This year the Brunswick celebrates forty years, a quarter of which I have shared as my home in this “good piece of city”. An apt phrase awarded by its architect Patrick Hodgkinson revealing a human quality to his iconic Central London megastructure and also honoring it’s monumentality. Originally lacking simple refinements such as heating, the blow air ductwork, more akin to the cabin of a 1950s cruise ship, blew warm air on to cold conservatory windows making condensation waterfalls like no other. Flats principally come in one or two bed sizes in which many welcome the abundant light, generous spaces and sense of designed-in democracy. All apartments share common values such as the conservatory living room, out of which was to slide a similarly profiled glass winter-garden enclosure to the balconies until it was later omitted to save costs. All flats face east or west and either look in on the ‘concrete valley’, where nearest opposing neighbours are 100metres away, or look out on framed Bloomsbury London vignettes.
Given a £30 million pound retail face-lift in 2008 the Brunswick housing above was finally homoginised and painted the colour Hodgkinson had always wanted ‘Regency Cream’ as used in the eighteenth century Regent’s Park terraces by architect John Nash. A carefully selected reference from Hodgkinson’s repertoire of another similarly ‘good bit of city’.
Unlike the Nash terraces the perceived impermeable London terraced Brunswick is broken by multiple opportunities to explore. Writer Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ talks of the way city blocks need to be perforated and short, citing “opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.” Published in 1962 to great acclaim it is likely to have influenced the young Hodgkinson fresh-faced from the Architectural Association and designing his first and, not known at the time, also his last major commission. The Brunswick is a living embodiment of Jacobs ‘short block’, the perceived impermeable walls of concrete are perforated by “fluidity of use and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture that ties together city neighbourhoods.”
Crucially the iconic stepped section and concrete A-frame makes opportunities for multiple perforations similar to that which break the Brunswick plan into ‘short blocks’. Oblique views dominate connecting offices to residences and housing walkways to the streets below. Housing walkways offer some shelter but are predominately exposed, above the fourth floor. to the weather making them more akin to external streets. Apart from providing passive surveillance and useful ‘defensive’ spaces the multiple views promote diversity and mixed uses at different times. Jacob’s talks about streets multiplying in successful city districts in which even alleyways become streets. The Brunswick void of alleyways but abundant in similarly narrow walkways that combine and link zones of activity, preventing what Jacob’s refers to as “the stagnation of these long blocks with the fluidity of use that an extra street could bring”.
The Brunswick’s inherently neighbourly design is reason why so many residents still live here since completion in 1972. Qualities no better captured than by actor Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger”, also completed in the same year, who was filmed walking down it’s steps, from housing to shopping streets, in one seamless flowing filmic cityscape,......a journey I repeat in my daily routine.
(A printed version of this is available in Blueprint Magazine Issue 314)
The opportunity to establish a new course of study offers some reflection on how the practice and teaching of architecture have diverged over the last 20 years. The New BA (hons) Architecture Course at Norwich University College of the Arts, commencing in 2013, explores the relevance of teaching to industry and practice. Placing importance on allowing each student to develop their own way of working and to be learned enough to place their praxis within the context of architectural history. Knowledge of design history and processes in defining the aesthetic qualities of architecture other than building, what John Betjeman referred to as the 'otherisms'of atmosphere and setting, will be key factors in defining a unique and local flavour. Important qualities that come out of the expeditionary faculties good schools of architecture traditionally held in conducting local fieldwork and understanding the qualities that give Norfolk and Norwich a strong local identity that is 'twinned' internationally, either through tourism, trade and other ethnological factors.
Pattern Book / Purist Collage
Learning from history to familiarize each student with the complexity of architecture and guide new design aesthetics is established in the first year of study where we first look at the architect collector and influence of the 'Grand Tour'. Starting with the 'Young' Soane and his first house commission, Letton Hall Norfolk we look at the role of pattern books in collecting and importing classical styles into the eighteenth century neo-classicists who in blending a desire to emulate with local craft and materials created new architecture that was far removed from the renaissance Palladian Villas. Importantly by understanding this way architecture was designed we reveal a similar approach adopted by Le Corbusier in mapping classical proportions and importing these into modern architecture. Studies will be 2d, initially drawing and observational to create the necessary ingredients that each student can then use to make their purist collage.
Forms in Space / Forms as Space
Following a similar pattern to the earlier exercise we now immerse each student in the Arts & Crafts and the qualities the country house and local craftspeople gave to houses by Lutyens, Voysey and Prior. Blessed with three outstanding local arts and crafts houses Happisburgh Manor House by Detmar Blow, Overstrand Hall by Lutyens and Home Place by Edward Prior we will immerse ourselves in furniture that comes 'out of architecture' and likewise how furniture mimics habit and creates space. We also look at the industrial aesthetic of objects dictated by use, be they the rudder of a boat or the casting of an engine block in making a suspended mobile study titled 'forms as space' in which the composition of familiar objects in suspension creates new spatial relationships. This is a 3d compositional study exploring similar 2d themes looked at in the earlier Purist Collage brief.
Future Memory
The final project of the first year's study is a comprehensive design brief asking students to work as a team in studying, surveying and making a diorama in which each of them will display scale models of their 'future memories'. Each future memory is an unoccupied structure that is infused with ideas representing time and shared memories. Suitable examples include memorials, clock towers, cemeteries,...
Casting Space
Following a site visit students are asked to make interpretive plaster-casts of found urban conditions. Making multiple cardboard molds to try and cast and link spaces within. In the final cast students are asked to rescale this and inhabit it by drawing sections that in the drawing make architecture. The exercise is a very good way of reversing the liner design programme as each cast is examined as a 'found' condition that holds a design waiting to be found and revealed.
Cities Stories
Revisiting design history learnt in first year studies students are asked to apply their knowledge and demonstrate an understanding of the different styles defining regional, national and international culture. These are presented as a 5 minute travelogue based on a filmed 'journey'.
Climate Construction Technology Design
Examining the influence of climate and technology on structures. Includes the passive energy differences and uses of lightweight versus heavy structures and how chosen materials can influence design aesthetics, the empirical feel of new spaces including acoustics and light. A key focus for this part of the course is an introduction to Part B and Part L of the building regulations and how different structures meet different statutory criteria.
Special Interest Report
Each student is asked to write about a current industry trend in the making of architecture to demonstrate the value of research in manufacturing and predicting or 'future-proofing' architecture.
City Slice
100 metre long city section at 1:100 as a device to find potential sites for the 'readings' and 'inserts' studies below. City Slice is contextual studies that reinvent the city in a similar way in which we only remember key moments of a journey to work. Creative interpretation of the traditional scaled architectural section is encouraged.
Readings / Inserts
Group analysis and discussion of the different sized sites discovered in the City Slices and investigations into suitable housing modules that can be replicated and composed to send 'echoes' into the larger sites.
Local into Global
Charles Jenck's mapping of architectural styles is the starting point for each students design briefing document that will direct their third year studies and research.
Global Contexts / Local Spaces
The final brief is a comprehensive design project exploring 'twinning' of local regional emphasis exported to an international location or imported from a global context into a local space. By now each student can apply the full repertoire of architectural design history and make knowing decisions about their work and how their work connects with and expands earlier studies conducted by iconic architects.
In the 1950s poet John Betjeman emphasized the importance of setting and atmosphere in each description in his, 'Collins Guide to English Parish Churches'and recognized the needs of the modern mechanized architect tourist.
"Authors were asked to write 'setting' after a church where the site or village was attractive. I found it necessary to supply brief prefaces to each country and large city, describing it's characteristics in scenery and building materials and houses."
Similarly there is something very parochial in seeing an Apache Helicopter, abandoned after hitting power cables and sitting in an Suffolk field in 2012. This unexpected event within a field makes one more aware of the field. What critic John Berger in 'Ways of Seeing", celebrating it's fortieth anniversary, referred to as a field narrative and describing how they link to make a shared folklore. The event draws your attention to the field and, almost instantaneously, your own awareness of the field then gives a special significance to the event. Berger further states the criteria for an ideal 'field' that is useful for architects considering a sense of place in which a new building or event occurs:
But the ideal field, the field most likely to generate the experience, is:
1. A grass field. Why? It must be an area with boundaries which are visible - though not necessarily regular; it cannot be an unbounded segment of nature the limits to which are only set by the natural focus of your eyes. Yet within the area there should be a minimum of order, a maximum of planned events. Neither crops nor regularly planted lines of fruit trees are ideal.
2. A field on a hillside, seen either from above like a table top, or from below when the incline of the hill appears to tilt the field towards you - like music on a music stand. Again, why? Because then the effects of perspective are reduced to a minimum and the relation between what is distant and near is a more equal one.
3. Not a field in winter. Winter is a season of inaction when the range of what is likely to happen is reduced.
4. A field which is not hedged on all sides: ideally, therefore, a continental rather than an English field. A completely hedged field with only a couple of gates leading into it limits the number of possible exits or entrances (except for birds).
Two things might be suggested by the above prescriptions. The ideal field would apparently have certain qualities in common with (a) a painting - defined edges, an accessible distance, and so on; and (b) a theatre-in-the-round stage - an attendant openness to events, with a maximum possibility for exits and entrances. For Berger however,"suggestions like this are misleading, because they invoke a cultural context which, if it has anything whatsoever to do with the experience in question, can only refer back to it rather than precede it".
