6th Arcane School Conference James Mills Winston Churchill ...€¦ · Winston Churchill once wrote...

FORCE OF FORMS 6th June 2009 Arcane School Conference James Mills

james mills 02/07/2009

Winston Churchill once wrote ‘We shape our buildings – thereafter they shape us’. So there is and always has been, since our origins, a reciprocal relationship between humanity and the built environment. The unfolding evolution of our species is bound up and reflected by the buildings we have created to meet our needs, mind, body and spirit. What is a building simply defined? It is a shelter with 4 walls, a door and a roof. This can be illustrated archetypally as a triangle with a square below it.

The roof connects with the sky or spirit reality and the walls connect the house to the ground, manifest reality. The house also relates to its environment horizontally through its faces or facades. It is through these archetypal relationships that we connect & identify with the expressive forces of a building and it is through our physical senses and our mental faculties that we experience these forms. To see, to touch, to hear, to feel and to think about a building puts us in touch with it on many different levels of experience, instinctual, rational as well as intuitive. I’d like to invite you on a journey from Waterloo Bridge on the river Thames into the Festival Hall, a Music & Arts venue on the South Bank.

• We move from the bridge with its noise and car fumes down via staircases to the entrance deck leading to the building.

• We walk along a terrace with the concrete and glass façade of the Queen Elizabeth Hall to our left and a view of the river opens out to our right.

Stairs from road Terrace approach Festival Hall



• Turning the corner there is the Festival Hall, a stone and glass modernist building built for the Festival of Britain in 1950. Its curved façade helps to soften its silhouette against the sky.

• What associations do you have with this form? What does it remind you of?

Architecture can be defined as the resolution of junctions. We can see this clearly when looking at this building’s front façade, its persona, which expresses the synthetic force of the building’s personality. The disposition of window and door openings to each other and the façade in general, the articulation, the proportions, sacred or profane, materials and colours; all these elements contribute to this force.

• The entrance doors are glass and bronze allowing us a glimpse of the interior. Grasping the brass and bronze handle we open the door

• The floor surface changes here from concrete paviors to smooth stone. The sound levels are now muted after the hubbub of the terrace.

• Before us is a warm interior with soft lighting and a timber floor. In the distance, we can see a staircase rising up to the next level. It appears to be hovering off the floor, a feeling of lightness is evoked.

• We ascend the staircase. The colours are changing to green and ochre, the carpet treads are soft underfoot making no sound, at the top of the stairs we can either move towards the large glass windows giving views out on to the river or turn back to climb another flight of stairs to the auditorium.

•

Entrance doors Lobby Stairs Balustrade

The architects have thought deeply about the series of transitions through the building from the external world of hard surfaces and noise to a more relaxing lighter, warmer world within. As a result, the forces impacting on us are gentle and express a 2nd quality of love/wisdom as defined in the 7 ray matrix of energies. If we contrast this building with the Bankside Tate Art Gallery a little further up the river we experience something very different. This gallery is housed in a disused power station; its silhouette is direct and uncompromising. Its walls rise up sheer like brick cliffs.



Bankside Tate Gallery Turbine Hall Entrance

• The main entrance is a slot punched into the base of the building.

• There is virtually no transition space between the exterior and the interior.

• You enter directly and dramatically into the Turbine Hall, a vast empty space with a floor that ramps down to a ticket office at the bottom.

• The colours of the space are monochromatic and cool, the surfaces hard and industrial, the lighting muted.

• This vast cathedral like space which embodies the 1st ray quality of Will is ideally suited for the contemplation of abstract ideas.

Now if we go back 90 years to the birth of the Modern Movement in Architecture, a point of crisis in the established order after the 1st World War has been reached, a turning away from Tradition results. Architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, designer of the Bauhaus, rebelled against the Classical Canon and embraced all things futuristic and technological. Their buildings were abstract explorations of light and space using the new advances in glass, concrete and steel construction as can be seen in Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. No longer did a building have to come down to the ground as Corb demonstrated in his Villa Savoy. The roof becomes invisible no longer pitched but flat and hidden, the building has no crown, no capital, a rational box floating in space, truly a ‘machine for living in’.

Bauhaus Villa Savoy Farnsworth House

The use of large facades of glass dissolving what is internal and external space; on a symbolic level one can see this as an attempt to bring personality and soul into direct relationship, flooding the dark interior with light.



But this is not the whole story, there is another strand to this Modern Movement, an ‘Organic’ Impulse’ as Rudolf Steiner termed it. The buildings of Gaudi, Steiner, Horta and Scharoun designed curvilinear buildings & interiors more akin to natural forms; a Yin approach in contrast to the Yang approach of Villa Savoy & its like. Here we see Erich Mendelssohn’s Einstein Tower Observatory in Potsdam, see how it grows out of the ground rather than hovering above it.

Gaudi – Casa Mila Horta House Scharoun – Einstein Tower

Over the past 90 years we have seen the adoption of the ‘rational box’ type of architecture as the vocabulary of our towns and cities from Anchorage to Auckland. The glass and concrete skyscraper, the beach hotel, the apartment block all find their genesis in these early modernist buildings. Unfortunately such abstract forms need to be carefully designed if they are not to become ugly, alien and out of scale with human development. But political expediency, car biased transport planning, short term thinking and a lack of creative imagination has inflicted some very poor architecture indeed on humanity. Prince Charles has championed a return to traditional architectural forms and town planning through his ‘Institute for the Built Environment’ and has built a development, Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester to show how a more human scale environment can be designed. Perhaps the most powerful force impinging on the built environment now is Climate Change as the Built Environment globally contributes 40% of all CO2 emissions and consumes 40% of global energy. The scope of the challenge is enormous as the rapid urbanisation of the world population continues apace. But perhaps we can gain some insight into the future trends in architectural form making by looking at two contrasting office towers in London: the Canary Wharf Tower completed in 1992 and the Swiss Re ‘Gherkin’ built in 2005, we can see how rapidly the ecological paradigm is changing our building forms.



The Canary Wharf Tower is a product of this modernist tradition with the some welcome Post Modern attributes like the reintroduction of a visible roof to meet the sky rather than the ‘headless’ high rise buildings that crowd our cities’ skylines. Its cladding and form is square and rectilinear, it’s massing block-like and environmental considerations, non-existent. The Swiss Re, ‘Gherkin’, on the other hand is a more intelligent building. Its aerodynamic, glazed shape minimizes wind loads and maximizes natural light and ventilation, reducing the building's energy consumption to 50 percent of that of a traditional large office building. The external diagonal steel structure uses triangular forms to be inherently strong, permitting a flexible column-free interior space.

Both buildings express 1st ray qualities of Will, but the Gherkin’s form is derived from natural forces not abstract ideas – here is a sea change in modern architecture. Curvilinear forms make a welcome return to the stage.

This environmental approach to design has been called Biomimetics which looks at natural eco systems and the creatures that inhabit them to use these inherent design strategies in buildings designed for those environments. An example of this is Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners' design for the Waterloo International Terminal, now sadly defunct, which demonstrated an example of form and process biomimicry at the organism level. The terminal needed to be able to respond to changes in air pressure as trains enter and depart the terminal. The glass panel fixings that make up the structure mimic the flexible scale arrangement of the Pangolin so they are able to move in response to the imposed air pressure forces.



These curvilinear, facetted buildings, have become possible to build because of the combined synergy of powerful 3 dimensional parametric and environmental computer software and advances in material technology. The optimisation of materials usage through systems analysis is allowing designers many more choices in how to develop responsive, environmentally sensitive buildings for a Carbon Neutral age. Another example of this impulse to movement and landscape is Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama harbour terminal in Japan which was generated using this parametric CAD software. It stretches the city into the sea, its beach of boardwalks weaving like braids through wooden “dunes”, ducking and diving, inside and out, as you promenade to your ship. In a conventional classical building you have a defined floor, walls and ceiling or roof; symbolizing body, soul and spirit, however in this new form - making it is sometimes difficult to say where the floor finishes and the wall begins or where the wall stops and the roof begins. We see this here in Daniel Liebskind’s building for the London Metropolitan University. Is this a search in form for an expression of synthesis of the different aspects of a human being?

Yokohama terminal Liebskind’s London Met Univ. Cymatic mercury

I’d like to quote you part of the opening paragraph of Greg Lynn’s book ‘Animate Form ’ : ‘…animation implies the evolution of a form & its shaping forces…Because of its to permanence Architecture is one of the last modes of thought based on the inert…This desire for timelessness is intimately linked with interests in formal purity and autonomy. Challenging these assumptions by introducing architecture to models of organisation that are not inert will not threaten the essence of the discipline but advance it.’ Can we make an analogy here between a dynamic architectural form & the emergence of flexible internetworked communities of people who come together for a common cause and then disperse to reform again in another formation? It is interesting to note that these experiments in form - making in collaboration with computer technology bears a resemblance to the extraordinary forms Hans Jenny captured on film in his Cymatic experiments with sound & matter. Here we see mercury dancing on a vibrating metal plate and forming elaborate structures under the joint influence of sound and magnetism.



In tandem with this development of smart materials, computer software and organic forms is a domestic scale return to indigenous technologies and craft industries such as thatch roofing, cob wall and straw bale wall construction. These systems combined with new micro energy generation technologies like solar water heating, wind turbines and ground source heat pumps are producing houses which come close to being carbon neutral. Prince Charles’s foundation has built their prototype to add to the debate, ‘the Natural House’, at the Building Research Establishment. The influential and popular programme ‘Grand Designs’ on UK television has brought to popular consciousness the empowering and inspiring vision of ordinary people bringing to birth, with sometimes melo-dramatic intensity, their beautiful and often very ‘green’ home. The emphasis on the process of bringing a thoughtform into reality demonstrates clearly that the triangular relationship between builder, client and architect has to be open, flexible and focussed on the collective vision to be successful, an example of magic in manifestation. This surely is another indication of the 7th ray energy of Ceremonial Order & Magic impinging on mass consciousness.

Grand Designs – self build Grand Designs - Earth Ship HRH Natural House

The influential inventor, Buckminster Fuller whose ideas are now becoming a physical reality through the works of his students, Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw and many others, talked about the ‘ephemeralisation’ of matter where we learn to do more with less through the application of science and lateral thinking. We can see this in such buildings as the biodomes of the Eden Project in Cornwall by Grimshaw & Partners. This trend driven by humanity’s aspiration towards higher consciousness and the pragmatic pressures of limited resources are inevitably converging and leading us to create purer more ethereal forms; the consequent forces of which will impact on our evolving sensory mechanisms producing further insights and inspiration. It is worth reflecting on the materials that we use to create our world. They come mainly from the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. All our building materials are extracted from the earth, processed and transformed into forms we use to build with and craft our possessions. These life forms give up their natural state of being to serve the needs of the 4th Kingdom of Nature, Humanity. We owe them a debt of gratitude perhaps best expressed by striving to create a world of beauty from their sacrifices. If we, under the inspiration of Soul, design forms of harmony & beauty, then we are raising ourselves and the our brothers and sisters from the lower kingdoms to a



new level of consciousness and transmuting substance in so doing; a spiritualisation of matter – creating soul infused forms & spaces. As Rudolph Steiner said in 1911 describing a temple building of the future, ‘the temple that belongs to the future will have walls - & yet no walls; its interior will have renounced every trace of egoism that may be associated with an enclosed space and all its colours & forms will give expression to a selfless striving to receive the inpouring forces of the Universe’ I’d like to finish off this talk by showing you some buildings which express reverence for life and the beauty of manifest forms. They are; the second 2nd Goetheanum by Rudolph Steiner, Paks & Siófok Churches by Imre Macovecz, the Universal Hall at Findhorn, the NMB now ING bank by Alberts Van Huut and the Ibere Camargo art gallery in Porto Alegre, Brazil by Alvaro Siza.

Goetheanum Main façade Interior theatre

Siofok Church Siofok interior NMB Bank Interior

NMB entrance foyer Art Gallery – Pt Alegre External Court

6th Arcane School Conference James Mills Winston Churchill ...€¦ · Winston Churchill once wrote...

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