The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Brief Encounters
mass and substance of architecture with this kind of event is difficult, but
any space will have components that can be used to amplify a sense of unexpected
connection—and that can happen on lots of different scales. Our own
office, for example, is an old industrial space. The rigid organization of desks
emphasizes this, but we introduced blue sails, pushing the inside out and
allowing the outside to come in. They are a parenthesis of the space that indicates
a dynamic of observation, signs of movement, so as you walk
through a building you feel a part of something else.
There is a way of generating a process of design that is to do with
moving through space, and being a figure in a space. This can bring about
quite different ideas that begin to modulate and therefore design that space.
We don’t work from the plan but from situations that are set up; we then
start to interpret the situations from a pragmatic point while searching for
what they allude to. In a small theater project in Poland we wanted to add
a vital sense of the present. By repeating the proscenium arch on the outside
of the building—so that you enter through it—a component of the inside
is exported to set up a tension in space and meaning. For me a narrative component
is derived from the thing itself. In other projects the tension is created
by the character of spaces rubbing up against one another, where each
space may be affiliated to very different things. In the National Centre for
Popular Music in Sheffield, the main museum is housed in four drums, and
between them is a cross. The building comes together like a piece of machinery,
the intention being that the cross is the connection to the streets
and passages, a continuation of the genetic coding that forms the street pattern
of the city. While the drums are more industrial in character, more static—you
enter each of them as into a cave. It is a very simple idea, but it sets
up a complex dynamic. While designing I didn’t really understand this
complexity—I was working intuitively. My hunch was that the enclosed
qualities of the domes would be very appropriate for the museum, when offset
and emphasized by the open, elevated, free-flowing cross shape.
This sort of duplicity in form, through what it feels like, makes the
experience at once familiar and not familiar, somehow commonly unfamiliar.
This leads to what narrative architecture is really about. It is not an architecture
that tells stories, so much as an architecture that has additional
fragments of choreography and insinuation that contradict the first-order
vocabulary. The museum and other current projects are more abstract with
their narrative. Today, our work is getting cleaner. It doesn’t have this sense
of collage that our work may have had before, but the transformational
mechanisms and illusions are there—just simplified. To strip down is a process
of amplification, and the way things work on the mind and body are far