Modern British Architecture

The changes that have been made to the London Docklands in the past 25 years have been among the most striking and most dynamic developments in the world. The London Docklands Development Corporation (1981-1998) played a huge role in the area’s transformation, turning what used to be industrial wasteland into a vibrant area for commerce, residential life, and tourism. The area of the Docklands is over eight and a half square miles, all of which have been affected by the new developments in businesses and transportation. The Docklands represent one of the largest concentrations of twentieth and twenty-first century architecture in the world, and with new projects in development now, it will continue to grow, benefiting not only the area but London as a whole.

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In 1938, the renowned architect Erno Goldfinger began to build 2 Willow Road for himself and his family in Hampstead. The house was completed in the summer of 1939, very shortly before the start of the World War Two in September of the same year.

At 2 Willow Road, Goldfinger merged more traditional Georgian styles with the concepts celebrated by the Parisian avant garde movement of the nineteen-thirties. This allowed him to create a house that was both widely different in its organization from traditional structures, but one that also blended with the surrounding Georgian architecture.

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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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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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When the young William Morris commissioned his friend and colleague, architect Philip Webb, to design him a home, it was inevitable that it would reflect their shared architectural philosophy. Completed in 1859, the Red House is regarded as the first building of the then un-named Arts and Crafts Movement, from its carefully asymmetrical façade to its hand-painted ceilings. Dedicated to honesty in design and good craftsmanship, and eager to allude to a romantic ideal, Webb and Morris created a home that, in its deficiencies as well as its strengths, clearly displays their youthful energy and commitment to their vision.

Morris and Webb met while working under Gothic revivalist architect George Edmund Street, for whom Morris was an apprentice and Webb, a senior clerk. While studying at Oxford, Morris had fallen in with a group of painters called the Pre-Raphaelites and Webb fit right into this artistic circle. In 1858, two years after they first met, the newly married William and Jane Morris approached Webb with the idea of designing a family home. It was Webb’s first solo project.

Webb actively resisted being attached to a specific style, preferring to develop a personal philosophy that was to become the foundation of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was strongly influenced by John Ruskin, an art and social critic, who once wrote that “art is the expression of pleasure in labor.� To Webb, an architect was no mere designer: an ideal architect would understand all the elements of construction, a ‘master builder’ who led a community of tradesmen rather than a domineering, distant presence. However, he rejected Ruskin’s idea that “a building without ornament is not architecture,� believing instead that good materials, arranged in a straightforward fashion, would be beautiful enough in and of themselves. While most Victorian architects tended to design according to some existing architectural style, without considering the context and integrity of the site, Webb wanted to reestablish a sense of place and consistency with regional traditions and craft.

Morris deplored the transformation that rapid industrialization had brought upon traditional English life, so it is not surprising that he chose the picturesque town of Upton-at-Bexleyheath - removed from the smokestacks of London - for his country home. The location had the added attraction of proximity to the pilgrim route Chaucer immortalized in The Canterbury Tales. At one acre, the plot was large enough for both a sizeable house and garden. Part of Webb’s philosophy was to think in terms of the whole site, and so the garden was part of the original design as well. The sloping roof of the building reaches down to the meet the climbing flowering plants, linking house with garden. Red House, as it came to be called, was built in the shape of an L, and took its name from its distinctive red-brick walls. Webb envisioned a house that, far from being just another box with windows, would consist of a collection of parts that color and distinctive roofing would bring together into a unified whole. Ruskin believed that the roof was the “soul� of a house, an idea Webb took to heart, constructing one that makes full use of varying pitches, gables, dormer windows and hips. Windows of all different shapes, sizes and arrangements break up the simple walls. The liberal design of the windows may seem haphazard, but in fact they correspond to the size of room behind them.

Some find the façade plain, even austere, but Webb believed that the beauty of a building came not from tacked-on ornamentation, but from the honest textures and colors of the craftsman’s work. The interior structural elements shared this devotion to honesty. Exposed brick detailing is found throughout, the ceilings share the general form of the particular roof shape above, and the point or segmentation of the arch is dictated by structural necessity. The simple, practical designs display a fidelity to the craftsman’s hand and gave Morris a space to ornament the interior any way he pleased. True to the Arts and Crafts spirit, Morris insisted that every decorative element and piece of furniture be designed and built specifically for his “Palace of Art.� He enlisted his visiting artist friends to paint, carve, and sew decorations for both the house and its furniture. The hand painted murals and glass window details often incorporated allusions to literature and allegory, while the tapestries that Morris’ wife Jane embroidered were covered with floral patterns of her husband’s own design. The personal touch is everywhere, from the iron-bordered dining table meant to withstand Morris’ drunken slamming of his beer glass to the presence of his motto, “If I can,� written beneath a window.

Although the house was built and decorated with a fastidious attention to detail, many more practical matters were overlooked. The Red House contains no bathrooms, only water closets; there was no back entrance for deliveries, meaning that they had to be carried through the garden; and there was an almost medieval disregard for heating. Victorians worried about the affects of the sun on their pearly white skin and interior furnishings, so the fact that the house was built facing North was not unusual, but this did mean that the house was brutally cold, even in summer. The larder, which should have been the coolest room in the house, was actually the warmest, while the ornate fireplaces were not large enough to adequately heat the rest of the house. In fact, the fireplaces smoked, and a few years after the house was built the chimneys had to be extended to fix the problem. Overall, however, Webb and Morris reached their goal: to create an unpretentious home, built by collaborative effort, that reasserted the status of the craftsman in the midst of the industrial revolution. The more pragmatic Webb later had some regrets about the building, but nevertheless, despite its idiosyncrasies, the Red House was a launch pad for the Arts and Crafts movement and remains a landmark of British Architecture.

Works Cited:

Kirk, Sheila. Philip Webb: Pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture. Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2005.

Marsh, Jan. William Morris & Red House. Great Britain: National Trust Books, 2005.

Hollamby, Edward. Red House: Philip Webb. London: Phaidon, 1993.

The De La Warr Pavilion (originally the Bexhill Pavilion) is a public arts, education and entertainment building located in the seaside resort town of Bexhill-on-Sea on the southern coast of England. Designed in 1933 by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and completed in December of 1935, it is considered one of the world’s best examples of Modernist architecture.

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BACKGROUND

Great Scotsman. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh.” [Online image] 15 Jul. 2007. http://www.firstfoot.com/Great%20Scot/crm.htm Read more

The Hill House is a home designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the family of Glasgow publisher Walter Blackie. Designed in 1902 and completed by March of 1904, the house is located in the town of Helensburgh, Scotland. Helensburgh, a burgeoning, wealthy seaside town, had developed as a retreat from the ever-more industrialized city of Glasgow (McKean 175). The country hillside provided an ideal setting for Arts and Crafts designers to express their anti-industrialist sentiments in the design of new homes. However, according to Blackie in John McKean’s “The Hill House,� many of the homes in this area drew on more traditional styles with red-tiled roofs, plaster walls, and wooden beams (178).

Unknown. “Hill House (Mackintosh).� [Online image] 14 Jul 2007. <http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/Vineyard/2423/hill_house.jpg>.

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Lloyd’s of London is a market for insurance underwriters. Beginning in 1688 in a coffee house, the underwriters come together to pool risk and sell insurance. Initially just for shipping, Lloyd’s now provides insurance for absolutely anything with value. The company, er, the ‘market,’ had changed offices often, to acccommodate its growth, so in the 1960s, when it began to consider expanding again, it sought a design that would provide maximum flexibility, that is, a space that could be adapted to changing circumstances.

Richard Rogers is the architect of Lloyd’s. He studied at Yale in 1961-62, the same time as Norman Foster, his comrade-in-high-tech. He came to international attention along with Renzo Piano when they won the competition for the Pompidou Center in Paris. It was very controversial at first, especially given how uniform the rest of Paris is, but, with its expressive systems and bright colors, has come to be a major attraction.

Lloyd’s ran a limited competition and selected Rogers for the job. Begun in 1977, the building was completed in 1986. Rogers designed a central trading floor with upper level galleries surrounding an atrium that goes up twelve floors. Separate service towers contain stairs, elevators, ventilation and heating equipment, and are pulled to the exterior of the building to exploit the irregular geometry of the site and to create the dynamic—literally– facade. Other than widely-spaced concrete columns, the interior is left completely open. A set of escalators forms a dramatic, moving people-scape at one end of the atrium. The interior buzzes with activity.

The major interior materials of Lloyd’s are massive concrete columns that carry gridded concrete floor slabs. Steel supports the glass in the walls and at balconies. Marble and carpeting cover most floors and interior walls are often finished with wood. At least two rooms from older buildings have been brought in and reassembled as meeting rooms. On the outside, steel and glass are much more prominent, especially in the service towers.

Lloyd’s is one of the icons of “High Tech” architecture, which describes the exploitation of a building’s structure and systems for aesthetic effect. Based on the idea that buildings are essentially big machines, High Tech emphasizes the idea of mechanism, and tries to make evident all the different parts that go into making a building work, rather than hiding them behind walls, as is usually the case. The Pompidou Center in Paris, from 1971-77, is also by Rogers, along with Renzo Piano, and is an evident precedent for Lloyd’s.

Questions that occur for high-tech architecture: How many such buildings can there be, that is, doesn’t the style require for its impact that other buildings be rather modest, to act as backdrops?

Does high-tech design continue leading modernist themes of taking aesthetic advantage of building materials and methods, or perfecting its own means of making, or is it just a fetish?

Is high-tech really about architecture, or engineering? And what’s the difference anyway?