Screens

SCREENS

JUNE 2015

^{Images: Avenham Park Pavillion, Preston. The Institute of Timber, Detroit}

‘What do you see when you look up through the trees? Try to imagine this moment in a pretended place or part of a journey through a particular sequence of spaces. How does one describe this experience? What is it about spaces in nature, for example forests, which make them fascinating yet at the same time unsettling places to inhabit? A forest offers a place of refuge and natural beauty where the element of surprise is all part of the experience’

The idea of nature as a spatial experience and a driver for architectural form was a question that ran through my academic work and has subsequently led to an obsession with a perceptual and evolving architecture. It is interesting that my time in the office has allowed me to both reflect and discover parallels that run through similar themes in the work of the practice. A pursuit for a “thicket-like” characteristic, which allows for shifts in spatial qualities and a variation of patterns that overlay like woven surfaces to define space are just some of the mannerisms that I have begun to recognise.

I compare my own attempt to generate a kind of place that is animated, brightening as you ascend towards the canopy when reading the blurred lines of the roof of the pavilion designed for a woodland park in Preston. The structure is designed as a number of layers of mesh to capture rain whilst creating a display of shadows that activate the building beneath. As a competition proposal, the structure was never fully realised yet it has been the ideas established during this process that still resonate today. By staggering the building between the tree density, the line of the pavilion is undefined breaking the traditional form of constructing space and allowing a new reading of the building and landscape. Particularly enlightening in the search for the enclosure of space is a fruition of a screen-like quality that works as a surface and also as a generator of it’s tectonic form.

The use of the screen as a ‘device’ in our architecture allows elements to become not only separators of rooms or the external environment but also actuators for unique and unimagined spatial experiences. In search of this architecture is an attempt to purposefully discover a different architecture and an unplanned result that wouldn’t necessarily be reached through something un-natural.

^{Benni Allan graduated from the Bartlett with Distinction in 2014, and has been working on a project for Jesus College, Cambridge since joining Niall McLaughlin Architects. In February 2015, Benni was named as one of the nation’s up-and-coming designers and ‘One to Watch’ by the Design Council to represent the future of British design. His project the ‘City of Forests’ looked at beautifying Detroit through reforestation strategies to promote a denser, greener and more sustainable future in which timber becomes the main economic output. As Detroit continues to struggle with the effects of massive industrial changes, this more positive image of vacancy as an asset opens new discussions about the future post-industrial city.}

A DAY OUT OF THE OFFICE

MAY 2014

We breathlessly boarded the 08.55 to Darlington. Like skilled waitresses we had kept our homemade, oversized, A1 box perfectly level throughout our chase through Kings Cross Station. The immaculate foam-board creation fitted perfectly on top of a double-seat on the near-empty train. East-Coast mainline rules are clear however; the guard reminded us that seats are for people only and at Peterborough we were duly ordered to deliver our carefully crafted friend to the dedicated luggage wagon at the front of the train.

The box was purposefully constructed to house a 1:150 context model of Bishop Auckland Town Square with ‘slot-inable’ building options for the site in question. The model was made for a meeting with Durham County Council and English Heritage at Auckland Castle that same afternoon.
Despite our ticket inspector’s fussiness, we were carried to our destination with the box and its contents in good order.

After a communal lunch with the review panel, the dozen-odd experts collected themselves around a table where the model had been assembled. The object took up so much space that notebooks occasionally and apologetically slid from the edges of the table.

For the following three hours, a multitude of building blocks representing different proposals for the new Welcome Building were inserted into the corner site. The new building is to link town and castle, engaging the new with the old, with our site at the axis of this pirouetting dance.
As we waltzed around the model, interchanging different pieces into our self-made jigsaw, a negotiation occurred between the many different people around the room, a parallel perhaps to the building itself.

During the second part of the afternoon, the presentation became more conceptual. The tower – the key feature of the proposal – was discussed in its meaning, shape and materiality. Was it a campanile, a siege tower, a lighthouse or a scaffold? Each version was debated with varying levels of approval or skepticism. We answered questions by pulling off bits of white card or finding any handy props to add on to the model; notepads, milk jugs and i-phones were used.
We left the meeting feeling excited, there was only this box to get all the way back to the office.

Image shows part of the paper model, with multiple versions scattered about, sitting on a windowsill after the meeting.

Anne Schroell studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She worked for Tonkin Liu and De Matos Storey Ryan as well as practices in Luxembourg and Austria before joining Niall McLaughlin Architects in 2006. The main projects Anne worked on are Deal Pier Café in Kent, Somerville College Student Accommodation in Oxford, Peabody Housing in London. She is currently running the Auckland Castle project which consists of 2 new buildings. One is a new gallery attached to the castle and the other is the Welcome Building and Tower for orientation and ticketing.