Modern British Architecture

Daniel Libeskind’s LMU Graduate Centre overlooking Holloway Road

As if to make up for its historical reluctance to, and often outright disavowal of, modern architecture, England and London in particular have become a hotbed of architectural advancement and ingenuity. Home to the Architectural Association School and studios of major-label architects like Zaha Hadid, London has seen a surge of new and innovative buildings within the past several years. Creations by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and the like have cropped up almost everywhere imaginable, both stretching the city’s imagination and establishing an architectural reputation to the rest of the world. Most of these novel buildings, bridges, and structures have grown up in the most predictable places, on the banks of the Thames, within the heart of the City, and among the office space of the flourishing financial district. Prime names will, after all, get prime real estate. Yet one finds Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre, however, in the most unlikely of places, along the seedy strip of Holloway Road. Home to a notorious illegal tobacco trade and LMU students on their way to anywhere but there, Holloway Road seems to be the last place one would find the work of an architect now famous for his work on Berlin’s Jewish Museum and the Ground Zero memorial project. But there it is, looking like a series of jagged steel bricks dropped along the edge of the street, seemingly entirely unrelated to its context. Despite its alien form and facade, the LMU Graduate Centre Building is in fact a “good neighbor,” an asset to the university, and a welcome sculptural break from the glum Holloway norm. It is a haven for students and a flicker of hope for local revitalization.

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As a current architect, Zaha Hadid seems to reach toward the future. Although critics tout her as the visionary of modern-day architecture, Hadid’s work, characterized by free-flowing forms, streamlined shapes, and even at times gesturing towards, as one puts it, “intergalactic space stations,� nevertheless incorporates fundamentals of the modernist movement which came before it.

Born in the architecturally global, modernist-infatuated Baghdad of the 1950s, Hadid grows up concurrently with the modern architectural movement. After receiving a degree in mathematics from the university of Beirut, she moves to Europe: first to Switzerland, and finally to London by the mid-seventies. While in London, she attends the Architectural Association and there latches on to a wave of 60s architecture which experiments with the utopian idealist forms of Soviet Constructivism. Her designs for a 14-story inhabited bridge over the Thames in her senior thesis are a poster child for this movement, taking their inspiration from an image of Malevich’s Tektonics—a fragmented city, floating through space.

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Walking into the south-facing drawing room of Mackintosh’s Hill House, this little table is what first caught my eye.  Well-known, often revered, and more often copied, Mackintosh furniture holds a particularly special place within his buildings, almost always explicitly intended to occupy a single space in a very singular way. This small– perhaps coffee– table is exemplary of the Japanese influences in the architect and designer’s works. A thin black-painted wood grid, the piece is both structurally dense and light, a study in perspective and massing of airspace. It is composed of simple parts in a complex arrangement, and even vaguely references the composition of a pagoda with its layered grid and slightly overhanging top.

It’s difficult to describe this piece without some reference to its surroundings– Mackintosh intended it be just where it is, a function of his building as gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The table, situated in the center of an overwhelmingly white and sunlit space, is a direct reference back to the darkened hallway the visitor had just walked through to enter the drawing room. Within the table there is the same emphasis on extending perspective, and while not as dramatically vertical as the enchanted-forest slats running the length of the hallway and the stairwell, Mackintosh’s love of verticality and is still evident. The structure itself is not entirely a grid, but a series of four flat grids supported by vertical beams. Sunlight glows into the room through the south window, and shadows play across the bright floor as the light filters through the black lattice of the coffee table, yet another example of the architect’s subtle uses of light and shadow to delineate and articulate space. A single small table at Mackintosh’s Hill House– where otherwise it would play the role of a smart surface to rest a cup of coffee and not much else– is a key element in defining light and dark, airspace and mass, verticality and horizontality, and all such devices that the architect is noted for– it is a theoretical Mackintosh interior in miniature.

Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the Denver Art Museum, recently completed in October 2006, is a baffling piece of architecture. An archetype of deconstructivism, the building shies away from formal analysis– it appears to be built upon a logic of its own. Typical expectations of windows, doors, façades, etc., are unfulfilled, and the viewer is forced to reconsider what really constitutes “building” or “architecture”. That’s what really struck me about the museum– its tendency to evoke deep questions as well as an intense visceral response.

One major theme that comes to mind when I view this building is that of propriety. Clad in a skin of titanium and glass over a seemingly impossible frame, the museum is certainly an escape from the white-box gallery mentality. But as striking and beautiful as it may be– a veritable work of art in its own right, I think– how well does it serve its purpose as a space for the display of art, if it does at all? The interior, as one would expect, is just as convoluted and tortured as the outside, creating dramatic spaces of light and shadow. Is this a distraction from the appreciation of the art within, or does it somehow enhance the experience? Though I’ve never been inside it myself, I’d like to think it’s the latter.

And how does the museum interact with its location? It certainly catches your eye, but in addition to serving as an individual structure, the building works with the surrounding civic center and public library to create cultural hub in downtown Denver. What is the museum’s relationship to its natural landscape? The titanium of its exterior is both foreign and reminiscent, a jarring escape from brick and mortar yet evoking the uniform colour and clarity of the Denver sky. Was that the architect’s intention? Did he pull his inspiration for the forms of his building from the jagged lines of the state’s iconic mountains? These questions and more are what Libeskind’s museum inspire in me, and what really endear it to me.