england

Serpentine Pavilion 2011 /  by hugo keene

Location: London, England, UK
Architect: Peter Zumthor & Piet Oudolf
Completed: 2011

7 Photographs

I remember my first encounter with the work of Peter Zumthor. I was working in the offices of Kerry Hill in Singapore, and Kerry had a black and white copy of the latest A+U monograph, focused on this elusive Swiss figure quietly crafting beautiful buildings in the mountains. I still have my copy that I bought later that week, and for one reason or another, I have found myself visiting a great number of buildings designed by him over the years.

As I look back on the catalogue of buildings I have visited and loved over the years, no other contemporaneous name is mentioned so often as the Bündner. I’ve posted about one of my favourites before, the exquisite Shelter Roman Archaeological Site in Chur, but that visit came many years after this one, my first visit to a Zumthor building and my first and only Piet Oudolf garden.

I recall being cynical about it before visiting and wanting to dislike it for some reason, but it left a lasting impression on me and I have enjoyed every one of Peter Zumthor’s buildings since.

I immediately loved the elegant simplicity. A simple design of a cloistered courtyard garden stripped back to its most essential elements. The entry hall wraps around the steep-roofed veranda surrounding the courtyard, overflowing with a garden designed to change and bloom constantly, providing a differing experience and landscape for the guest each time they visit. The entire building itself was black crafted out of timber, covered in a seamless coated skrim.

At the time, I was only really beginning to use photography as a way of studiously examining buildings, and I didn’t get a good or complete set of photographs, but in this instance, it seems like enough. It was a difficult space to photograph, but I liked the photos I did get and I think they portray the characteristics of the pavilion that I loved.

On recollection, two main things come to mind, which I have found myself referencing time and time again. One is the elemental nature of this building and others by Zumthor, something that has probably influenced me in ways I am only just aware of now. The other is that often his buildings are unassuming until you get inside. Curious yes, obvious no. The real delight is reserved for the user.

I am yet to see another Piet Oudolf garden that I am aware of, but in reminiscing, it reminds me to look them up and add something to the ever-growing list of adventures to be had.

HWLK

Coventry Cathedral /  by hugo keene

Location: Coventry, England, UK
Architect: Basil Spence
Completed: 1962

10 Photographs

Once upon a time, a friend needed something collected from Coventry, another friend was playing ice hockey in an arena had never been to, and I’d heard about this old ruin of a cathedral alongside a new one, that was apparently quite something. Armed with a triumvirate of reasons, friends, ice hockey, and architecture, it was a road trip asking to be had. And thus, we found ourselves setting off late in the day, in a small, rented Fiat 500, up and along the motorway and off into wider England.

I did not train as an architect in Britain, so at the time, I wasn’t really aware of how many buildings Basil Spence had designed, nor really of his importance to the development of 20th century design. If I’m being honest, I still don’t know a lot about his specific work, just that I like what work of his I have witnessed, most of which has been beautiful, considered, and crafted.

The old ruins, bombed during the 1940 Coventry Blitz, remain as the Luftwaffe left them, the whole spire and much of the walls remaining intact. What remains is a grand roofless space, with the new cathedral, hewn from a similar stone, nestling in from the north. The two buildings feel very much like they belong together, displaying the sort of congruity rarely seen in buildings constructed 500 years apart.

In this case, the decision to insist on the ruins being retained and the new cathedral built alongside is a masterstroke, providing the kind of unique building and space impossible in any other circumstance. Inside the cathedral does not disappoint, providing opulence, showmanship, and grandeur, suitable to this unique and exceptional building. The ribbed folded plane of the roof echoes the great European cathedrals, not in a superficial way, but deep within its very bones. It’s a very special building, full of the sort of stuff that you expect to see in a building like this, but each with its own unique twist. Like a lot of great epoch era straddling pieces of architecture, it feels like it’s simultaneously from the future and the past.

Later that afternoon, went to watch our Cambridge friends defeat the Coventry University team, and then took another stroll back through the roofless cathedral that evening before departing back to Cambridge that night.

HWLK

Kings College Chapel /  by hugo keene

Location: Cambridge, England
Master Masons: Reginald Ely, John Wolrich, Simon Clerk, John Wastell
Completed: 1515

11 Photographs

For a bloke from a small town out the back of Australia, spending a decade living in Cambridge, where the buildings are almost a thousand years old, felt at times like a fairy tale. I will always remember cycling recklessly along the narrow Cambridge streets in the wintertime, the slippery cobbles glistening in the lamplight, passing wooden portals in stone walls to strange worlds beyond, sometimes open, usually not. Beyond each of these gateways, I soon learned that all sorts of wonders lay waiting to be discovered, and of these that I know, the ‘little chapel’ at Kings College is my most beloved. The most extraordinary building in Cambridge and one of my favourite buildings in the world.

I do not remember exactly the first time I entered, I think it was the first time I visited Cambridge, but I found myself returning time and time again over the years. Every chance I had to take someone new, I would. It used to be free to visit if you were a resident of Cambridge and I loved to wander in on occasion and sit quietly while the tourists milled about. The experience of being a resident in a tourist town can be frustrating, but equally one is able to visit something like this over and over again when its beauty is enough to draw people from all corners of the globe to just see it once.

I cannot effuse enough about the chapel itself, so I will not even try but instead recollect the first time I met my good friend and collaborator, Peter Salter. We discussed two things that stand out amongst many, fly fishing and fan vaults. Peter had recently written an article about fan vaults, the miraculous stone vaulting system ingeniously employed in at Kings College to extraordinary effect, and we discussed the similarities between the two, the nature of tension, compression, and suspension. I was already in love with the chapel and I recall pondering the two interlinked discussions. I did learn to fly fish rather badly but like with a lot of what I learned from Peter, it will take me another decade or so to figure out what it really meant.

I contemplated not including this building, not because it’s more than 400 years older than nearly every other building I love, nor because my perspective may be clouding my favour, but because of just how little justice photographs can possibly do to a place like this. The grandeur of the exquisite stone ceiling is impossible to convey, much less the light from the stained glass coming in from all sides. I cannot do it justice, no matter how my photographs might try.

HWLK