PRIMERS Context PRIMERS Context Architecture and the Genius of Place ERIC PARRY To A. A. P. and I. M. P. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Registered office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www. wiley.com. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on- demand. 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ISBN 978-1-119-95271-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-118-94673-2 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-94674-9 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-94567-4 (ebk) Executive Commissioning Editor: Helen Castle Project Editor: David Sassian Assistant Editor: Calver Lezama Cover design, page design and layouts by Karen Willcox, www.karenwillcox.com Printed in Italy by Printer Trento Srl Cover photograph by Dirk Lindner Acknowledgements A book of this kind, like designing a building or directing a film, is made up of a complex web of parts, and here the actors are those who have participated; my most significant debt is for the time they allowed me in discussing their projects, particularly Álvaro Siza, Adam Caruso and Peter St John, Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, Lisa Fior, and Peter and Anneliese Latz. The stimulus to write has been a desire to add a bridge between practice, which consumes my daily life, and the academic discourse of architectural and urban studies. In the latter I am lucky to have long-standing friendships with outstanding contributors: Dalibor Vesely who encouraged me from the outset, Peter Carl, Bob Maxwell, Wilfried Wang and David Leatherbarrow with their boundless generosity, Joseph Rykwert and Richard Sennett through their writings and conversation. The chapter on the kinetics of the street is the beginning of a broader study that was stimulated by the Theatrum Mundi group that Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett have set in intriguing motion. Associated with this chapter has been the photographic record created by Dirk Lindner which continues to inspire me. Closer to home the project would not have been possible without the diligent, intelligent support of José de Paiva and in its production to Sarah Blackmore. My partners in practice Robert Kennett and Nick Jackson have been generous in their support and reading of the script. José de Paiva, Tao Sule-DuFour, Eimear Hanratty and Russell Watson have created a number of the drawings for which I am very grateful. Finally for their gracious patience and encouragement I am most indebted to Helen Castle and Merit Claussen. Eric Parry Contents Introduction 008 Chapter 1: Pavement 013 Chapter 2: Horizon 048 Chapter 3: Simultaneity 078 Chapter 4: Kinetics 106 Chapter 5: Artifice 146 Select Bibliography 185 Index 187 Picture Credits 192 Eric Parry Introduction There are a growing number of remarkable projects reflecting a widening global appetite and audience for architectural adventure. When Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997, the cherry on the urban renewal cake, it did more at a stroke than the massive infrastructure projects that preceded it, to reinvent the image of that city. Many others have followed suit, calling on the undoubted talents of a battalion of architects who spend as much time in airports as in their offices. At the same time interest in the city as an urban and social science project has burgeoned with the exponential rate of global urban expansion. Deyan Sudjic’s book The 100 Mile City (1992) explored the reality of the megacity with a breathtaking pace to mirror its subject. The Urban Age project, centred at the London School of Economics and supported generously by the Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Fund, has allowed eminent academics from the fields of law, economics, urban policy, urban design, politics and sociology to circumnavigate the globe to assess the comparative conditions of some of the most influential cities. This work reached a peak of public 008 attention with the Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Ricky Burdett in 2010. The Corderie (the long chain of former naval rope factory buildings where the Biennale’s main themed exhibition is held) were packed with comparative statistics, diagnoses of relative infrastructure successes and failures and above all harrowing projections of future growth. It represented an extraordinary effort and contained a huge amount of useful information for the next generation of policy makers, but given that vast space I came away overfed on facts but starved of the qualitative and haptic sense of what makes the world of cities the essential storehouse of human existence. I had contemplated gathering some of the intense urban narrative accumulated in piecemeal fashion by architectural projects that have preoccupied me for a couple of decades into a navigable order, when Helen Castle asked me if I would add Context as a title in Wiley’s series of books aimed primarily at both students and lecturers involved in the business of architectural education. As a former studio teacher and lecturer, now fully preoccupied by practice, I started to muse on the bridges between the two worlds. There are some things that are difficult and intangible in the school studio, two of the most important being the material and tectonic issues that the building crafts and industry offer to the designer’s palette and then additionally the collective nature of architectural design. The latter involves the specialist knowledge of many fields from landscape design to engineering with which architecture forms a synthesising and catalysing voice. The broad theoretical territory embodied in the book’s structure reflects my own wavering between art, architecture and anthropology. Additionally I can trace the roots of my interest in the European city to the lectures and seminars of two of my former teachers: Dalibor Vesely at the Architectural Association in 1978–9 and Kenneth Frampton at the Royal College of Art in 1976–7. Indeed it was Frampton’s references to Vesely during a remarkable set of two-hour lectures at the RCA that galvanised me to attend the AA at a time when almost all studios were absorbed by a heated discourse about the contemporary city, fermented by the director of the school, Alvin Boyarsky. While we can rummage through the history of city planning to ascertain where critical plans emerged, in the case of chapter four the street and the cities under scrutiny, it remains an obvious contradiction to so much muscular architectural effort today that the silent contributors are more often than not anonymous – like the unattributed poet ‘unknown’. And yet in their anonymity they have created a framework that is celebrated every day in the most liveable, communicative, entertaining and sophisticated sections of cities on earth. Eric Parry 009 Introduction View from Piazza della Minerva, Rome Context through the layers of successive epochs: ancient Roman, early Christian, the Baroque and the contemporary. In the foreground is Francesco Borromini’s Obelisco della Minerva (1667); in the background, the Pantheon (1st century BC, rebuilt c AD 126, with subsequent 17th- and 18th-century additions). On the question of the future shaping of the city, those archetypes that are as fundamental as eating, sleeping and conversing remain its shared spaces: the streets, the urban block, the square and the public garden. In order to move towards an understanding of the street, the ground on which it is cast 010 seemed an obvious starting point for the first chapter. The making of streets is taken for granted but actually it absorbs a huge quantum of the city dweller’s field of vision, constantly dangerous, engaging and subject to all the wear and tear that citizens can muster. Choice of material is resolved by proximity, continuities of tradition and context, and the differences are so clear that is it often possible to locate a place from the traces of its surface alone. The concern for a perceptual field rather than a focus on particular objects gave rise to the framing of the second chapter, ‘Horizon’.