Modern British Architecture

What makes a building fashionable? The vocabulary of couture is not inappropriate to a discussion about architecture. Both media flirt simultaneously with the artistic and the practical, the quotidian and the exceptional. Buildings are as essential to human society as clothes, and like clothing they can stand apart from or blend into their respective environments. Just as some garments are branded “loud”, a certain school of architecture has been called “brutal”, but these modifiers seem as referential to their objects’ milieu as to anything inherent to the objects themselves. A Hawaiian shirt stands out on a rainy day, as does a brutalist highrise on a street of stucco townhouses. In the urban landscape, context is key; a straightforward principle, perhaps, but deceptively so. For while the object, once finished, remains a constant (so long as it isn’t thrown out), context is ever-changing. Thus when it is well-made, a bit rare, and symbolic of a past era, a jarring object can be redeemed. It comes into fashion’s focus; it gains “vintage” legitimacy and retro cool.

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The Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 and is the only surviving structure from that year’s Festival of Britain. Its design is most commonly credited to the architects Leslie Martin and Peter Moro. As our guide (name?) pointed out, however, the postwar development of the Southbank site was a complex collaborative process that involved many engineer-architect teams as well as administrative bodies like the (now defunct) London County Council. The Royal Festival Hall stands at a nodal point both in London’s political history and on the modern architectural timeline. As the sole remnant of the Labour-Party-planned 1951 extravaganza, the RFH reflects that government’s preoccupation with social welfare programs and its aim for broad postwar socio-economic reform (strongly opposed by recently-ousted Conservatives, including Churchill). The building echoes Labour’s left-wing agenda from within. Its design embraces the egalitarianism (or “democratic-ness,� as we heard several times in reference to the auditorium) of the modern architectural zeitgeist. In 1951 its concrete walls maybe seemed to whisper: “social change is in the air.�

Much has been made of Martin et al.’s “egg in a box� design metaphor. As we discussed in class, the innovation here was to enclose and elevate the auditorium. The acoustically-isolated room faces south and almost suspends in the air, shouldered by an Atlas-like skeleton of foyers. The architects’ principal intent was practical: to shield the auditorium from the rumblings of the Northern Line below ground (thus the room’s elevation) and the commuter rail above (thus the building’s buffering frame). The egg was to be an enclosed space, enveloped in the protective glass and concrete of the surrounding foyers.

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The Mackintosh House is a permanent installation piece in the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery. The work recreates the apartment in which Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh lived between 1904 and 1916.

In Mackintosh’s case, visitors seem to demand artistic significance both from exteriors and interiors. Mackintosh was equal parts architect and interior designer. Hill House is a stimulating Helensburgh landmark, but it has not really been “seen� until explored inside as well as out. Mackintosh’s artwork thus renders the private realm public. Conceptually, the Mackintosh House may be his most interesting piece because, like a self-portrait, it operates on a meta level. By visiting the domestic space that Mackintosh designed for himself, we hope to glean some panoramic intuition about his artistic vision as a whole. An architect’s private home seems like the ultimate test of his artistry. He turns the blueprints on himself and reconciles his two identities—those of the artist and the human. In the resulting blend of his private and public life we expect some fundamental truth to shine through.

Interestingly, the Mackintosh House seems to have resided in a rather conventional 18th century townhouse-style building (that, needless to say, Mackintosh did not design). Therefore, only the interior of the apartment has been preserved as a historic work of art. I am fascinated, though, by this door (see photos), the only remnant of the Mackintosh House’s exterior. It is a floating door, perched about seven feet above sidewalk level and set into the Hunterian Gallery’s concrete exterior wall. It serves no functional purpose. Yet despite its inaccessibility to visitors from the outside, the Mackintosh door effectively beckons them toward the museum. It shrewdly advertises the institution’s main attraction; the eminently recognizable stained-glass grids on the lintel and in the center of the door suggest a portal to a magical Mackintoshian world.

This placement of Mackintosh’s front door is in itself a conscious artistic choice. Perhaps the Hunterian Gallery’s curators intended a symbolic bridge between past and present. As Stuart Robinson remarked at our visit to the Mackintosh Church, the architect’s work characteristically married traditional forms with contemporary context. On the surface, the Hunterian’s design concept seems in keeping with this understanding of Mackintosh’s oeuvre because it stamps an early 20th century imprint onto a shell from the 1980s. However, the Mackintosh door ultimately seems to me a rather gimmicky item that actually works contrary to the artist’s notions of functionality in the total work of art. As it stands, the door has nothing to do with the canvas where it appears. Mackintosh may not have designed the exterior of his home (which was unfortunately demolished in the ‘60s), but the front door he built was intended for the building into which it led. Its current positioning renders it a misplaced and dysfunctional transplant.

New York City, at the intersection of West St and Chambers St. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Built in 1992.

I am actually more immediately interested in this building’s context than in its design. It strikes me every time I walk by or on it that the TriBeCa bridge is fundamentaly superfluous. As far as I know, it is the only footbridge in Manhattan built over a perfectly walkable street. For example, there are–understandably–pedestrian overpasses above highways like the FDR Drive. West St, though, is fully accessible to pedestrians. It is equipped with crosswalks and stoplights. It is often congested, but really no busier than comparable arteries like Broadway or Park Av. In other words, the bridge’s practicality is rather dubious; one could full well cross West St the way he would any other avenue on Manhattan. In terms of sheer pragmaticism, the $10 million spent on the bridge’s construction might have been put to better use.

The missing factor in this equation is undoubtedly that brick building you see in the background–Stuyvesant High School (Jaime’s alma mater). Stuyvesant is a magnet school, one of the NYC public schools that specialize in math and science and accept candidates based on competitive exams. The TriBeca Bridge links Stuyvesant to the eastern side of West St; students can walk straight from school across to the opposite sidewalk without having to negotiate a busy avenue. Safety concerns, however, were probably not the principal impetus behind the construction of this building. I am not certain what materials make up its frame, but you can note the abundant use of glass. In fact, unlike with most overpasses, glass completely encloses the walkway and protects pedestrians from the weather. Of the architectural styles we discussed yesterday, I would classify the TriBeCa bridge in something like the High-Tech school. Meanwhile, the structure’s arching roof seems to reference such landmarks as the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle (http://www.freefoto.com/browse/?ffid=1043-27-0).

The TriBeCa bridge strikes me as a self-conscious hommage to Stuyvesant’s reputation as one of New York’s leading technical schools. Considering the rather generic appearance of the school’s physical plant itself, placing the structure in this location may have been an effort to reflect architecturally the disciplines and values that Stuyvesant represents. Unfortunately, the TriBeCa bridge seems, in my opinion, like a dispensable afterthought.