Modern British Architecture

The Gilsey House is not a particularly famous building in the Manhattan cityscape. Completed in 1869 as a hotel (the first hotel to offer telephone service to its guests), it is now a residential building somewhat overshadowed by the Empire State Building behind it, as the picture shows. However, I was drawn to it because it reflects a style I had not seen in New York particularly often (a style, I have learned, that is called Second Empire Baroque). The clock, positioned to face directly into the intersection of 29^th Street and Broadway almost immediately catches attention - particularly at night, when it is illuminated. The structure is a cast-iron facade, and indeed, the heavy ornamentation and many pillars give the building a sense of weight and strength not seen in other, more modern buildings.

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Figure 1. The Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern observation deck.

Why did the public cross the bridge? To get to the other side.

That joke is old news, just like crossing the Thames by foot is old news. The Romans built the first bridge across the river almost 2000 years ago, and the oldest surviving bridge,  Newbridge - dates from the 13th century (South). So how did the Millennium Bridge, something as simple and old-fashioned as a footbridge, draw over 80,000 people to its opening day in 2000? Perhaps location is the answer, as the bridge connects two high profile landmarks: St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery. Then again, Southwark and Blackfriars, two other bridges perfectly functional for crossing the river (as most bridges are wont to be), flank the new site relatively closely on either side. Perhaps the appeal lies in the bridge’s technologically sleek design? The designers touted the project as a “blade of light across the Thames” an emblem of technology at the start of the 21st century that “gives space back to the people” (Foster). Perhaps it was just the novelty of the new. In any case, whether the draw was function or inspiration or something else entirely, the opening of the bridge enticed the modern masses to come out and cross the Thames. So many came out, in fact, that they caused a modern building based on an idea as old as antiquity to become structurally unsound. But more on the unsound bit later on!

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The neighborhood of Wembley is in the northwest portion of the city in the Borough of Brent and is one of the most culturally diverse regions in the UK.  In fact, around 39 percent of its population was born outside of the European Union, the largest percentage in England.  On the fringe of the city, it certainly has a different feel than Central London, with many of the buildings appearing to have sprung up around the 1950s and early 1960s.  Much of the development in Wembley, and especially its multi-million pound refurbishment, is thanks to the dominant building in the neighborhood, Wembley Stadium.  The original Wembley Stadium was built in 1923 for the British Empire Exhibition, and slowly, the neighborhood began to grow up around it.  The new Wembley Stadium was opened just this year and is by far and away the jewel of the neighborhood, with its gleaming steel structure and white arch visible from all over the area.  The stadium was designed by Norman Foster and partners, who are also responsible for the Gherkin in central London.  Yet for the power and beauty that the stadium commands, it is in marked contrast to the older, poorer buildings that surround it. 

            While Wembley is not an extremely poor neighborhood, there is still a marked difference between the area and its neighbors to the south, Chelsea and Kensington.  Many of the buildings closest to the stadium are three-to-four story apartments with small retailers and shops on the bottom floor.  The neighborhood is not a wealthy one, as many wealthy people probably would not want to live in a place that is periodically invaded by 150,000 people.  The ethnic diversity is apparent as you walk down the street, with many shops’ signs being in different languages.  Many of the buildings look as though they went up in the 1950s and early 1960s with simple exteriors of brick.  Along the main roads facing the stadium, most buildings are commercial in nature (except for the apartments above the stairs), with the residential area being farther out from the stadium.  

            At first, I wondered how the poorer residents that lived around Wembley felt about the stadium, with the project costing just under one billion pounds.  I felt like it would be a very awkward relationship between the residents of Wembley and the gross display of wealth that is the stadium.  However, their neighborhood will benefit greatly from the new stadium because the government is actually revamping the surrounding area which will no doubt give a boost to the economy of the neighborhood.  

            Construction is already underway on luxury shops, apartments, and a new arena around the stadium.  The roads, railways, and tube stations in Wembley have all undergone a 70 million pound renovation to make the stadium as accessible as possible.  (Literally, all the roads will lead to Wembley Stadium)  Yet the new buildings, being led by Quintain Estates and Developers, are quite different than the current neighborhood, with their streamlined, modern glass exteriors.  In fact, the welcoming line on the new Wembley City website is “A brand new Wembley is emerging!�  I bet that if I were to go back in ten years, the neighborhood and its residents will have completely changed.  

            I’ll be traveling back to Wembley next week to see how the area transforms on the day of an event.  Being an exhibition football game of Chelsea and Manchester United, it will no doubt bring a huge, diverse crowd.  I am curious to see how the residents will handle such an influx of people and what visitors’ reactions are to the neighborhood, whether they spend anytime in Wembley or just head straight for the stadium.  My impressions on Wembley could be vastly altered in the next assignment.  I will also detail much more on the stadium itself, as (hopefully) I will have seen the interior as well.

The London Zoo is a neighborhood in its own right—even a lot like a gated community. To begin by looking at the special layout of the area, there are three types of land use: residential, commercial, and civic. The residential space is where the animals reside and this space is comprised of buildings, outdoor exhibits, and walk through indoor/outdoor spaces. These are like the apartments or town homes in another neighborhood:

This is a picture of the giraffe habitat, which is an example of the residential-like space in the zoo. The giraffes live both outside of this building and inside stalls inside the older looking, dark, brick building.

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It is difficult to discuss the Laban Centre for Contemporary Dance without some notice of its neighborhood context. Located on the eastern edge of Deptford in the borough of Lewisham, south of the Thames opposite Canary Wharf, and off the edge of most London maps, every article published in the London Times surrounding the Centre’s opening in 2003 made some reference to the area’s “inner city decay,� the “dark, deserted and creepy� streets surrounding the site, and the “landscape of bleak neglect� that serves as a background to this beautiful building. However, for now I’ll leave it with just those initial impressions of the Deptford area and talk about the Centre itself.

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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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If shown this detail out of context, my first instinct would be to attribute it to a Minoan palace, or some other ancient Mediterranean culture. Upon a more thorough examination, the column in this detail is too intricate to be something out of the early Cycladic period, but in many ways the column is similar to those found at the palace at Knossos: the red coloring of the column and the flattened capital to name a couple. Clearly this column is making a reference to ancient Greece, in this case, perhaps, specifically Aegean Greece. So, especially considering that the Greeks were pagans, the fact that this detail belongs to a modern, Christian church is a bit puzzling.

Though the use of the ancient Greek style seems odd to me, the column does have elements that tie it to the rest of the building thematically. For example, the feathery design that fans out at the top of the column. This motif is repeated in many places in the building (indeed, in this image the pattern occurs in the frieze about the column). What does this pattern mean? Is it making some sort of reference to birds? to flight? to something else?

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.

As a previous post has already described, the Catholic church Our Lady of Good Council, in Dennistoun, Glasgow, is a place for quiet, contemplative worship focused more on God and less on the building itself. The space is, for the most part, unadorned, and this is one of the few flourishes of detailed design by the architectural firm Gillespie, Kidd, and Coia. It is one of a pair of recessed spaces, each above and on either side of the central altar area. These grooves provide an interesting framing device for the altar— however subtle— and suggest a much more common design element— the column. Indeed, the groove on the right (pictured here) is terminated along an angle that, if it does not match precisely, at least suggests the same slant as the roof above it, creating the parallel line that would be present along the tops of columns as they joined the ceiling of the room. As the roof slants downward from left to right, and the groove on the right is shorter than that of the left, it even further enhances the concept of pillars supporting the roof. The left groove (not pictured) is longer than its mate, but its peak slants the other way, creating a somewhat startling asymmetry reminiscent of the asymmetry of the two sides of the roof,

The grooves are of a similar style as the three crosses in the upper-left corner of the larger northern wall, and fit well with the general motif of understated adornment (indeed, even the basin for the holy water is directly part of the low stone wall by the stairs, and not a separate piece of its own). This understated adornment provides for only the suggestion of the grandeur of a Catholic church— reminding the parishioners of their faith without distracting their worship. However, the grooves perform another function. Being located on either side of the altar, and only on the northern wall (the largest wall, the wall that the congregation faces during Mass), the use of grooves instead of columns— of empty space instead of structural elements— almost suggests that there is something else holding up the roof of the church— faith.