[EN] - Never Modern

// 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.