The Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, Wiltshire. SP3 6SJ
‘A building intervenes between subject and space.’(Kengo Kuma)
‘Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time.’(Alison and Peter Smithson)
‘The Charged Void- contains references to the architects’ concern that their buildings should command a wider territory. The Solar Pavilion is perhaps their most compelling exploration of this theme.’ (Sergison,2005:100)
The Upper Lawn Pavilion that Alison and Peter Smithson realised is actually nothing more than a primitive hut. Much of its appeal is that of its uncompromising simplicity a ‘light touch’ promoting a way of life like camping (or bathing) in the landscape; it has the kind of enchantment of a small building with big ideas, a building in the tradition of a garden pavilion or folly. The Solar Pavilion like the earlier Patio and Pavilion of 1956 is intended to be read as a symbolic habitat that could be seen as an attempt to self-consciously to embrace an intimate connection to nature; to tum back from the city and technology. For the Smithson’s the Solar Pavilion exemplifies a place for basic human needs, a piece of ground, a view of the sky, privacy and the presence of nature. It stands as a spiritual and physical counterpoint to urbanism and city life.
‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’
(Sergison,2005:97)
‘Architect’s homes provide rare occasions where the two issues of architectural theory and practice can both find a natural symbiosis; not only did the Smithsons’ build their ideas as concretely as possible, they also built themselves a private place for retreat and reflection.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)
Hybrid Construction; containing Mies’ tectonics and Le Corbusier’s pilotis and free facade.
Interventions made and consisting of existing elements (garden wall, chimney and windows from an existing building).
‘The construction of the box on the wall consists of a wooden frame clad with zinc. On all sides its posts function as a casing for fitted window frames. The frame’s wooden beams are put into the existing outer wall and are supported on the inside by a concrete beam poured in-situ and anchored in the existing chimney wall, and supported on both ends by square columns placed at a 45 degree angle. This construction results in non-supporting ground level facades, allowing the creation of the teak sliding doors along the full length of the garden facade.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)
Tony Fretton, working notes.
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE is the most enduring/valuable quality of an architectural project.
TEACHING informs my practice as an architect profoundly. It demands that I think, write and manage people, and places me in contact with great colleagues with theoretical and practical knowledge.
We have developed a methodology that channels my activities very precisely into design direction, presentations to the office and clients, and collective decision making on the management of the practice.
The Scheme It’s Style Their Form
Even an interesting delicacy in the detailing of the work.
MAKING architecture that is more prepositional, that reveals meaning and values in everyday objects and events.
ARCHITECTURE is a cultural artefact and a social art.
ARCHITECTS design buildings using knowledge of buildings that already exist, and the meaning of buildings is shaped by public attitudes.
FORMAL and IDEOLOGICAL INNOVATION is also necessary.
By WORKING TRANSPARENTLY with the relation between the present and past, it gives me access to richer cultural social and architectural territory.
I have understood that you can accept your social duties of being instrumental to society, while remaining productively critical.
I want to use the platform of contemporary architecture on one hand to make it more communicative and on the other more artistically enquiring about issues of the times.
BUILDINGS can explore issues such as national presence and identity in a foreign place. Political imagery in the ambiguity of the present times, the nature of place in which groups of people come together to work and its relation to the surrounding world and the relation between representation, physical security in relation to sustainable construction.
CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE Working Notes 2 July 2014-07-02
The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.
A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.
‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’
‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’
Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012
‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001
‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’
Schregenberger, 2005
The spatial practices of exhibition and education.
The humanities and architecture, Heidegger/Bachelard/Ingold/Herzog and De Meuron/Zumthor.
The politics of things/sociology and everyday life/dwelling and making. Natural History learning/thinking through things/situations and vocations. Contents/Contexts/Collection and Presentation.
Taxonomies and Subjectivity/Spatial Narratives of Layered Space (Spatiality) Mark Dion, Archaeology, Thames Dig.(Allegories of a pseudo-archaeology) Herzog and De Meuron, Archaeology of the Mind/Natural History.
Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self/Architecture and Allegory.
Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)
Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.
The Fanciful and The Scientific.
The Playful and The Reverent.
The Material and The Metaphysical.
Tensions in built spaces.
Between Evanescence and Substance.
Between Illusion and Specificity.
Between Slickness and Tactility.
Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.
The Projects Evolution.
Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of a vital serenity, a poetics of dwelling and its angle of repose hovering somewhere between the transcendental and the real.
Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.
Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.
Working Analysis.
CSC Object Analysis : Hans Coper/Innemess in the Ceramic Vessel and Architecture. Making (act/sacred bond of both an individual and a civilisation) from the inside out, from the interior, from the first movement or impulse, from the everyday condition/situation the as found nature of things. The innemess of the vessel of a room remains the property of our shared humanity, of our social being/becoming.
Why did this opportunity produce a wealth of transformative insights (conduits and territories) that are now active agents working across all facets of my practice?
Properties: Pastoral Setting.
Built within and amongst a monastery.
Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).
Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.
Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.
Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.
West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.
Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).
Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.
Winchester College, Winchester. Exhibition with talk on creative practice, display of large body drawings, cyanotypes, astronomical charts and architectural notebooks. Workshop conducted in the making and experimentation of using the cyanotype process (historical,light based,printing process 1843).
Link Gallery Winchester University, Winchester. Art and Archaeology around the Keatsian notion ‘Negative Capability’ photograms of anthropomorphic leper graves with excavated oyster shells found at the site (Mom Hill, Winchester).
Hyde Abbey Gatehouse and St Bart’s Church Winchester. Leylines exhibition of artist book photographs, drawings, maps and collages. Installation of archaeologist drawing frame with annotated lead labels, plumb bob, orientated to align with the speculative leyline phenomena.
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