May 2004
Robert Maxwell
Professor Emeritus Princeton University USA
Brick Leaf House 2003
The world here is privileged, discreet, an area of large conventional houses, well planted and beautifully maintained. The gardens butt on to Hampstead Heath extension, marked by an iron railing, but so thickly wooded that from here it seems like the back of beyond. To arrive at these railings on the public side will put you into instant exposure, looking in on a space of privacy and seclusion, also well planted and about to be beautifully maintained, if not conventional in the normal sense. These houses are unashamedly modern, but with discretion. Each of their gardens is dominated by a large mature tree - a copper beech, an oak - that have been here for aeons. The effect is of a clearing in the forest, quite paradisiacal.
The single building consists of two houses, each square on plan, each built around a light well which is normally roofed to make a two-story internal atrium, adjoining the staircase. The roof lights, at the touch of a switch, withdraw, so that the cool night air can flood the building. Back in place, they resist the hot air of daytime, or keep out the rain. The plan is climate sensitive, but it employs no sunshades, gaps or gimmicks, and there are no curves. It is the poetry of the right angle, again. Except that there is a gentle oblique angle between the two units, in plan, and a recess that marks the entry of one.
This building provides a home for two brothers and their families, each house being autonomous. The two are however connected by a passage way which can be thrown open to allow parties to surge from one to the other, or left closed up and un-noticed as a sort of family secret. Almost as secret is the way down to the shared swimming pool that lies under the upper house. It is not flooded with light, but top lit from either end. At one end is a light well that helps to insulate one house from the other; it is plastered in dark cement so that the light is not amplified, but all the same remains as a goal for the swimmer. At the other end a modest topflight inserted in the garden terrace will permit not only light, but on occasions, sunlight, to act as a goal for swimming in the other direction. Each length thus has its individual character, an encouragement for the swimmer to go for one more length.
The planning follows the same degree of understatement. The internal atria spread light throughout each house, without impinging on the individual rooms. These all focus on the large windows which admit views of the beautiful garden, without imposing a single orientation. Indeed, it is one of the charms of the house that the hierarchy of rooms is not dominated by one orientation; the lower house opens to the south and east, the upper house to the west and south. The individual rooms are in a sense free from constraint, each ordains in turn its own world.
On the outside, there is a corresponding ambiguity about the hierarchy of the space. The pattern of windows in each wall is strong and well considered, but not regimented. The metal frames are set close to the wall surface, maintaining the plane of the wall, which allows them to be big without disrupting the planes. There is no dominant "window wall". The house is thus broken up into episodes. To counter deliquescence, however, detail becomes important. Unity is maintained by the strict control of the detailing, which follows a minimalist style in the sense that it is always direct and consistent, with nothing extraneous. Flooring is always in the same pietra serena stone from Florence, and the wood floors and doors are always in American walnut, the handrails in bronze. So the unity of the whole turns out to be a difficult whole, not deriving from a spatial unity, but from a consistency of approach. It remains in place, is even very strong.
To some extent this strategy has developed from the issue of maintaining the autonomy of each house. The architect was conscious of the problems that might emerge in adapting the room divisions to individual requirements, and to allow clientsπ wishes to be followed through the design period. Partly to keep from possible entanglements during design the structure chosen is a steel frame, concealed in the pattern of partitions, but offering the least opposition to changes that might develop. The absence of a distinct structure and thus of a structural hierarchy is another feature that encourages the sense of being free from an architectπs rule.
On the other hand, the rather free pattern of windows on the east, west and south sides is balanced by an almost complete absence of windows on the north or entrance side. In a way, this has come about because it was considered as a kind of back, while the other sides share their function as "front". The sheer walls around the entrance point establish a sculptural quality, intensified by the choice of a handmade Gloucester brick, whose varied texture animates the surface in a telling way. The same brick is used to enclose the garden and outbuilding of the lower house, the one that is nearest the approach, so that the visitor is dominated by the privacy of the enclave, and by the sense of exclusion. The presence of the modest entrance doors within this austere composition renders them doubly hospitable. At the same time, the gentle angle between the two houses softens the composition, gives it a touch of the picturesque without imposing too much.
Another thing that helps to provide variety between the two houses is the presence of the outbuilding, the walls of which also extend the brick enclave approached by the visitor. This contains the garage, a workshop, and a ceramic studio, arranged in a single line. This building encloses the garden for the lower house, the one dominated by a large beech tree, and acts as a support for the building as a whole. The presence of an outbuilding, housing potentially noisy activities, is part of a strategy that the architect has formulated, partly as a response to the empirical requirements, partly as a counterbalance to the formality of the brick sculptural entity. And partly to establish the concept of a "grand house". He has issued a short paper called Notes on Making a Grand House, which makes his intentions clear.
What is at issue here, then, is to develop the concept of the grand house. The double client helps in this, providing a double occasion and double the response. The issue is how to respond without too much revealing the separateness of the double programme, and how to impose an overall unity that doesnπt jar. To do this the architect has adopted a strategy of going for a dispersed pattern, avoiding grandiosity as far as possible. I feel that he has succeeded admirably in doing this. It works for the clients, and it works for the public.
There is a general problem about grandeur, which as an aim is far from acceptable in our day and age. It sets the individual ownership against the public realm, it could raise democratic hackles. Long gone is the acceptance of the squire's superiority, let alone the intrusion of a new neighbour. The planners had no difficulty: they wanted above all to maintain the conformity of the development, in this case to keep up the context of a privileged realm: the building had to fit with a neighbourhood of fairly grand houses. The use of a dispersed window pattern, with no intrusion of an overcalled episode on the facade, helped to gain acceptance, no doubt. The choice of brick was safe, as was the use of white window frames, even if metal ones. Yet the house, as a whole, is not conformist, but remains strictly within a modernist canon.
But it is modernism with a difference. It uses abstraction, with neat, even slick surfaces; it uses modern construction, using a steel structure not as a matter of faith, but as a practical convenience; compact planning, not for cheapness, but to further the amenity, even the luxury of the programme; environmental principles, but not as an over-reaching justification for the parti. It is a different modern building that results.
As one of an older generation that used to think Corbu had the final answer, I am constantly having to revise my ideas since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nowadays we have had to get accustomed to a new kind of expressionism, a kind of no-holds-barred radicalism, affected to a large extent by the conceptualism of contemporary art. What matters with Libeskind is his narrative, with Hadid is her unbridled dynamism, with Koolhaas is his surrealism. With Woolf we have a clear originality that eschews any over-riding ideology, but for all its understatement projects a hidden strength. It's a quality that I feel grateful for.
Architecture Today Magazine Issue 117
April 2001
Dr Mark Swenarton
Tucked away in the corner of Strathmore Gardens in the Kensington Palace conservation area of London, this building is barely discernible from the street. Similar qualities of subtlety characterise its £160,000 refurbishment by Woolf Architects, which rather than imposing an image seeks to define and emphasise the inherent qualities of the building.
Soon after the street of four-storey terraced houses was built in the 1860s, a small chapel was squeezed into the site, between three party walls and with a narrow entrance front on the re-entrant corner. Later it was used as an artist's studio, before being converted for domestic use with a basement and sunken courtyard, a double height living area with mezzanine gallery and high rear windows; it was last modified in the 1970s.
Woolf Architects were asked to refurbish the house in 1998, retaining the two metre street facade. However, areas such as the basement bedrooms with their stained glass patio doors, the three-storey spiral staircase, and the gallery overlooking the living area needed re-examining. One of the key challenges was to maximise daylight, particularly in the basement. The architects were struck by the contrasting qualities of double-height living area and the basement - they saw the living area as a 'pavilion' and the basement as a 'cave' characteristic they sought to emphasise.
The living room has a vaulted ceiling and a full-height window looking north over the courtyard. The space was flooded with natural light and the architects were keen to retain this. To emphasis the cubic quality of the 'pavilion', the floor plan was clarified as a formal sequence. A new wall separates the entrance and the kitchen from the living room, creating a zone at the south end of the plan corresponding to the (external) zone of the courtyard at the north. Rather than integrating them into a single space with the living room area, the hallway, kitchen and stairs each form separate 'rooms'.
In contrast, the basement 'cave' is treated as an enfilade, with the open-plan stair-hall leading past the smaller rooms (guest bathroom, second bedroom, master bathroom) to the main bedroom. A sliding door detailed without threshold, is concealed within the wall. The polished resin finish to the concrete floor and the glass balustrade help maximise the sense of daylight within the 'deep' space of the stair-hall. Walls finished off in an off-white matt and the doors in a whiter gloss provide a subtle complement to the pale beige floor.
Apart from two small windows at the entrance area to the guest bedroom and bathroom, the only window is in the main bedroom. The existing stained glass windows were removed and the opening widened to accommodate two aluminium-framed glass panels, 2.4 metres wide and 2.0 metres high, the cill being flush with the external courtyard. It was decided not to span the whole opening as the architects did not want to smooth out the irregularities that gave the building its identity.
There are limited opportunities for introducing new windows and so the
architects looked to the potential of the roof. Just as the courtyard
was treated as an external sky-lit 'room' adjoining the living space,
so the mezzanine-level office was considered as a similar balancing volume,
also daylit. Existing roof lights to the rear of the living space and
the above the office were redesigned with hidden frames, making it unclear
as to whether they were glazed or open to the sky. A new roof light was
introduced above the stairs, bringing light to the depths of the plan.
Building Design Magazine Issue 1494
July 6 2001
Kieran Long
Pooled Resources
Woolf Architects' two houses for brothers are linked by more than a shared swimming pool, writes Kieran Long
Two conjoined houses for two brothers and their families. This could be a dream commission, suggesting all sorts of possibilities for investigating the extremes of the sibling's relationships, exploring the close interaction of two families, while providing private space for each.
Add to this the prospect of a large budget which enabled the architect to include a semi-subterranean swimming pool in the scheme, and an exciting steeply sloping site on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London and you have a brief that most small practises would kill for.
It has fallen to Woolf Architects, based in Kentish Town and headed by ex-Munkenbeck & Marshall architect Jonathan Woolf, to fulfil this almost too neat architectural proposition. Woolf competed against John Pawson and his old mentor Munkenbeck & Marshall in a mini-competition for the houses, and although less high profile than these two practises, his convincing response won him the job.
And as a site that requires a response rather than that faithful staple of the timid designer - the solution. The site is part of a steep man-made terrace which slopes 9m from front to back, and the houses are sited halfway down the site in a pinch point in the hourglass-shaped site. The plot is dominated by two mature trees, copper beech and English oak, which were influential in how the houses interacted with their surroundings. The Brick Leaf Houses, as they have now been christened, have a tree each, which form shaded areas and define the gardens, and the houses formalise the relationship between these two elderly inhabitants of the site.
The programme is also fascinating. Woolf explains: "The house deals with families, and the need to maintain and have privacy. The two brothers and their respective families are interested in living together, but in separate parts of the house. In that sense we looked at the grand house tradition, at houses like Kenwood [Robert Adam's 1764 stately home, also on Hampstead Heath], where you have two wings and communal space in the middle."
The common space here is not a grand music room or a library, but a swimming pool, accessed from a communal stair between the houses. The pool will be lit from above but, because it is largely underground, will have no conventional windows, making it a cavern-like top-lit space. Structurally the swimming pool is a rigid concrete box, with deep side pile which both houses sit.
The houses have four bedrooms each, as well as family rooms and formal reception rooms on the ground floors. Woolf decided early on that the houses should look like one building, with the same material and similar dimensions. The two houses are expressed by a subtlecant of a couple of degrees, responding to the irregular slope. The differences internally will be more appreciable, though. The architect decided also to work with the steeply sloping site, rather than excavating it to provide a flat area to build. The house sits on reinforced concrete platforms, but flooring height vary in the two houses, responding directly to the undulating topography. This will mean the houses are of a very individual character, while being expressed externally as two wings of the same building with a common entrance.
This pair of houses looks polite - brick on the outside, with windows shifting along facades with minimalistic glazing detail. This seems the stock trick of a certain young practice. The likes of Sergison Bates, Buschow Henely and Houlton Taylor have all employed this trick, taking plain rectangular facades and animating them subtly through the very simple method of arranging openings at irregular but beautifully proportioned intervals. It is a certain kind of pleasure to look at a drawing of a plain brick elevation with six openings, like listening to a three- note musical chord Simple and beautiful, there is an implicit assertion of the beauty and importance of each individual handmade Gloucester Grey brick and the combination of several as a legible and reassuring wall. There is a self-assuredness and humility about such an elevation.
These are not just simple brick boxes though Woolf has taken a step further with the end facades, and these will be made entirely of header-bond bricks with the short faces facing outwards. This will lend density to the house, as well a restrained opulence, suggesting an abundance of materials. This idea was prompted by the architect's work with wooden models - solid oak and iroko models of the houses were made at concept stage, and the grain of the wood became important to the feel of the houses. The idea to try to express the grain of the materials was carried through to the design of the brickwork.
The brief for this project is unique and an opportunity that it would
have been easy to over-play. Woolf Architects has made a plausible and
elegant response to the programme and site, and could create an important
project in the context of a new British architecture which is concerned
again with materiality and the beauty of simple details. Woolf's name
is one to remember. The house is due to be complete in 2002.