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Architecture and Urban Design
Keith Bradley is senior partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, based in Bath, UK. Bradley led FCBS's best known work, the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Housing Project in Cambridge. He's also worked on major urban regeneration schemes, public museums, galleries and academic buildings.
In this talk, Bradley explores FCBS's Manchester School Of Art extension building, completed in April 2013. He discusses the evolution of the design, which includes a vertical gallery space where students can showcase their work, an interactive hybrid studio intended to foster creative collaboration between students from different disciplines and triple height columns with a relief cast decorative detail inspired by the textiles of Lewis Day, who taught at the school a century ago. Manchester School Of Art was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize.
CD-ROM / 2014 / 37 minutes
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Architectural historian Iain Borden is Vice-Dean at the Bartlett School Of Architecture. His work focuses less on architecture with a capital A, than on everyday spaces and buildings, from bus benches and bill boards to food stalls in Japan.
In this talk, Borden discusses urban space as a social product. Applying the theoretical approach of Henri Lefebvre, he explores how different people experience the city, focusing on skateboarders, car drivers and the French film-maker Jacques Tati.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 45 minutes
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Peter Eisenman was born in New Jersey and studied architecture at Cornell University (1951 - 1955), Columbia University (1959 - 1960) and Cambridge, England (1966 - 1963). He taught at Cambridge until 1967, then at Princeton for a year, followed by brief spells at Cooper Union, New York, the American Academy in Rome and the University of Maryland, and then at Harvard. But it was as founder-director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, from 1967 - 1982, that he had the greatest influence. It provided a forum for discussion and became the most public and polemic voice on the East coast, extending its influence through its learned magazine "Oppositions", launched in 1973, which Eisenman edited during the decade of its existence, as well as through its monthly newspaper "Skyline".
Eisenman ran his own practice during these years and exhibited in, or organised exhibitions in the USA, Italy and England, dealing with urban design and renewal, housing, Rationalism, drawing, as well as showing the houses he has designed. In this talk he says that, whereas Post Modernism simulates a fervour for simulation and a return to history, he seeks to create a "topos", a place for invention, not representing anything, just being. He illustrates this with his most recent work, the building won in competition for the Ohio State Visual Art Center in Columbus, Ohio. This project, he says, invents its origins, its site, its program, even its history, thus being an act of dissimulation; and it invents its own representation, thus becoming a text, a record of its own history, the history of the act of making the architecture.
CD-ROM / 29 minutes
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The late Gino Valle was Italian- born and reared in Udine, and trained as an architect in Venice and at Harvard. He took over his father's practice in Udine after World War II, and remained there in partnership with his sister Nani Valle Bellavitis.
From 1977 he was also Professor of Architecture at Venice University Institute of Architecture. He was one of the few post-war Italian architects who remained outside politics or fashion. As he says, he did what had to be done at that moment. He expresses common sense and continuity in his work, which may account for the durable quality of his buildings both visually and technologically.
The significance of his architectural language rests upon a methodology of design and the fact that he composes with modules of human activities as well as of form carefully related to the urban environment. All this is explained in his talk as he describes some of the many buildings he completed, most of them in the region around Udine.
CD-ROM / 29 minutes
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The late Sir Denys Lasdun evolved an architectural approach and vocabulary now widely recognised, and which can be seen in his major post-war works. He was awarded Britain's Royal Gold Medal in 1977, and a Knighthood in 1976.
In his talk he explains that he subscribes to a set of ideas relevant to himself, reasonable in quality and which engage with history. These ideas are about an architecture of urban landscape, which is an extension of the city or the landscape and which indeed seek to promote and extend human relationships. His buildings are related to other buildings which may be close in space however far off in time, but they do not make stylistic concessions to the past. The buildings in fact are often a metaphor for landscape and he tries to express this through a visual organisation of 'strata' and towers.
As the architectural historian William Curtis has pointed out in "A Language & A Theme" (RIBA Publications, 1976), this architecture of urban landscape turns its back on the transience and brashness of a merely mechanistic world, and tries to elicit basic responses and to unearth fundamental human meanings.
CD-ROM / 26 minutes
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Reared in Alaska, Laurie Olin studied architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. He added urban design and landscape when he started to practice in Philadelphia with Robert Hanna. Most of his work has been in the public sector. Olin has also been active in teaching and lecturing and is a Professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Distrusting the idea of a personal style, he discusses the limitations to what landscape architects can achieve but on the positive side, where they get their ideas from. He aims to present the most natural things in the most unnatural way. Among his many completed landscape projects are the open spaces at Canary Wharf in London and the new Esplanade for Battery Park City in New York which has added breathing space to the area west of the World Trade Center.
Recorded against background sounds, in the Furness Library of the Graduate School of Fine Arts, at the University of Pennsylvania.
CD-ROM / 35 minutes
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Louis Kahn, one of the most admired second generation modernists, came to prominence later in life, producing a clutch of influential building before his sudden death in 1974.
This interview, one of a series conducted by architectural publisher John Peter, was recorded in 1961 at Kahn's architectural office. During the design of his Trent Bath House, Kahn had a realisation about the hierarchy of space that would become central to his work. Here he discusses the distinction between served and serving spaces both in architecture and urban design (in particular the architecture of the street which Kahn terms viaduct architecture), and the need for new rules for the making of cities.
CD-ROM / 54 minutes
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The Canadian born architect Rick Mather, who has had his own practice in London since 1973, trained in Oregon in the 1950s and at the AA Department of Planning and Urban Design in the mid-1960s. He has taught at the AA and Central London Polytechnic and his work has been widely published and presented.
He is an architect of modern buildings. Of his approach he describes four main aims: to design buildings which make a positive contribution to the city; buildings that are low in energy consumption; buildings that are, above all, interesting and exciting for the user to enjoy; and designs that exploit the technology of glass.
His innovative use of glass, exploring its structural and sensuous qualities, is a hallmark of his work, especially in the series of spectacular Zen restaurants in London, Hong Kong and Montreal.
CD-ROM / 36 minutes
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The British architect Richard MacCormac trained at Cambridge in the 1960s and is the senior partner in the London practice MacCormac Jamieson Prichard & Wright. In 1988 we recorded him talking about his design for Spitalfields, an area to the east of the City of London, a project which sadly was never built.
Since that time, he has been President of the RIBA and responsible for setting up its very successful Architecture Centre, while at the same time he has continued to design buildings for educational establishments. He uses four of these to illustrate this talk.
But he describes his sub-theme as being "about the power of ideas which are outside the obvious description of the architectural problem or the brief for each of them. To some extent these are historical ideas and to some extent they are rather unexpected; but in each case they are formative". This is not to say that the practical exigencies of the projects did not exist, each in their way highly exacting in terms of the purposes they fulfil. But, he says, "that's another story".
CD-ROM / 30 minutes
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Terry Farrell, born just before World War II, received his education as architect and planner at Durham University and the University of Pennsylvania then worked in the USA and England before becoming partner with Nick Grimshaw in the Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership* in 1965. This partnership was dissolved in 1980, since when Farrell has headed the Terry Farrell Partnership based in London. He has taught and lectured in Britain, America and Germany, has written in many leading architectural magazines, and is hailed as Britain's leading Post Modernist.
His work has taken on, he says, a more plastic form since 1980 as can be seen in the buildings he describes in his recorded talk ranging from curvaceous plastic greenhouses to fanciful interiors, from simple houses and small factories to sleek industrial buildings, culminating in the most notorious building of the 80's in London, the building for the new independent breakfast-TV organisation, "TV-am". Of this creation the client stated publicly "Terry created something out of nothing - out of a grotty nineteenth century garage in Camden backland. He has rediscovered delight."
CD-ROM
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Derek Walker, after six years as Chief Architect and Planner in Britain's Milton Keynes New Town, is now in private practice designing buildings in the UK, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and the USA. He blames current attitudes to land-use planning for the "sterility, blandness and lack of variety" in recent city developments, and would like to see instead what he calls a circular three-dimensional process with an urban designer in charge of it.
He confesses to preoccupations with the manipulation of major landscapes, as well as a continuing love-affair with detail. In his talk he illustrates examples of his work, from early buildings in the north of England to a recent building design in New York in conjunction with Norman Foster; and some imaginative building projects for Milton Keynes, done as a private practitioner, which include a city park, a sculpture park, a city club, and the recently completed central shopping building.
CD-ROM / 25 minutes
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Architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown got married in 1967, and have practised architecture together ever since.
Venturi was born in Philadelphia and trained at Princeton University and the American Academy in Rome. Between 1950 and 1958 he worked with O. Stonorov, Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn before setting up on his own with Cope and Lippincot and Short. In 1964 he was joined by John Rauch and in 1967 by Denise Scott Brown, the three of them together still. His book "Complexity *& Contradiction", published in 1966, won him worldwide recognition.
Scott Brown was born in Zambia and trained at the University Of The Witwatersrand, the AA and the University of Pennsylvania. She worked in various practices in London, Rome and Johannesburg before moving to the USA. She was the widow of architect Robert Scott Brown when she married Venturi.
Both Venturi and Scott Brown have taught and exhibited all over America, the practice winning many awards including the AIA Gold Medal. Both have written extensively about the amazing and contradictory landscape of built America, about the inclusion of the ordinary, about the richness of architectural meaning through the adaptation of conventional forms and through pattern, and about issues of social conditions in their relation to architecture and planning.
All this is elucidated in their talk, illustrated by some of their current work, ranging from an urban plan to a mosque, to a house, to a teapot. In all that they design, the form and spatial quality are very simple, direct and conventional, with the aesthetic excitement coming from the ornamentation, from contrasted scales and from ambiguity.
CD-ROM / 39 minutes
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Leon Krier was born in Luxembourg in 1946. He studied briefly at Stuttgart University, but his basic architectural education come from his older brother Rob Krier and his practical experience was in the offices of James Stirling in London and J.P. Kleihuis in Berlin. After 1974 he worked on his own in London and in close association with Maurice Culot (the Belgian architectural historian, teacher at La Cambre School and member of the ARAU research group). He has taught at the AA school and the Royal College of Art in London, and at Princeton University, and his published theories and designs have had great influence.
He says that "his projects are a series of polemical statements, reflections on the specific structure of the European city and opposing the global destruction of European culture through industrialisation". Briefly, he champions the "quarter" of the limited size as the basic of urban design - the "close-knit scene of community life and loyalties" - as opposed to the dogma of zoning, and the treatment of buildings as solutions to individual needs regardless of their relationship to their surroundings.
In this talk, he outlines simple design precepts and then demonstrates their application in his proposal for the redevelopment of a part of Stockholm, an area to the south of the historical centre.
CD-ROM / 23 minutes
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Architect Rob Krier, born and reared in Luxembourg and later Munich, has taken Austrian nationality and, since 1976, practised in Vienna where he is also a Professor and Dean in the Technical University. His book "Stadtraum In Theorie & Praxis" in 1975, analysing urban space systems, brought him instant recognition. His main goal is the establishment of articulated space in cities.
He seeks to reproduce the quality of public life of older cities which he misses in modern cities; and to rediscover the essence, scale, architectural organisation and geometry of the house in relation to itself and to the city. In his talk he adds that he wants to build in such a simple way that the man in the street can understand what he is doing. Work on low-cost housing is, for him, the most fulfilling as it concerns people's everyday life.
Though he uses classical categories in defining urban spaces - squares, courtyards, porticoes, streets - he rejects utterly fashions or isms in architecture. Historical spatial experience is introduced as a new concept - for example, in the Ritterstrasse housing. In a short statement in German at the end of the talk he despairs of the ugliness of modern cities. But he is dedicated to the struggle for truth and beauty and finds solace in his sculpture and beautiful drawings, some of which are shown in these images.
CD-ROM / 22 minutes
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Moshe Safdie's international fame began with his Habitat housing scheme in Montreal, completed for Expo '67. Since then he has worked in many countries other than Canada - USA, Puerto Rico, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Iran - and has offices in Montreal, Boston, Baltimore and Jerusalem. At the time of this talk he directed the Urban Design Program at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Born and reared in Israel, Safdie returned to that country in 1969. Now Jerusalem boasts a completed monumental building designed by him - the Rabbinical College near the Western Wall - and several lesser works; whilst other important projects have been undertaken since 1979, including the Western Wall Precinct and the outstanding recently completed Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial) project.
He discusses his work before 1980 in this recording (extracted from a talk he gave to the Royal Institute of British Architects in May 1979).
CD-ROM / 28 minutes
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The work of 10 Californian architects seen through the eyes of Cedric Price and Ron Herron at an exhibition in the RIBA Heinz Gallery in 1992.
Biographies of the 10 Californian architects in alphabetical order:
Rebecca L. Binder, FAIA
Rebecca Binder was born in 1951 in New Jersey. She received her master's degree in architecture from the University of California in Los Angeles, after first earning a degree in literature and studying in England. She has won many national design awards and is widely published. She states "my work is constantly evolving, derivative of modern precedents and cognizant of contextual influence and style". She has taught in Italy and is a professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) in Santa Monica.
Arthur Dyson, AIA
Born in 1940 in Southern California, Arthur Dyson was educated at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Oklahoma. At the age of 16 he apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright. Following his Taliesin studies, he apprenticed with Bruce Goff and William Gray Purcell. He states that his intent is "to create building that are appropriate to the site, climate and time and are relevant to the client's vision and dreams". While concerned with technical efficiency, environmental appreciation is expressed in the association of materials, colours and texture, light and shadow. He frequently uses common and inexpensive materials and construction techniques in new forms, textures and rhythms which extend their intended limits. Dyson practices in the agricultural central valley of Fresno, California. His designs have received international recognition and awards, and he has been published extensively.
Steven Ehrlich, AIA
Steven Ehrlich was born in 1946 in New York. After receiving his architecture degree from Reinsurer Polytechnic Institute in New York, he joined the Peace Corps Architecture and Planning Office in Marrakech, and worked with the Moroccan Office of Planning and Housing for two years. Continuing his stay in Africa, he taught architecture at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. A modernist greatly influenced by the African culture, Ehrlich returned to the United States where he settled with his family to practice in Venice, California. He considers himself an "architectural anthropologist" between social traditions.
Joseph Esherick, FAIA
Born in 1914, Joseph Esherick is an internationally known designer and educator and a leading practitioner of the San Francisco Bay Area style of architecture. He is the winner of an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1989 for work as "an outstanding designer, and educator steeped in the arts, and a humanist with deep concern for the preservation of the profession of architecture and our society". He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 1952 and has been the Chair of the College of Environmental Design and Department of Architecture. Currently a founding partner in the firm Esherick, Homsey, Dodge and Davis, he is an architect whose goal is "to create wonderful places for people".
Ray Kappe, FAIA
Born in 1927, Ray Kappe's work is a long tradition of architectural excellence. His work is internationally recognized and appreciated for careful, conscientious planning and a commitment to his community. Kappe was the founding Chairperson of the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, and he was instrumental in the formation of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ABC) where he served as a professor, founding director and member of the board of directors. Additionally, he won the California Council of the American Institute of Architects award of excellence for the SCI-ARC school building. Kappe has been elected to the College of Fellows by the AIA, and is actively involved in civic design and planning issues. His design philosophy is "that the major forms of architecture are a response to user needs, the development of space, the relationship to site and environment, and the ordering of structure and materials".
Kendrick Bangs Kellog
Born in 1934, Kendrick Kellog is a native Californian from San Diego who grew up in the beach community and on a horse ranch. Following his education at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Southern California and the University of Colorado, Kellog returned to San Diego where he has been active since the 1960s in architecture, zoning, building and design standards on a state and national level. His work has been widely published in the United States, Europe and Japan where his unique combinations of material, environment, sensitivity and curvilinear designs have attracted strong attention. Kellog is related to Fredrick Law Olmstead, the "father of landscape architecture" who in the 1800s significantly broke from the firm, symmetrical patterns of the time to produce curvilinear, irregular landscape patterns. This practice is continued in the work of Kendrick Kellog today.
John Lautner, FAIA
Los Angeles architect John Lautner was born in 1911. Throughout his sixty year career, his distinctive projects continue to push beyond what has been done before. He states "that each project was the best solution for the challenges it presented and did not result from prevailing style, fad or (his) earlier designs". Following a liberal arts education, Lautner left his native Michigan and joined Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1933. He established his own practice in burgeoning Los Angeles during the 1940s. He chose the architecture profession because "it is the most all-inclusive kind of profession you can pursue: it includes everything in life". His accomplishments have been marked by innovations that he partially attributes to his knowledge of construction practices and materials. Lautner is outspoken in his love of good architecture, and regarding his work: "I choose to be continuously growing with real ideas contributing to real architecture".
Donald William MacDonald, FAIA
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1935, Donald MacDonald received his bachelor's degree at the University of Oklahoma (1962) and his master's degree in Architecture from Columbia University (1963). MacDonald moved to San Francisco to teach at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1967 he began his own practice, and has received numerous awards and recognition for his innovative urban design, mixed use complexes and housing for the homeless. According to MacDonald "architecture must deal with the whole of society, and concern for the common man is part of great architecture". MacDonald has been the impetus behind and helped to fund and curate the 10 Californian Architects exhibition.
Charles Moore, FAIA
Born in 1925, Charles Moore has been an internationally acclaimed architect for over four decades. He received the Gold Metal in 1991 from the American Institute of Architects in recognition of unfailing pursuit of design excellence, education, and professionalism. His work, writing, and teaching have had a profound influence on American architecture. Committed to education as well as to practice, he has taught continuously for the last forty years. He was Dean of architecture at Yale and chairperson at the University of California at Berkeley. He has co-authored seven books on architecture, and illustrated the children's story Beauty and the Beast. Throughout his work, he has retained a deep appreciation for the uniqueness of the places where he is asked to build.
CD-ROM / 41 minutes
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The Dutch architect N. John Habraken was born in Indonesia and trained at Delft University, where he also taught from 1958 - 1960. After five years of practice in Holland he became Director of the Architects' Research Foundation (SAR) in Eindhoven. Concurrently he was Chairman of the Department of Architecture and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Eindhoven's Technical University, until he left for America in 1975 to become Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was still working in 1985.
He is author of several books and many articles on urban design and mass housing, in which he proposed using prefabricated "support structures" which could be individually filled in and given identity by the users. It was to further these ideas that the SAR was formed.
His studies have continued in America, and in his talk he discusses the built environment and identifies the three ways in which it can be seen. One has to do with territorial order, one has to do with enclosure and resources, and one has to do with personal expression; three networks of social inter-connection that are inseparable and that need to be understood.
CD-ROM / 28 minutes
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In his recorded talk, Terry Farrell concentrates on that aspect of his work to do with transportation systems and their connectedness to other parts of the cites they are in, and how this can be improved by their design. He describes work already completed and work as yet incomplete or still on the drawing board at the time of the recording. Farrell has always been fascinated by the problems of transportation, even for his student thesis; and he tells us of later ideas he has promoted: for linking railway stations across the River Thames, for example, so as to provide double access for passengers. He is a great proponent of travel for pleasure and in this category we have the huge symbolic structure he was completing on Hong Kong's 'Peak', reached by a cable-drawn tram much enjoyed by tourists. Also for Hong Kong is the Kowloon railway station which will rise on reclaimed land and will connect to the new airport, the Metro and local lines. But the most integrated piece of transportation design that he has been involved in is for a transport centre for Seoul airport, the arrival and departure point for all passengers by whatever method of transport, and is highly specialised in its relationship with air travel. Terry Farrell received his architecture education at Durham University and the University of Pennsylvania. Before setting up his own practice in London he was in partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw from 1965-1980. He is a master of three-dimensional planning and has built many very large scale buildings in Britain.
CD-ROM
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The architect Neave Brown, born 1929, qualified at the AA School of Architecture, and worked with Lyons Israel & Ellis for three years. But the peak period of his life was when he worked for the London Borough of Camden, and was selected to design and build the huge Alexandra Road housing estate, against enormous political opposition.
The prototype for this and all the other schemes he describes in this recording, was a terrace of identical houses he built for himself and four friends. These are structured in section and in plan responding to the priority of sequences of privacy and public life.
All his work is dominated by strong ideas of social structuring and the recognition of the inter-related identity of all the pieces in a project, while at the same time solving the problem of architectural and urban composition.
His talk is equivalent to a primer in how to design housing at any scale.
CD-ROM / 43 minutes
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The British architect Richard MacCormac trained at Cambridge University in the early 1960s and, after some travel in the USA and practical experience in England, established his own practice in London in 1969. He is now senior partner in MacCormac Jamieson Prichard and Wright. Concurrently he has always been involved in architectural education, mainly at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, which has led to a series of important university commissions in England. He has published many articles on urban design, housing and architectural history, and he is a member of Britain's Royal Fine Art Commission.
The largest and most recent urban design scheme that he has undertaken, together with a developer and the architects The Fitzroy Robinson Partnership, is for Spitalfields, an area on the edge of the City of London. There were three contending proposals, but MacCormac's was the one selected.
In his recorded talk he distinguishes between what he calls "foreign" and "local" urban transactions. "Foreign" are those that do not relate to the locality (banking, warehousing, factories, etc.), "local" are those that do (shopping, eating and drinking, housing, etc.). He explains how he has reconciled these public and private interests in his design for Spitalfields.
CD-ROM / 26 minutes
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