The Amazing, Funny, Serious, Demonstration House of Sarah Wigglesworth Charles Jencks (June 2010) The architect’s own house is a venerable genre, combining at best both the beautiful demonstration of an idea and a wonderful place to explore. John Soane’s house-museum is the English touchstone of this bloodline and Frank Gehry’s California family home is the last acclaimed version. Such autobiographical buildings, for Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, were places for selfexperiments some of which went catastrophically wrong. But as ideas which were later perfected for other clients, they provided a necessary springboard. Without risk, there is no invention, no character and then no identity. Auto-buildings, to give the genre an odd name, can be extreme and obsessive, the working through of an architectural concept without compromise. Le Corbusier’s wife famously said of her husband’s self-experiments in the sun-drenched building, “all this light is killing me, driving me crazy.” Sarah Wigglesworth’s house and studio for her office, and husband, Jeremy Till, takes its place in this continuous tradition as an explosion of architectural wit, from the front-door to the top library, a little eerie that peers out of its quizzical tower. This shed of a head looks over the bleak Islington landscape like a periscope from another world. Is it a defence against the world, and noise, pollution, and squalor; or just a cheap, vernacular shed? Although, perhaps, not intending the ‘Strawbale House’ (among its several names) to be seen as a series of amusing and relevant quotes on the history of architecture, it encourages such a reading because of its archetypes, as well as illustrating the intended lessons about sustainable living. Didactic buildings can be very funny, as James Stirling showed, either intentionally or by accident and, whichever way, humour is not a bad teacher. A gentle smile follows one throughout the Wigglesworthing narrative, the suggested story-line that starts on a late-Victorian street of rowhouses and ends in a library to contemplate the experience. The immediate streetscape sets the scene as a typical compromise of peaceful London. It is domesticity versus grinding metro-traffic, a grand elm tree hovers to one side against the commuter trains. This opposition is picked up in the front wall and on the rest of the journey, as a dialogue between light-touch organic and heavyweight industrial. The sophistication of this high wall with its bay rhythms immediately reminds one of an Italian palazzo, but here it is the grid of a grey Miesian frame holding up galvanised panels set below a rich weave of willow wood taken off the peg, ad hoc. Yes, ruddy-brown wicker-work is playfully turned on its side, and it turns the palazzo into an outsize basket or a seat. Any designer who doesn’t get this double reference, with its high front door, should retake Arch 101. The rustication becomes much more protective on the railroad side of the building where rotting sandbags, filled with concrete, slowly decay only to sprout a new skin of urban weeds amid their cellular units. These horizontal courses serve as heavy, acoustic baffling. But it is their expression that counts. They slightly bulge and hang over the side of the exposed I-beams like the flaccid clocks of Salvador Dali; they squeeze tight the black railway sleepers that frame the windows. Brunelleschi felt this way when he designed the massive rustication of the Pitti Palace, but here it is offset by a silver blue wall, also for insulation against noise, held in place by buttons! A quilt of bulging and ruckling pillows. This is an extraordinary and, I suppose, a feminine contrast. It gives the rustication of the World War II sandbags, the trench architecture, a metaphorical presence not seen since the 17th century, and those aggressive rusticated diamonds punching their pyramids at passing gondolas on The Grand Canal in Venice. Tourists still admire these. If only harried commuters would look up from their papers, as they sped past the Wigglesfort, they’d get an even funnier thrill. Holding this façade and the studio above, at least symbolically and visually, are gabions made from recycled concrete, the third ad hoc use of ready-made material. Inside these fat piers are the real
concrete columns. The Mannerism of heavy rectangular piers holding the massive Sandbag Order makes visual and semantic sense. It also harmonises with the raw concrete beams overhead and the pebbles and stones underfoot. And it allows a kind of stately Egyptian procession towards the studio between pairs of paired piers that, cleverly, work their rectangular logic on both the side and the front axis. They are not an avenue of double sphinxes, of course, or the monumental pairs of animals that lined Ming tombs, but the feeling of being in such a hieratic space is unmistakable. As if to send up the very quote she invokes, the white logo “Sarah Wigglesworth Architects” is displayed straight ahead. But it now runs vertically at right angles to expected logic (like the front wicker hurdles, also set the wrong way). And in case you miss these contrasts and inversions, they are displayed on a blood red door of impeccable modern taste. In effect, it is warfare architecture set against the pleasures of the pillow, counter-moods that set the tone for all that follows. If a façade deserves listing as the primary example of adhocism in Britain, it is surely this one, though preservation would go counter to its message of pleasurable decay. After confronting us with so much architectural firepower at the beginning of the drama, Wigglesworth would seem to have created a difficult role for the second act. But in the garden to the left of the entry the mood relaxes, and changes to the light and airy. In place of the primitive classicism one finds Japanese bamboo and picturesque planting. A window-wall of asymmetrical panes opens onto a typical back garden of vegetables, flowers, washing and an ornamental birch tree. It is a somewhat messy and relatively undesigned space, like the other gardens one can see extending down the row. But placed in opposition to this expression of the everyday are several intense elements of architectural order. A row of steel columns again holds the cornice of grey Ibeams. A corner inglenook juts out above the garden like a late work of Frank Lloyd Wright. And then one flourish ends the route, the straw-bale corner that gives the house its usual name. Like the famous Miesian corner at IIT in Chicago, on which an epochal debate took place in the 1960s, one realises a statement is made. This corner pavilion, enclosing the bedrooms in protective insulation, is the culminating piece of didactic English wit, also in the tradition of Arts and Crafts, and of James Stirling dimonstrazioni. No wonder it appeared blown up in size on the cover of The Architectural Review in 2002 for all architects to take note. It demonstrates, indeed laughingly proclaims, its green credentials to the Age of Sustainable Rhetoric. The first modern use of huge straw cubes for 200 years – 550 bales of super-insulation gathered from a west England farmer for £825, another victory for adhocism. “So there, you high-maintenance claimants to the prize of most-sustainable; so there Lord Foster, Sir Michael Hopkins and other be-knighted peers of the architectural realm. Look on my corrugated metal and polycarbonated sections with despair, and note the way I have layered and revealed them just so, to let your eye in on the secret and keep the rain out. The green lessons lie in the pleasures of clever re-use, those that create high-architecture not expensive high-tech.” If buildings could speak, Wigglesworth’s commendable bedroom corner would say something like this: that the most sustainable is not necessarily the cheapest or most ecological or most recycled, but any of this combined with architecture that people want to sustain because they love it. As it is her house and studio have many other accessible and esoteric messages embedded in their architectural language. And this brings up the questions of intentionality and communication, whether the many quotes are conscious or accidental. How much of all this is in her authorial voice, and how much is it in the heightened language of architecture itself? Next to the didactic Strawbale Corner (which is foreground, also on the cover of AR) is the trunk of a tree sporting its knots and branch scars. It (visually) supports a concrete beam and acts as a transition point to a miniscule Japanese garden. Bramante and Philebert de L’Orme are behind this Tree Trunk Order, as are many others back to Vitruvius and beyond. I have no idea if their memory is being invoked. But here, stripped of bark and elevated on a real concrete base and gently showing its non-structural truth like a good Post-Modernist, it is one more amusing and sensuous touch that shows the building to be a worthy exemplar in the great game of the architect’s own home.