Thinking about Architecture

Studio MGM have built some rather simple and elegant flats in Bury St Edmunds – published here by BuildingDesign – and for once a building reviewed in an architectural publication moves me to praise.

MGM flats in Bury St Edmunds

On a tight site, on a tight budget, Studio MGM have manged to make a piece of architecture that also works as a building.

The flat plans are simple, sensible and pleasant – they used sprinklers to get away from the  dingy hallway that is the enforced arrangement for many flats under fire regulations – offering decent dual-aspect living/dining rooms with discreetly open-plan kitchens. Nothing revolutionary, but unfortunately very rare at the bottom end of the market.

The building is elegantly framed and clad in larch – a timber that is among the most durable of european sustainably produced wood – Western Red Cedar has been so over specified and overused that it has become expensive, and largely comes from imports from the USA.

The exposed frame is intended to become overgrown with wisteria – which will be a lovely counterpoint to the elegant but rather hard edged exposed framing (I do worry about long term maintenance, but I’m sure that this has been thought through in what is obviously a highly considered scheme).

I was pleased to hear from Meredith Bowles at Studio MGM that David Lea was one of their inspirations – an architect I have long admired.

And very interested to learn that another MGM partner, Ralph Carpenter of modece architects has worked with hemp/lime in the past – a material we are working with for two current projects.

Jean Nouvel’s latest completed building, the ‘Bains-les-Docks’, at Le Havre, set me thinking.

There are more ‘photos here (copyright, so I can’t include them directly).

I haven’t seen the building, but the images show clearly that this is a work of some ambition, thoughtful, the result of a great deal of careful consideration.

They also show a building in which all detail has been pared back to a minimum – if you could zoom in to the image above, the only increase in detail would be in the water, not the building – there simply IS no detail. All effect (and there clearly is intended effect – the forms are highly varied, within a limited range of moves) is sculptural, formal, spatial – the forms could be, and many probably are, made of painted plasterboard.

There is no comment on this in the review I have read – it is evidently of little concern. And that’s what set me thinking.

When early modern, deliberately simplified, ‘abstract’ buildings began to appear, the typical reaction was shock – an inability to accept buildings so pared down, so mute about their own materiality, so denying of human craft (and those buildings were hand-crafted – hand-crafted to look as if they were the products of a machine-age).

The ‘progressive’ view of these buildings, though, appreciated the simplicity, the  ’Neue Sachlichkeit’ (New Cleanliness), as a breath of fresh air against the background of the cloying, eclectic detail of much late C19th architecture. These progressives came from a rich background of varied forms, rich and characterful materiality. For them the simplicity was always to be seen against this background; it meant something, offered something different, aspired to something.

The simplicity was noteworthy on both sides of the argument, for and against.

Flash forward to now, and the simplicity is banal, not worthy of the slightest comment. The children playing in some of the photos are experiencing a radically simplified environment, where there are only a few, saturated  block colours, where forms are made with the blankest of stuff.

Their background is perhaps emptier, less material, less varied, than any past generation’s; and the problem with this is that it’s a one-way street. If you’ve grown up in a rich, dense, complex environment, then simplicity is something you can deal with (you may or may not like it, but it certainly won’t be a cognitive stretch).

On the other hand, if you’ve grown up in a simplified world, then even a normal, natural level of complexity (normal? natural? I hear the post modern among you sneer: yes, the normal, natural level of complexity exhibited in the environment in which all humans lived until the very recent past) – can be overwhelming, disorienting, confusing – requiring concentrated effort to comprehend.

All of which is perhaps a long-winded way of saying – modern architecture is dumbed-down.