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…

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.