Pattern Place Purpose Essays by Proctor & Matthews Architects

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Proctor and Matthews’ Bermondsey studio, London

Pattern Place Purpose S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h e w s

Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. 1

1988, the year Proctor and Matthews was formed also saw the publication of the first English edition of Italo Calvino’s Charles Elliot Norton Lectures- Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Here Calvino articulated a series of characteristics—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency—which he passionately believed were central to inspired works of literature. At a time when public architectural debate seemed to be focussed around issues of style—postmodernism or iconic form-making— these observational essays seemed to offer an alternative series of strategies which could have equal relevance to architectural design as to that of the written word. The memo on “Lightness” offered most. The central tenet here that good stories, like traditional folk tales should lift beyond earthly constraints—”the weight… the opacity of the world”—and ascend to another realm even suspending

belief, reinforced for us the thought that good design must always look beyond the pragmatic brief of any project.2 It is not sufficient to merely create buildings which provide solutions to a series of technical performance specifications, spatial audits and detailed room schedules. It is after all this approach which often leads to the banality and standardisation of business parks, budget hotels and both subsidised and private housing developments across the country. The safe, predictable, yet impoverished products, of which we are all too familiar, are driven solely by a slavish adherence to Quality Indicators, notional space and performance standards, technical design guides and nothing else. As designers we have a responsibility to offer more than this: to have one foot in the pragmatic world through a strong dialogue with clients and stakeholders, but to simultaneously look beyond—to defy gravity and ultimately to exceed expectations. It is this challenge or aspiration which continues to inform an approach to design within our studio. This has led away from an architectural ‘house style’ towards more project and site-specific investigations. Strategies to solve the often demanding constraints of user requirements are

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combined with ideas for engaging with a contextual and cultural continuity. The investigations are overlaid with an abstract architectural dimension—the unexpected catalyst or ‘armature’. In a search for a guiding precedent, an urban example which continues to inspire us, is that of the seventeenth century Plaza de la Corredera in Cordoba, Spain. Here ‘historical layering’ combined with the ‘shock of the new’ created one of Europe’s most dynamic urban experiences to rival the great squares of Salamanca and Madrid. Influenced by the geometric footprint of earlier Roman structures (and now a market place and occasional bullfighting arena), this ‘set piece’ formal gesture acts as an unpredicted counterpoint to the Medieval Islamic background morphology—a woven filigree of alleyways and private courtyards. While supporting an entirely different institutional function, the rigorous form of the seventeenth century St Thomas Hospital in London

must in its day have delivered a similar counterpoint. These juxtapositions of urban form constitute and heighten the visual drama of the streetscape. The imposition of a ‘utopian’ gesture onto the textual backdrop of city fabric is also exampled in the loggias and colonnades of Renaissance Italy. Vasari’s Uffizi for example, a linear court ‘facade’ embedded in the Medieval core of Florence, overlays a spatial clarity onto the irregular city plan, acts as a powerful stabilising element within the city form and completes a strong sequential ‘armature’ connecting the Piazza della Signoria with the River Arno and the Pitti Palace beyond. In Arrezzo, Vasari similarly imposed the structured loggia of the Piazza Grande transforming the northern facade of the Medieval square: an architectural device which not only provides a structured visual focus to the principal square, but overlays a spatial coherence to the lateral movement across the town.

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Opposite Loggia, Piazza Grande Arrezzo Top left Plaza de la Corredera, Cordoba. Image courtesy Google 2009 Bottom left Uffizi, Florence Right Eighteenth century engraving, St Thomasâ€™ Hospital

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In all these examples it is notable that the theatricality that the ‘set piece’ gesture brings to the reading of the city’s context, somehow overshadows their respective programmatic content. A fascination for architectural contrasts within urban compositions has not only evolved from observations on specific historic precedents but is also inspired by the graphic sequential vision studies of Gordon Cullens’ Townscape.

Designs for Priory Quarter, Hastings; Brixton Central; the Hills Road hotel, Cambridge and Hanbury Quarter, Chelmsford, build on these observations. They explore spatial narratives and surface hierarchies, to deliver an episodic sequence of events and viewpoints which, on the one hand, are contextual and, on the other, play to the element of surprise. Wherever humanity seems condemned to heaviness … I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the reaction of present and future….3

Architecture must begin and end with the needs and aspirations of both the individual and the collective. Buildings which make little or no contribution to the public realm, which do not engage in supporting convivial activity or addressing life’s purpose beyond the purely functional are destined to deliver an impoverished experience. For us the primary motivations in any design exercise are social and cultural. These are considered first and inform an appropriate response to the functional and technical needs of a building in a holistic approach to design. The social His poetic descriptions of “enclaves” and “enclosure”; “indoor landscapes” and “outdoor rooms”; of “here and there”, “projection and recession” and “mystery” suggest an architecture of light and shade; of incidence and surprise. Yet nearly half a century later there still exists a dominant prevalence; an expectation in architectural design for buildings which display a uniformity of expression irrespective of aspect, orientation or elevational hierarchy. Despite this, the formal ‘showman’ fronts and uncontrolled rambling backs of the archetypal British seaside town, for example, continue to deliver townscapes of hidden contrasts and vibrancy. It is these qualities which we find so intriguing. Similarily, Stirling and Wilfords un-built project of 1980 for the extension to the chemistry department at Columbia University provides an almost caricatured exercise in the juxtaposition of contrasting forms and elevational treatments. The contextual or somewhat referential outer street composition provides the restrained counterpoint to the dramatic inner court expression of the buildings technological programme.

P a t t e r n P l a c e P u r p o s e / S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h ew s

Opposite James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, NYC 1982 Right Pieter de Hooch, A Courtyard in Delft with woman and Child, 1658

agenda of any time is central to the creation of architecture with cultural lineage. As the Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck explains, understanding how to respond to these social and cultural needs comes in part from an awareness of a “continuum” in architecture and society. It seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the mind’s interior as a continuum... this is not a question of travelling back, but merely of being aware of what ‘exists’ in the present—what has travelled into it: the projection of the past into the future via the creative present.4

The need for architecture to be a part of this thread focuses interest in an understanding of historical precedent. How design addresses social issues is often guided by reference to how others met similar challenges in their own time. Pieter de Hooch’s depiction of domestic life in Delft in the seventeenth century provides a relevant observation of the spatial transition between the public life of the street and the semi-private realm of the domestic courtyard.

greater emphasis on the reinstatement of our public spaces, amenities and infrastructure. With this intensification has come higher density living with a greater overlapping of home, work and leisure. This trend is delivering more urban vitality, will eventually ease traffic congestion and is restoring health to our cities. It is also posing very real design challenges particularly in the British context. New places of public interaction need to be countered with places of private retreat and quiet contemplation. These realms are central to the development of projects like the Greenwich Millennium Village (a joint venture development by Countryside Properties and Taylor Wimpey Developments in association with The Homes and Communities Agency), where a rich hierarchy of public and private space support the built densities proposed. Equally our proposals for the Governments’ Carbon Challenge competition at Hanham Hall did not begin with technologically advanced typologies but with public and private realms that could support and address the interdependence of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of our time.

We both greatly admire the social ideals and creative use of technology of the early Modernists. We may criticise their sacrifice of complexity, diversity and incident, but their inspiration for us lies in the search for a democratic architecture and language that could respond to the overwhelming social problems prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century. The way these architects explored the new agenda for living remains a constant source of inspiration. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, architects appeared to lose touch with social idealism as a creative force. Mainstream architecture became entangled in corporate aspirations, which often failed to respond to the broader social issues of the time. Much postmodern architecture appears shallow but so does the more recent and extensive employment of modernism as merely a style. We now live in an age where the architectural debate is once again focussing on underlying social issues which today include protection of the environment and its impact on people’s livelihood and well being. We are at the point when architecture appears to be evolving faster as a result of unprecedented personal, social, technological, economic and global changes. Buildings must respond to new conditions on all these interconnected levels. The urban renaissance witnessed throughout the past 15 years is hopefully set to continue, but requires a

The plan for the site at Hanham Hall proffers a template in miniature for the sustainable urban environments of the future.

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Buildings need also to be anchored in their wider social, historical and economic context. Our design approach embraces both an analytical understanding of these issues and an intuitive response. For us, architecture needs to make an active connection with the past, present and future through reference to the wider landscape of context. When everything else has gone from my brain— the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighbourhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.5

So begins the prologue to Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. It is this distillation of an essence or a sense of place, which is interesting in the creation of a work that is rooted in its context. A building should do much more than visually ‘fit in’—so often the confused mantra of Planning Departments—it should engage with the past, simultaneously participating with existing conditions and create a stimulating dialogue for the future. Design guidance, especially for those areas singled out for conservation often calls for a design response that should “contribute to and enhance” the character of an area. Successful interventions are often judged by a building’s ability to respond to these parameters by means of a submissive or referential dialogue with its physical surroundings. What is often missing is the magic

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Opposite Masterplan, Hanham Hall with circular enclosures for productive landscapes This page Wolvercote, village extension

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of an intuitive response to a broad understanding of context. Creative intuition can enable a design response to engage with the political, ecological, social and historical dimensions (as in the case of our Karlsruhe competition submission), and help anchor buildings in the spirit of a place. Architecture that manages this metaphysical dimension is sometimes able to connect past, present and future in a timeless dialogue. The limited competition schemes for neighbourhood extensions to the village of Wolvercote in Oxfordshire (for Oxford University) and suburban Houghton Regis near Luton are focussed on the re-definition of existing

settlement boundaries. In both locations the predominance of unstructured suburban housing typologies with standard front and back garden arrangements have created ill defined and incoherent edges and thresholds between existing neighbourhoods and their landscaped settings. The proposition for higher density, mixed-use masterplans, in these schemes required contextual investigation which extended beyond that of the existing fragmentary housing stock. The historic centre of Wolvercote focuses on the green, whilst the village boundary, although defined by

extensive water courses, is marked by a series of nodal, publicly accessible vantage points or ‘belvederes’. These unique elements within the landscape morphology of Wolvercote provided clues for our restructuring of the new village quadrant. The amorphous built context at Houghton Regis—a random collection of cul-de-sac housing estates again offers little in terms of a strategy for ‘conventional’ contextual studies. The flood plain location however triggered typological investigations of similar ‘vulnerable’ settlements. In response, the design concept—with clearly defined, almost ‘walled’ boundaries and protected

central square—proffers a counterpoint to unstructured suburbia, a clear neighbourhood identity and a catalyst for the spatial orientation of the surrounding estates. Dillard’s “dreaming memory of land” triggered our specific topological response in the creation of an architectural masterplan for the central quarter of Castle Hill, near Ebbsfleet in Kent. Dwelling types and cluster configurations were developed specifically for the dramatic southfacing slopes of a disused quarry. An articulated sawtooth

P a t t e r n P l a c e P u r p o s e / S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h ew s

Opposite Houghton Regis. Concept cartoon defining the new neighbourhood boundary Top Castle Hill. Sawtooth profile Bottom Castle Hill neighbourhood hillside space

profile of staggered courtyard villas was proposed, creating distinctive silhouettes and maximising views to the south, with a focal lake and chalk cliff escarpment quarry edge as the termination of framed vistas across the new neighbourhood. Conceptual ideas—the hidden spirit behind spatial configurations, forms and constructional detail, are a continuing architectural quest. Many times the search is inextricably linked to contextual anchoring and the creation of thematic armatures that transcend the pragmatics of a utilitarian brief. These are the devices that clearly define thresholds, ‘set piece’ architecture like the Renaissance loggias mentioned earlier. Projects like the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart by James Stirling and Michael Wilford and the earlier Olivetti Training Centre in Haselmere, by James Stirling, extend the city analogy to building scale. The architectural promenades imbedded in all these examples influenced our design of the unifying roof and loggia elements at Poplar Pier, the Gorilla Kingdom boardwalk at London Zoo, the entrance to John Eccles House and the emerging sequence of public spaces that are central to our project at Priory Quarter, Hastings. In this last project the new ‘twitten’ (a local traditional spatial typology) became the armature that not only structures a new public realm but also (through its three-dimensional expression) binds the public world of both building and city together. Devices like these can provide the regenerative catalyst for urban renewal or hierarchically create the thematic framework for the architectural organisation of space. The celebration of ‘threshold’ can even occur within the depth of a wall. The painting Woman at the Window, 1822, by Casper David Friedrich, evokes the dramatic potential of

captured views, controlled daylight and shuttered retreat. The layering of threshold space at our Shelley Road apartment buildings in the London Borough of Brent helped reinforce the sense of neighbourly protection. Similarly, the courtyard entrance sequence to each home from the street or communal garden at Phase 2 of the Greenwich Millennium Village do the same, while both Abode in Harlow and the Chronos Buildings in Whitechapel employ levels, stairs and platforms that create an overlapping of private and semiprivate space. The layering of facade components is employed to support these transitions. We often utilise framing elements, embedded or free standing, to delineate the boundaries of space, celebrate entrances or to control views. Our projects in Harlow and Hastings together with the proposals for Wolvercote all employ frames in this way.

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Top Poplar Pier. Unifying roof and loggia Bottom James Stirling, Olivetti Training Centre, Haselmere, 1969â€“1972

P a t t e r n P l a c e P u r p o s e / S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h ew s

Left Casper David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822 Right Shelley Road. Entrance court and staircase

Society is currently faced with an unprecedented and accelerating rate of change: life patterns, career changes, family restructuring, economic circumstances, choice through media, mid-life re-training and education. Buildings should respond in some way to this transient characteristic, to serve a society in flux.

high density neighbourhoods; a considered alternative to the call for high-rise apartment living as the only viable option for the densification of British towns and suburbs. An apartment culture so prevalent in mainland Europe appears to be at odds with a peculiarly British psyche—‘the English home as castle mentality’—firmly focussed on aspirations for ‘houses with gardens’. Inspired by the work of Serge Chemayeff and Christopher Alexander and the domestic architecture of Eric Lyons and Span we embarked on a series of designs for courtyard homes.6 Studies which included Homegrown and an un-submitted proposal for the government’s £60k House design competition were developed further in work prepared for an exhibition at the Building Centre in 2005 examining the potential for small prefabricated courtyard housing clusters to deliver densities of over 70 dwellings per hectare for urban and suburban locations.7 The courtyard in each home provides the domestic armature for flexible living. By maximising the number of habitable rooms with access or aspect onto this private retreat, a pattern of use of spaces within the home can evolve and adapt over time, and engage in a spatial dialogue of inside and outside extended seasonal use.

In recent years, studio research into flexible patterns of domestic architecture has focussed on the design of low-rise

The elements in design which facilitate change—that allow space to adapt—have been around for centuries. Embedded

These devices are also used at a small scale in the De Havilland prototype live/work apartment, the bespoke kitchen in the Chronos Buildings and the reception desk at The Workhouse in Poplar, East London. In this way assemblies at the smallest scale can become the armatures of domestic design. Inspired by the literal, the metaphorical, or the abstract, armatures help to drive the design through all stages of evolution. Unaffected by the specifics of building functions these conceptual ideas bring clarity and coherence to the minefield of the protracted building process—unpredictable planning regimes, building economics and procurement methodologies—and help to steer the project from design to completion.

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Top Wolvercote. Study for attic storey with captured view Bottom De Havilland House. Live/work apartment

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Left Chronos Building. Kitchen ‘frame’ Right Marc Quinn flexible studio/gallery

in the distillation of planning and sectional configurations, building typologies have enabled, for example the industrial warehouses of the nineteenth century to become the loft living phenomena of the late twentieth century. Similarly the modernist experiments of Le Corbusier at the Unité d’habitation in Marseille, and in Britain, the revolutionary work of Wells Coates for the Isokon building at Lawn Road, North London, proffer the small simple devices that allow for the day-to-day adaption of domestic change. The sliding walls and acoustic screens in both these projects and the simple way in which they enable open plan space to be converted to smaller subdivisions with ease influenced the designs of both the apartments at the Greenwich Millennium Village and the studio and gallery for artist Marc Quinn. By bringing service cores to the middle or edge of the plan surrounded by free flowing multi-use space and introducing sliding or folding screens, enables the immediate adaption of space for different patterns of use. Service cores are brought to the middle of the plan and sliding or folding screens are introduced creating free flowing multi-use plans that enable immediate adaption of space for changing patterns of use. There is, of course, a danger in designing for flexibility. Designs can fall short of initial functional intentions, and deliver buildings which are both inappropriate for specific use and future adaptability. However, the creation of successful flexible space is not an exercise of the architecturally clairvoyant, but an acceptance that change will occur without the need to predict in detail the nature of future uses or configurations. Obviously the fun in design is to sketch out possibilities without prescribing absolutes.

The big floating roof of the Poplar Pier design which was to provide the umbrella under which a multitude of ever changing community activities could take place, is a device repeated later in the Gorilla Kingdom design. Here the canopied boardwalk—the realm of the zoo visitor—acts as the controlling armature around which animal environments and night accommodation can radically change in configuration in response to improvements in animal welfare techniques over time. In many ways it is the ‘set piece’ rigour of these physical armatures which allow for flexibility and adaptability to exist. In a simple way the combined concrete reception bench and stair in our own studio in Bermondsey acts as the focus around which office life revolves. The entry for the Scotswood design competition—Mi Home, a contemporary terrace house—takes this idea one step further by locating a living wall at the heart of the home. This ‘cabinet of curiosity’ houses the most intimate of spaces within the home— bathrooms, kitchen, snug, study space, stair and storage for personal possessions. It is not a cluttered attic but is considered as a memory box or SIM card for the home. In moves towards the creation of a more inclusive society, community consultation is advocated as the panacea for a responsive architecture. The danger in this approach is the creation of a building with the finite agenda of an end-user group at one moment in time. We should avoid short-termism and design loose-fit structures for future generations. Providing the sustainable communities of the future will involve reducing the need to commute, through encouraging a mix of working, living and leisure environments.

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Top Modular courtyard housing. Prefabulous Exhibition 2006 Bottom ÂŁ60k modular homes

P a t t e r n P l a c e P u r p o s e / S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h ew s

Top left Chermayeff

L iv i n g

and Gordon, courtyard

K i t ch e n

house plans

Dining

B e d ro o m

Top right Eric Lyons,

Bathroom

Span courtyard

Study

house, Blackheath

Outdoor space

Bottom Proctor and Matthews’ studio. Reception Bench

In recent years we have witnessed a disturbing trend within the construction industry, which appears to promote the severance of concept design from what is perceived as the technical rigours of building assembly. This has been paralleled, some might say fuelled, by certain Schools of Architecture who struggle to instil students with a passion for materials and detailing—often abandoning the raw materials of architecture in favour of the theoretically tangential and dangerously esoteric.

entrances to each home at Abode, were all chosen for these reasons. There is clear articulation of building elements: roofs float (as in the design for the Hollick and Bucknall houses in Haddenham) and walls become planes or surfaces with depth and direction. Windows and openings

As students we were often encouraged to look beyond the restricted confines of architectural space to the broader context of city form and the discipline of urban design. Within the studio we now operate within a wide range of scales from that of regional and city gestures and building form to architectural components and material specification. There is a persuasive yet ambitious tenet, which links through issues of hierarchy of space and gesture, the macro to the micro in design. The generating principles of urban frameworks influence the detailed assemblage of buildings. With this in mind, we search for the devises that provide animation—textures, colours, light and shade—the palette of materials and detailing strategies, which can begin to energise and enrich, turning the diagrams of abstract space into architectural places for human habitation and interaction. Materials are selected as much for their colour and textural qualities as for their technical performance. The heavily figured douglas fir veneered panels on the pierced walls and soffits of the Gorilla Kingdom boardwalk at London Zoo and the stone filled gabions that mark the

form the seams between changes in surface texture; the point of interface between contrasting materials. We find delight in the unconventional use of the traditional palette, stimulating a dialogue between the craftsmanship of the past and industrial components of a factory aesthetic. The prefabricated flint panels on the Hall House in Norfolk, the steel and clay tiled porch assemblies at slo, Newhall, Harlow and the woven eucalyptus patchwork for the Lions of the Serengeti canopy at Whipsnade are all examples of this approach.

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Scotswood design competition. Mi Home with memory box

P a t t e r n P l a c e P u r p o s e / S t ep h e n P r o c t o r a n d A n d r ew M a t t h ew s

Proctor and Matthews’ studio with Albert Irvin paintings

For us, building assembly is inextricably related to a response to the surrounding environment and prevailing climate. In a deliberate rejection of an aesthetic minimalism in detailing, we are concerned with developing compositions that result in pronounced modelling—a mannerist response— that engages with a quality and play of light. By extending an architectural tradition that respects and responds to the implications of climate—in this way, we aspire to create an architecture that improves with time. On the walls of our Bermondsey studio on London’s South Bank, hang two paintings by the octogenarian artist, Albert Irvin—layered urban abstracts which describe the city in terms of “colour, energy, space and light. Kaleidoscopic arrangements... variously opaque and translucent”.8 Elemental motifs repeat in his work—grids, disks, stripes, boxes, and quatrefoils—part of a formal vocabulary which creates a “talismanic presence”.9 It is the energy embedded within these paintings and strategies to which

we aspire. A vibrancy and optimism which is “unashamedly joyful” yet engaged with a spirit of place.10 In an analysis of his own work, Irvin often refers to a description of artistic explorations by the pianist, Alfred Brendel, who observed “It is a mixture of the intellect and the emotion, of strategy and ecstasy.”11 An equilibrium of the analytical and the intuitive should, we believe, deliver buildings which lift the spirit and exceed the pragmatic expectations of any building brief.

Footnotes: 1, Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 2, Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 3, Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 4, Quoted in Aldo van Eyck’s Works, Ligtelijn, Vincent, ed., Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999. 5, Dillard, Annie, An American Childhood, New York: Picador, 1988. 6, Chermayeff, Serge and Alexander, Chrisopher, Community and Privacy– Towards a New Architecture of Humanism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966. 7, Prefabulous London—The A to Z of Modern City Homes, 2006. 8, Dunne, Aidan, Albert Irvin Four Score, London: Gimpel Fils Gallery, 2002. 9, Dunne, Albert Irvin Four Score. 10, In conversation with the artist Peter Fink–observations of Phase 2 of Greenwich Millennium Village. 11, Quoted in Moorhouse, Paul, Albert Irvin, Life to Painting, London: Lund Humphries, 1998. Picture Credits: P8, © David Churchill P11 Above, © 2009 Google Imagery, © 2009 Digital Globe, Instituto de Cartografia de Andalucia, GeoEye P12, P18 Left, © James Stirling/Michael Wilford Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal P13 © The National Gallery, London P19 Left, ©bpk, Berlin/ Nationalgalerie, SMB/ Jörg P. Anders, AI918 ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5 Black Dog Publishing Limited 10a Acton Street London WC1X 9NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097 Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 8682 info@blackdogonline.com www.blackdogonline.com British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

E n g l i s h n e s s a n d M o d e r n A r ch i t e c t u r e / A l a n P owe r s

Englishness and Modern Architecture A l a n P owe r s

“People have said that our work is very English, but they haven’t been able to articulate it very well”, says Stephen Proctor. Despite the difficulty of articulating Englishness, critics have identified it in the past as a weakness whenever they think they can detect it. What are they, in fact, seeing? Can it be articulated in a positive way?1 In his film Robinson in Space, 1997, Patrick Keiller, an architect by training, made ‘the problem of England’ the thread on which to hang his picaresque narrative of two depressive and alienated intellectuals in search of the soul of their country. While architecture is only incidentally a theme of the film (despite having been Keiller’s first career), it poetically and comically exposes the complex deception that England has become, not only with its buildings evoking the past, but with its concealment of economic reality behind a series of screens, so that most of the time the real activity of the country is invisible. The historical content of the film suggests that fakery has been going on a long time, as a form of denial of unpalatable realities underlying the wealth and power of the ruling class. Robinson in Space was made during the John Major years, before the unfulfilled promise of New Labour, which included the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales, prompting questions of what real English identity remained

when these more vocal and assertive identities were subtracted. The official celebration of the Millennium itself, at the Dome, was described as “flashy, arrogant, dishonest and empty at the centre”.2 An event that was meant to enhance a sense of Englishness offered pretentiousness and evasion. En route to the Dome, the public might have passed by the Millennium Village, where Proctor and Matthews were the designers of housing, distinguished by bright coloured panels, as well as by an exemplary concern for shared public space that was intended to set an example for a new wave of governmentpromoted housing. The first units were ready for occupation at the end of 2000, alongside taller housing by Ralph Erskine (Erskine Tovatt), and a school and health centre by Edward Cullinan, forming the core of a future community. Such conspicuous exposure was risky, but there was something generous and good humoured here that the Dome was lacking. Reviewing the scheme in 2003, Stephen Chance, an architect with PTEa, a larger and longerestablished housing-based practice, praised “the strong visual brand” that distinguished the housing by Proctor and Matthews and Erskine. 3 Kenneth Powell called it “crisply detailed and colourful–and not over folksy–an antidote to the drab surroundings.”4

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This has remained an apt description for most of the partnership’s work, although their liking for bold visual effects was apparent prior to the Millennium Village. As Chance recounted, while being “initially cautious about such decorative architecture”, they “embraced Erskine’s picturesque approach to massing and the ideas of Gordon Cullen”.5 Both principal partners studied at Sheffield University where they were tutored by the visiting professor Michael Wilford. Stephen continued on the Diploma Course where he was taught by the then head of school, David Gosling (a disciple of Cullen), the architect and planner mentioned by Chance, and author of a major study of his work and Michael Wilford. Andrew’s diploma studies were at Cambridge University. In 1986, Proctor worked briefly alongside Cullen and Gosling, devising schemes for the Isle of Dogs, a late and productive phase of Cullen’s career which is less well known, since sadly none of them were constructed. Nonetheless, it was a formative experience for Proctor which shows through the later work of the partnership. Gordon Cullen was born in 1914, and worked with Raymond McGrath and Berthold Lubetkin in the 1930s before going on to become an urban theorist through brilliant drawings and texts that established the theory of Townscape in the public mind. None of today’s younger practices can trace such a strong and direct line of descent from Cullen as Proctor and Matthews. As Proctor recalls, at Sheffield, apart from Gosling’s advocacy, “Townscape was a dirty word, too readily associated with a cheapened version of Cullen’s imagery that he himself was eager to disown when he wrote in 1971, ‘in my view, the original message of Townscape has not been delivered effectively. We have witnessed a superficial civic style of decoration using bollards and cobbles, we have seen traffic-free pedestrian precincts and we have noted the rise of conservation.’”6 The approved figures at Sheffield were Aldo Rossi and Georgio Grassi. These Italian practitioner-theorists had some affinities with Cullen, but arrived at their radical positions in a more abstract manner, without Cullen’s strong visual sense of how to compose buildings and spaces to make lively places linked to the past. Drawn to the unfashionable Cullen, Proctor and Matthews discovered his deeper purpose. They were aware that his vision sprang from the same impulse as the 1930s watercolours of Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious that frequently show places with a special character of contained space and varied scenery, and are now a nostalgic touchstone of Englishness seen through a mildly modernist prism. Townscape, like its parent aesthetic, the Picturesque, has

always been prone to oversimplification and vulgarisation, but its assumptions continue to underlie a large amount of English urban design practice, whether manifested in Leon Krier’s masterplan for Poundbury nearly two decades later, or even in the much-abused Essex Design Guide of 1976.

At the same time, there is arguably nothing essentially English in the urban conditions and situations that provided Cullen’s exemplars. Like his colleagues on The Architectural Review, Ian Nairn and H de C Hastings, he found more satisfaction in the small towns and parts of the larger cities of France and Italy. They must have been aware of similar theories developed by Camillo Sitte, although Townscape did not believe in showing its reference sources. It was far from being a smug endorsement of an English status-quo, more a warning to treasure what remained of an authentically varied environment before it became degraded by planners and road engineers into an extended Subtopia. In addition, it proposed new ways of creating the same effects, in order to stitch together the fragments, or even create de novo, as New Town planners such as Frederick Gibberd found themselves doing. In the words of Hastings’ alter-ego, “Ivor de Wolfe”, it was aimed at “all who believe the urban consequences of those odd bedfellows, Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier to be the spawn of the devil working through his chosen vessels”.7 Or, as Hugh Casson put it in 1947, “Those three old witches, the garden citizen, the Bauhausian and the County Councillor, still bicker round the pot brandishing their pet recipes–the cosy suburb, the concrete termitary, the classic well-drained boulevard– while the public stands round sniffing like the Bisto kids.”8 Townscape was the creed of the mildly agoraphobic: both the Garden City tradition of Howard, and its modernist reworking by Le Corbusier left open large spaces that inhibited pedestrian movement and deliberately destroyed the proximity of a European city.

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Opposite Steve Bell, Cartoon of the Millennium Dome Above Greenroof Way, Greenwich Millennium Village

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Top Illustration from A Design Guide for residential Areas, Essex County Council, 1973 Bottom Aldington and Craig, The Lyde, Bledlow, 1975â€“1977

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Gordon Cullen, Proposals for the Greenwich Peninsula, 1988

If there is one aspect of planning that has achieved a high level of agreement between otherwise opposing factions, it is the belief in the benefits of density, whether visual, operational or social, that have informed the Urban Renaissance report of 1999 and the New Urbanist movement, allowing Richard Rogers and Leon Krier to sit down, metaphorically, for coffee in the same piazza. In this climate of opinion, it has been possible to build densely in places such as New Hall, Harlow, creating mews courtyards and three-storey terraces which have strong urban qualities.

It would be a mistake to equate Proctor and Matthews with Townscape in any simplistic or limiting way. It is certainly not an identification that many architects would have welcomed in recent years, for there is a body of antiTownscape literature, coming first from the New Brutalists in the 1950s, but sustained into the present by writers such as John Macarthur and Andrew Law. 9 Arguably, however, this reaction has begun to play itself out. Back in the early 1960s, Alison and Peter Smithson created an exemplary townscape at the Economist Building and even commissioned Gordon Cullen to make drawings of the urban scenography framed by their fragmented pieces of building. Townscape does not answer all the questions that an urban designer needs to address, but in its own area of concern, the perceptions it codifies seem to be deeply rooted ones. There have been exemplars of antipicturesque planning, such as Milton Keynes Central, in which a plain grid creates a thrilling effect, partly because it is so rare in England, but the lack of variety and protected space in modern housing was high among the design

factors that turned opinion against modernism in the second half of the 1960s. Whatever secret fantasies of Cartesian graph-paper some architects may nurture, the terms of the unwritten truce between the British public and its architects in resolving the style wars have included a clause prohibiting their open display. Townscape is highly experiential, so that there is limited advantage to be gained by exploding its theory on paper if the reality continues to smile back at you. The work of Tayler & Green, a small practice based in East Anglia in the period between 1945 to 1975 gives a proof of the pudding. They did not depend on the pages of The Architectural Review for instructions on urban composition; rather they were part of the same sensibility and movement of thought, operating slightly ahead of the theory. Having proved their qualifications as pure modernists with a building in Highgate in 1940, Tayler & Green adjusted to the reality of working for Loddon Rural District Council. In their long terraces of houses remained embedded a memory of Ernst May’s terraces in Frankfurt, but theirs had pitched roofs, and, as time went on, simple forms of decoration in cut barge boards, diaper patterned brick walls, often with crisp borders and framing devices. They flirted with vernacular, but never became neo-vernacular, rather in the same way that their friend Benjamin Britten arranged folk-songs and by harmonising them with a knowledge of modern music, returned to them an authenticity that was obscured by the more ‘classical’ settings of the Edwardians. Tayler & Green’s effects remained under strict control, and they were not only decorators, but sound on construction. What mattered most was how to place houses on Greenfield sites in villages, retaining mature trees and hedgerows, getting the right balance between community and privacy, and making something that was pleasing to the passerby in a reworking of older forms. As Herbert Tayler wrote in 1955, “We must be frankly less ashamed of the aesthetic side of building houses.”10 Still today, aesthetics is a suspect word, but admitting that it isn’t everything that is needed in architecture does not automatically remove it from consideration. Until recently, Proctor and Matthews were unaware of Tayler & Green’s work but there are some instructive similarities. A substantial part of both practices’ portfolio of work is residential, and both courted criticism by their indulgence for decorative effects. These are not without their justifications, however, in terms of making housing more attractive to its users. While drawn towards a middle ground of popular taste, both practices remained true to a modernist aesthetic, although Tayler & Green probably went further in adopting

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literal representational elements than Proctor and Matthews. Tayler & Green were of the same generation as Ralph Erskine who was a student, with Cullen, at the Regent Street Polytechnic years before a stroke of coincidence put his work alongside that of Proctor and Matthews. Born in England in 1914, Erksine found himself in Sweden when war broke out. As a Quaker and pacifist, he decided to remain, and founded his practice there, getting a head start over some of his English contemporaries who had to wait the best part of ten years before they could begin to build. Swedish architecture of the 1940s, and Erskineâ€™s work as part of it, shows what a 1940s style of modernism might have been like had the war not got in the way. It has an anti-heroic character, with a strong attraction to nature and an openness to the past and to context, strengthening tendencies of the 1930s until the norms represented by modernism of the 1920s were almost completely reversed. This did not remain the status-quo for long. New Brutalism, the tendency that emerged in the 1950s as a new avant-

garde, tried to revive some of the formal qualities of 1920s Modernism, in conjunction with a new feeling for the authenticity of materials. One can view the long history of modernism as a sort of pendulum swing between these two sets of choices. Erskine was for a time a member of Team 10, the selfgoverning think tank of radical architecture, along with the ruling couple of New Brutalism, Alison and Peter Smithson. He reacted against the stereotyped mass public housing produced after the war in Sweden, while regretting that this reaction too easily became identified simply as an aesthetic or stylistic matter.11 As a northern pragmatist, he tended to distance himself from other Team 10 members who were more concerned with theory, finding most in common with Gian Carlo de Carlo, the Italian architect who had a rare concern for the lives and feelings of the people he was building for. Erskine built several major projects in England: Clare Hall, a post-graduate college in Cambridge, housing

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Opposite Eric Ravilious, Village Scene, watercolour, 1934

at Newmarket and Milton Keynes, and, most famous, the Byker Wall at Newcastle, which was undoubtedly the project that recommended him for Greenwich some 30 years later.

Right Ralph Erskine, Byker Wall, Newcastle, 1971–1982

Erskine was invited by Hunt Thompson Associates to become a prestigious lead designer for the Millennium Village, a project upon which a disproportionate weight of New Labour expectation was placed. The site for the ‘Village’ extends back from the eastern, downstream side of the Greenwich Peninsula, some way south from the Dome that marks the tip of this land configuration, a place whose uses through time have been almost entirely exploitative. It was a bold aim to build a community from scratch in this place that is physically disconnected from existing streets and houses, even though it offered the advantages of a cleared site with spectacular views. One of the principles for the project was to use several designers in order to achieve variety and cope with the speed of production needed, and when this question of which firms to engage came up at a meeting, the client, Alan Cherry of Countryside Properties, said “I’ll use young practices like Proctor and Matthews”. He had recently commissioned them to design the Chronos Buildings, a mixed-use project on a sensitive site in close proximity to the seventeenth century Alms House on the Mile End Road in East London. It was a lucky coincidence. They went out to meet Erskine at his office at Drottningholm outside Stockholm, and despite the tensions between other partners in the project, they learnt from Erskine how to work on a larger scale than before, and the importance of large balconies. Erskine liked to vary the position of these on the elevations, rather than having one stacked above another. Byker achieved a high public profile as a scheme that overcame public disillusionment with housing at the end of the 1960s. Instead of tower blocks in rows, there were smaller-scaled dwellings with the look of a settlement grown over time. Instead of concrete panels, there was patterned brickwork (an echo of Tayler & Green again) with bright timber balconies. Instead of repetition, there was variety. In place of the remote bureaucratic architect, there was an office on site where future tenants could discuss their personal preferences. After the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968, the inauguration of the Byker project the following year was the symbolic turning point for public housing in Britain, offering a new start and exorcising the memories of past failures. Not surprisingly, many architects who had committed themselves to an austere vision of social service found it hard to accept.

Lionel Esher described Byker as having “the shabby, makeshift, intensively humanised quality of a shantytown in Hong Kong. He reported that the old people said ‘It’s like the Costa Brava.’”12 Surely there was nothing quintessentially English here, unless it was a perennial willingness to appropriate foreign styles for their exoticism and their scenographic quality. Byker was conspicuous for its use of colour, which, by the end of the 1960s, had been long overlooked as a component of modern architecture (Tayler & Green, as one might expect, enjoyed colour in a Festival of Britain spirit). Too often, colour is discussed in isolation, and because a choice of colour can easily be changed, it is seen potentially as a superficial attribute of design. The words used by the architects Sauerbruch Hutton of themselves seem also to fit Proctor and Matthews, In our use of colour we set out with neither a didactic nor an academic approach…. Rather in our search for an architecture of intelligence and integrity; we continue the modernist legacy of treating colour as a resource in the creation of space. We also use colour to imbue places with sensual character and memorable qualities.13

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Academic architectural studies still tend to be printed in black and white, and thus colour is seldom a leading issue in scholarly discourse. It is furthermore a hostage to fate, since later building owners can so easily delete or misinterpret the design intention. Since 2000, bold colour has become much more widely used on buildings in Britain as part of the neo-modernist tendency. It is a component in what is now called “The New Ornamentalism”, which also includes the application of pattern to building facades. It is a fascinating turn of the modernist saga, as the tectonic Vitruvian roots of the movement are supplanted by the tradition of Gottfried Semper, with his emphasis on surface. It is a tradition little understood by the British when explored by unconventional modernists such as Thomas Tait, HS Goodhart-Rendel or Tayler & Green, and they probably failed themselves to recognise the source of their ideas. The recent enthusiasm in England for Dutch and Swiss architecture forms part of this movement, as does Caruso St John’s revival of relief decoration in homage to Louis Sullivan. It offers a new range of aesthetic effects at a time when the architect’s freedom of design in the building is often constrained and reduced to picture-making.

hovers above the ground like a piece of fake stone wallpaper that, in order to fool you, turns out to be the real material. This kind of scenography went down well in England, and Berthold Lubetkin, as one of Le Corbusier’s most creative followers, played with the whole range of these effects, introducing floating panels of knapped flint when extending a house in Mill Hill, and going to extremes of surface decoration with his own Penthouse at Highpoint II, brilliantly rendered into explanatory cut-away drawings by Gordon Cullen for The Architectural Review in 1938. When John Piper began to draw and paint architecture in the late 1930s, he transferred what he had learnt about organising flat shapes as an abstract painter into a stylised representation of neatly demarcated parallel planes. The immediate post-war conditions of building suited a collage style, since the supply of materials was unpredictable, and a little had to go a long way, with a mix and match technique that had been foreshadowed in the palmier pre-war years.14

One classic modernist strategy for using colour is that promoted by Theo van Doesberg in the De Stijl movement, where the intention is to emphasise the three-dimensional quality of the form. Proctor and Matthews use colour in a flatter and more frontal way that suits the limitations present in so much housing design. The effect is more like a collage than a model, a sensibility and technique that is also shared with Le Corbusier, at least when he was not in his De Stijl mode. Le Corbusier, whose work as a painter sprang from the launch-pad of Cubism, introduced a technique of collage into architecture, through making framed panels of texture, such as the rough stone of the Pavillon Suisse in Paris of 1930–1932, where the curving wall is snipped around and

As the brilliant but reactionary designer-critic HS GoodhartRendel remarked with evident delight in 1949, even modernism which claimed to reject style had grown up, and was now playing the same game of “evoking emotion… by the creation and selection of significant forms” that all architectures before it had played. “Forms that signify not physical desiderata such as convenience, cleanliness and cheapness, but spiritual desiderata–harmony, wonder, gaiety, awe.”15 It was not so much a change of material conditions but a change of heart and a temporary loosening of the constraints of the first phase of modernism. Cullen liked to use colour, and although it would be overdeterminist, no doubt, to say that the limitations of colour printing in the pages of The Architectural Review influenced

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Opposite left Netherfield, Milton Keynes Opposite right Taylor and Green, Housing for the Elderly, Ditchingham, Norfolk, 1959 Right Ralph Erskine, Clare Hall, Cambridge

his vision of architecture, it remains true that the cheapest way of adding colour was to draw ‘colour separations’ and use these to add ‘spot colour’ to black and white outlines, rather than create a full colour artwork and have it translated into expensive and unsatisfactory process blocks. The result, seen in a series of drawings such as “Bankside Regained” of 1949, or “New Marlow”, 1950, was much like a collage– patches of pure colour, usually vibrant, imposed without tonal modification, making the resulting visualisations read strongly in two dimensions, especially when combined with Cullen’s enjoyment of display lettering. When colour photographs were shown, as with a new school at Cheshunt, featured in September 1949 with scarlet, canary yellow and deep blue wall panels, and a blaze of coloured cupboard doors. As David Medd wrote in the accompanying article, these colours responded to the bright clothes and high-pitched voices of the children. The doctrine of Townscape developed at The Architectural Review under the inspiration of H de Cronin Hastings, with the hand and eye of Cullen to give it reality. The word began to creep into various articles in the magazine after the war, until at the end of 1949 it was presented by Cullen and Hastings together as a coherent theoretical position, a middle way between the two formalisms of modernism and traditionalism. Hastings’ text explained why such a permissive doctrine was the only justifiable position for professional designers to take after the war-time struggle against totalitarianism. In his mind, it defended the freedom for the common man against designers with over-insistent ideas about what was right. Townscape showed people how to use their eyes first, and enjoy the messy reality instead of trying to tidy it up (and failing, such being the enormity of the task). Hastings brilliantly linked this approach back in time to the English Picturesque movement of the 1790s, founded, as he put it “on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price”. In a way, Townscape achieved a brilliant solution to ‘the problem of England’, if that problem is interpreted as being one of resistance to modernism. It was a compromise, certainly, but one that by permitting decoration on limited terms, exercised its own particular potential to engage a latent sense of heraldic art, in its clear, conventionalised outlines and jewel-like colours. Besides this, it opened a door for the philistine English to become their own experts in the arrangement of spaces, as they were of their own crowded mantelpieces. In 1961, Cullen published his book, Townscape, which still remains, in abridged form, a standard text for urban design. Everyone who studies the history of post-war architecture in Britain, however,

becomes aware, almost by way of a foundation myth, that the colour and jollity represented in the Festival of Britain and its theoretical correlative, Townscape, were very bad things from which the soul of modernism had to be saved.

Following a historical narrative, we can trace the second near-death of modernism to the 1970s, when what had been a relatively unified style split into three branches. High-Tech is probably the best known, combining balancing a new decorative quality with an obsessive concern with the display of structure. The vernacular revival took many forms, and left that word exhausted in the wake of so many bricks and tiles held in space by steel frames beneath them. It was, however, the public’s favourite and to a large extent remains so. Outside the profession, few made the distinction between those architects such as Aldington & Craig, or Maguire & Murray, who were attuned to vernacular from a strong personal commitment to legible and meaningful architectural form derived from New Brutalism, and the larger majority who traduced its many possibilities. Coincidentally, it was Peter Aldington, an

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external critic at Sheffield who kept an eye on the progress of ex-students, who recommended Proctor and Matthews for one of their first commissions, two houses at Haddenham in Buckinghamshire. Finally, there were postmodernists, although perhaps all three categories deserve the name. Double-coding, classical references, jokes and lots of colour were unleashed, and sometimes performed with brilliance, as with James Stirling and CWZG, but outstayed their welcome as, like vernacular, they became common property.

the expansion of theory in architecture schools, and are adept at providing verbal explanations at all levels. Very little of this has been what is sometimes called “operative theory” that shows you how to solve problems. Instead, there has been a worldwide expansion of other more poetic forms of theory that do not exclude political ideals, although often fail to read as effectively across between pure thought and instrumental activity as they might wish. In this context, it is interesting to consider Proctor and Matthews as one practice among many more concerned with doing than with

The period when Proctor and Matthews were starting was the beginning of the next phase, in which their contemporaries succeeded in clearing the air, partly in the sober climate of recession in the early 1990s. Rejecting most of the pathways of their immediate predecessors, they followed the rule of the 30 year taste cycle and went back to explore the 1950s, finding in curves and colours, in collage and Cullen a manner that was popular and photogenic. They ushered in a period that may in future be seen as a remarkably fertile time of creativity in British architecture, helped by lottery funding for cultural projects and by the expansion of educational buildings. It could seem very shallow at times, although some have reaped rewards from

talking. Despite an attractive modesty, they were thrust into the spotlight on the Greenwich Peninsula, and survived. They have built a studio for a YBA, Mark Quinn, but with the same unpretentious care that they bring to speculative housing in Harlow or Chelmsford. They have built zoo buildings, following in the footsteps of Berthold Lubetkin and unlike him deliberately tried to play down the architectural display in order to allow visitors the best experience of the animals they have come to see. Is this modesty part of the definition of Englishness? Like all other attempts to define the term, there will be exceptions on both sides–modest foreigners and immodest

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Opposite Le Corbusier, Le Pavilon Suisse, Paris 1930â€“1932 Top Gordon Cullen, cutaway drawing of Lubetkin penthouse, Highpoint II Bottom Gordon Cullen, "Bankside Regained", The Architectural Review, 1949

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Englishmen and women. It is possible to pull out the desk drawer of English identity clichés and find plenty of others, but it is no longer a safe or useful activity. In his Reith Lectures of 1955, Nikolaus Pevsner was brave enough to try defining The Englishness of English Art. Some of his categories, such as linearity, ‘detachment’ (meaning compositions made up of discreet incidents rather than amalgamated forms) and the Picturesque seem to suit Proctor and Matthews very well. However, if instead we return to Patrick Keiller, does the ‘problem of England’ turn out to be that of architecture’s continued distance from the public, despite 20 years of trying to be nice? The entirely unexpected award of the Stirling Prize to housing in 2008, after years in which glamorous one-off projects took the prize, was a belated recognition of architects’ hard work in this unglamorous sector where there is a constant struggle with developers in order to

achieve anything that looks remotely award-winning without the best bits being value-engineered to oblivion. Despite their high reputation in this field, and the high sums available until recently from house buyers, Proctor and Matthews still express concern about the dislocation between design and delivery, a process in which important aspects of domestic architecture are often diluted. If the ‘problem of England’ was the lack of a sufficiently informed market for non-standard houses outside a few oases of eccentricity such as Cambridge, then its persistence during good times is a warning for what may happen in bad times, unless there is some radical change to the way things are done. Architecture lovers look back with some nostalgia to the housing schemes of Eric Lyons for the developers Span, believing in a golden age of the 1950s and 60s when planners made such things easy to do. Span was no

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Opposite John Piper, Littlestone on Sea, Collage, 1936 Right Hertfordshire County Architects, Cheshunt School, c. 1949

ordinary developer, its director being Lyons’s former architectural partner, Geoffrey Townsend. Span was commercial, but nobody made big money from it. Lyons most famous work on the Cator Estate in Blackheath was achieved despite a continuous struggle against Greenwich Council and he inserted a sculpture into an external wall opening at Hallgate of a man almost crushed beneath the weight he is carrying, bitterly entitled “The Architect in Society”. Townscape hoped to let the English discover their better selves in design, but it was over-optimistic. The ‘problem of England’ is surely that, despite the cultivation of English qualities in architecture, achieved with such success in circumstances that are never easy, a practice such as Proctor and Matthews (even with such high profile projects) has still made only a small impact on people who should recognise a good thing when they see it.

Footnotes: 1, In conversation, 21 April, 2008. 2, Bayley, Stephen, “A Doomed Dome”, TLS, 3 November 2000, p. 18. 3, Chance, Stephen, “Reality Check”, RIBA Journal, July 2003, p. 36. 4, Powell, Kenneth, New London Architecture, London: Merrell, 2001, p. 176. 5, Powell, New London Architecture. 6, Cullen, Gordon, “Introduction to 1971 Edition” in The Concise Townscape, London: Architectural Press, 1971, p. 13. 7, de Wolfe, Ivor, “The Death and Life of Great American Citizens”, The Architectural Review, February 1963, p. 91. 8, Casson, Hugh, “The Obliging Sharrawag” in Grand Perspective, Contact Books, 1947, p. 65. 9, See John Macarthur, “The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities”, Routledge, 2007 and Andrew Law, “English Townscape as Cultural and Symbolic Capital”, in Andrew Ballantyne, ed., Architectures: modernism and after, Blackwell, 2004. 10, Tayler, Herbert, “Landscape in Rural Housing”, Housing Centre Review, no. 3, May–June 1955, reprinted in Elain Harwood and Alan Powers, eds., Tayler & Green architects, the spirit of place in modern housing, Prince of Wales’s Institute, 1998, p. 72. 11, Erskine speaking in interview with Clelia Tuscano, in Max Rissalada and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Team 10, 1953–1980, in search of a utopia of the present, Rotterdam: nai publishers, 2005. 12, Esher, Lionel, A Broken Wave, The Rebuilding of England 1940–1980, London: Allen Lane, 1981, p. 187. 13, Sauerbruch Hutton Archive, Lars Müller Publishers, 2006. 14, See Alan Powers, “The Reconditioned Eye—architects and artists in English Modernism”, AA Files 25, Summer 1993, pp. 54–62. 15, Goodhart-Rendel, HS, “Ressessment 3: Paris Opera House”, The Architectural Review, vol. 105, June 1949, p. 303.

Picture Credits: P74 © Steve Bell P72, P76 (below), P80 (right) © Tim Crocker www.timcrocker.co.uk P77 © Mrs Cullen P76 (top) © Essex County Council P82 © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 P78 © Estate of Eric Ravilious. All rights reserved, DACS 2009 P79 © RIBA Library Photographs Collection, RIBA24920 P83 (all), P85 © RIBA Library Photographs Collection P84 © Tate, London 2009. © The Piper Estate

ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

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The threshold at Ropemakers Field

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The entrance is the most sensitive place in a dwelling: it gives some idea of the identity of the inhabitants and of whether they want you to know about them or not. Not so long ago the window looking onto the street would display a vase, a plant set between glass and curtain, or a statue facing outwards. Even the hem of the curtain was turned inward, the best side being reserved for the street. Front doors had attention lavished on them, protected by a welcoming porch. The letter box was celebrated, the door-knocker a piece of craftsmanship: this is after all the frontier of tactile contact between the outside world and the family. Nothing was abstract, nothing done in a mean or contemptuous way. What has happened to this constructive display of ethnological expression? It is notably absent in the basic modern door with its miserable letter flap in sheet metal and industrial bell-push. Today it is a relief even to see the scrap of sticking plaster which a doctor has stuck under his bell to inform his patients of changes in his surgery hours. Lucien Kroll, 19861

Everyone knows about the idea of carrying a bride across the threshold to mark first entry to the home, but few realise

how widespread such customs have been, just as we have become oblivious to the meaning of the word threshold as container for the precious harvest on which settled life depends. Among the Kabyle of North Africa the bride traditionally had to be carried by a foreigner to intercept evil forces, and having crossed the threshold she had immediately to be seated on a bag of grain, linking her fertility with that of the fields. This was placed against the female central column of the house whose forked legs supported the master-beam, an explicit representation of the houseâ€™s conjugal function. Pierre Bourdieuâ€™s famous account further includes a long list of customs defined by the threshold, controller of the transition between two worlds: the outer male-dominated public world and the inner feminine family one. 2 Although that example is unique in its detail, the anthropological record is full of parallel cases which show not only widespread social customs and prohibitions involving thresholds, but also that they have frequently been the sites of offerings and sacrifices. 3 Transition between internal and external worlds has always been important, so entrances have consistently been foci of architectural expression. This need has not ceased in modern times despite much denial and abuse, for we continue to differentiate between public and private, requiring markers to define where trespass begins,

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and we still need in our dwellings a means to turn an outer face to the world. Thresholds must signal the transition as well as controlling it, and they are usually layered so as not to be too abrupt, including zones of negotiation where greetings, partings, and exchanges can be made. Aldo van Eyck wrote poetically about this in relation to the protracted thresholds of his famous orphanage in Amsterdam:

behind one when one is ‘banged up’. The twentieth century version is more utilitarian, requiring a large gate for prison vans and a setback from the street. The treatment is drab in the extreme, its function (Maison d’Arret) announced only in a small and eccentrically mounted brass plate high above the right-hand door.

It was saved from being a bad house… by anchor(ing) the children’s large house/little city to the street, i.e. to the public sphere, where they enter and leave it, by introducing a large open square as a transition between the reality outside and that inside. It is an in-between domain leading the trail gradually in stages, helping to mitigate the anxiety that abrupt transition causes, especially in these children. Leaving home and going home are often difficult matters; to go in or out, to enter, leave or stay, sometimes painful alternatives. Though architecture cannot do away with this truth it can still counteract it by appeasing instead of aggravating its effects. It is human to tarry. Architecture should, I think, take more account of this.4

Surveillance cameras, lights, and glass viewing panels in two of the doors speak of security, and the sole tiny moment of celebration is the shield and pair of small flags identifying it both as a national and as a European institution. Prisoners are hustled in without ceremony, and nothing is done for the family members who might dare to greet them on their return. This is a harsh threshold, almost devoid of architecture. The meanest, most unforgiving door is on the left, grey sheet steel flush with the grey rendered wall: no sign, no shelter, no thickness, no transparency; keep out.

As zones of negotiation, thresholds must be clear but also gentle. Sometimes instead they are abrupt, unwelcoming, and deliberately so, and it clarifies our understanding to register the difference. An example that comes to mind is the entrance to the municipal prison in Chartres, France, which offers thresholds from different periods, both abrupt. The nineteenth century one in the Gothic style is severe yet not devoid of style, announcing its function on the tympanum with a moral stress on the possibility of ‘correction’. All the same, it is a door straight onto the street with no handle or means of contact, a door slammed

Transparency can soften a threshold, allowing glimpses within, yet it can also be too soft. Frank Lloyd Wright, on visiting Philip Johnson’s Glass House, is reported to have walked about taking his hat off and putting it on at inopportune moments to ridicule the lack of definition between inside and out. But some of the clearest examples of this problem are provided by Jacques Tati in his satirical film Playtime, for which he built a large set of exaggerated Miesian architecture. Monsieur Hulot has his usual fun with glass doors and glass enclosed waiting rooms which are continuous with the street, but there is also at one point in the film a flat with a living room at street level and floor to ceiling glazing, where domestic life is enacted curtainless after dark, the inhabitants appearing to the outside world as if on stage, the window as proscenium.

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Opposite left Aldo van Eyck, Orphanage, Amstelveenseweg, Amsterdam Opposite right Twentieth century entrance, Municipal Prison, Chartres Top Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967 Bottom Nineteenth century entrance, Municipal Prison, Chartres

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steel gate with a shallow step up and change of paving. Although these gates are not locked, and seem often to be casually left open, each defines a private enclave which the residents have made their own through planting and other personal touches. It is so obviously private that one even feels intrusive taking photos. The house wall is rendered white as opposed to the brick elsewhere, bringing both light and an implied sense of insideness. Where the paired doors of handed houses would come together stands a tall slab of brickwork which extends to protect the balconies above. This both exaggerates the separation of adjacent gates and provides concealment for the cupboards to take bins and bicycles. The house front doors are tucked beneath the balconies, contained by sheltered porches in each corner to allow intimate Because there is no two-way communication the viewer intrudes, becoming a voyeur. In Tatiâ€™s earlier film, Mon Oncle, the vernacular world of old Paris is presented by contrast as a complex series of thresholds, for Hulot reaches his room at the top of his house via a circuitous route which goes in and out, up and down, in a way that completely contradicts the logic of efficient circulation. But he is obliged to greet his neighbours on the way, and this seems to constitute his social life. Although this depiction is exaggerated and sentimentalised, the layering of territories and accommodation of multiple signs of life are true to tight-knit old towns that have been allowed to evolve idiosyncratically, with overlapping ownership where people share an entrance, a courtyard, a staircase, and mark the transition to their own space with a potted plant, a mat, or some ornaments before the door.

Housing, Ropemakers Field

This introduction has served to draw attention to the nature and importance of thresholds, which have been a consistent and dominating concern of Proctor and Matthews, especially in their housing work. It was evident early on, with the row of 11 terraced houses in Limehouse in the East London Docklands of 1996. These are houses without gardens, for the rear ground level is taken up with garages and a gravel forecourt. It was therefore necessary to negotiate with the outside world mainly at the front, and to make the most of a narrow strip about three metres wide which lies between the inner edge of the public pavement and the outer wall of the house. At street level this zone of the plan divides into a series of small yards or gardens, protected by a breast-high brick wall topped with minimal railings, and entered by a low

greetings and partings. The residents have not hesitated to personify their front doors, but the street effortlessly absorbs these minor variations. On the other hand, the naked brick and the brown staining of the timber frames which unify the appearance of the group of houses has been accepted as a defining communal feature, the residents deciding for themselves that this must be a consistent and shared element.

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Opposite top Jacques Tati, Mon Oncle,1958 Opposite bottom Threshold, Ropemakers Field Top Lloyd Baker estate ‘classical semis’ Middle Frederick Street Bottom The ‘back threshold’ Ropemakers Field

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The area between house and street is further exploited on the first floor with balconies on a shared timber frame, a kind of aedicule or ghost of a house standing in front of the main facade. The balcony provides another kind of transitional space, raised above the street and well-protected within its frame, roofed with a pergola on which plants can grow. Fretted screens divide adjacent balconies visually, though acoustic privacy is inevitably compromised. The whole apparatus of the big frame also helps screen the windows of the second floor, but its main job is to change the scale of the block as a whole, giving it an urban formality which plays down the individual houses for the sake of the street. Proctor and Matthews made the bold decision to group all the first and second floor windows of each house in a single timber frame, so that each is distinguished from a distance by what seems to be a single large window. The balcony frames stand in front, plugged into the centre of each of these, linking them with an alternating rhythm, though the formal impact is softened in most views through diagonal perspective. The formality of the facade as a whole and the play of scales are reminiscent of Georgian housing, the big windows working rather like the giant order used by Cubitt at Frederick Street, while the alternation of windows and frames are rather like the classical semis of the Lloyd Baker Estate where one pediment is shared between two houses. As in that case, one has to look twice to decide how the

rhythm divides. Also similar to Georgian architecture are the rusticated white base and the termination of the wall in a parapet, as opposed to the mansarded eaves at the rear. The threshold spaces between house and outside world do not stop with yard and balcony, for there is a generous and more secret roof terrace for each house set behind the parapet and invisible from the street, large enough to turn into a small roof garden. Gates at the ends of the dividing screens allow contacts between neighbours, as well as providing emergency escape. The back threshold is for vehicles, the garage doors blank and uninviting, but the play of rhythms and scales continues with narrower double-storey frames, the contrast between front and rear enhancing the identity of each. All in all, the houses are cleverly planned to make the most of every contact with the outside world and of the contrasting ways in which such contacts can be presented, whether through window, yard, balcony or terrace. The development cleverly combines a Georgian sense of urban decorum and street-making with a delicacy

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of threshold that has persuaded the householders to participate and express themselves.

The Millennium Village

The Greenwich Millennium Village came later and was much more ambitious, but it was also part of a masterplan devised by Ralph Erskine on a rather more informal and picturesque model, not harking back to the Georgian street like Limehouse, but engaging water and landscape at every turn and allowing variations in height from two-storey houses to eight-storey blocks of flats sometimes rising into towers. Cars were to be kept to the edges to make it a largely pedestrian realm, with peaceful paths and places for children to play. Erskine must have been a hard act to follow, as his genius at Byker and in his Swedish work had been to produce such endless variety in a large housing scheme, avoiding the dumb repetition which dogs the work of most contemporaries, and giving each part a new individual identity.5 But Proctor and Matthews soon demonstrated that they could play this game ringing the changes like the master, and also that they could take in their stride demands for prefabrication that might have increased repetition and made the housing appear mechanistic. Once again their house planning was deft and imaginative and they were able to develop a lively rhythm on the street, and once again they sought to articulate thresholds in a great variety of ways. A few examples will suffice to show how they reapplied and extended their techniques. Many of the two- and three-storey houses have courtyards front and rear, but while the rear one is private and an almost square outdoor room, the front is open to the street and half the width, enclosed by a single-storey vestibule

extension, a treatment reminiscent of JJP Oudâ€™s houses at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart of 1927.6 In some cases these little courts are paired, defined by a protective steel frame, a dividing column, and a pergola leading to the door, making an outdoor room. Paving treatments further define the territory, with cobbles on the frontier band, and an opportunity for planting between court and pedestrian street that has been accepted and exploited. In other cases the little courts are separate and the narrow extensions are of two storeys or more, so the whole space is sheltered. But again the ground treatment is definitive and includes planting areas that the residents have developed. Even when Proctor and Matthews are obliged to make no more than a door in the wall it has still proved possible to define the territory with a differently paved doorstep to which potted plants have been added, and to provide a sheltering canopy hung on an external frame. The horizontal wooden cladding in this case differentiates the two entrances with a continuous vertical band. The more private rear courts to some houses and flats were given a protective layer of gate and fencing with a planting bed in front, which has been so well exploited by some residents that they are now completely secluded. For the blocks of flats, balconies were provided with sun-shading devices that also add a sense of enclosure and protection. The higher blocks next to vehicle streets were pulled back from the pavement by a lawn and hedge-like planting, allowing a protected yard to

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Opposite top JJP Oud, Weissenhofsiedlung houses, Stuttgart, 1927 Opposite bottom ‘Outdoor room’, Greenwich Millennium Village Right Model with communal garden, Greenwich Millennium Village

the ground floor surmounted by glazed balconies above, the whole carried by a steel frame set forward of the building in a larger version of the timber one at Ropemakers Field. At the back end of the development it was necessary to plan some difficult houses (live/work units) backing on to the two-level car park, their lower two storeys confined to a single aspect. The payoff here is a high-level roof garden linked to the top storey living room, which has been well exploited by residents. Public and Urban

Proctor and Matthews’ concern for thresholds and inbetween spaces is not limited to housing, for the negotiation between public and private is something that affects all architecture, as even the most public buildings have their relatively more public and more private places. This is not only a matter of the difference between fronts and backs, but also of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, the concepts coined by Erving Goffman to describe common events in public life.7 Every shop has a frontstage counter where sales assistants deal politely with customers, and backstage stores or offices where they gossip or swear at one another. Similarly, when you take your car to the main dealer’s garage you pay the outrageous bill to the suited man in the frontstage office without seeing the violence done to your car by the backstage boiler-suited grease-monkeys. The restaurant and its kitchen are another example: it proves a potent concept once you start to apply it, and shows the necessary relativity involved between public and private, which we recognise by contrast and in their gradations.

A recent project in the seaside town of Hastings has caused Proctor and Matthews much debate about public and private, about the natures of different kinds of streets, and about the healing of the urban fabric. Their site lies between two streets. The major one, Havelock Road, dates from the mid-nineteenth century when it was set up in response to the railway, curving down the hill to link the station with the sea front. Behind, to the west, is Priory Street, a smaller back street diverging at an angle, which remembers in its name the long gone Medieval Priory whose grounds were there. Havelock Road had suffered a demolition gap like a knocked out tooth, and this (and more) the client (a government regeneration agency) wished to fill with offices, shops, and a sixth form college, a mix approved by the local plans, which would stretch through the block as far as the other street. Although the locality was devoid of actual listed buildings, it was a conservation area, originally built up with Victorian baywindowed houses and redbrick public buildings which simply followed the street lines. This remains the background fabric, though like most English towns it has been damaged by twentieth century intrusions. Since the land falls towards the sea, a considerable difference of level existed between the two streets which had to be solved and exploited, adding to the sheer complexity of a site with varied neighbours and odd plan-shape. Clearly, no simple modernist set-piece could be appropriate, and if the building has turned out something of a chameleon, that is largely because of the very complex contextual conditions that it was obliged to answer to.

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T h r e s h o l d s a n d E n c o u n t e r s / P e t e r B l u n d e l l Jo n e s

Opposite left ‘Sheltering canopy’ live/work units, Greenwich Millennium Village Opposite right ‘Lawn and Hedge’ threshold, Greenwich Millennium Village Top Public Square, Priory Quarter, Hastings Bottom Glass wall and folded floor plane, initial design, Hastings

It is easiest to start with the plan. Havelock Road is to the right, and required a continuous new frontage taking up the curve, but Proctor and Matthews decided it would be possible to break it at ground level with a new pedestrian alleyway leading through to Priory Street, following a local tradition of such alleys, which are known as ‘twittens’. On Havelock Road this alleyway and its entrance canopy break the long elevation, allowing it to change level and angle, as well as showing the new building’s permeability. On the other side, due to the angularity of the site, it was possible to conceive a south–west facing public square partly foreseen in the masterplan, for the street was due to become a pedestrian zone. Proctor and Matthews explored many ways of exploiting the change in levels, but eventually settled on an arena-like angled flight of steps which can serve as seating in summer. The funnel-shaped square leads naturally through to the alley, but also to the most public of the buildings, the new college. In early design studies this occupied the north end of the site in one of the two parallel blocks with a semi-private intermediate courtyard. Its main entrance address was both the public square and the alley, and in a bid to unite the internal circulation with the public alley circulation, the two ran in parallel sharing the same floor plane and folding with the same steps, divided only by a glass wall. In this way the division between the frontstage part of the college and the fully public alley was reduced to the minimum, and the college would become part of the city. This configuration changed as the design developed and additional sites around the public square were acquired for redevelopment. The education component of the brief became the second phase of a university campus already established in the

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town, and is now proposed for a site on the south side of the square at the rear of an existing 1930s Post Office building and entered via a gracious flight of stairs–a visual extension of the raking stepped profile of the square drawn into the building’s central atrium. The taller of the two ‘parallel’ buildings has become additional office space. In the final configuration, however, the initial spatial concepts remain in tact, with the vestiges of internal and external ‘twittens’ defining the principle pedestrian movement through both the semi-public entrance lobbies of the two office buildings and the public realm of the new Priory Square. The alley will be open 24 hours a day, and on the east side of the square a cafe is intended, so there is every chance for an animated public route. The view north from the mouth of Priory Street, framed by the new University building on the right, will provide a suitably large-scale public approach for the office buildings from the south allowing some breathing space for the taller nine-storey block. A transparent treatment of this tower-like building both celebrates the main entrance to the office space and makes a beacon of its board room and meeting spaces above, whose importance is celebrated with a big blue frame. On Havelock Road the elevation is utterly different to fit in with the way that the rest of the street is composed. Proctor and Matthews produced a sequence of drawings to show the various rules that the facade is obliged to obey, showing that behind the collage-like effect is a good deal of hard and precise thinking. Hole in wall windows and a heavy cornice pick up the rhythms and levels of the Victorian neighbours, while switches between render and exposed brickwork repeat the mix of materials elsewhere in the street. A

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Photographic Study

Indicative Street Elevation

Cornice line

Building Demise

Rythm of vertical bays

Primary Horizontal Modelling

Primary and Secondary Horizontal Modelling

Openings

Havelock Road Study of Existing Elevations

T h r e s h o l d s a n d E n c o u n t e r s / P e t e r B l u n d e l l Jo n e s

Opposite Havelock Street analysis, Hastings

colonnade at ground level announces the building’s permeability and allows shops to step back, while a kind of folded plate projects at the angle change of the facade to proclaim the mouth of the alley. This is important, for facade, alley and square operate together as an unfolding sequence of spaces which both reinterpret the idea of the ‘twitten’ for the twenty-first century and bind the new University building and its office neighbours into the town fabric as a collection of semi-public spaces with soft thresholds. People versus Animals

Proctor and Matthews have also recently earned a high reputation in the design of zoos, where ideas of thresholds and definitions of frontstage and backstage are rather different. Ever since the Royal Zoological Society went public in 1847 there has been a conflict between animal husbandry and the demands of public spectacle, for incarceration in small cages and exposure to the public gaze is hardly the most sympathetic treatment for our animal cousins, yet as we destroy their natural habitat our zoos have become increasingly necessary as repositories for preserving and breeding species on the verge of extinction. Captive animals also provide crucial subjects for zoological study and experiment, but their value as spectacle is far from exhausted. Even though David Attenborough’s programmes on television have given us all a much better idea of what wild animals are like and how they behave, there is still no substitute for seeing them in reality, hearing their roars and smelling their scent, and sensing some personal response in gestures or eye contact. Alec Guinness even used to visit London Zoo in search of characteristics for parts he might play, noting and imitating the poises and gestures of the creatures he encountered there. London Zoo had long kept its apes in a series of long low pavilions built in the 1970s and equipped with small outdoor cages, which monopolised a fairly large site near the middle of the zoo, offering a fairly neutral architectural experience with a lot of public route. Proctor and Matthews were asked to revise this and to create rather more generous conditions for the animals, concentrating particularly on the gorillas. 8 After some initial toying with an enclosed ‘biome’ structure, they decided to rework the site mainly as an open garden for the animals, achieving the crucial security requirement by making it an island bordered by a two metre deep artificial canal. They then reversed the traditional relationship in zoos by confining the people instead of the gorillas, obliging visitors to follow closely a prescribed route around the

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edge of the island, along a ‘boardwalk’ and through a building which allows views into the gorillas’ indoor accommodation. Traditional prison bars and grilles were altogether avoided by substituting 40mm thick glass in places where stretches of water are lacking, This allows the gorillas to approach safely within inches of people if they choose to do so. Having set up this general strategy, the whole onus of the project hung on the design of the boardwalk as an unfolding experience for the public, almost in a narrative or cinematic manner. Side glimpses of the island come first, as the gravel path winds in from the west to meet the boardwalk at a bridge where water crosses to enter the moat. A high side wall then encloses one to the right and a roof above, so one’s attention swings to the left and to the window onto the island, the glass wall and its roof supported by rhythmic groups of bamboo columns. As the space becomes more enclosed and the roof projects further, the view of the island switches to the interior of the day gym where gorillas are more likely to be found in bad weather. At the corner there is another threshold marked in floor and ceiling, and the space unexpectedly opens up. Light breaks through between the roofs and the turn is well controlled, the expanding space allowing room to linger before one moves on southward and out. There are more views into the gym on the right, then again across to the island as one leaves. Early concept sketches make the intention of this winding, changing route already clear, while sectional working sketches of parts of it show a concentration on changing boundaries, spatial adjacencies, visible structure, textures, and surface treatments. All this is thought through, architecturally layered and fine tuned, treated as ‘frontstage’ as opposed to the more relaxed and utilitarian treatment of the ‘backstage’ accommodation and technical areas required by the keepers, which were in any case required to be more flexible. The undoubted climax of the show is the long doubleheight gallery where one first gets the chance to face the gorillas directly through the glass, and where they may also occasionally amble across a bridge above you to their secluded sleeping quarters behind. The floor is of rough sawn recycled ekki hardwood, with a gravelled border to warn of the impending glass. The supporting structure of bamboo columns is placed in angled groups of three with large black pads of steel at floor and ceiling. Bamboo is immensely strong besides being a somewhat exotic looking natural material, and gives something of the impression of moving through a grove.

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The lower part of the back wall opposite is timber clad and broken with various exhibits, but the upper part and the whole ceiling are boarded rhythmically in plywood panels decorated with partly cut out linear patterns, beyond which is a transparent roof. The effect of this layered arrangement is to admit a dappled light which changes with the sun, creating an impression like being in a forest, but not too literally so. The surface pattern, fascinating in its variability and geometric freedom, is derived from African Kuba fabrics and therefore gives a hint of the gorilla’s original home. The figure-like arrangements in the original fabric must have local symbolic associations, but these are neither known nor translated. In the hands of Proctor and Matthews the pattern is rather used to give a crucial consistency to the main passage through the building as well as adding interest by filtering the light. It would be tedious to describe in detail the many variations in the treatment of the route around the island, and all the ways in which visual interactions between people and animals are handled and orchestrated, but even a glimpse

of the architects’ exploratory sections reveals their concern for the role of the building fabric in controlling and defining relationships. Arguably it is the same kind of concern that is visible in all their designs, whether people are looking at gorillas, passers-by in the new ‘twitten’ are glancing into the office lobbies of Priory Quarter, or people in the street are nodding to neighbours in houses at Limehouse or Greenwich. Hastings’ Priory Quarter, only recently completed in part, has yet to be tested, but the housing projects repeatedly demonstrate how residents have been able to declare their ownership and spill out into the public realm, while the architecture calmly accepts it. London Zoo’s Gorilla Kingdom has already proved popular with the public, but the animals too have profited from their new found freedom and variety of habitat, showing their enthusiasm in an orgy of sexual activity. Attempts to get them to breed in captivity had hitherto been unsuccessful, so if young are born, it will be a great compliment to the architects.

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Opposite Gorilla Kingdom, double-height gallery early perspective Top Gorilla Kingdom, Gorilla Encounter Bottom left Gorilla Kingdom, initial concept sketch with winding route Bottom right Gorilla Kingdom â€˜working sketchesâ€™

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Footnotes: 1, Caption from page 27 of Kroll’s book The Architecture of Complexity, London: Batsford, 1986, translated by Peter Blundell Jones. 2, Bourdieu, Pierre, The Kabyle House, in Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, also included in Mary Douglas, Rules and Meanings, Penguin. 3, For a rich collection compiled in the nineteenth century see H Clay Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant. 4, Aldo van Eyck, “The medicine of reciprocity tentatively illustrated”, first published in Forum April–May 1961, reprinted in Ligtelijn, Vincent, and Strauven, Francis, eds., Aldo van Eyck: Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947–1998, Amsterdam: Sun Publishers, 2008, p. 318. 5, For the author’s analysis of Byker see Blundell Jones and Canniffe, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, Architectural Press 2007, Chapter 11, pp. 139–152. 6, A conscious influence, according to Proctor. In Oud’s houses the tiny two-storey rear extensions define a kitchen court and contain laundry and drying rooms, see Peter Blundell Jones, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, Architectural Press 2001, pp. 21–22. 7, The classic text is Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh 1956 and numerous Penguin re-editions. 8, Colobus monkeys are also to be allowed on the island as they are compatible with gorillas and can come and go by different routes, but the two species have to be introduced to each other gradually. Picture Credits: P162, © Peter Bennett Photograpy P157, (top), P158(top), © Les Films de Mon Oncle P160, (top) Constanze Leibrock P156, © Spaarnestad Photo 2009/Louis van Paridon. All rights reserved P154, P159 © Morley Von Sternberg ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5 Black Dog Publishing Limited 10a Acton Street London WC1X 9NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097 Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 8682 info@blackdogonline.com www.blackdogonline.com British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

T h e S e l f l e s s P l a n / J e re m y T i l l

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The Selfless Plan: Social Patterns in the Wo r k o f P r o c t o r a n d M a t t h ew s J e r e my T i l l

Good Plans

When I was a student, my tutors used to talk to us about good plans and bad plans. “That is a beautiful plan”, they would say, and as dutiful students we would spend some time working out just why this might be the case. Because our education was phenomenological in its orientation, the plan was perceived in terms of its spatial potential and as a setting for social interaction. It was in pursuit of these qualities that I would pore over plans by Aalto (who gives up his secrets with good grace, with a direct sense of space implied in the plans), Schinkel (whose plans look simple but are actually very complex), and Loos. It was with Loos that I really struggled, because the compaction of the spatial intensity of his houses into two dimensions stretches the limits of the plan beyond breaking point; the plans need support from the other drawing conventions–sections, axonometrics–to understand their three-dimensional richness. It is with Loos that one is most conscious of Le Corbusier’s warning that the plan is an “austere abstraction… it calls for the most active imagination”.1 The plan is to architecture what the score is to music: a coded language that acts as a necessary instrument in the journey from the composer’s (architect’s) musical (spatial) imagination, to the listener’s

(user’s) experience. It is no more than that; the plan is not architecture, nor does the plan single-handedly generate architecture. Le Corbusier’s “plan is the generator” is more ambivalent than is usually understood. The quote appears in a section of Towards a New Architecture in which Corbusier scathingly dismisses the formalist tendencies of the BeauxArts, and rather than simply being a prescription for design, “plan is the generator!” may also be read as an admonishment of the pattern-making associated with classic architectural plans–remembering too that this section appears in the chapter called “The Illusion of Plans”.2 It is exactly the illusion that the plan is architecture that is so dangerous, because then it becomes an end in itself. It is all too easy to get lost in the making of drawings and see them as aesthetic figures in their own right, in which the act of design becomes focussed on the refinement of the formal gestures initially made in plan. In this world the good plan is the pretty plan, that with the most pleasing composition of shapes. This attitude of seeing the plan as a formal device is well illustrated by the story of Frank Gehry being so captivated by the composition of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Christ with Crown of Thorns, that he simply, and simplistically, transferred the underlying formal structure to make the plan for the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.

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The consuming nature of Gehry’s aesthetic compulsion somehow allows him to be untroubled by the cultural and political intricacies and contradictions that such a formal translation might bring with it. In many ways Gehry is the last great Beaux-Arts architect, twiddling with form as the world burns. Others at the more ‘fashionable’ end of contemporary architecture take these formalist obsessions still further. For architects and students concerned with the parametric production of architecture through the computer, the plan is simply a by-product. Starting with the object in space, or at least the virtual space of the computer screen, the plan is the result of a horizontal cut through complex form, just as the section is a vertical cut. The two, plan and section, assume equivalence as mere slices, and in this the designers forget the crucial distinction between the two: the section empathises a vertical, bodily, sensibility while the plan in all its horizontality is necessarily a removal from any phenomenal engagement with space. Maybe they forget this distinction because they are slumped diagonally in front of their screens, but the resulting shapes on the horizontal slices can only pretend to become plans through being labelled with activities. The modernist credo of form follows function is reversed so function follows form. Where the modernist equation is rightly criticised for its reductive and positivist nature, its reversal is a straightforward abrogation of the architect’s responsibility for human occupation since function is seen as no more than a way of filling shapes; and so what is trumpeted as formally progressive is revealed as socially regressive. At the less fashionable end of contemporary architecture, the modernist rule of plan still holds sway, in so much that it is reduced to the ‘efficient’ arrangement of functions. The plan

of rooms is seen to emerge as the inevitable consequence of data-gathering, room schedules, occupancy rates and furniture layouts, most of which are unthinkingly provided by clients and their project managers in the name of objectivity. The only task left to architecture is to take this information and arrange it (the plan), and then to disguise the paucity of this act by wrapping up the efficiencies in an aesthetic skin (the elevation), hence the demise of the section (the most liberating and human of all the orthographies) in so much of the dross of recent architecture. Contemporary architecture’s use of the plan tends to flip-flop between these two extremes; either they are the by-products of formal invention or they are instruments of operational efficiency. The most successful architects of the age such as Norman Foster expediently combine the two. It is for this reason that when I talk about the idea of ‘good plans’ with my students, they look at me blankly. They do not understand the idea of the plan as score, a device that is at the same time a severe abstraction, but with the application of an active imagination becomes something imbued with spatial and social potential. To get through this blankness it is necessary to be direct–to stand, for example, in the intricate spaces of Candilis-JosicWoods’ Free University of Berlin plan in hand, and admire the way that the weaving of the plan as mat is both anticipation and recording of the soft spatiality—and in the same place to despair at Foster+Partners’ disruption of that intricacy with a bombastic blob and understand the way that this crudeness is so clearly anticipated and recorded in the plan. I am not sure, therefore, that my students would share my enthusiasm for the subtleties of Proctor and Matthews’ plans, and so it behoves me to be teacherly and explain.

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remaining nine defined the structure of roads in the town, then this is just a dispassionate indication of the authority of the autocratic plan as it overwhelms nature and society with equal ease. It is not for nothing that Le Corbusier illustrates the opening page of his chapter on the illusion of plans with the plan of Karlsruhe.

Opposite left Historic radial plan, Karlsruhe Opposite right Competition entry, plan, Karlsruhe Right Framework plan, Pontoon Dock, Royal Docks, London

Social Patterns

The first term of the title of this book, Pattern, Place, Purpose, might suggest that Proctor and Matthews are interested in the pattern in terms of shape and form, and that this interest is best deployed through the plan as a formal device. There is, of course, a long tradition of architecture’s games being played out through the making of plans. How better to keep control than through the apparent order and power that the pattern of the plan exerts? And how quicker to create the fiction of a stable knowledge base for architecture than through the classification of plans? Hence the enduring hold of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s nineteenth century typological exercises. An early competition entry by Proctor and Matthews, however, shows that they stand outside this tradition of the use of the plan as formal pattern with its associated trappings of power and type. The setting for the competition is poignant; Karlsruhe in Germany, one of the prime examples of the urban plan as pattern, a starburst of 32 radiating routes emanating all too symbolically from the Margrave’s hunting lodge; and if 23 of these served as hunting rides through the surrounding forest and the

The competition asked for a Garden Festival quarter with a long term legacy of cultural and educational uses, to be attached to this imperial board game. Most of the entries took the given geometry as a starting point and played typological games with it. Proctor and Matthews’ scheme firmly resists this temptation. Their interest is not with the fixity of formal patterns but with the dynamics of social patterns, and then how these might be inscribed in space. The resulting competition may look wilful in relation to the rigidity of the historical fabric, but this oppositional stance is only a ‘problem’ if one privileges form over social occupation. If, however, one starts with the anticipation of social relations as the task of design, then the plan emerges as the result of thinking through the occupation of space, rather than as the precursor of abstract space (and thus consequently as the controller of social space). Proctor and Matthews’ entry is a conscious reaction to the idea of the masterplan, which is normally seen exactly as the exercising of overall order and control. Instead their approach is one that proposes a set of what they term “armatures”, whose exact formal definition is of less importance than the spatial– and hence social–relation of one to another. This attitude is still clearer in the work that they did for the London Docklands Development Corporation in contributing to a framework for the future development of the Royal Docks. The word framework is telling here, since it is suggestive of a background support system rather than a foreground ordering system, and so while the urban plans developed by Proctor and Matthews may look quite fixed in their formal language, they were never intended as anything more than catalysts for others to work from. T h e C o n g e n i a l D we l l i n g

If we now move from the scale of the city to the scale of the individual dwelling, the question is whether a similar attitude to the plan is carried through–an attitude, that is, of the plan as a rumination on social organisation? Tracking back to the Hollick House, one of Proctor and Matthews’ first standalone projects as architects, one might expect to find the answer since, as with many architects’ early works, it wears its heart on its sleeve and becomes the test-bed for ideas that will be developed through later projects.

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The Hollick House has a definitively ‘good’ plan on my terms. It does not at first sight have an elegance or formal refinement but it is a plan that bears study, asking one to read it as a conductor reads a score, so that with some effort one can begin to project oneself into the experience of the spaces. Taking the plan on its own, without recourse to other representations, one can sense the following sequence: Left Dunbar Wharf, Ground and second floor plan Right slo (simple living opportunities) house plans, South Chase, Newhall

Through an oversized entrance door into an inside/ outside space, courtyard on the right (I guess those are stones in a pond), a suggested niche on the left (for boots muddied in the vegetable garden?). Ahead a small flight of stairs just caught in the slightly thickened walls to form a threshold to the conservatory beyond; round to the left the entrance to the kitchen, maybe partially hidden behind a nib wall (one can only guess at its height), but still open enough to be inviting. Now in the kitchen, on the right are doors set between fins suggesting a thick slab of transitional space (is that where one puts plant pots, in which case are they for lemon trees and other semi-hardy plants?).

And so on. As with all good plans, this one is suggestive of a variety of occupations and actions, and if it is reminiscent of Edwin Lutyens, Mackay Baillie Scott and Charles Voysey, this is not accidental, because these architects are also interested in the congeniality of dwelling. Proctor and Matthews are of course very aware of such antecedents, and sensitive to the Arts and Crafts tricks of shifting axes, dual symmetries in rooms and niches to form pockets of dwelling, but even

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more so they are aware that these planimetric devices are only part of the designer’s toolkit. The lesson here is that the Hollick House could not have been developed solely through plan, but the plan is one of many design tools–among them models, axonometrics, sketches, and sections. The interplay between these multiple methods can be sensed in the resulting plan, which at the same time is a recording of the traces of the design process in all its layers and an anticipation of the traces of occupation. Just as Proctor and Matthews are very well-informed about architectural precedent, so too are they well read. My favourite story is of the two partners when they were teaching at the University of Sheffield. They would set off from London at the crack of dawn and drive up the M1, one reading books to the other. One of these was Martin Heidegger’s Building, Dwelling, Thinking. The M1 at 6.30 in the morning, fog aside, is pretty much antithetical to a Heideggerian sensibility, but nonetheless it appears as if something of that elliptical text stuck. Where the modernists allegedly reduced living to a set of functions, Heidegger’s call is for the restitution of the dwelling as the primal condition of Being. Clearly Proctor and Matthews have not followed the more essentialist followers of Heidegger, but they do understand the house as something much more than an appliance for living, and so see the plan as much more than an instrument of functional organisation; it becomes a setting for congenial dwelling. L iv i n g O b j e c t s

The Hollick House establishes one defining feature of Proctor and Matthews’ housing work, namely an attitude to

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Marc Quinn Studio, Ravey Street, London

dwelling, but it also introduces other design devices that are played out in later work The first is the use of courtyards as external rooms which manage the transition from inside to outside in an easy manner. The second is the way that architectural objects–moving walls, built-in furniture and, as in the Hollick House, staircases–are used to activate the surrounding spaces. They are treated like pieces of furniture, to be moved, sat on, slid. Time and time again in Proctor and Matthews’ plans, the staircase is treated as an organising and suggestive element–suggestive, that is, of action on and around it–rather than as a mere tool of circulation. This works both in one-off projects, such as Dunbar Wharf, and in the mass housing schemes such as the very recent slo (simple living opportunities) houses at Newhall, Harlow, in which the staircase is at the centre of the whole plan, brilliantly opening up and extending the spaces around it. The most extreme manifestation of this idea of the living object is in the conversion at Ravey Street done for the artist Marc Quinn, in which an arm of architectural equipment slices through the centre of the plan. Like a Swiss Army penknife, bits extend out of this core, which also contains the quasi-laboratory type spaces that enable Quinn’s bodypart-art. This central living object acts in just the same way as the urban armatures in the Karlsruhe scheme, stimulating the spaces around it. D y n a m i c D we l l i n g

Ravey Street introduces another common theme in Proctor and Matthews’ work that of flexibility and adaptability. Flexibility is understood here as capable of physical change

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and adaptability as capable of social change.3 The plan in architecture is often seen as a static given, something that fixes patterns of living. Indeed this determinant role of the plan is part of the architect’s arsenal of weapons to wage war on ambivalence and uncertainty. The hard plan marshals its occupants into ordered action. The soft plan, on the other hand, allows it occupants to unfold their lives in multiple ways. Proctor and Matthews are masters of the soft plan. The most explicit example of this is the plan for the apartments at Greenwich Millennium Village, in which a series of spaces rotate around a central core of services. These spaces can be variously divided up depending on the occupants’ needs at any given time. These changes might be frequent (the closing-off of the bedroom at night) or long-term (the gradual dissolving of bedrooms into living space as children leave home). The plans at Greenwich Millennium Village are a clear tracing of, and expectation of, the dynamics of dwelling, from internal patterns of use to external changes in social demographics. Proctor and Matthews are one of the very few architects operating today who take these dynamics seriously as an issue that the designer must be generous enough to accommodate if today’s housing is not to be tomorrow’s obsolescence. It is a generous act because the volatility of dwelling and demographics means that changes to the original plan are beyond the direct control of the architect. For many architects these changes are inflictions on their ideals, but a more realistic attitude is not only to accept them but also to positively encourage them.

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Flexible Apartment plan, Greenwich Millennium Village

It is exactly this anticipation of change that Proctor and Matthews achieve in Homegrown, their most sophisticated take on housing for the twenty-first century. In the explanation for this project, which is essentially a piece of self-funded research, Proctor and Matthews refer to the individuality and unpredictability of the traditional English house as a starting point; homes that might accrue over time and in so doing throw up a variety of living spaces. More poignantly they mention the ‘rambling plan’ as something to be aspired to. Where rambling might, against normative architectural values, suggest imprecision and woolly thinking (and with this a derogation of professional control), for Proctor and Matthews it is an honest and delightful reflection of the way that multiple lives might be played out in space over time. The rambling occurs in both plan, most clearly in the four-bed mews houses, and also in threedimensions, most clearly in the smaller houses where a tight plan suddenly opens up to double-height spaces, which are clearly intended to provide for (but not determine) social interaction. The more that one looks at these plans, the more one is asked to occupy them. The magical hinged doors–or are they walls–which in their ambiguity of scale imply an ambiguity as to the way they and spaces around them might be used. Then there is the ever-present premonition that these spaces might be filled in, flat roofs be built on, doors moved, garages turned into offices. All this sense of anticipation is intended by the architects, and to achieve it takes more than a bit of skill. One has to be continually projecting different ways of living, changing family structures, long-term, short-term, and seeing if one’s plans can accommodate them. Some things (stairs, kitchens, hearths) act as stable anchors around which these social dynamics are allowed to evolve.

The Selfless Plan

Homegrown is the most extended investigation into the dynamics of dwelling, but one sees the same ideas, and hence traces in plan, in other schemes. For example, the housing in Rochdale, designed mainly with the extended Asian family in mind. Here a five bedroom house can be combined with a two bedroom maisonette by knocking through the party wall on the staircase landing, but each part of the dwelling retains its own sense of privacy through the courtyards round which the elements are arranged; thus an elderly part of a family can be connected to their children but not overwhelm them. As with all good architects, Proctor and Matthews work best when up against constraints, forcing ingenuity into the tightest of corners. This is clear in their prefabulous scheme, and £60k house commissioned by the Evening Standard in anticipation of the UK government’s competition, which asked for mass housing to be produced for £60,000. The plans condense many of the Homegrown concepts into a high-density compact scheme. The rambling nature of Homegrown’s plans may be partially lost, but the use of staircase as organiser, of courtyards as extended living spaces, of the kitchen as the stable focus of family life, and the anticipation of bits being filled in all remain. Where many of the subsequent £60k schemes rolled out spurious technologies or tinkered with elevations, Proctor and Matthews’ first concern is the way that people may live their lives in these necessarily economical spaces. Their scheme may be reduced in terms of area but is by no means reductive in terms of the social occupation that it enables.

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Homegrown expandable home

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It is this aspect of Proctor and Matthews’ attention to the plan that is selfless. The tendency in current architecture is towards visual excess, be it through the display of technology, the manipulation of plan as pattern and/or through formal gymnastics. Such is the hubbub created by the competing claims of these formalist spectacles that one is distracted from the essential purpose of architecture, that of forming empowering social and spatial conditions on behalf of others. The selflessness comes from the fact that such conditions are not immediately apparent, nor do they have the impact of aesthetic excess, which appears to be the primary value system in contemporary architectural production. Proctor and Matthews thus risk losing a place at the high table of architecture, which is dominated by ‘progressive’ formalists selling their wares on the global commodity exchange that tragically, and noisily, constitutes so much of the architectural foreground. Proctor and Matthews’ plans, in contrast, work quietly in the background but have much longer-term implications and benefits for those who will occupy them. This attention to the lives of others is of especial importance in the design of housing, but it is also apparent in the Proctor and Matthews’ projects for other uses and scales, from gorillas in the zoo to the urban scale weaving of roads,

fronts, courtyards and backs at Abode. All these schemes have ‘good’ plans, and by now we have moved towards an understanding of what this might mean. The ‘good’ plan is the one that plans (as verb) in the name of others, against the temptation to consider the plan (as noun) as a “pretty thing to be drawn, like a Madonna face”.4 In this respect of making dynamic plans for others, the work of Proctor and Matthews is exemplary because it reminds us of the combination of modesty and skill that is required if architecture is to (re)gain a role as an agent in the betterment of the social realm.

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back house, Rochdale Bottom ‘Prefabulous’ plans

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Footnotes: 1, Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, London: The Architectural Press, 1946, p. 46. 2, Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, p. 166. 3, These definitions are those of Stephen Groák. See Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Flexible Housing, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2007, p. 5 for further explanation. 4, Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, p. 46. Picture Credits: P208, © Charlotte Wood

Black Dog Publishing Limited 10a Acton Street London WC1X 9NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097 Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 8682 info@blackdogonline.com www.blackdogonline.com ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

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Design Method

Working alongside Proctor and Matthews for two decades has given me a special respect for their method. The longevity is partly due to proximity. Our respective careers have made their way in central London working on similar varieties of social projects; housing, schools, arts and leisure buildings. But there is a deeper affinity. I have followed it un-selfconsciously over the years and am now offered the opportunity to study it. There is a belief system about what buildings should be like, how their use and expression combine together. Part of this is an attitude to the purpose of construction itself. Their approach has been forged by continual questioning, confrontations with the perennial architectural questions. What is a facade for? What can it contribute to townscape? What value has the marks of assembly? These architects have avoided the sidestepping of so many other moderns; if a problem appears intractable then sidle up to it through a different discourse; sociology, literary theory, historicism. They are architects pure and simple. The â€˜simplicityâ€™ that Mies referred to. They confront the problem of building by making form.

In what follows a pre-disposition to set up this partnershipâ€™s work as dialectically opposed to other trends or as a drawing together and continuation of earlier threads is resisted. (Certainly they are not immune to their surroundings, why would one site oneself in London then ignore its architectural milieu. The weakness of the contemporary critical base they seem to overcome by jumping back to the work of the 1980s critics).1 My approach will be to take the use of construction in these designs to be a well-thought out generating system and a structure, in the sense of open-work system, into which can be fitted a variety of meanings. To start with elementary things. In the work separate components defined by specific functions are studied, understood then brought together. Materials are treated in their essences and joined painstakingly. The interactions within each chosen pallet of materials are used to reinforce their physicality. Across the projects the manipulation of elements is made by the establishment and subsequent development of a series of tropes. Elements recurring tend to be those that handle best when subjected to these treatments and which then display this parsing. Is this more than just a sifting and recombination of architectural patterns combined with a respect for materials?

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of construction that has occurred. They will comfortably leave traditional materials to get on in their time honoured way placed right next to seemingly unique assemblages of built form; consequences rigorously thought out. Different methodologies rarely co-exist for long. In their treatments of reinforced concrete construction Auguste Perret went one way and Le Corbusier another. The latter’s treatment of flat-slab neutral space and skinned facades has dominated subsequent development. Perret’s framing, fields and revetments, are neoclassical in origin, if that naming includes the speculations of Auguste Choisy who found the wooden architecture of the primitive hut in everything that followed. Proctor and Matthews work is not neoclassical but takes a cue from the way buildings have been made in the past. Each project refers not only to its own making but to other constructions as well. This is not the opposition of the built object to ‘all the constructions it might otherwise have been’. It is more about a rifling through of previous methods for what might best be bent to solving the conditions at hand. Every excursion is controlled by the trajectory of previous findings.

These architects are a generation too late to acquire directly any of the pragmatism instilled by war and subsequent austerity. They also avoided the contamination of working in either of the off-shoots of Team 4 so their technical uptake has been very different from a large proportion of their contemporaries. To me they read very much as an alternative to that establishment. The spectacular success of the HSBC headquarters, Hong Kong and Lloyds, London with their technology transfers from transport and military hardware, extreme specifications of glass, artificial rubber, metal alloys and high strength concretes combined in dry assembled, mannered joints have tended to swamp other discourses. Proctor and Matthews have steadily worked away in a parallel universe. Distinct among current genres I would summarise their work as a craft-based approach forced through the filters of relatively recently developed forms of prescriptive specifications, and of modern building science. Everything is re-studied for its potential but worked within the context of its back-story, where it came from to be as it is. This makes for practical procurement. They do use materials in seemingly new ways and their use of technology may therefore be deemed ‘high’; (they have been styled ‘inventors’), but this drive is unrelated to the general dislocation between design and pure performance

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Opposite top Hall House, panels of flint in galvanised steel trays Opposite bottom Le Corbusier, Ozenfant Studio, 1922 Above Auguste and Gustave Perret, Church of Notre Dame du Raincy, 1921â€“1922

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Opposite top left and bottom Island Gardens Housing Office, ‘weightless’ roof Opposite top Abode, ‘folded’ ridge and thatch roof Right Poplar Play Nursery, component model

It is easiest to interpret this as the development of a series of set-pieces sharing common forms though the objectives on each occasion may be very different. Architectural/Structural Elements

The following list of architectural devices was compiled by scanning through arrays of thumbnail photographs of projects we have worked on or visited. By making comparisons sets jump out at one. This ordering process is not at all comprehensive, and the names given to classes are rather arbitrary so as not to belie the complexity they have. There will be other useful groupings crossing the divisions made here. The elements chosen share three characteristics: They originate in structure. Each listing encloses common forms, hierarchies of elements, adjacencies. They look as though they could have been made in the same way.

Canopies

The roof as ‘type’ speaks of the origin of building. The projects featured in this book are very much of-this-earth and placed in relation to the ground plane. The all-encompassing roof made its earliest appearance in the first design for the Poplar ‘Pier’ leisure centre and was to be later explored further in the Coram Foundation competition submission and the Oak Tree centre in west London. At Poplar the roof plane containing the ‘pepper pot’ of sky lights and tree apertures is bounded and is not an infinitely extendable surface, but a cropped plate, the edges contributing to the stiffness of the beam grillage beneath rather than being sustained by it. Supporting columns function in the same way as trees in the grove, cantilevering up from the ground and shaped accordingly. The absence of bending moment at their tops allows the insertion of a visual separation, a capital detail. The weightless but geometrically controlled roof then resurfaced at the Island Gardens Housing office. The elliptical spitfire wing profile is given a pronounced belly and was originally intended to be left as gloss sealed timber. Simple devices are employed to make the roof ‘float’.

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Its form is complete and closed and it stands on slender pins above a clean-cornered frame. Inside a small table matches the canopies form; the architects of Proctor and Matthews’ generation who were influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s attitude to construction detail hit on metonymy and played it to the hilt. Large structures mimic small, the detail embodies the whole. Circular windows are the set-piece penetration in the smooth cast walls, projected to deal with the curving plane. Big deep pitched roofs, particularly for gathering places give height and volume and genuinely save structural weight until extremely steep. Halls embrace gatherings. The social function could not be more obvious.

Colonnades

If the plans are set up as overlaid patterns then their internal consistency has to be maintained at the same time as they are being coupled together. Arcades enclosed and extending are one way. The courtyard is a hermetic world, columns are short and close spaced to carry low sheltering roofs. Loggias are set high and wide to make peristyles. Poplar Play Nursery and the Poplar Pier Centre were developed together as a town-planning structure. They share common details. The playschool was first. Folding doors are everywhere, big wide-hinged, defining boxes then releasing them. They appear as facade shutters. As these planes are folded back the main building frames are revealed as column lines, aisles and edges. At right angles to the main ranges of building simple colonnades are set up immediately defining a bounded space. The remaining two edges are lightly drawn in with landscape features. Different column rows are distinguished in their shaft treatments to lead the eye on and to establish the legibility of circulation. The common structural materials have a wide range of elasticity’s which yield different diameters for a given storey height and this property is manipulated to highlight the patterns of structure.

All the time that there is a building up of technique away from the primitive hut there is a reaching back down. At Abode, Newhall thatch is used close cropped and precise, the ridge completed with the severest line of folded lead sheet. The Zoo buildings are like children’s camps assembled from found objects. The lion house at Whipsnade shows how such direct manipulation of materials changes down an architectural gear towards the making of an animal house of intense simplicity. There is a brand of contemporary architects who think it synthetic to use developed forms inflected in new ways. The responsibility for ensuring these appropriations don’t leak is pressed back on the subcontractor; skylights used as windows, space blanket insulation to make building envelopes. This product abuse is a subversion of the postwar pragmatism when high value materials were combined to meet quotidian requirements. Those applications were made by people well-versed in using standardised, packaged, deliverable products. Proctor and Matthews unpick the knot and do not seek re-centring effects. They work closely with sub-contractors, respecting the depth of their knowledge.

Aedicules

The schemes are peppered with aedicules , enclosures of space, of all scales, for example oriel windows, cabinets and sleeping closets, whole houses within ‘Spreken arches’. Everything is treated like large pieces of furniture. How many times does one see an architect correct a misconceived space by emphasising the staircase, an element to galvanise a leaden space. But if the stair is just a fixed piece of furniture from the first, neither forming the centre-point of the circulation composition nor a dynamic diagonal but simply

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Opposite top and bottom Island Gardens Housing Office, study model with circular windows, curving plane and elliptical â€˜Spitfireâ€™ wing Right Island Gardens Housing Office, entrance interior, with small table matching canopy form

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boxed in square and stabilising the flows of movement around the room then other potentials present themselves. The device of separating the upper treads from the lower by the omission of a single riser, as seen in the slo homes at Newhall, expresses the family withdrawing from the communal reducing the bridge structure of a domestic staircase to a floor box and suspended companion-way.

concentration of animation. The little house within the big. But the adoption of forms suited to volumetric production before any move to prefabrication points beyond technical determinism. There is a tradition that building construction perpetuates a distinction between Eupalinos, constructor in stone and Tridon, the builder of ships in wood.3 Both however share a common method, for some reason identified as characteristically modern, originating in the rationalised manufacturing of Marc Brunel.4 Tasks are sub-divided and sub-assemblies and blanks brought up gradually. This is the craft tradition drawn upon in these designs, that of the specialist making his manageable section of work then bringing the distillation of expertise to be slotted into the whole. This approach works well in refurbishments of existing buildings. Precise boxes, independently expressed, fetch up against particular points of existing armatures. The new installations appear fully reversible. The transition from rough to smooth, low tolerance to arrised, is negotiated across narrow spaces. Shadows infiltrate themselves and expand the spaces slipping away into the gaps. In the new-build projects secondary elements are always treated as frames and formalisations. Front doors are for greetings. That pause is controlled with the provision of a pavilion, real or implied, mediating between indoors and out. At Ropemakers Field external spaces are defined matching internal ones in size. The play of perception is precisely channelled in these adjustments and reinforcements of scale. B r a c e d b ox k i t e s

If these sub-assemblies are treated as coherent items then scales become elastic, small houses are made bigger by their envelopment of the kind of spaces Gaston Bachelard calls ‘shells’.2 Their margins become points of intense architectonic activity. Seals have to be made, fixings are expressed or suppressed. The relative movements of the parts are catered for. Occasionally the aedicules break their bounds to resolve competing demands in a composition. At Abode, Newhall the big dormer windows simultaneously separating out the terrace units and tying together the roof and walls.

These elements are a real joy to the engineer. In the absence of elemental timber framing, a common feature of many of Proctor and Matthews’ projects but un-available in mass housing projects, the builders’ predisposition to making in wood, (‘Tridon’ as above), is satisfied by the refinement of trussed crates of space. These armatures might mount a screen, (Adobe), or a canopy, (John Eccles House), sometimes just a loggia (Hotel, Cambridge). At Ropemakers Field the primitive hut outside is implied by the barest assembly of sticks with a fully embedded wood embrasure set behind it.

The containments that pre-fabrication brings are made into compositional devices. Even the finest car design concentrates itself around the points of contact, visual and tactile, the wheel hubs, the dashboard. There is a

A u g u s t P e r r e t ’s f r a m i n g a n d f i e l d d ev i c e s

This is taking up Perret against Corbusier. One seldom sees the picture frame treated as a structural type like the arch or

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Opposite Bucknall House, ‘precise’ window box in existing aperture Right Ropemakers Field, ‘frames and formalisations’, analytical axonometric

beam but it is an efficient and a flexible construction motif, load from above being directed into edge posts then distributed back into the elastic medium below. It provides the capping to the end-grains of a field of larch board. It is the tray for an egg box of flint cobbles. Like pictures in a gallery the sparse frames of Proctor and Matthews’ work enclose and separate off spaces of intense activity, finely detailed joinery or enriched material. According to engineering statics the best places to pick up a frame are the four quarter points part way down the sides. This induces an efficient pattern of bending and leaves the corners free to read visually. Formal frame elements are used in counterpoint to main frames. The Hall house, Burnham Overy Staithe, has panels set within sub-frames in turn set upon principle frames. The lightness of the non-structural component draws attention to the functional dimensions of the primary elements.

Columns and their Capitals

The juncture of horizontal and vertical is a place where architecture must address construction. I once saw the architect Peter Foggo react badly to the critic Charles Jencks’ slide of the five orders of architecture set alongside a Miesian cruciform column and thereby positing an evolution of ideas. There is no development. It is the anamnesis of the recurring present, the same problem re-presenting itself over and over again, making the opportunity to carry different contents. In Proctor and Matthews’ work the column is continually reworked. The Gorilla house posts confront the same problems as those of the Doric column. Horizontal bending in the entablature must be converted into vertical compression of the shaft. A bundling of sticks becomes the fluting of the cylinder in light, and the point of highest strain, the echinus, is a spreader radiating the kinaesthetic of strain.

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surrounded by a sequence of commentaries, marginalia added by hand over generations, and the original wordings get expunged by the side of subsequent scribe’s hands. The residue is a conceptual space of great subtlety.

Opposite left Abode, entrance threshold and screen Opposite right Hotel, Cambridge, loggia Right Chronos Buildings, entrance canopy frame

Proctor and Matthews most often choose base and head details that are recessed, dealing with the disparity in those frames where the column, not to buckle, is of greater breadth than the head beams. The plates or billet separating the elements are made long enough to allow a measured rotation. The Chronos Buildings on the Mile End Road, have a very fine capital detail; the cushion moulding is an uncapped hollow section, as is the base. The shadowed recesses in both junctions pick out the components they connect. Columns particularly register the movement of daylight an effect enhanced when the shaft is taken up past the ceiling seeming to support only a skylit area. Similarly the base to the ‘flitched’ timber column at the Hall House is a fabricated cruciform of galvanised steel plate. Drawings

There is a wide range of drawing techniques and projections deployed in the generation of these designs. Flexibility of drawing style obviously broadens the compass of what is achievable. This seems an important part of the spread that the work embodies. Sketches tend to be built up. I have heard this called paratactic ordering.5 A design is built up rather in the way Jewish Mosaic Law is assembled. The original text is

In our experience the most common way an architect will develop a design is by using ‘a flock of sheep’. In the film The Belly of an Architect the central character diagnoses himself with the broad sweep of a felt tip, large graphic arrows analyse feelings experience and context. In such ways design steadily condenses, some magic point where the protean lines mesh then lie still. Alternatively there is an inexorable march from master concept to particular condition. A cartoon illustrates the flash of inspiration. A heart designates the heart of a design. But what of another way, the piling up of mutually antagonisms and difficulties, until a rich peat of potential can be excavated and re-ignited? Individual sketches build up into a sketchbook tracking back and forth. Contributions from different sources are collected together, but without overt ordering. This is how Proctor and Matthews work. The sketches use that Renaissance trick, perhaps taken from the dissecting table, parts are disembodied and studied. The page is rotated to separate the parts. Into the centre the design appears. Like Carlo Scarpa and his ‘cartoni’ the design trajectory can be tracked in the build up on the page. Only at the very last is there a cascade of design information fixed and co-ordinated for building to commence. If modern procurement processes would allow it one could imagine these architects following the open-ended design methods of Jorn Utzon or Hugo Häring. Given the ‘worked over’ nature of the sketch material by comparison there seems a scarcity of study models. Competitors working the same ground use large-scale models, pulling apart and reconfiguring in rapid bursts, adding and subtracting and photographing. At Proctor and Matthews the models look relatively finished when they eventually appear. The full-scale joint prototypes beloved of the big firms aren’t there either. The time needed to make such physical studies seems to be too much of a jump-cut in the flow of a design process. Perhaps in certain circumstances actual making only serves to constrain. Model-making is suggestive and illustrates problems but may also limit responses which run far freer across the papers surface. Isometric projections from below recur in the design studies. Their deployment is much closer to early examples of such drawings rather than James Stirling’s more recent celebrated examples. It is as if the architects at Proctor and Matthews have taken Kenneth Frampton’s critique on the limitations of Auguste Choisy’s analytical drawings to heart.

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Left Poplar Play Nursery, exploded worms-eye axonometric assembly drawing Right Auguste Choisy, analytical drawing

..Choisy presented tectonic tropes as complete entities wherein the space form was inseparable from the mode of construction and where subcomponents were presented as set pieces derived from the influences of climate, material, and cross-cultural interaction.6

This is all well and good but where the critic places such representations as a cul-de-sac in which solid construction is depicted as homogeneous mass anticipating in-situ concrete Proctor and Matthews literally explode that limitation, first by accurately depicting each part then by separating them into assembly drawings. Conventionalised elevations are used in their classical form to study the modelling of shadows with planes juxtaposed to give depth to a building’s boundary. These drawings shade into more abstract studies. Tonal exercises activate the

optical illusions of depth caused by clashing colours. The hotel in Cambridge has an elevation made out of recessive blue planes. In the Baron’s Place volumetric housing scheme the emphasis is cleverly switched from the stacking of volumes to a camouflage of surface. The type of drawing is made as a pattern of co-planar tones. And of course and most important to this essay is the detail studies, the 1:5 and full size ‘working details’, the crisp definition of additive elements, functional layers, connection points and drain paths. This work is relentlessly pursued. It is almost Piranesian in the close study of the action of building reflected in its tools. The actual equipment is not drawn,(or I haven’t seen it), but the actuality of the fixings, screws and glues, is all depicted. The appearance of the junctions, the degree to which assembly is revealed is precisely controlled. It errs on the side of demonstration but occasionally can conceal also.

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Baronâ€™s Place, key worker volumetric housing, surface camouflage

So these are some of the recurrent themes and combinations and the places where they occur in the built work. What of process? A collaboration between architect and engineers, structural, environmental and financial, obviously involves exchange. Early sketches allude to effects. A proposal gradually appears. Structural rigour is suspended, reined in, released again and so on cyclically. In Proctor and Matthews work the final definition is very precise; in fact amongst the most detailed prescriptions of building I have ever encountered. The way every bit goes together is considered with an intensity that is maintained throughout the work. Urban scales and window openers get the same care. N ewh a l l N e i g h b o u r h o o d C e n t r e, H a r l ow

At the time of writing we are mid-project with Proctor and Matthews. A range of farm buildings at Newhall, Harlow is being developed as a neighbourhood centre for surrounding housing developments. This planning gain is to a tight budget. The existing buildings have a long history and have been careful assembled through a sequence of accretion over generations. Each part is leanly built yet well-made representing a significant expenditure from the surplus of a farming community. A large timber barn, cross-framed in oak timbers thought to be taken from ships de-commissioned from the British navy, forms the eastern stop of the composition. The profile indicates a steep thatched roof that has been recovered with asbestos cement corrugations. A four-square brick storeroom of two storeys with tiled roof is set on the other

end of the building range with low, narrow outbuildings in between. A beautiful tractor canopy framed in scantlings completes the working set. The circulation pattern of the working farm was around the outside of this arrangement with links across to remote buildings. As structural engineers we were brought to the project only after the first major moves had already been made. The utilitarian buildings are to become the communal hub of the neighbourhood. The big barn becomes a meeting house and auditorium for moots and recitals. The brick barn is refurbished for a high-end restaurant franchise. A third building is proposed, placed midway so that the existing infill is swept away but its outline retained to form two courtyards, internalised but permeable. The colonnades revert to loose ranks of flags, the enclosure is a cloister. The three buildings are allowed an easy relationship. This is the gathering place of a community. The processes of addition and pragmatic use of materials to hand which suffuse the existing fabric have been taken up in all that has followed. First the barn has been closely examined; to understand its original actions and current imperfections. There are inherent design faults in its bracing system and disposition of elements. The envelope of the building needed replacement, it is dilapidated and impossible to upgrade to any proximation of current standards. At first it looked as if the frame would have to be dismantled and rebuilt, an honest enough action given the original intention of de-mountability. That proved unnecessary. Some additional lateral stiffening might be needed, clearly defined cross-walls with discrete fixing points back to the existing members. An analysis and

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sensitivity check, (the effect on possible outcomes of the uncertainty of design parameters), showed that the existing joints could be strengthened enough for the frame to function as it always has, a pseudo-structure taking some stiffness from its envelope of boards. Once established these patterns of design behaviour were turned upon the remainder of the buildings, new constructions and existing improvements. The central building, scaled to mediate between the two ends is heavily modelled with openings and is therefore framed. Walls that are not allowed to reach ground level become stiff plates spanning between gables. This and a whole series of engineering set pieces appear alongside the architectural devices. Typical are the three pinned frame and lean-to. The columns are to be light and therefore free of bending. Their top is restrained by a slender member spanning onto a more solid core. The roof covering is minimal or absent. The form of the central building at Newhall distorts in response to the spaces created between the two ends. The structuring of the roof is treated as a closed problem. The

influence of the boundary conditions is initially ignored in its development then subsequently allowed to modify its edges. Points on a continuum of structural potential were chosen as study options. Full-length purlins and an eaves beam were examined. These emphasize the substance of the side walls. The whole building was considered as a set of folded plates, nothing beyond the form of enclosure, just surfaces bending and developing membrane stresses. A crude steel frame with dimensions arranged to suit a simple infilling of timber studs and rafters was drawn up. A scheme for an array of close-framed timber portals, a hull of members dispersing forces like a balloon frame, worked somewhere in between. Each of these arrangements brought different conditions to their margins. Much time was spent on the western elevation where the external wall of the building is patterned into the adjacent cloister. Pre-cast concrete uprights, capable of taking imprints would either have to take the lateral forces produced by spreading arches or be relieved of significant load which is instead carried to into more substantial corner posts. This continual manipulation of the relative stiffness of

structural elements permeates our work. The architectural balance of components, their close proportioning, is adjusted by means of this structural manipulation. Farm buildings, despite their seeming perfectibility, have received some attention from architecture’s modern movement. The famous example of Häring’s Gut Garkau farm illustrates their use as sites on which to demonstrate attitudes to functionalism. The particular way they are made has also been appropriated on occasion. Utzon’s Bägsvaerd Church is a prime example. That building is a social foundation in a farming community. The choices of material and detailing are not intended to fit the building into its context but to demonstrate an attitude to existence. At Newhall there is a novel form of urbanised English countryside way of life being forged out. What seems to be resulting is a kind of veneering. The picturesque is avoided by selecting materials with some reference to historical modes of covering. These are then used with fully modern details to occupy the spaces left by the original construction.

On the old barn the roof covering is spaced off its frame to mediate the crookedness of the old timbers with the planar surfaces of walls and soffits. This separation deals with the thin-ness of the new high performance insulations relative to old barriers of wattle and thatch. Junctions become discrete locations where loads can be fed into the strong points of the frame. Shadows modelling the space appear in the spaces between. The purer architectural features are not ignored. The steep pitched roof is opened out to its full volume. Resin rods, drilled in and concealed beneath pellets were considered to return the main joints to adequate strength. In function they matched the ash dowels of the original carpentry, oven dried to an expanding fit. Instead we agreed to use surface mounted strengthening plates. These are contingent, clearly differentiated, scaled distinctively from the surrounding joints but having an immediacy of the latest, simplest means. The joints are not celebrated, nor hidden they just are. Quality levels and convenience are not concealed. The treatment of the ancillary accommodation is perhaps the

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Opposite Newhall Neighbourhood Centre, 'three building' hub Top Neighbourhood Centre, Phase 1 Bottom Neighbourhood Centre, Colonade of ‘loose rank of flags’

most intriguing part of the scheme. The low range of service spaces on the south side, toilets and stores, are handled in a straightforward way, load-bearing masonry cells with flat timber roofs. Except for precise proportioning the buildings seem unencumbered by design intentions. On the north side the colonnade forming the main entrance loggia breaks into a top-lit foyer space as it turns onto the end of the main hall. The monitor light is simply framed in reinforced concrete, an incongruous big glass-ended wedge returned to familiarity by construction techniques suited to the resources of local contractors. New elements seem more articulated than existing additions, huddled hard against one another. The embodied energy of the conversions and small-part new work appears good. The scheme may well be built in stages and the articulated ordinance and interleaving of otherwise independent structural systems allows for this. The complex of buildings can be gradually dismantled or re-configured in the future. There is a real opportunity here for an application of ‘terotechnology’. These buildings are being conceived of as a resource to be husbanded and managed, to support the community and to be cared for in return, not neglected but adjusted to real fitness for purpose at all times. As the design decisions have presented themselves a virtual maintenance manual has been used to evaluate the buildings after ten, 20 or 30 years of their lifespan, when they are in the middle period of their use and should be at their best. The current scheme draws a wide variety of materials and treatments together, at least five different structural systems and any number of architectural devices. For

coherence it relies on a consistency of method in construction and in design. The way the building will be built has been with the designers at all times. The architectural outcome is governed by their understanding and overt demonstration of the way they have chosen to build. ‘Truth through making’ is the continuity. This note has set out to show that here again is a building construction whose parts, those running through structure and tectonics, act as pure form carrying a variety of contents, chosen by the architect. The proof of this is in the evident switching that is attendant on the perception of these varied yet all-of-a-piece projects.

Footnotes: 1, This is something different from just sticking to what they know, that window of education that fixes us all. True they are not currently deeply immersed in academia (although were teaching continually from 1988 to 2000 and have continual involvement as external critics and examiners to schools of architecture and abroad) but they are too well read not to be making their choices from contemporary criticism. 2, Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space. 3, The French poet Paul Valery contrasts the architect Eupalinos of Megara with the naval architect Tridon of Sidon, both from archaid Greece. 4, Brunel, Marc, The father of Isambard and the originator of batch production. 5, Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative. 6, Frampton, Kenneth, Studies in Tectonic Culture, p. 59. References Frampton, Kenneth, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 1995. Leatherbarrow, David and Mostafavi, Mohsen, Surface Architecture, 2002. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, 1976. Picture Credits: P260 (left) © Peter Bennett Photograpy P262 (top right), P268 (all) © Tim Crocker www.timcrocker.co.uk P266 ©Nicholas Kane P260 (right) © Michel Paoli/ FLC P262 (top left) © Morley Von Sternberg P261 © Mary Ann Sullivan P258, P262 (bottom), P265, P269 © Charlotte Wood