Pattern Place Purpose

Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. 1

1988, the year Proctor and Matthews was formed also saw the publication of the first English edition of Italo Calvino’s Charles Elliot Norton Lectures- Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Here Calvino articulated a series of characteristics—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency—which he passionately believed were central to inspired works of literature. At a time when public architectural debate seemed to be focussed around issues of style—postmodernism or iconic form-making—these observational essays seemed to offer an alternative series of strategies which could have equal relevance to architectural design as to that of the written word. The memo on “Lightness” offered most. The central tenet here that good stories, like traditional folk tales should lift beyond earthly constraints—”the weight… the opacity of the world”—and ascend to another realm even suspending

belief, reinforced for us the thought that good design must always look beyond the pragmatic brief of any project.2 It is not sufficient to merely create buildings which provide solutions to a series of technical performance specifications, spatial audits and detailed room schedules. It is after all this approach which often leads to the banality and standardisation of business parks, budget hotels and both subsidised and private housing developments across the country. The safe, predictable, yet impoverished products, of which we are all too familiar, are driven solely by a slavish adherence to Quality Indicators, notional space and performance standards, technical design guides and nothing else.

As designers we have a responsibility to offer more than this: to have one foot in the pragmatic world through a strong dialogue with clients and stakeholders, but to simultaneously look beyond—to defy gravity and ultimately to exceed expectations.

It is this challenge or aspiration which continues to inform an approach to design within our studio. This has led away from an architectural ‘house style’ towards more project and site-specific investigations. Strategies to solve the often demanding constraints of user requirements are

Pattern Place Purpose/Stephen Proctor and Andrew Matthews 9

1

Pattern Place PurposeStephen Proctor and Andrew Matthews

Proctor and Matthews’

Bermondsey

studio, London

10 Proctor and Matthews Archi tects

combined with ideas for engaging with a contextual and cultural continuity. The investigations are overlaid with an abstract architectural dimension—the unexpected catalyst or ‘armature’.

In a search for a guiding precedent, an urban example which continues to inspire us, is that of the seventeenth century Plaza de la Corredera in Cordoba, Spain. Here ‘historical layering’ combined with the ‘shock of the new’ created one of Europe’s most dynamic urban experiences to rival the great squares of Salamanca and Madrid. Influenced by the geometric footprint of earlier Roman structures (and now a market place and occasional bullfighting arena), this ‘set piece’ formal gesture acts as an unpredicted counterpoint to the Medieval Islamic background morphology—a woven filigree of alleyways and private courtyards. While supporting an entirely different institutional function, the rigorous form of the seventeenth century St Thomas Hospital in London

must in its day have delivered a similar counterpoint. These juxtapositions of urban form constitute and heighten the visual drama of the streetscape.

The imposition of a ‘utopian’ gesture onto the textual backdrop of city fabric is also exampled in the loggias and colonnades of Renaissance Italy. Vasari’s Uffizi for example, a linear court ‘facade’ embedded in the Medieval core of Florence, overlays a spatial clarity onto the irregular city plan, acts as a powerful stabilising element within the city form and completes a strong sequential ‘armature’ connecting the Piazza della Signoria with the River Arno and the Pitti Palace beyond. In Arrezzo, Vasari similarly imposed the structured loggia of the Piazza Grande transforming the northern facade of the Medieval square: an architectural device which not only provides a structured visual focus to the principal square, but overlays a spatial coherence to the lateral movement across the town.

Opposite Loggia, Piazza

Grande Arrezzo

Top left Plaza de la

Corredera, Cordoba.

Image courtesy

Google 2009

Bottom left Uffizi, Florence

Right Eighteenth

century engraving,

St Thomas’ Hospital

11Pattern Place Purpose/Stephen Proctor and Andrew Matthews


In all these examples it is notable that the theatricality that the ‘set piece’ gesture brings to the reading of the city’s context, somehow overshadows their respective programmatic content.

A fascination for architectural contrasts within urban compositions has not only evolved from observations on specific historic precedents but is also inspired by the graphic sequential vision studies of Gordon Cullens’ Townscape.

His poetic descriptions of “enclaves” and “enclosure”; “indoor landscapes” and “outdoor rooms”; of “here and there”, “projection and recession” and “mystery” suggest an architecture of light and shade; of incidence and surprise. Yet nearly half a century later there still exists a dominant prevalence; an expectation in architectural design for buildings which display a uniformity of expression irrespective of aspect, orientation or elevational hierarchy. Despite this, the formal ‘showman’ fronts and uncontrolled rambling backs of the archetypal British seaside town, for example, continue to deliver townscapes of hidden contrasts and vibrancy. It is these qualities which we find so intriguing. Similarily, Stirling and Wilfords un-built project of 1980 for the extension to the chemistry department at Columbia University provides an almost caricatured exercise in the juxtaposition of contrasting forms and elevational treatments. The contextual or somewhat referential outer street composition provides the restrained counterpoint to the dramatic inner court expression of the buildings technological programme.

Designs for Priory Quarter, Hastings; Brixton Central; the Hills Road hotel, Cambridge and Hanbury Quarter, Chelmsford, build on these observations. They explore spatial narratives and surface hierarchies, to deliver an episodic sequence of events and viewpoints which, on the one hand, are contextual and, on the other, play to the element of surprise.

Wherever humanity seems condemned to heaviness … I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the reaction of present and future….3

Architecture must begin and end with the needs and aspirations of both the individual and the collective. Buildings which make little or no contribution to the public realm, which do not engage in supporting convivial activity or addressing life’s purpose beyond the purely functional are destined to deliver an impoverished experience.

For us the primary motivations in any design exercise are social and cultural. These are considered first and inform an appropriate response to the functional and technical needs of a building in a holistic approach to design. The social

agenda of any time is central to the creation of architecture with cultural lineage. As the Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck explains, understanding how to respond to these social and cultural needs comes in part from an awareness of a “continuum” in architecture and society.

It seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the mind’s interior as a continuum... this is not a question of travelling back, but merely of being aware of what ‘exists’ in the present—what has travelled into it: the projection of the past into the future via the creative present.4

The need for architecture to be a part of this thread focuses interest in an understanding of historical precedent. How design addresses social issues is often guided by reference to how others met similar challenges in their own time. Pieter de Hooch’s depiction of domestic life in Delft in the seventeenth century provides a relevant observation of the spatial transition between the public life of the street and the semi-private realm of the domestic courtyard.

We both greatly admire the social ideals and creative use of technology of the early Modernists. We may criticise their sacrifice of complexity, diversity and incident, but their inspiration for us lies in the search for a democratic architecture and language that could respond to the overwhelming social problems prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century. The way these architects explored the new agenda for living remains a constant source of inspiration.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, architects appeared to lose touch with social idealism as a creative force. Mainstream architecture became entangled in corporate aspirations, which often failed to respond to the broader social issues of the time. Much postmodern architecture appears shallow but so does the more recent and extensive employment of modernism as merely a style.

We now live in an age where the architectural debate is once again focussing on underlying social issues which today include protection of the environment and its impact on people’s livelihood and well being. We are at the point when architecture appears to be evolving faster as a result of unprecedented personal, social, technological, economic and global changes. Buildings must respond to new conditions on all these interconnected levels.

The urban renaissance witnessed throughout the past 15 years is hopefully set to continue, but requires a

greater emphasis on the reinstatement of our public spaces, amenities and infrastructure. With this intensification has come higher density living with a greater overlapping of home, work and leisure. This trend is delivering more urban vitality, will eventually ease traffic congestion and is restoring health to our cities. It is also posing very real design challenges particularly in the British context. New places of public interaction need to be countered with places of private retreat and quiet contemplation. These realms are central to the development of projects like the Greenwich Millennium Village (a joint venture development by Countryside Properties and Taylor Wimpey Developments in association with The Homes and Communities Agency), where a rich hierarchy of public and private space support the built densities proposed. Equally our proposals for the Governments’ Carbon Challenge competition at Hanham Hall did not begin with technologically advanced typologies but with public and private realms that could support and address the interdependence of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of our time.

The plan for the site at Hanham Hall proffers a template in miniature for the sustainable urban environments of the future.

Opposite James Stirling,

Michael Wilford and

Associates, Department of

Chemistry, Columbia

University, NYC 1982

Right Pieter de Hooch,

A Courtyard in Delft with

woman and Child, 1658



Buildings need also to be anchored in their wider social, historical and economic context. Our design approach embraces both an analytical understanding of these issues and an intuitive response. For us, architecture needs to make an active connection with the past, present and future through reference to the wider landscape of context.

When everything else has gone from my brain— the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighbourhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.5

So begins the prologue to Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. It is this distillation of an essence or a sense of place, which is interesting in the creation of a work that is rooted in its context. A building should do much more than visually ‘fit in’—so often the confused mantra of Planning Departments—it should engage with the past, simultaneously participating with existing conditions and create a stimulating dialogue for the future. Design guidance, especially for those areas singled out for conservation often calls for a design response that should “contribute to and enhance” the character of an area. Successful interventions are often judged by a building’s ability to respond to these parameters by means of a submissive or referential dialogue with its physical surroundings. What is often missing is the magic

Opposite Masterplan,

Hanham Hall with circular

enclosures for productive

landscapes

This page Wolvercote,

village extension



of an intuitive response to a broad understanding of context. Creative intuition can enable a design response to engage with the political, ecological, social and historical dimensions (as in the case of our Karlsruhe competition submission), and help anchor buildings in the spirit of a place. Architecture that manages this metaphysical dimension is sometimes able to connect past, present and future in a timeless dialogue.

The limited competition schemes for neighbourhood extensions to the village of Wolvercote in Oxfordshire (for Oxford University) and suburban Houghton Regis near Luton are focussed on the re-definition of existing

settlement boundaries. In both locations the predominance of unstructured suburban housing typologies with standard front and back garden arrangements have created ill defined and incoherent edges and thresholds between existing neighbourhoods and their landscaped settings. The proposition for higher density, mixed-use masterplans, in these schemes required contextual investigation which extended beyond that of the existing fragmentary housing stock. The historic centre of Wolvercote focuses on the green, whilst the village boundary, although defined by

extensive water courses, is marked by a series of nodal, publicly accessible vantage points or ‘belvederes’. These unique elements within the landscape morphology of Wolvercote provided clues for our restructuring of the new village quadrant.

The amorphous built context at Houghton Regis—a random collection of cul-de-sac housing estates again offers little in terms of a strategy for ‘conventional’ contextual studies. The flood plain location however triggered typological investigations of similar ‘vulnerable’ settlements. In response, the design concept—with clearly defined, almost ‘walled’ boundaries and protected

central square—proffers a counterpoint to unstructured suburbia, a clear neighbourhood identity and a catalyst for the spatial orientation of the surrounding estates.

Dillard’s “dreaming memory of land” triggered our specific topological response in the creation of an architectural masterplan for the central quarter of Castle Hill, near Ebbsfleet in Kent. Dwelling types and cluster configurations were developed specifically for the dramatic south- facing slopes of a disused quarry. An articulated sawtooth

profile of staggered courtyard villas was proposed, creating distinctive silhouettes and maximising views to the south, with a focal lake and chalk cliff escarpment quarry edge as the termination of framed vistas across the new neighbourhood.

Conceptual ideas—the hidden spirit behind spatial configurations, forms and constructional detail, are a continuing architectural quest. Many times the search is inextricably linked to contextual anchoring and the creation of thematic armatures that transcend the pragmatics of a utilitarian brief. These are the devices that clearly define thresholds, ‘set piece’ architecture like the Renaissance loggias mentioned earlier. Projects like the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart by James Stirling and Michael Wilford and the earlier Olivetti Training Centre in Haselmere, by James Stirling, extend the city analogy to building scale. The architectural promenades imbedded in all these examples influenced our design of the unifying roof and loggia elements at Poplar Pier, the Gorilla Kingdom boardwalk at London Zoo, the entrance to John Eccles House and the emerging sequence of public spaces that are central to our project at Priory Quarter, Hastings. In this last project the new ‘twitten’ (a local traditional spatial typology) became the armature that not only structures a new public realm but also (through its three-dimensional expression) binds the public world of both building and city together. Devices like these can provide the regenerative catalyst for urban renewal or hierarchically create the thematic framework for the architectural organisation of space.

The celebration of ‘threshold’ can even occur within the depth of a wall. The painting Woman at the Window, 1822, by Casper David Friedrich, evokes the dramatic potential of

captured views, controlled daylight and shuttered retreat. The layering of threshold space at our Shelley Road apartment buildings in the London Borough of Brent helped reinforce the sense of neighbourly protection. Similarly, the courtyard entrance sequence to each home from the street or communal garden at Phase 2 of the Greenwich Millennium Village do the same, while both Abode in Harlow and the Chronos Buildings in Whitechapel employ levels, stairs and platforms that create an overlapping of private and semi-private space. The layering of facade components is employed to support these transitions. We often utilise framing elements, embedded or free standing, to delineate the boundaries of space, celebrate entrances or to control views. Our projects in Harlow and Hastings together with the proposals for Wolvercote all employ frames in this way.


Opposite Houghton

Regis. Concept cartoon

defining the new

neighbourhood boundary

Top Castle Hill.

Sawtooth profile

Bottom Castle Hill

neighbourhood

hillside space


Top Poplar Pier. Unifying

roof and loggia

Bottom James Stirling,

Olivetti Training Centre,

Haselmere, 1969–1972

These devices are also used at a small scale in the De Havilland prototype live/work apartment, the bespoke kitchen in the Chronos Buildings and the reception desk at The Workhouse in Poplar, East London. In this way assemblies at the smallest scale can become the armatures of domestic design. Inspired by the literal, the metaphorical, or the abstract, armatures help to drive the design through all stages of evolution. Unaffected by the specifics of building functions these conceptual ideas bring clarity and coherence to the minefield of the protracted building process—unpredictable planning regimes, building economics and procurement methodologies—and help to steer the project from design to completion.

Society is currently faced with an unprecedented and accelerating rate of change: life patterns, career changes, family restructuring, economic circumstances, choice through media, mid-life re-training and education. Buildings should respond in some way to this transient characteristic, to serve a society in flux.

In recent years, studio research into flexible patterns of domestic architecture has focussed on the design of low-rise

high density neighbourhoods; a considered alternative to the call for high-rise apartment living as the only viable option for the densification of British towns and suburbs. An apartment culture so prevalent in mainland Europe appears to be at odds with a peculiarly British psyche—‘the English home as castle mentality’—firmly focussed on aspirations for ‘houses with gardens’. Inspired by the work of Serge Chemayeff and Christopher Alexander and the domestic architecture of Eric Lyons and Span we embarked on a series of designs for courtyard homes.6 Studies which included Homegrown and an un-submitted proposal for the government’s £60k House design competition were developed further in work prepared for an exhibition at the Building Centre in 2005 examining the potential for small prefabricated courtyard housing clusters to deliver densities of over 70 dwellings per hectare for urban and suburban locations.7 The courtyard in each home provides the domestic armature for flexible living. By maximising the number of habitable rooms with access or aspect onto this private retreat, a pattern of use of spaces within the home can evolve and adapt over time, and engage in a spatial dialogue of inside and outside extended seasonal use.

The elements in design which facilitate change—that allow space to adapt—have been around for centuries. Embedded

Left Casper David

Friedrich, Woman at

the Window, 1822

Right Shelley Road.

Entrance court

and staircase



Top Wolvercote. Study

for attic storey with

captured view

Bottom De Havilland House.

Live/work apartment

The big floating roof of the Poplar Pier design which was to provide the umbrella under which a multitude of ever changing community activities could take place, is a device repeated later in the Gorilla Kingdom design. Here the canopied boardwalk—the realm of the zoo visitor—acts as the controlling armature around which animal environments and night accommodation can radically change in configuration in response to improvements in animal welfare techniques over time. In many ways it is the ‘set piece’ rigour of these physical armatures which allow for flexibility and adaptability to exist. In a simple way the combined concrete reception bench and stair in our own studio in Bermondsey acts as the focus around which office life revolves. The entry for the Scotswood design competition—Mi Home, a contemporary terrace house—takes this idea one step further by locating a living wall at the heart of the home. This ‘cabinet of curiosity’ houses the most intimate of spaces within the home—bathrooms, kitchen, snug, study space, stair and storage for personal possessions. It is not a cluttered attic but is considered as a memory box or SIM card for the home.

In moves towards the creation of a more inclusive society, community consultation is advocated as the panacea for a responsive architecture. The danger in this approach is the creation of a building with the finite agenda of an end-user group at one moment in time. We should avoid short-termism and design loose-fit structures for future generations. Providing the sustainable communities of the future will involve reducing the need to commute, through encouraging a mix of working, living and leisure environments.


Left Chronos Building.

Kitchen ‘frame’

Right Marc Quinn flexible

studio/gallery

in the distillation of planning and sectional configurations, building typologies have enabled, for example the industrial warehouses of the nineteenth century to become the loft living phenomena of the late twentieth century. Similarly the modernist experiments of Le Corbusier at the Unité d’habitation in Marseille, and in Britain, the revolutionary work of Wells Coates for the Isokon building at Lawn Road, North London, proffer the small simple devices that allow for the day-to-day adaption of domestic change.

The sliding walls and acoustic screens in both these projects and the simple way in which they enable open plan space to be converted to smaller subdivisions with ease influenced the designs of both the apartments at the Greenwich Millennium Village and the studio and gallery for artist Marc Quinn. By bringing service cores to the middle or edge of the plan surrounded by free flowing multi-use space and introducing sliding or folding screens, enables the immediate adaption of space for different patterns of use. Service cores are brought to the middle of the plan and sliding or folding screens are introduced creating free flowing multi-use plans that enable immediate adaption of space for changing patterns of use.

There is, of course, a danger in designing for flexibility. Designs can fall short of initial functional intentions, and deliver buildings which are both inappropriate for specific use and future adaptability. However, the creation of successful flexible space is not an exercise of the architecturally clairvoyant, but an acceptance that change will occur without the need to predict in detail the nature of future uses or configurations. Obviously the fun in design is to sketch out possibilities without prescribing absolutes.


Top Modular courtyard

housing. Prefabulous

Exhibition 2006

Bottom £60k

modular homes

entrances to each home at Abode, were all chosen for these reasons. There is clear articulation of building elements: roofs float (as in the design for the Hollick and Bucknall houses in Haddenham) and walls become planes or surfaces with depth and direction. Windows and openings

form the seams between changes in surface texture; the point of interface between contrasting materials. We find delight in the unconventional use of the traditional palette, stimulating a dialogue between the craftsmanship of the past and industrial components of a factory aesthetic. The prefabricated flint panels on the Hall House in Norfolk, the steel and clay tiled porch assemblies at slo, Newhall, Harlow and the woven eucalyptus patchwork for the Lions of the Serengeti canopy at Whipsnade are all examples of this approach.

In recent years we have witnessed a disturbing trend within the construction industry, which appears to promote the severance of concept design from what is perceived as the technical rigours of building assembly. This has been paralleled, some might say fuelled, by certain Schools of Architecture who struggle to instil students with a passion for materials and detailing—often abandoning the raw materials of architecture in favour of the theoretically tangential and dangerously esoteric.

As students we were often encouraged to look beyond the restricted confines of architectural space to the broader context of city form and the discipline of urban design. Within the studio we now operate within a wide range of scales from that of regional and city gestures and building form to architectural components and material specification. There is a persuasive yet ambitious tenet, which links through issues of hierarchy of space and gesture, the macro to the micro in design. The generating principles of urban frameworks influence the detailed assemblage of buildings.

With this in mind, we search for the devises that provide animation—textures, colours, light and shade—the palette of materials and detailing strategies, which can begin to energise and enrich, turning the diagrams of abstract space into architectural places for human habitation and interaction. Materials are selected as much for their colour and textural qualities as for their technical performance. The heavily figured douglas fir veneered panels on the pierced walls and soffits of the Gorilla Kingdom boardwalk at London Zoo and the stone filled gabions that mark the


Top left Chermayeff

and Gordon, courtyard

house plans

Top right Eric Lyons,

Span courtyard

house, Blackheath

Bottom Proctor and

Matthews’ studio.

Reception Bench

1 Liv ing

2 Ki tchen

3 Dining

4 Bedroom

5 Bathroom

6 Study

7 Outdoor space


Scotswood design

competition. Mi Home

with memory box

For us, building assembly is inextricably related to a response to the surrounding environment and prevailing climate. In a deliberate rejection of an aesthetic minimalism in detailing, we are concerned with developing compositions that result in pronounced modelling—a mannerist response—that engages with a quality and play of light. By extending an architectural tradition that respects and responds to the implications of climate—in this way, we aspire to create an architecture that improves with time.

On the walls of our Bermondsey studio on London’s South Bank, hang two paintings by the octogenarian artist, Albert Irvin—layered urban abstracts which describe the city in terms of “colour, energy, space and light. Kaleidoscopic arrangements... variously opaque and translucent”.8 Elemental motifs repeat in his work—grids, disks, stripes, boxes, and quatrefoils—part of a formal vocabulary which creates a “talismanic presence”.9 It is the energy embedded within these paintings and strategies to which


Proctor and Matthews’

studio with Albert

Irvin paintings

we aspire. A vibrancy and optimism which is “unashamedly joyful” yet engaged with a spirit of place.10 In an analysis of his own work, Irvin often refers to a description of artistic explorations by the pianist, Alfred Brendel, who observed “It is a mixture of the intellect and the emotion, of strategy and ecstasy.”11

An equilibrium of the analytical and the intuitive should, we believe, deliver buildings which lift the spirit and exceed the pragmatic expectations of any building brief.

Footnotes:

1, Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.2, Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.3, Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.4, Quoted in Aldo van Eyck’s Works, Ligtelijn, Vincent, ed., Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999.5, Dillard, Annie, An American Childhood, New York: Picador, 1988.6, Chermayeff, Serge and Alexander, Chrisopher, Community and Privacy– Towards a New Architecture of Humanism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.7, Prefabulous London—The A to Z of Modern City Homes, 2006.8, Dunne, Aidan, Albert Irvin Four Score, London: Gimpel Fils Gallery, 2002.9, Dunne, Albert Irvin Four Score.10, In conversation with the artist Peter Fink–observations of Phase 2 of Greenwich Millennium Village.11, Quoted in Moorhouse, Paul, Albert Irvin, Life to Painting, London: Lund Humphries, 1998.

Picture Credits:

P8, © David ChurchillP11 Above, © 2009 Google Imagery, © 2009 Digital Globe, Instituto de Cartografia de Andalucia, GeoEyeP12, P18 Left, © James Stirling/Michael Wilford Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, MontréalP13 © The National Gallery, LondonP19 Left, ©bpk, Berlin/ Nationalgalerie, SMB/ Jörg P. Anders, AI918

ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5

Black Dog Publishing Limited10a Acton StreetLondon WC1X 9NGUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 [email protected]

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.© 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

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