04 - Art and Architecture. How we collaborate with artists by WestonWilliamson+Partners

The relationship between art and architecture has evolved over many centuries. Since the Modern Movement stripped-back adornment, various approaches have been developed to integrate the work of artists and architects.

This essay by Robert Bevan, writer and architecture critic for the London Evening Standard, was written following a series of conversations with WestonWilliamson+Partners.

It is one in a series marking the 30th anniversary of the practice in 2015.

1. Eric Gill’s RIBA crest, based on the treasury gates for Mycenae around 1300BC. 2+3. Gill was a complex character, but a hugely talented artist and graphic designer.

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ven Adolf Loos thought things had gone a bit far; 20 years after he equated ornament with crime, he declared: “I did not mean what some purists have carried ad absurdum, namely that ornament should be systematically and consistently eliminated.”

It was too late. Despite Loos not taking his own often cryptic and contradictory advice, a fundamental disjuncture between art, decoration and progressive architecture had taken hold.

Loos had a point when it came to the new edifices of Vienna’s Ringstrasse being misleadingly gussied up as Aristos’ palaces, but was more doctrinaire than rational in his condemnation of the Secession’s degenerate exuberance – his arguments often more useful to the city’s anti-permissive reactionaries than Rotes Wein’s Left.

Olbrich’s brilliant fretted dome and Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze for the Secession Building were to become anathema to high modernism: “Combining art with a material function,” declared Loos, “is a profanation of the great goddess.” (For Loos, women were saints or sluts.)

Even though the Bauhaus sought to recombine the applied arts and architecture in new ways, mainstream modernist architecture would, essentially, become a frame for the tapestries, artworks or furniture to come; a building could be an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, but kunst itself was, in practice, usually a separate, additional layer hung within or parked in the plaza outside. Despite Gropius’s efforts, the idea of craft itself being integrated into architecture was also, in great part, lost; decoration was left to frivolous fashion styles such as Art Deco, or to the not-quite modernism of 55 Broadway, or to the BBC, which employed the talents of Epstein, Moore and Gill.

Tellingly, when Loos allowed some ornamentation on his own projects, it was classical detailing that he turned to. In Britain, too, the Classical and Neoclassical could offer a model to Modernists who admired Georgian proportions and decorative restraint while decrying Victorian Gothic curlicues.

Gothic architecture was seen as medieval, animal, sensual, feminine, and superstitious (everything Loos seemed to have hang-ups about), while the Classical embodied the rational, enlightened, scientific, self-controlled, and masculine. The Classical decorously restricted its decorative flourishes to the edges of the frame – the cornice, for instance, or the structural corbel or capital – while the unruly Gothic, with its stained glass, polychromatic paintwork and statue-infested rood screens, didn’t know when to stop.

There is, of course, no logic to this stance (and certainly no moral logic), especially as Classical-age buildings were not bleached temples but highly coloured edifices. Likewise, you only need to think of the decorative mayhem of the Francis I Gallery at Fontainebleau to realise that the Renaissance was quite prepared to blur frame and content in the most florid of ways.

Mainstream modernism in the 20th century, however, pursued the idea of whiteness, of the minimal, of an ornament-free, false purity. This did not generally allow for art to be integrated into the architecture. There were exceptions to this rule: Lubetkin’s jokey Highpoint II caryatids, or Le Corbusier’s incised Modulor figure at the Unité spring to mind, but collaborations such as Mies’s uninstalled commission for Rothko at the Four Seasons (or its famous Picasso curtain, originally designed for the Ballets Russes) were art embellishments rather than truly integrated elements of a whole.

Collaboration It has taken the cracking of the Modern Movement’s hegemony and the blurring of disciplines under late capitalism for art to be reintegrated into architecture once more. Postmodernisms decorated sheds and supergraphics proliferated in the 1980s, but it was only in the 1990s (in Britain at least) that art in architecture boomed. Artist Bruce McLean’s work at Tottenham Hale station led the way as “percent for art” schemes proliferated alongside initiatives, such as the Royal Society of Art’s Art for Architecture programme. These days, nobody bats an eyelid at Caruso St John using bricks or tiles to create a pattern, or 6a Architects incorporating figurative imagery into its rusted façade for Paul Smith on Albemarle Street, London W1.

“The issue is the blending of the two; how do we integrate the art and the architecture while avoiding tokenism,” suggests WW+P’s Steve Humphreys.

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4. Le Corbusier was both an architect and artist and based his architecture on the human proportion.

5. WW+P’s Paddington Crossrail site provides the artist with many different collaboration opportunities.

Various artists submitted excellent ideas from which Crossrail selected those of Spencer Finch.

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WW+P has been engaged with art from its outset and even considered establishing an art collection for the office before the partners realised that they couldn’t agree on what to purchase. Selecting artists to work with on projects has, happily, proved easier.

Interestingly, it is stations and other transport infrastructure that have proved particularly amenable to the inclusion of artwork within the architecture for WW+P. It is interesting because art (as opposed to decorated structural elements or later memorials) has rarely found a place in train terminals. At London’s Paddington station, Brunel appointed Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones to provide decorative architectural and colour schemes respectively, but art per se did not form part of the engineer’s vision. The granite lampholders at Eliel Saarinen’s Helsinki Central station and America’s New Deal station murals were early exceptions.

Selecting the Artist Today, WW+P is both masterplanner and architect for elements of the Crossrail improvements at Paddington, including a 120m-long canopy that runs down the side of the train shed which is being designed in collaboration with American artist Spencer Finch.

The canopy is based on Finch’s study of English clouds, images of which are incorporated into the 200 glass panels – each measuring 6.1m by 1.9m – and is made more celestial still by being interspersed with purlins in mirror-finished stainless steel.

For Finch, the appeal is obvious: “No one believes me when I say this, but English clouds are really different from American clouds; they are closer to the horizon, denser, and move across the sky differently. The opportunity to work on a cloud piece at this scale is totally irresistible.”

The project is part of Crossrail’s proposal to incorporate large-scale art into eight of its new stations using artists chosen in collaboration with London’s leading commercial galleries. In fact, it is transport organisations such as London Underground Ltd and Crossrail which have been at the forefront of the commercial sector’s reintegration of architecture and art. For WW+P, the artwork also offers the chance to be creative with the canopy’s fritting – using Finch’s clouds to vary the degree of transparency and shading. In early renders of the project, the practice was considering incorporating pulsing coloured lights into the canopy. “Finch’s work is influencing our work,” says Williamson.

However, he acknowledges that, although Crossrail has a wellconsidered art programme, it has come along rather late and so limits the opportunities for integration.

The practice is also working with artist Julian Opie on a massive scale for a video installation across the Thames footbridge at Hungerford Bridge – it will be the world’s largest video installation.

True collaboration with artists means giving up an element of control over a project – something some architects obviously find difficult – but it can take proposals in entirely new directions. At the time of writing, WW+P was submitting its entry for the Reimagining Mayfair competition, which has invited proposals from interventions in the public realm around the former Museum of Mankind (Burlington House). The practice worked with Yinka Shonibare who rejected WW+P’s earlier ideas, such as moving some of the statues on Burlington House to new street locations: “He was dead against it,” says Williamson. “It is so subjective.

He has a lifetime of interests and we have ours – you have to come up with a common ground.”

“That’s the challenge” agrees Humphreys “but if it comes too late in the processes you miss out on opportunities to feed off each other like that.”

One way of avoiding the scenario of artists being introduced too late in the proceedings is for a practice to provide the artistic intervention itself.

WW+P organise drawing classes for the office and encourage sketching to communicate: “There is something special about a pen or pencil making a mark on paper and the conscious act of thinking that it takes. We are at the cutting edge of technology and aspects of BIM but many good ideas still start with a sketch.”

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6. The artwork by Julian Opie will be the biggest LED installation in the world and a major addition to London’s reputation as a leading world city.

7. The artist Christo famously described the process of gaining planning permission and other stakeholder consents as a vital part of the art. The process for the Julian Opie artwork on Hungerford Bridge has helped WW+P understand this.

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8+9. Working with Yinka Shonibare and uncommon, WW+P proposed a closer integration of the art from the Royal Academy with the tailoring of Savile Row and the art world of Cork Street to create a vibrant new quarter in London’s West End.

10. Six artists were interviewed for the art installation at the DLR Woolwich station. Michael CraigMartin produced a compelling image, drawing on various local references.

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WW+P worked with Michael Craig-Martin at Woolwich DLR but is providing its own art input at Woolwich Crossrail station, which falls outside of Crossrail’s own art programme. In this case, the inspiration has been the Dead Man’s Penny – the memorial coins minted at Woolwich during the First World War and sent to the families of those who died in battle. The motif has been incorporated into paving and some of the cladding which, when it is perforated metal, gives the coin image a print-dot, Warholian quality (Williamson is a pop art fan). Armaments were also made at Woolwich, and the practice has incorporated a particular surface-grooving patterning found on bullets used with guns manufactured with the ‘Woolwich’ rifling system.

For Humphreys, the use of such elements in abstracted ways begins to raise the question of when something stops being an artwork, applied art, a craft or decorative pattern. It’s a question to which there are no easy answers when artists, such as Damien Hirst or Bridget Riley, have teams who craft the actual works on their behalf, and artists and architects assemble structures that amount to conceptual art rather than buildings as such. Just think of Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark or James Turrell. “The art I like does have a craft element to it,” says Humphreys. He admires the intensity of Bridget Riley’s, for instance, and the high-quality delivery and finish to the work.

The making of Art The practice has been involved directly at times with the production of artworks (for example, Antony Gormley’s version of ‘Field for the British Isles’ in an empty Colchester department store), and also uses architectural competitions to draw out the artistic talents of the practice’s staff – to the point where partner Travis Walsh thinks it has helped them to win competitions, such as that for a stadium in Brasilia where the team devised a folding roof that responded to the weather: “It was dancing; a brilliant idea. It has become an important part of the way we work. When we interview people now we hire from various arts backgrounds.”

11. Michael Craig-Martin’s original graphic for the DLR Woolwich station. As is clear from the previous page, this was altered to suit the space and the context of the installation.

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12. This project with Firstsite and Antony Gormley involved the installation of his work ‘Field for the British Isles’ in a disused department store building in Colchester.

‘Field for the British Isles’ consists of hundreds of individually crafted clay figures that form an inspiring and intriguing work of art.

This installation occupies a predefined space and the figures face the viewer from a set threshold located upon one of the disused store’s retail floors.

13. WW+P’s 2014 proposal for London’s Christmas Lights. Instead of lights being strung across the streets, these LED snowflakes would pulse down the length of Oxford Street. Every snowflake lit at any one time would be different.

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Get this crossover wrong, however, and the wheels can come off; Anish Kapoor’s Orbital project for the London 2012 Olympics shows how horribly wrong it can go – it is art that failed to consider the practicalities of architecture with a failure to consider basics, such as a means of escape, sufficiently resulting in awful late-stage compromises: “Artists offer a completely different way of thinking; they are not bound by practicalities. Kapoor is a brilliant thought provoking artist,” says Williamson, “but on this occasion it doesn’t quite work. It really looked like a last minute idea – a real contrast to his usual considered work.”

When art and architecture are fully and successfully integrated, however, the resulting ensemble is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but it can also be almost impossible to decide where one begins and the other ends; lawyers have grown rich on the legal arguments regarding whether an artwork is integral to a building or a fitting that can be sold – Henry Moore’s sculpture at the Time & Life Building on New Bond Street and Canova’s Three Graces from Woburn Abbey being two high-profile examples. Here, architecture is both the ultimate in applied arts and also incorporates fine art – and is none the worse for that.

14+15. WW+P’s design for a vertical zoo in Buenos Aires.

Based on the 1972 futuristic film ‘Silent Running’, the design blurs the boundaries between sculpture and architecture.

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16+17. During the First World War, families of soldiers who had been killed in battle were sent a medal from the King.

The medal became known as a ‘Dead Man’s Penny’ and thousands of them were minted at the Woolwich Arsenal.

WW+P’s design for Woolwich Crossrail integrates elements of these medals into the architecture of the urban realm.

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18+19. Building as art. WW+P’s design for a stadium in Brazil, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2014.

Picture Credits: 1. © The Eric Gill Society 2. © The Eric Gill Society 3. © The Eric Gill Society 4. © Le Corbusier 5. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 6. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 7. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 8. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 9. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 10. © Richard Seymour 11. © Michael Craig-Martin 12. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 13. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 14. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 15. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 16. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 17. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 18. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 19. © WestonWilliamson+Partners