William Mann — part 2

This is the second half of a conversation between host Tim Abrahams and William Mann the first half of which was broadcast earlier in this series. This week the practice William is a partner of Witherford Watson Mann will complete their extension to Clare College in Cambridge. This is a discussion about that building but much more. Moliere, Freud and Imannuel Kant.

Podcast transcript

William Mann: Immanuel Fucking Kant. Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: Sorry. This episode comes with a slightly late parental advisory warning. Hello. Superurbanists. And there are now quite a growing number of you, which is very cheering. Please tell all your friends how great we are. My name is Tim Abrahams and this week we are revisiting an earlier episode. When I spoke to William Mann, we talked about so much. I split our conversation with the second half to come. Now with Witherford Watson Mannn, the practice William works with opening Clare’s college in Cambridge, the last of four major projects they began in 2014 – e’ll tell us which ones –  I think it’s time to revisit that first episode, particularly the wider conversation we had afterwards, listen out for the ducks, listen out for Molière, the mesquita in Cordoba, how War made Somerset House and of course Immanuel Kant. I started by asking William about what was happening for the practice when they won the competition to build Clare College. 

Is it 2014?

William Mann: 2014 was the Stirling Prize. And then after two years, 20 competitions, 19 of them lost, we then had one year where we won four, a diverse set of projects, substantial increase in scale from what we’d been doing to date. You got the Business Centre in Hoxton for Workspace, the Almshouse, Clare College in Cambridge, and then the Courtauld Institute of Art. Suddenly you can’t just fiddle with every detail. You have to work at the big picture and the details just support that.

Tim Abrahams: And we’ve spoken about your essay, Twixt Cup and Lip. Perhaps you could just explain what you mean by a Twixt Cup and Lip. because it describes something that, for me, changed the way I think about architecture, the time lag and what that creates and how it makes architecture work as a historical phenomenon.

William Mann: Yeah, well it’s an essay I wrote and it was published in Casabella earlier this year, which is a reflection about, you might say it’s the return of history to the practice of architecture, at the same time sense it’s never gone away. This idea that buildings are untimely, they take a long time to gestate and conceive end up getting interrupted. You’re navigating political cycles. You’re navigating economic cycles and then also just a change of personalities. People come and go and how that shapes things. Maybe that’s the interesting kind of quality of it, is that making buildings is very contingent, hedged with tons of contingencies and therefore, and in a way, you just need a certain kind of fortunate contingency to get something started. And even and until it’s finished or until it’s finished, for now, it’s always at risk of being interrupted or incomplete.

And even then, when it’s finished, and of course we then take our nice photographs and walk away and actually then that’s when its life starts. And in 10 years, 20 years, 40 years, I don’t know, it gets adapted. And they’ve been paid for, they’ve proved their ability and they just added to and adapted. So, at the same time, in that first 30 years, they’ve still got that sort of charge in us. And people is too exhausted to do anything with them. What interests me certainly is how you think about buildings both with this sort of stop-start sticky time of their conception and that somehow you are bringing to them the hopes and dreams and collective delusion that you and your society have built up over preceding decades.

I don’t know, some idea of the European city or density being good or mid-rise density being a positive at the same time then it’s all these kind of contingencies of the political cycles. Even to the point of certainly the business centre, what we visited the German brick works. So, I think the week after the Brexit referendum they said, oh, we’re surprised you’ve come. But, and there’s this building that’s with German bricks, I don’t know, Austrian wood, Danish windows, a variety of Eastern European labour all completed just around the time of the departure. So, I suppose this building that somehow and you know, and it’s European in its materiality, in its labour, partly in its idea. And yet, it’s going to come at the wrong moment.

Tim Abrahams: William has an encyclopaedic list of references, not just to the work of his practice, which he partners along with Christopher Watson and Steven Witherford, but to a whole history of specific buildings and none more so than when I asked him if this untimeliness can have positive consequences.

William Mann: I suppose there’s things like the Young Vic Theatre where they were building the National Theatre with three stages with Lasdun Olivier at the head. And then there was, we’ve got three stages and we got running a company out of the Old Vic one stage and they realize they have to grow the audience and they also, and diversify the audience. You have to grow the company because you need actors who can start on the smaller stage and earn their trade, so they say, in order to build the theatre, we have to build another theatre, a temporary theatre. Frank Dunlop Olivier’s assistant works then with Bill Howell of Howell, Killick, Partridge, & Amis and they knock up this brutalist version of a Shakespearean theatre on a bomb site in six months for 60,000 pounds. And Dunlop is looking at the plans of the Fortune Theatre or the contract for the Fortune Theatre. Because that sort of tells you what his dimensions and things are. And Bill Howell’s looking at, I don’t know, pylons and things like this. So, you’ve got this sort of funny spidery excess skeleton to it. And then it makes this theatre that’s so compelling The Who played there because, they liked its energy. You had Andrew Lloyd Weber, what’s it called? Joseph’s Technicoloured Dream Coat, when that was fresh and new and, in the Seventies, you had, they played this sort of cabaret style of Molièree. So, it was something very energetic and powerful and then it shaped this thing, and then that’s what Winston Churchill said, shape our buildings and then they shape us. 

The impulse there shaped this thing. And then actually it turns out to be that good that you say, let’s hold onto it, let’s adapt and extend. And it’s, I suppose it was that then almost like that twenty-five-year lifespan it had, was it 35? And then they reset it and rebuild the auditorium basically on the same lines. So, I suppose what interests me is just how the architects operate in this very contingent field where things are stop-start. You can never kind of quite tell what’s going to go, what’s not and how do you make something that endures but has got the lightness of touch that it’s also open to change.

Tim Abrahams: How do you do that? One of the suggestions that’s implicit in that essay when I read it was your recommendation is for a different temperament for architects, almost a different, it’s not just a philosophical change, which you describe in very compelling ways and a convincing way. But that presupposes, okay well architecture, I need to be cognizant, we are not in this condition that we were told we are, we are actually in this condition. We need to approach things in a different way to that which we were told it is not the heroic modernist moment. How do you react to that without being totally fatalistic and whatever will be?

William Mann: I suppose you could say, and we’re sat here by this lake in Sourest Park looking at a modernist tower block being, I don’t know, either torn down or refurbished. 

Tim Abrahams: It looks like it’s being refurbished.

William Mann: Yeah hopefully, because structure should be good enough, should have the redundancy. So actually, talk about economy means earlier. Economy means is great, but actually for what one of my hated words, future proofing for evolution, you actually have capacity. Something can do rather than being a sharp instrument – a sharp knife –  buildings are blunt tools, and to be a blunt tool, you actually need to have capacity to change. Which may mean the ability to add additional loads or to add to the structure. But I suppose, that change of temperament for the architect for me is I think modernism, the role of the architect in the 20th century was a sort of attitude of mastery topped by technic by industrial production and if you then say, so what if you change that to not being paternalistic and omnisicent but being a kind of civility that’s not too dangerous a word. And although maybe is it is Beaumarchais’s Figaro with a bit of slyness and wit and…

Tim Abrahams: So your model for the architect is a devious servant? 

William Mann: Quite possibly. Yes, it’s Odysseus not Prometheus stealing fire and making mankind. You are remaking, you are just ducking and diving and surviving and finding your way and improvising solutions to different things. I suppose that sense of civility, certainly dependence and actually respect and acknowledgement that your clients are bringing an awful lot to the party and they understand they have to live with the building after you are gone. So, they have a kind of wisdom that you need to tap into. They need to buy into it because actually if you force it on them, what’s it going to do? What’s that going to be like in two years? Obviously famously with what the Villa Savoye Le Corubusier pissed off Monsieur Madam Savoye so much that they deliberately let it go to ruin, you know, just to spite him. So, if you force it it doesn’t work. In a way that’s the interesting thing then can it come out of, can you have a kind of imagination that is, have all these tools, I think using the contingencies of the site and of the time and those are the skills,

Tim Abrahams: I think that’s a very interesting and accurate vivid description of an approach. How did that change? How much is that informed by the process?

William Mann: I suppose it’s amplified by that, but it’s like I said, it comes after things looking at the Young Vic, I suppose, I’d maybe rewind to our first building for Amnesty International in Shoreditch where we took two old furniture factories on opposite the side, sorry, of the old Holywell Priory, which is then where the Burbages Theatre was built, because it was the 20th century and we always did this cut and carve and adaptation of these two existing furniture factories. I showed it to the head of a judging panel for an award who was a QS and we’ve got this beautiful view of our extension and the existing building within the street. And he said, so which one did you do? Or which bit of this did you do? I suppose that’s both kind of compliment and a concern because I suppose it makes you see the addition had a certain sort of organic belonging in that at the same time there’s some pretty.

Tim Abrahams: He’s a quantity surveyor he should bloody know.

William Mann: Pretty odd and ugly other buildings in the picture. But we have emerged from that just realizing that you’ve had to present the journey in a way that when you’re adapting you have to explain much more how you got there rather than what you started with rather than here’s the thing. And I suppose we also realized that this whole field was, didn’t have a lot written about it. I had an old photocopy of an essay by Raphael Moneo about the Mesquita in Córdoba, which is really beautiful. And he talks about its evolution change and of course then uses the tools of Italian Marxist to criticism to justify the construction of a Catholic cathedral in the middle of the Mesquita. So, it’s brilliant and also brilliantly absurd.

Tim Abrahams: So, it’s really can’t, we’re going to have to work on this

William Mann: I suppose we’ve been reflecting on this for a long time and just trying to just get our bearings in this force field of contingency and obstacles and time. I suppose, perhaps the best is this thing which statement by Viollet-le-Duc that the architect finishes what others have started and starts what others will finish. And I suppose you might then say there’s an equality to that where, and these do have different textures in the sense that when you’re a late comer and Clare College, the site is so built up, they had to build a bridge across the river to access the site, you are using the last bit of capacity. The attics have been built out; the cellars have been built out. So, this little funny little slither land between two garden walls was the last bit remaining. There you are fitting in around everything else. And how you build it is… so it’s built as a timber skeleton because that’s the sort of just about the easiest thing to get across your temporary bailey bridge across the river to build up. Whereas of course when you are doing a new building, you have greater freedom. Although on an urban site it’ll be more constrained, and then in a way what you need is to build the spare capacity for someone to add on to what you’ve done.

Tim Abrahams: Interestingly, history is manifested in architecture in material ways that is treated 99 times out of a hundred through context. Context is history whereas one of the things I think that’s really interesting about, and within those four projects you’ve got Clare whereas context is…

William Mann: The backs

Tim Abrahams:  Is everything. And then you’ve got Courtauld where you’ve gone into the very guts of the building. The history is not just like what the next-door neighbour building looks like, but something that speaks on a far more fundamental level about human need, about the historical evolution of human needs.

William Mann: This steep structure of collective life. And I suppose collective time is after of that history is an interesting, tricky one in the sense that history doesn’t leave its mark on buildings very much. And I suppose that you might say that’s again this thing of untimeliness. Buildings get destroyed and that leaves a mark. It’s interesting, there’s some Soane’s museum, they’ve got the plans of the Somerset House and you’ve got the Treasury Seal on Chambers plan as dated 1777. And of course, what you’ve got is the American War of Independence. You’ve got the Napoleonic Wars and the Somerset House is basically a big government building to raise taxes to pay for wars and the admiralty to wage the wars. And then there’s this little gatehouse that’s left over for, probably was unusable for anything else. So, they said, we’ll put stick some learned societies in there, including the Royal Academies.

But then you’ve got the statue, Georgia the third, you’ve got the crest, the British Empire on the pediment or attic. So, it’s got this sort of imprint of 1777 on it. But it’s all a bit elusive, isn’t it? And so, in a way I suppose you could then say there’s then another rhythm of history, which is how things like how the monastery in western European Christianity is a version of the villa – Roman villa. And awfully even, what is it? Monte Casino was owned by the Gregory the Great’s family and they were a patrician family from Rome. and then they build a monastery in around on the old villa, the family villa, and one thing morphs into another and then the monastery gets dissolved and becomes, what is it, Charterhouse where I think that’s where 11 aside football started. because the cloister was so small that you couldn’t have the whole village playing. So therefore, you’d have 11 aside.

Tim Abrahams: I’ve not heard that story 

William Mann: Yeah. we shape our buildings, they shape us.

Tim Abrahams: It is always been a compelling argument. But it’s really interesting the condition in which they used it, which is 1943, the House of Commons have been bombed.

William Mann: Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: And there was a discussion of changing the bicameral adversarial debating chamber.

William Mann: Well, which obtusely, I only heard it on the radio a couple of years ago that made sense is that it’s the relic of the choir stalls of the royal palace or something. Which is why they sit in rows and shout across the choir at each other.

Tim Abrahams: And it’s also a very interesting moment because it’s at that point that Churchill is leading a national government. Let’s not get used to it. We’re going to be back.

William Mann: Indeed

Tim Abrahams: We win this and we’re going to be back at each other hammer and tongs.

William Mann: Oh, that’s a very good point. Because of course then in the 45 election he was saying, oh well if you let in the socialists then the Gestapo will be around the corner. Seriously, and then there’s people who’d been working with international interest for five years. Suddenly were like the enemy and the lowest of low. I suppose there is a sort of tradition of, or an intellectual creative tradition as imagine, you know, I suppose you could call rationalism or where you are looking at this in a very sort of calm and objective way and just classify stuff and find the thing from the box that works best. And I suppose what that captures is that with the built, you’re always dealing with something that’s live a little bit too close to home to be objective about. and its strength and its weakness. It is emotionally resonant, and I suppose in that sense, as I said before, it’s like the spatial imagination is the same as the historical imagination is the same as the social imagination. You can’t separate them.

Tim Abrahams: Yeah. One of the, it’s very talk about the history of architecture, but there’s also the evolution of the history of ideas. And one of the ways in which we think about the built environment, the way you are describing the built environment is obviously of its time. You are articulating not just your own position on architectural history, we are seeing examples of it. And I wrote about Battersea Power Station and you spoke about it and you start, you came up with the phrase extreme heritage, incredibly resonant phrase, and it described something that I’d seen of this, the smashing together of a one worldview, of a you know, architecture is instantaneous sculptural like creation and what you are describing, which is the kind of the accretion historical railing. And this was a moment where these two things meet,

William Mann: Well, there’s these two things meet. Exactly. And I suppose on the one hand you’ve got this sort of acceptance that the old within the urban landscape, which for a long time isn’t really there, and the idea that you reach, that you keep your old power stations rather than knocking them down, obviously they hadn’t arrived in the eighties because they started ripping down Battersea. And so, but you now have this acceptance that the old gets kept to then even the point that, what is it, the Elbephilharmonie, they keep the facade of the old sixties warehouse. So, the past has an emblematic quality. It’s very Oedipal in a way in the sense that, so like I say, you’ve got an acceptance now that the past has its place in the city, which wasn’t there for a long time, and then you have this viewpoint that I would certainly advocate, which is that the present and the past in a way illuminate each other and enrich each other through dialogue.

Where I become a little bit uneasy is then when you rely on extreme engineering to force or amplify that dialogue. So, and what’s interesting is, for example, even was the  Zumthor’s in Colomba in Colgogne built on the old, this sort of palimpsest of old church buildings and that has that beautiful kind of ruin space with the walkway and the columns. But then actually the old, the new, sorry, new brick walls are built on the old stone walls, and you can’t build a four-story brick wall with a lot of floor load and whatever on it on something that fragile of course they micro piled through the walls to carry it. And it’s not to say that this is wrong and that there’s a right, but the point would almost be just that the logic is cultural rather than practical. And it’s interesting at what point this becomes very gymnastic, very perverse in order to make some interesting but peculiar kind of cultural point where the territory, and we’ve had to go at a project a bit like that. But somehow for me the past has its value almost because it’s uncontrollable. Because you don’t fit it to the logic of the present. it is maybe heterotopic, it’s awkward and that’s its value. It can’t be disciplined to the economy and culture and everything else for the present, and then so therefore taming it and overpowering it, arm wrestling it.

Tim Abrahams: The listener will be pleased to know that William is doing an arm-wrestling move at this point.

William Mann: That’s right, arm-wrestling it to a kind of subordinate supporting role and it is this sort of Oedipal thing where then obviously modernist Oedipal kind of action and thinking was that’s just not the effing thing down. And then this sort of extreme heritage position is, oh we’re going to treasure it and respect it but we’re going to also shout that a little bit louder than it.. 

Tim Abrahams: But you can look at it another way. More of a kind of dialectic in the fact that you go to Bilbao and you look at, is this a response the scale of the industrial city. You can say as a signifier, the creative city. But it has to be of that size, and what is interesting about Gehry and why he’s that figure is, the means by which he does it is through Catia, the engineering software which was used up and down the west coast of the United States to design planes during the seventies, eighties, military planes, cold war ends. Yeah. Loads engineers are made unemployed and Gehry is one of the first people to give them work. It takes the software.

William Mann: No, that I did that I didn’t know. But I suppose what’s interesting is that then you are always working with the capacity of the culture, aren’t you? And that capacity might be craft, it might be industry, it might be, as you say, this sort of Cold War technology. So, on the one hand it’s the need to do something at the scale of the city. On the other hand, it’s the capacity that’s available to serve that because otherwise if you’re doing that, I was intrigued and I don’t have a conclusion from this, but looking at the SANAA faculty in Lausanne. Which is all this sort of beautiful sort of ramping, twisting, tilting floors. It’s all done on I think single use plywood form work. 

Which I don’t know, there’s no, that doesn’t make it better or worse, but it’s interesting because it’s where you just somehow feel a little bit more computer generated than that. You know, obviously then get into the whole world of, or the whole story rhetoric of 3D printing, which is what are you actually printing and what somehow, I suppose that interesting, and I am fascinated and by this idea that fast, faster, bigger change, more changeable, somehow answers the needs of the human conditions. For example, if the Young Vic is one example, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace is an example of the faster, bigger, more adaptable. And absolutely, I’m not at all, if you look at it to scale, it’s not at all surprising that it didn’t get built. because it’s just absurd in its size and the size-cost expense of maintenance even of the infrastructure to just generate quite modest human and social benefits.

Tim Abrahams: Let’s give the public cranes to place. 

William Mann: Yes Exactly. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong and swivelling wrote escalators and yeah,

Tim Abrahams:  Bagsy, I have to go over the gantry next.

William Mann: Exactly, and it’s marvellous. It’s a marvellous idea of sort of technology enabling freedom in individual and collective freedom. But of course, it’s nuts. And I guess the thing of, yeah, and of course something like, was it NEOM is fascinating because again, it’s this sort of sense that faster, bigger new city and I watch its progress with great fascination. Of course, it is basically Paxton’s Great Victorian Way in a line rather than a circle and bigger. So, in that sense, I suppose what’s interesting is that even futurism is, or things that claim to be unprecedented, have precedents.

Tim Abrahams:  Not everyone has your historical framework. I think you’re the first person I’ve met to find a historical analogy to NEOM, 

William Mann: Which I know it’s the great Victorian way come on. Which is such a shame they didn’t build that going back to the history of ideas then Immanuel Kant say Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden  of the crooked timber of humanity. Nothing straight can ever be made. How wonderful is that? And I think, I suppose what’s interesting and perhaps slightly troubling with what I’m arguing and perhaps what we’re doing is that there’s this sort of thing which is a little bit counter enlightenment at the same time that I guess where we know where enlightenment goes in its sort of worst tendencies at the same time. Hard not to feel like a party pooper.

I had to say, yeah, great idea, but it’ll never work. Or oh, you got to be a realist. And so somehow maybe that the joy of the disobedient servant is the corrective for that. But sorry, obviously to make the analogy explicit, obviously Emmanuel Kant was not describing NEOM and the line, but we’re saying you can’t make something, you can’t make a straight line out of the human being, and I love the idea of humanity as crooked timber because it’s material imperfection and human imperfection somehow talking to each other. And I suppose this is the interesting thing where left and right have now flipped and what is it the right of the radicals and the left could perhaps be the conservatives, how far that is there maybe is a bit there with what the 15-minute city.

Tim Abrahams:  I’m intrigued by this flip and I wonder what relevance this has for the idea that the architect is a disobedient servant. What is an architect today or what is he or she not Ideas that are explored in the essay Twixt Cup and Lip that we alluded to earlier.

William Mann: Yeah, and we’re not this sort of paternal as people who just know best. And I’ll tell you what’s good for you. At least to have a conversation feels to me important. And then, and obviously we tend not to discuss Emmanuel Kant with our clients that are, but at the same time we don’t have to be embarrassed about having magpied that from somewhere off the internet. And I suppose certainly what is interesting is how you can, I mean we sit at Martin and Kurt at the Almshouse, laugh about some of the things that we say about the building yards. That’s good. At the same time, we also found a hell of a lot of common ground about what we were talking about, what we were trying to do. Maybe it is just actually, it’s almost, I suppose there is a, I think embracing that civility is good, but equally just finding common interests is in a way you build through alliances.

You don’t build by telling people when lecturing and actually what’s interesting is how much the architect isn’t it…is it Auden who wrote pottery makes nothing happen. Architects make not very much happen, I suppose indirectly it happens. What is it you do? Pencil, mouse, bit of cardboard, then there it is. That’s a city, but it’s not this magic tool that you are or a joystick on your Gameboy. Because actually what you’re doing has a sort of resonance within the industry, within the society, and that you are somehow voicing and you are steering forces that are already there socially, economically, and that’s how it has an effect and it has this effect also through persuasion. 

So, I think in a way there’s something to enjoy, acknowledge, embrace that it works through persuasion and makes a case, and of certainly in British English culture, there’s a sort of slippery slope with that where it’s like what you can get planning permission for is whatever you can build a rhetorical mountain about. But nonetheless, there’s tje sort of, the informed consent of communication with the people who are paying for it. The people who are going to use it, the people who are going to build it is a rich and beautiful thing and without which you’re just some sort of dry instrument.

Tim Abrahams: I haven’t seen Witherford Watson Man’s work at Clare College in Cambridge yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing it a great deal. The final passage in a chapter of one of the UK’s most interesting architecture practices. The site at Clare College looks like an occupied wall or occupied perimeter. The compact site of the college was almost fully built up, hemmed in by wonderful but listed buildings. Grade one, even the gardens are grade two. Needs must though and space was required for postgraduate researchers. The lifeblood of the Oxford and Cambridge, the central role of the old court, the core of the college needed to be preserved. It’s a really interesting contrast with the building we discussed in episode six in Bermondsey, the Almshouse where the historic construct is not an actual physical body, but a plan, an idea, a concept, which is brought back to life. 

I always like talking to William, especially when he starts talking about NEOM and quoting. Can’t putting this together, with the ending of my conversation with Roland Moore last week, I just can’t help but wonder what would a neighbourhood designed by Witherford Watson man look like? What would a whole settlement, I feel this is an incredible strategy for a particular kind of architecture. What interests me is someone with that level of architectural imagination starts to talk about mega structures in the desert. That’s architecture. Why I love it. Anyway, I digress. We are recording some interesting new conversations in the next couple of weeks. Please keep on doing what you’re doing. It’s obviously coming forwarded by word of mouth because I know how little I do to promote it and see how many people listen. So please keep it up. Talk to you soon. Bye.

 

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