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Make Way for Contextual Architecture
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19727 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
1,398 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
Paris has its grands projets like the pyramid of the Louvre and the Arche de la Defense, but London has a new buzzword: "contextual" architecture. This signals buildings that are clearly new yet sit happily with their older neighbors. Architects are at last recognizing that if London is to remain London, then the street must usually be regarded as more important than any individual new building.
The practice that is most successfully making a specialty of this is the Rolfe Judd partnership. Their building at 68 Cornhill, near the Bank of England, was singled out for praise by the Prince of Wales in his book and television program A Vision of Britain.
Judd says, "We don't have a house style. We respond to context. We try to reflect the materials of neighboring buildings. It's like the adage "The best-dressed man is the one who doesn't stand out in a crowd."
Dick Dickenson, the partner responsible for 68 Cornhill, sees himself taking up themes from architects like Lutyens, Joass, and Holden, who designed many of the best office and bank buildings in London during the first four decades of the century.
"There was an extraordinary subtlety and sophistication there, killed off by the Modern Movement," says Dickenson.
The Victorian and Edwardian architects who gave the City of London its character, like their American counterparts, were constantly playing the game of adapting the classical orders--Doric, Ionic, Corinthian--to ever-taller buildings.
One solution, typified in New York's Cast-Iron District, was to give each story its own row of columns. But while it is easy to make copies in cast iron, carving endless capitals in stone would be an expensive business. So more often than not, architects have followed the style of Michelangelo and Palladio by constructing giant columns fronting two or more stories.
Extra stories could be introduced in the base, or by adding an attic story above the main cornice. Sometimes it was possible to design a cornice so massive that an extra row of windows could be contrived within it.
Severely Geometric
The other
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