Simon Henley

Simon Henley is one of London architecture’s unsung heroes. His practice Henley Halebrown wrings great buildings from unlikely sites across the city, Hackney New Primary School being a great example but also their latest work Thames Christian School. But Simon is also a great advocate for the culture of architecture as a writer but in a host of other ways. Tim talked to him about buildings, history and London.

 

Podcast transcript

Simon Henley: Every building is in an opaque sense a beginning 

Tim Abrahams: Hello, Superurbanists. This week, I’m talking to Simon Henley. A London’s architecture scene, he’s one of the unsung heroes. Of course, I love the work of his practice, Henley Halebrown.  They build great buildings from unlikely sites across our nation’s capital, Hackney New Primary School being a great example. But also, their latest work, Thames Christian School. But Simon is also a great advocate for the culture of architecture. As a writer, he’s explored a road less traveled. His book on Car Parks is an unexpected joy, quite a long way from his own work. 

His book on Brutalism is a loud proclamation of the movement’s continuing relevance, rather than the cozy tucking away of it in the past, as it is for some architectural historians. He’s as passionate about the details of his own work as he is about the greater example of his heroes. He talks about history as a living, breathing, informing process. I went to his office, he showed me his work, then we sat down and had a little chat afterwards.

Simon Henley: So, Thames Christian School and the Baptist Chapel came about because of the redevelopment of the post-war housing states right by Clapham Junction train station. And as these things inevitably do, when you’re completely redeveloping an estate, you’ve got to move the pieces around. And the first pieces in the puzzle were a small independent school with a concentration of students with special education needs, and a chapel.  We had to move the school and the chapel to a different site altogether, really close to the station, with all sorts of issues of acoustics and a very tight site.

So, we ended up making this six-story building with a plinth of school hall and chapel. The building is monolithic, it is literally a rectangle. It then becomes an S-plan on the upper floor, so there are four stories of two open-sided courtyards, one facing essentially southwest, the other facing northeast. And in so doing, it introverts the school, which is partly about how you bring a community of teenagers together and gives them some sanctuary in the context of a massive infrastructural place in terms of Clapham Junction, but also the estates of six-story deck access, lateral and maisonettes.

And of course, we want to ask the question, should you have been able to try and adapt some of the buildings? We had no part in whether that was possible. We don’t even think the architect that led the masterplan could have influenced what was essentially a political decision, plus the fact that you’re trying to double the density of the space. But anyway, it was not a legible bit of city. It was toys chucked out of a pram, scattered across the space, which given that that part of London had a quite coherent urban grain about half a century ago…

What drove the logic of this building?  This idea of sanctuary, this compression and density, the inevitable concentration of the building into a very tight form, but also the challenges of acoustics and natural ventilation. The regulations on schools make the threshold quite low, so in terms of a certain noise level, you basically have to shut the windows and then you have to make out your ventilated building. What we wanted to try and do with our S-shaped plan was turn all the primary windows into the courtyards. And by doing that, shielding them from the noise and being able to facilitate natural ventilation, which we were able to. 

So, it’s quite an achievement, and then what that gives you, is galleries of circulation and tails of rooms. And you’ve got this shell of masonry facades and then a glazed lining to these courtyards. Diagrammatically, you arrive in the middle of the S, and then, you pinwheel going left or right. And you’ve got larger classrooms in that area, and then you’ve got smaller classrooms on the tales. The south half of the ground and mezzanine is the schools and the north half is the churches, and the church then splits into two.

Tim Abrahams: So, what’s the relationship between the school and the church? Is there any?

Simon Henley: Largely accidental, these two buildings were close to each other, but they weren’t affiliated anyway when they were 500 yards away. I guess there are all sorts of typologies that one could have developed, and people probably would have expected either just an even more monolithic block or something more conventional that would have put the bigger things in one place. And brought the rest of the school down to the ground. But it seemed highly appropriate, one of the things which when you’re there and you’re on the north side of Clapham Junction and you’re quite high up when you’re on the tracks, they’re sitting on a big brick viaduct. 

So, it felt appropriate that the building itself offered a similar masonry plinth to the school. When Will Alsop made Peckham Library, what he was doing was lifting that community up. It was always his preoccupation to stick buildings on legs. But in this instance, it made complete sense to elevate a group of people, to see the long perspective, especially kids.

Tim Abrahams: It also elevates the status of it. Here’s our library, it’s important.

Simon Henley: There was this amazing way in which he enabled somebody who lived in a piece of London, a little bit of London, to see the whole of London. And that was purely coincidental to making a library. But I guess it was about knowledge, ambition, and perspective. So, in a quite different way, but nevertheless his idea of getting people high enough up to get away from the contingencies of the infrastructure of the train station and the impact that would have, given that it was on the south side. Literally, the overbearing and overshadowing scale of it, which we’re not aware of when we’re in the train station. 

The more formal elevations to north and South, and less formal elevations to East and West. The church is running from the East, from West to East, with the altar east ending. We started this in something like 2017, so we’re talking seven years ago. And the reasoning, it’s not that he gets lost, but you do forget the cumulative decisions that lead you to somewhere. 

Tim Abrahams: A school plus something else. I think we’ve been here before.

Simon Henley: Hackney New Primary School. It’s interesting, we are working on another one, which may or may not ever see the light of day. Like so many things, this a relatively small office. We don’t do lots of anything, and when we have done schools, it’s normally because an opportunity arises. Hackney New Primary School, it’s a free school that was competing for a site on the open market, and that equation, whilst the state would fund the building of the school, the state would not fund the buying of the land.

So, you then get into this marriage of something that has to buy the land. But we could not have developed a school with this typology because the government is so strict about what constitutes an efficient school. This is what the space should be like, these spaces are necessary; these spaces aren’t necessary.

Tim Abrahams: What’s an example of that?

Simon Henley: Here, it turns out, in this free school, the focus or the added extra is an emphasis on music. But in essence, what they’re really trying to do is draw out of the child an engagement in communal life, because more often than not, you play a musical instrument with a group of people. But because of the challenge of getting a point block of apartments, as it turned out, on the site and the school, it starts to allow you to explore a way of making a school that is contingent on its relationship with the apartment building, and the two things end up being intertwined. 

And in a way, the site, if this was a rural school, it would have a lot more outside space. So, it’s not that we’ve got huge amounts of outside space, but it’s really simple in a way, the making of a courtyard, taking all the corridors out of the building, pouring all of that circulation space into a central space, which on a couple of levels is all useful, not in an absolutely functional sense, but just the freedom to be, whether you’re kicking a football or sitting having a chat with a friend. And then, of course, also, we’ve got gardens on roofs and so on, so we’ve extracted almost as much outside space as we possibly could outside. Every space is directly related to the outside.  

I imagine this classic situation where an elder sibling, who’s in a way slightly patronizing to their younger sibling, starts saying, you’ll be there and I’ll be there. But that in itself means that these children can stand in the space and they completely understand their world. And their world is growing as they grow, and this is a scale of space, place, community, 350 kids and some adults, that you completely get your head around it. Not the number, but the scale of the space and the relationship of everything, which is very equal. 

It’s what I would call a concentric space, it’s not circular. But unlike a linear order, unlike a building that relies on a corridor that actually immediately disadvantages people who would end up down one end of the corridor or the other. A huge number of Victorian and 20th-century buildings relied on the corridor.

Tim Abrahams: It’s got a little village feel to it.

Simon Henley: It’s more ordered than that in reality.

Tim Abrahams: The axonometric really brings that out. It’s finding shelter in quite hostile environments, isn’t it?

Simon Henley: In these instances, yes, but one of the things that just runs through all the work is that we think that making a building is primarily a social act or an antisocial act, and you can get it wrong or you can be disinterested and you’re disinterested at your peril. The motivations of architects are many and varied. You can see that people are technocrats, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and so it goes on. It’s a medium for expression, and discovery and exploitation. The making of a building has a purpose, but what drives and motivates people to make them? 

So, I suppose in our case, amongst other things, it’s the degree to which it creates the circumstances in which people congregate, the rituals, formal, informal, the degree to which the ebb and flow of life from that, whether that’s a literal center, whether it’s inside a building or between buildings, quite informal in the case of Chadwick, it’s a place to delight in as opposed to protect from. But again, there are similar desires, which is to invite common and communal experience, that people have an understanding of the others around them, and their fellow, whatever it is, students.

Tim Abrahams: Chadwick Hall.

Simon Henley: It’s a series of halls, residents in the grounds of an enlisted 18th-century house. There had been a second house within the grounds with wings by Soane, but in the early 20th- century, the building was demolished. So, by the time the Alton West Estate was built…

Tim Abrahams: Tell me a bit about the Alton West Estate from your perspective.

Simon Henley: Yeah. The Alton West Estate is arguably one of the best pieces of social housing, and I think part of that is the architecture itself is good. It’s interesting, a lighter version of Corb’s Unités, but those are the blocks people remember. There’s a series of them that sit echelon on one side of the veil, there’s also a series of point blocks, and then there’s cottages. Typologically, or functionally, there’s almost every dwelling you could imagine set in this landscape and set in the grounds of significant 18th-century houses. There’s beautiful parkland, mature trees and an aspect of the West, which rolls down the hill towards Richmond Park. 

And into this context, the LCC, and at that point, it was Bill Howell and his future partners of Howell Killick Partridge and Amis who were working for the LCC that worked at least on the mini unites, which is perhaps why they have greater interest as historians and architects were. But as a whole, it’s a fascinating ensemble. And this reclaiming of the parkland of the privileged 18th-century society becomes a place for the welfare state to manifest its ambitions of social housing and adopts and casts the 18th-century houses as follies in this landscape. And then to that, they add artwork, Lynn Chadwick’s, The Watchers, look out over this triumph of democracy. It’s a period of architecture that I’m most fond of. 

I’ve spent time in Italy, I’ve done all sorts of things, been all over the world, but there’s something really fascinating about the role of the architect, particularly in a post-war Europe and the contribution they make into the rebuilding of the city, the rebuilding of nations and the democratization of life: kindness, generosity. You see a similar thing in a post-colonial South America, less so in Africa, although it’s there, but people like Artiga and Mendes da Rocha and people like that in Sao Paulo, giving people a sense of what that nation stood for could be, is, was to be through the making of their buildings. It’s a similar time. A generation of architects who obviously, depending on where they were in the world and the situation they found themselves in, their raison d’etre would be slightly different, but somehow, it always seemed to be directed, almost always seemed to be directed at a humanity. Of course, it plays out in physical things, it plays out in material, plays out in light, plays out in form, but also it plays out in the democratization of space, but does also play out in the iconographic role of form.

Tim Abrahams: It’s another thing to build in that environment, isn’t it? What was that like?

Simon Henley: So, it was wonderful, and it was wonderful because it invited a series of conversations. If somebody asks you to make some housing, some affordable housings, an apartment building, a school, a health centre, they’re certainly not looking for theory or philosophy, and they’re not looking for art. And so inevitably we find your way of expressing things that are beyond the conversation. But in this instance, we were in the grounds of an 18th century Grade Two star listed house. We were within 50 meters or whatever of the closest of the Grade Two star listed Alton West estate slab blocks. So immediately everybody was concerned, we had Historic England, we had the 20th Century Society, we had the Georgian society, 

Tim Abrahams: The full house. 

Simon Henley: Yeah, we had every society. But that was great because of course it raises the debate and allows you to start talking about an appropriate language and there’s an appropriate typology, plan forms. In a way, sort of mimicking the typological orders of the 18th and 20th century. So, you end up with these buildings that resemble, or one particularly, resembles a country house with wings. And its form comes about from finding a way of situating that building so that from the street it appears slightly smaller because you’ve got this primary central bay. And then from the gardens, the primary body of the building is set back to give space to a historic garden wall, part of the curtilage listing and the fabric of the garden.

The master plan of the scheme comes from the garden of Downshire House. And so, we set about using that garden to make a court, placing a building to the west and a building to the east. And the building to the east has the party loosely of an 18th-century house as a four-bay center and two wings, and then opposite, we make this pinwheel plan for apartments, which of course is loosely drawing on the 20th century, maybe more the Aalto-esque version. Interesting, it plays out in the way that you then organize the flats. 

The 18th-century house actually becomes a group of terraced houses, whereas the pinwheel plan is three apartments of a central core with the living spaces at the ends of each of the wings, which means that the way the apartments relate to the landscape is distinct. It is the way that the typology of these buildings is more than the shape of a building, it’s actually situating the inhabitant in the landscape in a certain way. The pinwheel plan takes the group of people who share that flat into the landscape as the plan of the building will let them see the prospect of the land. That’s their experience, whereas those who were in the 18th century planned this effectively row of houses, their relationship is of living spaces on the ground floor, bedrooms above and a neighborliness from having a row of front doors on a terrace and so on.

Tim Abrahams: Pinwheels and masonry shells, I love the language that Simon uses when he’s talking about architecture. There’s something very precise about it, but also very evocative. I enjoyed talking to him about the details of his work, but I wanted to ask him a little bit more about the role that he saw architects generally having, stepping outside of his own work and looking across the scene generally. So, we popped into the meeting room, had a coffee and we talked again.

I was asking you about Chadwick and about the opportunity it gave you for reflection on the changing role of the architect, because there you have, on one hand, the architect as the deliverer of great marvels to the aristocracy, and then you have a very different condition, a more generous democratic vision, because time has elapsed since that moment. Or do you still feel like you’re in that historical continuum or has it changed?  And is there any change caused by the fact that you are articulating between two historical moments?

Simon Henley: As well as the kind of buildings, there is this physical dimension, then the role of the architect as a technician, let’s say, or at least exploring technology. The technology of 18th-century architecture was the wall, a solid wall of brick. And it has certain connotations for people, vernaculars tell you things. If you have a fat roof, you’re probably going to feel warm. Your brain is going to start feeling warm and will probably accommodate a certain lack of warmth, a tropical bungalow will do something else. It will shade you from the sun, these deep verandas, and one of the things I guess we were trying to do was recognize that in a way we lost our way as a society about how we built performative structures.

Kahn talked about the immeasurable and said, if only science would be in search of the immeasurable, we found ourselves in an age of the highly measured, whether it’s area purporting to be space, as in a certain amount of area. Some of you might describe a space, but they’re not describing space, they’re describing a highly deterministic amount of area that a function deserves or needs. And the same way that facade now is not something which is particularly legible, it’s not approximate, it’s performative, it’s layered, and it often, and it’s all benign performance that people don’t understand.

So, what we were interested in, at Chadwick, could make a wall that in being a load-bearing, independent structure was reclaiming the role of the wall as something that people understood. Drawing on the 20th-century language of the frame, this traviated thing, it was also borrowing from a deep language of masonry construction, somewhere in that world of those two things. But what it was also doing was placing people in a third space between the interior and the exterior, a place of experience, social and in a way, it’s ecological because people, through their sensible aspects as well, the idea that it orientates people to this natural world, help us to think about what matters.

We’re navigating a late capitalist world. There’s a lot of people who’ve got opinions about what you do and they’re quite dogmatic and we can only play our part. There’s a huge amount of collaboration, but there’s also a huge amount of negotiation and there’s a huge amount of compromise.  And therefore, the outcomes are far from evident when you start. One of the things is that we should be trying to play a greater part in helping people understand the whole question about how we live. It’s a hackneyed thing, perhaps to be talking about the environment, but not if we think about it, perhaps the way that we’ve been thinking about it, which is that it’s something that people need to understand and participate in. 

It needs to be engaging, it needs to be tangible. And in that context, I think it’s really fascinating that it makes complete sense that you buy a fridge and it has an energy statement on it, and it tells you, this is a good fridge. But when you put a label on a building, you basically absolve everybody who uses that building from any responsibility because it’s a product. And then you’re a consumer and you have rights, but you’re not a citizen with responsibilities. How do we expect people to engage and participate in it? When essentially you make the solution incomprehensible.

You go back to the past point about the immeasurable, the immeasurable would be a much more interesting and thoughtful, so it sounds too subjective, but it’s a more agile, flexible way of thinking about sustainability. Because in the process of making more sustainable buildings now, what we’re doing, we’re leaving a legacy of not very sustainable buildings. Because every single building that gets finished is very quickly outmoded in its performance. But in it is vast amounts of embodied energy. And whilst it’s evidently possible to use low-carbon materials on low-rise small projects, it is, in this economic environment, difficult, but particularly difficult in this regulatory environment in relation to housing. 

I presume it’s, in a way, it works for society to be seen to solve the problem and for it to be solved at source, as opposed to this much more subtle and challenging, ultimately, I suppose, in a way, thing, which is how might you change where you live? How might we build for that? But that is, and this seems to be at the essence of the role of the architect now, is can we nudge this question of sustainability away from an engineered solution to something which is much more tangible and participatory?

Tim Abrahams: Do you feel that’s where architects are, that’s one of their key missions at the moment?

Simon Henley: Yes, because the conversation about sustainability is tedious because the solution at the moment is primarily an engineered solution, highly regulated, highly codified, and largely taken away from the architect. I went to India in the autumn, and if one looks at Indian architecture, chronologically but simply, there’s a pre-colonial history, let’s say in Rajasthan, of heavy stone architecture, of perforated stonework that allows for shade, but also ventilation for the breeze to blow through the interior.  So that was a version of making a cool and comfortable building. And they had also other heavy rainfalls, so you end up with these walls with what are called [inaudible], so the jali screens, the perforated stonework, and the [inaudible], which are things that shed the water. So, you get an architecture which is uniquely intensely, but evidently responding to the climate. And then you get a, let’s call it simply a colonial bungalow. And that was a very good way of dealing again with rain and heat and shade and shelter. 

And then you move through to the work of Corb and Kahn and more importantly, Doshi and others, who developed this heavy masonry, concrete brick, brutalist architecture, which for a generation or more was a pragmatic way of building for that climate. And now, all that’s gone. They’re building glass buildings with no shading, with no roof, no canopies, no overhangs, no nothing. Big glass buildings, which are clearly having to be air-conditioned. Even a glass building can be argued to be sustainable, but ultimately you know in your heart of hearts, there are ways of building which are sensible. They’re sensible in the sense that they can be sensed and they’re sensible. We’ve got to change the way we live. But we carry on the way we are building like we’re building, what we’re doing, is legitimising big engineered buildings.

Tim Abrahams: That’s very interesting, this sounds like it’s coming out of nowhere, but it’s very much a reflection on some of the things you’ve been saying. It’s also thinking about the fact that we’re heading forward to an election without necessarily being party political. One of the things I really love about your work is it’s very located in London and it’s through your architecture that I have a positive idea of where London is at this moment. How optimistic are you, what would you like to see more of?

Simon Henley: I need some time.

Tim Abrahams: That’s a big question, but one of the things that you’re very good at, and one of the things that we’ve been doing is explaining through the immediate pragmatic experience. If the question you feel is too big, we’ll come back after the election and see how you feel.

Simon Henley: I do find some respects of London quite parochial now. Central government, but also local government and the decisions they’ve made about regulatory structures and what’s considered to be good and bad and right and wrong and what’s the priority. And that in conjunction with an economic situation is almost impossible. This means that on a day-to-day basis, it’s quite hard to have your voice heard and one tends to slightly withdraw and do the best you can in your conversation with William Mann, he’s talking about the contingent and the sort of unpredictable path that buildings go on.

He was talking about it perhaps for other reasons, or reasons, and one of the reasons now is the numerous people who are involved.  And this is a cultural thing, perhaps more than a political thing, that a huge number of people are involved in a project. If you have three or four people around a table, it’s much easier for those people to admit to a certain degree of fallibility, curiosity, and to start a conversation, a bit like having supper together and a conversation would flow.  A project can run like that, a small group of people can come together and a conversation will flow and the thing emerges from that.

But if you put a huge number of people, not even around a table, in a virtual Zoom meeting, and they now, all have loads of responsibilities in relation to codes and regulations to deliver, then the building becomes an imprint of all of this preconceived necessity. And there is not a lot of common ground. There’s very little opportunity for people to share interest in something that’s barely a dialogue and very difficult actually to then have a conversation that might lead to consensus or somewhere specific.

It’s not a political condition, but it’s a condition of our age that we find out is functioning in that world. It’s a very nebulous thing to ask, perhaps, of a political party. But it seems that we have reached a point in our society, and I think it’s quite English, because we’re collaborating with Belgian architects, German architects, Swiss architects, and they recognize some of what I’m saying, and they don’t recognize what we deal with day to day. Less people could be involved in things, and it is about bureaucracy. It doesn’t matter who the client body is, because everybody’s functioning in a bureaucratic sort of context.

Inevitably, they have to respond to that bureaucracy, and they become bureaucratic, and the whole process becomes bureaucratic. It’s a bit like, was it the Foreign and Commonwealth Office got bigger as the colonies became independent? You’d think that the foreign office would shrink, but I believe it got bigger. What’s the basis and necessity for that? Part of the fact is just the nature of the evolution of civilization seems to be that it becomes more bureaucratic. So, there is a very clear ambition, society should be less bureaucratic, and I think the results will be better.

Tim Abrahams: Yeah, I feel that cuts across quite a lot of political viewpoints, that feeling at the moment, actually. There seems to be a feeling that what happened with HS2, the fallout from that was: how could this happen? Commentators, historians, journalists, engineers, interested parties, from across the political spectrum, some people not even on the political spectrum, have seen that and thought there is a systems issue. I have a pocket full of answers normally, but this one I’ve got no idea.

Simon Henley: Let’s say that we are in this bureaucratic paradigm. We can’t get out of it; we just keep going in one direction. Again, this is less about a political question right now, just fundamentally about humans on the planet. It needs to value time, the economic models have always been to extract raw material, in ever and ever more efficient forms. And that plays out in the practice of architecture, the making of buildings, it plays out in architects’ fees and resourcing, and how much building we need to be involved in. But it plays out in every aspect of life. It’s not really about architects, and architecture is just about society. We need to do the opposite of what we’ve been doing now, which is currently devaluing time.

Tim Abrahams: It’s one of the things that any time that I’m asked about media, or how careers in media, I remember Nike had the slogan, just do it, which was a very liberating, from the 90s moment, kind of happens. Not long after the Berlin Wall went down, it was a very positive mindset. Yeah, just do it. And that really quickly became, why aren’t you doing it? If it can be done, why aren’t you doing it? You know, there was like a proposition. Why don’t you have a website?

Simon Henley: But I often talk about hurdling and high jumping, and to continue the athletic analogy, then why aren’t you doing it? Translates into codes and regulations, which is essentially to hurdle. And so, people stop high jumping. Yeah, how high can I jump is not normally a question that people ask. They just say, oh, so you want me to clear that. Because we’re pessimistic. We’ve become a pessimistic society.  And to come back to your question about the next government, they need to be optimistic. Not naive, but they think they need to be optimistic. 

Tim Abrahams: I, one hundred percent agree.

Simon Henley: And one of the beauties, admittedly, it’s in a dim and distant historical past, but Clem Attlee’s government seemed profoundly optimistic. More recently, Blair’s government, profoundly optimistic. Let’s stick with the Clem Attlee one. The impact that had through its optimism to change people’s lives. And in a sense, it was an easy case to argue because we were indebted to a huge majority of people who survived a war. And maybe it’s harder to explain why we should be indebted. We live in a country of 60 million people, but we’re all fairly selfish.

Tim Abrahams: To talk about just doing it, I was talking to you about your writing, because I must admit, in a very good way, I always find it quite hard to tally the books that you’ve written. And I thought it was very interesting when we were speaking that you said, I like writing about other things. It’s almost like an act of stepping away from your day-to-day work. Is that how it’s always worked, or is that how it still works?

Simon Henley: I guess I’ve grown in confidence about writing. As a kid, my English was diabolical. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, eventually learned to do these things, but never at school. Anyway, I wrote a book about car parks. And that was largely accidental and wholly intuitive, in the sense that as a student, I discovered a book published in the 1960s about [inaudble] car parks, refound it in the late 80s, and refound it in the mid-90s. And I love the book, landscape, and shiny paper. It’s a multi-story car parks, and garages by somebody called Klosh 1965, black and white photographs, line drawings, very concise text.

And in a way, a manual, very strait-laced, showing you graphically all these extraordinary buildings, like Bertram Goldberg’s, Marina City, or also in Chicago, Parking Facility Number One, which is the most purely graphic building I’ve ever seen, which is a lift-type car park no longer there, slabs and wires to stop the cars from falling off. So that’s the façade of the building. I mean, it’s absolutely beautiful. So, this book was full of these kinds of things, and yet all the exploration was very sensible.

But then it was at a time, I guess, when Irma and the Super Dutch were exploring the ramp, or absolutely exploiting the ramp, in something like Jussieu Library and MVRDV’s VPRO office building, probably exemplify that era.  But there’s a whole string of projects built, unbuilt.  And then, I guess, you had Herzog and De Meuron’s and the Swiss School popularizing the material as a thing. And often concrete and tough use of material, artistic use of material, which I could see in the car parks. And so, the premise of the book was really that a hundred years in, it seemed like this type of building that had never been central to the debate about architecture had actually become a huge inspiration and a manifestation of cultural buildings.

 So, what it became was a primer. So, this thing about writing about things that I’m qualified to write about, the book had a certain amount of theory and history in it, but then it looked at four dimensions of the car park. It looked at matter, it looked at elevation, it looked at light, and it looked at what I call the obliquity, which I suppose is the fluidity of the surfaces resulting spaces that you got. And in a way, because these buildings are stripped bare, Adolf Loos talked about the only type of construction that could constitute architecture was the tomb or the monument. His point being it’s very hard to make architecture where function plays too much of a part.

Of course, most people think of the car park as being very functional, but actually it has no real functional content. So, in a way, at least my sense was that Adolf Loos could have said the tomb, the monument or the car park could be architecture. And so, the car park then becomes a primer for architectural thinking, how to make an elevation, how to use matter, how to use light, how to make space, in a way that is always more layered in any other building. It’s absolutely there to see, and then that led a few years later to me writing about Brutalism, which I guess my idea about brutalism as it goes on, it’s not what most people have agreed it is, which is concrete buildings from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

I think it’s far more than that. It’s a series of motivations, and it plays out in the democratization of space, it plays out in welfare, it plays out in nation-state building, it does play out in the use of material. But it seems that it plays out in that intersection of certainly a certain politicization of the production of buildings, but also the convergence of a material reality and a social program. And so, when one looks at, let’s say broadly speaking, the work of Team 10, and their curiosity about settlement planning, social space, and at the redirection of the modern project through the 50s, 60s, and into the 70s. 

So, what plays out in these things, these buildings, whether it’s Aldo Van Eyck or Giancarlo Di Carlo, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, all those people, the Smithson’s, they’re exploring social questions at the same time as considering how to make things. In a sense, in a very artistic way. A less industrial way, which of course was the way that was, at least it was justify itself, democratization and industry would go hand in hand and here something else goes together. So, those are things which I find important in our work, but I find it easier probably to point them out in other people’s work.

And then I’ve gone on to write about all sorts of other things, whether it’s Neave Brown or whatever, but I guess I’ve become very preoccupied more recently with the way we make facades and the way in which they do or don’t work in terms of sustainability, that they have no real social purpose and they have very little material quality. And so, to flip that and say they should have all of those things and that completely energizes the question of how we make a building. I was asked to speak at a conference in Aachen about space and I found that relatively easy to talk about. The next time it was about form, and we very rarely talk about formal properties of our buildings. It was very uncomfortable, discussions about form happen in this office. 

But in some respects, they’re not necessarily easy to explain because a certain amount of form is intuitive, but also a certain amount of form ultimately does come like the form of a body, comes from all the things that are going on inside the body. If you start by talking about what goes on inside a human body, it’d be very easy to then explain why it looks the way it does, as opposed to just saying, look at the body. And the formal aspects of buildings are the preoccupation of most architects and most critics. What does it look like? Maybe people are like tectonics, but they’re basically talking about surface, but they are also just talking about what it looks like. So, our preoccupation is to do with primarily one sense, is what we see, but what we should be thinking about comes back again to the purpose in the making of things.

Tim Abrahams: So, let’s accept form follows function, and let’s drill down into the experience of form.

Simon Henley: There are moments when the composition is right, that there’s beauty in it. There is that distant view that one has of things that exist. And in the end, form is the thing that architects largely rely on to be understood.  But that understanding, you must have to be able to trace it back to other things. And in the making of the wall at Chadwick, we’re talking about how to build, how to make buildings make sense. We’re talking about how everybody should be attuned, can be attuned to the natural world, how they might have a common experience with others, and how building is both a social act and a sentient experience. These are all, they’re all experiences, and they’re all ideas that you hope by making things a certain way that they become evident. 

And for example, when we made Hackney New Primary School, and I think a year or so after it was finished, it was the summer when it got to 40 degrees centigrade, the school stayed open. When we were talking to the head teacher, she said, I can explain this building to the students. I can explain to them about the light and the air and the shade and temperature and things being comfortable and why it works. So not only did it work, it was comfortable at 40 degrees C, but also possible. The building teaches. A building not being a benign, engineered solution that people look at quizzically in its product. This is something which is recognizably doing things, it’s working. It’s a finite thing

 

Tim Abrahams: That’s a great conclusion. I do feel very lucky to spend time with people like Simon Henley. I only wish his intelligence was as infectious as his optimism. So that’s another episode in the bank for Superurbanism, a growing resource of conversations with people who make wonderful things. People who do things, rather than people who just talk or prevent things from happening. Be one of those first type of people, Superurbanists. They are the ones who make the world a better place, and who are also, ironically, the ones who have the most interesting things to say.

Thank you to all the people who have contacted me in the last couple of weeks in particular to say how much they are enjoying the podcast. When I started this, I didn’t expect it to be so warmly received, and I’m very grateful to it. Please tell everyone you know. Like, follow, subscribe, all those things.  Oh, and check out Instagram. There will be some images on there coming over the next few days to illustrate some of Simon’s work. Thanks, bye.

 

 

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