very difficult. But again, there's the
idea of the public theater and the public office coming
through and connecting up. The benefit of the
research in a large team, is that it is the most complex
BIM model we've ever made. I'm not obsessed
with BIM but when you're dealing with this much
below ground it's essential.
And then this is
the building as it begins to appear in the city. The public space of the office. The kind of expression
of the making of it. The idea of the roof terrace.
Working with an artist
on a new public space that will link to square,
revealing a listed church. The theater itself, with
its alabaster trims. The box within two
meters of the edges. And then it's a very
flexible auditorium within.
So it contrasts very much
that watchmaking idea when I went to Ahmedabad
on a tour of India and I saw the Mill Owner's
building by Le Corbusier. And we were asked to work
on this project, which is a million and a half
square feet of offices, two and a half billion square
feet of accommodation, with the idea of could we make
a building out of only four components, concrete, lifting
technology, a recessed glazed facade, and a floor by
floor by floor plant system. And the way in the sense
we pursued this model is only through the-- we resisted other
devices and pursued it only through the technology
of 3D printing and casting. And then developing
organizational ideas for the phased construction
of this project, of which this is the latest iteration.
I'll end with that image,
which is a promise of living. Which is really just to
say that what's interesting for us, being 400
people around the world, is that we've opened an office
in Oklahoma 12 years ago because someone told me
that they came from Oklahoma and they thought it was
an interesting place. It is an interesting place. It's kind of not known
by many Americans.
It's certainly not known
by me so I went there. But what's been very interesting
is displacing ourselves, the comfort level we're in,
working in Europe and even India, which we
kind of understand and then coming to
a classic burnt out, white flight American city. And being immensely surprised
by both the ambition of people there to rebuild their
city and rethink their city. So that idea of always
displacing yourself, whether you're going for
five weeks, or five years, or whatever, it's
displacement that I think is the greatest
asset to creativity.
Thank you very much. [Applause] Simon, will you take
a few questions? Yeah. Questions. You referred to this in
the end about Oklahoma.
Maybe because I think that
both what you mentioned about Bristol in Oklahoma
is-- thank you, Matt-- that you had people
in the office who wanted to go back to
Oklahoma, and people who are in the office who wanted
to go back maybe to spend time in Bristol. And you encourage them
to then set up a firm. Part of it is really
the kind of expertise that you as a
practice can provide, the kind of
infrastructure that you can provide to then make
people successful in places like Oklahoma or Bristol. Which I think is an interesting
thing because I think-- I'm assuming that it might have
been harder for those people to be as successful
if they didn't have the backing of the firm.
But you might disagree with
that and they might disagree. They might say
otherwise, but I'm raising that because you went
very seamlessly from like 1999 to 2017. It's been seamless mostly. It's been seamless.
Well the thing is, I was saying
to Michael, at some point, like 20 minutes ago,
you were only at 2007. And then you
covered the 10 years in a very short period of time. And the reason I mention that
is that there is a level of kind of sophistication
and complexity where the first projects, in
a way, are interesting but they're very, in a
way they're normative. But the projects that
you're working on now, they involve very
complicated infrastructure, whether it's how you're
plugging into the rail system or whether it's how you are
transforming the post office building and its structure
and overlaying it with another structure.
And you didn't
really-- you like made it seem as if it was just
like you did the pool house and now you're doing this. But it seems to me that the
argument about the relationship of architecture to its site
has shifted quite a lot, in terms of your
most recent projects, because the complexity
of organization, and technology,
what is existing, the connection to the city. It speaks of a different
idea of architecture, which is in a different
way at the intersection of architecture and
the city, in some ways. And it's not the historic idea
of architecture and the city.
So I'm just interested
in this question of the role of complexity,
the role of technology, the role of how sophisticated
the practice needs to be. Of course, a lot of
that is due to Hanif-- [inaudible] --how Hanif and AKT have helped. But I would be interested
more about your observations. I don't think the
architecture's change.
The opportunity's changed. In the early days,
our view always is to make a project
as simple, as simple as it can possibly be. As legible as it can be, with
as few components as possible. Therefore, when we do
something, we have a thing-- I don't know if you
have it in America.
We have it England. They call it value
engineering, which has nothing to do with
engineering or value. It originated in America. Which is called stripping
anything of any interest is what we call it.
And so what we've
always thought is if you get down to the
essence of the opportunity, if the building is very small
and simple, like Casper, the only opportunity, there
is one opportunity when you're working that cheaply. And that is to make the
circulation special. The accommodations
are perfectly nice. We detail the kitchens
and bathroom very nicely, and there are some
nice balconies, and there is some
decent brickwork.
But at that scale, there's
only the opportunity to pursue a simple,
a legible idea. As the projects get
more complicated, we're still trying
to make it simple. It just there's more
complexity in it. There's more complexity in
the scale, in what we're doing technologically in terms
of the different programs we might be incorporating.
We have more knowledge. So you build up a
body of knowledge. You've built up more buildings. So in the early days when
you present a building, they always say, can you do it? Now they assume we can
do it and they often think we might know more than
they do about how you do it, or it's a very
open conversation.
So we're still trying to make
things as simple as we possibly can. It's just that as we
deal with larger projects they have greater complexity. Which is why I showed
India after No. 1 Oxford Street because
India is four or five times as big as a project.
But we're trying to reduce
that to only four packages to give it a constraint
because we know there will be limited maintenance. We know it's a tough climate. We know that the
building technologies are kind of different
and challenging in another kind of way. And it contrasts with No.
1 Oxford Street,
where I think we've earned 15 million pounds in fees
on that job over the 10 years and I've had 20
people on it forever. And when I'm designed it
with the team back in 2007, we know it's not going
to be built for 10 years. It's kind of a
slightly strange thing to be designing knowing it's not
going to happen for 10 years, knowing that you'll probably
end up redesigning it. So we are still-- the same thinking
is underpinning what we're doing, which is
the idea of convergence, an idea of simplicity, about an
idea of the importance of time in architecture.
An idea about actually
allowing things we don't know about and the
uncertain and doubt to exist. That the thing is,
obviously, as we've grown as a practice, the
opportunities and the scale of the problems
we've been dealing with have become greater. And in that sense, I find
them more interesting. I find putting eight buildings
in Camden Lock more interesting that doing a loft conversion
in Camden Lock, which we used to do when we started.
And then you get a railway
line going through it, and the canal, and
Victorian infrastructure. Those are the
visible constraints. And there's invisible
constraints. But to me, it goes
back to that comment about without problems
there's no design.
The reason we like
the greater complexity is there's more constraint on
us, there's more challenges. And that makes us think harder. Whereas India,
there's no constraint without quite a lot of Indian
bureaucratic regulations. There's no real
formal constraint so we have to invent our own
constraints of a minimal set of manufactured systems
as a way of controlling the tendency of architecture,
in my book, to kind of run away.
Going back to a comment
by a friend of mine, we can only do so much
with architecture. I love it. I think it's really a great
thing to be involved in. But actually, life carries
on around architecture.
It matters hugely to us. Cities probably matter
more than buildings. But as I'm in the business
generally of making buildings, the most interesting
challenge I can have is to be putting
suites of buildings together and then
making pieces of city. Well, I'm still wondering
whether one doesn't need a different
kind of language to describe the
moment at which trying to simplify the
complexity still produces new forms of complexity.
And how do you how do you
discuss that in architecture? But I'll let [inaudible] Well, thank you for the talk. It's very interesting. I've followed your
work for a long time. I recall sitting in
Amanda Levete's office and we're designing
an academy and we're looking at your drawings
trying to understand the organizational system.
And I recall also that you're
firm was pretty much every week on BD covers, and these things. So it's great to see
the practice grow and where it is now. But as a kind of comment
or maybe slight question, I want to say that I think that
it's very interesting to see that you're interested in
quite important architectural or disciplinary questions. And I want to go back to
the original diagram you showed about the
theater, which is for me positioned in the city.
The theater had
several components. There's constituencies, there's
a stage, there's an audience. There's actors, and there's
many things that go around. And I feel like you're
interested in mixing these things and re-questioning
how they are composed.
And then, if you look
into the architecture, I think the way you're
doing it, especially challenging typologies. I think that many of
the projects you showed have atriums and staircases
and some other important kind of public spaces. And it seems like you interested
in always like merging things, hybridizing things in order
to see what actually happens with those spaces and how
people behave in them, how they navigate
through these things. So I was wondering if you
have noticed post-occupation if there's any surprises
that happened in those spaces that you created because for me,
they're all hybrid typologies.
They're not anymore just an
atrium, or just a staircase, or just things
where they converge. You're mixing art with fashion. You're mixing
schoolchildren with sports. So maybe you can talk
about a little bit, are there any surprises that
you discovered after the fact? There are some quite hard
core technical surprises we've discovered is that
sophisticated clients don't know how to run their buildings.
Which is why we've
ended up going back to simpler buildings. I mean, just technologically. The most sophisticated
people, even in an environmental
engineering company we work with in a
building we're in, everyone's got
fans on their desk and no one's using the system. So that's a simple
example of the surprise.
In terms of, again,
about that map of London, I think what's become
increasingly important to us is the idea mirroring
the uncertainty of chance encounter in the city. The [? Elizabeth ?]
Lancaster picture is really talking about the
fact that what happens is the reason people don't
live in barns and the reason they come to cities is for
the chance social encounter. We over structure
things in cities now. We regulate things and
people curate buildings, which I find slightly weird.
I think we should be allowing-- I think we used to
talk about instead of mixed use we used
to talk about misuse, the uncertain
condition of the city. And so what we've
always found is we are looking for
simplicity but we're finding there is enough
complexity coming out of working out
public circulation system through buildings. And that we like the fact as we
go and do post-occupancy work we discover they are doing
things quite differently that we hadn't thought of. And they are
appropriating spaces in different kinds of way.
And even at The White
Collar, the public space, even before it's opened,
people are setting up shop there and doing their own thing. And we talked a lot about
that in the design of it. Allowing life to happen. The greatest challenge
is persuading clients to think about the benefits of
that and not obviously public or an arts organization with an
art gallery, or think about it.
But a lot of people
have spent the last 50 years working how to keep
people out of their buildings. What we're saying is if
you're more generous, a bit like the city,
than they will work. In terms of
hybridization, to me it's about specific and the generic. If we're making space we're
moving people through it.
Amsterdam we're moving
through a different way than we are in London
because in Amsterdam we couldn't put new
lifts in because there was no budget for
there was no shafts. And we could make
the structure work so we rethought the idea of
the role of the staircase. But when you do that, then
when you come back to London and do another building you're
learning from that thing. And so it's the uncertainty
in your own things and not having absolute
certainty and conviction is also quite useful.
As you're designing a project,
recognizable that thing we thought was going to work
one way hasn't worked that way but it's worked another way. Also, if you're going to push
clients along, what we always say is if we give them
a retreat position they can be more brave. So we'll say, well, let
the public come through, let them use your building,
let them go up to the garden. But if that causes you
great concern down the line, we design a set of
retreat mechanisms the you can close
the building down.
So you've got to manage
things politically and architecturally. And you've got to have a clear
vision of why you're doing it and what you're setting up and
how the hybrids might work. And that's the Johnson
encounter idea. But it requires a
lot of persuasion.
But we are lucky
enough to by working with people over 4, 5, 6, 8, 10
projects you can continuously build on. So I always think it's
innovation by iteration rather than the great leap forward. If you're talking
about the great leap forward is you don't have
enough time to learn. I like great leaps, but you
don't enough time to learn and you will find few people
who are prepared to fund that leap forward.
So if you can do it across
a series of projects you can take someone
on a journey and learn. Also, we're pretty open to hear
a contrary view from people of what we're doing. We find that pretty useful. So we can be quite
difficult in the office about what we're doing
and why we do it.
But when we're out
of the office we can look like we're very
collaborative because actually it's quite useful. I mean, we architects have
been beaten up over the last 20 years with public consultation. And we get roundly abused. But I don't mind because
I think it forces-- I mean, I don't
like it at the time, but actually it forces us
think a bit harder when we get rebuffed by planning.
I don't necessarily
agree with the planners, or historic England,
or in Amsterdam by the aesthetic
committee they have. But in a sense, it forces
you to think harder. So to me it's always
the idea about accepting that threat and that challenge,
and trying to find out what's underpinning it. [Inaudible] Yeah.
Hi. Thank you. I'd like to go back to
something, a question that you posed at the beginning
of the talk when you said, and what is the role of
the practice in training and educating architects today? And I was wondering if you
could talk maybe specifically about the ways that
your firm engages with that process of
training and educating. Well, I think like
most people here, we've always been involved
in teaching and practice.
It's not unique to us. When I was at the RIBA, which
is just one of those things you do a few hours a week. There was this thing about
the educational model. And a lot of my friends,
who were running schools of architecture, said you
need at least three years to get through the degree, at
least two years to diploma.
And my view was
actually, I've met students who are for three years
are better than some people who'll do as many diplomas
as they like and will never get through. So what we suggested
was we had this idea of teaching practices. It's partly also
an economical model because we used to
have free education. And it's not so strong now.
Basically, until 1958
in the UK, most people didn't go to
architectural school. They went and studied
in a practice. I'm not saying that's great. And the reason
somewhere like the AA.
Was formed is
because they didn't think it was great either and
they wanted academic input. But I think a hybrid, talking
about the hybrid thing, a hybrid of actually
academe experience. Many of the great
architects never entered an architecture school. If you've been working on a
building site for five years or you're a joiner
or something, you're going to have a different set of
skills to someone's whose been through an architecture school.
So what I encouraged was
this idea, as it used to be, you can go through
many different ways. So we've got 48
schools in England. There's more opening every
year, which is kind of fine. But there's a new
school, for instance, that has been set up based
on that principle called the London School
for Architecture.
They take diploma students. And those diploma
students spend a year in an office, where
they're earning money working for three days. And they're doing
they're own work for two days within the office itself. What then happens is the
people in the office who are asked to mentor those
people through that process, they have their own external
tutors and programs.
But those people are
taking responsibility for developing the
talent within the office. Which frankly, is
no different to what we do anyway with anyone
coming to the office. We're there to help
develop talent. Because if we're going to be
any good as a practice is only because of the people
who pass through office are interested while they're
there in what they're doing.
So in a sense, as I said
in the very beginning, I don't really see a difference
between academe and practice. The only problem is
that practice really doesn't engage with academe and
becomes more and more dreary. And academe, when it
doesn't engage in practice, becomes less and less
relevant, let's say. So the ebb and flow
between the two, the recognition
that everyone's just interested in architecture,
and whatever that might be, is a much more positive place.
I still think there's much
opportunity to do further master's and PhD's. Maybe to do them at
different speeds. Maybe to do them at different
points in your career. The object of education
has mapped the-- We finish buildings.
We do go back but we don't go
back and life gets on with it. And it's a bit like that. We finish objects of education. You're 23, you're
done, you're out.
Slam, bang, and off
you go into practice. It's the same thing. You've got to continue
learning in practices. You learned in academe.
So mix it up, seems to me,
a healthy kind of disruption to the old system, which
was not that old anyway. It was new. Simon, thank you very, very much
for really a wonderful talk. Lots of discussion to follow.
[Applause] Thank you all for coming..
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