Turning Forms and the (Science) Fictions of Utopian Architecture
Nic Clear
Performance
Mathew
Architecture and the other arts have been mutually entwined since humanity first drew animals on cave walls or blew coloured pigment over their hands to leave a trace of human occupation.
— Neil Spiller
Surreal Urbanity
Sectors of the Exquisite City
Neil Spiller
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ARCHITECTURAL
Neil Spiller sees architecture as the mother of the arts, always seeking to bring his wide knowledge of the latter, particularly Surrealism and Dadaism, into his drawings and architectural designs. Over the course of a 40-year career, first as a student and then as an architect, he has experimented with automatic drawing techniques, détournement, sculpture and painting to further the art of architecture.
Neil is the Editor of 2, was Visiting Professor of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada (2020–22), and Visiting Professor at IAUV Venice in 2021. He was previously Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London. Prior to this he was Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at Greenwich, and Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL).
He has guest-edited eight 2 issues, including the highly successful Architects in Cyberspace I and II (1995 and 1998) and Drawing Architecture (2013), and more recently edited the issues Emerging Talents: Training Architects (July/August 2021), Radical Architectural Drawing (July/ August 2022) and California Dreaming (March/April 2023). His books include Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2006), Architecture and Surrealism (2016) and Educating Architects (2014), all published by Thames & Hudson. He is also the author of How to Thrive in Architecture School: A Student Guide (RIBA, 2020).
His architectural design work has been published and exhibited worldwide. He is an internationally renowned visionary architect and has been architecturally speculating with drawing for four decades. He is also known as the founding director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research (AVATAR) group, which conducts research into the impact of advanced technologies such as virtuality and biotechnology on 21stcentury design. He is also recognised internationally for his paradigm-shifting contribution to architectural discourse, research/experiment and teaching. 1
In Constant Renewal Interstitial Creativity
INTRODUCTION
Greenberg’s method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things like art itself, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal, trans-historical forms.
— Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 19861
On the first page of the introduction to her book debunking the notion that modern art was somehow a definite break from what constituted art in previous centuries, Rosalind Krauss evokes American art critic Clement Greenberg and his ideas about art as ‘it is to assert that the life of these forms is dependent on constant renewal, not unlike that of the living organism’.2 This of course, applies to architecture too.
Architecture and the other arts have been mutually entwined since humanity first drew animals on cave walls or blew coloured pigment over their hands to leave a trace of human occupation. Since those initial millennia-old moments there has been a continual dynamic process, a Greenbergian constant renewal.
This 2 explores, through examples of contemporary architects’ and artists’ work, the mutual benefits of bringing together the fields of architecture and art even closer and the extraordinary creative results that can be developed from these interstitial conditions.
Carl Laubin, Another Professor’s Dream: A Tribute to Charles Robert Cockerell RA, 2005
opposite: Capriccios are artistic conceits that bring views and scales of various objects together in a fantasy. In this case the life’s work of British architect CR Cockerell (1788–1863) is imagined in rooms of his own design. They are useful in showing the constant renewal and reinvention of their creator’s architectural lexicon.
Carl Laubin, Cloaked in an Ancient Disguise, 2004
right: This capriccio illustrates the oeuvre of British architect John Outram (born 1934). Over the course of his career, Outram has developed a formal metaphysical architectural language that melds aesthetically high-code and low-code ideas and objects – producing architectural elements, symbols, geometries and mythologies that can be read and interpreted on many levels.
Antique Artifice
All cultures make art and use that art – whether visual, haptic or aural – to adorn places of inhabitation or worship as well as objects. Encompassing a cornucopia of methods and practices, it often embodies a culture’s perception of its place and/or agency in the world and cosmos, and mediates its relationship to the dead.
Since the early days the depiction of nature – of flora, fauna and the mathematics it sometimes reveals – has inspired various architectural languages and concepts. From the hexagons of the beehive, to the acanthus leaves on the capital of the Corinthian column, to the serpentine tendrils evoking sweet-pea stems in Art Nouveau and much, much more.
We might think of the medieval stonemasons, sculptors and woodcarvers and the sublime synthesis they achieved over centuries, in numerous Gothic cathedrals and humbler parish churches across Europe. This multiplicity of symbolism, divinity, art and architecture created edifices capable of bringing mere mortals to their knees in prayer and awe. These semiotic, encrusted machines of worship resonate powerfully with all the tricks of the architectural trade plus all the artistic tropes at their creators’ disposal at the time, such as scale, storytelling, coloured light, sound, music, monolithic materiality, ritual, faith and not a small amount of people control.
Ian Chamberlain, Network II, 2022
A contemporary analogy of the Gothic cathedral’s spires, finials and jagged profiles could be said to be telecom aerials and masts. Their technologically advanced silhouettes inhabit our cities, thrusting into the sky similarly to how their medieval counterparts do.
Ian Chamberlain, Maststudio3, 2022
Chamberlain’s work is often etched on copper plates. Here the Gothic nature of communication masts is revealed in all their pre-printed glory – a landscape of scribings akin to the stonemasons’ tracings tables found in some cathedrals.
Nicholas Bava, Monument to a New Landscape, 2022
A work inspired by the imagined jungles of proto-Surrealist artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). Never having been to an actual jungle himself, Rousseau’s images were inspired by numerous visits to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes and Jardin d’Acclimatation, which were artfully designed with often-flawed representations of the real thing. Bava’s work mimics this uncanny aesthetic and reimagines it in the age of synthetic biology.
One is guided through their vast, highly articulated volumes, which also deny access for some to certain parts, dependent on who one is. The invention of the pointed arch served a joint benefit in that it is both structural and ecclesiastical (it represents the Holy Trinity, and is formed by three interlocking circles). The innovation of the Gothic arch was then extrapolated, put to use to configure high vaulted, pointed ceilings and structurally enabled by flying buttresses (all derived from the pointed arch’s architectural genetics), and richly carved in stone inside and out – a perfect synthesis. Artist Ian Chamberlain treats the finials and spires of communication masts in a reverential way, portraying them with a sense of wonder similar to the Gothic church; they are conduits for communication with higher numinous powers and virtual entities.
We might also think of the Baroque architectures and sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini who created many of the sublime urban design set-pieces of Rome (such as the colonnade at the front of St Peter’s Basilica, 1656–67), many of its most revered architectures and interiors and many of its most beautiful and extraordinary crafted, sculptural objects. He was the most talented, foremost multivalent designer of his generation. His marvellous artifice and skills combined with an ingenious aptitude to portray mythic, religious, metamorphic movement and ecstasy, plus an incredible ability to sculpt marble to look like flesh, all earned him long years of papal patronage. This was not all of the artistic pursuits at which he excelled; he also painted, designed furniture, fountains, funerary monuments, stage scenery and theatrical machinery and wrote/ directed/acted in plays. His mastery and integration of nearly all the arts in his work was simply extraordinary – another perfect synthesis. Similarly to Bernini, famed for his Apollo and Daphne (1622–5) depicting Daphne metamorphosing into a tree, but in a contemporary manner, artist and architectural designer Nicholas Bava has created a series of charcoal drawings that explore the metamorphic technologised landscape of today and its hybrid ontology, both natural and unnatural –strangely unnerving and glowering.
Vistas of Reflection
A more contemporary architect whose career followed a path of integrating the arts and also landscape into his architecture was Italian Carlo Scarpa. He was inspired by the craftsmanship and history of the Venetians, their glassmaking, their stonemasonry and their boat- and shipbuilding. He was also interested in Japan and the Japanese attention to detail and contemplation in both their buildings and their gardens. Such preoccupations conditioned highly original and subsequently much-admired buildings. A particular much-revered scheme, commissioned in 1968 and finished in 1978, is his Brion Sanctuary in San Vito d’Altivole near Treviso in Italy. Its centrepoint are the sarcophagi of Giuseppe Brion and his wife Onorina Tomasin. It is a masterful essay in its concrete materiality, the use of craft in its detail, water, and pensive, thoughtful vistas exhibiting a fusion of all of Scarpa’s Venetian and oriental references but reworked into an original architectonic synthesis. Whilst monolithic concrete is used to great sensitive effect by Scarpa, it was also the material of choice for the architectures of warfare. Ian Chamberlain, again, seizes on the daunting appearance of these architectures and represents them beautifully in their rough majesty.
The Roster
This 2 features architects and artists who, today, are seeking other sublime syntheses, with articles penned by themselves or by writers who admire them. The arrangement and order of pieces follows no predefined thematic structure but was merely constructed to surprise, keep the eye moving and intrigue.
The issue commences with historian and curator Paul Greenhalgh discussing recent work by British painter, architectural artist and printmaker Brian Clarke who has long been innovative in the realms of successfully combining the arts for sublime effect. He is particularly known for stunning, often large, modern stained-glass interventions into buildings.
Next is an article by Ian Ritchie, a consummate architect, displaying imagination, flair and skill in all aspects of architectural discourse. He could be described as a Renaissance Man, with a deep knowledge of the sciences as well as the arts. His creativity manifests itself in numerous forms, such as prose, academic papers, books, poetry, drawing, etching and sculpture as well as buildings. Here he outlines his creative methods and discusses some of his artist friends who inspire him.
Artist Ben Johnson produces intricate paintings. Whilst at first viewing they seem hyperrealist, they are in fact highly articulated meditations on the underlying geometries of architecture. In an interview he talks of his formative years, the evolution of his work and current preoccupations.
For years, architect Felix Robbins has been experimenting with integrating the underlying rhythms and detail of historical buildings, digitally collaging them and deconstructing them to create highly contemporary capriccios, diaphanous in their line work. His drawings are also embedded in his studies of secondorder cybernetics and he has certainly created a personal universe of architectural discourse unique to himself.
The monotone of Robbins' pieces is followed by artist Brendan Neiland’s highly colourful, airbrushed recent work which is described and extrapolated by his close friend, founding director of the World Architecture Festival, Paul Finch. Neiland uses the
city as a creative engine; in long walks through its glistening modern surfaces, he waits for it to reveal itself to him in jumpcut reflections, and captures its dazzling, collaged sublimity on his camera. He then retreats to his studio to produce his paintings with a painstaking methodology of precision and patience that creates the amazing vitality of his art.
Whilst Neiland’s work is imbued with the influence of the modern metropolis, Andy Goldsworthy’s art is often constructed with nature’s leaves, stones, ice and branches, to name but a few of the materials he has found and bent to his service. Here, as well as giving a lyrical context to his work in nature, writer Eva Menuhin takes us on a tour of his recent work of very architectural and interventionist pieces including ‘Hanging Stones’, which are both a landscape journey as well as a series of installations in small derelict buildings.
Ian Chamberlain, Mirror III, 2016
An illustration of a 30-foot (9-metre) diameter, cast concrete, parabolic sound mirror. Such acoustic mirrors were built along the UK coastline from 1916 to 1930. They were the forerunners of radar and constructed to give early warning of enemy aircraft by amplifying their sound.
Bigg has earned an international reputation as a graphic designer for his mastery of creating beauty from wonderfully composed fragmented marks, objects, textures and photographs, often using the pentimenti and palimpsests of previous works. Here, a room is implied with a window and a distorted tree – all flawed to perfection.
Like Zoe Zenghelis’s recent work, architectural designer and artist Nick Wilkey is interested in a painterly representation of archetypal architectural elements that are abstracted to a powerful yet simple geometry. Wilkey often sets his tableaux in a deep-horizon, Surrealist ground.
Chris Bigg, The Beauty of Imperfection, 2020
Nick Wilkey, These Towers We Build, 2023
Goldsworthy’s rough-hewn and organic surfaces contrast radically with American artist Danny Lane’s glasswork. Lane has a long history making glass furniture and architecturally scaled sculptures, often employing techniques he has developed himself – ‘bastard techniques’, as he calls them. In an interview he charts his influences, history and the philosophy within his oeuvre. Exploring the second-order art produced almost at random as a by-product of creative activity, architect Peter J Baldwin documents some interesting pentimenti and palimpsests that are associated with art and architecture. The tangible and sometimes intangible residues of this other site of artistic production widen the conceptual spectrum of this 2 and give us another view of what might be worth considering as we search for sublime synthesis.
Zoe Zenghelis’s painting has long been associated with architecture and the early work of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), of which she was a founder member. Later she became recognised as a painter in her own right. Her output often consists of delicate tones and architectonic, abstracted forms. Architect and educator Hamed Khosravi examines her recent work, its themes and preoccupations.
New Models of Artistic Production
In similar but very different ways to Goldsworthy’s ‘Hanging Stones’, art curator, writer and scholar Kathy Battista asks three fundamental questions: Why are artists, one of the least governmentally supported demographics in the US, providing community building projects where the cities have failed? How are these projects a form of artistic practice that builds upon the social practice of 1960s artists? How can disused architecture support urban regeneration and new models of artistic production?
Another model of artistic and architectural production are the high-tech methods of the spatial modelling research group Captivate, which creates high-fidelity virtual models using remote-sensing technologies to document historic buildings and landscapes for archaeological and pedagogic purposes. One of its three founding members, Simon Withers, writes on their activities, particularly in relation to work done in conjunction with the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Nic Clear, Dean of the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield, and Leeds Beckett University architectural tutor Hyun Jun Park use 3D-scanning equipment to create the raw material for their architectural propositions. This brings the technology out of the domain of just recording urban, architectural and artistic conditions: instead of passively surveying, it becomes a proactive element in the work.
The issue then moves on to sonic interactive environments. Architect, digital artist and sonic tapestry weaver Mathew Emmett asks: ‘What happens to architecture when you combine a legend of the German avant-garde and innovator of the Krautrock music genre with an architect-artist whose visionary work defines space as psychoactive? The answer lies in the futuristic worlds of Space Interface’ – an ongoing series of collaborative multimedia performances involving both.
On the Spectrum
This issue seeks to provide a brief glimpse into a spectrum of activities that can be leveraged in the pursuit of aesthetic, artistic and architectural joy. It introduces the reader to a cast of characters whose work may be unknown to them – or, if known, further elucidates their understanding and knowledge of them. Like the examples given in this introduction, each architect or artist has a history of constant renewal and sublime synthesis in their work. This is the only way for a successful creative to be. Each article explores the individuality of its subject and their creative practice. Enjoy soaking up the ambience and take inspiration from them. 1
Notes
1. Rosalind E Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986, p 1.
Transfo the Wor The Architectural Art of Brian Clarke
Brian Clarke is one of the UK’s foremost international artists. For the last four decades he has specialised in creating highly beautiful stained-glass work, instantly recognisable for its bright and arresting colours. His work is often thoughtfully integrated into buildings, providing them with a special sense of place. Paul Greenhalgh, Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, investigates Clarke’s creative trajectory.
rming ld
Commissioned for a private home in 2016, and completed in 2019, the St James’s project is one of Clarke’s most important interiors. The initial brief for a mosaic floor developed via his ideology of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, into a fully homogeneous environment.
Brian Clarke, Mosaic interior of St James’s House, London, 2019
Paul Greenhalgh
The life and practice of Brian Clarke is in many respects an exemplary product of 150 years of the Modernist project. More than this, for over 40 years his art has had a seminal relationship with architecture. In his own words, ‘Ever since my youth I’ve always proclaimed to be, in some mysterious way that I have difficulty explaining, connected to architecture. I respond to architectural culture, and to the way architects think. Over the years I’ve had many close relationships with architects, fewer with painters.’1
This is all the more interesting given that he is not an architect. In fact, his oeuvre has defied any of the available categorisations. He has on occasion referred to himself as an ‘architectural artist’. While this nomenclature does offer a description of much of what he does, for decades he has enjoyed recognition on the international scene as a painter in a mainstream sense. There is also a considerable body of sculpture, and over the past decade, his mosaic and tile work has been at the forefront of those disciplines.
Spectacular Pioneer
However, most significantly in the context of this publication, he is widely understood to be the most important stained-glass artist at work in the world today. He has worked with some of the leading architects of our times, including Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster. The latter has asserted that ‘Clarke is a contemporary pioneer in this field, and his direct involvement in the production of this medium is responsible for the molten fluidity that he has started to achieve.’2 He and Clarke have worked together on a number of spectacular projects.
At root Clarke’s oeuvre occupies a space created by key Modernist thinkers. He exemplifies the notion of Modernity as ‘an unfinished project’, and the underlying positivism of the first generation of pioneer Modernists is at the heart of his outlook. Central to this is the philosophical commitment to all practices in the arts functioning in an integrative, interdisciplinary way. It was integral to early Modernist manifestoes, summed up in the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Architecture, as the most important of the visual arts, was to be the site on which the integration of the arts took place. Interestingly, the term was first used by the composer Richard Wagner, in 1849, to describe his ambitions for opera. Gesamtkunstwerk underpinned the outlook of Wagner’s contemporaries, the Art Nouveau architect-designers such as Hector Guimard and Henri van de Velde, both of whose lives straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and in turn it was the central vision of Walter Gropius as he led the establishment of the Bauhaus from 1919).
Reintegrating Ornament
Yet in many respects, and despite the revival of ornamentation in Postmodern decades, architecture is less integrated now than it was then, and the intellectual culture of architecture remains distressingly isolated. Of course, there have been powerful exceptions to the generalised picture presented here. Le Corbusier considered himself as a painter as well as an architect, and felt the two arts to be interdependent. In our own era, the career of Sir Peter Cook has been one of crossing boundaries; and most spectacularly, Zaha Hadid
Brian Clarke, Stained-glass windows, Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont, Switzerland, 1990–97
above: Clarke’s new windows, set in the existing Gothic embrasures, animate the interior of the 13th-century abbey with a clever use of light and colour that recaptures the otherworldly ambience and retrospection so characteristic of ecclesiastical places – mythologies that can be read and interpreted on many levels.
opposite: The sanctuary window eschews the traditional motifs of Christianity in favour of an abstraction that inculcates a sense of appreciation of nature in the viewer.
The
general
failure to realise an integration of the arts has in some respects given Clarke’s practice a sense of mission
was committed to practice that brought the arts together. While she was an architect through and through, she is widely – and rightly – regarded as a painter of mainstream importance, and her aesthetic vision has resulted in masterpieces across the disciplines. She and Brian Clarke were occasional collaborators, as well as close friends.
But the general failure to realise an integration of the arts has in some respects given Clarke’s practice a sense of mission. Art historian Martin Harrison has said of his oeuvre that he ‘is fulfilling his ambition to re-integrate art and architecture’.3 We can recognise this impulse as one which roots back to his earliest career. Born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1953, Clarke benefited from the very liberal and progressive attitude to art education in the region, and so developed rapidly into a highly competent professional. He was first and foremost a painter, and recognised on the national scene as such, as well as a beguilingly gifted draughtsman. Despite the range of his practice in the following decades, painting has always been there, not simply as a practice, but as a way of seeing the world: ‘It is through painting that I understand how to view architecture. It is through painting that I can appreciate the rhythm of a poem. It is through painting that I can appreciate and draw pleasure from the structure of a well-composed sentence. And it is through painting that the complexity of music makes itself understood to me. It is through painting, in fact, that I am.’4
Norman Foster has shrewdly noted that ‘Brian Clarke is for me one of the most interesting of contemporary painters. I say “painter” because I know, from many conversations that we have shared, how important the act of painting is to him. He has come to regard it as a kind of touchstone to which he constantly returns, to be nourished by its disciplines.’5
The Discourse of Painting
In short, painting is a discourse, rather than simply a means of making imagery, and as a discourse it is one which has revealed itself capable of conceptually engaging with other major practices, not least architecture.
Most major painters who have engaged with stained glass came to it relatively late in their careers, such as John Piper, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger. By contrast, Clarke grasped its significance as a child, and so began to work in earnest with the medium early in his professional career, in 1973.6 By 1980, he was firmly established as a world figure in the medium.
While wholly a thing in itself, we might view the extraordinary power of Clarke’s stained-glass oeuvre as a product of the complex fusion of his obsessions with painting and architecture. More than this, as an art quintessentially about light, and the projection of colour through light, he realised that more than any other medium, it was capable of transforming space. Stained glass has always been a vital aspect of his art because from his earliest days, it allowed him to intervene in architecture.
Career Landmarks
There have been many landmarks in Clarke’s architectural career. An early seminal work, the roof canopy of the Queen Victoria Street Arcade in Leeds (1990) fused the grand tradition of Victorian arcades with the modern age. At the time, this
composition was the largest work in stained glass in Europe. Commissioned in 1996 and completed in 1997, his hundreds of ceiling panels for the Pfizer World Headquarters in New York accumulated into a giant environment. The core theme of the whole was the microbiology of viruses. Most spectacularly perhaps, in 2000 in Riyadh, in a collaboration with Norman Foster, he created the façade of the Al Faisaliah Center on an extraordinary scale. This was the largest work in stained glass in the world at the time. In 2006 in Kazakhstan, he worked again with Norman Foster on the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, known also as the Pyramid of Peace and Accord. This is perhaps one of his most overtly spiritual works: the tower exudes a sense of humanist spirituality.
While he has provided stained glass for a range of religious buildings, across faiths, Clarke does not view stained glass as intrinsically religious. As witnessed by his numerous works on public and corporate buildings, and on domestic architecture, he regards the medium as technologically driven, modern and a secular means of expression.
Brian Clarke and Norman Foster, Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, Astana, Kazakhstan, 2006
right: Brian Clarke and Norman Foster worked together to create a crystalline, pyramidic structure that surmounts Foster + Partners’ Palace of Peace and Reconciliation. Clark’s artwork at the apex of the pyramid acts as a beacon in the landscape.
Brian Clarke, Roof of Queen Victoria Street Arcade, Leeds, UK, 1990
above: In its time this roof canopy was the largest secular stained-glass art installation in the world – 120 metres (400 feet) long and spanning from one end of the arcade to the other. It is sandwiched between theatre architect Frank Matcham’s Victorian façades.
Brian Clarke, Ceiling of Pfizer World Headquarters, Manhattan, New York, 1997
The worldwide pharmaceutical company Pfizer commissioned Clarke in 1996 to design an illuminated ceiling depicting some of its highpoints as a company.
Brian Clarke, Stained-glass façade of Al Faisaliah Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2000
Clarke’s art easily makes the transition between cultural difference, motifs and semiotics. Here, within a building designed by Foster + Partners, the Arab world is assimilated and interpreted expertly and majestically.
Anatomical motifs abound.
Brian Clarke, Multi-faith and Wellbeing Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 2023–
In this Gesamtkunstwerk project begun in 2023, Clarke’s stained-glass window designs skilfully evoke the fecundity and beauty of nature and the cyclic renewal of spring, and will bathe those inside the building with a sense of peace and warmth.
‘Brian Clarke: The Art of Light’ exhibition, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 2018
opposite: Sculpting with the effect of the eye receiving photons through coloured glass, Clarke utilises the glazed end of the Sainsbury Centre to create spectacular views from outside the building, but the views are even more effective from the inside out.
Brian Clarke, Coach House Spa, Beaverbrook Hotel, Leatherhead, Surrey, UK, 2019
below: In a highly dynamic interior refurbished from an old coach house, Clarke has created a calm and beautiful progression of spaces reminiscent of nature and with episodes of various degrees of enclosure in the work.
Having said this, over the last few years he has continually worked on a project that has moved him into new terrain and carried the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk to its logical conclusion. The University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich (founded 1963) is celebrated for its late Modernist campus architecture. It is home to the Sainsbury Centre (1978), for example, Norman Foster’s first major public building, and Denys Lasdun’s famous campus, including his Ziggurat student residences (1966). The university asked Clarke to create a new centre for multifaith religious worship, which would also be its centre for wellbeing. He determined that he would create the entire building in a spectacular integration of all of the arts: stained glass, painting, mosaic, ceramic, metalwork and architecture. Most of all, the many huge stained-glass panels will throw light across the space and bathe those inside the building in colour.
Much of the glass in the UEA centre is based on nature, and especially on the flower form. A major theme in Clarke’s work of the last number of years, flower iconography has the important ability to simultaneously convey spiritual values in a pan-religious way, and celebrate the universal dimension of spirituality. And so, in the UEA Multi-faith and Wellbeing Centre, the artist, with his dynamic team, is creating a Gesamtkunstwerk for our times.
In conclusion, it is perhaps important to emphasise, in these politically dubious times, that for Clarke, architecture and stained glass have a public role. Neither has any meaning outside of the public arena, and both impact the quality of life of the communities they inhabit. Writer Kenneth Powell has noted that if one mentions public art to Brian Clarke, ‘you are likely to set him off on a line of argument which, though it is one he has often pursued, constantly causes him to question his own work, as well as that of others, and to urge a return to a way of working which was as familiar to the late Victorians as it was to the ancient Greeks but has got lost in the aftermath of the Modern Movement’.7
A public art for our times, that is capable of transforming the way we see the world. One cannot ask more of any artist. 1
Notes
1. Brian Clarke in Phillips de Pury & Company, Brian Clarke: Works on Paper 1969–2011, gallery brochure, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2011, unpaginated.
2. Norman Foster, ‘Introduction’, in Brian Clarke: Into and Out Of Architecture, Mayor Gallery (London), 1990, p 6.
3. Brian Clarke in Phillips de Pury & Company, op cit
4. Interview with Paul Beldock, in gallery brochure, Hessisches Landesmuseum (Darmstadt), 1989, unpaginated.
5. Norman Foster, ‘Preface’, in Brian Clarke: Microcosm (Stained Glass and Paintings), exh cat, Sezon Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo), 1987, unpaginated.
6. See Brian Clarke, The Great East Window, HENI Talk, 2021: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VYMMheq9DSg.
7. Kenneth Powell, Brian Clarke: Architectural Artist, Academy Editions (London), 1994, p 12.
Imaginative representations made ‘before’ and ‘after’ visiting the Arctic with Barbara Rae in 2016. Contrary to their expectations, there was little sea ice, and although the glaciers meeting the sea were an impressive sight, global warming was a very real presence.
Ian Ritchie, Arctic Imagined 2, 2016
Arctic Warming 3, 2018 (ooposite)
Ian Ritchie is not bound by stylistic fetishes and long-established, old-fashioned protocols of solving architectural problems. Each of his projects is designed from first principles, even before spaces and materials are projected. He prefers to get to know his clients and their organisations in extreme detail. At concept stage he uses the other arts to inspire his outputs – poetry, etching and painting, to name but a few. Here he describes his methodologies.
Barbara Rae, Achill Fence, 2013
Rae’s work explores the human impact on, and perception of, the world around us; how humankind’s presence in the landscape is defined by the marks we leave, and how colour and form affect our emotions, memory and imagination. The physical layering of texture and colour in her work, such as in the silkscreen print here, echoes the layered history, mood and atmosphere that her vision depicts.
‘You need to stop thinking. Just do.’ Easier said than done for an architect attempting to make a work of art in a medium with which he is unfamiliar. But when the artist offering advice is a good friend graciously letting him explore and play with the inks, rollers and materials in her Edinburgh studio, and happens to be Barbara Rae, whose sensuous use of colour in abstract, complex landscape paintings and prints has made her worldrenowned, this architect meekly bows his head and attempts to coerce the analytic mind into emptiness. Time spent in Japan as a young man gave me some insight into the art of seeing and the contemplative practice of silencing thought. Yet it is still difficult, especially for someone who initially reflects upon a new commission with words rather than drawings as most architects do.
There is a reason behind this seemingly anti-intuitive method of working. During the first preconceptual response to a project, a melding of cognitive knowledge and imagination takes place; inspiration and creativity are combined to produce percepts –words and images. Although drawing is the fundamental way of communicating an architect’s concepts and most architects begin that way, an architectural image, even if subsequently discarded, can leave a visual trace in the mind that locks in an initial idea. For the same reason artists will often scrape down a canvas completely after a false start, to begin again, rather than rework an existing painting. Words are more fugitive; they allow the freedom to explore various concepts for longer.
Architectural Calligraphy
Once I have a sense of the emerging project, the tentative phrases develop into a poem or even an aphorism influenced by a wide range of subjects, some of which have only tangential links with the project. It is only then that the Japanese brush pen
comes into play and a few lines are made – usually in black sumi ink on white paper. The drawing, never more than a few simple lines of architectural calligraphy, attempts to synthesise and reveal the essential aspects of the project from the words in a way that makes an object or space immediately tangible. Just as the poem or aphorism was the synthesis and distillation of multiple ideas and emotions, the subsequent calligraphic image incorporates complexity within simplicity, becoming more powerful as a result of the layers of embodied meaning within each line. These thoughtful and precise actions of hand and mind are the antithesis of the process of creating monotypes at Barbara Rae’s studio.
Leipzig Glass Hall
A framed emptiness brings down the sky to meet the earth.
Diaphanous shell stretched taut over squared silhouettes of thin round metal.
Light chases darkness. Shadows are holes in light. Colours flow throughout the space. Sunlight and cloud, the shadows come and go.1
This is the start of the conceptual and collaborative stage of the architectural design, which embraces both an aesthetic and pragmatic assessment and continues to cycle between the two, refining the concept to its ultimate end.
Ian Ritchie, Leipzig Glass Hall, Leipzig, Germany, 1996
Framed in an imposing yet delicate steel vault, 25,000 square metres (270,000 square feet) of glass arch over a lightflooded interior that still feels as new today as when it was finished. The etching, made in 2000, captures the essential aspect through two curved lines – one structural, the other glass – and hints of the links to the exhibition halls and the trees within: Portuguese oak and magnolia.
Ink, Acid and Metal
Occasionally the drawn lines translate the essential from the words in a way that is immediately identifiable. In such cases, these first brush drawings are often produced as etchings into a copper or zinc plate in the London studio of another friend – the artist, printmaker and Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd. One of the world’s most skilful masters of aquatints, Ackroyd is to acid as the painter JMW Turner was to water, using his vision and skill to capture the spirit and essence of landscapes on pale paper using only tones of black ink, just as the Chinese and Japanese masters of ink-wash painting did.
Ackroyd’s work was a revelation, because architectural drawings are a means to an end, primarily a tool and a source of information, although they can be, rarely, something of intrinsic aesthetic value. Architects use black and white primarily as proxies or alternates for light and shadow, to define space and volume, only a step in the process of converting their vision into structures. Ackroyd reveals the hidden rainbow within black, that most ancient, achromatic colour, transforming it by working through our memories to create landscapes that evoke a response from all the senses.
Silently watching him work is an education in the application of acids, sometimes delicately, with a fine brush, and in how acids etch metal; in the use of resins, aquatint and ink; in ink touching paper, and paper absorbing ink under pressure – and in slowing down when turning the drawings into etchings, for etching is not about speed but about reflection and light. Etching offers the artist the ability to layer tone, texture and line, to build them up using all the glorious effects the process makes available to invoke colour, and also to lay down the simplicity of lines that create architectural calligraphy. Yet there is nothing more frustrating than when a calligraphic line, carefully placed and beautifully formed after several attempts, is burned by over-etching – foul biting – the plate in the acid. There is agony within the ecstasy of creation using what William Blake calls the ‘infernal method’.2
Architectural Chimerism
Ian Ritchie,
Spire of
Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 2003
One tapering line drawn from the base – with a hint of a Celtic spiral – ends in Ireland’s ever-changing skies. The simple line conceals the enormous design challenges of realising this urban sculpture. It is 3 metres (10 feet) in diameter at its base, anchored into the granite below, rising to 120 metres (394 feet) and narrowing to 15 centimetres (6 inches) at its tip.
There is, naturally, a concordance between an architect’s initial brushstrokes (or pen strokes or CAD drawings) and the built reality of the final architectural or industrial design. Architecture is about feeling spaces, surfaces and textures in one’s mind through imagination, and then translating these into spaces that respond to the demands of the project. And architecture will inevitably have the architect’s own personality embodied within it, as with any artist’s work. Here lies the unquestionable origin of the art in architecture – as opposed to mere buildings – and it is the characteristic that gives architecture its tangible humanity. It can also be its downfall, if the architect forgets their responsibility to the building’s users. Architecture has a function, a social commitment, whereas art is a personal act of communication. Architects with an eye on posterity selfconsciously create drawings and buildings that reinforce the idea of individual artistry as a basis for their buildings, with poor (non-functional) architectural results.
Norman Ackroyd, Stac an Armin – Evening, St Kilda, Scotland, 2010
The rocks of this sea stack in the St Kilda archipelago are partially covered with guano, white as snow, from its gannetry, one of the largest in the world. The artist has brought them alive in this etching with wonderful changing tones of black and white, capturing the essence of their stark beauty.
Ian Ritchie, Stenness Stones 12, Orkney, Scotland, 2017
below: More than 5,000 years old, the four menhirs are what remain of a Neolithic circle of 12 stones, sited on a thin sliver of land between the freshwater Loch of Harray and the sea Loch of Stenness. As the stones are lifted from the bedrock, they break along natural fracture lines, creating the angular ‘cut’ at the top. The monotype here attempts to capture their age and physical presence, and an impression of the colossal energy needed to erect them.
Architecture has a function, a social commitment, whereas art is a personal act of communication
There are some projects where the architectural synthesis of the man-made with nature – the synthesis of ideas, intentions and materials into form and space in time and light – can be turned to a purely artistic end, as was the case with the Spire of Dublin, or Monument of Light (2003), designed to replace Nelson’s Pillar (1809), blown up by the Irish Republican Army in 1966. It is a refined engineered structure designed to conduct light — a light pipe turned inside out. The concept, an embodied search for a beautiful expression of optimism in the form of a monument without individual or political allegiance, gave the structure meaning in itself. The quality of its surface ‘captures’ the lights of Dublin’s changing skies and brings it to earth as a soft line, allowing it to flow to the street below and disappear into the granite rock on which it is anchored. Its base is patterned, leaving partly polished areas surrounded by the shot-peened surface that reflects the light of street life. Its pattern is derived from the interplay between a scanned sample of the granite rock and the double helix of DNA representing the Irish diaspora. At night the Spire becomes darker than the sky, as if the earth’s shadow is being drawn upwards, leaving a tapered cut in the horizon.
For the Delight of Art
But the seductive notion of making art for its own sake again, simply for the sheer delight of it, not done since childhood, came relatively recently, about 25 years ago, as a result of accompanying Norman Ackroyd on his annual boat trips through the wild waters surrounding some of the most remote and beautiful landscapes of the British Isles, where he captures the flickering, shifting moods of light as it reflects off landand seascape. The drawings done during those holidays are a rediscovery of what it means to have the time to look at the natural world, and to find joy in the act of drawing.
One stereotype about architects, among many, is that they don’t ‘do’ colour. Another is that they only wear black. Many architects do use colour, of course, but like many clichés these have a basis in fact. When the architect creates a space, they are also creating a stage for the lives of the people who will occupy it, so neutral colours are a way of ensuring their preferences can be accommodated.
Ian Ritchie, Study in Light 2, 2014
Monoprint from a series made with no thought other than of how to capture the day, the night and their combined spectrum in one imaginary landscape of light. It was also an experiment in the technique of colour overlays.
