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A Place for All People. Richard Rogers
Читать онлайн.Название A Place for All People
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isbn 9781782116943
Автор произведения Richard Rogers
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
We raced around California, seeing as many of the Case Study Houses as possible. I had written my thesis at Yale on Schindler, so felt like an expert when I went visiting. In one, an older woman let me in, and I told her enthusiastically all about Schindler’s architecture, his wild life and his many affairs. She listened to me politely, and then said, ‘I know. I was his wife.’
We returned to New York, and considered staying there. But we were enticed back to England by the prospect of working on Creek Vean, Su’s parents’ house in Cornwall. They had commissioned designs for updating their creekside holiday home from Ernst Freud and sent them to us in New York for our views. We delivered a fairly tough critique – this was a job that required fresh thinking and a younger architect! – Marcus Brumwell suggested that we take over. We came back from California in the summer of 1963 (we were also expecting our first child by then), and Norman returned shortly afterwards.
Raphael Soriano’s Case Study House, 1950, which used standardised steel components to create an extendable and open structure, would influence Parkside, the house I built for my parents in Wimbledon.
With my mother on a site visit at Parkside in 1968. The three steel portal frames of the lodge are in the foreground; the five that would form the main house are beyond where we are standing.
Viewed from the side, you can see Parkside as a series of slices, capable of endless extension.
3The Language of Architecture
From the primitive hut to the soaring skyscraper, architecture seeks to solve problems in three dimensions. It combines scientific analysis with poetic interpretation, using technology and order to create aesthetic impact and functionality. It transforms the ordinary and the mundane by giving order, scale and rhythm to space. Renzo Piano described it as the most public and socially dangerous art: we can switch off the television or close a book, but we cannot ignore our built environment.
Parkside: Adaptability, Transparency and Colour
Parkside, the house that I built for my parents in 1968–9, was the first fluent expression of an architectural language that had been evolving since I arrived at Yale nearly ten years earlier. Its transparency, its use of colour, its industrialised construction and its flexibility set the scene for much that followed. The house, which I designed with Su and my long-term collaborators and partners John Young and the engineer Tony Hunt, is situated on the edge of Wimbledon Common, shielded from the road and the Common by a mound of earth, designed so that only the rooftop is visible.
Parkside was a considerable refinement of our architectural idiom, reflecting how new techniques and materials had transformed our design approach over a decade. It was a prototype of a flexible building type that would adapt to multiple changes in use, family structure and ownership, but was also an intensely personal project, reflecting my parents’ characters, lives and values. And it was the last domestic project we would build before the maelstrom of the Pompidou Centre engulfed us.
My father was retiring from full-time medical practice, and my parents wanted to move somewhere that would enable him to continue to see some patients, but would also be single-storey, close to local shops and Wimbledon Common, and easy to maintain and flexible as they got older. The brief combined his rational approach to ageing with my mother’s delight in views, in colour, in light, and her growing interest in pottery.
A concept sketch of Parkside, completed in 1969, showing (from top left), Wimbledon Common, the road, the mound, the lodge, the courtyard, the house and the garden.
The structure is essentially very simple. Parkside is a discontinuous transparent tube, supported by eight 45-foot steel portal frames (five for the main building, three for the lodge). It is a tunnel of light, connecting its gardens to the beautiful open space beyond. The house mixes mass production with traditional on-site building techniques (we had hoped to prefabricate the whole structure but planning and building regulations made it impossible). Glass panels demarcate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ space – the main house, the garden designed by my childhood friend Michael Branch, the lodge – but also blur the distinction, creating the impression of a sequence of spaces, like a procession of courtyards or patios, rather than of fixed boundaries. The structure is open-ended; the central courtyard could be enclosed with the addition of two more portals, or the building could be extended, repeating its pattern out into the Common beyond.
The external walls were formed of two-inch-thick ‘Alcoa-brand’ insulated aluminium panels normally specified for refrigerated trucks, joined together with neoprene. As we experimented with new construction materials, John Young kept up subscriptions to numerous industrial magazines, and the inspiration for these panels – lightweight, highly insulated and mass-produced – came from one of them.
The succession of spaces in Parkside expresses a fundamental facet of architecture – the interplay of light, transparency and shadow. A famous essay by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky distinguishes literal transparency of light passing through glass or a void, and phenomenal transparency – the layering and organisation of built elements, light and shadow to create appearances of texture, of space, of continuity, of singularity – when light falls on them. The first is a transparency of seeing; the second a transparency of reading, of interpretation. As the visitor’s gaze passes through Parkside, these two forms of transparency – layering and penetration – coincide and contrast, creating a dialogue.
I love this play of transparencies. The special glass John Young developed with Pilkington for the Lloyd’s Building makes the light sparkle, breaking up the blackness of plain unlit glass, brightening the aspect from the outside, but providing privacy for those at work within. The Pompidou Centre turns expectations inside-out, its structure transparent and legible on the outside, but also enabling light to penetrate deep into its floorplates (the space available for use on each storey).
Pierre Chareau’s 1931 Maison de Verre in Paris lets light in through translucent glass bricks, creating a glowing wall, but only reveals its structure when you enter through the simple sliding glass door. The building was rediscovered in the 1950s. From the first time I saw it, I was captivated by this magic lantern off the Boulevard St Germain, tucked in under an existing building, and wrote my first article in Domus about it. Later I got to know the Dalsace family, who commissioned the building as a home to display their wonderful collection of modern art, books and furniture, with consulting rooms for Dr Dalsace on the ground floor. The interior of the building is even more radical than its steel and glass-brick exterior. Among its many magical and inventive elements was the beautiful steel staircase that led from the entrance to the double-height living space, its banisters leaning away from the stairs themselves, like a cow-catcher on the front of a train. The collaboration between Chareau, Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet and skilled metal worker Louis Dalbet created a building of carefully designed moving parts, with sliding screens and shelves adapting the house for different times of day and functions. The spaces and craftsmanship have influenced everything from the Pompidou Centre to the interiors of my house in Chelsea, and Renzo Piano’s Maison Hermès headquarters in Tokyo.
The Maison de Verre, designed by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet, epitomises inter-war modernism in its transparency, its industrial quality and the craft of its construction. The house, tucked beneath an apartment occupied by a recalcitrant tenant,