Spiekermann’s Corner

Next Monday evening, renowned typographer and Blueprint columnist Erik Spiekermann will join in conversation with the designers of his east London house, Ullmayer Sylvester Architects at the Royal Academy, London. It is the third and final event in the Two Stories series of talks organised by Blueprint, which look at the ways in which creative clients can affect the process of an architectural project.

Clients don’t get much more creative – or daunting – than Spiekermann. Apart from being one of the world’s leading typographers, responsible for typefaces such as Officina, Meta and an entire system of typography for the German railways, he has also worked on the development of two other house projects; one in Berlin, another in San Francisco. Fortunately perhaps, the architects were not initially aware of his huge reputation in graphic design: “When the project was well on site a friend of ours mentioned a film about Erik at the ICA – I guess then it finally sunk in” says Sylvia Ullmayer.

The project began when Spiekermann’s house, a Victorian terrace in the Dalston area of east London that he bought in 2001, started to fall apart. After finding Sylvia Ullmayer and Allan Sylvester, an Anglo-German partnership also based in Dalston, the brief he gave was particular, although not especially precise: Spiekermann would only be staying in the house for occasional visits to London while the rest of the time his son would live there. It was decided that Spiekermann Snr would have a space at the top of the house, in which he could work and live while in London. There was also agreement that the spirit of the Victorian terrace had to be respected, but also updated.

The result is a project of rigorous subtlety, entirely in keeping with Spiekermann’s own work as a graphic designer. Ullmayer Sylvester has retained, and in some cases restored, the internal rhythm of the house while opening it up to more daylight and more coherent routes between the back and front of the building. “What these houses are good at is not being grand, but being in good proportion,” says Ullmayer, “we played with existing room patterns, manipulated them and adapted them… yet the original, typical room layout can still be perceived in the ground floor, 1st and 2nd floor.” The architects also established new views through the building, for example creating a narrow window slot in the ground floor, which clears a view from the hall into the garden.

There are also touches that combine that architectural and the graphic; in particular the approach to bringing the house’s essential services into one integrated system. “The clutter of electric cables, heating pipes, radiators, sockets and new data connections has been combined, resulting in a Leitmotiv for the whole house: the lining, a tall skirting that runs through the whole house. bringing together old elements and new ones,” says Spiekermann.

The typographer says that the collaboration has made him a better client, while Ullmayer has been delighted at the ease of having a client who understands the design process inside out: “If it was halfway affordable and we could make a case for it, he’d let us do it. It was like having a patron.”

To find out more about the project – and get involved in the discussion – come to the RA Forum Unplugged: Two Stories, 7pm, Monday 15 December. It’s at the Cinema Space, 6 Burlington Gardens, London. Tickets: £7 (£4 concessions), including a drink. Space are limited, so please call 020 7300 5839.

Click here for more information.

Time out of Scale

The latest project by Ben Van Berkel of Dutch architect UNStudio is either proof that architects and designers can find ways to weather the financial storm, or a last hoorah from a more luxurious time. Commissioned by phone manufacturer Motorola, the Time Out of Scale installation at St Martin’s Lane Hotel at the beginning of December, created an immersive environment inspired by Motorola’s new premium mobile device, AURA, which is on sale for £1,200. Both phone and installation are remarkably extravagant. The handset’s intricate craftsmanship, featuring more than 200 parts and a seamless opening mechanism – as well as the industry’s first circular display – were the inspiration for UNStudio who were briefed by Motorola to create a bespoke installation that immerses the public in an individual sensory experience.

Van Berkel says of Time Out Of Scale, ‘Taking AURA as our inspiration, the installation has enabled us to explore and deconstruct the themes of time and craftsmanship beyond what is ‘known’ and to create an ‘experience’ where anything seems possible.’ Within the installation, time is represented in the form of rhythmic changes in sound and imagery. The seamless white space with its large convex eye at one end combined with projections and music create a setting in which visitors can lose themselves. Yet van Berkel has no problems with the extravagance: ‘I feel very good about it. Luxury is not just about expense, it’s about time and craftsmanship.’

The architect sees it as a further development of UNStudio’s installation during the Venice Architecture Biennale, Changing Rooms: “One-of-a-kind projects offer architects an opportunity to break constraints and explore concepts that are both challenging and unprecedented,” he says.

The Venice installation was a much more involved and complex project: a huge, organic piece of architectural sculpture that wound its way between the columns of the Arsenale. ‘The installation structure shows an architecture that is as supple as textile, in which floors, walls and ceilings flow into each other.’ It will be interesting to see if such experimental projects can survive a recession. Intriguingly, Van Berkel says that the Venice installation has now been bought; by an international bank that he cannot name. Clearly some people’s credit is more crunched than others.

From Chandigarh, with love

Anyone who has been to the Le Corbusier exhibition in the crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool will have been taken by the beautiful plans and models of Chandigarh on show. We’ve already reviewed the show when it was at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein and we’re looking at it again with its extra British twist in the next issue. There are many ways to approach an exhibition on Corb of course – as many ways as there are to approach the man himself – but one of the facets of his work that is made clear is the influence of non-European approaches on his architecture. Corb didn’t just export a modernist style, he learned and adapted from different cultures. Like Picasso, he ploughed through the established hierarchies of primitive and civilized to find values and forms, which were eternal, immutable.

This inversion of traditional value systems has had an unexpected consequence in the twenty-first century. Now, though, the inversion is a struggle between those who wish Corb and his pals’ design ethos to be consumed by a caring elite and those who wish it to be for the less caring proles. Writer and architect Jonathan Nicholls and the artist Patsy Craig are working on a project called Chandigarh Catalogue, which is  is a collection of photographs, interviews, building studies and found objects used to identify and file traces of everyday life in India’s City Beautiful. The catalogue brings together these studies to consider the effects of Modernist design on Indian society and culture.

The city of Chandigarh sits on the edge of the Punjabi plain near the foothills of the Himalayas. As a result of the partition of India in 1947, the Punjabi capital of Lahore was lost to Pakistan. This picture is from an element of the project called Furniture Conversations. The pictures capture the furniture designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand in situ around the city. Anyone who visited the DesignArt exhibition in London will have seen some of this work, highly restored and available to buy at great cost, but in the Indian city, the bespoke modernist furniture is ubiquitous.

In the next issue of the magazine, you can read how the approach to conservation is changing in the city as it seeks UNESCO World Heritage status, but in the meantime, if you are interested in exhibiting or publishing the Chandigarh Catalogue or want to know more about the project please go to www.chandigarhcatalogue.com.

 

Stephen Lawrence says more than Stirling

Critics would say that because the Stephen Lawrence Prize is the second largest architectural award in the country, it can duck the major issues of the day. With the Stirling Prize attracting all the headlines, the Stephen Lawrence awards can indulge itself in mere prettiness. The Stirling Prize, they say, has to make a statement – frequently an overtly political one. It doesn’t have the luxury of making qualitative architectural judgements. Yet what the recent annual Stirling shortlists have made clear is that assessments based on what a project means rather than what it does are, in fact, the easy options. The final choice isn’t the issue, it’s the drawing up of the shortlist by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

 Ultimately a genuine selection, based on the time honoured combination of prejudice and objectivity is made by a jury. This is not the problem. It is the fact that by then a consideration of what each building means has already been made and some seriously good architecture discounted because selecting a certain typology would send out the wrong message. Not so the Stephen Lawrence Prize. This years shortlist of the East Beach Café by Heatherwick Studio, Classroom of the Future by Gollifer Langston Architects, Cremorne Riverside Centre by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and – a real discovery this one – Glass & Timber Houses by Hampson Williams all fulfilled the simple criteria that the budget was less than a million.

 Certainly the scale is smaller than the Stirling projects but you feel that each project was selected because it delivered a great idea well. Nor is it elitist. The Sackler Crossing was a good winner – a project that slowly embeds itself into the collective unconscious, with its simple lyricism. The Stirling Prize winner looks like a decent housing scheme from the 1970s. Nothing wrong in itself but a sad indictment that we have to give such projects awards to simply show that architects can build nice houses if they are asked to. The shortlist – like the Stephen Lawrence shortlist – should inspire and amaze people.

Serra in the City

 

Richard Serra at the Gagosian

This week saw the revealing of a set of three new works by acclaimed American sculptor Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery. It follows the recent exhibition ‘Promenade’ at the Grand Palais in Paris. Oddly given that his work is invariably at the heart of any debate about contemporary sculpture and its relationship to architecture here, it is his first exhibition in London since Weight and Measure at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

The exhibition demonstrates Serra’s beautiful construction of spatial architecture that challenges our perception of the way we move through sculpture. Like his greatest work, the pieces combine bold structure and form with material weathered and manipulated to perfection. ‘Fernando Pessoa’ sits beautifully within the third gallery, altering the weight and balance of the room and draws your eyes in with exquisite texture and colour.

The poetry of space, created in ‘Open Ended’ asks questions of your navigation whilst forcing you to engage with the material at an extremely personal level. You become immersed in texture and light with movement of the body becoming secondary.

In the main gallery the two huge forms of ‘TTI London’ sit within a room just large enough to contain them. Their beauty lies in the steel edges cutting through space combined with the experience of the precision-formed steel. Yet even though this experience is moving, the work does not feel comfortable within a gallery. They need space around them to allow the forms to breathe, combined with natural light and atmosphere.

Yet Serra’s work is always alienated no matter what context it stands; be that the Gagosian or the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Despite the success of Serra’s piece ‘Hwnetwo’ which sits in Broadgate near Liverpool Street station, Serra seems uncomfortable about his sculpture sitting within the city, particularly in reference to vandalism:

“I think that if the work was made with stainless steel and looked like the range of products people know from door knobs to Bentleys  [vandals] wouldn’t touch it, but if it looks like its part of the decaying industrial revolution then they are not going to get involved with how the body could actually relate to it.”

Serra’s work insists that personal expression can be made within the urban environment, the creation of contrasting spatial experience within the city would fulfil the potential of these monumental works. Whether people actually appreciate such a work within public space is unknown, as Serra says himself:

“When you put a piece in a public space people don’t care about the artist, what they are fearful of is that you are occupying space in a place they have privilege to.”

Richard Serra: Sculpture is at the Gagosian Gallery. 6-24 Britannia Street in London until 20 December.

Playing (in) the Pipes

Click here to view video

The Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was a 63m long, 1.2m diameter pipe, which ran between the German and Russian pavilions, an act which highlighted the construction of the Nord Stream pipe, which will connect Vybord in Russia with Greifswald in Germany, although the exact route has to be decided upon, it will run through the Gulf of Finland to the north of Estonia and through the Baltic Sea. The real pipe will cost around €8-9billion and, say supporters increase Western Europe’s energy security.

(These include former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who is chairman of the shareholders committee for Nord Stream and the managing director Matthias Warnig, a former member of the Stasi who was good friends with Vladimir Putin during the latters time as a KGB agent in East Berlin.)

The Eastern European countries aren’t convinced, seeing it as a means for Russia to exert its influence on them by controlling energy. They can carry on supplying energy to their powerful Western neighbours whilst dictating the flow to places like Ukraine. Those nations that surround the Baltic are concerned about pollution and the fact that Putin insisted that the best way to guarantee the safety of the pipe was for the Russian Fleet to patrol the Baltic.

We’re not sure why 3 Blueprint operatives, climbed through the pipe on a balmy September Sunday afternoon. They kicked in the metal grilles that had been placed at two points down it and arrived into the sunshine some 10 minutes to the sound of a German guy saying, ‘there are some people in the pipe.’ All we can say is they are unlikely to try doing it with the real pipe, which if constructed would stretch over 1,000km.

Are you the UK’s young design entrepreneur 2008?

The British Council is looking for three talented young UK design entrepreneurs to take part in a two-week tour of the Indian design industry. The winner of the UK Young Design Entrepreneur 2008 award and two runners-up will visit India in early 2009, to find out about India’s design industry, from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedebad to the thriving design scenes of Delhi and Bangalore. The group will meet leading industry figures and their peers from the Indian design sector and learn, first hand, about the dynamics of the sector and how business is done there.

Applications are now open. The deadline for applications is Thursday 14 August.

For more information about the award, the tour of India’s design scene and details of the application procedure please visit: www.creativeconomy.org.uk/ukyde08

Martin Pawley, 1938-2008

We are very sad to hear that architecture critic and author Martin Pawley has passed away after a long illness. Pawley was a unique voice in architecture who contributed to a wide range of publications throughout his career, including Blueprint and The Architects’ Journal, as well as editing Building Design and World Architecture. In February, Blueprint published a review written by Professor Peter Cook of The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism: Martin Pawley Collected Writings (Black Dog Publishing). As a co-founder of Archigram and long-term friend and sparring partner to Pawley, Cook gave an inspiring and very personal account of the writer’s talents and attitude to architecture. The review is reproduced below as a tribute.

David Jenkins, in his introduction to this book, honours Martin Pawley’s technique as a writer, pointing out that his style can range from Hunter S Thompson to that of the Daily Telegraph. This may be true in terms of manner, but it cannot conceal a special characteristic that seeps through the whole collection, namely that combination of seriousness and a certain elegance of argument that few of the current swarm of architectural writers seem able to emulate.

Pawley often presents the background to his reports in a steady, almost pedantic way, so that in a 1987 piece on the Piccadilly Line train‚ we are reminded that, ‘in the case of the 1973 Tube Stock a car length of 17.8m was finally arrived at’. A 1991 piece on Stansted Airport relates the Foster structure to the fact that ‘laser-levelled floor plates of 25,000m2 are not unusual, and 50,000m2 is not unknown’. Yet his pedantry soon reveals itself to be that of an enthusiast. Pawley is never a mere bystander.

New New Towns

As we in Britain look again at building new towns. Blueprint announces New New Towns, a symposium organised by the Architecture Foundation, which will be held on February 20 and 21 at Rich Mix Foundation, London. We asked Peter Hall professor of planning at the Bartlett School of architecture and planning and between 1991 and 1994, the special advisor to the government in strategic planning to give us an overview of recent thinking. Peter is involved in the conference. See www.newnewtown.com for further details.

How To Look Like £800 Million

Is The £800 Million Station the best documentary about architecture ever made? Its certainly the best since the last Anthony Wonke documentary, The Tower was aired. The two films focus on very different projects, the former of course is the refurbishment of St. Pancras, which has just opened and the other a high-rise in Deptford as it goes through regeneration. However, both programmes exhibit Wonke’s ability to capture multiple narratives contained in one project, through exhaustive filming and deft editing.

One of the best moments so far has to be the site of poor dear Alastair Lansley bursting into tears because, if memory serves, his glazing wasn’t flush on the East facade. Even better, though was the episode screened on November 21, which gave us an insight into the working of the PR department. Some amazing moments include Paul Day artist of the kissing couple statue, called Meeting Place, being briefed to create a work of art that will ‘appear on mugs’.

Even better though was the moment when Day finally unveiled the work to the client group. His single piece of feedback was that he’d got the straps on the woman’s shoes wrong; a piece of crticism that appeared to have originated with the Director of Communications’ wife. It was also revealing about how offensive in both meanings of the word, the public relations campaigns for major infrastructure projects have become.