'Continuita' at West Malling Abbey Part 1: Fusion Cuisine by Maguire & Murray

In Gorgias, Plato's critique of the art of oratory, Socrates states that this art, (along with cookery) isn't an art at all, but a knack of producing a 'pleasurable [emotional] response' in subjects; a sort of 'pandering'.  Socrates goes on to say that he regards any kind of 'irrational' occupation as more of a 'knack' gained by experience, rather than a genuine ‘art’ supported by sound theory and training {Gorgias, Penguin Books p.45-47}

Although this critique is in fact a thinly veiled (but valid) discussion on the drawbacks of democracy and the 'surly mob' placated by 'bread and circuses', the argument itself is flawed and contains within it the sort of 'cold-logic' that would eventually lead to Plato's call for the transference of the breeding and rearing of children to special centralised authorities in 'The Republic'.

The same cold logic was employed by Le Corbusier in the development and enunciation of 'his machine for living in' and just like no wants to outsource their breeding capabilities similarly, no one really wants to live in hygienic white boxes.

Rational systemised housing, though not quite 'white and hygienic' has proven to be just as unpopular.  The masses have not swallowed architects' various overtures to 'platonicification' in the built environment and have instead, led chiefly by Prince Charles demanded pitched roofs, cornices and fluted columns.  The blighted neighbourhoods and sink estates that have resulted from this impasse has led in recent years to an increasing number of architects attempting to chart a conciliatory course; The likes of FAT, Sergison Bates and Caruso StJohn have all attempted to reconcile the demands of a platonic architecture with the emotional needs of the masses with the result that their architectural practice has assimilated familiar forms and patterns and beloved cultural quirks with varying degrees of success.  Is this pandering?  To some degree perhaps but this doesn't make it wrong. 

We as architects have to accept that our offerings must sometimes be tempered with sugary motifs to make them palatable and perhaps this formed part of thinking of architects Maguire & Murray when they approached the commission to design a new chapel for the Benedictine Order of nuns who live on the ancient site of St Mary's Abbey in West Malling Kent in 1962.

After you enter the abbey complex you turn left to approach the chapel which is situated just to the left (north east) of the 10th century ruin of the original Norman cathedral.  Two things are immediately apparent; the first is that the chapel while taking clear cues from the Norman ruin, clearly 'panders' to [entirely appropriate] associations of a rural kind.  While the agricultural grade precast concrete blocks and the precast semi-circular window surrounds in the lower part of the building are clearly meant to pay homage to the illustrious ruin adjacent, the tower/elongated dome form above recalls the barns and oast-houses that one imagines to be common to this part of the world, while also acknowledging the partial octagonal tower form embedded in the ruin.  Secondly, as we move closer, we see that the forms are combined with a pitched pantile roof to create a further new and unique form which has something of the naiveté and irreducible character of an Aldo Rossi archetype only even more abstracted so that in amongst the associations, we are presented with an attractive disposition of volumes ‘in light’ to enjoy, something that is reinforced, as with their slightly earlier church at Bow Common, by superlative workmanship.

Having said that, this strategy of 'fusing' disparate elements and accents into a new evocative whole has given rise to some strange occurrences, such as the 'collision' between the pitched pantile roof and the base of the oast-house 'tower' form.  Details like these have pushed the limits of traditional detailing and narrowed the tolerances within which builders must have been required to work.  This is as much about the strength of personality of the architects as it is about the drawing-board.

However, the 'feeling' that results from these decisions is 'spot on', the conviction behind many of the key moves speaking of a craftsman’s sensibility; intuition and instinct abounds without the reassuring 'safety-net' of an underlying architectural order, recalling vernacular architecture and the work of figures like Carlo Scarpa. 

It perhaps comes as no surprise to learn that one half of the practice, Keith Murray was an artist craftsman by training who designed the fixtures and fittings of the practices projects.

An exposed hardwood entrance canopy, rather 'Japanese' in flavour leads into the church via a vestibule intended for 'public' use (the church space proper is reserved for the Benedictine Order).  The vestibule and the canopy together have the flavour of a 'lean-to' thus preserving the Platonic/Rossi-esque autonomy of the main building and perhaps symbolising the relationship between an enclosed religious order and a visiting public.

The Abbess who led us on the tour made the point just outside the church that people usually either liked it's exterior or it's interior but rarely both and on entering the church it is apparent why.

Quite unexpectedly, The vernacularist, oast-house aesthetic of the exterior is found to camouflage a heroic internal space reminiscent of the interior of Le Corbusier's Assembly Building in Chandigarh, India.

It’s a beautiful, pure serene space, perfectly suited to it's sacred function and far superior to the exposed trussed rafter structure that the pantiled roof suggests you may find inside.  Your mind (if you’re an architect or perhaps a epistemologist philosopher) recoils at the idea that you could clad an iconic modern  material like in-situ cast concrete with traditional clay pantiles but it ‘feels’ just right and in fact it recalls the way in which stone vaults are roofed in timber framed slate roofs in Gothic cathedrals.

Internally, the oast-house form is found to be framed in a painted exposed trussed rafter structure, it's lightness perfectly counterbalancing the solemn weight of the concrete structure that supports it below.

Maguire & Murray also designed a startling new cloister quite unlike any you will see anywhere else.

Entered through the retained ancient south wall and doorway originally used by the Order for accessing the cathedral, the cloister forms part of the access from the nuns' living accommodation to the church.  Here the slightly incongruous seeming clay pantiles and exposed timber experienced on first approaching and entering the church, reaches fulfilment and we find the same refined craftsman’s judgement here that underpins all the work.

The warm exposed timber structure of the pantile roof slopes down from the ancient stone wall towards the central garden.  It’s raining when we visit and we can see that there are no gutters so that we are faced with the beautiful spectacle of rainwater cascading down into the garden just in front our eyes, watch the fight scene between Nameless and Sky in the movie ‘Hero’ to get an idea of what I mean!  

As the exposed roof structure transitions from the floating wall plate down to the timber framed windows, something strange and rather unfashionable happens to the building work.  Lightness is added by a shallow clerestory formed of little timber cylindrical vertical supports, routed to within a millimetre of pastiche.  Below this, a further heresy as 40 years of Modernism is cast aside and we find ourselves in the presence of 'leaded lights'!  Only the honeycombed pattern of these lights prevents outright pastiche if not sacrilege.  Maguire & Murray were bitterly criticised by the architectural establishment of the time for these bold details, to get an idea of just how ‘out-there’ this work was, consider that Lasdun's 'modernist' Royal College of Physicians was built 2 years earlier to critical acclaim.

But (if you're an architect) put aside your deep seated 'modernist' conditioning for a minute and consider how bland and utilitarian the space would be without these 'traditional' touches and realise that once again, Maguire & Murray have 'judged' it just right.

As we went round, the Abbess regaled us with a litany of complaints regarding the user-friendliness of Maguire & Murray's work at the Abbey; the honeycombed windows are a nightmare to clean, the position of lighting in the church makes for inflexible use of the space and the change in character between the main church and the public/entrance vestibule means that a torrent of condensation pours down at the junction between the two in early spring.  The deep precast semi-circular window surrounds house almost inaccessible and highly impractical single-pane, vertical, centre-pivot windows with nothing but surface mounted neoprene gaskets for stops.

Many changes have had to be carried out to the original building, some quite soon after completion; the columns for example had to be introduced after major structural engineering errors meant that the original floating concrete soffit was untenable; various subtle level changes conceived by Maguire & Murray in line with their liturgical philosophy had to be expunged soon after for access reasons.  The tightly interrelated set of fine judgements instituted by Maguire and Murray at the Abbey has been disrupted but the power, serenity, beauty and quality of the architecture has become none the poorer for it.  It reminds me, for example, of the way in which Inigo Jones’ vision for Covent Garden retains it’s essential power despite the drastic changes the precinct and the church has undergone over the centuries, a mark of truly great architecture?

plans showing original column-free design and level changes

Although the building itself has tolerated and accommodated changes admirably, it seems that the architects themselves were not able to do so.  They were apparently so hurt by the Abbey’s choice to mitigate the major structural failure by installing concrete columns rather than opting for the prohibitively expensive partial rebuild required to preserve the original concept, that they never returned.  But this didn’t bother the Abbess half as much as the architect’s decision to employ an ill-conceived lighting arrangement, originally employed at the chapel, in a subsequent church design after the Abbess had informed them that it didn’t work, ‘Sheer arrogance!’ she said.  It was Confucius that said that a person’s qualities belong to a ‘set’, perhaps the sensibility required to pull off such a great piece of architecture is inseparable from this arrogant obstinate streak?

I asked the elderly Abbess, who has been there through it all, whether she, in her private moments 'cursed' the architects for all the additional costs and on-going issues, to which she replied 'Not at all, it's lovely', an answer reminiscent of Alexander Pope's line 'Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door', food for thought.

AR's 'Big Rethink', letter to Editor, Feb 2012 - Full text

Dear Madam,

The AR's 'Big Rethink' is a welcome change from the coffee table nature of many of it's past building studies. However, Peter Buchanan's article has come too late to have any meaningful effect, and even after the same points have been raised by contributors to other periodicals. This is due more to the timing of the AR's new direction than any fault on Buchanan's part.

Where the Buchanan article has perhaps trumped other similar offerings, is in the severity and urgency of it's tone and in the direct -albeit qualified- criticism of named practices; a dubious honour, but Buchanan has probably only written what has already been said at dinner parties, cafes and lecture theatres across the UK at least, over the past few years.

The targets of Buchanan's ire are notable by their almost complete absence from contemporary architectural theoretical discourse; they are the architectural equivalent of the Football world's 'Galacticos'; great names of the past who have become victims of their own successes and who are not likely now, to suffer significantly from negative criticism. There are many other architects who are just as guilty of the 'sins of the starchitect', or at least would be , given the choice between growing their practice off the back of a large prestigious job and turning such a job down for ethical reasons. There is a reason why Peter Zumthor is unique.



David Beckham, Figo, Ronaldo & Zidane were well past it by the time they joined the 'even more past it' Raul to form the 'Galacticos' at Real Madrid FC. Football's equivalent of the 'Justic League'.

No, I fear that there is more to the malaise which presently afflicts architecture than the simple cult of the starchitect. Ultimately we must as architects and theorists admit our powerlessness in the face of larger forces. Modernism was the child of the Industrial Revolution, leading to an unprecedented break in the continuing evolution of craft techniques that had always underpinned architecture, but which had never been properly acknowledged.

This meant that the technical and cultural failures of many of the products of Modernism were probably inevitable.

But what happened subsequently was certainly not inevitable. The fact that architects and theorists never learned from those initial mistakes and continued to assert in their lectures, publications and commentaries- with ever more delusional vehemence - the autonomy of the heroic artiste-architect, led to the repetition of the same cultural and technical failures as before.

In fact it has only been in the last 10 -15 years that the architectural profession, at least in the UK, has begun to see building production in a more interdisciplinary light. This has only occurred because the profession's delusions regarding it's independence have led other actors - contractors, QS's and clients - to lose patience with it and to develop ways of procuring buildings that rely ever less on architects. They will not tolerate another repeat of the failures of Modernism.

If architects and theorists had learned the initial lessons and had developed a Postmodernism that was more responsive to societal needs -such as Peter Buchanan has enunciated - and less self-indulgent, then we may well not have been where we are now as a profession.

Personally I'm interested in how and why this happened. How did the soothe-sayers and the kings (theorists /critics and the architects they taught) get it so wrong? Buchanan talks of Eisenman having gotten away with it for all these years but, like Rogers and Bernie Madoff (to draw parallels with another more immediately significant crisis for a moment) he is an easy target and is not alone in his guilt.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there are some people who, like Nouriel Roubini, can feel satisfied that they at least, have been doing justice to their vocations as opposed to milking them.

In the mid-nineties, when I started training, and when the building boom that has just ended was about to get into full swing, Kenneth Frampton was way ahead of the game with his 'Studies in Tectonic Culture'.

In Switzerland, Sergison Bates architects have just completed yet another 'cheap plain building with quiet unobtrusive dignity', the type which Buchanan has rightly identified as being tragically beyond the reach of most architects, but which Sergison Bates seem to have mastered. It says much about the current state of affairs in this country that practices like theirs seem more welcome on the continent than in the UK.

In the 1970's (when I was born) the unfashionable Robert & Brenda Vale carried out their autonomous house project and concluded that the continuing growth of cities (and the economic growth that underpins it) is not compatible with sustainable development. Increasingly, it's looking as if they were right but few in the profession have really taken them seriously.

Alas for the AR, Buchanan and others like them, because the horse bolted a long long time ago.

Sincerely

Michael Badu

Michael Badu Architecture, London