Within the school of architecture in which I teach, there are many tutors who, like me, are engaged both within the academy and in practice. For some, no doubt, the academic studio is a place of retreat from the drudgery of much that is inherent in, what is commonly described as, the procurement of buildings. However, the attitude to practice shared by myself and David Howarth, with whom all the work discussed in this essay has been undertaken, emerged into a resonant space, which we found in the oscillation between these two conditions. The projects illustrated within this chapter echo and reverberate across this space.

BETWEEN THINGS
In his essay Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture, Peter Zumthor suggests that the first thing a student needs to have explained to them is “…that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answer he already knows.”1 The emergence of Architecture - its transference from intellect to artefact, appears a largely inexplicable process. One that, fundamentally, cannot be taught, only learned. In this light, we understand ‘teaching’ as an ongoing dialogue, part of a “necessary voyage of discovery” 2 upon which we are engaged alongside our students. It is one in which practice is understood as both noun and verb. We seek to subsume the theoretical and the practical into praxis, a developing precision, which is engendered through the repetition of questions asked and in the search for specific answers. This iterative discipline allows intimate engagement with the particularities of individual situations and circumstances - whilst concurrently and constantly developing relationships with the enormous repository of knowledge and experience that constitutes the culture and history of Architecture.

In this regard, we remain students of architecture, alongside our own students. It is important to recognise however, that neither us, nor them, are singularly engaged in an on-going present. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, physical perception exists in a dialectical relationship between the actual and the possible structures of the world, to which the body belongs. In other words, it is an experience that simultaneously involves both memory and imagination. Therefore to us, as architects, our relationship with the real and immediate, which is established through the actions and processes of design, operates in constant negotiation with the already known and remembered, on one hand, and the imagined and anticipated, on the other. 3

This thought is reiterated in Martin Heidegger’s essay Building Dwelling Thinking - “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”4 This realisation leads us to consider the site of architecture as a temporal space, which we must first learn how to dwell within. In considering this, we have learned to approach its actual site as, in some senses, an archaeologist might. Through careful examination of its hidden layers, we seek to reveal the often complex and overlapping histories of typology, construction, adjustment, and inhabitation, found in the traces of its immediate physicality.

Teaching adds a further complexity. Here, we inevitably approach not only the site but also the student. Zumthor makes the point that “We all experience architecture before we have ever seen the word. The roots of architectural understanding lie in our architectural experience.” 5 With this in mind, the beginnings of an educational project seek to establish not only a common ground in relation to site and project, but also conditions which can allow the student to draw upon their own body of memory and experience in the physical world.

Histories and memories are, of course, very easy places in which to lose oneself. As David Leatherbarrow suggests “There are two ways of being mistaken about history: one is to see it as something outside the present, what once was and is no longer, and the other is to view it as something which constitutes the present, what we are now within. The truth of the matter is neither so far off nor so near. Similarly the present is neither so empty nor so full…the latency or potentiality of settings in shadow is nothing other than the present force of past events.” 6 This notion of latency or potentiality is critical and we only understand these reflective actions of observation as being truly useful at the moment they become propositional. Beyond a means by which to get to ‘know’ a site, they also offer clues as to how intentions might begin to be scaled in relation to it - revealing and transforming the character of the found, through that which we bring.

We are intrigued by this conception of architecture acting as a ‘measure’ – the means by which we can establish not only a direct physical understanding of a place but beyond that, through which we may calibrate a particular situation in relation to our wider knowledge of the world.

We would hope therefore that the architecture which we make, encompasses, but also seeks to surpass, these beginnings - acknowledging what has gone before and what may come after, but also immediately, precisely and critically engaging with the particularities of its own time.

Our intention is not that our work should ‘abstract’ ideas, but rather that it should be able to be understood very directly: through a material manifestation; in the spatial relationships which are engendered; via an invitation to inhabit which is implicit in the resultant form and scale. Indeed a common thread within our projects is that we understand them to operate, concurrently, at many scales, between which perception oscillates - between the experience of the body and the experience of the city.

THE MEDIATING ARTEFACT
The position I have outlined resists much contemporary discourse around architecture. Far from registering its innate experiential and temporal nature, this often appears only to be concerned with, and understood through, the currency of its image. Of course, we understand that the relationship of the constructed building to its preceding representations has always been central to the making of architecture. In Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier remind us that “since the inception of Western Architecture in Classical Greece, the architect has not ‘made’ buildings, rather, he or she has made the mediating artefacts that make significant buildings possible - from words, to many kinds of transcriptions and drawings, to full scale mock-ups.” 7

However, as Colin St John Wilson has asserted in The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture8, the publication in 1790 of Immanuel Kant’s hugely influential treatise on aesthetics, Critique of Judgement, began a process of profound transformation in the established relationship of architecture, relative to its image. St John Wilson argues that Kant’s description of the essence of a work of art in terms of ‘purposefulness without purpose’, enshrines the dislocation of the ‘high art’ of architecture from the common requirement to build.

This critical disassociation of ‘beauty’ from mere ‘use’ has, over time, transformed our societies cultural understanding of architecture. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says (of language) that “the meaning lies in the use.”10 Separating the two, has removed architecture from being something that, in Wittgenstein’s terms, might only come to be understood through the ‘practice’ of inhabitation. Therefore, whilst many buildings have, inevitably, continued to remain un-regarded - ‘built’ as part of the backdrop to everyday life, the value of a recognised work of architecture has, at the same time, come to be understood, often entirely, through its visual presence.

From concentrating on the making of representations, which might offer a degree of eloquence in the struggle to evaluate, refine and convey the complex conditions from which buildings emerge, architects have therefore, increasingly turned their attention to the presentation of images which attempt to emphasise the ‘beauty’ of a completed work. Such images generally seek to capture architecture at a single, iconic moment in both time and space. In fixing our relationship to it, with a permanent unblinking gaze, they privilege the eye, but in doing so, they distance us from the possibility of an experiential, bodily encounter or, conversely, a cerebral and imaginative one.

Within Architecture as an academic subject, this distance often appears to have been stretched still further. For many academics, it seems that the architectural image has become a purely symbolic representation of a wider cultural discourse - one which has taken the place of the building entirely. Indeed, this fundamental shift might be said to have occurred at the very foundation of the formal teaching of the subject. The first school of architecture, as we might understand it, was The École Polytechnique in Paris. It was established in 1794, shortly after the French Revolution and, significantly, within a few years of the publication of Kant’s thesis. Within the school it was images of architecture, drawings such as Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton for example, which became important. The drawing had become “not merely a tool but an aim in itself”10 – a symbolic description of the new cultural aspirations of liberté, egalité, fraternité. There was little interest in understanding how, or whether, they were to be actually constructed. Hence, somewhat perversely within the new Republic, a hierarchy was established, in which the conceiver of ideas was privileged over those who merely brought them into physicality.

For us, such a hierarchy is a misnomer. Architecture is not, ultimately, a matter for abstraction. Rather, it is of matter. Heidegger tells us that “living amongst things is a basic principle of human existence”11 and as practitioners we understand this innately. We know it in the process of watching a building emerge under the hands of the craftsman; in the moment when we enter a space we intimately understand from a drawing, and it surprises us; in the feeling when, as we run our fingers along a surface, it becomes defined through the touch of a material, rather than through the lines with which we once demarcated its edges.

Nonetheless, it remains easy to forget, in the making of the plan, that it is not the thing itself. Of course, professional experience does have the potential to reduce the space of perception between the abstraction and the actual. For a student, however, the experience of their own ‘architecture’ is almost always, by necessity, mediated. The distance between their knowledge of the works of others, which they may have looked at or visited, and the lines on the paper (or the screen) which is in front of them, can appear insurmountable. Indeed, any potential relationship between the two often remains entirely unrecognised.

The evocation of a concrete, objective experience of architecture is, therefore, central to the way in which we ‘teach’. We do not privilege conception over production because we understand them rather as a continuous process of thought. Hence, our studio often begins with the crafting of an actual material, in the description of an actual room, or through an intervention within an actual situation – a 1:1 experience. The intimacy of engagement required, if one is to succeed in appropriating ideas out of such tasks, becomes concentrated in the resultant piece. A reservoir of creative potential, it becomes a touchstone12 for the ensuing project. In our conversations with students, such pieces become a constant counterpoint, around which to discuss the development of the more abstract representations that an architect also needs to master. They are a means by which we may collectively draw out intuitions, concentrate thoughts and calibrate responses. Most importantly perhaps, our hope is that they instigate an ongoing action of thinking through making. Not only can this assist in making a complex, intellectual, acquisitive process more tangible, but it also encourages the acquisition of skills useful in articulating the physical manifestation of the resulting architecture.

1:1+, a piece by a recent, former student Tom Brooksbank(FIG 1), illustrates this well. The piece ostensibly describes the external form of a town hall. However its sheer physicality – its weight and the brutal precision of the bricks shaped with an angle grinder, from which it is constructed, render its scale and purpose ambivalent. It has become both a model and a fragment of the building itself.

Our approach, as practitioners, mirrors our methods within the academic studio. A similar description to that in the previous paragraph could be made, for example, of our plaster cast of the concrete element within the Khan House(FIG 2). We hold dear those things that can allow us to reflect upon and maintain the core of a project, through the often complex and lengthy process of realising it. Sometimes however, aided by experience but precluded by an absence of the time available within education, such things emerge from what we know, rather than from things we make. We understand ourselves as part of an architectural continuum. The memories and knowledge of buildings, which we hold in our minds, are a constant reference point for our conversations. We admire and learn from the precision of ideas and of physical expression, which we see in the work of artists, unencumbered as they are perhaps, by the complex inter-relationships that inevitably determine so much that is architecture. The compactness of Carl Andre; the unequivocal precision of Bernd and Hilla Becher; the intimate intensity of Giorgio Morandi and the precise equilibrium of abstraction and situation, which we find in the permanently installed works of Donald Judd at Marfa, for example, have all influenced what we do. At the same time we would strongly concur with the sentiment expressed by John Toumey in Architecture, Craft and Culture, when he suggests that “architecture cannot be an art in the pure sense; it is inextricably caught up in mundane affairs.”13 Thus we arrive back at the concern with ‘usefulness’.

Throughout the process of development we search for the mediating artefacts, which can approach the ‘concreteness’ of actual architectural experience and subsume reflection and proposition. We progress in a manner which oscillates between drawing and the physical model, but in the constant hope that they will synthesise into a sense of continuity.

Xenia Adjoubei’s project for a new Photographers Gallery evokes the potential of such synthesis.(FIG 3) It develops from the notion of the Lucid Room, playing on the title of Roland Barthes’ reflection on photography, Camera Lucida. The project understands lucidity through the intertwining of the physicality of light that appears to carve matter, forming luminous collective spaces between dark rectilinear galleries. Her representation of these ideas physically embodies them. Constructed photo-grammetrically, they move between an orthodox plan drawing and a wax model, which become one through the agency of light meeting the surface of photographic paper.

Such a holistic embodiment of process, project and programme, within a single representation is, however, difficult to achieve. We are aware that the immediacy of the traditional architectural drawing has receded even within the time-span of our own careers, as the computer, rather than the pen and the sheet of paper, has become the primary interface through which we engage in it. In coming to terms with this, exploratory models have become ever more important to us and we make them repeatedly and at many scales. Often crudely direct, they offer a means to fix an idea at an appropriate scale, relative to the constantly updated, visually scale-less, but paradoxically always full-scale, drawing file. Equally importantly, such models draw complex, disparate strands into a holistic physical entity, revealing unconsidered problems and, sometimes, unexpected opportunities.

Although not always with the poetry manifest in Xenia’s project we have, in common with many other architects, found that the shift in the technology of drawing allows us to introduce a third medium - synthesising the relationship between it and the model in a new and powerful way. That medium is the photograph and, in particular, the digital photograph.

If the role of the architectural drawing transformed from the Eighteenth Century onwards to become one which, at least in part, was engaged in presenting architecture symbolically, rather than as a means to achieve its actual production. Then, during the Twentieth Century, it was to become eclipsed, in this regard at least, by the new medium of photography. The possibilities which photography offered, further transformed the manner in which architecture was documented, disseminated and perhaps most importantly, understood.

Beatriz Colomina has documented how Le Corbusier selectively airbrushed photographs of his early house, the Villa Schwob, which he completed in 1916, prior to its publication in L’Esprit Nouveau 6, in 192114. The revised photographs re-described it as being closer to his later ‘purist’ projects, with the overall coherency of his oeuvre seemingly considered ‘more real’ than the actual, tangible fact of the building itself. Subsequently, such carefully constructed and edited photographs, widely circulated, have become commonplace in the definition of iconic architecture.

However, the ability to manipulate the photograph, which has become accessible and straightforward through computer technology, offers a powerful tool not only to distort architectural reality but also, conversely, to approach it. Through the camera, the model can become a drawing. In doing so, it can offer us the ability to directly perceive the intrinsic physical, material and spatial properties of an architectural proposal in a manner which can be startlingly revealing. Through such a process, we are invited to explore the subtle, less tangible manifestations of spatial experience, which we might have previously discovered only at the moment of a building’s completion: how a person moving through a room might adjust the sense of its scale; the paths and complex patterning of sunlight travelling across a wall; the shift of atmosphere in a space, from morning to evening or from summer to winter.(FIG 4)

The opportunity for us to see in this way draws us, we would hope, toward Le Corbusier as consummate maker of buildings, rather than as arch propagandist This is however an assumption we remain questioning of, for whilst the constantly improving ability of technology to describe sophisticated and realistic architectural representations is enticing, we need to remain critical in our appropriation of such tools. Within an architectural representation, it is often through that which remains unsaid or only hinted at - a potential found latent, that we come to desire the actual presence, the physical reality, which does not yet exist. If the ‘completeness’ of the presented image fills those latent spaces within it, which we might previously, in our imagination, have inhabited, then we are in danger of losing the desire to see beyond it.

That danger is clear, whenever we open an architectural journal. The outputs made possible by digital media have allowed the graphical virtuosity of architectural presentations to become ever more firmly understood, as perhaps the primary manifestation of the opportunities and possibilities, which architecture might offer. The almost infinite potential for the transfer, reproduction and dissemination of such imagery risks affording it a universal currency and by the same token, seems to deny it any sense of being placed. This, allied to its speed of production, as measured against the inevitable lag which occurs in the complex and often messy procurement processes of actual buildings, has established an almost overriding desire for new forms as a mark of architectural progress. What one might describe almost as a tyranny of innovation. Thus, it is often through the immaterial renderings of the computer, the complex surfaces made prior to construction, that such architecture is understood as being made complete. Where the physical actions and processes of building do follow on, it is as an almost inevitable process of degradation from an ideal.

Carlo Scarpa said “I want to see things that’s all I really trust. I want to see and that’s why I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it.”15 For him however, drawings were simply the means by which he was able to approach the tectonics of architecture with precision. He drew over the same drawings again and again, discussing them on-site, directly with the craftsman, until the things they depicted were ready to build.

For us this remains the opportunity. It is not that the architect should reject the power of images, but, increasingly, there is a need to refocus their purpose and to reconnect them to the physical. As I have described, we have been particularly concerned to address this issue with our students. For them, in particular, the representation must be considered to be, in many ways, the reality. For it is with these that, for the most part, their projects conclude.

The challenge remains then, to find ways of appropriating these new and powerful technologies, in the exploration of the age-old concerns and possibilities of our discipline. For us, as for Scarpa, at least one opportunity to do this is to be found through the idea of site, not only understood in terms of place, but more particularly as a place of construction.

SITES OF CONSTRUCTION
The potential for the dematerialisation of Architecture could be simply understood as part of a wider phenomenon of placeless-ness. The claims of building systems manufacturers, prefabricators and the components industries, might seem to bear this observation out. However, it would appear to us that the inevitable distortions of technology, when confronted with the particularities of place and topography, has largely continued to frustrate some in the profession, who dream of standardised buildings and mass produced, off-site, production.

This does not lead us toward an anachronistic argument, for a nostalgic return to the past certainties of craft-based skills. It is however, doubting of the reduction of the architect’s role to the elaboration of the junctions between specified packages. Instead, we embrace the wider implications of the actions of making as a means through which to realise the potential of a work of architecture. We do this in the same spirit with which we recognise in it a means to approach the design of that work.

In an essay, More Tolerance, Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates describe a conscious conceptualisation of construction, referring not to “construction itself but to the image of construction and the feelings awoken by that image.”16 Whilst we would not wish to disconnect the image from the action so directly, we do seek to articulate and to expose those actions, allowing them to become appreciated by the users of the building as an implicit part of the pleasure of inhabitation. In many of our own projects, we have sought to do this through the intensification of the idea of a material – to approach what Adam Caruso, writing on Lewerentz, describes as “a material basis for form.”17

Our project for the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation speaks of this approach. It inhabits part of what was an in-situ concrete framed warehouse - one of three, which the Foundation has combined into a single entity. In our initial role as design advisors to the client for the project as a whole, we questioned the concealment of the raw, material quality of these existing structures, as well as the need to disguise both the discontinuities between them and the necessary interventions, which they were to undergo. Subsequently asked to undertake a modest part of the project ourselves, the Foundation’s own offices, we sought to manifest these questions physically.

Parkhaus II18, by the photographer Rut Blees Luxembourg describes the interior of a car park, coincidentally near to our site, which she photographed with a long exposure. We enjoy the transformation of a singular, mundane concrete structure into luminous glowing surfaces, captured in time by the open lens.

In the light of this image, our project became concerned with both material equivalence and material transformation. In physical terms, our intervention into the existing, raw concrete shell is explicitly a second order. Indeed it expresses that most normative of conditions, the stud partition and suspended ceiling of the office ‘fit-out’. Here however, a singular material, fibreglass, is allowed to subsume and at the same time to reveal all scales, including the ghosts of the frames, which support it. In utilising the possibilities of differing opacities and surface qualities, we have asked it to envelop space, surface, structure and function. A poured material, it amplifies and literally reflects the textural qualities of the existing, poured concrete structure, whilst also transmitting and appearing to ‘hold’ light.(FIG 5)

For us, in defiance of the disassociation between product and the act of production, which has become synonymous with contemporary culture, site continues to be a place where the potential of what might be can still be seen to emerge from the possibilities of what is. This potential is an energy, which lies embodied within the materials, processes and sequences of construction. It appears to allow the building site to stand almost alone in continuing to expose, in a grounded and often brutally immediate way, such processes of making. This implies, we believe, that the breaking of ground, the instigation of the moment of construction, might be a place to begin, rather than be seen as the potentially inconvenient resultant, previously described. It suggests a means by which we can embed our architecture, however modest, within larger cultural issues. It becomes a documentation of the otherwise hidden, but ever ongoing, patterns of destruction and construction, which form the city.

With this thought, our work becomes haunted by a different kind of image altogether – J.M. Gandy’s famous painting of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England19. Painted just prior to the first phase of Soane’s reconstruction of the Bank and yet depicting it in a manner inspired by Pompeii, this extraordinary picture is of an architecture that existed for its architect in the past, present and future simultaneously - it is, at once, a survey, a speculation and a ruin.

One might describe a ruin as a half remembered form, receding into landscape - merging with the ground upon which it was founded. Closer to, one might imagine it, ghost-like and haunted by the presence of past inhabitations. For Alison and Peter Smithson “A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse; at certain times of a building’s construction, the anticipatory pleasures of ruins is made manifest...For us an architecture which is palpably built is the most pleasurable of all.“20

In approaching the design of Khan House, the transformation of a forgotten, derelict and perilously unstable early Victorian shop/house, our imagining of it as ‘ruin’ and of its reconstruction as a ‘ruin in reverse’ appeared to suggest a very particular relationship between the immediate act of construction and the deeper cultural resonances of building. (FIG 6)

The history of the existing house was one of expedience.Built cheaply and speculatively, it had been adapted and distorted over time to suit circumstance. This was of most immediate concern to us in its basement. Here, the earth floor had been dug out to provide extra space. In the course of this, the corbels had been sheared off the bottom of the party walls, living the building structurally unsound.

The house was a ruin, in a very real sense - metaphorically and literally floating in time and in space. Conceptually, therefore, the project became about re-founding the house and in doing so, beginning to offer a measure of it, an ordering which would allow it to be re-understood, materially, spatially and temporally.

The need for a new foundation might, upon first consideration, appear a mundane element within a programme for an artist’s house and studio. However, beyond re-establishing the building’s relationship with the ground, it was brought into appearance to become a kind of armature, which rescaled the building as a whole. Constructed in concrete, it is structurally, materially and programmatically dense. Rachael Whiteread’s House was an obvious reference for us, in our consideration of it. Powerfully material, House was at once the palpable construction and the ruin invoked by the Smithson’s…but of course House was not a house. Solid, impenetrable and monumental it no longer invited inhabitation.

Our piece becomes, in a sense, the inverse of this inversion, in that its concentration of material allows the spaces around it to become ambivalent. Described topographically rather than as cellular, domestic rooms, each floor within the transformed interior becomes a sequence of connected spaces at varying levels, which accommodate the adjustments in the section of the building, over time.

Rosalind Krauss, the art historian, described Whiteread’s House as: “entropic – condensing and stretching, a ‘congealing’ of time and space.”21 We translate this description literally, through the material quality of the new piece which resides between interior and exterior, between city and domesticity. It is poured in-situ, against finely made, douglas fir shuttering and oscillates between rawness and sensuality, brutality and precision.

The marks of the shuttering scale the building, establishing a dimensional rhythm, which accommodates the steps of the new stair and the widths of the douglas fir boarding which forms the timber wall linings. These linings extend the concern with time beyond that of construction and, in doing so begin to expose a larger conversation about the history of the house. Recalling the shuttering, which they replace, they overlay and then continue on from the boardmarks of the concrete – becoming a refined, double height, timber lined room and a timber stair, which connects studio to street.

As discussed, in considering how one might think through making, we have sought to encompass the prototypical actions of working with actual materials and processes in parallel with the testing of spatial and formal concerns, through the construction and documentation of large scale models. Emphasising the holistic, we critique the possibilities engendered within these investigations through the making of drawings, which follow on and in turn, lead to more refined physical manifestations.

Nonetheless, within the academy, the outcomes of such considerations are generally only considered at a certain distance. The discussion, easily prescribed by the shorthand of materiality can, all too often, become a limited conversation, defined and critiqued largely through the textural qualities of a presented image. Conversely, in attempting to counter the seductive immediacy and inevitable objectification of the image, it is easy to lose sight of the primacy of the artefact within abstractions of process.

The British Library Pavilion is one of two occasions where we have successfully extended the idea of the 1:1 fragment into the construction of a small, simple ‘building’.22 At this moment, practice, academia, image and artefact finally merge and we become collaborators with our students – approaching architecture in its most meaningful sense

The project was the result of a design collaboration between our University studio and those run by Patrick and Claudia Lynch of Lynch Architects and Andrew Houlton of Houlton Architects. Following a series of design workshops, where we collectively generated ideas, the project was developed in detail within our office23, in conjunction with the students. They subsequently went on to construct it in the forecourt of the Library, for London’s annual Architecture Week festival in June 2006.

The site, form and tectonic of the pavilion emerged spatially from thinking about the relationships manifested by the Library itself, and temporally in response to the moment of festival, relative to more day to day experiences. The Library’s status as an institution is inscribed through a series of threshold spaces, which establish its position relative to the city beyond. Through our collective discussions, the pavilion became understood as an aedicule – a ‘niche’ of space within the largest of these spaces, the entrance courtyard.

In this context it sought to introduce and to mediate the scale and programme of the larger building to its urban context. Programmatically, its loosely defined intention was to foster the spoken rather the written word – to be ‘before and after the book’. In encompassing the possibilities of intimate, everyday conversation and the particular moment of oration, on a stage, facing a public space, its physicality established itself ambivalently between recollections of furniture, room, house, tent and stage.

However, recalling the structural constellations of Joseph Albers24, the pavilion might also be thought of as an unfolding drawing. Despite its small scale, it engaged with and connected disparate elements, imaginatively, through its form and material:

A diagonal, which ran through the form of the pavilion, marked the route from city gate to reading room. Its placement on the existing steps, transformed them from a place of passage into a moment to pause, or from which to speak - the horizontal beam of the structure responding to the larger horizon of the library and inferring a proscenium. The same diagonal scribed a line to the top of the Library tower. Within the Library plan the tower does not appear, but sitting on the seat within the pavilion, one could experience the tower being visually brought to ground - captured between the spaced double members of the corner post – the only verticals in the structure. The other geometry within the structure also pointed upwards, over the bulky horizontality of the Library, to the intricate Victorian Gothic of St Pancras Station’s slate roofs and spires. In the pavilion’s twisting timber frame, one could imagine their deliciously deformed interior constructions.(FIG 7)

The trabeated form of the timber construction reflected not only these readings but also the temporal and environmental conditions with which the pavilion engaged. In response to the timing of Architecture Week, the enclosure it defined referred to the sun rather than protecting from inclement weather. This offered it yet another definition, as pergola or summerhouse, which through shadow, scribed itself onto the ground. In reality, though, it was very lightly placed.

In answering these issues, we utilised the potential of the computer to represent, not the image of the building, but its construction. The geometries of the structure meant that every piece of timber was different and their junctions were complex, often compound, mitred joints. To facilitate the required accuracy, a CAD model was made, which described each piece and each junction three dimensionally. From this, two dimensional, 1:1 templates were drawn and printed. These templates were then stuck directly to the timber sections, allowing the students to accurately cut and drill each junction, with the whole construction being pre-fabricated and test assembled before it arrived on site.

Final assembly took two trouble free days. The pavilion was inaugurated on the first evening of the festival with readings by poet Elaine Feinstein and by children from a local primary school - all of whom read their own poetry to an audience gathered in the courtyard. Due to its popularity with visitors, it subsequently remained there for the rest of the summer.

FEELING EYES SEEING HANDS
In describing these projects and preoccupations, I hope to have articulated our search for a space between things, in which we might discover a place to make architecture: between academy and industry; figure and ground; continuity and transformation; here and there; the past, the present and the future.

Our position, both as architects and as teachers of architecture, remains formative. We continue to develop our own understandings and we do not reject, but we are deeply critical, of many of the preoccupations of current architectural practice. For, besieged by images of itself, contemporary culture might reasonably ask that the architect’s imagination should dwell upon the question of whether all that is solid should melt into air25 or even, that it might resist such a process. Yet it seems that the profession’s collective imagination is, instead, in danger of dissolving, mesmerised, in the flicker of those self same images.

In response we, and others, look to appropriate contemporary techniques and technologies in the service of a more grounded, holistic practice. One that might be experienced beyond the visual, with Goethe’s “feeling eyes and seeing hands.”26 In this way, with our whole body, with all our senses, through our memories and in our imaginations, we might collectively rediscover an architecture that can both physically embody culture and make place. We hope, in a manner that is searching and deeply questioning but is also generous and accommodating – to make an architecture that is both beautiful and useful.