// Irenee
Scalbert on 6A - Never Modern
 |
| 6A Architects |
“In
Never Modern, Irenee Scalbert explores the role of narrative,
history, and appropriation in the works of the London-based firm 6a
Architects, whose recent projects include the South London Gallery,
Raven Row, and the new fashion galleries at the Victoria and Albert
Museum. Scalbert examines the unique approach of the members of 6a,
wherein they avoid style and signature in favor of what Scalbert
calls a premodern sense of metis, or “flair, wisdom,
forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance,
opportunism, varied skills, and experience.”
Scalbert’s
analysis is accompanied by a striking visual essay of archival
photographs, artworks, film stills, and recent projects by the firm.
In the end, Scalbert argues that like contemporary society in
general, the architecture of 6a Architects is fundamentally a work of
bricolage, creating art composed of various objects on hand, drawing
from history and the everyday to create something new and vital.”
Name
& Stance
The
essay is opened with a simple explanation of a most most banal name
for an agency “6a”, it corresponds to their address 6a, Orde
Hall street in London. It is a name that doesn't presuppose anything,
unlike a polemic name “OMA – Office for Metropolitan
Architecture”, nor an attitude “9H – hardest pencil lead
available” or even a signature like “Herzog&DeMeuron”.
I
would like to quote an article that can be found on “Notes On
Metamodernism” which claims the beginning of the end of
“starchitecture” given the shifts in recent geopolitical economy
and explicits a position by Blair Kamin “The
age of the architectural icon—that extravagant, exuberant,
“wow”-inducing building on a pedestal— is dead, or more
precisely, in its death throes”.
Evidently
such a claim is not so simple if we look at the whole market where in
the recent years the rise
of “BIG/Bjarke Ingels” has been the combination of what the
current economy allows and an excellent communication strategy by the
danish agency. The analogy is also seemingly complicated in Asia,
especially in China where the “wow” factor is still very much
alive, although some architects like Li Xiaodong, Neri&Wu etc..
have been demonstrating new contemporary ways of treating and
affirming Chinese aesthetics.
Back
to London, where 6a have chosen modesty, modesty which allows them
flexibility in their practice and conception philosophies
Studies
& Influences
6a
architects position themselves in a circle of influential British
architects and artists that rose in the early 80's with the likes of
Wentworth, Fretton and the “Whisperers” opposing themselves to
the “Smithsons”
The
members of 6a met and befriended Richard Wentworth,a sculptor
identified with the new British Sculpture movement. Tim
Woods has characterized the movement by identifying four major
themes, "(a) a synthesis of pop and kitsch, (b) a bricolage
(assemblage) of the decaying UK urban environment and the waste of
consumer society, (c) an exploration of the way in which objects are
assigned meanings, and (d) a play of colour, wit and humour, these
are themes that are further explained in the essay « Never
Modern » which have heavily impacted the work of 6a. Tony
Fretton, Adam Caruso, Peter St. John, Jonathan Sergison, Stephen
Bates and David Adjaye used to always meet on Sundays and read their
essays to one another - Peter Cook called them "The Whisperers".
The
Evening Standard of London published an article on October 7, 2009
called THE RISE OF SLOW ARCHITECTURE with
the claim that Now That the Noughties Boom of Blobs and
Steel Is over, the Time Has Come for a More Restrained Style Favoured
by a Group of London Practices Which until Now Have Been More Valued
Abroad Than at Home
« Now
the Slow Architects' time has come. One of them, Tony Fretton, is
favourite to win this year's Stirling Prize on 17 October with his
Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark, and has just completed the new
British Embassy in Warsaw. Another, David Chipperfield, is the
subject of an exhibition at the Design Museum, opening this month.
Caruso St John's Nottingham Contemporary gallery, the firm's most
signifi-canwork to date, opens next month with a major Hockney
exhibition; they have also created something more transient, the big
tent for the Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park, which opens next week.
It
is not that these architects are new or young or obscure but the
change in the economic climate and the decline of more spectacular
work makes them more visible. "If you stick around long enough
and do good work," says Peter St John of Caruso St John, "people
can't ignore you any more. ».
Slow
Architecture, is a form of « new seriousness » in
architecture that can be also found in oher european countries as Tom
Dyckhoff once put it.
« The
subject is what surrounds you »
« The
subject is what surrounds you »
6a immediately note the importance of the subject that was, the
subject that was said to be « dead » by Postmoderns is
re-affirmed alive. For the project of Raven Row gallery, 6a
where confronted to the subject as an emanation of how the building
lived by the past, and what had happened in it, alothough it was, as
they put it “invisible”.
The
invisible had became visible, and it seemed clear that the building
had become a canvas for different lifestyles and narratives in it, as
Viollet-Le-Duc, french revivalist architect claimed refurbishing a
building is not giving it it's former “has been” but giving it a
new state of life adapted to the current situation, indirectly it
seems this would have happened to the building over it's life.
As
an opposition to this vision is 41 Artillery lane that was fossilized
into a “fantasy object” and a “showcase of the restorer's art”
recalls Raphael Samuel. However 6a have given importance to most of
the minute details that populate the existing building, such as the
door, fireplace etc, that are signs of knowledge and “momentary
resourcefulness” all of the elements that the context are giving
need a sound theory on intervention
«
Natural History»
How
were 6a to interpret the broken history of Raven Row? The architects
question themselves how much can you transform a building until it's
essence is lost? Until it becomes something else?
For Gaston Bachelard lies an extremly strong phenomenological relation between a building and it's occupant, images communicate, when one sees a room, iages of his youth, rest, sleep etc come to his mind, how could you keep alive this relation, when working on an existing building?
The
main clue to the question lies in the subject yet again, the two
women who have lived there since 1972 and how they appropriated the
space in order to create an own one.
In
the final building the space seems 'bleached' with images of the past
building operating as ghostly appearances, maybe even glipses of the
past of the building, in a house turned to gallery.. The Natural
history of the building made visible.
“Attention
to details”
If
we are to oppose to the pristine dream of an industrial design, that
is as clean and defined as the building of the Bauhaus in Dessau,
which is respectable. The single fact that Raven Row is within an
existing situation changes the task as a whole
6a
demonstate a strong empahsis on Craftsmanship that is explicited in
the “new seriousness” and a new “autheticity”
aswell as the respect for the past, as contradictory as it may seem,
they have so well demonstrated.
Details
that communicate in the way of ornaments or traces are central in
making the claim of the architects, they are opportunist, they cease
a small moment in time, and make the most of it, they mark the
authenticity of the space in which the architects are working, and
henceforth the gallery that is being visited. Authenticity as in the
fireplace (above) that hasn't been cleaned, left in the immaculate
state the architects found them in.
Details
are not abundant but well chosen, they are “inadvertant signatures”
like the end of the handrail, that was made by the architects
themselves, it is for 6a a way to make a statement, as opposed to a
building that makes a statement, and like Wenworth, to whom they
referred for photographic details, they believe that making allows
simultaneously to delve in a larger understanding of what may be
surrounding us.
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