As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.
Ann Cline
Architecture is not made with the brain.
The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.
Architectural Association 2005.
Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.
Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.
Holistic Practices.
The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.
Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)
Transitions between spaces.
‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life
Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production
‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining.’(Schregenberger,2005:82)
‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001
‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)
Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker
Urban Structuring.
Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.
‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)
‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison’2005:98)
The Everyday.
Life between buildings.
The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.
Heavy Prefabrication: Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.
John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.
‘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)
The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.
To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’
We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker, 2005:85)
The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.
Cultural Background.
Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.
Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)
The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.
Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities."
The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.
The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."
And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.
To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book's publication).
It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.
Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.
The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.
Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.
Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.
Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itself (importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time).’ (Krucker, 2005:87)
The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).
The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch'i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, "Even here, the gods reside."
Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)
‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways,etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison’2005:97)
Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership.
‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison’2005:98)
Could it be that where a human settlement seems structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?
Neutrality and Character.
‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.
The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker, 2005:89)
‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker, 2005:90)
Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson
With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.
‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions. ’
Research Contexts/Materials
The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.
What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.
Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.
A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project.
‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison’2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings.
A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.
Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution.
‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison’2005:94)
Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project.
‘The concept of Ways as a means of organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)
A simple organising circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.
Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.
By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.
The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.
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