Expectant air

by Alexander Hill, Associate at Chipperfield Architects, London

Traditional representation of architecture; drawings, models, photographs, is dominated by the visual. This limited palette is narrowed further because their purpose is usually confined to promotion, instruction and occasionally education. What used to be called, somewhat inappropriately, the “artist’s impression” has been replaced by the computer generated image or CGI. These glossy imaginings are, of course, not generated by computers but by people and are usually crude approximations of

the unreal, caught in a perpetual and shadow-less sunshine or geographically equivalent twilight.

In an age where digital representation is so advanced that the genuine and simulated are easily mistaken these makeshift images are reassuringly fake. For more tangible representations

or reflections on architecture we should look elsewhere.

Curiously, the most ‘real’ descriptions

of architecture are to be found within the works

of fictional prose. Writing can conjure the full sensory spectrum of our experience. A novel’s depiction of the built environment is untainted

by the professional interests of the design and building industries, and importantly architecture

is seldom its main subject. In the domain of a novel encounters with buildings and landscape may

be of central importance or incidental, they may

be a setting, a protagonist or both, banality may

be as noteworthy as beauty. This mirrors our own experience of architecture, it is subliminal, background and aggregate. Of course, that isn't

to underestimate the impact our environment has on us, on the contrary a novel dissects how we perceive our surroundings and their significance, this is inherent in its form. Authors of literature are on the whole detached from the specialised business of making buildings, the criteria and conventions

of design, however, they are often concerned with settings, how we live, and how we interact with others. The author is indifferent to ‘quality’ and ingenuity in architecture but is more often sensitive to experience, consequence, and connotation, suggesting that some of the deepest thoughts

on the subject might be found not in professional criticism but in novels.

According to Irish novelist Iris Murdoch, the novel must ‘combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways’. Her works are infused with the unexpected, the dissonant and the unremarkable and as a result, Murdoch’s work holds some of the most insightful and subtle evocations

of architecture to be found. It is problematic

to extract such moments as without their context these fragments lose some of their pathos;

a Murdoch novel is an amalgamation rather than

a sequence of set pieces. However, take this passage from The Sea, The Sea.

The main staircase turns inward to reach the space of the upper landing. I call this a ‘space’ because it is a rather odd area with

an atmosphere all its own. It has the expectant air of a stage set. Sometimes I feel as if I must have seen it long ago in a dream.

It is a big windowless oblong, lit during the day through open doors, and adorned, just opposite the ‘inner room’, by a solid oak stand upon which there is a remarkably hideous green vase, with a thick neck and a scalloped rim and pink roses blistering its bulging sides.

I have become very attached to this gross object. Beyond it, there is

a shallow alcove that looks as if it should contain a statue, but empty resembles a door.

In this story Charles Arrowby, a theatrical celebrity, escapes to a remote and ugly house by the sea planning to spend a time of ‘recollection in tranquillity’. Endearingly self-aware of the faintly ridiculous and pompous nature of this quest for seclusion, his reminiscences are attended to by

the unwanted appearance of various characters from his past who disrupt not only his vision of retirement but also an idealised view of his former life. The house itself is the first challenger, wrong footing him by ‘playing up’, but as they become acquainted it is increasingly a surrogate consciousness: ‘as if the house were a sensitised plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past—or, it now occurred

to me for the first time, were going to happen

in the future’. The house and landscape seem

to grow more sentient and powerful while a series

of unexpected events render him weakened. Eventually Charles’ ideal to dislocate himself

from the world is wrenched away. As with other works by Murdoch there is an ambiguous almost mystical force at work that seems to operate outside the novel as well as within, as though

the story is not written but is rather a coalescence of events, people, thoughts and place around

an elusive central truth. In this territory, human mastery is fragile and characters find that the ground shifts beneath them.

In other works, this fluid orchestration extends

to a whole city. In Under the Net the central character shuttles between apartments and acquaintances, 1950s London is a benign but mutable presence as if the city itself is subtly directing the drama. Murdoch’s work constitutes

a kind of grasping at reality which is constructed

by the physical as much as the intellectual, she can draw meaning out of light, weather, architecture

in a way that builds not only a story but an outlook or philosophical position. Take the innocuous observation from The Sea, The Sea that ‘The room was dark, shut in by the rain which was falling outside.’ Architecture does not prefigure a certain quality of light, rather the light and weather become architecture, physical and bounding.

The absolute quality of the house, its detachment and the independence of mind it represents for its owner is destabilised and more broadly we are prompted to consider the changeable nature of things. Initial impulses to change aspects of the house give way to an acceptance of its idiosyncrasies which echoes the protagonist’s realisation that he cannot direct his life as one would a play, his fate was unknowingly sealed long before in what Murdoch terms his ‘prehistory’.

Returning to the parallel between the author and architect, consider how either handles the theme

of this publication, light and its relationship to the city and our way of life. The designer is typically concerned with practicalities (lighting an office adequately, orientating a kitchen) or compositional effect (illuminating a certain wall, framing a view, accentuating a form). In other words, light is deployed and controlled in very specific ways.

From the Medieval stained glass window to the contemporary ‘curtain wall’ the treatment of light

in architecture has also been attributed aspirational or moral qualities. The health enhancing qualities

of large open expanses of glass in buildings of the Modern Movement was an antidote to the slums

of the nineteenth century and represented progressive clarity and purpose. More recently

the ‘transparency’ of glass has dubiously become equated with accountability and is used as such by commercial organisations without irony, or much regard for local environmental conditions, across the globe. In the midst of a climate emergency,

the proper use of both natural and artificial light

is being re-evaluated, with ethical implications.

By contrast the novelist is sceptical of simplistic

and aspirational projections and looks upon our environments with a critical eye. The depiction

of elements such as light is not for mere effect,

it can contribute to meaning, invoke a familiar sensation or emotion, and can lend authenticity. Murdoch in particular has a preoccupation with reality in all its volatile and arbitrary ways and

her description of light are consistent with this,

in their variety of expression and acuity.

This conviction overrides any a priori schema

or individual narrative.

It is liberating for the designer to read an author such as Iris Murdoch because one sees things as they are, there are no neat assumptions, no definite values. Her writing embodies an attitude that

is antithetical to most architects’ methods of careful manipulation. It exemplifies a kind of looseness that permits both the general and peculiar. She is attuned to the temporal, the life lived rather than the genesis. As an architect

one feels for the lead in The Sea The Sea, whose plan goes awry and whose ‘project’ fails, but one wishes to identify more with the writer and her insights, to share Murdoch’s commitment to the reality and complexity of our existence, to attend

to it thus and to revel in it.

Most instructive though might be Murdoch’s attitude to her characters, the inhabitants of her work.

In The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited she

uses architecture as a metaphor explaining that

the novel should be ‘a house fit for free characters

to live in’. Murdoch’s conception of the novel

as a house is telling, her writing creates the conditions for her characters to access a reality independent of the author. This autonomy also extends outside the work itself, after being published it is read, interpreted, shared, translated, edited. Turning to architecture again, it will be dismantled, reused, absorbed. She adds that ‘in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed... is that other people exist’. If we think of our buildings and our landscapes, those we have inherited and those we propose, with this self-effacing spirit, we leave room for the unexpected, the unsightly, we do not overprescribe and do not fight the unavoidable. In other words, we want our buildings to allow space for all our multiplicity, our varied routines, habits and our vagaries.

The Value of light

by Rut Blees Luxemburg

After a storm—the skies brighten up. In the German language, Aufklärung, the clearing up after darkness and corruption, is the term given to the Enlightenment. More light, Goethe requested from Ottilie, just before falling into eternal slumber. More light, and its desirable offspring, luminosity, we hanker after, like so many demented Nachtfalter, nocturnal moths, spiralling in their death drive.

Yet it is no longer the orientating light of the stars or the coastal sunset we are after, not the Naturtheater of light and space; it is the artificial, reflected light we crave, constructed throughout history, from the Venetian golden glow of the mosaics of St. Mark’s to the refracted glimmer of the evening sun on the expensively-cheap façade of a Canary Wharf Tower… to the shiny bargain pixels of the CGI, light as rock-bottom time crystals, a cyber-luminosity, eye-candy, our promise of enlightenment.

We crave these luminous crystals and the resulting images, CGI generated prototypes. We have trained ourselves to believe the infinite crystal pixel, as the virtual suggestion seems in any case more rewarding than the proposed realisation. This confidence trick could only happen because the experience of the luminous is swift, weightless, a flutter of a possible epiphany and therefore so enjoyable, so radical, so transformative.

A reckoning.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, April 2020

Felicity Hammond

Two Palaces
by Jordan Rowe

From the balcony of our ninth-floor flat we stood

in its imposing shadow. In the eyes of a 12-year-old, its cold metal and steel craned over us. A symphony of hostile materials shooting into the sky, adapted and utilised to form a delicate lattice-like pattern.

The Crystal Palace transmitter sits on the ruins

of its namesake—a former palace, nominally created ‘for the people’. Previously hosting the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, the building found permanent residence within the well-to-do south London suburb of Sydenham Hill. Displaying the accumulating wealth of Britain’s empirical pursuits, exhibits would showcase the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution to a largely aspirational, middle-class audience. The content

was a display of strength and power, wealth and prowess, reflected by grandstanding engineering and spectacular architecture.

Rising from the ashes of the exhibition halls,

the transmitter marked the dawn of another age

of technological and engineering innovation, reaching a height not seen before in the UK and providing new capacity for television broadcasting. Adorned on its skyscraping summit stands

a red light:

a nocturnal warning message to planes and other flying objects to avoid potential catastrophe.

This continual blink proves to be more than a banal piece of practical infrastructure. From the bedroom of the flat I shared with my mum, my window pointed out to the hill it was perched on. Each night I would fall asleep with the transmitter flashing away in the background. Perhaps unsurprisingly

it took on an almost mythical presence in my mind, assuming the role of a guiding star for lost travellers in the deep suburbs. I was one of them.

A boy of mixed heritage, struggling with his sexual identity, looked out upon this adventurous jungle gym and saw a device that could propel him to the peak of the city.

Could it gain him the height necessary for a better perspective on the city, and a chance to identify

a place he could truly feel at home within it?

In spite of the heights of our own vertical residence, my perception of the two spaces couldn’t have been more divergent. The transmitter was a known, yet elusive figure. A critical element in the mechanics

of the city—it was maintained, attended to, and cared for—quite unlike the fading block in which

we resided. The propelling nature of our frequently broken-down lifts soon lost their shine. We were

a relic to the transmitter’s marvel.

High-rises have often been used to project power, and the transmitter was built to be as much

of a statement as the original Crystal Palace.

The transmitter was my palace. Confused by my circumstance and my surroundings, I projected myth and a tropicality upon it. Attractive, yet exclusionary, I could perch on my windowsill with

a lingering curiosity as to what it stood for and what it meant for me. An example of the heights that can be achieved - the ones I would spend my life trying to climb—and a reminder of the heights that are overlooked and undervalued—I was sleeping

in one.

Painting by Sam Greasy

Site by Daniel Wilkinson AKA NIFF Books