AA Files 59 - 6a Architects

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William Firebrace
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Mômo in Marseille
Adam Phillips
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On Losing and Being Lost Again
Tom Heneghan
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After the Goldrush
Tom Emerson
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Richard Wentworth in Conversation
Theodore & Stephen Spyropoulos
28
Memory Cloud
Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Hugo Palmarola
30
A Panel’s Tale
Mark Campbell
42
Aspects not Things
Steven Spier
50
There’s Just Something About Switzerland
Irénée Scalbert
56
Parklife
Ines Weizman
60
Architecture’s Political Spectacles
Christopher Pierce
70
Nave(l) Gazing
Adam Caruso
74
Whatever Happened to Analogue Architecture
Pier Vittorio Aureli
76
The Geo-Politics of the Ideal Villa
Barry Maitland
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The Will of the Epoch
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Contributors
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Richard Wentworth
in conversation with
Tom Emerson
Richard and I have been having a version of
this conversation for a very long time. It started
after my partner Stephanie Macdonald and I
became interested in his pictures and the talks
he gave to students, and developed as we got
to know each other through invited lectures at
unl, edited articles for Scroope magazine, car
journeys and greasy spoon lunches. This episode
follows a visit we made together to Raven Row in
March this year. Raven Row is a new contemporary art exhibition centre at 56–58 Artillery Lane
in Spitalfields, London, which we designed between 2005 and 2009. Our walk and talk crossed
over history, light, casting, immigration,
floorboards and whether London’s sash windows are not, in fact, a Dutch invention. Later
on the conversation turned to the photographs
found in a box at the London Metropolitan
Archive, tracing the history of the place through
the twentieth century, from the grandeur of
1905 to the squalor of Spitalfields in the 1960s
and the ferocious fire that gutted the building in
1972. We continued to talk over several months,
trying to find the centre of the piece, but as is
often the case with Richard, the subject is what
surrounds you. So again, we got distracted by
the Heras fencing alongside the car we were
sitting in, and ended up speculating about the
kind of inventive yet anonymous knowledge
that produces the right kind of stiffness to say
‘keep out’. He once said to me that he never
gave the same talk twice but really only had one
talk. Twelve years on, this comment still rings
true but the conversation is much bigger – in
fact it’s not even ours anymore and perhaps
never was. Architecture is a kind of conversation. Richard is an artist, operating like a
detective, sniffing around taking photographs.
I’m an architect; I also sniff around but then
I arrange things. But we bitch about the same
things and laugh at the same jokes.
—Tom Emerson
First floor front room, 56 Artillery Lane, 1971
© City of London, London Metropolitan Archive
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rw Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you, Tom,
I was at Google.
t e No one has ever said that to me before.
rw There had been a fire. I was trying to
explain to them what a human-sized canister of
propane gas could do. It’s really dangerous. And it’s
hilarious that you have one out on your terrace to
run a barbeque just because you can. They were
saying, ‘it’s only a few flames’, and I was saying,
‘it’s a bomb’. It wasn’t in a confined space, which I
suppose made things a little better, but helicopters
started to appear and everything else, so my meeting had another 90 minutes tossed into it.
te Funny, I’ve brought along
some pictures showing the aftermath
of the 1972 fire at Raven Row, which
provoked a lot of ideas for us. The fire
was caused by paraffin lamps and it
destroyed much of the interior space.
These pictures are part of a collection
of about 70 images – all of them from
inside the Raven Row building
between 1908 and 1972, all taken
anonymously and all taken with a
real seriousness. I mean, look at all
the verticals – none of them converge, everything is correct. We found
them as part of a set, about the size
of a shoebox, in the London Metropolitan Archive and kept wondering
who took them and why.
rw In the 1970s London was
always burning. A lot ‘on purpose’ and
even more ‘accidentally on purpose’.
There’s such an eye behind the pictures
isn’t there? It might be the eye of a creative policeman or an insurance
adjuster, like the wonderful Larry
Sultan book, Evidence, but it’s still an
eye. They’re almost like a Walker
Evans. But emotionally they also really
convey the England of the 1930s and
50s – all those fireplaces and doorways,
some original and some a bit extemporised. It’s so English. The shot with the two filing
cabinets is incredible.
te A dark cabinet for a dark room.
rw Yes, that’s so bizarre. It is almost a little
artwork in itself, with a light side and dark side.
te And that’s what I don’t understand.
There seems to be a real kind of artfulness,
or even artifice, in photographs of this place
that remains absolutely consistent over almost
70 years.
rw Do you think this was because the photographs offer an architectural record, and that in
becoming witness to the survival of the space the
cherished process of black-and-white photography
expresses a special kind of respect? Building as
palimpsest, picture as document?
te I think so. But I’m still surprised. This
image does not record a fragment of architectural history but a 1970s bedroom in an old
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house in east London. They must have been
taken for another reason, and that’s the bit that
seems so puzzling. Someone, or a series of people, was able to project this whole endeavour a
long way into the future, to a time when the thoroughness and pathos of the images might
become important.
rw All these pictures remind me of Eugène
Atget. And one forgets with Atget that he actually
lived through to the beginnings of the modern
period – he died in 1927, I think – and so had
reached infant Art Deco. These pictures seem to be
the kind of thing Atget would have photographed
if he’d lived on – he used the French word
documents to describe his photographs. Of course
if Atget had taken these there would be a figure in
the shot – a man in the doorway or a woman’s face
behind a window. In their absence the dating
instrument here is the wireless. I’m sure there are
people around who would be able to tell you exactly
what kind of radio this is, what stations it received.
Radio as a public medium is the politics of the first
half of the twentieth century – and it’s only 20 years
older than me.
te As much as the furnishings and traces
within the images, the other story of the place is
that one whole wooden panelled room was packaged up and sent to the us in the 1920s as part of
a permanent exhibition at the Chicago Art
Shopfront, 56 Artillery Lane, 1967
© City of London, London Metropolitan Archive
Institute on the English domestic interior. How
the exhibition’s curators came across it I have no
idea. The room was on display in Chicago until
the 1940s and then was put into storage. The
interesting thing is that while it was away the fire
happened, and so when the room came back to
London it was as the only remaining original part
of the house.
rw The room is a pelt isn’t it, a skinned interior? Had the room been loaned to them?
te No, the Chicago Art Institute had bought
it, and so 15 years or so after the fire, and as part
of their lobbying to renovate the area, the
Spitalfields Trust was compelled to
buy it back. It first returned to
England in the late 1980s, and was
stored in a barn in Essex belonging to
someone in the Trust. I took a photograph a few years ago showing the
room on the day it arrived back at
Raven Row – stacks and stacks of it
all packed up in cases.
rw A room in a box. I just saw a
picture of the house that features in the
James Dean film, Giant, which was sent
from the Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios
to Texas in 1956, with all of its parts –
gables etc – packed up in crates. Was
any of yours missing?
te About 25 per cent.
rw How funny – the missing bit in
a flat-pack. It’s all so les meubles isn’t
it? – you know, the ‘moveables’ – as
opposed to our awkward word, ‘furnishings’. It also makes me think about
walls, and the strange material collision you get with old pink plaster walls
– what I call the very late Anglo-Saxon
wall – and that whole English culture
of mud. Even with modern breeze blocks
you still get this. I’ve never been sure
with these which bit is the breeze and
which bit the block. But along one side
you get that lovely wavy pattern to help
the render key to the block, which in turn produces
these incredibly beautiful markings that are never
seen as decorative but clearly are. Maybe these lines
are the breezy bit. So many things work in the same
way. I mean look at bubble-wrap – it’s basically just
early rococo.
te The muddiness of English walls was
something we really had to get to grips with. I’ve
only ever seen it in England and it produces an
effect where everything becomes a slightly fleshy,
pinky brown.
rw It’s your very own Lascaux. But all these
images of a kind of accidental artifice and a vernacular are just the languages of life. It’s like, how do
we talk about the pleasures of the bruised corner.
There’s a point at which some people would say
‘the corner’s fucked’, but others would go, ‘oh look,
that’s rather like a nice frayed jacket’, which is
precisely the sensibility that English country houses
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run on – the whole comfy thing. Somebody at the
Ruskin School recently told me that they were at
Garsington Manor, and, looking out from a faded
time-worn drawing room, they overheard a visitor
say, ‘this could be really nice if they just sorted it
out’. For years and years that room had handled
wear and tear and someone wanted it to be pinched
up tight.
te I think it’s all related to geometry
– it’s something to do with how things change
both in terms of their surface and their structure.
Most spaces end up slouching from the ground
up as well as fraying at the edges.
rw In the same way certain old
people look great because they’re just
consistently wonky, while others try
to correct this and you want to ask, ‘is
it really uplifting?’ You can also see it
in the very young – for example, I was
thinking the other day about the
eroticism of young eyes, how between
the ages of 18 to 25 people’s eyes are
… wow. I mean, who organised that
glistening? Of course it’s just a consequence of light beaming out, but it
looks amazing.
te Okay, cast your old eyes
over this photograph of a staircase
from Raven Row. The guys who
made it loved the formwork so
much that they kept it all.
rw The whole culture of mouldmaking and pattern-making has
gone now. Infill is always silicone.
The world was always made of seams
and gaps.
te But even with silicone you
get funny little traces, weird radii –
those concave impressions that
result not from a mould but from
the slide of the fingertip across the
soft silicone. So you still get a kind
of payback.
rw Extruded fingerprints. How many architects are interested in this kind of stuff? I mean,
I’m barely an artisan, but I do know what a blockplane sounds like when it’s taking off an arris. Is an
interest in this generational or something to do
with taste, with appetite?
te I think it’s all appetite. Most architects
are interested in some kind of knowledge or skilfulness but the process is chopped up so that our
own processes are easily disconnected from the
process of making. Although last year, a student
of mine at Cambridge surprised me with his real
fascination with plaster-casting. He was really
excellent, but the funny thing about this kind of
appetite is that it can easily go too far and get
confused with craft – a world which I’m increasingly finding alien.
rw I’m beginning to think that craft ought to
be like a Japanese erotic print – it should be kept
behind a screen. You know that it goes on, but you
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enjoy not seeing it. There’s something so odd about
the lack of intellectual curiosity that coincides with
craft. There is a fingertip intelligence which you can
witness in young children. I see no reason why the
old haptic wisdom of the trades (wet, dry, hot, cold)
should spend the twenty-first century in a ghetto
called craft.
te I was thinking about this recently
because I was asked to review a book by the
Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa.
I had really liked his earlier book, The Eyes of the
Skin, and the new one had a promising title,
The Thinking Hand, but it turned out to be
steeped in a kind of virtue. This is where the
world of craft is lost on me.
rw In that slim little book I did called
Where Do Shapes Come From? I left the question
open – is craft moral? Of course, it has had this
quality from the very beginning – trades’ pride etc
– but right now there is a real kind of virtuousness
to craft. You can see the same thing in the recent
Richard Long exhibition at the Tate, which in many
ways is a highly moralising show. You should go
and see it. Now I’m sounding like a missionary.
te I have to admit I’ve never been drawn
to those Richard Long pieces, especially when
I could go along the river and see a Giuseppe
First floor front room, 58 Artillery Lane, 1914
This room was later removed and shipped to the
Chicago Art Institute, before being reinstated
in its original location in 2008
© City of London, London Metropolitan Archive
Penone show, which seems much more interesting. For me this all comes down to a difference
between craft and knowledge. Architects typically demarcate an interest in these kinds of
things by suggesting that it is a category or stage
in architecture with its own separate name –
detailing. Detailing has become a slightly
strange fetish, but architects still draw detailed
sections through their designs without really
knowing the most basic things – whether they
are light or heavy, for example.
rw Recently I was looking at
a picture of a medieval building in
Bergerac which had an air-conditioning unit stuck to it like a limpet mine.
It suddenly dawned on me that the two
big holes on one side of this unit were
nostrils, one for ingress and the other
for exit. I then did a double-take on the
medieval jettied joists, which had a
careful quarter-turn stop at the end,
and I suddenly realised that details
like these are all about dealing with
water, stopping it from seeping in
through the end-grain – a breathing
detail. I’m sure there’s some latterday Alec Clifton-Taylor out there who
could tell us about the resonances
of these things, but it seems that we
should all be thinking a bit more
about basic stuff like, ‘will it get wet’,
rather than presenting every design
decision as a play of light or detail. For
example, the antebellum houses I just
saw in Alabama are as much a memorial to their climate as to their mad
position in history.
te This reminds me
of a conversation I had with our
engineer, Paul Toplis. After Raven
Row I showed him a picture I’ve
always liked of the interior of Little
Moreton Hall in Cheshire. The
main beam in the house has inscribed on it the
name of the carpenter who built it, Richard Dale.
Paul’s line on this image was that 500 years ago,
when Little Moreton was first built, moving a
tree in England then without canals was a real
pain, and so they tended to remain intact within
the construction process. He picked out the outline of a tree within the image of the building:
‘there’s the root beam – you only get one or
maybe two – and those are the main branches,
while these are the smaller branches in the window frames, and so the whole tree is in there’.
rw So it’s architecture as offal. It’s like
looking at a great side of beef and some sausages.
te Paul was also the engineer on Raven
Row and like some kind of fifteenth-century
carpenter he could improvise. With things like
the staircase in the gallery he argued that since
we couldn’t calculate its loads we should just
go ahead and do it.
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rw It’s great that the carpenter got the credit.
Calatrava is the only person I’ve ever seen acknowledge this … the people who get their hands dirty,
risk limbs, digits, life. But what does go ahead and
do it mean? Just jump up and down on it?
te No, it means that you should make sure
you get people who know how to build a stair.
rw So you cook without using a recipe.
te Yes, absolutely. If you do it by the
recipe, you’ll start with the wrong set of ingredients. The way that these behave is outside of the
way that engineering analysis works. In the end,
the quality of the finished space was a testament
not only to the engineers but to the construction
crew we had on site – an Irish guy called Ray and
the others, all Lithuanians and Poles.
rw What language did
they communicate in?
te English and a kind
of physical sign language.
It’s amazing how little verbal communication you
need to do all of this.
rw The Catholicism
of the Poles and the Irish in
the context of the Protestant
city reminds me of the
Huguenots. The building
itself isn’t Huguenot, is it?
te Yes, it is.
rw So Raven Row is an
essay in migration and religious war. There’s that
series of books for nerdy men
called Osprey Military
History books. These are
really odd and captivating
at the same time, full of
details about the Waffen-ss
on the Eastern Front,
November 1941 to April
1942, and that kind of thing. There’s one that I have
on French religious wars, about the Huguenots. The
history of this stuff is really complex. Those wars
went on and on.
te Well, to be nerdy about it, the Huguenot
silk-weavers began to settle in the open area to
the east of the City after the revocation of the
edict of Nantes in 1685. The following 70 years
or so were really the making of Spitalfields, with
terraces built to accommodate the master
weavers. Most of the Raven Row building was
constructed in the 1720s. The facade that we see
today dates from a bit later, from the 1750s. The
Huguenot connection extended beyond the silk
trade right into the building’s fabric, like the
rococo hand-carved plaster ceiling. But then we
found the photograph of the burnt room – an
image that quickly became the single most compelling shot in the whole archive of photographs
– and we suddenly shifted tack, aesthetically,
from heritage towards memory, surfaces and
traces. The violence of the fire opened up a new
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space outside history. Takeshi Hayatsu, who was
the project architect, said that in the village in
Japan where his parents grew up there is a tradition of using charred timber. Before domestic
and commercial paints became stable, the
deliberate charring of wood provided a really
good foil against bugs and insects and also
against the corrosive saltiness of the Japanese
sea air. Weirdly, but also when you think about
it, logically, it is also good against fire. Charred
wood doesn’t burn again. Because of this, we
felt we had to use a charred timber element
somewhere in the new gallery building. And so
we carried out lots of experiments with blow
torches, burning off just the surface 2 or 3mm of
timber planks, but never managed to achieve
the effect we were after. But then Takeshi went
home for Christmas and came back with the way
to do it.
rw Was it in a heritage manual or did he discover the technique by watching people do it?
te No, he just went around asking people.
The answer was to bind three planks together to
form a kind of triangular column. You prop this
up vertically and place it on a brick or something
so that air can pass all the way through, from the
bottom to the top. Some newspaper or a bit of
straw is then stuffed into the bottom and the
thing set alight. You immediately get the most
ferocious chimney. It also generates a really powerful acoustic effect. The roar of the thing as it
burns is incredible. The flames quickly work
their way up the length of the planks, taking off
the surface of the wood and eventually burning
First floor rear extension, 56 Artillery Lane, 1971
This part of the building was later demolished
to make way for a new office building
© City of London, London Metropolitan Archive
away the binding. As soon as this happens the
planks topple over.
rw And then it’s ready? The thing is
cooked. You have your baked potato. The ping
of the microwave?
te Yup. And then this whole thing about
burning continues to run through the project
with the casting we did both inside and out.
This wasn’t the result of some kind of conscious
impulse to work with fire and heat, but in the
end everything we introduced into the project
was either cast or burnt.
rw Isn’t it funny when something comes up as
a sort of binding principle. The Richard Long show
is full of this kind of thing. One in particular, I think,
was very clever – he defeated the Tate’s voice by
prefacing all the statements
and captions with ‘I’.
Unfortunately it’s all in the
Tate’s brand typography so
it loses a bit of its intimacy,
but nonetheless it’s always
an ‘I’. Reading these statements you know that it has
the authority of a lived life,
but then you mistakenly
believe that Long knew what
he was doing right from the
outset, when in fact as an
artist you have to do things
and not know why. Long is a
typical empirical
Englishman. You have to do
the work and then go, ‘fucking hell, it’s all held together
by fire!’ If you had set out
saying, ‘okay, this is our idea
– 38 very hot things’, you
would have ended up with a
pretty rubbish project. But I
think that’s how we are
psychologically, and why we work with certain
kinds of people and not others.
te And that was one of the very nice things
with Raven Row. The client never turned around
and said, ‘What’s your concept?’ He understood
that a project like this doesn’t have to come out
of a neat diagram. We’re not Foster’s. It doesn’t
have to have this level of engineered neatness
and yet it still works out in the end. And he was
also much more interested in participating,
which meant that you couldn’t tie up the design
and present it to him as a ready-made package.
rw The word you just used, ‘participating’, is
one with really nice, elaborate resonances, but the
other word I was thinking about when you were
talking was ‘accommodating’. And this is not a hint
(it’s just a way of making an example), but right now
I’m slightly uncomfortable sitting on this stool. But
over years and years of sitting on slightly uncomfortable stools you learn to keep moving your arse.
And even though this idea of accommodation, of
dealing with discomfort, is in everyday life, I don’t
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think it’s found in architecture, either in the way it’s
taught, or in the way it’s exchanged or valued. As a
result architects are very bad at dealing with any
kind of wear and tear (a very nice English rhyming
expression). For example, the other day, while sitting at a bus stop waiting for a bus, I watched a
bunch of guys try to fit a new facade to a drycleaner’s. The thing was just a kit, box-frame aluminium sections – basically an act of engineering.
But what was happening was that the door wasn’t
fitting in its opening properly, because somebody
hadn’t understood that with its dead weight, even
if it was immaculately engineered, it wouldn’t be
able to just sit true and swing free. So
while I was waiting, I had this totally
compelling sideshow. They had all these
bits of aluminium and spirit levels and
plumb lines – they obviously did this
professionally – but the system was
resisting. The whole thing was so far
removed from the world of timber shutter-making.
te This comes back to your
earlier question about an appetite
for building. In architecture there is
this really awful concept of the new
and the old. They’re seen as two separate things. I think it’s a modernist
hangover about the end of history,
which was seen to have stopped in
1913 or 1918, and after that everything was no longer old but new. But
even now, nearly 100 years later, people talk about the contrast of new
against old.
rw My anthropologist friend, Dan
Hicks, says that nobody seems to be
able to get their heads around the fact
that we all live in the present. It doesn’t
matter, then, whether you want to
locate something in the past or the
future. What matters is the present, and
yet this is something that we are incredibly bad at inhabiting. Garrison Keillor
is very funny about this too.
te We could have used Dan on site.
With Raven Row, because it’s Grade 1 listed,
and because it had been meticulously photographed over the last 100 years, it took a long
time to realise that it actually occupied the
present. It was only when we realised that there
was no new and old – it’s all now – that the
thing took off.
rw You see this to a certain extent in your
archive of photographs – their exactitude and precision flattens them out, not just aesthetically but
chronologically. Back at the Tate, you can see that
Long’s work falls right at the end of black-andwhite photography as a branch of the calligraphic
– the impeccable tastefulness which merges the
Japanese woodblock with Gill Sans. But then he
starts to try colour and you get the distraction of
fluorescent moss and lichen.
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te There’s also the whole thing going on
with the chemical processes involved in photography. More than the medium’s intrinsic qualities (and this maybe has something to do with
the fact that I lost several teenage years in my own
diy darkroom), photography can also become
a craft. Of course there is an absolute, chemical,
unchanging aspect of photography, but there is
also something obsessively subjective and personal. Developing prints you just get so caught
up with all that equipment and expertise.
rw Looking at your photographs of the
finished building, or of the close-to-completion
elements arriving in the gallery, did you get a ‘we’ve
had a baby!’ feeling of triumph, or was there a lot of
lip-biting, and ‘oh my God, did I really mean that?’
te There was plenty of both. This is probably where working with someone like Takeshi
was important. When the huge cast concrete
staircase arrived I did a lot of ‘isn’t it wonderful,
don’t you want to stroke it’, whereas Takeshi
was actually measuring it and making sure that
when a truckload of the stair bits turned up in
Spitalfields you had the right number and the
biggest bit would fit through the front door.
These precast concrete elements all look so
benign, so weightless, especially when they’re
pale, and yet four guys can’t lift them – you need
serious equipment.
First floor rear room, 56 Artillery Lane, 1972
© City of London, London Metropolitan Archive
rw Again, I think that’s a modern condition,
not quite knowing the sizes or weights of the thing
you are creating. I would love to have walked
an 8× 4 of plasterboard through an eighteenthcentury terraced house, me on one end and Steen
Eiler Rasmussen on the other. But what about
all the plaster details in Raven Row – there must
have been something more manageable about
all of that work?
t e All of the plasterwork on the ceiling in
the eighteenth-century half of the gallery was
modelled in situ. What’s really interesting about
plaster decoration is that the old mixes couldn’t
perform as cast repro carvings – fine
details would just be papier mâché.
Plaster of Paris is effectively the
moment when someone puts some
very fine gypsum into the mix and it
releases the full language of casting.
And there was a period of only five
years or so between the discovery
of plaster of Paris and the appearance of a market in cast decorative
elements. It’s called plaster of Paris
because some guy in Paris did it first.
The material demands of plaster
are also so interesting. During a
recent site visit, a delivery turned
up and somebody shouted upstairs,
‘Darren, can you come down and
help unload the truck?’ And the
reply came back, ‘no, I’m spreading’.
You just can’t stop. And that was
unquestioned. Any other trade would
have had to down tools and help
with the unloading.
rw I’m always astonished by the
physical and spatial energy of building
work, catching thrown scaffold poles,
tossing bricks, heaving stuff through
confined spaces. It’s a kind of performance but I would never dare reveal this
thought to anybody on site. And this is
something that a formal architectural
education, and all that emphasis on the portfolio,
can never quite prepare you for.
te I remember at the aa a couple of years
ago I was on a panel that interviewed a student
for first year. He must have been about 30 and
was a ballet dancer for the English National
Opera. He had no portfolio. We were a little bit
shocked because portfolio culture is just so
ingrained at the aa as it is at all schools of architecture. So we ended up chatting, and asked
him, ‘so what are you doing here?’ and he said,
‘well, it’s the end of my career as a dancer, and
given that I’ve been doing space for the last ten
years through my performances I thought that
I should now be an architect’. At that point we
just thought, ‘you’re in’, even if it all messes up
by June, because if only for the people around
him, he would have been amazing. I have no idea
what happened to him.
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