PATRICK LYNCH
Patrick Lynch is the founding partner of Lynch Architects, an award-winning London practice whose work has been widely exhibited and published, including at Venice in 2008 and 2012, and Milan in 2019. He studied architecture at the universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, from where he holds a MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture. Patrick completed a PhD, “Practical Poetics” in 2015 at London Metropolitan University where he was supervised by Peter Carl, Helen Mallinson and Joseph Rykwert. He is an honorary professor at Liverpool and has taught at UCL since 2020. Before this he taught history and theory at Cambridge and design the AA, London Met and Kingston. He is the author of several books including The Theatricality of the Baroque City (2011), Mimesis (2015) and Civic Ground (2017), Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect (2022), etc. In 2018 he founded Canalside Press alongside Claudia Lynch. Thus far they edited and published 10 issues of the Journal of Civic Architecture and 10 books. These include architectural history, photography and poetry, and books of theory concerning urban culture and ecology as both praxis and reflection. He is also a poet, and the father of two teenagers.
GIANCARLO FLORIDI
Giancarlo Floridi is an architect and partner of Onsitestudio architects in Milan. Their projects have been widely published and exhibited. Giancarlo studied at Politecnico di Milano from where he also holds a PhD, as well as at ETSAM Madrid. He teaches and researches at Politecnico di Milano - DATSU and was recently a guest professor at Harvard GSD.
LB
19 LYNCH ARCHITECTS n2, is the nineteenth title from LONG BOOKS COLLECTION.
REPAIRING THE CITY
Number 8 Andrews Road Hackney E8 is home not only to Lynch Architects but also to Canalside Press. Seemingly free of hierarchies, the same space plays host to both editorial and design activities, with piles of freshly printed books and lots of maquettes. Copies of the Journal of Civic Architecture are piled up on the tables alongside models of residential buildings, door handles, and pavilions. Lynch Architects’ deliberate generalism is typical of the intellectual architect, who understands the architecture of the city as a complex interweaving of different scales and levels.
A site model, in progress since 2007, sets out their successive projects completed along Victoria Street, including the building known as n2, which does not mark the end of the journey. In terms of built work, this began with Kings Gate (2016), a residential tower, and The Zig Zag Building (2015), offices - a pair of buildings next to Westminster City Hall. The renovation of and extension to Westminster Coroner’s Court (2024) and n3 (2028), will conclude Lynch Architects’ work there.
Together with their partner David Evans, Patrick and Claudia Lynch use the model to tell the story behind this unique attempt to create a coherent part of the city through staged interventions, in different times and places, in what might be described as a sort of ‘petite guerre’. The process stands out on account of their own work existing now as a precondition, with the initial condition coming to serve as a theme for the whole. Lynch Architects produce several versions of individual projects before having a clear idea of the final urban design. Clients’ assignments and briefs are reinterpreted as time goes on, and – like some sort of cadavre esquis exercise – by stubbornly sticking to the same set of rules and objectives, they ultimately arrive at a coherent system. Constructing an ensemble one part at a time is a complex affair, since it calls not only for analytical skills and an acceptance of the limits of the task at hand, but also for an awareness of the overarching character of the project as a whole. It might even be described as a Milanese situation on account of the need to see each individual project as one part of the whole.
Visiting the new office building known as n2 also provides an opportunity to explore the part of the city that has developed around Victoria Street. As we walk, Patrick and Claudia Lynch draw connections – as they do in all their projects – at the physical and cultural levels: between John Francis Bentley’s vertical facades dotted with balconies and bay windows; the building designed by him that stretch the entire length of the street of Ashley Gardens on Ambrosden Avenue; the endless series of windows that adorn the residential courtyards of Thirleby Road; the corner of Cardinal Mansions, designed by George Baines, and even the backs of other anonymous yet astonishing buildings around Westminster Cathedral. As we walk, we come across other projects by Lynch Architects: Kings Gate, a residential building constructed in a very dense, hightraffic area, which they tackled by reconciling the urban and the domestic – with some ambiguity – through the depth and dimension of the stone elements on the facade. Further along Victoria Street, next door, The Zig Zag Building appears foreshortened, replacing a horizontal modernist block with a sort of “building of buildings”, whose discontinuity and verticality are intended to enter into dialogue with the urban concept of the high street that predates it.
On leaving the dark stone arches of Victoria Station, you arrive before the n2 building. The design does not immediately jump out at you: the overall urban effect still prevails, in line with JM Gandy’s painted view of urban accumulation created by Sir John Soane’s maquettes. It forms the backdrop and missing part to a somewhat curious collage, made
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
2020 - 2023
IMG 01 Structure axonometry
IMG 02 Southwest axonometry
SITUATED IDEALISM: ON N2 AND LYNCH ARCHITECTS’ WORK AT VICTORIA, LONDON SW1, 2007-2028
“The metaphor with which I have been concerned with is more extended - a double one - in that it involves three terms, a body is like a build ing and the building in turn is like the world.”
Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture
“The metaphor with which I have been concerned with is more extended - a double one - in that it involves three terms, a body is like a building and the building in turn is like the world.” Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture
Lynch Architects have been involved in the transformation of Victoria Street since 2007, and have realised a number of urban blocks, each of which responds very precisely to their immediate context. n2 is the third of five structures which Lynch Architects will have built there. Completed in 2023, n2 is an 18 storey office block, a part of what is now known as the Nova development. The other projects nearby include Kings Gate, a 15 storey stone apartment building housing 100 flats sat beside Westminster City Hall (2010-16); its neighbour, The Zig Zag Building, a 13 storey office building (2010-15); Westminster Coroner’s Court (2017-2024), currently on site; and n3 (20072028) another office building beside n2, which goes on site next year. Kings Gate and The Zig Zag building replaced one third of a 1950s megablock that previously sat each side of the tower of Westminster City Hall.
Nova started life over twenty five years ago as the Victoria Transport Interchange (VTI), as an attempt to unify major transport infrastructure upgrades to the rail, bus and tube network at Victoria with a coherent approach to urban design. This project was instigated by Transport for London in concert with our client, Landsec, part of which, the Victoria Station Upgrade (VTI) involved the demolition of a number Landsec-owned properties and the construction of a new ticket hall for the tube station beneath the site of n3. During this time, several accomplished architects have worked at Victoria for Landsec, including unbuilt schemes by David Chipperfield, Wilkinson Eyre, Snohetta, Michael Hopkins, Allies and Morrison, etc., and completed buildings by EPR, KPF, Cesar Pelli, and Benson and Forsyth. Various unsuccessful attempts have been made to try to directly connect Victoria Station to Buckingham Palace through the creation of new public spaces fringed by very tall towers.
Construction of VTI entailed the demolition of several poor quality 1950s and 1960s buildings to create a new ticket hall beneath what is now the site for n3. We became involved at the end of 2006, having won a limited, invited competition that autumn for a small site at the corner of Victoria Street and Vauxhall Bridge Road, opposite what is now known as n3.
Conceived originally as a typical Victorian High Street, until recently the rich hinterland of Victoria Street - its urban metabolism of hotels, schools and housing – had been obscured by large and monotonous twentieth century buildings. Numerous master plans seeking a singular visual order seem, in retrospect, perhaps always to have been doomed to be defeated by the fragmentary and episodic character of Victoria Street. What is emerging instead are several buildings that address specific situations, and yet which are also part of a contemporary whole, a new temporal layer within the urban sediment of Victoria revealing its hitherto submerged urban order. These seek to heal rifts in the urban structure, revealing connections between Belgravia and Victoria; reconnecting Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Street; opening pedestrian routes between City Hall and the urban grain to its east, west, north and south; reinforcing the density of uses and urban forms that one expects to find on a typical High Street. This fragmented approach is re-creating a typical London quarter, recovering the “mixed character” that Roy Porter describes, in London: A Social History (1998), of our typical metropolitan urban villages - albeit at a grand civic scale.
As is perhaps obvious, Victoria Street borders a number of Conservation Areas containing many of the most important and impressive buildings in the UK. Not all of these are significant solely for their architectural quality, but also for their role in the political life, statecraft, and civic culture of the country. Victoria sits in-between Belgravia to the west, with Buckingham Palace immediately north alongside Green Park and St James Park, with Westminster Cathedral approximately in its midfield, Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey to the east, with the River Thames to the south. In terms of the 2,000-year history of London itself, Victoria is a relatively new city quarter, originating in the 1860s following the creation of The Victoria Embankment. This coincided with the draining of marshland, and the canalisation of rivers that now flow underground into the River Thames.
For example, the River Tyburn flows directly beneath n2 in a sewer designed by the great Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Simultaneously, new train lines were laid into an old canal basin – thus feeding Victoria Station with commuters from Kent, Sussex and southwest London. These developments then led to the creation of the Circle and District Lines, buried just beneath the surface of the ground there. So, in introducing new transport infrastructure systems, layered on top of slightly older forms of technology (tube lines commingled with sewers) the builders of Victoria were engaged in the creation of a very modern form of city making.
These complex below-ground constraints at Victoria account for the fact that Westminster Cathedral (1895-1906) does not face east on cardinal orientation, in contravention of tradition and Canon Law. This is because it sits atop of and re-uses the foundations of the old Tothill Fields Bridewell Prison, which was previously situated in inhospitable marshland. John Francis Bentley won the RIBA Gold Medal largely for his masterful designs for the cathedral, yet he died before he could receive it (and so the prize was never actually awarded in 1902). Informed by Bentley’s trip to Venice and Istanbul (which he never reached) in search of architectural inspiration, and dedicated to the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Westminster Cathedral is aligned roughly northwest-southeast, approximately perpendicular to Victoria Street. Yet it appears as part of a coherent city quarter because of its proximity to streets of 5-6 storey brick Mansion Blocks, an urban grain that Bentley constructed for the Church to fund the creation of its new cathedral. Internally, Westminster Cathedral is pure structure, an architecture formed primarily of rhythmic mass and voids.
The ground beneath n2 is full of tunnels: tunnels full of water, and tunnels full of tube trains. This unusually porous subterranean condition led to a structural solution that forms the most obvious formal, spatial and tectonic characteristic of the building at ground floor - a series of enormous concrete and steel trusses. The largest, 45m x 9.5m, spans the whole of the southern face of the building and extends into the fabric of the building and the1st floor plant room.
Victoria Station was in fact originally two stations, constructed side by side by two different railway companies, and only unified as a single address
in 1923. The bricky, western side, known as the London Brighton & South Coast Railway part, was designed by the engineer Robert Jacob Hood, and opened in 1860. The much more articulate and deeper, pseudo-Baroque stone façade of the South Eastern & Chatham Railway part was designed by the architects Alfred Blomfield and WJ Ancell. It opened in 1909. Seen from one’s arrival at the station, n2 is very obviously the backdrop and setting for the Victoria Palace Theatre (1911), designed by eminent Victorian architect Frank Matcham. Giancarlo Floridi suggests that n2 addresses “Station Square”. Yet there is in fact no such place named in the maps of London. The station forecourt and the theatre façade do now resonate with each other more strongly than before, forming a legible urban spatial figure. The appearance of this hitherto unremarked and latent spatial relationship is aided and abetted by the presence of n2, Floridi observes. The intensification of a series of parallel urban layers of sympathetic architectural detail, and sheer geometric mass, seems to open the space of a clearing in front of the theatre, thus emphasizing the civic character of the public space between it, the theatre and the station
A linguistic-spatial resonance is intensified by the repetition of typical architectonic tropes across the facades of both the theatre and train station. The latter’s City Gate type is echoed in Matcham’s Proscenium Arch motif, and they seem very obviously to have been “speaking to each other”, as it were, in 1909, across the latent, or nascent, station square. In retrospect, it seems obvious that these architects would have acknowledged and responded to each other’s designs in a harmonic game of Call and Return (to use a musical analogy). They were working in dialogue with each other, figuratively at least - if not actually meeting and discussing work together in each other’s studiosjust as they were in imaginative dialogue with the deep time of architecture and history. The erudite ingenuity and the wit of our Victorian predecessors seems both delightful and obvious to us today.
Without directly referencing this Neo-Palladian Palace-Station-Theatre typological continuity in stylistic terms, n2 is nonetheless, like Adler and Sullivan’s early steel-frame offices in Chicago and Buffalo, clearly composed of a Base, a Middle and a Top. n2 references and defers to the architectural intelligence of the Victorian city, whilst seeking to reach out a friendly hand to try to retrospectively
IMG 03 Photograph as-built
IMG 04 From Bell Tower view
IMG 05 Public and private buildings executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1850, watercolour by JM Gandy
situate its more “autonomous” recent neighbours in the creation of a civilized part of the city. Elsewhere Floridi has called this work an example of “Civic Grace” - the title of a lecture series that he organized at Milan Polytechnic with his colleague Cino Zucchi to which I contributed in 2022. Civic graciousness is accompanied at n2 by an urbane approach to ecology: the deeper layers of the south façade of act as a new-old form of solar architecture, shading the interiors and reducing its energy consumption, whilst rhyming with, and echoing, the masonry detailing of its neighbours. This gesture is both scientific and artistic, ethical and aesthetic. Its embodies the civic “virtu” that Alberti saw as inherent to the ethos of all good architecture, and of ethical city life itself. This mercurial combination - of advanced engineering technology expressed in a recognizable architectural language, and of a revived architectonic and spatial imagination grounded in principles of passive environmental design - grounds the seemingly irreconcilable demands of commerce and engineering within a nuanced attitude towards both sustainability, ornament, and decorum. Alongside this the new public real embraces the natural world both literally and figuratively.
It does so within the cultural domain of townscape and heritage design, a methodology derived, Robert Tavernor recently suggested, from the Picturesque tradition of Humphrey Repton’s garden design practice. “Townscape” methodology, a term first identified by Gordon Cullen in the 1950s in London, is an urban compositional method based upon precisely “Verified Views” of new building designs placed into the context of neighbouring listed buildings, or within Conservation Areas, in order to evaluate the “damage” that new architecture might make to the Heritage Assets (i.e., a number of listed buildings) of its august setting. Parts of Victoria, including The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey at the eastern end of Victoria Street, are in fact designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Townscape design is now a highly sophisticated activity embracing Global Positioning Systems, Revit models and digital photography, resulting in Computer Generated Images - Verified Views - that have a status in English Planning Law similar to scaled orthographic drawings. Lynch Architects have embraced this design method as a means to determine precisely both scalar, morphological and architectonic characteristics. The aim of this method is the creation of a harmonic urban
picture, and so n2 is designed to be encountered as part of the urban tableaux. n3 will deepen this civic ethos further when it opens in 2028.
Speaking at the Architectural Association in January 2024, I called this emerging ethos, somewhat self-consciously, “Situated Idealism”. It is an ethos founded on an attitude towards a form of modernity and modern architecture, grounded in topography, geography, economics, and social reason. In this instance, the unusual circumstance today of the proximity of several buildings designed by a single architectural practice working over numerous decades - on multiple sites with various programs, adopting diverse spatial and formal types - has engaged us consciously also in questions of the appropriate anonymity and artistic character of city buildings. We have asked ourselves these questions with Aldo Rossi’s The Idea of a City (1966) in mind. Initially entitled, “The Forgetting of Architecture”, Rossi argued against the creation of “Pathological Types” - modern buildings whose civic anomy was baked-in alongside their inherent technological obsolescence. We are trying to address this pathology in two ways, seeking to future-proof architecture. Doing so primarily through the principles of passive environmental design combined with a serious approach towards urbane facade-making; and secondly, through the potential for re-use and ease of renovation – what Rossi called, approvingly, the virtues of “Projective Typologies”. This approach allows diverse uses and building programs to generate different design responses that are attuned primarily not only to “function”, but to their solar and civic orientation. We are creating individual buildings, often in pairs, capable of being perceived together, and singularly, as part of a hierarchy of legible, urbane architectural figures – as parts of a whole.
The figure of a human body within our façades - of actual bodies in windows and on balconies - is not just a metaphor, but a situated experience of being in the world in an urbane and healthy manner. In sum, our approach emphasises cultural continuity as much as the freedoms of modernity. Yet “freedom for” innovation is, in our ethos, not simply “freedom from” the social and cultural obligations of civic life. The imaginative potential of graceful design today still grows, fundamentally, from the situated idealism of civic architecture itself.
PATRICK LYNCH
FEATURED WORK
n2
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
2020 - 2023
Area
Total area (GIA) – 24,154 sqm
Office area (NIA) – 15,045 sqm
Client
Landsec
Architect
Lynch Architects
Employers’ Agent
Gardiner & Theobald
Structural Engineer
Robert Bird Group
Services Engineer
Aecom
Landscape Architect
Muf architecture/art, J & L Gibbons
Transport
Momentum Transport Consultancy Area
Cost
Aecom
Façade
Thornton Tomasetti
Lighting
Studio Fractal
Planning
Gerald Eve
Main Contractor
Mace
Contractor’s Architect
Veretec
Façade
Scheldebouw
Concrete Superstructure
J Coffey Construction
Structural Steelwork
William Hare
Basement substructure
Keltbray
Images
© Andy Stagg (cover, pages 14, 15, 27, 28, 29, 30, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54 & 66)
© Rory Gaylor (pages 02, 03, 08, 16, 17, 19, 23, 28, 31, 36, 38, 39 & 65)
© David Grandorge (page 05 middle & bottom)
© Miller Hare (page 13)
© Johan Dehlin (pages 04 & 12)
© Valentin Lynch (pages 24 & 60)
© Lynch Architects (all other images)
PUBLICATION
DATA INFORMATION
COLLECTION AMAG LONG BOOKS
VOLUME
LB 19
TITLE
LYNCH ARCHITECTS n2
ISBN
978-989-35617-5-1
PUBLICATION DATE
April 2024
EDITOR AND GENERAL MANAGER
Ana Leal
COLLECTION CONCEPT
Tomás Lobo
EDITORIAL TEAM
Ana Leal, architect
Filipa Ferreira, designer
Inês Rompante, designer
João Soares, architect
PRINTING
LusoImpress
LEGAL
DEPOSIT
480255/21
RUN NUMBER
1000 numbered copies
PUBLISHER AND OWNER AMAG publisher
VAT NUMBER
513 818 367
CONTACTS
hello@amagpublisher.com
www.amagpublisher.com
Other titles about this collection:
LB 01 DAVID ADJAYE mole house
LB 02 NICHOLAS BRUNS guimarães chapel
LB 03 DAVID ADJAYE the webster
LB 04 CARVALHO ARAÚJO casa na caniçada
LB 05 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES centro coordenador de transportes
LB 06 ANDRÉ CAMPOS | JOANA MENDES PEDRO GUEDES DE OLIVEIRA fábrica em barcelos
LB 07 DAVID ADJAYE winter park library & events center
LB 08 DAVID ADJAYE 130 william tower
LB 09 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS community hall laufenburg
LB 10 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school pfeffingen
LB 11 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS double kindergarten rüti
LB 12 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school aarwangen
LB 13 BRANDENBERGER KLOTER ARCHITECTS school birrwil
LB 14 ANGELO CANDALEPAS the castle
LB 15 PAUL MURDOCH ARCHITECTS flight 93 national memorial
LB 16 ÁLVARO SIZA monte da lapa volume l
LB 17 SO – IL amant
LB 18 AFF spore initiative
AMAG LONG BOOKS COLLECTION brings together a unique selection of projects that establish new paradigms in architecture.
With a contemporary and timeless conceptual graphic language, the 1000 numbered copies of each title document work with different scales and formal contexts that extend the boundaries of architectural expression.
