Beilei Ren

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Different Shades of Publicness

This week I am really interested in the idea of different shades of publicness, especially in the Royal Festival Hall. With multiple entrances and multiple staircases, a wider public is welcome to engage with the building. And various platforms are created for people to encounter with each other, creating different shades of publicness. The same idea of “meeting” space can also be applied on residential projects. With the interest on this idea, I worked with to other students and made video for the Odhams Walk, which is a residential project in Soho. In our video, we are interested in the corridor space connecting every residential unit and also the “meeting” space created especially for people to encounter. Please have fun and see who is the one in red socks and red umbrella!  

A photo of the staircase and platform in Royal Festival Hall:

The video explaining different shades of publicness in the Odhams Walk:

The frames of the key moments in the video:

A drawing explaining how the corridor/ platform space related with domestic life:

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Churchill Garden as a respond to the Greater Plan of London

This week I made some sketches to explain how Churchill Garden as an after war project responded to the idea in Abercrombie and Farshall’s the Greater London plan.

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The Inter-war Period and Emigre Architects

This week I’d like to summarize the content covered in class as a review. 

Art Deco and Charles Holden

Art Deco is the art movement happening before Modernism, starting from an international exhibition taking place in Paris in1925. The exhibition attempted to celebrating industrialization by decorating industrial products, such as the iron frame of Eiffel Tower. With these decorations, buildings functioned as a tool to brand for certain companies for the first time, which was profound as a respond to the need of communication in post-industrialization time. 

Charles Holden, who designed a series of buildings as tube stations in diverse forms, is one of the followers of the idea of Art Deco. His experimental design of stations resembled the design of churches by Wren in 1670s. The design was challenging to be required to build on the existing railway and to have the main entrance facing to motor ways, similar with the limitations from existing property lines in Wren’s case. Secondly, monumental features were applied to the buildings to attract people fa away, similar as the portland stone that was used for the tower of St. Mary-Le-Bow. In this way of design, the buildings, responding to the idea of Art Deco, served as a tool to communicate with the public and brand for the London underground company. Thirdly, brick and concrete were combined, like brick and portland stone were used for churches, indicating that the stations were considered as new urban “churches” with the impact from industrialization. Above all, the tube stations became new social centers gathering people and conveying information. 

There were other buildings practicing with the idea of Art Deco around this time. The Senate House by Charles Holden, applying geometric decoration to express the bran identity of the building. The Battersea Power Station, as an industrial facility itself, was express as new urban cathedral with geometric decorations and monumental features suck as the chimney with fluted shaft. 

Transition

The Peckham Health Center, which was commissioned by two doctors with to two engineers marked the transition point from Art Deco to Modernism, The two doctors, bearing with the idea of reconsidering the medical profession as not only a curative one but also a preventative one, commissioned the engineers to construct a building for their new social agenda. The engineers, with modern building technology, provides technical support for the construction. In this case, the intellectual part concerning social issues and the technical part supporting construction were still separated, which were brought together by the architects of Modernism. 

Early  Modernism

With the emergence of groups like MARS and CIAM, Modernism came to the stage with an idea of breaking the boundaries of nations and came up with the international style intending to be applied on different context. Dealing with political and social problems, the modernist attempted to merge the social and technical together for the first time, considering them both crucial for architects. However, their works were not welcomed in Britain, criticized that they were against national values and lacking respect local traditions. Some of these architects were immigrant from Soviet Union, others were from Germany, who came to London for work. Although not welcomed, they did practice with some projects locally. The first example is Pullman Court, provides affordable flats for deprives class and also a pool for people to socialize. In terms of construction, piloti were designed to realize a light-weight structure, leaving space for people to circulate. The boundaries between private and public was also redefined in this project. The other example is Isokon flat by Well Coates in 1934, designed a oceanliner-like for communal living. In these projects, the architects experimented with the ways peoples live and the project became an urban laboratory, which were not so welcome by the locals, however still marked the milestone moment in architecture history

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“No Style” Became the Argument

This week I am interested in the idea that from the early 20th century, styles no longer responded to political agendas and a combination of styles became the fashion. Especially for the colonial projects, the vernacular and the imperial were intentionally combined to obtain maximum engagement with the local people as well as control over them. Si I made a collage based on the Vice Roy’s Palace by Lutyens in Delhi as one of the most symbolic architecture in his New Delhi project to create a new capital in 1910-30. In the collage, several architecture with Roman elements as well as the chajja from Hindu temples are applied, showing different styles encountering in this project.

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All Saint Margaret Street

This week I’d like to share two videos made by me of All Saint, Margaret Street in London, which celebrates one version of the Gothic Revival. There will be one about the exterior and one about the interior. The video is interested in the structural polychromy expressing the structure, contradicting with the previous ones hiding the structure such as College Hill. Brick is used as primary material for this protestant church. Also the interior even more ornate with the same idea of polychromy decoration, providing an amazing visual perception.

There are also some photos of All Saint Chapel attached.

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From Disegno to Empiricism

The idea of Disegno, considered as the origin of the discipline of architecture from the time Renaissance companying with the development of drawing techniques, was productive and efficacious but brought limitations at the same time. The process of creation was once limited to the intellectual as an indoor activity, which focused on merely visual perceptions. However, from the18th century, with the intentional engagement with nature in architectrual design, architects started to bring multiple sensations besides vision into a more comprehensive experience for the users. In the case of Rousham House and Garden by William Kent, by intentionally questioning the conventional hierarchy of nature and architecture, new curiosity and playfulness are aroused and stunning landscape was composed, offering more opportunity for buildings than merely rational functions.

Globally speaking, there were more rethinking about the natural and the artificial happening in other placed in the world. In Italy, the boundary between the natural and artificial elements is blurred in the Grotta di Buotalenti in the Boboli Garden, with the nature elements eating away architecture and becoming undoubtedly dominant. And there are also attempts to accommodate buildings in the natural scenes. Such as Palazzo Pitti becomes a background image when it is in distance instead of a dominant figure. 

While the Chinese administrators' gardens in Suzhou share the similar picturesque aspects. The Netmaster's Garden in Suzhou is an ensemble of buildings around the central pool. The paths between buildings is indirect, with zigzag bridges as the primary access. The indirect pathways provide changing views, which is much richer compared to the simple view provided when walking along the axis. As well, numbers of small pavilians, tings, are constructed to provide a closest contact with water.

In addition, the concept of borrowed landscape is applied in both the Boboli Garden and the Netmaster's Garden, which means brings the landscape beyond the wall into the garden and becomes part of the scene in garden. In Boboli Garden, after going up with the stairs and before going into the “theatre” space, the view in the corner is framed for the Duomo in a distance. While in the Chinese gardens, it is common to borrow the pagoda, which is always in a distance, to complete the scene in the gardens. 

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Nash’s Picturesque

In 1811 the Prince Regent, who is later George IV, employed John Nash to design an urban landscape. It was planned as a Picturesque Route from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. It is a route from where the Prince Regent lives and worked, in the Carlton House close to St. James’s, to his summer villa in the outer London. John Nash created a Picturesque Landscape transition from an urban scene to a rural scene. Including the Duke of York’s column, the Colonnade and the all Souls Langham Palace, Nash provides a series of Point-De-Vue to redirect views. The comparison between the urban layout and land scape painting is unprecedented in a way to bring monumentality and nobility into the streets and squares.

After the Great Fire and the failure of Christopher Wren to impose order on rebuilding the capital, in the late Georgian Period, London’s architecture and layout reflects the growing population and stratification of classes. With the poor and disreputable Soho and the elegant and noble Whitehall, the tension seems to be conspicuous between the authority and the underclass. However, different from Trafagar Square which served as open space as a buffer zone for confrontations and provides National Gallery as urban threshold to reduce tension, the planning of Regent’s Street as a ceremonial route made no contribution to solve the problem. The grand road for noble occupied the space originally for the merchants and works and forced them to narrow streets and meaner houses. Besides the fact of Nash’s involvement in corruption, it is also not surprising to learn that the Colonnade was demolished because it stared to become a place for crime, where the people from low class expressed their resentment. Above all, architecture in 19th century is seen more as source of social problems than solutions, as in 16th century.

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The Construction History of St. Paul’s Cathedral

This week the focus will be a summery of the construction history of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which has rich content to reflect on in terms of both architectural development and social/political context. A timeline and bullet points of the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral is concluded as follows:

The Old St. Paul’s:

1.The Old St. Paul’s was firstly built in 604 as a wooden church with a selection of the site on a slope and later on in 675, it was given its monumental significance with Erkenwald buried in the crypt.

2. With the Vikings attacking London, it suffered from a major destruction and in 962 it was rebuilt in stone. 

3.The Norman, in 1221, turned the Old St. Paul’s Cathedral into a Gothic Cathedral with elements such as buttresses, spire, lancet window, rose window and tracery, which later on started its social significance by creating public space not only for religious activities, but also for games and news.

4. During the Dissolution of Monastery in 16th century, the church was destructed by the iconoclasts for its Gothic character and served as a book/printing center instead. 

5. With the King’s attempts to reconcile with Catholicism in 1634, Inigo Jones was firstly commissioned to reform the Old St. Paul’s. He came up with a design of cladding the whole edifice with portland stone, adding a deca-style portico and removing some of the buttresses to move from Gothic towards Classical. 

The New St. Paul’s:

1. After the civil war and then the restoration of monarchy, Christopher Wren was commissioned to repair the further destructed St. Paul’s Cathedral. As a architect went to both France and the low countries, Wren became a follower of the “fashionable”  Baroque, bringing back the idea of ornamentation and beginning his experiments of a protestant cathedral. From his first proposal to his final one, the plan was transformed remarkably from a Greek cross to a cruciform to meet the requirement. And a dome is added associated with his Baroque taste to give both contemporaneity and monumentality. Furthermore, to solve the structure problems, the dome was built in three layers including the cupola, the cone and the drum. As well, with the original size of the dome unable to built, the architect scaled down the rest part of the cathedral to maintain the stunning visual perception of the dome.

2. At the time the St. Paul’s Cathedral was completed in 1708, the idea of architectural dynamism in Wren’s Baroque was manifested, which encouraged changing views and diverse perceptions in one building.Therefore, to maintain the availability of the changing views of St. Paul’s, a law, St. Paul’s Height and Vistas, was published in 1930s to keep uninterrupted views from certain spots in London, which still impacts on current constructions in terms of forms and locations. 

3. Also under the implication of Wren’s Baroque, dozens of churches built between 1670 and 1695 were experimented in plans of different shapes, which not only conformed with the existing property lines but also continued his idea of architectural dynamism with diverse perceptions. 

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Changes of Buildings after the Great Fire

There is a video made on my way to school on the Gracechurch Street of the Bell Inn Yard, which is built on the site of the Crosskeys Inn destroyed by the Great Fire. In the video, I mainly recorded the discovery of the architectural elements illustrating the changes of construction after the fire, based on what we discussed in class. There are also several photos made on site attached. And do forgive me for the surrounding noises and possible unclearness of the audio.

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Inigo Jones vs. Andrea Palladio

As the first English architect, Inigo Jones had several trips to Europe, more specific, to Italy and France, which provided him a comprehensive understanding of Renaissance architecture and varies interpretations of it. During his trips, the works of Andrea Palladio, one of the most influential individuals of Renaissance Italy, impressed Inigo Jones by the emphasis on symmetry, proportion, and geometry, and conscious development and orderly arrangement of elements such as columns, pilasters and lintels. There are two pairs of cases, each has one by Inigo Jones and the other one by Palladio, illustrating similarities by diagrams as follows:

Queen’s House vs. Villa Caldogno  

1. symmetry

2. geometry with central square

3. elevated and balustraded ground floor

The Banqueting House vs. Palazzo Chiericati

1. symmetry

2. repeated motif with serlian window between two pilasters

3. alternating pediment 

Above all, Jones returned home and adopted Palladio’s style, largely of facades, The “Palladianism” of Jones became extremely popular and however, brought him to closely associated with the court of Charles I to survive the turmoil of the civil war.

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Pacifying Destruction and the Double-core Shanghai

There are two topics covered in class that I really would like to reflect on: Firstly, the idea of considering architectural destruction not only as an aggravator but also as an alleviator of the tension between the public and government catches me immediately and reminds me of the fall of Berlin wall (Fig.1). Secondly, the double-core layout of London, one as the center for merchant and the other for the crown, shares considerably similarity with today’s Shanghai. With the political center of Shanghai, the people’s square, separated from the Lujiazui finance and trade zone, the forms of the building are developed in two directions just as those of London. In two CBDs, skyscrapers towering into the clouds claims the wealth of the sponsors in a loud voice (Fig.2), while in political cores, the buildings tend to be majestic, with public space and other cultural centers surrounded (Fig.3). However, in this case, the reason for the emergence of two cores is different. in London, the cores emerged based on the supersession of the rulers as discussed in class, which I would say is fairly unconscious. While in Shanghai, the cores are formed through demolishing agriculture land and replacing with planned construction. So the question becomes: what kind of metropolitan cities have the potential to have two cores? If double-core composition does benefit the city, which steps can it take to achieve it?