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Jewel of the Thames
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20092 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
1,998 Words |
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
London has a magnificent new landmark crowning one of the best of all views of the river Thames. Whether you stand on West mister Bridge or Waterloo Bridge, the silhouette of Terry Farrell's Embankment Place building over Charing Cross Station forms a new climax to the whole riverfront from the Houses of Parliament to Somerset House.
The view is exhilarating, precisely because this stretch of the Thames is so wide, the north side scoured continuously over the centuries by the weight of the descending current and the incoming tide.
It was here that Farrell had the opportunity to build. What matched him particularly with the task was his keen eye for twenties and thirties architecture, leading him to draw resonance from neighboring buildings in a way no other architect working in London would have done. The new offices had to be big enough an distinct enough to hold their own among powerful neighbors, and large enough to support the huge costs of building over a railway terminus in constant use.
Yet nowhere do feelings about bulky new buildings run higher than on the Thames. Farrell's clients, Greycoats, however, went to him because, among all the rising stars in British architecture, he is the one with the two qualities most essential for this site a sense of context and a sense of scale. Terry Farrell is an architect who positively enjoys working with large masses. So much of twentieth-century architecture has concentrated on the character of spaces rather than the walls and roofs that enclose them. The desire for lightness and openness has meant that the tallest buildings are often intended to appear the most ethereal or insubstantial.
Farrell is a master of spatial planning, whether of outdoor urban space or intriguing sequences of rooms, but it is his ability to make mass and weight a positive virtue that singles him out from virtually all his contemporaries. In a real sense Farrell is a modern-day counterpart of Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace. The parallel life not only in the dramatic marshaling of extraordinary volumes of masonry, but in the wonderful effects concentrated on the skyline. It lies too in a love of emphasis or exaggeration. "I like repetition, even obsessive repetition," he enthuses.
What makes embankment Place so startling is the sheer extent to which Farrell has been able to marry two completely different building types-the arched steel roof of the railway terminus and the layered, repetitive
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