Review: Daniel Rosbottom
Sergison Bates Architects: Brick-work: thinking and making
Exhibition at The Yard Gallery, The Architecture Foundation, London Published as ‘Deconstructing Construction’ in
Building Design no1722 – 18th May 2006, p20
Sergison Bates Architects: Brick-work: thinking and making
Exhibition at The Yard Gallery, The Architecture Foundation, London Published as ‘Deconstructing Construction’ in
Building Design no1722 – 18th May 2006, p20
Still young, they have come to prominence through a series of built projects and competition proposals, which manage to question certain modernist orthodoxies without falling into the literalism of much of what passed as post-modernism.
Projects such as their estate houses or their shed-like public house, hunkered down next to Caruso St John’s Walsall Gallery, evince an interest in the making of associative, almost familiar forms. Conceptually, they refer to the practice’s fascination with the work of the Smithsons, and their call for a re-interpretation of modernism through projects like the Sugden House.
At the vanguard of a strand of recent practice within the UK, they have sought to critically engage with found conditions and to make buildings that mediate between particularities of circumstance and an abstracted, reductive sensibility - drawn from contemporary art practice and specifically Northern European modes of architectural production.
Their exhibition at the RIBA bears witness to this latter observation, having arrived here from ETH Zurich, the influential Swiss school where the pair have recently been Visiting Professors. Both exhibition and accompanying publication extend Sergison Bates’ previous thinking, but also indicate a subtle shifting of position and a refocusing of attention.
In an essay, More Tolerance, from a previous publication, Papers (2001), they describe a conscious conceptualisation of construction, referring not to ‘construction itself but to the image of construction and the feelings awoken by that image’. Their project for urban housing in Hackney, one of the eight case studies in the exhibition, demonstrates this. Quietly, almost anonymously, describing the end of a Victorian terrace, it visually mediates the varying conditions of its immediate, brick built, neighbours. Unlike them however, it is a modular, pre-fabricated timber construction, wrapped in a jacket of brick slips. The architects’ expose this discontinuity subtly, in a rhythm of open ventilation perpends and through flush, tonal mortar jointing, suggesting a skin-like quality.
This conscious slippage between surface and structure, implicitly critiques the appropriation of apparently expedient techniques of modern commercial construction. It is the theme of many of the chosen examples. Beautifully constructed large-scale models, made by students of London Metropolitan University, extend this sense of material abstraction. Each is made in a different, inherently artificial, board material, treated in a variety of ways to infer a series of understandings and possibilities for brick construction. Brick becomes surface, more or less precise – rhythmically incised, blurrily transferred from a print or discovered in the found, textural qualities of reversed hardboard. The aforementioned social housing gains a material quality only revealed by absence, a CNC’d grid of perpends cut into MDF.
This sophisticated dialogue seems in line with earlier statements. However the form of the exhibition reveals other concerns. Whilst wall-panels offer background information, this is not an exhibition about site or programme. It is in their assemblage and interrelationships that the models become situated. A grouping of familial objects, gathered in quiet conversation, standing gauchely on delicate, spindly legs. Those familiar with the practice will have noted a scale shift in recent years and this engagement with larger, civic projects has, perhaps, adjusted their thinking relative to the object. Particularly in the proposal for Bornholm Cultural History Museum, this gravitas seems to have given a sense of weight, revealed directly through load bearing construction.
Large-scale constructional wall sections accompany each model and are reproduced in fragments in the book, alongside exquisite model photographs. Intriguing, in that they give equivalence to built and unbuilt, these are also where problems arise. In places the resolution of unbuilt projects seems partial, questioning, for me, the status of the drawings as a whole, in a surely unintended manner. Despite their emphatic-ness, they feel the least surefooted moment in a convincing argument and the literality of the photo-shopped brick-work, seems at odds with judgements exhibited elsewhere.
That said, this is an enticing glimpse of a mature and satisfying body of work, from an increasingly important practice. Further, it represents a hugely welcome debate, where construction might directly engage with ideas, to describe formal, spatial and experiential qualities. The accompanying book is a beautiful, material object in its own right. As with the work, it appears, at the outset, to give little away and could, with justification, be described as a contrivance. However, it is its very lack of information that somehow saves it. With gaps as wide as those between the claddings and linings of the architecture, it becomes an understated visual manifesto, a question rather than a pattern-book of answers. It is, at least, a worthy tribute to those carefully manicured publications of the Smithsons, which the practice so admires.
