CONCRETE QUARTERLY LASTING IMPRESSION 2014-17 | LEADING DESIGNERS AND THE CONCRETE BUILDINGS THAT INSPIRED THEM ALAN STANTON w JIM HEVERIN w JOHN TUOMEY w SIMON ALLFORD w RAB BENNETTS NÍALL McLAUGHLIN w WILLIAM MITCHELL w HUGH BROUGHTON w DEBORAH SAUNT w CHRIS LOYN ARTUR CARULLA w EUAN MACDONALD w MARION BRERETON w GAVIN MILLER w NEIL GILLESPIE LASTING IMPRESSION 2 IN EACH ISSUE OF CONCRETE QUARTERLY, WE INVITE A DESIGNER RENOWNED FOR THEIR WORK IN CONCRETE TO SHARE THE BUILDINGS OR STRUCTURES THAT HAVE INFLUENCED THEM MOST. THEY HAVE CHOSEN HOUSES AND CATHEDRALS, CONCERT HALLS AND FACTORIES, SWIMMING POOLS, SILOS AND ZOOS. THEIR ANSWERS ARE OFTEN SURPRISING, ALWAYS ILLUMINATING, REFLECTING THE VERSATILITY OF CONCRETE AND THE MYRIAD WAYS IN WHICH GREAT ARCHITECTS HAVE The National Theatre in London, by Denys Lasdun (1976). Chosen USED IT TO SHAPE THE MODERN WORLD. by Marion Brereton, page 15 On the cover: CONCRETE QUARTERLY Brynmawr rubber factory LASTING IMPRESSION 2014-17 | LEADING DESIGNERS AND THE CONCRETE BUILDINGS THAT INSPIRED THEM in Ebbw Vale, by the Architects Co-Partnership (1951). Chosen by Chris Loyn, page 12 The Concrete Centre is part of the Mineral Products Association, Photo: Veale & Co / the trade association for the aggregates, asphalt, cement, concrete, dimension stone, lime, mortar and silica sand industries. ALAN STANTON w JIM HEVERIN w JOHN TUOMEY w SIMON ALLFORD w RAB BENNETTS NÍALL McLAUGHLIN w WILLIAM MITCHELL w HUGH BROUGHTON w DEBORAH SAUNT w CHRIS LOYN The Concrete Society ARTUR CARULLA w EUAN MACDONALD w MARION BRERETON w GAVIN MILLER w NEIL GILLESPIE www.mineralproducts.org Photo: George Perkin SUMMER 2014 3 LASTING IMPRESSION ALAN STANTON FROM A FRENCH MONASTERY TO AN ITALIAN FURNITURE SHOWROOM The way we design buildings is in many ways similar to how an artist works on a sculpture, so concrete is quite often an ideal material because it’s very versatile and plastic. A building that exemplifies this is Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery 1 (1959) near Lyon in France. It’s very crudely built, but 1 3 you really get a sense of the wonderful sculptural qualities of concrete. It can form itself to do all kinds of things throughout the building, and because it’s all concrete, it has a tremendous integrity. Another is Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre on London’s South Bank (1976), which we worked on about 15 years ago. Denys said to me, “We had a very limited budget, but what we did have was the luxury of space,” and the concrete actually creates those spaces. The whole building is in rough board-shuttered concrete and you can light it to get a soft, almost furry quality. Certainly on the interior I think everybody loves it; the exterior is another question. The other interesting thing about the National Theatre is that if you put concrete together with luxurious materials – Lasdun does it with stainless steel, lighting and a very beautiful purple carpet – then immediately you lift people’s perceptions of it. The person who does this best is the great Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. I recently visited his Gavina showroom 2 (1963) in Bologna, in rough board-marked concrete with two big circular windows. There are grooves in the concrete where he’s put gold leaf, and little bronze fittings around the windows – it ennobles the concrete, if that’s not too grand a word. At the Sainsbury Laboratory 3 [in Cambridge], we managed to get very high- quality fair-faced concrete, and by putting it with a rather beautiful limestone and timber and beautiful detailing, it just became a very, very special material. 2 Alan Stanton is co-founder and director of Stanton Williams Photos: 1. Jacqueline Salmon/Artedia; 2. Klaus Frahm/ARTUR IMAGES; 3. Hufton + Crow FROM THE ARCHIVE: WINTER 2003 5,500 HOLES IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS The Glasgow School of Art (pages 4-7) is not the first time that New York architect Steven Holl has set tongues wagging with a massive, in-your- face university building. Back in 2003, in the rarefied setting of the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holl completed the Simmons Hall student housing block – a hulking 10-storey concrete honeycomb with more than 5,500 small square windows cut into its solid exterior. “The dormitory’s massing resembles two Pac-Man figures set head to head,” thought William Menking, writing for CQ. As with the Reid Building, it is inside that the building really comes to life. “The most successful spaces are those that could only happen with concrete as a material,” writes Menking. “The most impressive are the six multistorey group lounges that slice up, across and through the standard residential floors. These flowing spaces, made of thin poured concrete, suggest Bilbao crossed with La Tourette and cut diagonally through the building’s walls and floors, often spilling into the hallways. They are expressed on the facade as large irregular openings that Holl labels ‘amoebic’, but which look for all the world like gaps in Swiss cheese.” Access the full CQ archive at www.concretecentre.com/cq AUTUMN 2014 4 LASTING IMPRESSION JIM HEVERIN INSPIRED BY ITO’S TOKYO AND THE BUILDING ACROSS THE ROAD … While thinking about this, I realised that I haven’t visited enough of the buildings that inspire me – it’s one thing to admire them from a distance, but to actually see and touch and use a building connects you to it. A lot of the post-war projects by Nervi, Candela, Le Corbusier and many other architects feed into our work, but we also admire contemporary work such as the Angel building by AHMM (2010). The Angel 1 , just up the road from our office, is a 1 3 great project, particularly the central atrium. AHMM took a building that wasn’t very interesting and created a lot of quality. It’s good to see concrete coming back into commercial projects, and it’s also pertinent that it’s a refurb – the concrete projects of the post-war generation aren’t appreciated enough. I’m looking forward to Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern extension. The in- situ staircase will be spectacular, the precast frame looks stunning, and there’s a precast ceiling that I first saw in the Schaulager building 2 in Basel (2003) – we couldn’t figure out whether it was in situ or precast. Water runs through it for heating and chilling, and lighting is placed very precisely in the gaps. At the moment we are travelling quite a bit to Japan, the kingdom of in-situ concrete. I like the universal application, the fact that it’s used in very ordinary buildings but delivered with amazing skill and care. The facade of Toyo Ito’s Tod’s building 3 in Tokyo (2004) is phenomenal. None of the corners are blunted, the panels are extremely smooth and the finish is so consistent – it’s like polished stone. When that’s applied to a really great building, like his Tama Art university library (which I haven’t seen), it’s an amazing combination of the materiality of concrete, which can be structure and cladding all at once, and this ability to be very permanent and to allow architects to carve out spaces. 2 Jim Heverin is a director at Zaha Hadid Architects Bisig; 3. Edmund Sumner/VIEWpictures.co.uk Photos: 1.Peter Cook/VIEWpictures.co.uk; 2. Tom FROM THE ARCHIVE: AUTUMN 1962 REVIVAL OF A THEATRICAL CLASSIC The Chichester Festival Theatre, which has just reopened after a £22m refurbishment by Haworth Tompkins, was “a pioneer in English theatrical design”, according to CQ when the curtain went up on Powell and Moya’s bold modernist auditorium 52 years ago. Not that there was a curtain: Chichester was the UK’s first modern thrust stage, with no proscenium arch, little scenery and the actors “thrust” out into the audience. This dramatic functionalism was reflected in the building design, with Powell and Moya’s novel hexagonal form determined by the shape of the stage and auditorium – an “adventurous step”, according to CQ. As with the productions inside, the mechanics of the construction were given a starring role: “The supporting skeleton is exposed on the outside, and both columns and beams are of structural concrete, cast in situ and bush- hammered to expose the grey aggregate,” noted CQ. Inside, “the soffits are left as they came from the formwork and simply painted white”. Over the years, the building has suffered from that old theatrical problem of over-direction, with a number of extensions compromising the clarity of the original design. Enter Haworth Tompkins, stage left … Access the full CQ archive at www.concretecentre.com/cq WINTER 2014 5 LASTING IMPRESSION JOHN TUOMEY FROM THE PROFOUND TO THE ‘ELEVATED ORDINARY’ My interest in concrete is to do with it being cast in situ. I absolutely love the feeling that the building is made in the place or even right out of the place. When I try to think about that, two things come to mind. One is an everyday anonymous concrete that you might find in any Irish handball alley or municipal swimming pool or Atlantic pier – the 1 whole thing of concrete as a landscape consolidated halfway between topography and geology. My exemplar for that would most certainly be Àlvaro Siza’s swimming pool 1 at Leça (1966) just outside Porto in Portugal. It takes concrete architecture to a high poetic form but it comes out of trying to make something like seawalls and benches – landscape works, in a way. Siza was very young when he made it but it’s just one of those in-situ topographical concrete buildings that never ceases to inspire me.