50 Architects 50 Buildings E-Book

Twentieth Century Society

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 336

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The most inspirational buildings in the world, as chosen by well-known contemporary architects. In this book, published in conjunction with the Twentieth Century Society, 50 contemporary architects choose the buildings from around the world that have inspired them and made an impact on their own work.  Architectural  journalist  Pamela Buxton interviewed each of the architects to create these outstanding portraits of the buildings that have influenced modern architecture .  The diverse selection is introduced by Twentieth Century Society director Catherine Croft, and  illustrated throughout with photographs by Gareth  Gardner  and Edward Tyler.   The book features a diverse range of inspirational buildings, from housing estates to castles, coal mines to cathedrals. W ork by the giants of twentieth-century architecture including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto are featured, as well as lesser-known gems. Examples include Richard Rogers (of RHSP) on Maison de Verre (Paris, France); Chris Williamson (of Weston Williamson) on the Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames (Los Angeles, USA); Takero Shimazaki (of T-SA, UK) on Hexenhaus by Alison and Peter Smithson (Bad Karlshafen, Germany); Ted Cullinan (of Cullinan Studio) on Chapel of Notre Dame Du Haut by Le Corbusier (Ronchamp, France); Michael Squire (of Squire & Partners, UK) on Grundtvig's Church by Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint (Copenhagen, Denmark); and Jonathan Woolf (of Jonathan Woolf Architects) on Haus Esters and Haus Lange by Mies van der Rohe (Krefeld, Germany). This beautifully produced book offers a great insight into the power of existing architecture and its immense influence on the world we build today.

Leseprobe

50 ARCHITECTS 50 BUILDINGS

The buildings that inspire architects

50 ARCHITECTS 50 BUILDINGS

The buildings that inspire architects

Edited by Pamela Buxton Photographs by Gareth Gardner and Edward Tyler

Introduction

The Architects

1. Workplace

2. Education

3. Cultural Buildings

4. Individual Housing

5. Housing Developments

6. Places of Worship

7. Public Buildings

Introduction

Buildings that inspire architects

How do architects get their ideas? How do they learn from other people’s buildings to make their own work richer and more satisfying? Architects draw on all sorts of amazing sources, including music, fine art, numbers and nature, but all architects visit other people’s buildings, whether as a deliberate act of pilgrimage, a fact-finding mission or, inescapably, in the course of day-to-day life. For many architects, one building stands out as having had a transformative and long-term impact on their own designs. In this book architects share these often life-changing encounters with other architects’ amazing buildings.

Pamela Buxton had the very enviable job of taking fifty of the most interesting architects working in Britain today to visit the buildings which have inspired them most. Commissioned by the architectural publication Building Design, the records of these trips by Pamela and photographers Gareth Gardner and Edward Tyler capture the experience of each visit, and are brought together here as a collection for the first time. Together they encourage us to see these inspirational buildings afresh through an architect’s eyes, and understand why it was that these buildings made such an impression on them.

What does inspire mean?

”Inspire” was an important choice of word: the participants were not asked to pick their favourite building, or to attempt to select a “best” building – indeed sometimes difficult and flawed buildings are more inspiring than perfect ones. To inspire means to fill someone with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. Some participants describe their choices as “profoundly moving” or feeling “like coming home” – the sort of analogies we draw when talking about finding a human soul mate. Although they could have taken Building Design to gothic cathedrals or baroque palaces, the majority looked back no further than the beginning of the last century, and picked C20 buildings. The architecture of the C20, and modernism in particular, seems to be what excites today’s architects most.

First encounters

What is the first building you can remember being in? Many of our earliest memories are of places and the emotions they provoked. I’m struck by the fact that many of the architects here choose buildings they have known for an extremely long time and, not surprisingly, many initially encountered the buildings they selected in architectural books and magazines, and first visited them themselves as students, sometimes returning again and again over subsequent years. But some go even further back. James Soane picks the Liverpool Playhouse Extension; not a very famous building, but one to which he feels an intensely autobiographical relationship. Not only was it “conceived” in the same year as he was, but his father was its engineer, and had a picture of it over his desk. James recalls how “it entered into my consciousness before I even knew what architecture was” and “made me aware of modern architecture before I knew anything about it”.

Another native Liverpudlian, Paul Monaghan, picks Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, “Paddy’s Wigwam”– a building he admires because it is “really loved by the public”, and is where his whole school went for services. Niall McLaughlin chooses “the building that made me want to be an architect”, ABK’s Trinity College Dublin Library, and he recounts how he was all set to study English at university until he looked carefully at this building, and its “extraordinary vividness” had such an impact on him that he changed to study architecture.

Many architects are enthusiastic travellers, and young architects often take work abroad, sometimes for their “year out” – the year (or more) spent working in architects’ offices between undergraduate and post graduate study – architectural education is a long haul. Many of the buildings selected here were first seen at this point, and some of our architects had personal encounters with their heroes. Edward Jones first went to Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook campus to take life-drawing classes when he was working for Eliel’s son Eero for a summer – that must have led to some interesting conversations. Chris Williamson had a spell working in New York, and then headed west to California where in 1980 he could wander into the garden of the Eames House and find Ray Eames still living and working there. Some of the first encounters were casual or even illicit (there’s some squeezing though hoardings, and climbing over locked gates recalled here). But some architects had very formal introductions: Michál Cohen went to the newly completed Hellerup School on a British Council study trip and was shown round by the head teacher. Some architects went alone, some with their colleagues, some added on a visit as a treat after teaching in a new city, or visiting a site for a forthcoming project. I suspect the itineraries of some family holidays were tweaked to take in a special place, somewhere long lodged in the subconscious or freshly spotted in a journal.

Revisiting

All these circumstances and more impact on how a place affects us, and going back with Pamela and a photographer specifically for this project was always going to be a different experience. Many participants reflect on these differences, and how they and the places have changed. Some first visits were made when buildings were brand new architecture, some have now shifted status to be regarded as historic buildings. Sometimes the original use has weathered this change; sometimes buildings now have a very different role. There are buildings that have decayed while others have been spruced up and restored. Some architects are uneasy about over-restoration, some would love to get the job of sweeping away disfiguring accretions, or sorting out those little bits that in their opinion never worked in the first place. Perhaps most surprisingly Jon Buck and Dominic Cullinan chose somewhere they had never actually been before, and made their first ever trip to Leicester Engineering Building. Might it have inspired them differently if they had actually visited earlier?

How do buildings inspire architects?

The hardest question these encounters raise is exactly how these buildings have inspired the architects who have selected them. Some of them talk directly about this: Sean Griffiths is provocatively flippant when he tells us that “FAT has nicked many ideas [from Loos’ American Bar]”. Jonathan Ellis-Miller is now amused at “how blindingly obvious” the influence of Hopkins has been on his firm’s work “in terms of plan, aesthetic and organisation of space.” There is a bit a self-deprecation there, but also an innate self confidence that each has added something extra and created something new. In contrast, Tony Fretton is adamant that he can’t see any Asplund influences in his own work. And, of course, architects and critics can have different interpretations of what is going on. Sometimes we remain so close to something we have created ourselves that we can’t see it remotely objectively.

Building an inner library

The late Jonathan Woolf went to see the Krefeld Villas to study brickwork for a commission where he chose to use brick for the first time, but few of these buildings have been so consciously picked out for individual project research. I like Tim Ronalds’ reflection that he returns to Gothenburg Law Courts “not so much to copy ideas or forms directly, rather to recharge my aspirations”. Others talk of a specific buildings as a “touchstone”, “a reference”, “a pin-up for us” or “as a starting point”. “Borrowings”, of whatever form, may be recognised and acknowledged at the time, or only realised much later. Biba Dow says she can only now “see subliminal analogies” between her choice of inspirational building and the practice’s own work. Marie-José van Hee talks about how a building “goes right into your inner map, your personal library, and you never know when and how it will come out again until it does.”

Working as part of a team, architects, generally unfairly, get a reputation for arrogance. Here they reveal both longings and vulnerability. Sole practitioner Niall McLaughlin, reflecting on ABK, the architects of his chosen building, envies the camaraderie of having soul mates to work with, and rather than selecting buildings where a single architect is seen as a lone creative genius. Many participants choose buildings which exemplify the importance of a good working relationship with an inspiring client – sometimes with a bit of wistful envy!

Confounding expectations

What I particularly like about all the stories told here is that they make the point that actually visiting a building is a very different experience to reading about it, seeing photos, or even watching a film or digital modelling. Sometimes a visit confounds our expectations. I, too, have found that a building I thought I knew well from photos was in a totally different location to the one I was expecting, or unexpectedly “dinky” or “something you can cuddle rather than something that overawes you” as Cullinan and Buck say of the Leicester Engineering Building. Visiting a building allows you to soak up the atmosphere of a place, the sounds and shadows, the feel of rough board-marked concrete, the breeze from a half open window, the reflections on the ceiling from the pool outside. By visiting you can observe the patterns people make as they use the space, where they like to sit, how they work out where to go, how the building makes them behave and feel. It’s because this can never be fully captured nor replicated that C20 Society campaigns to keep real, actual buildings on the sites where they were constructed. It’s also why we like to take people to see buildings for real too. Like the architects here, some of our members are designers or knowledgeable historians too. When we visit buildings in a group, knowing details of how projects came about is important to some, others just want to bathe in an intense atmosphere, or imagine the essence of a building seeping into them. Some want to sketch or photograph, like these architects, to record, understand or explore.

Challenges to our perceptions, as well as the confirmation of anticipated delight, are what visiting great architecture is all about. We hope you will enjoy being an armchair visitor with these architects, and be inspired to make your own visits too.

Catherine Croft Director of the C20 Society

As well as campaigning for the preservation of architecture in the UK from 1914 onwards, the C20 Society organises trips in Britain and abroad. Find out more and join online.

www.C20society.org.uk

The Architects

David Archer is co-founder of Archer Humphryes Architects, which specialises in the design of hotels, restaurants, residences and resorts. Notable work includes Chiltern Firehouse and Great Northern Hotel in London, as well as Hakkasan and Busaba Eathai for restaurateur and long-standing client Alan Yau.

Rab and Denise Bennetts established Bennetts Associates in London in 1987 followed by the addition of an Edinburgh office in 1994. Since then the practice has steadily grown to around 85 people with projects including the redesign of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford.

Ted Cullinan is the founder of Cullinan Studio. He has designed more than 110 buildings including the Grade II* listed Ready Mix Concrete Headquarters in Egham and the Weald and Downland Gridshell in West Sussex. He is the recipient of many top accolades including the RIBA Gold Medal in 2008.

Alex Ely is an architect, planner and founder of Mæ architects. As well as designing a wide range of housing and urban design he was the author of the Mayor of London’s Housing Design Guide and has contributed to publications for the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Cany Ash is a founder partner of Ash Sakula Architects. The practice works extensively in the arts, education and housing sectors with key projects including the UK Centre for Carnival Arts in Luton, Peabody housing in Silvertown and the Hothouse arts centre in Hackney, London.

Michál Cohen was born in South Africa, studied architecture in KwaZulu Natal and London and set up Walters & Cohen Architects with Cindy Walters in 1994. Through research and in practice, she has developed a strong interest in the link between the design of education buildings and learning.

Biba Dow and Alun Jones formed Dow Jones Architects in 2000. The practice works across private, public and commercial sectors, with key projects including a Maggie’s Centre in Cardiff, refurbishment of Christ Church Spitalfields crypt, and The Garden Museum, both in London.

Sarah Featherstone is an architect and director of Featherstone Young, a practice working in the housing, community, cultural and education sectors. She teaches at Central Saint Martins and is a Civic Trust Award assessor and a Design Review panellist for several local authorities.

Peter Barber has run his own practice since 1989, specialising mainly in mixed-use and residential regeneration schemes. Key London projects include the Donnybrook Quarter in Bow, the Spring Gardens homeless accommodation in Hither Green and the Employment Academy in Camberwell.

Tom Coward is an architect and director of AOC. Based in East London, the practice aims to design generous architecture that is both beautiful and socially engaged. Diverse projects include a Reading Room for the Wellcome Collection, the Spa secondary school in London’s Southwark and The Green, a community centre in south London.

Jonathan Ellis-Miller, a London based architect and teacher, set up EllisMiller Architects in 1991. He has been responsible for designing notable projects including Mansell Street in the City of London, the Catmose education and community campus in Oakham and the Women’s Institute HQ in Cambridge.

Tony Fretton has been in practice since 1982, designing a wide range of cultural, public, residential and office buildings with an emphasis on creating a sense of place. Key projects include the British Embassy in Warsaw (2009), the Red House in Chelsea (2001) and the Lisson Gallery (1990), also in London.

Cuban-born Edgar Gonzalez is a co-founder of London-based practice Brisac Gonzalez. Key projects include the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Le Prisme Concert Hall in Aurillac, and The Pajol Sports Centre in Paris. Ongoing work includes a 18,000m2 mixed-use scheme in Paris.

Sean Griffiths was a founder member of the architecture studio Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT), whose work included A House for Essex designed with artist Grayson Perry and Islington Square housing in Manchester. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster in London.

Stephen Hodder is founder of Manchester-based architects Hodder + Partners and a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His practice was the inaugural winner of the prestigious Stirling Prize in 1996 for the Centenary Building at the University of Salford.

Adam Khan designs public buildings, social housing and private houses in both the UK and overseas. Notable projects include the £22million regeneration of a Danish housing estate and the competition-winning design for the Brockholes Visitor Centre in Lancashire, which created a cluster of buildings floating on a large pontoon.

Piers Gough is an architect, writer and co-founder of the award-winning architectural practice CZWG. His best known work includes the Canada Water Library in Rotherhithe, the Green Bridge in Mile End, East London, and the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Nottingham.

Roger Hawkins and Russell Brown set up Hawkins\Brown in 1988. The practice works across the education, residential, transport, commercial, cultural and civic sectors. Projects include three Crossrail stations, the Corby Cube civic centre and the regeneration of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield.

Simon Hudspith is a founding partner of Panter Hudspith Architects, and has extensive experience designing buildings in historic settings as well as mixed-use, residential and cultural buildings. He is also a national panel member for CABE, the Southwark Design Review Panel and Design South East.

David Kohn is director of David Kohn Architects (DKA). He studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and Columbia University, New York. DKA’s work includes A Room for London, a one-room installation in the form of a boat created with artist Fiona Banner on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s Southbank.

Tom Grieve and Hana Loftus are co-founders of Colchester-based architects HAT Projects. Work includes the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, High House Artists’ Studios in Purfleet, Essex, and Gasworks arts complex in London. HAT Projects was RIBA East Emerging Architect of the Year 2014.

Graham Haworth is co-founder of Haworth Tompkins, a practice with a particular expertise in the cultural, education and housing sectors. Recent projects include the Royal College of Art’s Dyson Building in Battersea, and the regeneration of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank.

Edward Jones is co-founder with Jeremy Dixon of Dixon Jones, architects of the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, and the re-design of Exhibition Road in London. The practice also designed Kings Place in Kings Cross, and the Said Business School at Oxford University.

Julian Lewis is a director of architectural and urban design practice East. He is visiting critic to the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group, and a member of the Newham Design Review Panel. East focuses on projects of public relevance including housing, schools, community buildings and public spaces.

MJ Long, the widow and former professional partner of British Library architect Colin St.John Wilson, is a partner at Long & Kentish. The practice has a particular specialism in libraries and also designs galleries, museums and studios. MJ Long has taught at Yale School of Architecture in Connecticut since 1973.

Educated in Dublin, Niall McLaughlin has run his own architecture practice in London since 1990. The practice works broadly across a variety of building types, with recent award-winning projects including the Bishop Edward King Chapel and student residences for Somerville College, both in Oxford.

Eric Parry established Eric Parry Architects in 1983, and has combined his practice with teaching, most notably at the University of Cambridge. Key projects include the renewal of St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square and the award-winning extension of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath.

Richard Rogers is a founding partner of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he and his partners have designed many buildings including Centre Pompidou, Lloyd’s of London, the Welsh Assembly, the Millennium Dome and the Leadenhall Building in London.

Dominic Cullinan and Jon Buck co-founded SCABAL (St Cullinan And Buck Architects Ltd) in 1997. Key projects include the Trumans Road Houses, Dunraven School Container Sports Hall and the Christ Church Spitalfields Nursery. Ongoing work includes education projects in India and London.

Patrick Lynch established Lynch Architects in 1998 in London. Recent London work includes the Kings Gate apartments on Victoria Street, The National Youth Theatre in North London and a library in Westminster. Marsh View, a holiday house for an artist, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2012.

Paul Monaghan is a founding director of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Key projects include the BBC Television Centre master plan and the new Scotland Yard headquarters for the Metropolitan Police in Whitehall, central London. AHMM won the 2015 Stirling Prize for Burntwood School in South London.

Greg Penoyre is co-founder and senior partner at Penoyre & Prasad, where he has played an important role in more than 300 projects across commercial and public sectors. Key buildings include the Ludwig Guttman Centre for Health and Well Being in Stratford and Swiss Cottage Special School, London.

Tim Ronalds is founder of Tim Ronalds Architects, which specialises in the design of arts, education and public buildings. Major projects include the regeneration of the Hackney Empire theatre and Ironmonger Row Baths, both in London, and the design of the Landmark Theatre in Ifracombe.

Takero Shimazaki is a director of London-based studio Takero Shimazaki Architects (formerly Toh Shimazaki Architecture). Works include OSh House, Centre For Sight, Curzon Bloomsbury and Leicester Print Workshop, each engaging deeply with context, history and materiality of sites.

Gerard Maccreanor is co-founder with Richard Lavington of Maccreanor Lavington. The UK and Netherlands-based practice has won 42 architectural awards including six RIBA National Awards and the Stirling Prize, won in 2008 for the Accordia housing in Cambridge.

Alex Mowat is an architect and founder of Mowat & Company (previously Urban Salon), which designs across the retail, museum, office, housing and education sectors. Clients include Peabody housing association, National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Design Museum and BRE.

RCKa was formed in 2008 by Tim Riley, Russell Curtis and Dieter Kleiner. The practice’s aim is to produce vibrant, socially responsive buildings and places that support use and activity, encourage social interaction and cohesive communities, and are meaningful to the people that use them.

Peter St John is a partner of Caruso St John Architects, a practice with an international reputation for the design of public building projects, museums and galleries. The practice designed the New Art Gallery Walsall (2000), Tate Millbank Project (2014), and renovated and extended Stockholm City Library.

James Soane is a founding partner of Project Orange, a research-led design practice, currently working on large-scale residential projects in the UK, hotels in India and an office building in Moscow. James is also Director of Critical Practice at the recently launched London School of Architecture.

Michael Squire founded Squire and Partners in 1976. Residential, office and masterplanning projects include apartment schemes One Tower Bridge and Clarges Mayfair, the Bulgari Hotel & Residences in Knightsbridge and the mixed-use One The Elephant development at Elephant & Castle.

Hans van der Heijden is an architect living and working in Amsterdam and an editor of the Dutch Architecture Yearbook. He has been a professor in sustainable urban design at Cambridge University and was founder and creative director of Rotterdam architects biq from 1994–2014 before setting up his own practice.

Paul Williams is a director of Stanton Williams, winners of the Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2012. Key projects include the University of Arts London campus at King’s Cross, Compton Verney Art Gallery, the Sainsbury Laboratory, and the Eton Manor venue for the London 2012 Olympics.

Jonathan Woolf (1961–2015) founded Jonathan Woolf Architects in 1991. He completed more than 35 projects, including a number of multi-generational dwellings in London, most notably the award-winning Brick Leaf house in Hampstead, north London, and Lost Villa in Nairobi, Kenya.

Studio Egret West was founded by Christophe Egret and David West in 2004. The practice works widely across the housing, education, culture, health, public realm and mixed-use sectors. Notable projects include Clapham Library in south London and the regeneration of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield.

Marie-José van Hee has run an architecture studio in Ghent, Belgium, since 1975. Her award-winning practice concentrates on public buildings, private houses and urban development with a focus on creating timeless architecture that offers a high quality of life. She also teaches extensively.

Chris Williamson is founding partner of architects and urban designers Weston Williamson + Partners. The practice has a specialism in transport, designing the Paddington Crossrail Station and the Kuala Lumpur Metro. Current work includes design development for Crossrail 2.

Clare Wright is a partner at Wright & Wright Architects, which she co-founded in 1994 with Sandy Wright. Completed work includes the Women’s Library in London and Hull Truck Theatre. She is working on new libraries for Magdalen and St John’s Colleges in Oxford and on a revamp of London’s Geffrye Museum.

John Tuomey is co-founder with Sheila O’Donnell of Dublin-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, recipients of the Royal Gold Medal architecture prize in 2015. The practice has an expertise in cultural, social and educational buildings, with key projects including the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.

Keith Williams is the founder and director of Keith Williams Architects, a firm with a specialism in museum, gallery, library, music and performing arts buildings. Recent work includes Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, the Novium Museum in Chichester and the National Opera House, Wexford.

Stephen Witherford and William Mann are two of the three co-founders of Witherford Watson Mann Architects, which won the 2013 Stirling Prize for the residential renovation of the ruined Astley Castle in Warwickshire. Other projects include a UK headquarters for Amnesty International.

Workplace

Chilehaus

Location: Hamburg, Germany

Architect: Fritz Höger, with artist Richard Kuöhl

Completed: 1922–24

Chosen by Eric Parry of Eric Parry Architects

Eric Parry at the Chilehaus, a brick tour-de-force constructed with about four million clinker bricks.

Chilehaus captures an extraordinarily vital moment in German culture, part of the great flowering of expressionism. It was built just a few years after the end of the First World War but has this terrific sense of the optimism and renewal of the time that proved to be all too brief.

I spent my adolescence in Liverpool, like Hamburg, another great port city. My grandfather was a marine engineer for shipping lines trading with the Far East and on the dock road the prows of ships, overshadowing the great nineteenth-century wall, were messengers from a world beyond. Chilehaus has a potent sense of this spirit of mercantile voyaging which appeals to me still.

I had seen the contemporaneous publication of the building on its completion in Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst of 1924 but visited it for the first time when we had an office trip to see Peter Latz’s seminal landscape work in the Ruhr. I now know the city well and have visited Chilehaus many times.

Chilehaus was designed by Fritz Höger, who came from a building craftsman’s background steeped in the Hanseatic tradition of brickwork, ‘der Backsteinarchitektur’, in which buildings both sacred and secular shared the humble module as foundation for extraordinary inventiveness. With Chilehaus this earthbound tradition meets, in spirit, the esoteric idealism of Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture (1917) and Lyonel Feininger’s crystalline imagery of the same period.

Chilehaus is a populist building housing the offices of dozens of firms but its origins lie in the tradition of the Kontorhaus – the merchant building that combined warehouse, offices and living accommodation. The porosity of the ground-floor level with the central court, public passages and retail units, is in essence an urban-scaled version of this tradition.

Chilehaus is a vast single entity whose scale demands two entrances which are placed to the east and west side of the central public court. A public route passes under the building from north to south-sloping towards the docks, and is marked by two load-bearing brick arches each of which comes to rest on six massive concrete piers. The piers and soffits are in themselves masterpieces of their craft as are a series of finely detailed, Bay Keramik loggias around the curtilage of the building.

These crafted elements are testimony to the close collaboration of Höger and sculptor Richard Kuöhl. Kuöhl was born in 1880 and grew up in Meissen, traditionally the centre of German ceramic art. He studied in Dresden and came to Hamburg following the appointment of Fritz Schumacher as Oberbaudirektor – the head of city architecture and planning. Schumacher led the rebuilding of the merchant city, a quarter stigmatised by a cholera epidemic at the end of the nineteenth century.

The design of office buildings as places of work and contributors to the city is close to my heart and I find Chilehaus inspiring on many levels – it’s a sophisticated urban response on a par with other great city buildings. At the time, it would have been seen as audacious and an incredible investment by Höger’s client Henry Sloman in the future of Hamburg’s mercantile world. It soon became one of the most emblematic images of the city.

It has a muscularity but also a responsiveness in its articulation. A certain courage was needed to take on a 200m-long site and think on that scale. It was the biggest office building in Europe at that time, with multiple entrances and some 2,800 windows, yet it doesn’t seem overbearing. Instead, it has this extraordinary uplifting exuberance culminating in the iconic moment at the ‘prow’ on Pumpen and Burchardstrasse. Mies did the same thing in glass with his Friedrichstrasse project in Berlin at exactly the same time. Here, however, we are firmly in the Hanseatic world and the architectural expression is unmistakable and particular.

Höger was creating an urban complex. It is very pragmatic and rational, but like Borromini’s oratory of Saint Phillip Neri in Rome, things aren’t quite symmetrical – long walls respond to the urban condition. Höger thinks in urban terms, addressing the square across the street even though that means the urban passage that leads through the building isn’t centralised.

He clearly undertook the challenge of designing a 480m-long elevation by gauging the impact of the building at different distances. He created a unified stepped cornice to read at the city scale; the building is arranged to respond to the new surrounding urban plan, and then he created more than a dozen distinct ‘episodes’ at street level, many of which are memorable, like the beautiful curve along Pumpen.

Höger had an extraordinary ability to work a façade once he had established a structural logic for the type of building. His use of brick to articulate the design was very clever and is reminiscent of Gaudi in Barcelona. I have not designed many brick buildings but find myself frustrated by the banal wallpapering of the material. My choice of this building is in part to hold a mirror up to the limp tectonic and material platitudes of today, not least in Hamburg.

The brickwork has a closely understood structure. Flat panels above and below windows are simple, while in prominent areas like the archway over-panels they are a riot of textural brick weaving. The wall surface is given stiffness and relief by triangular vertical piers rising from the double-height base to the underside of the cornice. These in turn have an inflection every seventh course to give a scaling between window and wall. So often art and architecture become disassociated and art is left as an afterthought but here architect and artist were in close dialogue, both helping to create a result greater than the sum of its parts.

Chilehaus today continues to work as it was intended. It is essentially a passively controlled environment with a clever services distribution system from an innovative basement structure. The internal finishes of the common areas are simple and dignified, and the external envelope should be good for centuries to come. Not many contemporary buildings can boast such urban sustainable and aesthetic credentials.

Chilehaus terminates in a distinctive ship’s prow-like corner, a probable reference to the client’s mercantile business.

One of the two courtyards within the Chilehaus development. All elevations are lined in brick.

BRICK ICON Chilehaus was built by the shipping magnate Henry B Sloman and named in reference to the saltpetre from Chile that had made his fortune. Sloman commissioned Fritz Höger to design the 10-storey building for Hamburg’s then new merchant district, the first dedicated office zone in Europe.

Höger’s design linked two irregularly shaped plots of land by building over the narrow Fischertwiete Street close to the River Elbe. The huge building is arranged around two internal courtyards to either side of this street, and terminates in a sharp corner reminiscent of a ship’s prow at the intersection of Pumpen and Burchardstrasse. Chilehaus was built with more than 4 million dark clinker bricks on a reinforced concrete frame with sculptural elements by Richard Kuöhl.

Nearly a century later it retains most of its original features including its semi-public entrance halls. It is let to multiple office tenants with retail spaces and cafés at ground floor.

One of the many entrances off the larger public courtyard. The building name refers to the client’s business importing saltpetre from Chile.

Chilehaus’ semi-public entrance halls are lined in glazed ceramics. Eric Parry admires their “simple and dignified” quality.

Zollverein Coal Mine

Location: Essen, Germany

Architect: Martin Kremmer & Fritz Schupp

Built: 1927 (OMA-masterplanned regeneration from 2002)

Chosen by David West and Christophe Egret of Studio Egret West

Christophe Egret (left) and David West (right) of Studio Egret West at the Zollverein Coal Mine Complex, which now accommodates a variety of post-industrial uses.

David West

Zollverein has become a shorthand reference for us to explain to clients, communities and stakeholders a type of post-industrial environment that isn’t sanitised through regeneration, but instead uses landscape and narrative to create a rich new platform for sustainable development. This creative re-use appeals to us because we enjoy the obstruction of retaining as much as possible and using resonance with the past to help discover new uses and place-specific designs.

Zollverein stands out for us not just through the nature and sheer ambition of the regeneration, but the quality of the original industrial architecture. You can see why it has been described as the most beautiful coal mine in the world. With its rigorously planned brick blocks, chimneys and chutes, it is designed to be absolutely utilitarian yet somehow the architecture becomes really playful and, when we visited, we all discovered something of the fairground about it.

Because it’s such an unusual collection of buildings and spaces, Zollverein is good enough to have a second life, and this is an inspiration for any architect to make their buildings good enough for another incarnation. We admire the ambition and commitment that has sought this second role at Zollverein. Zollverein has the potential for this completely new layer of programme as a cultural and business centre on a monumental scale. Everything about it is extraordinary. The dramatic juxtaposition of new and old is very raw and strong. One of the key reasons that Zollverein has been such a pin-up for us at Studio Egret West is the untamed-yet-structured wilderness nature of the post-industrial landscape.

It’s not too cosmetic or precious. Near the coal washery, the memory of the railway tracks is amplified when it would have been very easy to clear it all away. We like how the regeneration avoids clearing up the place to within an inch of its life. As a result, Zollverein retains a lot of its grit and specialness. So often architects overcomplicate things but this is a simple, pared-back restoration with one clear big move that brings it alive – the giant orange escalator up to the new museum, which adds a new, memorable element without dissolving the narrative of the past.

Zollverein has been an inspiration for us on many of the post-industrial landscapes we’ve worked on that have needed reinvention. We like to pull out stories from the site’s history and show its layers, such as at the Old Vinyl Factory, the original home of HMV in Hayes.

So many developers take a corporate and banal route when creating what they think people want rather than concentrating on what differentiation a place can offer. There’s no reason that business parks and offices have to be so dull. Why can’t they be the inspirational working places of the future?

Reinvention does take time and at Zollverein they’re taking a piece-by-piece approach to building out the masterplan including some memorable ‘meanwhile’ uses such as a 500m-long ice track and swimming pool at the coking plant which we like – our approach has always been that meanwhile is worthwhile. It’s about slow-cooking change to gradually evolve a place, although because of the recession and the UNESCO restrictions the pace might have slowed down a little too much at Zollverein. There’s a very long way to go, but at Zollverein, they’re in it for the long haul.

Christophe Egret

This project has been one of our inspirations since we started our practice – a reinvention of disused, post-industrial heritage to create an active leisure park through a blend of urban design, inspired raw landscape, contemporary architecture and the reuse of old buildings.

A lot of architects are inspired by the architecture of individual buildings, but both David and I are particularly interested in the nature and architecture of a place as a whole, and on every site we work on we immerse ourselves to find the specificity of the site.

Zollverein is about sustainability. Here, industrial land is becoming a cultural landscape and it’s a testimony to the place that it can evolve so well. This is inspiring for us because one of the important things for the future is adaptability.

It does go against the architect’s ego and it is harder to adapt a building than design anew, but preserving rather than wiping the slate clean can be the catalyst for reinvention – if we keep that building, that tree, that landscape, we can keep a connection with the pulse of the place. Zollverein is a good example of this. None of the spaces are beautified. They still have a raw quality, apart perhaps from Foster’s Red Dot museum. There must have been a time when it would have been quite attractive to demolish Zollverein but someone found the will to stick with it. Now the point has been made and it’s a success.

Industrial architecture is interesting in that its shape does everything as efficiently as possible. Like a uniform, it’s an aesthetic to do with function rather than fad. Zollverein is dramatic but also harmonious and elegant. The approach of the regeneration has been to keep the soul of the past industry as an anchor for the creation of contemporary new uses. The danger, especially with the restrictions of its UNESCO status, was that it might have become a monument rather than a catalyst to regeneration.

What works so well is the meshing of the wild landscape with the tough, industrial environment. That for me is the magic moment. It draws the whole thing together and in our projects, we’ve always found that the one thing that really holds the spirit of the masterplan is the landscape – the paths, the streets, the squares.

When we visited, one of the most amazing parts was the room in the coking plant with the coal bunkers that resemble great concrete udders. You couldn’t ever justify building something like that but because it’s already there, you end up with a space that has so much more character than if the whole lot had just been swept away.

So many places that have been restored end up being sanitised — like the Fiat factory in Turin, which is now a mediocre shopping complex. Zollverein is full of resonance with the past. It just needs a bit more contemporary life, but that, I hope, will come.

Coal bunkers in the former coking plant. Many of Zollverein’s industrial buildings have been utilised for site-specific art installations.

MINE REINVENTION Once the largest producing coal mine in the Ruhr area, Zollverein is now being regenerated as a mixed-use development. The mine, which covers 100ha in the north of Essen, was active from 1847 to 1986 with the coking plant operational from 1961–1993. The diverse site was rationalised to maximise productivity, with buildings arranged in strict symmetry in uniform red brick with steel frames.

The mine buildings were saved from demolition when it was decided to develop cultural and business uses for Zollverein. OMA’s masterplan included the refurbishment of halls and open areas and the conversion of the coal-washing plant, the largest above-ground building, in 2003–6.

SANAA completed a new design school building in 2006 on the edge of the site, now occupied by Folkwang Academy. Foster & Partners’ Red Dot design museum is housed in a former boiler-house. The whole site is a local recreation area and events venue. Zollverein became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.

The former coal mine is now a recreation area, with several of the industrial buildings incorporating new mixed-uses such as museums and education.

Many of the imposing 1920s red brick mine buildings are considered fine examples of Modern Movement architecture.

New landscaping retains the spirit of the site’s industrial past, incorporating many of the railway tracks that crossed the site.

The Economist Plaza

Location: London, UK

Architects: Alison and Peter Smithson

Completed: 1959–64

Chosen by Tom Grieve and Hana Loftus of HAT Projects

Hana Loftus (left) and Tom Grieve (right) of HAT Projects at the Economist Plaza in central London.

Tom Grieve