STYLE

Stately architecture
Burntwood School
in south London,
winner of the 2015
Stirling prize

ARCHITECTURE

A modest revival

ROB PARISH

Once everyone wanted buildings of glass, steel

and outrageous curves. But Robert Bevan sees
the twilight of the starchitects falling

47

STYLE
Loud and proud
The bulbous
Walkie-Talkie building
in Fenchurch Street,
London

48

Parametric design perfectly responds

to the demands of market-conscious
developers, because computers can
maximise the rentable floorspace
er-aided design (cad), the limitations of working with
paper were obliterated. Architects could now toy
with surfaces. They folded and bent thin skins, so that
buildings imitated rolling natural terrains, geological
formations and biological structures. Architecturally
speaking, the past, with its imprecise and unflexible
bricks and mortar, had been left behind.
Cities, companies and institutions across the
world suddenly demanded similar buildings as the
centrepiece of a regeneration initiative, the new wing
of a museum, or a corporate hq, hoping for their own
Bilbao effect. Crucially in the commercial world,
parametric design, as Zaha Hadids sidekick Patrik
Schumacher observed recently, perfectly responds to
the demands of market-conscious developers, because

ALAMY

The 2015 Stirling prize was awarded to Alford

Hall Monaghan Morris (ahmm) for six buildings
it designed for the Burntwood School campus in
south London. A modest exercise in neo-Brutalism
in which the composition of concrete panels recalls
the stately public architecture of the 1950s and 1960s,
they fit tactfully within the schools existing campus.
In September, meanwhile, the Walkie Talkie won the
Carbuncle Cup, Building Designs annual prize for
the worst building in the United Kingdom. A 37-storey skyscraper in the centre of London, the tower is
named for its bulbous, top-heavy shape its an office
that has steroidally bulked up its chest and shoulders
but allowed its legs to wither. Prizes dont make taste
but they can point towards the direction in which its
shifting, and the coincidence of these awards suggests
a weariness among tastemakers with the exuberances
of contemporary architecture.
This a far cry from the mania for instant icons,
which first emerged with the opening of Frank
Gehrys 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao. The art gallerys
shimmering, titanium bulges were credited with putting a run-down town in northern Spain back on the
tourist map. The Bilbao Effect was born and a thousand outlandishly shaped buildings sprung up across
the world. The face of London is now blighted with
outlandish figures. First came the Gherkin, then the
Shard. The Can of Ham is on the horizon.
The capability to create novel, gravity-defying
curves and cantilevers stems from the expansion in
computing power in the early 1990s and the innovative digital design tools that developed alongside it.
Unconventionally shaped buildings had always been
imagined and even, on rare occasions, achieved
think of Erich Mendelsohns 1920s Einstein Tower in
Potsdam, Gaudis still-unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona and Jrn Utzons nose-bleedingly expensive opera house for Sydney. But digital made
complex forms, especially curves in multiple directions, easier to design, engineer and construct and
thus more affordable. Information coded into a digital
drawing could be used to manufacture components of
the buildings themselves in the precise laser cutting
of titanium sheets, for example.
Even more significantly, architects could now fix
the limits of a virtual three-dimensional form, then
manipulate shapes with these parameters. These
shapes could then be manipulated. This technology,
dubbed parametric architecture, made Zaha Hadids architectural vision more readily buildable. Previously Hadid had built physical models, sliced them
into cross-sections, then scanned the slices onto a
computer to render her ideas virtually. With comput-

ODONNELL + TUOMEY

computers can maximise the rentable floorspace on

expensive but constrained sites, like those found in
the City of London. The swollen Walkie-Talkie, its
upper floors much wider than the plot on which it sits,
illustrates this in exemplary fashion. And while the
curvaceous can waste space conspicuously impractical extravagance has always been a measure of luxury
it does so with digital efficiency.
Digital design tools also hastened the rise of
the global designer, whose signature style could be
airlifted in to brand a development as forward looking. The Guggenheim Foundation led the trend in the
cultural world, commissioning leading architects to
present itself as the outrider of the avant-garde. Hadid
was joined by Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Jean
Nouvel, Peter Eisenman, among others. The global
starchitect was born and he won all the prizes.
Yet the past has always persisted and now it is
fighting back. All architects these days, bar the occasional crank, use digital drawing packages. But increasing numbers of designers are insisting that they
should be the masters of technology, not enslaved to
it. Colour-washed sketches to convey the mood of a
place are again being produced after decades of de-

mands for the sterile photorealism produced by cad.

Because creatives are no longer enthralled to the giddy
novelty of digital, it has become just another tool for
those who can maturely blend different approaches
using lasers to cut traditional letterpress type, for
instance, or software to extrude a brick arch. Brick is
now in such demand for tall residential towers in Britain that there is currently a severe shortage.
Concerns are being raised about imposing buildings that ignore the urban contexts in which they are
built, fail to make any concession to the human scale,
and serve only as three-dimensional branding for their
creators. These critiques echo an earlier generations
displeasure with the anonymous global products of
post-war Modernism. One response was Critical
Regionalism, an approach that sought to humanise
Modernism by making it more sensitive to place. The
reaction this time around is more akin to the return to
analogue that can be observed throughout contemporary culture in the enthusiasm for vinyl records and
handicrafts, for example. In an increasingly virtual
world, there is a longing for human touch and a spirit
of resistance to the invisible forces in which we find
ourselves enmeshed.
There has also been a slow realisation that the >

Going straight
Plans for the V&A East
development in east
London by ODonnell +
Tuomey

609

STYLE

The building
of icons to
stand out, the
fetishisation of
the digital, is
definitely out of
favour

curvaceous parametric buildings often work better

on screen than in reality. Their construction still too
often depends on a precision that is hard to achieve
in practice. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects
of the recently opened Broad Museum in downtown
Los Angeles, promised a diaphanous, perforated veil
as its sweeping cladding. Instead, it is far more static,
regularly shaped and solid a concession that had to
made in the course of building.
In Britain in particular, ostentatious architecture
did not find favour with the public. Many ill-conceived National Lottery-backed projects relied on the
presumption that an impressive building alone would
entice people to flood through the doors. In the case
of Will Alsops arts centre The Public and Sheffields
drum-kit shaped pop music museum, they didnt.
New uses for the vacant icons had to be found.
Londons Victoria & Albert Museum is perched

609

Rise of the red bricks

The Saw Swee Hock student centre for the
London School of Economics, designed by
ODonnell + Tuomey

on the cusp of the two architectural philosophies. It is

in the middle of building a new extension to its South
Kensington home, a conspicuously folded form by
Amanda Levete. But for its next large-scale project.
the v&a East part of the planned Olympicopolis cultural quarter in the East End it has appointed Irish
architects ODonnell + Tuomey, who have been quietly crafting buildings on the edge of Europe for some
decades now.
Kieran Long is keeper of the design, architecture
and digital department at the v&a and involved in the
development of v&a East. He sees a deliberate move
away from the formal excesses of parametric architectures high noon. I am super happy that ODonnell +
Tuomey were appointed, he says. They dont lapse

VIEW

> beguiling computer-generated images of glossy and

into the abstraction that the big shape-makers fall

into. He admires the craft that the practice brings to
a project. Their buildings, such as the Saw Swee Hock
student centre for the London School of Economics,
may be made of brick but they are far from conservative. Indeed, digital tools were employed to achieve
the inflected brickwork walls of the lse centre. Long
contends that ODonnell + Tuomey will provide a
monumental character for the museums new building. It achieves this in drawings at least through
a measured, rectilinear massing of materials, rather
than by resorting to an architectural caprice which reveals all its got in a single glance. The v&a East will
be a weightier affair: A more permanent architecture, says Long, that contrasts with a lot of the thin,
powder-coated steel and glass of a lot of those shapemaking buildings nearby.
English practices such as Caruso St John, Eric Parry, Sergison Bates and Patrick Lynch are also devoted
to the craft of construction and willing to quote historical examples and use ornament in their work the
antithesis of the slick futurism of the parametric. The
same counter-tendency can be found elsewhere in
Europe. The work of Portuguese architect Eduardo
Souto de Mouras work has been described as slow
architecture, not because it takes an age to build
but because it can only be appreciated slowly and
through repeated viewing. And while this reaction is
primarily European North America lags noticeably
behind European architectural practice instances
of this approach can be found as far afield as China
and Vietnam, where architects are reinterpreting the
vernacular.
Dissatisfaction with the hegemony of the blob and
the profusion of architecture graduates who can make
a nifty digital image but dont actually know how to
design a feasible building or even sketch an idea by
hand is rippling through the profession. One of consequences has been the launch of the London School
of Architecture in October, a collaboration between
academics and architectural practices. It is the first
new architecture school in the capital for more than a
century. Did it, I asked the lsas founder Will Hunter, emerge out of desire for a richer, contextually informed design approach? Definitely, he says. The
building of icons to stand out, the fetishisation of the
digital, is definitely out of fashion in favour of whats
good for the urban fabric.
Hunter accepts that parametric design can be an
important element of the architects toolbox, especially if devoted to more ecologically minded and culturally relevant buildings, but he wants his students to
think through drawing, to analyse a site and respond

with nuance. What once seemed daring now is obvious and gauche, a novelty act whose shine is losing its
lustre. Hunter is blunt about the era of the big, simplistic architectural gesture: Its over.
Grandiloquent, digitally driven architecture will
doubtless continue to land in our cities. The tech
sector in particular is still in thrall to the parametric.
Its latest fashionable exponent, the Danish architect
Bjarke Ingels has been commissioned by Google,
alongside English designer Thomas Heatherwick,
to design its Truman Show-like hq in California. In
London, Google is rumoured to be on the verge of
ditching the current design for its Kings Cross building by this years Sterling prize-winner ahmm in favour of something less boring by Heatherwick.
But this style no longer represents the avantgarde. In recent years the Stirling prize has been
anointing a quieter kind of architecture: the subtle
rebuilding of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool by
Haworth Tompkins; and Astley Castle, the collaged
reworking of a ruined castle by Watson Witherford
Mann, who have layered the contemporary on top of
the historical, creating a dialogue between the two.
This years shortlist was especially notable for the
absence of bloated buildings. Even the Guggenheim,
the original sinner of parametric architecture, did not
commission Gehry or one of his acolytes for its latest
outpost in Helsinki; it chose instead the sober-sided
Parisian architecture practice Moreau Kusunoki.
Their design incorporates curves, but as gentle inflections to the walls and roofs of rectilinear pavilions
more Japanese temple than overinflated blobology.
The bubble, it seems, may finally have burst. n

Stirling work
The collaged reworking of
the ruined Astley Castle
in north Warwickshire, by
Watson Witherford Mann

609