concrete

Taliesin West /  by hugo keene

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Completed: 1937

12 Photographs

One thing that I found striking about the southwestern USA, was how familiar it felt. It makes perfect sense, given the similarities in climate between the American desert and the place where we grew up on the edge of a desert in Australia, but it wasn’t just the warm dry air and the expanses of sand. What also felt familiar was the landscape, in particular the plants, which have evolved to cope with the harsh dry desert conditions, protecting themselves from the sun, heat, and drought, striking against the raw redness of the dust, dirt and rocks. Our grandmother was a renowned collector of cacti and succulents, so we grew up surrounded by these kinds of plants.

I felt a similar level of familiarity with the architecture of Taliesin West. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t know the building well before we visited. I’ve never studied FLW at length and while it is one of the most prominent of Frank Lloyd Wrights works, he built so much that I just never looked too hard at any individual projects.

What is clear, is how much this his thinking has influenced generations to come. It is most evident in some of the case study houses, but also works further afield, from Australia to London. This building made me think of the early work of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Alabama, raw, immediate, and utilitarian, definitively buildings of spirit. It also reminded me of the work and spirit of my old friend and teacher, David Morris at the Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and of a lot of the architects who have influenced me from back home. In this, it seems the influence of the work extends beyond the landscape in which it is set.

I found it to be a very powerful and evocative architecture, at times almost spiritual. It is literally and figuratively both embedded in and crafted from the earth on which it sits. Splendid stuff.

HWLK

Couvent Sainte Marie de La Tourette /  by hugo keene

Location: Éveux-sur-l'Arbresle, Rhône-Alpes, France
Architect: Le Corbusier & Iannis Xenakis
Completed: 1953 - 1961

22 Photographs

Of all the buildings I have written about so far, none have been harder to write something meaningful about than this one. Even harder still were my attempts to convey a building like this in a limited number of photographs. The long list was 95, the shortlist was still 47 and the final selection still feels like it leaves out almost everything. There is so much richness and interest to this building, that one can only visit it to really understand it. In that way, I am reminded of Corbusier’s other seminal work, the chapel in Ronchamp, one of the central modernist buildings from which today’s sinuous buildings have evolved. Compared to Ronchamp though, La Tourette is something altogether different. It is an incredibly rigorous building, vast in its scope and ambition, a courtyard building evolved around the programmatic order of the priory and the monastic tradition.

It’s a building which you might easily dismiss from afar as a severe and unforgiving structure, cold and imposing on the hill like a concrete sentinel, but inside the playfulness and rich complexity of form and plan, interposed with bright programmatic use of colour, makes for beautifully lit warm and compassionate spaces. The unusual design collaboration with musician Iannis Xenakis is evidenced in the rhythm of the windows in the façade, which relate both internally to the spaces and externally to the massing, giving the building a kind of pulsating rhythm that echoes throughout the place.

A lot of the time, when I travel on architectural adventures, it’s a whistle-stop tour of electric pace. There are always a million things to see and not every building is well understood or researched in advance, some are just names or coordinates on a long-forgotten map, but some buildings you do know well, having studied them at length at university or since. With Corbusier, they always feel like the former and not the latter, no matter how well you think you know them. I have several books on La Tourette and have admired it as a masterwork for as long as I can remember, but visiting it was reminded of how little I really understood it at all and I felt like a green student again. It’s a terrible way to write about a building, to state outright that it feels pointless to try to describe it, but if there is a central theme to my writing about photographing buildings, it’s probably about the importance of visiting them to understand them. I can’t think of a better example of this than La Tourette. Like discovering that a lifelong friend has a previously unbeknownst fascinating side to them, or that they are someone else completely beneath the façade. Buildings, at least the good ones, are almost always like that. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to read space from afar, or from drawings, and I’m not ashamed to say that sometimes I don’t feel very good at it.

Visiting buildings multiple times is something which doesn’t happen too often. There are a few places I have gone again and again. Sometimes I visit somewhere, and I end up returning to show someone else, maybe my brother, or a group of students, or I just happen to be passing by, but occasionally simply visiting once just is not enough and you yearn to return. Therme Vals springs to mind immediately, the Mariendom Neviges as well, and La Tourette is another. Of all the wonders of the oeuvre of Le Corbusier, this one has always fascinated me the most and I walked away from it vowing to return. Like a lot of these journeys, they happen on the way to somewhere else, and for obvious reasons, I haven’t been ‘on the way somewhere else’ in quite some time, so I haven’t been back yet but hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, I will. It might be some time before that happens, but when I do, I’ll plan to stay the night in one of the cells and explore a little more on my own terms.

I have loved going through the process of editing all my old photos and reliving the experiences of visiting the buildings. I have tried to unlock and understand the buildings and the visits at an arm’s length, and it’s been a rich and rewarding experience, almost like traveling, just without the hassle and significantly cheaper.

HWLK

Sydney Opera House /  by hugo keene

Location: Bennelong Point , Sydney, Australia
Architect: Jørn Utzon
Constructed: 1959 - 1973

14 Photographs

Every time I visit Sydney, I take a walk down to Bennelong Point and the Sydney Opera House and each time, I marvel at the unique vision and circumstances that gave rise to what is perhaps the most recognisable building in the world. It’s known as just the Opera House back home, a building at the heart of a nation, similar in stature to some of its other greatest natural treasures, like Uluru, the Great Barrier Reef, the kangaroo, and a myriad of others.

I do not recall my first encounter with the shells of the Opera House but it must have been as a child on one of my first visits to Sydney. It’s so ubiquitous in Australian culture and media, that it just feels like it’s always been there. I recall Glenn Murcutt once explaining that great buildings are in a way, obvious, or inevitable, in that they respond to their context with an innate sense of belonging, like they were made for the place, and similarly the place for it. I personally cannot think of a building which is more obvious in this way, or better reflects what Glenn was trying to convey than the Opera House.

It is a remarkable building, even more so when you understand the tumultuous road that it took to completion. I tried to include more photos of the interior than the outside, as perhaps it is a side of the building not seen by most before, but one equally incredible in its resolution and vision, despite its torturous history. The scale and articulation of the geometry and form of the concrete shells is something that would be envied even in today’s world of design, assisted as we are now, by the power of computing. It’s even more remarkable to think that the whole thing was not only built without the aid of a computer, but designed by Utzon from a world away, without having ever visited the site.

A few years ago, I was in Sydney for a few weeks and was lucky enough to be staying near a ferry stop, so every day, was able to commute into Sydney on the ferry, passing by the white shells twice a day in all sorts of conditions and experiencing them, and the harbour, as those fortunate enough to live here do. I’ve always loved the building and wondered whether those who see it every day continue to marvel at it in the way I have over a lifetime.

I won’t try to list the intersecting reverberations that have spread like bouncing ripples through the world of architectural thought by this simple beautiful building, but instead, I will try to tell the same story through a simple analogy. If you know the complex topography of Sydney Harbour (if you don’t then perhaps take a look at it on Google Maps), then I might ask you to imagine how a giant stone thrown in the middle might cause a never-ending pattern of similarly intersecting ripples that would bounce off the edges and crash together as they continuously move around the inlets and bays formed by the millennia of geology and weather. To me, the influence of Utzon’s masterpiece seems something like this.

Each time I see a new cultural centrepiece building perched proudly in the middle of an ambitious cityscape, I can’t help but compare it to the Opera House, but I have to say I am yet to discover one which feels quite so suitable.

HWLK

Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle /  by hugo keene

Location: Mechernich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Architect: Peter Zumthor
Completed: 2007

16 Photographs

When I discovered that our travel route would come near this little field chapel, I confess that I was just a little excited about the prospect of seeing it in the flesh. Probably the smallest building I have visited, and one of the most memorable. It’s a simple timeless primitive little building, squeezed into a narrow slice of buffer land between large swathes of agricultural land. Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, but impossible to forget.

I love this building so much, I visited it twice within the space of 24 hours. We had arrived at the site late in the day one afternoon and enjoyed the brief time we’d spent there. It was clear then, that the building would feel vastly different closer to the sunrise, so we (I) made the decision to backtrack the following morning and return to the little chapel for another go.

On the two occasions we visited, we approached the structure first from the back (the wrong way?) and the following day, from the front (the right way?), and then returning back along a series of alternative routes, so we saw and watched the building from four unique angles. One of the most intriguing aspects this revealed is the way the long narrow plan means that the tower profile changes as you move around it, at first appearing flat and squat, from the sides when viewed at a distance, before becoming almost impossibly slender when viewed from the front or the back, the only way you can approach the building up close. In doing so, it plays a game with scale, reducing the relative scale of the structure, by adjusting and controlling your perception of it. It is very clever.

The way the concrete is cast, it literally feels like it is hewn from the very earth it sits on. It is the rawest concrete structure I have ever seen outside of a farmyard. The texture and layering of it looks and feels more like rammed earth, or some of the more undulating textures of the work of Tadao Ando at Chichu. It feels at once immediate, agrarian, and utilitarian, while at the same time beautifully crafted. There is a considered roughness to nearly everything, put into distinct contrast by the fineness of the finishing details. As the effect of its production on the climate is now understood, today we have a more complicated relationship with traditional concrete, yet it has always been a construction material that has fascinated me with its enormous potential. I feel like this modest little chapel is a grand example of concrete at its finest.

Inside, it has the feeling of a simple primitive place for reflection and, if you’re that way inclined, prayer. I have always loved to drop into little churches and chapels along the way wherever they pop out along the roadside, and this felt similar in that way. If it were not for the buzz of similarly inclined travelers such as myself hovering in and out and breaking the calm, it could easily be forgotten that this is a masterpiece drawing visitors from far and wide.

HWLK

Maria, Königin des Friedens (Pilgrimage Church of Neviges) /  by hugo keene

Location: Neviges, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Architect: Gottfried Böhm
Completed: 1968

14 Photographs

When I tell non-architect friends about these journeys, sometimes way off the beaten path to look at often quite obscure buildings, they nearly always look at me rather quizzically, as if they can’t understand why I would devote my time to do such a thing. On those rare occasions that I take someone not otherwise inclined along, almost without fail they inevitably understand. Sometimes buildings are so special, so beautiful and so unique, that it is impossible not to be overcome by and to viscerally experience that power.

Maria, Königin des Friedens (The Pilgrimage Church of Neviges) is one of those buildings. Hidden away in an unassuming part of Germany, squeezed between narrow streets and tucked behind a bunch of things, it’s easily missed, even if you’re looking for it. The kind of building where you catch a glimpse over a roof top, around a corner, between a tree and a lamp post, like a leopard in the trees, hard to catch a glimpse of, let alone figure out what it is. Even from the piazza out front and up close, though utterly original, it does not really reveal its secrets.

It is only on entering the dark cool space, through the giant portal door, that you find yourself in another world, utterly transformed from the one outside, and impossible to describe in words. I love the pictures, especially these ones, but nothing beats standing in a building like this.

Most times, you visit a building only once, but other times, like with a garden, you want to see it in another light, another time of day or another season.

The pilgrimage church is like that, I’ll definitely be back. 

HWLK

Kimbell Art Museum /  by hugo keene

Location: Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Architect: Louis Kahn
Ccompleted: 1937

15 Photographs

There is something timeless about the Kimbell Art Museum, almost like it could be a hundred years old, or a thousand, the way it rises out of the earth like a stone formation, left alone by the hand of the wind. It has a character quite suited to becoming a ruin, and will no doubt be a highlight in post-apocalyptic tours of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area if it survives the churn.

Henry and I had come to Texas at the end of a long road trip through the deserts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico and we had experienced many wonderful places, people, and events along the way. Only weeks before, we had stood in Monument Valley, admiring the mesas in the dusty purple evening light after dusty day on the road. Having lived as desert rats for the weeks leading up, it is no surprise that when we come to talk about the Kimbell so many years later, Louis Kahn’s masterpiece evokes a similar kind of connection to this place for the both of us.

In the days after our visit, Henry described it as ‘The most complete building, I have ever visited’. In the years before and since, I have seen a lot of concrete buildings, old and new, from the good to the great and all the way down to the terrible. I have been involved in the construction of a few of our own as well. Amidst all of this, I still can’t think of another building that compares. There is a level of craftsmanship in the Kimbell that makes it feel like a piece of furniture as much as a building, and when you understand how in-situ concrete of this type is made, this makes perfect sense. To make a building like this, the liquid concrete is poured into a negative formwork, made of steel or timber, and then that formwork, almost like a cabinet shell itself, is stripped away to reveal the concrete.

I have always been intrigued by how we as humans inhabit the desert. It is such a hostile but beautiful place and from Sedona to Uluru, humans have struggled with how to inhabit the hot dry parts of the world, providing protection from the elements, and embracing the beauty. There is a lot of learning from those attempts in the result at the Kimbell, both in the form of the building and its response to the elements. Like all desert dwellings, the primary objective is to bring in the light, while protecting from the sun and in doing so, this is the great success of the building, above anything else. The way the ceiling vaults reflect light is just divine, the shape and finish carefully crafted to express this as primary to the function of the building.

Like all profound artistic works, the Kimbell Art Museum feels simple enough to be drawn by a child. An architect I admire once claimed that good architecture is obvious in retrospect because where it is successful, it is drawn out of its context in such a way that it feels almost inevitable. The Kimbell is a building that does this, a perfect example of Oliver Wendell Holmes concept of ‘the simplicity the other side of complexity’, sitting neatly at the intersection of a mud hut and a Stradivarius.

HWLK

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Tomba Brion /  by hugo keene

Location: San Vito d'Altivole, Treviso, Italy
Architect: Carlo Scarpa
Completed: 1968

12 Photographs

I am glad I visited Tomba Brion when I did. I had just really discovered Carlo Scarpa’s work, and I was travelling at a time when I could not afford a rental car, so had found a bus and dragged my travelling companion across the Italian countryside one bright morning, on the promise of life changing architecture, in a cemetery.

The private burial ground for the Brion family, the L shaped walled garden wraps around one side of the traditionally designed San Vito municipal cemetery. Unusual, tilted concrete walls greet the visitor from afar, before one arrives at a gap in the wall, overhung by trees, which beckons one beyond.

Upon entering, I was speechless for a bit, I wandered about, I sat and stared for quite a while and I also cried a little, though i am still not sure why. A profoundly moving space, richly layered with detail. After some time alone, a funeral procession from the village made its way up the same road we walked along earlier, which we watched for a short while. After the proceedings, the mourners drained out of the old cemetery and some went back to their lives, while a number stayed behind and filtered through the unusual looking opening between the old and new and explored the unique wonderland behind.

By the time we left, the last bus of the day had long gone, and we had to hitchhike back to Venice. 

HWLK

EPFL Learning Centre /  by hugo keene

Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Architect: SANAA
Completed: 2010

11 Photographs

I once got into a robust conversation with a student about this building during a crit. She was trying to claim it was the best thing since sliced bread and I was probably overly reactive to that, having forgotten what it was like being a student. From memory whatever critique I gave, was not that well received.

Perhaps around 2003, I saw Sejima present a lecture at the National University of Singapore, where she showed an early concept sketch of this building. I remember distinctly a moment during the lecture, which was initially given in Japanese with a translator, where Sejima stopped the translator, corrected her and then, moments later, seemingly dissatisfied, switched over and completed the lecture in English. I recall the sketch being a slightly more playful version of what was finally built, but much the same.

We visited this building during a break in term time at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, so I wasn’t able to see it ‘in full flight’, but I imagine that when it is, the undulating floors are inhabited at all angles by students of all shapes and sizes. I especially liked the circular courtyards cut-outs which puncture the unique undulating concrete under croft. It was a beautiful sunny day when we visited, and these pockets of sun were wonderfully varied.

The building reminded me of the works of some of the architects who have influenced me, Mies, Glenn Murcutt, and Kerry Hill, and other masters of the screened box, but done with playfulness and that sense of humour that Japanese architects excel at.

I have not been back since that day, but we have family in the region and have driven past Lausanne a couple of times. I will have to stop by again during the winter, as I would love to see it in the snow.

HWLK