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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, was completed in 1932.

I wrote my first published article, for Domus in 1966, on the building; its transparency, its flexible use of space and its beautiful staircase all made a lasting impression on me.

This play of light and shadow creates scale, and all scale ultimately comes back to human bodies, to the fingers, hands, forearms, feet and strides that defined standard measurements in the pre-metric era – when man was literally the measure of all things.

Scale helps a building to communicate. I have always wanted to make the signals given off by buildings clear and unambiguous, to enrich the enjoyment of users and passers-by alike, to express buildings’ role in city and community. These signals should help people to understand the process of construction, navigate buildings and places, see the potential they offer for private and public life. All elements should give order, nothing should be hidden, everything should be legible – the process of manuacture and erection, the role everything plays in the building, how it can be maintained, changed, demolished, and what the building itself does or could do. Parkside has this simple expression – you can see the steel portals that hold up the house and the joints connecting the aluminium panels.

Parkside is also suffused with colour. The insulated aluminium walls are white, the internal walls are yellow and lime, as are the steel portals that form the heart of the structure. In post-war England, it sometimes felt as if colour itself had been rationed, and that only shades of grey and brown were permitted. In this monochrome world, my mother stood out; she had always dressed in bright colours – much to my embarrassment when she dropped me off at primary school. But she clearly made an impression on me. Later, in 1957, when my father had asked Su and me to help decorate the doctors’ dining room at St Helier Hospital, where he opened the renal unit and brought the first kidney dialysis machine to the UK, we choose bright yellow, bright green, bright blue and bright red, each wall painted a different colour. These were the colours of cubism, of the work of Mondrian, Matisse and Picasso that had seemed so bright in the gloom of post-war England.

Parkside viewed at dusk from the courtyard when my parents were living there, the steel frame and aluminium panels clearly visible.

The dining table and chairs designed by Ernesto Rogers, with the open kitchen to the left, and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames behind.

Inside Parkside’s bright living space, looking out from the open kitchen, with bedrooms and the library beyond the central dining space.

The steel portal frames are visible as slices in the ceiling. In the upper picture, my mother’s beautiful pots are arranged in ‘villages’ on the kitchen counter.

Reflection and transparency: my mother’s mirrored dressing table in the bedroom, with the door open through to the kitchen and living room beyond.

My mother in the study at Parkside.

Travelling round the USA and Mexico, I had seen the bright colours of California, of the Case Study Houses. I had seen how colour was used in industrial architecture, to indicate function, distinguish components, or signal hazards. It seemed natural to bring all this back to London, as an additional layer of meaning – a different way of making buildings legible and transparent in their functions – but also as a form of play, a way of lightening and clarifying the formalism of imposing structures. Ancient buildings – from the Acropolis to medieval cathedrals – were much more colourful than their bleached stone tells us today. Using modern industrial components frees you to experiment with colour too: plastics are whatever colour you choose to make them. I sympathise with Gropius who, when asked his favourite colour, replied, ‘All of them!’ People are frightened about choosing the ‘right’ ones, but I don’t worry about following rules. Green can go with red or pink; if a colour is beautiful, it will go with another beautiful colour.

Parkside originally included a consulting room for my father to continue medicine, and the separate lodge included a carport, and a studio for my mother’s pottery. The focal point of the house was an open-plan kitchen. Cooking and entertaining had always been the heart of our family life and bringing the kitchen into the living space made cooking a social activity, not a segregated chore. Over the years, my mother cooked for so many of my friends, and instilled a love of Italian food not only in Ruthie, who went on to create the River Café with Rose Gray, but in Georgie and Su too, and my sons, who are all really good cooks.

On the other side of the kitchen counter, the house made room for the beautiful 1930s modern furniture that my cousin Ernesto had created in Italy as a wedding present for my parents. My mother’s pottery was on shelves, and walls were hung with paintings by Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron – and a prized Picasso print.

Over time Parkside has adapted and evolved: the carport and pottery became a flat for my brother Peter, then for John Young, then the design studio of my son Ab, who moved into the house when my mother died. When Ab moved out, we gifted Parkside to Harvard, as a residential centre for their Graduate School of Design, led by Mohsen Mostafavi. Each year, six research fellows will live in the house, which has been reconfigured by Philip Gumuchdjian, who co-wrote Cities for a Small Planet with me when he was working at RRP, pursuing research into urban development, and it will also host lectures and other events. It has changed with the times, accommodating different needs and uses rather than constraining them, reflecting the architectural philosophy later summarised as ‘Long life, loose fit, low energy’.

The Limits of Traditional Technique – Creek Vean and Murray Mews

Su and I began work on Parkside in 1968. For five years, first with Norman and Wendy Foster, and then with John Young and Laurie Abbott, we had been working towards a new architectural language, feeling our way along a path without knowing clearly what the destination would be.

Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman, who married in 1964, at Team 4’s offices.

When we returned from the USA in 1963, Norman, Su and I had set up Team 4 with my ex-girlfriend Georgie Cheesman, and her sister Wendy. At first, we worked out of Wendy’s bedroom in a two-room flat in Belsize Park. Frank Peacock, who had studied with me at the AA (literally alongside me, as our surnames made us neighbours in every class), and was a brilliant technician and draughtsman, built a box to put over Wendy’s bed, so that we could use it as workspace during the day. When clients visited, friends would be roped in to pose as architects, to make Team 4 look like a larger concern than it was.

As neither Norman nor I had completed our training, we were not entitled to call ourselves architects. Georgie had qualified and gave Team 4 some legitimacy, but she quickly saw that Norman and I were going to be impossible to work with, so moved on. The core of Team 4 was Norman and Wendy (who fell in love with each other and married), and Su and me. Norman and I did manage to complete our registration, but only after being summoned before the Architects Registration Council for practising without a licence.

Team 4’s first commission, Creek Vean, was both Parkside’s twin and its opposite. Like Parkside, it was for our parents – in this case, Su’s, Marcus and Rene Brumwell. Like Parkside it has now been listed as Grade II*. Like Parkside it presents a deceptively blank face to the road outside. But there the similarities end.

Marcus Brumwell had asked us to look at the plans for renovating his holiday home on the banks of a Cornish creek by the Fal estuary. We soon decided, and persuaded our client, that he needed to demolish the existing house and start again. Our designs set up a dialogue between light and shadow, between the geometry of concrete blocks and soft contours of a creekside, between modern materials and sense of place.

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 we have a similar approach in that expressing the process of construction is an important part of our architectural language, something to be celebrated as it was by Paxton and Brunel, not to be hidden away behind the romantic stylings of neoclassical and neo-Gothic façades.

All good architecture is modern in its time, reflecting both changing technology and the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist. Architectural language needs to evolve with the times, just as painting, music, fashion, even the design of cars does. It is from the interplay of function, technology and zeitgeist that good architecture emerges, with a tough beauty that contains bitterness as well as sweeter flavours.

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.