existing building

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

Rijksmuseum /  by hugo keene

Location: Amsterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
Architect: PJH Cuypers/Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos
Completed: 1885/2012

15 Photographs

The first time I visited the inside of the Rijksmuseum, we just happened to be in Amsterdam on the weekend it re-opened, after one of the longest and most publicly awaited renovation projects in Dutch history. Since I first visited the city, it had always been closed and sat quietly at the head of the Museumplein, the mix of gothic and renaissance themes intimately familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Netherlands yet presented with a composition and grandeur unmatched in the city. In a city like Amsterdam, so overflowing with great buildings and interesting things, it was easy to overlook the dark quiet stranger at the end of the park. Being designed by the same architect as the Amsterdam Centraal Station, which followed the Rijksmuseum, the two distinctly similar buildings sit at either end of the old city like an old pair of bookends, romantic revivalist celebrations of Golden Age.

I always loved the story that of the many delays and issues encountered in the renovation project, one of the most hotly contested, was down to a desire for the inhabitants of the city, to be able to continue to cycle through an existing road through the middle of the ground floor of the museum instead of around it as initially proposed. I’ve been a cyclist, in a cyclist’s city and I feel very deeply that it’s a thing that should be encouraged and protected at all costs, especially the majesty and dignity of the cyclist’s experience when it is seamless, safe, and relatively direct.

The renovation of the Rijksmuseum is brilliant. As an afficionado of fine architecture, I’ve visited many museums of the world, a building typology that would be the centrepiece in any architect’s portfolio and one of the crux architectural problems of any young architect in training, be that right or wrong. The solution here is particularly clever in overcoming the challenging problem of how to provide contemporary visitor standards and architecture, within an examplar historical building. By dropping the entry concourse below and under the road, and covering the whole courtyard with a deep, layered set of roof structures, this allows for a generous entry space filled with dappled light, while allowing the functional back of house relating to entry and security to tuck neatly under the stairs, without disrupting the existing gallery programme above. This alows the gallery spaces to function more or less as originally intended while adding a stack of new space. The original courtyard feels like it is simply dropped down and draped across the functional requirements of the building. The cycleway through the building and the campaign to retain this thing of value to the cyclist city (citizen) has been a positive design contribution rather than a constraint.

Despite the radical adjustment to the conceptual diagram of the museum, it retains much of the qualities of the 18th-century building, with the new parts fitting neatly in with the old, each part feeling familiar and unimposing on the next. The existing spaces themselves are beautifully restored and the new insertions meticulously placed and considered, such that it is not immediately apparent where the junctions are between old and new.

There are many good museums around, I have visited quite a few and waxed lyrical about some, but the Rijksmuseum is up there as one of the most interesting and unique of them. It rightly sits comfortably at the heart of a city and in the heart of its citizens.

HWLK