Architectural Adventures

Walt Disney Concert Hall /  by hugo keene

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Architect: Frank Gehry
Completed: 2003

11 Photographs

The original Gehry masterpiece, the Guggenheim Bilbao, was completed while I was a university student and at the time, this twisted crumpled collision of titanium seemed to turn things upside down. What was not immediately apparent was that the museum was an iteration of a previous design, at that moment unbuilt, for a concert hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Perhaps appropriately it was in the order they were designed that I visited them, rather than the order in which they were built. And thus, they are presented here, in the same sequence.

Unusually with a building like this, we were able to wander freely around all the spaces despite it being ‘closed’, except for the main hall, which required the accompaniment of a tour guide.

My favourite space was a roof garden on the top, nestled among the folds, where each tile of the titanium skin reflected the sky and sunlight in every possible direction, including within the slot, which felt enclosed but open at the same time.

I loved the way the inside of the building is made of a tumbling matrix of knitted timber strips, like a bizarre woven wicker doll from another dimension, all of which is enveloped in a crumpled metal fabric skin which billows in the breeze. I have seen quite a few of Frank Gehry’s buildings, many of which are variations on a theme, but as far as that theme goes, none feel quite as comprehensive and coherent as this one.

HWLK

EPFL Learning Centre /  by hugo keene

Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Architect: SANAA
Completed: 2010

11 Photographs

I once got into a robust conversation with a student about this building during a crit. She was trying to claim it was the best thing since sliced bread and I was probably overly reactive to that, having forgotten what it was like being a student. From memory whatever critique I gave, was not that well received.

Perhaps around 2003, I saw Sejima present a lecture at the National University of Singapore, where she showed an early concept sketch of this building. I remember distinctly a moment during the lecture, which was initially given in Japanese with a translator, where Sejima stopped the translator, corrected her and then, moments later, seemingly dissatisfied, switched over and completed the lecture in English. I recall the sketch being a slightly more playful version of what was finally built, but much the same.

We visited this building during a break in term time at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, so I wasn’t able to see it ‘in full flight’, but I imagine that when it is, the undulating floors are inhabited at all angles by students of all shapes and sizes. I especially liked the circular courtyards cut-outs which puncture the unique undulating concrete under croft. It was a beautiful sunny day when we visited, and these pockets of sun were wonderfully varied.

The building reminded me of the works of some of the architects who have influenced me, Mies, Glenn Murcutt, and Kerry Hill, and other masters of the screened box, but done with playfulness and that sense of humour that Japanese architects excel at.

I have not been back since that day, but we have family in the region and have driven past Lausanne a couple of times. I will have to stop by again during the winter, as I would love to see it in the snow.

HWLK

Nordic Pavilion /  by hugo keene

Location: Venice, Italy
Architect: Sverre Fehn
Completed: 1962

7 Photographs

I have only been to Venice once, and we arrived early in the morning. After finding our accommodations, delivering our backpacks, and getting a couple of espressos to recharge, we walked to the Giardini della Biennale. The garden is full of pavilions for all the different countries represented at the annual Biennale, and each is of varying architectural merit, but I had come there to see only one.

I first discovered the work of Sverre Fehn in a lecture given by Glenn Murcutt, who spoke about the quality of light in his buildings with such reverence that I knew I would have to find out more about his work. I had made two separate failed attempts to see his Nasjonalmuseet - Arkitektur in Oslo and had never ventured deep enough on my excursions to Norway to see anything else. While I had not come to Italy, nor Venice, to specifically see the pavilion, it had long been a building which had stuck in my memory as something extremely special.

I was visiting a few days before the Biennale began and work was ongoing to prepare for the event. As I was poking around the building, a workman noticed me and thought I was the artist coming to set up. After making no effort to correct his misconception, he unlocked the pavilion, allowed us in, and left. Nothing was arranged in the space and dust clothes remained over trunks and trolleys, but we got to spend an hour alone in the space, before the actual artist, immaculately dress and looking considerably more Nordic than us arrived and shooed us out of the space.

I remember Glenn talking about the Norwegian light and how masterfully Mr Fehn was able to harness it in his buildings. The Nordic Pavilion is essentially a single space, built from more or less one material, about more or less one thing, light. After thinking about this building for many years and trying to understand it, I think I will need to visit it again to really get it. What I have learnt in the years between though, is that, with effortless simplicity, the building seems to almost remove itself completely and transport you to the middle of a tranquil Nordic forest, in the snow.

Of all the wonders of Venice, elaborate and intricate in their own ways, this is perhaps the least elaborate, but no less remarkable.

HWLK

Musée Soulages /  by hugo keene

Location: Rodez, Aveyron , France
Architect: RCR Arquitectes
Completed: 2014

11 Photographs

Sometimes a building arrives as surprise, a random part of another adventure entirely. We had driven from the top of France to the bottom to visit some friends a few days previously and had quickly adjusted to the uptick in cheese and bread consumption. I would not say I have travelled extensively in France, but a healthy majority of that has been exploring cities or wandering the countryside looking for buildings, and already this trip we’d seen some delights old and new.

I had first heard of RCR Architectes some years beforehand, when an architect friend with whom I was collaborating was ruminating on the blackened steel panels lining the inside. At the time, we only looked at some photographs of that part of the building at the time and so I knew very little about it. That day we journeyed to Rodez specifically, to visit the gallery and restaurant for that same friend’s birthday, and after a spectacularly good and uniquely French meal, we walked through the museum grounds and the gallery itself.

As is obvious from the pictures, this was the perfect kind of day to wander around this building. The scattered clouds providing a pale muted backdrop against the faded green summer grass and the earthen red of the weathering steel. It is a beautifully simple building, in both form and function, perched on the edge of a green strip, overlooking the city.

The gallery itself contains only the work of the artist for which it is named, Pierre Soulages, whose work seems to my untrained eye to be at the intersection between painting and sculpture. Perhaps it is what you might call physical painting, exploring texture and material and graphic in what to me seems like an exciting and abstract way.

I cannot remember another museum that enclosed the work of a specific artist with quite the same effortless poise as the Musée Soulages does. The beautiful weathering steel box outside, with the blackened steel inside, and the unique work of Soulages lurking in the shadows behind the veil. It really is a marvel. I have heard before of great museums that the curators did not rush to fill because of the drama of the spaces themselves. While this does not feel like that in quite the same way, it definitely feels like neither needs the other, despite belonging together.

HWLK

Casa das Histórias Paula Rego /  by hugo keene

Location: Cascais, Portugal
Architect: Eduardo Souto de Moura
Completed: 2008

11 Photographs

I have spent many days gazing out into the ocean on Europe and North Africa’s Atlantic coast and it always struck me as a vast exposed kind of ocean. When I look at it on a map that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but in Adelaide, when you look out to the ocean, it never felt that immense to me, despite the fact that the Great Southern Ocean surrounds an entire continent.

In 42 years, out of the 25 times the annual Pritzker Prize has been awarded to someone outside the United States, London or Japan, 2 of those recipients have been from not only the same town in Portugal, but effectively come from the same practice, with the offices of Souto de Moura sitting a floor below those of his mentor and previous boss, Álvaro Siza Viera, whose work was introduced to me by my old boss Kerry. I like the elemental quality of Souto de Moura’s buildings, they remind me of the raw concrete framed post slab buildings that I was surrounded by when I discovered his work while in Singapore. As my travels took me further abroad, I realised that the Mediterranean countries had a similar kind of thing, raw, sometimes unfinished, but beautiful in their simplicity. The Casa das Histórias is a very pure expression of that elemental simplicity, both in terms of the monolithic way it is built and the layout of the spaces. The red hue of the concrete pyramids, sitting within the crisp walled green garden, with the deep ‘bluebird’ sky providing the perfect counterpoint, like an advertising poster for RGB.

One of my great pleasures in life is taking friends to visit extraordinary places and it is the similar but different kind of pleasure when you visit with students, the questions are more informed, but less personal and the element of surprise is different. When you tell most people that that are going to see something amazing, they are sceptical, but architecture students have a special kind of optimism and the good ones at least are yearning for their minds to be opened. I liked this place as an explanatory example of how buildings can be radically different, while being intimately familiar.

As is often the case with buildings like this, we weren’t allowed to take photographs inside the galleries, which is a shame, as the spaces themselves, inverse of the pyramidal forms, have a wonderful quality of light from the apertures at the top.

I have always loved walled gardens and while I usually like something richer than a crisply mowed lawn, I wholeheartedly enjoyed lazing on the lawn within the walls while the students wandered about asking the occasional question. Later, after buying a striped pair of euro style short swimming trunks, a small group of us swum in the chilly vast Atlantic Ocean, then had a beer in the sun.

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

Stahl House (Case Study House #22) /  by hugo keene

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Completed: 1959

13 Photographs

Los Angeles is an enigma. I have only really seen parts of it, despite driving up and down, across the bridges and back along the overpasses. I’ve seen downtown, Chinatown, the river, the ports, and endless highways, but a city on that scale takes years to understand. You have to start small and expand out from little pockets before you can start to stitch those parts together to get any real kind of picture.

As a visitor, one thing which is both hard to ignore and distinctly familiar is the climate. Coastal California inhabits a unique climatic region, which is found in a few pockets on this planet, the Mediterranean being one, and our home, Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) being another. Even in the middle of winter, you get these clear blue-sky days which are the deepest azure, like something out of a comic book or a Matisse.

Sometimes you get lucky with a building visit and you experience it at the perfect moment, or time of day, and you really understand what the building is all about. This was one of those days. A crisp mid-winter afternoon with a typically clear Angelenos sky, dimming into a spectacular sunset. If you are going to visit a west facing house, perched in the Hollywood Hills, it is the time to do it.

I had always admired the Case Study Houses, a series of post-war experimental houses designed to take advantage of modern material technologies and to provide a vision of the future of individual (and later multiple) houses. There is a bunch scattered around the area, and we saw a few that day, but this was the first and the only one in LA that we were able to explore completely, inside, and out. It was in conversation with my old boss Kerry Hill that I first came to know the Case Study houses, and it shares a similarity with the Tugendhat House, the Barcelona Pavilion, and other of Mies works, and I can see it in Kerry’s work and likewise perhaps echoes in my own.

Just like this house, there is lots to love about a city like Los Angeles and maybe also for some, a lot to hate, but they are definitely both marvels to behold from a distance as they twinkle in the dusk.

HWLK

Olivetti Showroom /  by hugo keene

Olivetti Showroom - San Marco, Venice, Italy - Architect: Carlo Scarpa - Completed: 1958

10 Photographs

We grew up surrounded by a lot of Italian culture and Italy in its various guises has always been close to my heart. Australia, and Adelaide, in particular, received a lot of post-war immigration from ‘the old country’, our mother speaks Italian, and we have extended family who are of Italian descent. My last job before architecture was in an old Italian cafe around the corner from the Skeleton House which was famous for it’s fabulously rude service, which in truth was all sorts of fun.

While I had been to Italy before, I had never visited Venice, something which seems to be something of a right of passage for young European architects. When I began to work on the Walmer Yard project, it became apparent to Peter and Fenella that this was a shortcoming that needed to be rectified. In order to understand the richly layered textural quality that we were trying to achieve and to grapple with the innovative and unusual problem-solving techniques these two wild-cards employed, I absolutely needed go to Italy, with no delay, and reinforce my colonial ways with a few critical pieces of architectural history. I was armed by these two with a long scribbled list of weird and sometimes wildly inaccurate directions to or descriptions of places that I absolutely must seek out. A couple of weeks and a few convenient coincidences later, I found myself riding along the Grand Canal, sitting on the back of a vaporetto with my backpack.

While I found most of the important ones on the list after considerable effort and cajoling of travelling companions, the Olivetti Showroom was the least difficult to find. An obvious choice for any architect in Venice, despite it being so discretely tucked into a corner on the edge of the Piazza San Marco. When I look back on the photos, it almost seems like it is night-time in some of them, but it was not. I recall flip-flopping about in the heat, seeking refuge in the shade of the colonnade lining the square, that first layer of protection against the Mediterranean sun.

In this exquisite piece of architecture, you can see hundreds of years of Venetian design and craft history, as well as the ubiquitous sense of calm imbued in most of Scarpa’s work, the kind of quality that is usually reserved for Japanese temples. It is an unusual place, like the tiniest museum in history to a set of products that no longer exist. The showroom and typewriters are a bit like Venice itself. They are old and polished and no longer flexible enough to adapt to a new and changing world, but intricate and beautiful, nonetheless.

HWLK