Tag: Brick

Conversion Moment

[Image: Proposal for a converted residential water tower in Utrecht, by Zecc Architects; rendering by 3D Studio Prins, based on a photo by Stijnstijl Fotografie].

While we’re looking at work by Zecc Architects, it’s worth checking out their proposed renovation of a water tower in Utrecht.

A circular room with panoramic views of the city, and a modern fireplace in the center? Yes, please.

[Image: Proposal for a converted residential water tower in Utrecht, by Zecc Architects; rendering by 3D Studio Prins].

I even love where the tower’s original brick core is revealed, despite appearing in something as mundane as a restaurant.

[Image: Proposal for a converted residential water tower in Utrecht, by Zecc Architects; rendering by 3D Studio Prins].

As a very brief aside, meanwhile, one of many things that remains amazing to me about the architectural world today is that these sorts of buildings—grandiose brick megastructures, from water towers to old tobacco warehouses to classic New York brownstones—are immensely popular as domestic renovations or large-scale residential conversions, but they otherwise seem to be completely beyond the pale for architects to consider designing from scratch in the present day. Even when contemporary architects do take on such commissions, they seem to leave their creativity at the door.

As a former New Yorker, it always blew me away that incredible building stock existed in neighborhoods such as DUMBO—that is, huge warehouses featuring recessed arched windows, ornamented brick, and, at times, gorgeous exterior buttressing—or that even the most random online image search for historical warehouse districts pop up such incredible and evocative buildings. Yet there seems to be no appetite, either amongst developers or architects, to explore what architects could do with these same styles and languages today.

Even just imagining a 21st-century brick super-warehouse (or circular tower) built from scratch in New York City—or Boston, or Bermondsey, or Hamburg—featuring modern interiors and finishes, and designed to avoid the headaches of older building stock, makes my head swoon, and there is no doubt in my mind that elaborate, architecturally complex brick megastructures could be realized today without falling into kitsch or postmodern quotation. And there is also, in fact, no inherent reason why creating brickwork residential super-projects should lead to an emerging financial ecosystem for absent investors in the process.

But, hey: I’m not a real estate developer and I have no way to change the game.

Spaces of Guilt and Innocence

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

I was in London earlier this month, primarily for another year of external exams at the Bartlett School of Architecture. This consists for the most part in meeting with a large group of students from different design units across the school for one-on-one presentations of their work; much of that work was incredibly interesting and worth sharing here.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

This first project is a design for a new London Law Court, by Matthew Turner for Unit 12. The class, taught by Jonathan Hill, Elizabeth Dow, and Matthew Butcher, looked at what it called “the public private house,” with a focus on civic institutions and their relationship to the larger city.

In this case, that institution is a court of law.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The entire project is built around a set of stark spatial polarities set up between public and private, accuser and accused, guilty and innocent.

Circulation—the actual path a visitor might take to pass from one room to another, or from one part of the facility to the next, or even what can or cannot be seen from specific standpoints, such as the witness box or the judge’s robing chambers—is thus the building’s major organizing principle.

It is all about sequence, connection, and adjacency.

[Images: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Even better, the project is a rigorous exploration of brick, a hugely overlooked material, including micro-studies of structural bricklaying patterns and surface effects.

[Image: Brick patterns from “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Turner explained that different surface treatments show up throughout the building almost as a kind of signage or way-finding tool, such that particular patterns come to signify types of interior spaces throughout the complex—a public waiting area, for example, or spaces for the accused.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

These pattern-studies are rendered in a style that makes them deeply reminiscent of Auguste Choisy.

[Images: Brick patterns from “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Turner really went for it with the axonometry, cutting gorgeous sections through sites of extreme structural complexity that reveal slices of the interior that seem more like Cubist abstractions than actual building plans.

Yet, as his thesis voluminously demonstrates, all of the spaces nonetheless maintain both architectural and narrative coherence.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The passage of light, as can be seen in this next image, is also given symbolic or explanatory weight. As Turner writes, “Distances are compressed and spaces seem to step through each other. Spaces are attenuated, echoed and re-echoed before their sources are experienced. Light in the building does not signify divine truth and justice but instead its shadows and effects are hard to define.”

As they day progresses, the interior is like a clock, and “shadows become spaces within themselves.”

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The thesis is immensely detailed, and these selections are barely sufficient as an introduction to Turner’s work. As a study of how architecture itself—that is, the careful and deliberate sequencing of spatial experience—can be used to instill narrative sensations of guilt, resolution, privacy, institutional respect, and so much more, it was really commendable.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

I’ll hope to post a few more projects from the Bartlett over the next couple of days.