CONTINUITY IN ARCHITECTURE

Three Mirage 2000 jets of L’armée de l’air fly north towards the Franche Comte/Lorraine border in this odd postcard from Ronchamp*. The aerial view is not particularly flattering to a building that was designed to be approached from the slopes below. The previous chapel on the site was bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and the remains were used as building materials in the new building. I suppose the chapel is being protected rather than threatened by the jets but what is the meaning of the title on the postcard back: flagrant delit?**

Mirage fighters were a feature of motorway travel in France in the ‘seventies and, flying in formation above the Autoroute near Dijon, evoked the over-dubbed delights of The Aeronauts*** a Saturday morning TV programme shown alongside Robinson Crusoe and The Flashing Blade.

*bought in the early ‘nineties and found in ‘the bottom drawer’
** in flagrante delicto
*** Les Chevaliers du Ciel in France (link)

St Antun* Catholic Church, Belgrade. 1936-63. Architect: Jože Plečnik

A circular church with a circular tower that is now leaning slightly as can be seen in the gap between it and the neighbouring block.

Monolithic columns in the porch have capitals unlike any I have ever seen, what are they? Due to the crowded site this building is very hard to photograph.

Architect’s drawings as reproduced in Ferlenga & Polano (authors) Jože Plečnik, Progetti e città. Electa, Milano 1990*St Anthony of Padua

Further to Richard’s post below, more pictures of BDP’s Underley Hall projects from the early ’sixties.

Photoset

I recently visited Underley Hall near Kirby Lonsdale in Cumbria with Richard Brook of Manchester School of Architecture. This is Richard’s account of the visit:

Architects’ original model of the proposed Chapel at Underley Hall

Representatives of CiA and team-bau recently made a foray into Cumbria to investigate a little known chapel by BDP, built between 1964 and ’66 and annexed to a country mansion. The chapel was commissioned by the Lancaster diocese shortly after they took ownership in 1959 to run the estate as a junior seminary for the training of Catholic priests: St. Michael’s. Nikolas Pevsner in 1968 described the chapel as “easily the best recent ecclesiastical building in the country”. The site is now a residential school for young people with behavioural problems and as such may only be accessed by prior arrangement.

The principal building on the estate is the rather imposing Underley Hall, built over the footprint of a former house within an estate established since the Sixteenth Century. It was constructed after 1825 in a Jacobean Revival style for Alexander Nowell and designed by George Webster (see Notes at the foot of this post).

Drawing by Thomas Allom, engraved by J Thomas, 1830.
http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/html/lgaz/lk12046.htm

Plan from Architecture North West. No.33, p.15, 1968

The 1960’s chapel sits to the east of the main hall, between it and the River Lune and was designed by William (Bill) White and John Sheridon, assisted by a full compliment of consultants from the progressive multi-disciplinary office of Building Design Partnership in Preston. A Victorian palm house was demolished to make way for the new addition.

The planning of the scheme and the distinctive cellular nature of its elements were informed by both designated programme and material selection. The demand for more side chapels than would be requisite in a parish church, delivered a strip of seven cells for private contemplative prayer to the rear of the main space. These can be accessed with no interruption to services and are subtly composed to reinforce solitude and composure. A mixture of long windows or roof lanterns either facilitate connection or separation from external stimuli, and a single step up within each chapel further promotes the isolative qualities of these spaces.

Budgetary restrictions meant that the material palette, whilst restrained does not bear the quality hallmarks of the building’s composition. Both the internal and external walls are constructed of concrete paving “split to reveal the colour and texture of the natural aggregate”. It was intended that this was complimentary to the stone of the existing hall, though perhaps a crisper, more reflective masonry would have provided a vivid but restrained contrast. The settling and movement properties of the concrete were effectively unknown and lead to the repeating ‘C’ shaped bays separated by full height windows. The floor is finished throughout in quarry tiles and fittings and linings are almost exclusively in stained softwood.

Most of the original fabric remains intact, though the sanctuary and nave spaces have been subdivided with temporary partitions into a store and gymnasium respectively. The simple confessionals, which sat beneath the visitor’s gallery, have also been dismantled. The roof construction is cleverly afforded an airy presence by the use of lanterns that occupy the spaces between the deep trusses and cast a soft light to the side and rear walls. Above the Sanctuary is another huge roof lantern that would have undoubtedly drawn focus to the altar. Externally this is expressed as a rather squat slate-hung tower.

The connection to the existing hall is by a glazed corridor, described as a cloister, but not perhaps evoking the monastic spirit that one would traditionally associate with the term. Where the new and old meet, it is, however, a neat junction composed of cleanly engineered timber components that visually frame and stretch the event of threshold transition.

An element of the scheme unknown to either of the visiting parties was waiting beyond the breadth of a corridor, once inside the original building. Contemporary to the chapel was a small dining room created from the infill of an internal courtyard. The space had been recently stripped back to reveal that all of the finishes were intact, original wall and floor linings and a beautifully engineered truss system, composed of slender timber sections and tension rods to facilitate a continuous band of clerestory glazing and carry a roof lantern. The quality of the diffused light even on such a grey day was soft and calming and the muted palette of the rest of the fittings gave the space an appropriately ethereal time capsule quality.

A quick sojourn across the playing fields for a more distant contextual appreciation revealed two things; one, that the light that day was particularly bad for photography and two, that our initial sentiment, with regard the lack of contrast between the old and the new buildings, was somehow proven. The lack of a powerful direct light source didn’t permit the formal interplay that shadow would promote in the reading of the two forms and perhaps would justify a material with stronger reflective characteristics.

One final surprise still lay in store, a Waring and Gillow table with a ‘new’ Formica top. Considerably more jarring a collision than any intervention by BDP.

All text and photographs copyright Richard Brook 2009

Notes

“1825 15 January. The foundation stone of the new Underley Hall was laid a few days ago by the owner Alexander Nowell, esq. It is nearly on the site of the old house and Mr. Webster of Kendal is the architect.”
From: ‘Supplementary Records: Kirkby Lonsdale’, Records relating to the Barony of Kendale: volume 3 (1926), pp. 278-291. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=49383

“Born in 1797 George Webster was the son of mason turned architect Francis Webster of Kendal. In 1818, at the age of 21, George Webster designed his first independent country house, Read Hall in Lancashire and work commenced on his design for Underley Hall in 1825.” http://www.whittingtonvillage.fsnet.co.uk/html_pages/whittington_hall/whittington_hall.html

see also: Taylor, A., The Websters of Kendal, Cumberland + Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 2004. ed. Martin, J.

It is St Walburge’s Beer Festival time again. This is your opportunity to sample the ales of Britain alongside one of the country’s great buildings: Joseph Hansom’s St Walburge’s RC Church, Preston. We’ll be there Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday afternoon.

Beer Festival: 26-27-28 March 2009. Details/Location

Eamonn Canniffe of Manchester School of Architecture and Neil Stevenson of Sheffield Hallam School of Architecture, drinking under hammerbeams…

Clare Hartwell’s major revision of Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: North Lancashire has just been published. The book describes all the significant buildings of the region from early history to the present day. It is an engrossing work and provides us locals with the chance to find ourselves in the Index of Architects, Artists and Patrons alongside, amongst others, Pugin, Hansom and Velarde.

The pictures here show Francis Xavier Velarde’s Our Lady of Lourdes Thanksgiving Shrine in Blackpool. According to the book the building was built in thanksgiving after the Lancaster R.C. Diocese was spared serious damage during the Second World War; now in the care of the Historic Chapels Trust. A singular building which combines familiar forms with exotic motifs…

Book details on Amazon: Lancashire: North: The Buildings of England (Pevsner Architectural Guides)

Our Lady of Lourdes Thanksgiving Shrine: Photoset

C20 Society: Building of the Month

F.X. Velarde in Liverpool

James Robertson, the Rome Scholar in Architecture, is approximately half way through his period at the British School at Rome. His research on the ecclesiastical architecture of Jack Coia has revealed many parallels in the twentieth century churches of Rome. James writes

“I have been getting together a fairly comprehensive list of churches contemporary with Coia, and up to about 20 years earlier, as some of these earlier Italian buildings seem to have some similarities to those by Coia. There seem to be several distinct groups, or types of church, starting with a kind of brick neo-Romanesque, through to the neo-Classical, semi-rationalist / fascist, full-blown rationalist and then a group which does not seem to fit properly into any of the above! There is one in this group by a rather obscure architectural historian called Bruno Maria Appolonj-Ghetti. He designed a church in Rome called Ss. Martiri Canadesi, which Fellini used in his film ‘La Dolce Vita’.”

The church interior, then recently completed, is used in the film as the setting for an encounter between Marcello and his intellectual friend Steiner, who plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on the church organ.

James is also researching at the Scots College, searching for evidence of the influence of Rome-trained clergy on the architectural direction of the Archdiocese of Glasgow and their commissioning of Coia.

Piscina carved into the cill at All Saints, Brockhampton, Herefordshire. Architect W.R. Lethaby, 1902.

Photoset

Iqbal Aalam’s flickr photostream includes some evocative slides from his 1967 trip to Kahn’s First Unitarian Church in Rochester NY (dedicated 2 December 1962). A commenter on the flickr site wonders whether Kahn’s building inspired the rooflights at Zumthor’s recently completed Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne.

It’s a play really of wall and variety in the getting of various conditions around the windows which caused one to make these changes. And in some instances this window seat turns into a thing which you don’t need at all above and that would not be expressed here…The idea is to develop really quite frankly a silhouette

Kahn’s words and plan and section of the First Unitarian Church from Louis I Kahn, The Complete Works 1935-1974 by Heinz Ronner & Sharad Jhaveri (ISBN3764313471)

The Historic Churches Commission has refused to authorise the reordering of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. The change would have involved siting a new, smaller altar at a lower level.

It is difficult to say whether Frederick Gibberd had an underlying geometrical plan for the Blessed Sacrament Chapel that might explain the proportions and position of individual elements. Unity is provided by the combination of colour, line, light and relief in Ceri Richards’ great painted reredos, tabernacle doors and stained-glass windows. The original intention was that Richards would produce an altar frontal as part of the scheme. This was never executed.

Cathedral website

Photoset

NB The reredos was too big to be accommodated in Richards’ studio so he painted it in the basement of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain).

The White Church is a familiar sight to those travelling along the old road to Blackpool through Lytham St Annes. It is one of a number of Anglican and Non-conformist churches vying for prominence along the route, set back from the road in the nineteenth century seaside grid. Most of the other churches choose a variation on Gothic. The White Church, originally Fairhaven Congregational Church, is intended to be Byzantine but flirts with Moorish and Edwardian Baroque. As Pevsner points out in the North Lancashire volume of Buildings of England the church: “stands out, by size, by colour, by style, only not alas by quality.” Commenting on the odd mixture of styles, among which he spots “South West French Romanesque”, Pevsner goes on to say: “It needed some courage to put up such a building.”

The building works as a landmark but few people stop for a look. Closed most of the time, the white faience is cold and uninteresting up close. Inside is a different matter. Entering the church on the diagonal you are brought into a square nave with a generous arched bay to each side. The square shape and the low dome produce a surprisingly warm and intimate space for the congregation. One arched bay is occupied by the communion table and the viewer is oriented to this focal point by the slope of the floor. The interior is relatively plainly decorated and the stained glass windows to each side of the church predominate. They provide a vivid narrative of early Christianity, the Reformation and the history of Non-conformity (including a dramatic depiction of the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers).

This weekend (13-14 September) the building is open to the public from 10.30-16.00 on Saturday and from 13.30-16.30 on Sunday.

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Fairhaven Congregational Church, now URC. Completed 1912
Architect: Briggs Wolstenholme and Thornley of Blackburn, Lancashire.
Cost of building £12000.

The building now known as the Basilika in Trier, Germany was actually the throne room of the Emperor Constantine and formed part of a wider palace complex when the city was a capital of the Roman Empire. The footprint of the Roman building (c 310 AD) and elements of its enclosure survived centuries of change prior to reconstruction by the Prussians following the defeat of Napoleon. The illustration shows elements of the building (’c’ is the Roman apse) incorporated into a palace complex during the Renaissance period.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of the Basilika and the baroque palace in front is explained by the new significance of the building following the continuing unification of Germany under Prussia. Frederick William IV of Prussia ordered the reconstruction of the 33m high ‘basilica’ as a Lutheran church - a project that was completed in 1856. The building is remade to correspond with a new function and and rises up to dominate the palace structure it had served for centuries. The Prussian structure reflected the architect’s ideal project - the reconstruction of a Roman ruin. The architect interpreted the remains as an early-Christian basilica and borrowed the organization and stylistic elements of early-Christian architecture in Rome.

The building was destroyed by allied bombs in 1944 and reconstructed again in the ‘fifties. The destruction of the Second World War was interpreted by some as a judgement. In its newest form the great hall was stripped of all decoration and given a pre-stressed concrete coffered roof. According to the official history available in the church: The new idea of the reconstructed church can be interpreted as follows: expression of worldly power and its spirituality has been conquered and extinguished by the Nazarene’s message: to put service before all else.