For Sale – A Modernist Masterpiece

We were out with friends last week and somewhat out of the blue, they mentioned that they had recently been tempted to move out of London.

After expressing surprise at such a statement (especially from these two who live in the heart of urban London in Golden Lane, near the Barbican) I was directed to these photos from the ever wonderful “House Porn” site The Modern House.net.

These pictures illustrate what I can only describe as what looks like an almost perfect place to live, and I suddenly understood why they might by contemplating such a big move…

Designed by the Architect Peter Womersley and completed in 1954 (then extended in ’56), Farnley Hey  has everything you could ever want from a Modernist home: a Grade II listing, strikingly good looks, acres of space, timber and stone finishes throughout, floor to ceiling windows, a double height living room, beautiful built in furniture, clever use of existing site levels, 4 bedrooms and a double garage… It was even awarded an RIBA Bronze medal in 1958.

And all for a not unreasonable £575,000.00… Yes it’s a lot of money, but when you compare what you would get to some of the other properties for sale on the The Modern House website in and around the Capital, I can see why it all became rather tempting.

The thought that such beautiful houses as this are still available to buy and live in, is something I haven’t really considered before, and it got me to thinking how fantastic our own mid century teak furniture and 1960′s ceramics would look occupying these rooms…

You see how easy it is to fall in love with a good building, I’m already thinking about gazumping my friends…

Not really though. Sadly (for us not the house) it’s all the way up in the The Yorkshire Dales, and the daily commute (3 to 4 hrs via Wakefield apparently) back down to South London would be a real bugger…

Vertigo inducing photos by Sachigusa Yasuda

Saw this amazing image in the weekend papers…

A Japanese photographer called Sachigusa Yasuda starts by taking 100′s of digital images by leaning out from the tops of tall buildings and then she stitches them all together to create something rather special…

Their seemingly simple, single point perspectives, are generated by images taken from a multitude of view points, giving a new twist to what we would ordinarily think of as familiar urban skylines…

Project Japan – Metabolist Architecture

Taschen have recently published this rather fine looking volume.

Co-written, edited and researched by the Dutch (st)architect Rem Koolhaas, it’s an in-depth review and assessment of the Japanese architectural movement called Metabolism, often considered to be the first non-western avant-garde movement of any significance.

Launched with the publication of their bi-lingual manifesto “Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for a New Urbanism” a group of young Japanese architects, including the now familiar names of Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Fumihiko Maki and Kisho Kurokawa, set out how they imagined cities of the future could be designed to reflect their contemporary society.

These proposals generally involved placing various forms of compatible accommodation (such as retail, mass housing, education and transit hubs) in large scale megastructures designed to be both theoretically and physically flexible enough to reflect the changing demands and needs of their inhabitants.

These concepts were very much inspired by the many new technologies being developed throughout the post war world during the 50′s and 60′s, effectively arguing that improved construction methods and techniques could allow previously ‘static’ built forms to develop organically over time. It’s no coincidence that similar ideas were being explored by many of the younger architects of the time such as Superstudio in Italy and Archigram in the UK (who even went as far as proposing cities that could move themselves…)

Due in no small part to the practical and financial implications of getting such massive projects built, the movement lasted not much longer than 10 years or so, and a relatively few number of built examples were completed before the swan song of the movement at the Expo of 1970 in Osaka, master planned by Kenzo Tange.

Two buildings that stand out for me are the amazing Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo which we went to see when we were in Japan in 2005, and which I have previously written about, and the truly awesome silhouette of Tange’s, Culture Hall in Yamanashi from 1966, sitting like some huge malevolent beast in the center of a predominantly two storey historic Japanese town…

Anyway, Koolhaas’s book looks fascinating and with over 700 pages of beautiful drawings, stunning photos of concrete and bonkers ideas, something I would definitely like to own…

If it wasn’t for the fact that some of the online reviews (and most of the personal ones on Amazon) complain that its been poorly designed, with images disappearing into a ridiculously small/ non existent central gutter and difficult to read text/ background choices. So instead I think I’ll wait until I next get to the RIBA bookshop and have a look at the real thing…

The images below are flattened versions of the pages and look fantastic, except for the second image which demonstrates the central gutter problem…

A quick aside here, when we stayed in Tokyo, our hotel overlooked this very distinctive building, a fly over and some railway lines (which was fantastic because we could watch the Shinkansen trains sliding past below). After I recognised it from the page extract above, I went and found this photo.. our hotel is the big thing in the background and that’s us waving from our room in the red circle on the 12th floor…

63 Harley Street, London W1…

Damn..

I’m disappointed that me & And missed the opportunity to buy this beautiful Art Deco house that was up for sale in January this year…

At £6,950,000, I think it would have been a bit of a bargain… nine bedrooms, a reception area that just about covers the whole of the ground floor, a lift, two roof terraces, at least three kitchens and 5 bathrooms, not to mention a Harley Street address and Grade II Listed Status.

Designed by Edmund Wimperis, William Begg Simpson & Leonard Rome Guthrie and completed in 1934, the commission for a celebrated eye surgeon and his wife (the Blue Plaque on the front wall commemorates one “Sir Stewart Duke-Elder”) was for a suite of easily accessible, purpose-built consulting rooms with a family residence and servants quarters spread across the rest of the space.

The design of the building was a modern take on the traditional town house and the interior featured specially designed built-in furniture, panelling, and lighting fittings. The building has been empty for at least the last 5 years, however at the end of last year it was granted planning permission for change of use to a solely residential building, hence the sale…

The plans are pretty interesting, full of Art Deco curves and features, and although there appears to be no garden, set backs and internal courtyards to the rear, would have meant that the interiors would have been very bright. I particularly like the arrangements around the second consulting room (now a bedroom) at first floor level. Originally the domain of Mrs Duke Elder (or Lady Phyllis to her society chums and also a highly regarded ophthalmologist), the room is reached via a rather fine elliptical stair in the rear hallway that leads past an open terrace with a wonderful circular roof light over the Masters surgery below…

So, despite the estate agents particulars suggesting the property was now in need of “full refurbishment” I still think, that if I did have a spare £7M lying around (plus at least another £1M to do it up), I would have been very tempted to buy this rather splendid house in the centre of town… (no idea where we’d put the car though…)

There is more about the house and its owners here if you’re interested…

London’s only Deconstructivist Building? Peter Clash* @ Canary Wharf

When I was at PCL at the turn of the Nineties, learning how to be an Architect, one of the big architectural movements of the time was Deconstructivism, a sometimes complex approach to design in which surfaces, plans and form were subjected to rigorous processes of fragmentation, reorganisation and manipulation. The resultant proposals were often chaotic and random in appearance, and it was often hard not to think that much of it was made up as it went along and then post rationalised to some sense of validity only at the very end… (As students of course the rigour bit was usually missing, and the post rationalising bit overly relied on…)

Still, in many ways it was the perfect antidote to the tedious formal excesses of Postmodernism, allowing students and architects alike, to really let their imaginations loose, creating many thousands of miles of paper architecture (i.e. stuff that could never be built) whilst only a relatively few practices achieved convincing projects that were actually constructed (Co-op Himmelb(l)au, Morphosis and Peter Wilson come first to mind…)

Anyway, I never really worked out why, but outside of the student environment, the Europeans and Americans were always better at Deconstructivism and seemed to take it more seriously than we did. In fact, I can only really think of one building in London that I might suggest has any Deconstructivist leanings… and that is this little building near Canary Wharf by one of my old PCL visiting tutors, Peter Clash. A building which I happened to cycle past recently, having completely forgotten all about it, and which I think still looks pretty amazing…

Tucked away at the back of the Canary Wharf Development, is what I think it is a control building for raising the bridge next to which it stands, so allowing boats through to the inner dock areas. Surprisingly I can find absolutely nothing at all about it on line, so I can’t even confirm its proper title or use, but it must have been completed before about 1991 when I left PCL, because I can clearly remember cycling over to see it when Peter told us it had been completed. Docklands then was not the place it is today, trust me… I seemed to cycle around for hours through the wilderness of E14 looking for the bloody thing…

It’s a wonderful little gem… A utilitarian, silver, metal clad base building the shape of a quarter circle, with a variety of sized and shaped openings punched through its skin. A simple staircase placed externally along one side, leading up to a control box held in its seemingly precarious position via two steels that don’t seem to have enough fixing back to the structure, whilst the “monocoque” roof curves down to an interesting flick of an eaves and on down to the floor.

Then there’s the curved services tray, playfully reflecting the form of the cables should they have been left unsupported, and the knowing, sci-fi like appearance of the control room perched rather off-puttingly at almost exactly eye level height from the bridge… It looks like the control tower could retract into the main armoured body of the building if it sensed it was in danger…

Whether Peter Clash (still working, still making lovely things) would have thought of it as Deconstructivist, I don’t know and can’t now remember, but I suspect not. He always struck me as something of a cool dude, who would surely have resisted any such obvious attempts at categorisation…

But it made my day seeing it once again after all this time and remembering the fun we had at PCL being encouraged to do silly things in the name of architecture…

* UPDATE : I have been corrected, this building is credited to Allsop & Störmer. As such, I am somewhat confused. Everything I wrote in this post is the truth as  I remember it… I can only think that Peter Clash was maybe working at A&S and involved on this project when I knew him, and I had forgottten that…

I Want One, My Very Own Richard Meier House…

As Christmas is fast approaching, I thought I might ask my little A for one of these, as sent to me today by Arch Daily…

Our very own Richard Meier Villa overlooking Lake Garda in Italy.

How cool would that be… (although it’s probably just out of our price range if I’m honest)

Mr. Meier describes this rather beautiful villa as representing a “continuous exploration of solid and void, transparency and opaqueness, light and texture, and the interrelation between the ephemeral with the physical world.”

Nice… and believe it or not, these images are all CGI’s, so imagine how good the real thing will look when it’s finished in 2014.

Italian Doorways

We had the great pleasure to be in Italy recently at our friends wonderful Tuscan Wedding.

We’ve been to Tuscany a couple of times before and each visit always leaves me marvelling at the timeless wonder and beauty of the little hilltop villages to the south of Pisa. Other than the odd car crawling past on the narrow roads, they seem to be almost from a different era, stuck in some enduring, parallel time line. How they manage to survive so apparently untainted by the 21st Century (at least from the outside) is a complete mystery to a committed city dweller like me…

One thing that really stood out for me this trip, were the wonderful doorways and entrances that seemed to be around every corner…

Thresholds and the idea of entering and crossing from one space to another is such an important aspect of Architecture and Urban Design, and I’ve always been fascinated by the apparent simplicity of a door and frame in an opening, as together they represent so much more that what they physically are… security, promise, intrepidation, excitement, adventure…

Anyway enough of the thinking… These are just a few of the doorways that caught my attention in the village of Morrona, where the almost wilful lack of effort to maintain some of them I would argue, only adds to their appeal…

50 Years of London Architecture @ University of Westminster

We went to see this exhibition last weekend. It’s in the Ambika Gallery in the basement of my old University (or The Polytechnic of Central London as it was back then), a huge almost triple height space that I remember housing the model shop and structural testing labs…

The exhibition itself is huge.. almost never ending. There must be well over 150 panels, each one with a couple of images of the building in question, and a small descriptive panel to one side. It seems it was originally shown last year (hence the 50 years bit) and this is simply an update to that first exhibition, but it’s well worth a visit if you get the time before it closes on August 25th.

I found it really interesting to start at 1960 and move slowly round through the decades and styles finishing up with today’s cutting edge proposals… and whilst looking at the wide range of stuff on show, it struck me that by far the weakest and least interesting period on display was the mid to late 1980′s, which was exactly the time I started out on my quest to be an architect… not sure if that’s significant in any way…

As to which of the many buildings on show would be my personal favourite, that’s a difficult one as there are just so many to choose from. So it might be easier to chose a favourite architect, and that would have to be Denys Lasdun, the genius who created The Royal College of Physicians (1964) a truly stunning and timeless piece of work, and a strong contender for the best building in Britain; the elegant flats overlooking St. James Park (1960); the controversial but beautifully made National Theatre (1976); the ground breaking Keeling House flats from the late 1950′s (included in this exhibition because of the excellent refurbishment by Munkenbeck and Marshall in 2001) as well as various buildings he did for the University of London.

Out of This World & Frank R Paul at the British Library

I recently went to the British Library to see the Out of This World exhibition. Its pretty good, very book/ paper based (as you might expect) but with lots of beautiful book jackets, magazine covers and illustrations spanning several hundred years. In my opinion however, all the really lovely ones are from the roughly 50 years between 1920 and 1970.

One aspect that shone out, and a name I had not come across before (although I, like most fans of Sci Fi, am familiar with his style) was the work of Frank R Paul.

Paul (1884-1963) was a Viennese émigré and an architect by training. He was a gifted technical artist, and had spent most of his early professional life producing science and building based illustrations mostly for magazines.

When Hugo Gernsback, the man responsible in 1926, for publishing “Amazing Stories”, the worlds first Science Fiction magazine, asked him to stretch his imagination for the cover art of his new publication, Paul rose to the challenge and over the next 30 years or so created some truly memorable Science Fiction images, in the process, almost single handedly setting the tone of the whole genre for many decades to follow, influencing many young readers who would later become masters of the genre, Arthur C Clark, Ray Bradbury and Philip K Dick to name but 3…

Frank R Paul is also credited as being the first person to illustrate in colour, both a flying saucer (November 1929) and an orbiting Space Station (August 1929) and whilst his style can’t really be seen as being anything but dated through todays eyes, his brightly coloured flights of fancy still amaze and enthrall…

There is an amazingly concise collection of Paul’s cover art here if you fancy some more.

As an aside, it’s the third time I’ve been to the British Library since Christmas, and do you know what, I really like it. Designed by Colin St. John Wilson in the mid 1970′s, the enormous structure took more than 25 years to build. To say that it generated mixed feelings when it finally opened in 1997 would be something of an understatement (the Idiot Prince’s description of it “looking like the assembly hall of a secret police academy” being the most often quoted).

It was however nominated for the 1998 Stirling Prize (sadly losing out to Fosters RAF Duxford Museum) and I would suggest that the building has mellowed and improved with age. The courtyard to the front offers a generous and sheltered place for a coffee, and the building itself is alive with light and people, working perfectly as one London’s finest contemporary Public Buildings.

Vimeo videos

I had some spare time yesterday so I had a little look around the Vimeo site, a place where film makers can upload their projects for the world to see. There are some amazingly talented people around making some wonderful things…

I particularly like these two…

Project: Desert Colossus, by Reginald Emvula and Joaquin Ardiles is a stunning flight of fantasy in which two men with huge hands and tiny legs, jump, fall and fly through an endless space, landing on large stone-like flying creatures that are moving inexorably toward some unknown horizon… and all set to a big guitar tune that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I think is the mighty Long Distance Calling

I really like the use of the limited colour palette, beautiful lighting and the seemingly continuous movement of the point of view, spinning and rotating, looking up, looking down, sometimes out of focus and at other times pinpointed on a sharply imagined detail..

The 3rd and the 7th by Alex Roman is a very different animal, but equally absorbing. Its a longer piece involving what looks like an amazingly choreographed sequence of both filmed and digitally created spaces referencing a number of famous buildings, including Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Khan’s Exeter Library and Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum.

Having said that, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it was all created digitally.. the construction and rendering of the images is so brilliantly realised that, until odd things start to happen that can only be digital (check out the peeling roof at 9.30 mins) it looks like it’s all been artfully shot on film. As you can tell, I have no idea how it’s been done, if it’s real or CGI or both, and in many ways it doesn’t matter, as the overall effect is visually so arresting…

Whilst the opening sequences with the camera are pretty good and the whole film is well worth watching, try skipping forward to about 2.00 mins when the architecture starts… that’s when the soundtrack and the imagery combine to create something very lovely indeed..