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A Midland monument

23/9/2020

In the countryside outside the Midlands town of Tamworth stands an extraordinary golden tower, 12m in height, placed on a hill and visible from the nearby M42 and main rail line. It's the work of environmental artists Dalziel and Scullion, and is the centrepiece of a country park made to heal the land on the site of a former coal mine that supplied the factories and foundries of Birmingham and the Black Country. A former slag heap is planted with a wood of silvery birch trees, and a winding path to the top of the hill leads to 'Gold Leaf Buried Sunlight.'

Its position on the top of a hill of mining waste is emphasised by leaving the site around the tower unplanted and raw. Its form, an extruded birch leaf in plan, gives it a multifaceted shape, different from every angle and for me at least reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe's early Glass Tower project of 1922. Its golden surfaces catch the light, making a precious object that serves to restore the site located in a lush agricultural landscape after 150 years of mining activity. Completed in 2012, this monument is far less well known than it should be and stands as a rare and effective piece of art that is a memorial to the Industrial Revolution that spread and despoiled the world, and was formed in the English Midlands.

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Le Corbusier's last building

20/9/2019

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Heidi Weber Centre Le Corbusier, Zurich: Le Corbusier 1967

Completed in 1967 two years after his death, Le Corbusier's last building seems very strange in the context of the huge volume of his work that preceded it, whether the Purist phase of white cubic forms or the later work of organic forms and rough concrete. This museum dedicated to his work, commissioned by Heidi Weber, nevertheless displays plenty of long term Corbusian themes: raw concrete, ramps, extensive glazing, spatial dynamics, but is also an entirely new architectural synthesis. It has (almost unique in his work) an exposed steel frame, and the dislocation of a wildly expressive roof hanging over its orthogonal structure.

And more surprising is its apparent quotation of others' work : the colours of De Stijl, which are its strongest visual element, and the modular metal box form of Jean Prouve. It's also looking forward- extraordinarily- to work to come much later; the fragmented forms of Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind in its roof structure, and even the coloured downpipes of Richard Rogers.

It has, from inside, the feel and scale of an extraordinary domestic space: the 'problem' of the house was for him and most other modern architects a crucial ongoing project. So a fitting work to bookend his career, which started and finished in his native Switzerland. It's a visual compendium of many of the themes of Modernism, by the architect frequently termed the greatest of the 20th century.

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The originality of Luigi Moretti

13/9/2019

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Palazzina Girasole, Rome, Luigi Moretti, 1950

Born in Rome in 1907, Luigi Moretti built consistently during both the Fascist period and the post war period of Italian reinvention. What is most extraordinary in buildings of the 1950s and 60s is his originality, a playful inventiveness that used the forms of modern architecture: but rather than copying them, which most of his contemporaries did, turned them into a language to be subverted and re-thought. In the Girasole flats in Rome, the apartment block (with strip windows and unadorned white walls) is raised above a rough and primitive base, with a narrow gash in the centre of its thin and separated facade, and is topped by an asymmetrical split pediment. Thus he created a kind of Mannerism in modern architecture, and indeed set the scene for the full-blown Postmodernism later developed by Robert Venturi, who acknowledged the inspiration of Moretti's design.

Via Corso Italia, Milan: Luigi Moretti 1957

In the mid 1950s Moretti designed a development of a small site in the commercial heart of Milan, with four separate blocks both commercial and residential. A slim wedge-shaped block juts over the street line, while each building is distinctly and expressively detailed in the modernist formal language. He showed this great ingenuity at a time when most other architects were designing dull copies of SOM's Lever House in New York in similar urban contexts !

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Zaha Hadid in Rome

13/9/2019

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Zaha Hadid was the most original architect of her generation, whose work emerged from a new synthesis of Modernism she experienced while a student at the Architectural Association School in the late 1970s. Influenced by her tutors, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, she soon developed her own interpretation of an alternate modern tradition based on the Suprematist and Constructivist traditions- highly visible in art, but almost entirely unrealised in architecture. Winning numerous architectural competitions in the 1980s, starting with the Peak club in Hong Kong (1983), her exhilarating drawings and large-scale paintings were inspiring and exciting. But while a few small projects were realised, her work was largely developed in graphic and theoretical terms until the late 1990s. The translation of her work into large-scale built form, including the London Olympic Aquatics Centre and BMW in Munich, has not been without its problems, but it may be the Museum of the 21st century in Rome- MAXXI- is the most successful in realising the dynamic spaces that her early designs represented.

She spoke of the building as a field, of the flows and pathways that create this fluid continuity of spaces: that the building was not a static enclosure, but a temporary crystallisation of forces. Surely an appropriate vehicle for the presentation of contemporary art, and despite what some have said, on my recent (and first) visit it seemed to work well as a place to show art, but also as a dynamic experience of space.

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Key Modern Architects: fifty short histories

31/5/2018

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Key Modern Architects: fifty short histories is published by Bloomsbury today, and the product of my work over the past several years. It presents and analyses the work of many of the most original and significant individuals working in modern architecture since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the 1920s, and the product of visionary ideologies and fractious debate, a model of modern architecture emerged which is still recognizable almost a hundred years later. But some of the most successful work was created in the 1950s and 60s when more nuanced original thinking reshaped the course of Modernism: current work remains indebted to the figures who created it.

Ideas rather than buildings are at the forefront of the book’s discussion, and the most successful architects who build are shaped by the thinking of those who have come earlier: architects’ capacity to influence is seen as paramount in presenting them as important. Architectural Modernism as a realised ideology, as cultural expression, is the focus of the book’s interest: artists as well as architects helped to form it, while the most outstanding buildings are its achieved outcome.

The book is led by words rather than images- posts I’ve recently made on Instagram and also on Facebook are meant to be a visual counterpart. As well as the reader searching for further images of the buildings and projects discussed to supplement the images in the book, mostly just one per chapter, the book will lead to further reading with the selective list of books and journals that take the interpretation of each architect beyond what the book has the space to present.

A side note: many of the architects who are discussed here few would disagree with - Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Kahn, Sullivan and so on, but beyond twenty or thirty there are very many figures who would have a claim to be in some way ‘key’. While in each essay I argue for their significance, I’m very aware that a different historian or critic would come up with a list that varied from mine. And to raise the question of historiography, all histories including this one are far from unbiased, there is certainly no claim here to be absolutely ‘right’- but I very much hope it is an interesting and useful book that gives a different interpretation of the practice modern architecture.

The cover image, courtesy of the RIBA, is of the Economist Building in London designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, in a drawing by Gordon Cullen, 1959. It represents a phase of Modernism emerging in the post war period, that related distinctly modern forms to their context and also illustrates the unique space-making that modern architecture has engaged with.

For publication details see the Bloomsbury website:
www.bloomsbury.com/key-modern-architects-9781474265034

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The importance of framing: the re-hang at MASP

14/2/2018

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Museum of Art, Sao Paulo- gallery space with Cezanne: Lina Bo Bardi 1968

In Brazil last month I re-visited MASP (the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo) and was delighted to see that the permanent collection of paintings has been re-hung to restore the original intentions of its architect, Lina Bo Bardi. The collection- probably the richest in Latin America, with paintings by many European masters including Botticelli and Titian, Van Gogh and Picasso, as well as Brazilian artists- is presented in a unique way. The vast open space of the top floor of the museum is filled, not with panels or walls, but with a forest of paintings that appear to float, thanks to the clear panels, set in concrete bases, that hold each work. The visitor wanders through them, with no set order or didactic direction, so each can be seen as an object in its own right. There's a particular concentration that becomes possible, and odd, personal connections can be made while meandering through the gallery.

Gallery space with Botticelli on left, Museum of Art, Sao Paulo

It's very much a modernist idea- presenting the painting as a painting, a material object, irrespective of what it may represent. But in a way typical of Bo Bardi, it's also playful, and as well as the high seriousness which may befit great works of art, seeing the curious conjunction of visitor and artwork is also part of the rich experience that she has generated. All credit to the Museum for re-creating this singular vision.

Museum of Art Sao Paulo, showing construction of 'easels'

Museum of Art, Sao Paulo: portrait by Portinari 1936

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Pikionis's making of place

5/6/2017

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St Dimitris Loumbardiaris church on Philopappou Hill in Athens, Dimitris Pikionis 1951-7

The Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis was one of those most concerned with a very particular direction that architecture would take in the years after World War II- that of re-engaging with a specificity of place and a specificity of materials. The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson might have been expressing similar issues at the same time, however much their work appears quite different. They were to refer to him later as one of the 'silent architects', whose quiet and self-effacing work belied great originality and significance.

The restoration of the St Dimitris Loumbardiaris church on Philopappou Hill in Athens is part of a far larger project in which Pikionis reshaped the park landscape of the adjacent Acropolis as well as Philopappou. As a way-station in passing through this extensive and intensely historically loaded site it provides a paradoxical contrast to the great and idealised forms of Classical perfection on the opposite hill. A gentle and welcoming place, a modest alternative to the Parthenon as an architectural model: the carefully designed paving made throughout the site subtly structures the visitor's experience, as well as resembling the forms of abstract art.

St Dimitris Loumbardiaris church, pavilion paving

His design for the church also creates adjacent terraces and a pavilion, using the simplest of means with timber contrasting with stone. As well as feeling somehow Japanese, these spaces provide a vivid making of meaningful place in a way reminiscent of other modern architects, while using timber frame and thatch. Overall, these make for places that are human and timeless, created just sixty years ago when an international Modernism was in full flood elsewhere.

St Dimitris Loumbardiaris church, terrace

View from pavilion of St Dimitris Loumbardiaris church to entrance porch

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The sights of Pampulha that define the architecture of modern Brazil

18/3/2017

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Church of Sao Francisco, Pampulha: Oscar Niemeyer 1943

The first post for a long time- after a long trip to Brazil and an even longer period before that, busy with researching and completing a new book- more later !

Oscar Niemeyer had the longest career of any modern architect, starting to build in his native Brazil in the 1930s and still at work internationally at the time of his death in 2012. Best known, perhaps, for his work in the new city of Brasilia which was the big idea of President Kubitschek, the Congress, Law Courts, Cathedral and many more public buildings were built in the early 1960s. But perhaps his most original work was done earlier, also for Kubitschek who was then Belo Horizonte’s mayor, in the new garden suburb of Pampulha. A church, casino, dance pavilion and yacht club were completed in 1943, each representing an idea that would be followed through and extended in his later work.The much-published church of St Francisco is formed of undulating parabolic concrete shells, one end wall a pictorial tiled panel and open glazing at the other.

Casino, Pampulha, entrance hall: Oscar Niemeyer 1943

Casino, Pampulha: windows around stage area

The complex form of the Casino, later an art gallery, includes many of the formal devices such as ramps, piloti-defined volumes and spatial dynamics that were ultimately derived from Le Corbusier but which Niemeyer developed and made his own.

Casa do Baile, Pampulha, marquise: Oscar Niemeyer 1943

The small Casa do Baile or house of dance is, on the other hand, dominated by the form of a serpentine concrete slab or marquise, open on its lakeside site: a simple but spatially complex building that makes me consider it a tropical Barcelona Pavilion. Niemeyer’s work at Pampulha exhibits most clearly the role of architecture as an artistic practice, in clear contradiction to the moral and social imperatives of most of his contemporaries in modern architecture.

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Remembering Zaha

5/4/2016

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Many people have already written their recollections of Zaha Hadid who sadly died last week. My main memories of her are from the Architectural Association in the later 70s and 80s, before she really built anything and long before she became a world- celebrated architect. The AA at that time was a small and very intense world of its own, inhabiting three houses in Bedford Square, but with little relationship to the London architectural world outside. Instead, in a way rare in London at that time, it was genuinely international- with staff as well as students from all over the world, finding a home there as Zaha did herself. It might sound odd that it seemed like a kind of family rather than a School of Architecture, its relationships were intense and very particular: and this was what I think Zaha valued and participated in fully. She was a striking, beguiling and utterly stylish figure, along with being a strong and individual voice, and her successes when they came were the School's successes, supported all the way by the AA Chairman, Alvin Boyarsky.

Zaha Hadid and Alvin Boyarsky at the end of year exhibition at the AA, July 1980

Her work was exhibited in the AA several times: the drawings of the apartment conversion in Eaton Place filled the 18th century saloon of the Members' Room in 1982, and also won the top RIBA project award that year. The paintings representing that space are exhilarating and clearly show an architectural and spatial sense like no other, that many buildings over the later decades would show.