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A Place for All People. Richard Rogers
Читать онлайн.Название A Place for All People
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782116943
Автор произведения Richard Rogers
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Marcus Brumwell, my father-in-law and Team 4’s first client, with Creek Vean, completed in 1967, on the hillside behind. The double-height living space faces the Fal estuary; the lower living spaces overlook the creek.
Our final design had two axes: the living accommodation was arranged along the contours of the site. A double-height living room, dominated by a hanging Alexander Calder sculpture, and kitchen face out towards the Fal estuary; three bedrooms are angled in towards views over the creek to the hills beyond. A stepped path separates the living room and the bedrooms, bridging over a glass-roofed gallery that forms a connecting corridor and housed the Brumwells’ collection of St Ives School art. The path leads down from the road to the creek itself, where we spent many happy days sailing with Marcus and Rene – and our children and grandchildren still return there to sail every summer.
Team 4 at our Hampstead Hill Gardens office in 1963 or 1964. The way we were posing like a pop group, not an architecture practice, convinced John Young to apply for a placement with us.
The buildings hug the hillside, and have over time been softened by the vegetation that grows over and around them (the planting was designed by Michael Branch), but their form is uncompromising, and you can still see the powerful influence of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that we had visited while driving around the USA only months earlier. The house was designed so that it could be extended: the wall at the end of the bedrooms was intended to be a pause not a terminus, a semicolon not a full stop.
Working with Tony Hunt and Laurie Abbott, we used carefully specified concrete blocks for the main structure. But rather than letting them dictate the geometry of the building, we cut them to shape like lumps of cheese, so that they could follow our unconventionally contoured plan. We used neoprene, a type of rubber that was a new technology at that time (I think we were among the first to use it), for the joints between blocks and glazing.
At the same time as Creek Vean, we were working on three houses at Murray Mews in Camden. We were exhausted, putting in fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. It’s not a good way to work, but we were young, and it was the culture we were used to from those late nights at Yale. I remember saying to Su that I didn’t expect to ever have a whole weekend free, but that it would be nice to have just one Sunday off, maybe every other month.
Where Creek Vean was exciting and tiring, Murray Mews was dispiriting. The clients had very different requirements or changed these over time: one of them, Naum Gabo’s stepson Owen Franklin (our GP), wanted a bachelor pad full of art and sculpture at the outset, but had married and had children by the time the house was finished. His needs had changed, but the building had difficulty meeting these.
The plan for Creek Vean, showing the stepped path leading down from the roadside, the two wings either side of it and the glazed gallery connecting them under the path.
Pill Creek Retreat, which we built near Creek Vean as a summer house – and a refuge for the client to escape from his architects.
Zad, Ben and Ab on the steps.
The concrete stepped path now softened by vegetation, leading down between the two wings of the house.
The kitchen-dining room, the heart of Creek Vean, looking out towards Falmouth.
Inside the gallery, a flexible space for displaying works by Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and other artists of the St Ives School.
The budgets were very low and the contractor was incompetent and keen to cut corners: everything leaked, walls weren’t square, we discovered a small river running through the sunken dining room in Owen’s house, and chimneys missed fireplaces. I remember one horrendous site visit with one of the clients. First of all he poked at a piece of what looked like asphalt, to discover it was just a copy of the Daily Mail painted black. Then we went downstairs, where the U-bend of the lavatory was visible. The owner hit it to make a point, and it broke, showering him in sewage. Charlie Chaplin couldn’t have done better. John Young, who had just joined us, prepared intricately detailed plans for tiling the bathrooms, showing how every tile would fit. These were ignored, and used to wrap fish and chips. I walked off site one day and went to sit under a tree on Hampstead Heath, and burst into tears. I wondered, not for the first or last time, whether I was really cut out to be an architect.
At Creek Vean, we were luckier with our builders; their work was excellent, though their attitude was pretty laid-back. If the weather was good, they would down tools and go fishing. This was one of the reasons, though not the only one, that it took the six of us the best part of three years to complete Creek Vean.
From Classical Temples to Friendly Robots
We couldn’t continue to work like this. Creek Vean and Murray Mews pushed us to fundamentally rethink our approach to technology and the process of construction. Technology is the raw material of architectural expression, the equivalent of words in poetry. Without a proper understanding of words there is no poetry, and architecture starts from an understanding of technology, materials, the process of construction and a sense of place. Norman and I were modernists, but were inspired by the amazing heritage of early industrial buildings, from the world’s first cast-iron bridge at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, to the incredible lightness and delicacy of Brunel and Paxton, who used iron, steel and glass – the high tech materials of their day – to create great station sheds, bridges, glass houses and crystal palaces.
In the twentieth century, technology had continued to transform our cities: it was the steel frame, the telephone and the elevator that freed buildings from the ground, enabling Chicago to build the first skyscrapers. At the same time, the Model T Ford had shown what could be achieved on production lines, and so technology had also created an economy of manufacture. Norman and I had studied the use of manufactured components in Buckminster Fuller’s work, in Soriano’s architecture and Paul Rudolph’s early designs, in the open-ended architecture of the Eames House in Los Angeles, in Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated steel structures, and in modern industrial buildings and machinery.
Though industrialisation had created countless new possibilities for building and construction, many of the buildings we saw in 1964, and see today, still use tools and techniques – bricks, mortar and timber frames – that have been used for 500 years or more. As Peter Rice, the Irish engineer who became an indispensable partner on the Pompidou Centre and so many other projects, liked to say, traditional techniques have been used so many times that you don’t give them any thought; radical architecture has to start from first principles.
I have never liked the label of ‘high tech’ architecture that is sometimes applied to people like Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw and me, but I do believe