On Fragments Zachary Henderson

1. Base drawings and brief for Graves’ studio exercise.

2. Original plans for Flinders Street Station

On Fragments

Zachary Henderson

As part of his teachings at Princeton University School of Architecture in the 1970s, Michael Graves administered a studio exercise which saw students replacing part of E. G. Asplund’s Snellman House with a new guest wing. In his essay, “The Swedish Connection,” Graves notes that:

While the villa can be seen as complete in itself, the requirement that the addition be physically connected to it raises the possibility that the villa be considered a fragment, an incomplete condition. The addition can be seen as the completion of the fragment, as its extension or as a new fragment in itself.

The Princeton students received a Snellman House missing its single storey service wing, the ‘fragment’ described by the drawings (fig. 1) on the opposite page.

The idea that a non-intact building should be understood as a fragment is not without consequence—the implication of fragility forces the author of any potential alteration to confront their attitude towards how, and if, they care. I think back to the Flinders Street Station design competition commissioned in 2011, and consider the railway station in its current form as a fragment of the original 1900 proposal (fig. 2). The ornate arched roof is at once something that was never built, and something that is lost. Looking at the shortlisted designs, a common impulse among the entrants was to retrieve something of that lost roof, most explicit in Herzog & de Meuron and Hassell, and ARM’s submissions.

When dealing with the recognisably nonintact, it seems the image of what is lost has a strong pull.

In an Antoun studio discussion Spooner remarked that:

Everyone seems to be contained by the kind of ‘U’ of the U House, but you can be a little bit ambivalent about that.