A theory of making: architecture and art in the practice of Adolf Loos
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317 conditioning, lighting and blinds. The traditional composition of panes to the new aluminum- framed double glazed windows further recalls the historical function of the building. Working with Arup Engineering, Borgos Dance have removed all of the columns from the ground floor by suspending lightweight floors for the upper levels from two 27 metre long, 2.5 metre high roof trusses. The resulting free-space of the ground floor heightens the dominance of the iconic image of a factory space by enabling views from one end of the 42 metre long building to the other. Maintaining this abstract quality, a displacement air-conditioning system is concealed beneath the power-floated concrete of the ground floor, while the ceilings throughout are treated with a render system to improve acoustic performance. Triple-height clear glazing at the junction of the floors and one of the elevations heightens this sense by enabling an unbroken view of the window openings. A grid of beams to the 10.5 metre high entry space allows for the support of large works of art. This triple-height space punctuates a visitor’s entry to the building, creating an interior space at the scale of the exterior streetscape. From this space one moves either into the 4 metre high main gallery space or into the café, which possesses something of the quality of an exterior space through its positioning outside the monolithic form of the main building and the incorporation of a fully-glazed roof. While the angled wall of the entry space functions to announce the imposition of a new function within the existing building, the curved wall of the café space seems somewhat incongruous with the geometry of the rest of the project. Glare and black-out blinds to all of the windows are automated to respond to the sun to control lighting conditions in the gallery spaces. While each of the window sills incorporates a lighting feature by American artist James Turrell, the varying degrees of opacity created by the architects’ use of blinds also recalls the artist’s work. The abstract, massive and planar appearance of the windows and shadows and silhouette that they produce also resonate with the work of Turrell, whose work filled the gallery spaces for the opening of the Institute. The building’s plant is concealed behind a polycarbonate screen on the roof of the building, also illuminated by Turrell. This screen encloses two translucent glass roof-lights that bring natural light into the top floor. Like the roof of the café space, their sloped form and visible fixings circumvent an abstract resonance, but nonetheless this roof glazing recalls Turrell’s Skyspaces. The sparseness of the Louise T Blouin Institute and a number of other recent gallery projects in London could be interpreted as a reaction against more obviously figured or spectacular proposals for art projects. However, to describe The Institute as a blank canvas because of its lack of overt formal gymnastics would be to exclude the possibility of more subtle forms of figure or spectacle. Like Caruso St John’s recent Gagosian gallery in London’s Kings Cross, the Louise T Blouin Institute is no less sculptural than Herzog and de Meuron’s proposal for the extension of the Tate Modern, but rather its sculptural gestures operate and at different scales. The Louise T Blouin Institute resonates particularly with the work of James Turrell but will undoubtedly also provide a provocative context for the work of many other artists. In this sense the building should not be seen as a rebuke of the importance of the architectural diagram, but rather an example of the importance of the relationship between an architectural diagram and architectural detail. 317 318 Zaha Hadid: William Tozer, ‘Inner Light,’ Monument, issue 79 (June/July 2007): 60–64. [Copyright image removed. Refer print version in UCL library.] Despite her international notoriety, it was not until the completion of the most recent Maggie’s Centre that Pritzker Prize winning architect Zaha Hadid had completed a building in the United Kingdom. Facilities for the support of cancer patients and their friends, families and carers, Maggie’s Centres are the brainchild of Maggie Keswick Jenks, the late wife of architectural theorist Charles Jencks. Maggie ‘had a unique ability to make everyone feel special by giving them the time and space to express and be themselves’, says Hadid. ‘I hope that the look and feel of the Centre in some way enhances a visitor’s experience and provides a warm and welcoming place for them to relax and access the support they need’. Underlying all practice of architecture is some degree of belief in environmental determinism, the concept that one’s environment can elicit behavioral, emotional or intellectual responses in its inhabitants. While this notion generally goes unnoticed and unconsidered by most architects, it would be difficult to overlook in a building where the brief is to promote the well-being of cancer patients and their friends, family and carers, before, during and after their medical treatment, It is rare that a building brief requires that the environment promote anything other than a positive response from its inhabitants, but the Jewish Museum in Berlin is an obvious example, and its architect, Daniel Libeskind, is one of the other well-known names currently being called upon to design Maggie’s Centres. This raises interesting questions in relation to the ability of architectural form and space to affect such change, and the appropriateness of different formal and spatial qualities to elicit a rehabilitative response. With the Dundee Maggie’s Centre, it seems that Frank Gehry felt the need to depart from his normal curvilinear formal vocabulary to create an appropriate environment. While a large diversity of geometries are evident in Gehry’s career, the curvilinear, abstract expressionist phase has dominated in recent decades and so it is difficult to see his Maggie’s Centre as anything other than recognition that he felt this vocabulary not sufficiently reassuring. Despite the comparatively dark qualities of her architecture, Hadid has not felt the need to append a detached an element of her normal vocabulary to an otherwise familiar building in the way that Gehry has done. The angular, black Fife Maggie’s Centre is unashamedly recognizable as the work of Zaha Hadid. 318 319 Hadid is known for the darkly futuristic formalism of her work, and in the Maggie’s Centre this is manifested in a black, angular, folded exterior surface perforated by triangular openings to a curvilinear white interior. The contrast between the exterior and interior could be understood as a metaphoric representation of cancer and recovery. Hadid describes the goal of the form as creating an edge to the coal mining hollow that adjoins the site. This hollow is perhaps the inspiration for the sparkling black surface treatment, achieved through the application of black liquid polyurethane with silicone carbide grit. The sculptural quality of the folding gesture is supported by the treatment of the roof and walls in same material, and the articulation of other enclosing elements visually neutral through the use of clear or translucent glass. The folded form seems likely to be a metaphoric gesture of protective enclosure, turning its back defensively on the hospital. Spatially this metaphor is extended to embrace the ‘distinctive protective environment’ of the coal hollow onto which the Centre opens. The building is conceived as an enhancement of this quality, incorporating ‘a wall that gradually rises to separate the public space of the entrance from the private spaces of the terrace. It terminates by wrapping around the southern tip of the Centre as a south-facing terrace which feels shielded and protective’. The architects describe the building as possessing a ‘strong directional language’ and the form as a ‘directional surface [that] moves the visitor’. This language suggests that through the spatial arrangement, Hadid has attempted to give a sense of progression analogous to a patient’s treatment, recuperation or self-realisation. The realization of Zaha Hadid’s design for the Fife building is the fifth Maggie’s Centre. Another seven centres are planned in the next five years; for Lanarkshire, London, Oxford, Cheltenham, Nottingham, Cambridge and Swansea. Richard Rogers and Daniel Libeskind are among the star architects donating their time to the design of these buildings. Meanwhile, following on from the successful completion of her first building in Britain, we can now also look forward to the scheduled completion in 2008 of Zaha Hadid’s design for The Architecture Foundation Building. 319 320 Herzog and de Meuron: William Tozer, ‘Character Lines: Herzog and de Meuron’s CaixaForum,’ Monument, issue 89 (February/March 2009): 82–89. [Copyright image removed. Refer print version in UCL library.] The new Caixaforum building by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog and de Meuron shares its site with an historic existing building. The removal of this building would undoubtedly have reduced the construction cost of the project, and little more than the original facade remains. However, the dynamic relationship between the two types of architecture creates a potent composition. Rusted steel forms the facade of the new building, and its orange shade of brown sets up a visual relationship with the faded terracotta and brick of the original building, without resorting to the familiar conservationist device of matching materials. The form of the addition makes a similar allusion to the original building, extrapolating the pitch of the gabled roofs into forms that pitch and crank in three dimensions. The ornamental quality of this form, and the surface perforations with which it is detailed, perform an analogous role to the surface decoration that adorns the original building. Increasing the height of the building establishes a less diminutive relationship with its contemporary neighbours, and the greenery treatment of the adjacent elevation of one of the neighbouring buildings reinforces the connection of the abstract building form to its context. The language and materiality of the new facade is carried through into some areas of the interior—such as the subterranean auditorium—which is otherwise composed of a contrasting vocabulary of white and steel elements articulated in rectilinear, curvilinear and folded geometry. Within the original building the interaction of the interior with the exterior takes the form of visually neutral frameless glazing, which does not match but is proportional to the removed traditional fenestration. Above the level of the original building, however, the new building envelope takes the form of orthodox black-framed window openings. This gesture seems more convincing where it assumes a relatively neutral rectilinear form, rather than deferring to the geometry of the rusted facade, such as in the stairwell. Plain white surfaces are largely reserved for the predominantly rectilinear walls and ceilings of the galleries and ancillary spaces, but are also applied to the more overtly sculptural curvilinear staircase. The installation of lighting into the underside of this staircase—rather than illuminating it from the adjacent walls or floor as is the case elsewhere in the building—somewhat diminishes its sculptural quality. 320 321 Folded geometry is deployed in some areas of the gallery walls, but most extensively in conjunction with the raw steel sheeting to the ceiling of the external undercroft of the building. The undercroft space is the most dramatic spatial gesture of the project, and is reminiscent of the architects’ earlier Barcelona Forum (Monument 64). It creates an outdoor public space connected to the street and adjoining square, providing cover from rain or harsh sunshine for snaking queues of visitors. As with the earlier project, however, it seems curious that the programme of the interior of the building does not interact more with this space—an engaging spatial experience left largely uninhabited. This space opens onto open squares to both the north and south of the building, the former of which is framed by the wall of greenery described above, serving to appropriate this square more directly into the spatial ordering of the building. Internally, the spatial distribution could be described as a series of stacked open-plan floor plans, the lower of which have been given something of the character of landscapes through changes of level and meandering circulation. These open-plan spaces are punctuated by the stairwells, which create dramatic voids through the section. This building is clearly part of a recent trajectory of Herzog and de Meuron projects that also includes the aforementioned Barcelona Forum, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. The departure from the rectilinear geometry that characterised their earlier work has alienated many of their previous architectural admirers, but it has been argued by this author (Architectural Research Quarterly 12) that the partisan division of architects along lines of geometry stems from the accepted conception of modern architecture as rooted in issues of function, whereas fine art provides a more convincing explanation. The minor reservations about the Caixaforum expressed above to some extent stem from the fact that it is more difficult for architecture to convincingly function as art due to the way in which it is perceived by comparison to other mediums such as painting and sculpture. Herzog and de Meuron’s earlier buildings possess ambiguities between found object and designed object, and between function and art, allowing a degree of latitude to their perception as art objects. These ambiguities have become clear divisions in the more recent projects, and the success of these buildings is diminished to some degree at any points of contact between them that are less than perfectly handled. 321 Document Outline
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