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Avery Associates Architects
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There was, however, far more to MOMI than constructional ingenuity, not least an almost uncanny ability to cope with difficult sites. Amidst the cramped, unprepossessing location under Waterloo Bridge, Avery sought to regulate the construction with 'ideal' geometric proportions and, simultaneously, to forge an architectural language that echoed both the image-conscious glamour of film and the serial repetition of the still frames from which moving images are conjured. What is most revealing is not so much that this improbable synthesis was achieved, but that it was attempted at all: It is in such conjunctions of apparent opposites that clues to understanding Avery's sometimes bewilderingly various output are to be found.
Avery's synthetic architectural imagination has deep roots. As a student he learned to fuse a Beaux-Arts attitude to composition with a thoroughly Modern determination to work in the 'nature' of materials, and developed what has proved to be a lifelong admiration for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. He shares with Wright an occasional fascination with unorthodox triangular geometries, but for the most part the influence has been completely assimilated. The vast spiralling mounds proposed for the Millennium site at Greenwich and in Green Park seem to echo Wright's spiralling 'automobile objective' that eventually proved to be the unwitting primer for the Guggenheim Museum, but there are equally obvious, and more local, precedents in Neolithic earthworks.
Postgraduate study at Essex under two of the rising stars of British architectural education, Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely, deepened Avery's love of architectural history and introduced him to the phenomenological ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger that were later to prove so widely influential. These emphasised the 'relatedness' of architecture to the human subject, to programmatic content, and to physical and social contexts - qualities widely downplayed in mainstream High Tech.
It was at Essex, also, that Avery fell in love with circular buildings such as San Stefano Rotundo, Santa Constanza and Bramane's Tempietto in Rome, not to mention the even more exotic delights of the Teatro Maritimo at Hadrian's Villa, and these would later serve as primers for projects as various as the Dubai Imax cinema and the small but powerful arts building at Oakham School. Similarly, an unbuilt theatre by Inigo Jones eventually provided the springboard for one of the UK's most highly acclaimed recent auditoria, the Vanbrugh Theatre at RADA, while the space-expanding mirrors discovered in the Salle des Glaces at Versailles came to mind when renewing the performance space in the Royal Overseas League.
It was at Essex, also, that Avery developed his fascination with the work of that quintessentially English architect, Sir John Soane. By hiding structure, slashing unexpected vistas through his sections, concealing sources of natural light, and multiplying the resulting effects with mirrors, Soane brought to architecture the variety of the Picturesque landscape and bequeathed to Avery a repertoire of ideas that have informed many of his most successful projects. From the mirror-enhanced interiors of Plantation House and Charterhouse Mews to the drama of the taut cleft between the swelling auditoria at RADA that is animated, on mid-summer's day, by a raking shaft of sun that slices through the space to illuminate a bust of George Bernard Shaw, Soane's influence is pervasive.
The apparently bewildering variety of Avery's work is not, however, attributable primarily to his wide-ranging love of architectural history - a fascination that can all too easily lead to the shallow eclecticism typical of much recent architecture - but rather to his determination to address each commission on its own terms, not simply passing it through the filter of a personal style. Avery's 'style' is not a predetermined formal language or familiar 'look', but a way of working that begins with a close interrogation of brief and site, seeking to find there the stimulus for something new and particular. Like a landscape designer following Alexander Pope's celebrated advice, Avery seeks to 'consult the genius of the place in all'.
For Avery, the 'in all' qualities of programme and site are notably far-reaching, embracing not only the physical character of the locale, but also its 'spirit', mediated by imagination and memory. He may love the unifying simplicity of circular geometries, but is always alert to inflections that can tie project to place. Formally, his repertoire ranges from abstractions derived from the immediate landscape - as, for example, in the cliff-like forms proposed for the Turner Museum at Margate - to a rich range of responses to complex urban sites.
In the competition project for the Channel 4 television headquarters, for example, the principal facade was conceived as an almost independent screen of Avery's familiar angled glazing (of which more below); the secondary side elevations were to be 'greened' with foliage; and to the rear an arc of stone addressed a civilised crescent of cafes and shops.
A recent project for offices adjacent to the Old Bailey is similarly inflected to mediate the contrasting scales of the adjacent courts with a surviving fragment of the City's Roman wall to the rear, generating in the process an intriguingly bent atrium - an elegant and novel inflection of an often cliched form. The principal elevation is to be furnished with groups of balcony-like projecting windows, while to the rear deeply recessed openings will maintain vision through a plant-covered wall courtesy of a boldly projecting stainless steel 'ruff'.
Finally, at Neathouse Place, where most architects, like its original designers, would see the need only for a 'universal' shaft articulated, if at all, by considerations of solar control, Avery again deployed two contrasting window forms. Addressing Victoria Station is the angled glazing explored in several earlier projects, while to the other side you discover a procession of facetted oriels. Both, unusually for an office building, combine technical issues - daylight penetration and solar control - with experiential opportunities: the oriels draw the eye towards a glimpse of nearby Westminster Cathedral, while the unequal planes of the angled glazing are calculated to frame the sky and direct the gaze down to the public space of the street below. Avery's use of angled glazing is one of the many ways in which he seeks to interrelate buildings and users.
Not least amongst these is an almost atavistic desire to engage our bodies and widely shared cultural memories in the shaping and experience of architecture, hence his love of large-scale earthworks and fascination with buildings conceived as surrogates for, or abstractions of, land forms.
Several urban projects - one thinks immediately of the competition designs for the Cardiff Opera House and Museum of Scotland - appear as constructed landscapes, while Avery's abstractions of land forms range from the almost minimalist expression of a new office building near Euston Station, rendered as a sedimentary block of stone riven by a quartz vein - to the place-specific narrative developed for a Central Area Development in Kolkata in India. There, the complex was cast as an abstract representation of the floodplains, tea-growing terraces and snow-capped Himalaya of West Bengal.
What is implicit, ultimately, in all these projects is an invitation, in the heart of the city, to renew our relationship with Nature - a relationship at once physical and cerebral. Its importance and scope Avery came to understand early, as a boy growing up in the New Forest, and it remains central to his most potent theoretical projects, from the visionary Wilderness City to the proposal for a network of Ecological Beacons to stand watch, like ancient megaliths, over our global environmental impacts.
This Romantic love of landscape is matched by a Classical concern with systems of proportion, and he breathed surprising life into this perennially vexed issue with an original and provocative speculation - first published in the Architectural Review - about the possibility that the seemingly universal appeal of the Golden Rectangle may lie in the physical economy of human vision.
The unrealised Rank Xerox Headquarters of 1991 promised his most thoroughgoing exercise in geometric control, with 2:1 and 1:1 rhythms ordering everything from the intervals between buildings to the proportions of spaces and details. And Pantheon-like, the volume of the Jerwood Theatre at RADA is described by a double sphere, while the new elevation forms a Golden Rectangle. For the most part, however, it is only in small interiors - such as those in Plantation House and Charterhouse Mews - and in the detailing of elements such as windows, that he has been able to fully realise his ideal. At the Old Bailey offices, for example, the recessed windows change proportion, courtesy of their deep, raking cills, from a Golden Rectangle to a double square.
To those who no longer believe in the value of systems of proportion, such ingenuity may seem beside the point, especially - they might argue - as the vicissitudes of perspective mean that the direct apprehension of 'ideal' proportions is usually far from easy. And yet we seem to sense in spaces conceived with such care, from the grandeur of the Pantheon to Sigurd Lewerentz's diminutive Resurrection Chapel at Stockholm's Woodland Crematorium, a life-enhancing calm and composure.
We may no longer believe that our bodies are shadows of some ideal geometric figure - as most famously depicted by Leonardo da Vinci - but the feeling of gentle control and inter-relatedness that carefully studied proportions can bring has been a perennial tactic in the search for beauty and that attendant reciprocity between subject and object that lies at the heart of aesthetic experience.
For the Neo-Platonists of the Renaissance, 'ideal' geometries were means to deeply human ends, and similar concerns inform Bryan Avery's work across the entire scale of architectural endeavour. His range is almost unique in recent British, if not world architecture, and he has won acclaim for graphic and product design as well as buildings and planning. Inventions such as the now ubiquitous office uplighter were quickly exploited by manufacturers in contravention of his patent - confirming the impossibility, without vast financial resources, of protecting something so self-evidently useful.
Other ideas, like the continually renewed and enriched project he calls Wilderness City, probably struck many as hopelessly ambitious when first proposed, and attracted interest from geographers before architects. Twenty years on, with the global environmental crisis looming large in the collective consciousness, his ideas on urban intensification and rural
de-settlement now seem universally and urgently relevant.
In an era of specialisation, when architects increasingly devote themselves to a particular sector of work such as housing, health or education, Avery's eagerness to range freely within and beyond the supposed limits of the discipline is both refreshing and, one suspects, as professionally precarious as his refusal to promote a 'signature' style. But such, surely, was always the way of the twentieth century's major architects: What they envisaged was a new and better world, not merely new buildings, a 'total architecture' - to borrow a phrase from Walter Gropius - whose scope embraced every aspect of how we construct a shared world.
Ironically, in countries dominated by ephemeral media and the machinations of global capital, the scope of architecture seems to be diminishing just as the societal and environmental challenges are expanding exponentially. Against this background, Avery's work remains a beacon of hope, inviting us to reject the foreclosing of the discipline around questions of style, and to marshal our technical and aesthetic resources to address the major issues of our time.
No single project, arguably, better sums up Avery's lifelong concerns than his design for the British Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Responding to the Expo's theme of 'better city, better life' Avery proposed a poetic distillation of Britain's most influential contribution to urbanism and landscape - the Garden City and Landscape Garden. The support spaces were to be housed in an ivy-covered base that filled the available site and supported various archetypal gardens - rose, cottage, herb, etc. - through which ran a Picturesquely meandering path.
At the centre of the roof-top 'park' was to be a lake, and in the lake a mysterious glass island, housing the main exhibition and shaped like a dream-distorted memory of the British coastline or the white cliffs of Dover. As visitors approached, the island was to be shrouded by artificial fog and protected by choppy water; after this momentary disorientation, they would be admitted across a metal grid rising from under the water and through an automatically-opened parting in the glass walls.
Had it been realised, Avery's richly-evocative pavilion might well have proved to be Britain's most significant contribution to the architecture of such events since Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace sheltered the Great Exhibition of 1851. The contrast between the two is telling: Whereas Paxton gave dazzling expression to the global aspirations of the world's dominant power and, more broadly, of an emerging technological civilization, Avery proposed to harness advanced technology in the service of a vision of our re-engagement with Nature. Rooted in the perennial British concern with the particular and the local, this fusion of the ecological and the technological, the pragmatic and the poetic, epitomises Avery's growing body of work and offers a compelling architectural vision for the 21st century.
By Richard Weston
This is an abreviated version of an article that will appear in the forthcoming book "Fragments of Wilderness City" by Blackdog Publishing (see news).
Avery Associates Architects © 2009 |
