Category - Glenn Murcutt

Taking Root

Piers Taylor was asked by Common Ground to contribute a chapter to a new anthology on personal experiences of woodland that is being published in memory of Oliver Rackham. Here is the text:

image2Taking Root moonshine wood 1cPiers Taylor-1

It is mid May, and I am surrounded by iridescent lime green beech trees, heavy after the rain with shimmering – even effervescent – wild garlic bursting into flower underneath. The trees, plants and sheer visceral actuality of the stuff around me – and its seasonal abundance – remind me that woodland is our natural state in the UK, and that everything here reverts to woodland if left alone. This makes it hard to remember that globally, we are living through the greatest rate of social change in the history of human kind, where, at an unprecedented rate, we are becoming urbanized, abandoning the countryside for the city, seemingly unconcerned with the bucolic.

Such is the dominance in the arts of the metropolitan, that for an early part of my working life, I felt a kind of guilt that my own work was so focused around the rural – and questioned even the validity of making work that was concerned with matters that did not address the overriding architectural concern of our age: how to live sustainably in dense, urban environments. As an architect, I often find myself on the fringes as a reluctant agent of cultivation.

Although for periods of my life I have lived in the city, growing up, landscape and nature were woven in to the fabric of my life, inseparable from the day to day – and this intrinsic and fundamental relationship with the natural world stemmed from my upbringing. As children, we grew up with a small woodland on my parents’ land, and in our mid teens, my brother and I would spend much of our time thinning the woodland, felling trees and splitting wood. In our later teens, my parents bought a remote Welsh house two miles from the nearest road and with no electricity, where we spent most weekends and much of our holidays.

My father would always know instinctively and precisely how the daylight patterns of sunrise and sunset differed from the day before and the day after. He’d be the first to spot the subtle changes in colour in winter as, way before there were any buds, branches would become slightly pinker in preparation for spring. He would always know when the first snowdrop appeared, and how it differed from all of the previous years, where the first nightingale would be singing, and how in spring the brightness of the green elm flowers differed from year to year.

My father was (is still, at 87) always an obsessive naturalist. He had grown up as part of a generation that made an exodus the countryside during WW2, and as part of a family with a single working mother and four children, they ran semi wild in the Cumbrian landscape to which they had escaped. As a teenager, he’d think nothing of cycling the full length of the country bird watching, sleeping under hedges as he went. This desire to explore meant that he became part of the British Antarctic Survey Expedition in the 1950s (immortalized in W Ellery Anderson’s 1957 book ‘Expedition South’), where, dressed in tweeds, he spent three years sledging with a pack of huskies, surveying glaciers and designing the first optimized dogs diet.

Landscape, nature, the countryside – all of this, as a wider family, was part of who we were – but I’d never really made the connection with architecture until my first week of University. I’d been a wayward child and had been repeatedly expelled from school – for being considered ‘un-teachable’ (read energetic, curious and distrusting of authority) – and had wound up in Sydney (my mother’s homeland) and entered university on the strength of a portfolio (I had no formal A levels) to study design.

In the first semester, all design students were taught together alongside architecture students – and consequently shared lectures. The first lecture in the first was by an architect – Glenn Murcutt – who gave me a road map for most things I’ve done in the 25 years since then, and I came out of the lecture, reeling, my head spinning with the possibilities I’d been shown by Murcutt, and went immediately to the university office and transferred to architecture.

 

testuser5_feb2008_04_murcutt_g_3oaG2w_.ZainrMurcutt talked of geomorphology, geology, hydrology, topography, flora fauna, and the imperatives of understanding weather patterns and climate as intrinsic to architecture. He talked of how farmers and rural dwellers knew characteristically how to orientate a building to keep the rain out, and how to maximise ventilation to moderate climate. He demonstrated how to use scarce resources effectively. He talked of the fragility of landscape and how to build without disturbing a site. And, he showed me how you could define an architecture by examining a place – critically, an architecture that was distinct from place, but was utterly defined by it.

Murcutt’s work was also quintessentially and effortlessly Australian, and presented such an incredibly powerful narrative about place. His modest, frugal, delicate structures were so totally bound up in the specifics of site – and yet spoke of universal themes about climate, belonging and culture. Conventional modernism had banished regional concerns, but Murcutt showed how the particular, the regional and the local were themes that could have centre stage in a new architecture. As legendary British architect Alison Smithson said, “Murcutt found an exquisite architectural poetry in sunlight and rainwater collection and harnessing the natural environment.”

Fast-forward ten years or so, and, back in the UK, I was practicing in the south west of the UK and teaching architecture at the Universities of Bath and Cambridge. What was becoming apparent to me was – in architecture – the divisive split between ‘thinking’ and ‘making’. What I hadn’t understood at the time was how timber – or trees – would help me bridge the gap with my own practice and teaching work.

In 2002 I’d bought with my partner a 200-year-old tiny stone castellated building in the middle of a woodland (traditionally called Moonshine Wood) on valley-side 5 miles form Bath that was inaccessible except on foot via a 500 metre path. I’d fallen in love with the site when Sue was in hospital having our second child, and was gripped by a primaeval need to be in that woodland. The old building was habitable (just) and came with about half an acre of land.

Immediately, woodland became a way of life for us – it completely surrounded us and the rhythms of the woodland became, to a degree our own rhythms. The woodland rhythms were those of the bluebells, the goshawks, the fungi, the badgers, the wild garlic, the orchids and the gradual closing in of the woodland each May, which, living so immersed in the woods, threatened to envelop us completely. What we were so graphically exposed to was the way that woods work. Woodland ceased to become an abstract entity, and instead we saw them as – as Richard Mabey described in Beechcomings, as “symbiotic networks of carpenters, beetles, deer, land-thieves, lichens, pollards and toadstools” and, critically for us, our home.

A love affair with timber itself began when we built a new house on the site, next to the old stone folly. The house was conceived of as a structure that – using Murcutt’s own phrase – touched the ground lightly. It was raised off the ground, leaving the highly shrinkable clay and the water table around the house undisturbed.

The house in Moonshine Wood was designed to maximize early morning and winter sunshine, and took its form from an analysis of wind and weather patterns in the valley. Having lived on the site for two years helped enormously. One of my teachers, Richard Leplastrier, described how he get to know a place, prior to designing: “For many buildings I have camped on site, many days and nights, with a drawing board. It is the best way to feel a place out. The form of the terrain, its effect on climate, the path of animals and the sun. Where do you put your campfire?” Using Leplastier’s analogy, we felt ready to know where to put our campfire.

The house had to be designed to be carried in components along the woodland track and so inevitably using timber made sense, as it is so ready a material that allows – encourages, even – on-site improvisation. Curiously, though, I’d had little experience of working with timber. It was a material that the architectural world had become suspicious of – given its relative unpredictability and its refusal to act submissively.

 

01 reduced 2Working on my own house – physically constructing it myself – exposed to me my own naivety in terms of preconceptions around the idea and ideal of the drawing being a mechanism of control. In architecture, instead of drawing being a tool for thinking or discovery, it has become a ‘command’ whose purpose is to banish contingency, uncertainty, or on site discovery.

Historically, it was drawing- as opposed to building – that affirmed the status and idea of the architect as an individual mostly concerned with immaterial ideas. The architect produces a set of instructions – drawings – which fixes outcome and ensures that a singular vision is exactly realized by anonymous construction workers who are concerned with material (and subservient) ideas. Indeed, the prevailing condition in architecture is one where the hand – and judgment – of the maker is banished.

Building my house, and using timber, gave me a glimpse of the extraordinary richness of the material world, and how more than anything, I was missing out on a world of visceral and sensual feedback – not just from the material itself, but also from the sheer potential and excitement that was exposed once ‘making ‘ and the collaborative conversation with all involved in making – was expanded to encompass designing – and the real time uncertainties were brought centre stage in stead of being banished. Looking back now, the evolution of my way of thinking about making stemmed from this period of building my own house, and how It opened my eyes to a sense of what the process of construction and material exploration could offer.

What followed was an about turn in my method of teaching, and the same year that I built the house a group of us started something we called ‘Studio in the Woods’. We didn’t ‘set it up’ – I’m suspicious of things that are ‘set up’ or premeditated too much – Studio in the Woods just evolved out of friendships with other architects, and casual conversations about how it could be fun to organise a workshop with students in the woods around my house. Trusting we’d be agile enough to catch things as they happened, we just threw the cards up in the air to see where they landed.

Where they landed – or what came out of the first weekend of Studio in the Woods 10 years ago – set the pattern for subsequent years. We’d test ambitious ideas quickly, at 1:1, using timber felled and milled on site. For me, the giddy and heady freedom that came with being able to work directly, with materials to hand and with the chaos and surprise of inventing on the hoof was amazing.

This way of working allows the richness of discovery, conversation and contingency to be incorporated in real time into the architecture. The anthropologist Tim Ingold calls this ‘a way of knowing from the inside – a correspondence between mindful attention and lively materials conducted by skilled hands at the [material’s] edge’.

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is a way of working that I’ve been moving towards for 15 years now. Underpinning this move towards a different way of working is a fascination in using full scale making as a method of testing ideas, and using the process of consolidation or accumulation as a design tool. Rather than refining a prototype and then unveiling something perfectly formed and defect free, I am interested in allowing a prototype to be continuously modified and adapted so that it is allowed to become the ‘final’ piece, with modifications and mistakes made manifest.

Studio in the Woods provided me with this new model of working – one where new architectural forms and relationships could be discovered, rather than merely willed. One of the big questions many architects have is – if we don’t merely want to use precedent or deterministic processes, how do we discover architectural form? For me, allowing construction, material exploration and full scale making in real time went some way to answering this.

In addition, it provided a freedom from a world where only ‘skilled’ people could make things. The material relationships that are formed by alternatively-skilled (conventionally unskilled) people are often more interesting to me than those that are perfectly, and blindly, crafted. I’m a big fan of the ‘bodged’ joint where evidenced in it is the maker’s journey of discovery. Of course the ‘bodger’, instead of being a cack-handed and clumsy labourer, was traditionally an itinerant worker who used green timber and found materials that led to unconventional timber joints and connections.

Architecture is, or was, full of concern with ‘correct’ detail and material expression. The Fall’s Mark E Smith called Rock ‘n Roll the ‘mistreating of instruments to explore feelings’, but in architecture, even at its most loose and improvised, there has conventionally been little room for mistreating of tools to explore ideas – or buildings made by ‘amateurs’ or ‘bodgers’ without due regard for technique. My buildings are often badly made in the received sense and often have little regard for technique. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about how they are made. On the contrary, I care enormously about how they are made and the elemental relationships between components, but these relationships differ from those held sacrosanct by high architecture.

What emerged from my work with Studio in the woods was an invitation from London’s Architectural Association to get involved with establishing a new program for students in a 400 acre woodland in rural Dorset, which had been bequeathed to them by the furniture designer John Makepeace. He had established the woodland as a research facility which examined how low grade forest thinnings could be used in construction. Several seminal structures had been built there including Frei Otto’s building that used young waste wood in the construction of a lightly skinned big workshop.

 

hp_19The AA’s idea was to set up a new masters programme where, over 16 months, architecture students would design and construct their own campus using timber sourced from the Hooke woodland. The first building that came out of the program was a complex and unusual big span workshop that used juvenile larch between 12 and 18 years old. My role developed from tutor into executive architect, and, with the engineers Atelier 1 and carpenter extraordinaire Charley Brentnall, we developed a system of using standard 300mm house-builders fixings to connect the timbers – a low tech, low skill method that allowed students and volunteers to assemble the building alongside Brentnall’s skilled team.

 

Big_Shed_Interior_Students_Working_01_©Nozomi_NakabayashiWhat followed was a series of buildings and structures forming the campus using almost exclusively materials sourced from the woodland at Hooke, with teams formed from a combination of those who were conventionally skilled alongside those who were unskilled in construction.

Inspired by an impromptu ad hoc coming together of interesting people at Hooke Park and Studio in the Woods, I realized that there was no room in conventional practice for me. I resigned from the practice that I’d co-founded (Mitchell Taylor Workshop) and formed Invisible Studio to allow a method of practice that made more sense to me.

Invisible Studio took its template from Studio in the Woods where there was no institution, no one owned it, no organisation funded it, no one audited it, and it was beholden to no one. There was never any commitment to ever work together again. There was no hierarchy, no presumptions and certainly no succession planning. Studio in the Woods wasn’t a charity, a company or a co-op – and nor is Invisible Studio. Like Studio in the woods, Invisible Studio isn’t a practice – it’s a kind of anti-practice. It is just people, who work together with no labels, titles or expectation. It has no fixed work force, no formal company – it is just a loose, unstructured collection of people who work together when the conditions are right, and don’t when they aren’t. The simple motivation is the creative work. Alongside this, the world of timber has become more and more fascinating to me. We’ve recently bought – with our neighbours – the 100 acre woodland around the house, which we manage alongside practice and family life and built our studio in it with timber from the woodland, using friends, neighbours and bodgers in its construction, and almost no drawings.

 

VisStuAndMatt9The studio was an exercise in harnessing the resourcefulness that many of my rural neighbours have. Few had any formal construction knowledge, and certainly none had ever built a building before. Free from the baggage of ‘correct’ ways of doing things, all brought an extraordinary sensibility to the project. The building was an exercise in frugality that is typical of many traditional rural buildings – we simply used local materials and resources to shape the project. In an era where most architecture is defined by its extravagance, the studio was an attempt to do the most with the least.

Working in this vein, we have now just finished delivering two buildings for Westonbirt, the National Arboretum, that forms their Tree Management Centre using a similar method, but with a completely different scale. The buildings are the first that the arboretum have built using their own timber – and use 20 metre long hand hewn Corsican Pine structural members in complete lengths – as well as Oak, Spruce, Larch and Douglas Fir. Many volunteers have worked on the project alongside skilled carpenters, and the Carpenter’s Fellowship have used the buildings as vehicles for up-skilling their trainees.

 

AMAT-0120-0053Living in a woodland, working with timber in this manner and embracing contingency, chance and the glorious properties of green timber felled on site as part of a wider management plan, architecture for me has shifted immeasurably away from the idea of a lone designer, working on a static object of singular, finite and shallow beauty. Design has becomes a forum that allow the unexpected to emerge. The architectural academic Jeremy Till, who is highly critical of much contemporary practice describes this way of working as a ‘crucible for exchange between a mix of professionals, amateurs, dreamers and pragmatists’ with the architect an ‘open-minded listener and fleet-footed interpreter, collaborating in the realization of other people’s unpolished visions’. For me now, it is among these amateurs, dreamers, pragmatists, bodgers and – perhaps most importantly, trees – that I thrive, in the knowledge that all of my own work will, one day, revert to the woodland matter from where it came.

Piers Taylor © 2016

Categories Articles, Glenn Murcutt, Hooke Park, Invisible Studio, Mess Building, Moonshine, piers taylor, Studio in the Woods, Westonbirt Tags

Richard Leplastrier

0d580fa96894c785c76294441d287224I’ve been wondering recently why as a country, we’re all so desperately conservative when it comes to our domestic buildings. I don’t mean in terms of tradition, taste or style – but in the way that the building works.

There’s a typology that has evolved over the last few hundred years that is pretty much the default choice for everybody. This is a house that has basically the same accommodation in it – just configured differently. There’s usually a formal entrance, a living room, kitchen (which, if you’re feeling radical, may be in the same space), a series of bedrooms for individual occupancy, and a bathroom or two.

Bigger houses are generally more of the same, and while there may be many conversations about finishes and fittings, there’s almost no conversation about the principle of a dwelling, and little rethinking of the set of conventional spaces that appear to be beyond question.

Without doubt, the most profound experience I’ve ever had in architecture was going to see a house by the infamous architect Richard Leplastrier in Lovett Bay, just north of Sydney in 2001, and it is a house I think about almost daily.

I’d been in Australia for a few weeks, visiting old friends and looking at a series of supposedly good houses, before I went to see Richard’s house. The other houses that I’d seen just before visiting this one were all award-winning houses – but were all variants on the same theme – just configured differently.

Richard’s place was already special by virtue of the journey needed to get to it – by rowing boat. It was a glorious relief to discover that there was someone that was prepared to go beyond the terrible tyranny of assuming that he needed to be able to park outside his house. Instead, Richard embraced a 15 minute rowing boat ride across the water to the land, which he, his partner and his kids would do every day.

Much as I’m interested in the technology of vehicles, domestic architecture is unquestionably throttled by the dominance and abhorrence of the awful patch of tarmac, which constitutes a driveway and a double garage outside the front door.

On arrival at Richard’s jetty, there was a short steep walk up through bush land to his house. I call it a house, but the celebrated novelist Peter Carey who wrote a chapter of one of his books about this house called it an ‘extraordinary campsite’. Another architect – Glenn Murcutt – called it ‘like a swiss watch, just an exploded one’.

There was no door to speak of – just a deck that you stepped up on to, and of course no front door – just a series of plywood flaps that opened up on a series of beautifully inventive hinges and struts, through which you could enter – although much of the living was done outside, irrespective of the weather.

There were no rooms to speak of either – just one big open space for all domestic purposes, and from where Richard ran his office. There wasn’t even any furniture to speak of – just one drawing table and Richard’s mother’s old rocking chair in the corner. There was a series of built in window boxes, in which one could sit – but most of the living was done on the threshold out onto the deck, where there were a series of beautifully generous steps, that encouraged sitting and lingering. Not that this was a family that did too much lingering – the kids were all rattling around, without anyone asking them to tidy up or keep quiet. Here was a house that encouraged life – not throttled it like most banal and sanitised contemporary buildings.

The bed, such as it was, was a mattress that the family of 5 would pull down from the exposed ceiling joists at night, and all pile on to. The dunny was across a little plank bridge in the bush, and the kitchen a makeshift affair under the verandah.

Every part of it was acutely beautiful and constructionally brilliant – from an architect who had spent much of his life making timber ‘skiffs’ in which to plough the waters around Sydney. But irrespective of its beauty, the house offered an extraordinary different vision of living, which went way beyond the same series of spaces from which most of us use as a starting point.

Sure, the weather is better in Sydney – but that isn’t the point. You may not want to live like Richard, but that isn’t the point either. The point, of course, is that there is a different model of living from the default and unthinking identikit series of spaces in different dressings which most of us have.

What’s also curious is that Richard’s way of life is that this is how many of us lived up until relatively recently in social history, and was considered the norm. Certainly, up until the middle ages and beyond, families lived in one space, with little privacy. Now, though, despite patterns of work and living having changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, we’re typically unable to reconsider our dwellings from first principles.

This, of course, is a shame – and this means that most of the design conversations around houses in this country are limited to issues of shape, colour and taste, and consequently they’re pretty boring. The conversation needs to move on now, and houses need to change, adapt and evolve. They need to challenge basic assumptions of how we live, and suggest alternatives.

At present, alternative models of domestic space are really only considered by a few progressive architects, and this needs to change and enter the mainstream. More than anything, domestic architecture should be progressive and idealistic, and not default to received norms. The tragedy is that the model of living that is rammed down our neck by mainstream house builders is a cynical one that they know will sell, as there’s little alternative. As a community interested in self-build, we all have an obligation and responsibility to challenge this.

© Piers Taylor, 2015

Categories Articles, Glenn Murcutt, Heroes Tags

Glenn Murcutt, Riversdale

Great picture of Glenn Murcutt at his Riversdale project, in Bundanon NSW sent to us by Lindsay Johnson. He was the guy that gave us the road map for much of what we have done.

Categories Glenn Murcutt Tags

Glenn Murcutt, Lightning Ridge

Just been sent this great Murcutt sketch for his Lightning Ridge Opal Museum. It will be great to see another large scale project by Murcutt. I love his drawings – and love that the essence of how the building is put together is always evident in his sketches. It’s impossible to imagine him doing a ‘presentation’ drawing for clients – he uses drawings to get ideas across, not ‘sell’ a scheme with a rendering.

Categories Glenn Murcutt Tags

Lecture in Vienna

GLENN MURCUTT AND EUROPE

Accompanying Programm to the Glenn Murcutt exhibition

Introduction and work presentation : Wed, January 25 2012, 7pm, Podium Az W (2)

CONTENT

Françoise Fromonot travelled to Australia in 1991 to research the work of Glenn Murcutt, who was almost entirely unknown in Europe at the time. The result was the book Glenn Murcutt. Buildings and Projects, which introduced his architecture to a European public for the first time. In a later edition he addressed Murcutt’s impact on the following generation primarily through his teaching work. Françoise Fromonot holds a brief lecture on Glenn Murcutt’s work and approach.

Piers Taylor is a partner in the architecture office Mitchell Taylor Workshop in Bath (UK). In 2001 he participated in the first annual Glenn Murcutt Master Class. In a presentation of works he talks about his own approach to architecture, which is deeply inspired by Murcutt — whose influence clearly goes beyonda purely formal translation of the architectural vocabulary.

SCHEDULE

7pm Dietmar Steiner, Az W, welcome address

7.10pm Francoise Fromonot, professor at the ENSA de Paris-Belleville:

Introductory lecture about Glenn Murcutt

7.45pm Piers Taylor, architect, Mitchell Taylor Workshop, Bath:

work presentation

Pictures from the talk, above

Categories Glenn Murcutt