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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
Our experience with Creek Vean and Murray Mews had shown the limits of traditional technologies; the challenges of working with ‘wet trade’ contractors – those deploying traditional techniques of bricks and mortar on site – even when they were competent; the time taken, and the risks of constructing fixed buildings for clients whose needs changed over the years. In 1969, a few years after we had completed these projects, I wrote a manifesto arguing for change. At a time when we needed 400,000 houses a year in the UK (a curiously similar challenge to the one we still face nearly 50 years later), it made no sense that it had taken six architects four years to build four houses. We wanted to create buildings that took advantage of industrialised technology, that were general purpose not tailor-made, so that the same shell could cater for different clients’ needs or for one client’s needs changing over time.
We had to go back to the system-built structures that had inspired us, assembling components not stacking bricks, creating lightweight vessels not heavy-boned buildings. Essentially, the modern building site should be an assembly site, leaving the manufacture of components in the workshop. Using industrial components and systems, our architecture could be based on an interchangeable and adaptable kit of parts, not the creation of a perfectly formed doll’s house. It would not be frozen classical music, but jazz, allowing for improvisation, propelled and supported by a regular beat.
Buildings should not rigidly determine the way they are used, but should allow people to adapt and interact with their space, to bring their own character, to perform freely inside and out, to bring life to and complete the expression of the building. Our buildings would not be classical temples where (to use the Florentine architect Alberti’s phrase) ‘nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for the worse’, but friendly robots, non-deterministic open-ended systems that could respond to users’ needs, changing as these changed and allowing for improvisation. The tension between buildings being open-ended and adaptable, and the pressure to fix use and configuration often for reasons of short-term cost savings, persists in architecture today.
Adaptability is even more important, as accelerating technological and social change makes it hard or impossible to predict how we will live and work in the decades to come. If our buildings are to be sustainable, they must cope with radical changes in configuration and use.
Romig and O’Sullivan’s graph, published in Hospital Engineering in 1982, compares the replacement frequency of parts, systems, buildings and urban infrastructure. Flexible buildings should allow for the replacement of services with minimal disruption to the structure.
Researchers have analysed the differing replacement rates for different parts of the built environment: basic appliances (and nowadays IT systems) have a life of ten years, systems like air conditioning and heating can maybe last 40 to 50 years, buildings themselves can last 100 years or more, while the cities’ infrastructure and layout date back centuries.2 A building’s framework should allow for services to be replaced and renewed, with minimal disruption.
Reliance Controls, built on time and for a very modest budget in 1967, was Team 4’s last project.
The factory was constructed from standard components – I-beams, braces and corrugated steel.
Internal partitions were moveable, creating flexible and democratic space – bosses and workers used the same entrances and the same canteen.
Allowing for change in the design and construction of a building is a constraint, but constraints are a critical driver of our aesthetic language. Cost, time, the availability of materials, planning and building regulations, evolving technology, political decisions and clients and users requirements – these all shape buildings. But constraint defines the area of possibility, and gives direction to design. There’s a famous anecdote about the seventeenth-century architect Inigo Jones being commissioned to build St Paul’s in Covent Garden. The Earl of Bedford said that the cost needed to be as low as possible, saying ‘I would not have it much better than a barn.’ Jones replied, ‘Then you shall have the handsomest barn in England!’ You do not have to sacrifice beauty or function to a reduced budget, though money always helps, as my mother used to say.
A Beautiful Barn – The Reliance Controls Factory
The window, added by the factory’s occupiers, showed that we needed construction systems that could respond easily to changing needs.
The Reliance Controls Factory represented a leap forward both functionally and aesthetically, a shift from the language learned from Wright and Corbusier, to one influenced by Fuller, Soriano and Eames, and by the industrial structures we had seen travelling round the USA. It was the first building that we built using standardised components and systems, rather than the chaotic construction of traditional building techniques. The commission came about when Peter Parker, later to be chairman of British Rail, asked Jim Stirling to recommend young architects who could build an expandable 30,000 square foot electronic component factory near Swindon – to be completed within ten months of the first client meeting, and at a cost of £4 per square foot, a tiny budget even in those days.
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