coate house
TEXT: WILLIAM TOZER
PHOTOGRAPHY: HELENE BINET
The new offices of Caruso St John have something of the character of an institutional space. While this is in part due to the galvanised steel sheet tables, old school chairs, pin boards and linoleum flooring, it is equally a consequence of the practice's commitment to the idea of architectural production as an intellectual pursuit. A1 drawings pinned up around us in a space lit from above by skylights, one almost expects a crit, rather than an interview, to begin as I sit down to discuss their refurbishment of the building.
Caruso St John are the first occupants of Coate House, a disused1930s warehouse which they have reconfigured and refurbished. The end result is part celebration of the existing fabric and part high modern utopian vision. Upon first inspection, it is difficult to discern what is new from what was existing and what is intentional and considered from what is accidental. Large-scale drawings of the radiators and their connecting pipe-work indicate a concern with the careful articulation of things ordinary. Helene Binet's photography of such moments seems strangely familiar - dead-pan black and white still life compositions of a type instigated by the German Werkbund at the beginning of the 20th Century and further developed by Bernd and Hiller Becher. Caruso St John's treatment of such otherwise insignificant moments in the building can be seen both as a celebration of their role in artistic production, and as the establishment of a reciprocal relationship with architectural production.
Talking about the Tate Modern, Jacques Herzog described the importance of the proximate relationship between fire escape signs and air-conditioning vents and the work of artists such as Donald Judd. Peter St John and Adam Caruso have a concurrent attitude to the placement of pipes, sockets and fixtures in Coate House. The ceiling is lit with exposed fluorescent battens, but these are positioned so that upon entering the space from the single staircase access, the fittings, which wash the ceiling, are concealed from view. This strategy relies upon neither an expensive recognisable designer lighting system with all the unavoidable cognitive associations, nor an unthinking refurbishment of the existing. Rather, the existing is literally shed in a new light by sublime intervention.
"Ordinary things only start to have presence in the project when you intensify them", says Adam Caruso. Relating the approach to the much-discussed Swan Yard house, Caruso describes the strategy as removing some of the normal things to stablise what is there. The plasterwork to the dry lining of their extension was left unsanded and unpainted to bring the addition into an active relationship with the existing - "The height of our retentiveness" he confesses humorously. By circumventing strategies of both erasure and juxtaposition, the plasterwork instead assumes a fresco-like character. Similarly, in Coate House the existing ceilings are neither cleaned down and seamlessly re-finished, nor left in their raw state but are painted over as if to freeze in time the moment of reoccupation. "It's about making judgements in relation to the character of things that are there in order to intensify the situation", Caruso explains. While "objects can have energies in autonomy [we prefer to] draw upon energies that are already in that place".
"The existing building is either magnificent or pathetic depending upon how you look at it", says Caruso, dividing the building into it's "tough Germanic back" and "pathetic but redeemable" front. Ironically while the street was most likely built around Coate House (one of the first concrete framed buildings in London), the rear of the building has assumed a certain frontality. This switch of hierarchy is due to its visibility from Hackney Road, one of the spines connecting the new development of East London to the centre and the west.
"Nobody looks at these buildings - they're so ugly", comments Caruso, comparing the project with another for the same developer four years ago in Northburgh Street. At the same time, however, he is quick to recognise a certain richness in many of the materials and a grandeur to the enormity of the elevations. In this preceding project, additional depth was lent to the street elevation by staining the brickwork to the entry reveal and cleaning the remainder. Meanwhile, exposed timber stud-work to the entry itself provided an explicit signal of the newness of the renovation. Similar subtlety was applied to the consideration of the street elevation of Coate House. To emulate and intensify an impression of a membrane character to the existing facade, delicate shifts in the projection of windows were introduced to break reflections of the surrounding context. An admittedly arbitrary proportioning system was then rigorously applied to the new windows to provide both consistency and idiosyncrasy to the more expansive glazing of the irregularly sized openings.
Claiming to have never cultivated commercial clients, the Coate House commission was the result of the practice's successful involvement with Northburgh Street and their previous tenancy in another of the developer's buildings. With the inevitable changes to the practice as a result of their successful realisation of the competition-winning scheme for the Walsall New Art Gallery {Monument 35], came the need to move on from the premises they until recently shared with MUF and FAT on Clerkenwell Road. Their landlord placed a condition on showing them a potential new studio space - that they design the building's refurbishment. "We're interested in working for people who are going to use the buildings", proclaims Caruso, explaining their general disinterest with commercial projects. Instead, the practice is avidly pursuing competitions with the aim of extending the departure from finely crafted single residences which was precipitated by the Walsall project. However, they do not believe that their work on the private house is done, but rather that they need to move on to other typologies for a while. As Peter St John remarked recently, " We've been doing the same project for the last twelve years".
Widely regarded amongst architects as the building that should have beaten Alsop to the Stirling Prize in 2001, the gallery at Walsall is a truly remarkable first large building. "I think we can judge how many ideas a building needs", claims Caruso, noting that the failing of many architects making a similar transition is to invest a project with too many disparate interests. While the project provided less to work from in terms of existing context and made greater requirements for permanence, the scheme extends the same range of concerns as their earlier work. Unfinished plastering is replaced by timber paneling, which recalls the moment of production of the adjacent off-the form cast concrete. "I think one has a responsibility when one does a public building to make sure it lasts", states Caruso, explaining the shifts in materiality and articulation from the smaller, preceding projects.
The fire escape to the rear of Coate House is the single most distinctly new addition to the building. The stair was problematic to the architects as it runs counter to the general strategy of sublime intervention. The articulation draws upon an earlier signage project for the Bankside area, utilising both white coated and uncoated galvanised finishes to reinforce the concealed mass of the building. Discussing the careful articulation of the cladding, stairs and railing, Caruso observes that "as interested as we are in ordinary things, nothing we do is standard". The observation recalls Wittgenstein's obsessive individual production of details in favour of manufactured perfection.
The building is within sight of a Venturi-inspired house by FAT, clad in blue cement board and adorned with iconographic imagery. While stylistically the house differs enormously from their scheme, Caruso has much respect for Sean Griffiths of FAT, who similarly views architecture as a considered and thoughtful act. Also within sight is a Lasdun tower block of flats, recently converted into apartments by Munkenbeck and Marshall. While the building typology is much closer to Coate House, the slick office foyer character of the renovated entry space indicates a very different design ideology.
"We're interested in the culture of architecture, whereas High-tech is neo-productivist and aligned to capitalism", says Caruso when asked to define the practice in relation to the persistent international image of British Architecture. Adam Caruso and Peter St John have emerged alongside Tony Fretton, as central figures in the new breed of British architects in the process of supplanting the High-tech. "We're interested in the spatial capacity of materials, rather than their appearance...I think people have a lot of capacity for that stuff". "That's the power of architecture. Buildings are not machines. Construction is the medium of architecture".
Currently included in the workload of the practice are the resurfacing of a Baroque Square in Sweden and the installation of a school into and around the remnants of a brick-clad early iron building in East London. Speaking to Adam Caruso about the work of the practice, one is overwhelmed not only by the level of intellectual investment in the practice's work but equally by a sense of humour which, while not immediately apparent within their projects, is central to their character. "We never thought of not painting Coate House white again. The windows were baby blue, so we made them silver - it's a little more Mercedes".
house of straw
A new house and office in London's borough of Islington by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects was described to me recently as "an elegant shed". Recalling David Mitchell's thesis on the development of modernism in New Zealand this observation aligned with my own first-hand perceptions of a distinctly antipodean character. This impression is not surprising given that the design is intentionally rooted in things agricultural. The use of raw materials and the somewhat singular spatial development which constitute this character are reminiscent of the history of the site as an orchard, while also acting as a notation device for the political alignment of the project.
The scheme is in many ways a showcase for a collection of eco-friendly construction techniques in its presentation of discrete constructional components - sandbags, recycled concrete, cloth, timber and straw bale sit politely alongside one another. The project can be seen as a counterpoint to the Brookes Coombes House by BHMA Architects, the other eco-house recently completed in London to broad acclaim. Where the form of the Brooke Coombes house is a diagram of the eco-house hewn of refined modern materials, the Wigglesworth project can conversely be seen as a diagram of eco-materials contained within a complex architectural composition. The ecological agenda which drives the house, and seems to overarch all the other architectural agendas of the practice, is rooted in a belief that such a mode of operation must become the norm. Tired of the label of "green architecture", they propose that non-ecologically sensitive architecture should instead be labelled "red architecture", enabling buildings which deal with issues of ecology as a matter of course to be the subject of intellectual interrogation at other levels.
Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth believe that "architecture is about the construction of ideas". The intellectual complexity of the Stock Orchard Street scheme is a testament to this philosophy, which is in essence a reactionary position to the British notion of the 'idea of construction'. The longstanding obsession of British architecture with the making of things, in corollory with a suspicion of intellectualism can be traced through Arts and Crafts to the High-Tech and the Minimal. Jeremy Till asserts that "the myth of technological neutrality" by which much contemporary British architecture is produced leads to the presumption that "progress is defined through technology". Instead, he sees the house, and their work more generally, as the manifesting of ideas through space and form. Responding to claims that the project is self-indulgent and contains too many ideas, Wigglesworth and Till assert simply that they "prefer too many ideas to no ideas at all". This concern with intellectual underpinnings is no doubt largely the result of extensive teaching, research and writing conducted by both Till and Wigglesworth alongside practise.
In many ways the pair see the project as a distillation of their philosophy of design in its incorporation of both living and working and the rituals which are associated with both activities. The dining table upon which the design began can be seen both as a workspace and eating place, and as a metaphor for the process of design explain Wigglesworth and Till. "The lay of the table" provides an analogy for the devices by which architects order and categorise space, status and function. The process of dining, in turn, can be seen as evidence of the manner in which occupation and use undermine the rigidity of such an interpretation of the physical and cultural world. The dirty table cloth which results from this disruptive ritual can similarly be seen as both a trace of occupation and a strategy for more sustainable architectural ordering and place-making. This dining table now quite literally assumes a pivotal position between work and home, punctuating the entry space to the house as one moves from the stairwell which separates the two functions.
A stated ambition of the practice is "to make spaces which are more than just photographs". This position is motivated by a distaste for minimalism and the popular representation of architecture which both documents and drives this aestheticism. "Architectural culture is so obsessed with the empty image" frets Till, lamenting the fact that the gate-keepers of success for architects (the press) insist upon such image-making to define the work of the profession. Perhaps it is this imperative, or the preconceptions of the photographer, which has resulted in the images of the Stock Orchard Street scheme conforming to this stereotype. In spite of this imagery, when moving through the house it is clear that a determined ecclecticism is in fact the overarching character of both the house and its contents.
"Architects normally put things in categories and then refine them. The less categories you have, the more mature you are", states Till ironically. Where generally "architects define and protect themselves through these categories", the Stock Orchard Street house can be viewed as a laying bare of such categorisations. There is little attempt to refine the technologies which compose the parts of the scheme, let alone an ambition to disguise or integrate these diverse construction methods. Refinement as a mode of operation is here replaced by a delight in the rawness of each technology. The British architectural tradition of craft is to a large extent displaced by an intellectual tradition concerned with the embodiment of ideology and knowledge. [?]
Claiming to "prefer the everyday to the iconic", Till is quick to add that he does not see this as an alignment with other contemporary proponents of the Everyday; Tony Fretton, Caruso St John, Sergison Bates, David Adjaye and Will Russell et al. Where these local peers of Wiggelsworth and Till are concerned with the image of the everyday, their own work is more engaged with the rituals of everyday life. Till is prepared to admit, however, that the house is clearly not everyday in its appearance, but rather a sculptural and iconic piece of architecture clearly at odds with its Victorian terrace neighbours. Recountinng the story of a workman digging the road purchasing the first copy of the book of the house, and in the defense of the idea of the Everyday, he hastens to add that "at another level, the punters love it".
The project is a case study for the practice's agenda of broadening the representation of women in architecture. Careful to avoid stereotypes of the masculine and feminine, Till claims that the house and office is a distinctly different project for the simple fact that it is a female/male collaboration. Preconceptions of the office as a masculine realm of hard surfaces and slick materials is parodied in a caricature of the traditionally feminine domestic by cladding half of this portion of the building in a giant padded quilt of fabric. The construction method of straw bale can also be discussed as a device for the involvement of women in the construction of the building. Circumventing the requirements of physical strength which generally still preclude women from direct involvement in construction, this lightweight material allows for a closer association with the physical realisation of the architectural form.
The sand-bags which clad the other half of the office block create a sense of defensive positioning. Separating the rest of the site from the adjoining railway line, these concrete-filled bags provide sound protection for the office space. As the bags weather, an undulating wall of concrete will eventually emerge. Suspended on gabion encased columns and springs which dampen the vibration of the passing trains but also permitting framed views through, the massive composition of sand bags and concrete does not attempt to conceal the existence of its industrial neighbours. Standing on the gravel which covers the ground underneath the office, a visitor was reminded of a lake scene in his native Switzerland - the beach underfoot, the expanse of sky and the passing of ships in the form of trains. While appreciating the modernist sensibilities of this massive rectanglular form raised defiantly on piloti, this romanticised view was appealing but difficult to embrace as we struggled to maintain a conversation as commuters passed by.
Interpretations of the project are many and varied - a gulag of sand bags, watch tower and exercise yard ; a padded cell; a Swiss lakeside beach; a New Zealand bach to name a few. These multiple interpretations, some related to the authors design intentions and others autonomous, are a testament to the richness of the architectural composition. The architects have occupied the project as an office and home in an almost completed state for nearly a year to date and in-situ post-rationalisations and reinterpretations of the relationship of the building to its surroundings and the parts of the scheme to one another continue to drive the completion of scheme. Where the project began with a series of narratives, inhabitation challenges these prospective accounts and prompts a new storytelling which continually redefines the activity of living and working on the site.
William Tozer.
dirty house
Adjaye Associates have recently completed a house in Shoreditch for London-based artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The so-called Dirty House is the latest project to be completed by the practice headed by David Adjaye and extends a number of themes evident in his earlier work.
Comparisons can readily be made to the Elektra House, David Adjaye's much-publicised first project after his split with previous working partner Will Russell. Both projects present an almost anonymous face to the street, posses a monumental quality and can be seen as controversial departures from accepted models of the modern house. These similarities and many others can be most broadly explained and understood in terms of the practice's concern for conceptual architecture. In general terms, it is this interest in buildings which embody or communicate ideas, which sets the practice apart from a local architectural community whose primary concerns are technological and historical. The titling of Adjaye's projects with their own names, rather than those of their clients' signifies this shift of interest.
The idea which drives this particular project is the client's own artistic interest in rubbish. Tim Noble and Sue Webster are perhaps best known for their compositions of refuse that cast realistic shadow portraits. This notion of the value of discarded material, is transferred into the architectural manoeuvre of retaining the shell of the existing warehouse on the site, in spite of the council's preference for it to be demolished and significant tax incentives for constructing an entirely new building. This polemic is further extended by the history of the site, which previously accommodated a pub until it was destroyed in a World War II air raid. As a consequence, the warehouse, and now the Dirty House, is constructed atop a back-filled basement. The thematic is carried through into the structural strategy for the project, which makes use of the existing structure where possible, binding it together with new components as necessary to form a new whole. The almost archaeological approach of encasing the existing building in a protective coating, however, reveals that Adjaye's creative interpretation of rubbish is very different from his clients'. Rather than mimicking Noble and Webster's work, the Dirty House extends their art practise by putting forward an autonomous but related architectural interpretation.
At the level of detail, the coating the architect has chosen for the building is anti-bill posting textured paint, giving the building the status of street furnishing by establishing a dialogue with identically treated lampposts, post boxes and bollards. While this treatment further engages with the idea of detritus, it does so from a defensive position with the aim of repelling further rubbish from accumulating on the surface of the building. The flush-mounted and mirrored windows to street level further extend this idea, by removing window ledges which might collect refuse, and by refusing or throwing away views into the building. By contrast, the internal courtyard created to the rear of the house preserves the history of the site for simple observation, rather than through the homogenising preservative treatment applied to the facade. Away from the public gaze, small windows to the rear elevation of the top floor are freed from the function of providing privacy and surveillance, and instead frame particular distant views.
The separation of the warehouse elevations and the volumes containing the new functions further extends the defensive appearance established by the street elevations. The exterior wall resembles the outer wall of a castle, to which the interstitial circulation space is the metaphoric moat. From behind the outer wall, one can survey the street unnoticed including observing the local prostitutes applying their make-up in the mirrored windows. The defensive and anonymous relationship of the house to the street can be usefully understood through Adolf Loos's idea of the facade of a house as a mask from the public realm. In the Dirty House, however, the blank facade conceals the work areas of the house, while the top floor living quarters are articulated as a pavilion which peeks out stealthily from behind the mask. Where for Loos a distinction between work and home was clearly articulated, Adjaye mixes work and living programmes and the architectural languages through which they are expressed. The lower floors contain work spaces based upon the proportions of the Royal College studios in which Noble and Webster trained. A spare bedroom on a mid-level mediates between the verticality of this working zone of the house and the horizontally expansive living zone on the top floor.
Adjaye describes the house as part of a sequence of work, also including the Elektra House, which make use of what he describes as "poor" materials. Perhaps reacting against the English architectural obsession with construction or the perfection of material surface, Adjaye's work often makes use of low-cost and readily available building materials. Where the Elektra House used as a cladding material coated plywood normally used for concrete formwork and then discarded, the Dirty House incorporates decking board turned upside down and painted as an internal floor finish. Other everyday materials such as plywood flooring and strip lights sit alongside the sleekness of the client-selected Philippe Starck bathroom fittings and door handles of the architect's own design.
The immediate neighbour of the Dirty House is Rachael Whiteread. Unlike Noble and Webster, however, it seems that the artist known for her raw concrete castings has chosen not to see her own house as an extension of her work. Adjaye seems almost disappointed at a missed opportunity, when I reflect upon the apparent orthodoxy of the conversion of the disused synagogue into her studio and home. Only a few minutes walk away is the house of Adjaye's ex-partner Will Russell's, and a few blocks further, the house they worked on together for Chris Ofili. With FAT's house for its founder Sean Griffith's and Sarah Featherstone's own house nearby also, it is clear that the Dirty House sits in the midst of what could fairly be labelled an incubator for the new English house.
William Tozer