COMMENT
(WHAT THE PAPERS SAY)
General:
" When people see an Outram Building, their immediate
response is to wave and cheer"
SUNDAY TIMES 20th
January 1991
"Mr. Outram's ideas are practical, inexpensive and they
work - at all levels"FINANCIAL
TIMES 11th February 1985.
"Outram is, in a sense, the truest traditionalist".Rowan Moore, The Independent newspaper, 29 November 1989
"John Outram can be said to be a Modernist who has put decoration at the cutting edge of architecture"Alan Blanc, CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTS, St James. Press 1994.
" an Act of Architectural terrorism and "an impossible dream" Bob Maxwell, Emeritus professor of Architecture, Columbia University, .ARCHITECTURE TODAY November 1995.
"John Outram is perhaps the first Architect since
Lutyens to embark seriously on enlarging the frontiers of
Classicism": Lionel Esher in
"The Glory of the English House", Barrie & Jenkins
1991.
" Britain's most eye-catching Architect"
Cover Headline, Culture
Section, SUNDAY TIMES 7th January 1996
"Outram has erected an astonishing Pantheon to literacy" Fulvio Irace ABITARE MAGAZINE. November 1996
Outram is, like the very different Miralles, uncategorisable. Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times , 12 July 1998.
"Its Architect is John Outram, whose style is unique, colourful and intelligent", Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times , April 15th 2001.
"The taboos of 20C Modernism can be broken exploded and discarded". Martin Pearce, University Builders, Wiley-Academy 2001
On The Judge Institute of Management Studies:
" The heart of Cambridge has a new colossus - brightly
coloured, boldly detailed and provocatively soaring above
every rooftop save the chapel at King's....This is Outram's
biggest building yet and proves resoundingly that his love
of colour and heroic scale can produce popular
architecture.
THE TIMES 1st June
1995.
"Nobody since Frank Lloyd Wright has put so much effort into
enhancing that humble and ancient material, concrete"
"...it is part of the cleverness of the man that his
buildings are conceived as direct responses to the problems
of today's technology...you can, indeed, get a lot of stuff
into an Outram building."
.SUNDAY TIMES 7th
January 1996
"The Judge Institute has the air of a building where a
decade or more of ideas has suddenly been uncorked...It has
extraordinary spirit and conviction, especially when
compared to the polite-but-boring structures that a recent
college building boom has unleashed."
.DAILY TELEGRAPH 26th
September 1995
"When it looked at the plans for the building, the Commssion
praised it as imaginative and exciting. In real life it is
certainly both these things.THE
ROYAL FINE ART COMMISSION 8th November
1995
"The new Cambridge Buildings are as diverse as The Judge
Institute by John Outram Associates, St. John's College
Library by Edward Cullinan, The Law Faculty library by Sir
Norman Foster and Jesus College library by Evans and Shalev.
Of these the Judge Institute is the most astonishing:
despite its un-donnish colour and exuberence, it is a
building of serious intention by one of our most thoughtful
architects.COUNTRY LIFE
24th October 1996
"...the whole is a celebration of form interlocked with
colour ...for the first time since 1919 the Judge Institute
evokes an atmosphere of hope and real confidence in the
future."
THE OLDIE magazine
June 1996
"The joker in the pack? A profound statement about the roots
of architecture? Or a major new building which offers as
much to the public realm as it does to its users? Arguably,
John Outram's Judge Institute is all three. It is certainly
the most striking recent addition to the restrained
Cambridge architectural
scene.PERSPECTIVES ON
ARCHITECTURE Magazine, Aug .95
"Outram introduces a series of ingenious and thoroughly
practical new interpretations of space and building
technology.......the Judge Institute is perhaps the most
richly inventive and dazzlingly contemporary building you
are ever likely to see. It is a building to visit and gasp
in amazement...it will undoubtably be a popular building. It
also promises to be popular on a more philosophic plane, as
it punctures modern movement doctrines that have never been
wholeheartedly accepted by the public. Such achievements are
not to be sniffed
at."......BUILDING Magazine
8th December 95.
"The most liberating aspect of the Robot Order is that it
virtually banishes the wandering architectural thrombosis
called the service core, which, like the nonsensical idea
that architecture is structure, has been one of the main
props of modern architectural composition in this century.
In place of a service core, the centre of the Judge
Institute is filled with space, light & decoration, with
the Robot Order columns surrounding the gallery like beads
on a necklace.... The sheer terrorism of combining visual
structure into a sixth order - the 'robot order' - makes
this architecture a child of
today. ARCHITECTURE TODAY
Magazine November 1995.
" It stuns....Outram is supremely confident with the brick
medium and in the Judge Institute he has explored and
extended the vast palette of colour and texture it
offers.BRICK BULLETIN
Winter 1996.
"Some of Outram's best work has been in creating new buildings out of old, and, presented with a rather plain three-storey building that looked as if it had a brick portacabin stuck on the top, Outram wrapped wrapped a polychromatic cornice around it. Inside the stairways network across the space, creating an effect like a Piranesi engraving.
It has been hailed as a wild success and even those in
the conservation business concede that the building looks a
great deal more iinteresting now. As Outram says: "I believe
in modernising tradition".
Sunday Telegraph 27 August
1995
"Futuristic and Historicist"
"In some ways spiritual heir to Stirling's idiosyncratic inventiveness, John Outram has reincarnated the stately acrobatics of his History Faculty Library in his Judge Institute of Management Studies (page 182), reinstating at a stroke the claims of the ugly and the beautiful against the nearby petit bourgeois Philistinism of Quinlan Terry. Easily dismissed as an an 'architecture of excess', Outram has erected an astonishing Pantheon to literacy - at once a temple to the idea of the Robot and a celebration of his fertile visual imagination. Masked by the 'decorated shed' of the ex-Addenbrookes Hospital, the Judge institute does full justice to all the commonplaces about people relating to each other 'at a human scale'. Outram's temple is a collection of places at once archaic and hypermodern, a dissolved suspension of technology and iconology which relegates Robert Venturi's decorative virtuosity to the status of software simulation.Fulvio Irace ABITARE MAGAZINE. November 1996
On The New House, Wadhurst Park, Sussex: 1
" Probably the best house built since the war. It is inspired by classical proportions yet is absolutely original " .....Gervase Jackson-Stops, Sunday Times, 20 August 1989
"The Entrance hall is almost impossible to photograph, but it is surely one of the most successful new rooms iin Britain. It is marvellously inventive in its use of Classicism and new materials; and equally, if not more, is the restraint. .Clive Aslet. Country Life . July 17th 1986
Aslet continues...
"The form of the room is oval, and in the floor at either end are what look like giant compass doials inlaid into the travertine. The pattern recalls the footprint of a Cporinthian column, and the number of stripes in each banded section counts the number of hours, days, weeks and months in the year, including the lunar ones. Above each of these discs is a ceiling window, the only source of daylight in the room apart from the doors.
There is a pharaoh's tomb quality about the darkness and the sense of enclosure, which is enhanced by the richly-coloured walls. They are made up of alternating bands of dark red stucco lustro (created by polishing stucco with a hot iron so that it takes on a shiny, marble-like surface), and burr elm veneer edged with aluminium. The doors are of avodire´wood covered with a trelliswork created from different grey-stained sycamore veneers. Each door contains 2,500 pieces. With its rounded columns to either side of the double doors, the room suggests both Empire and Oliver Hill at the same time".Clive Aslet. Country Life . July 17th 1986
The New House, Wadhurst Park, Sussex: 2
"The interior will ravish any but the most reductive
Modernist. It feels open, light and airy and only the
richness of the colours and materials prevents the
magnificent views from dominating the attention and
eclipsing the interior. Detail and construction are
immaculate, and colours, from the pink and yellow plywood
ceilings, to the pinks, greens and greys of the walls, and
the other shades and patterns of cabinet work, flooring and
tiles are all precisely judged to be rich, lively and
harmonious.
Though such a strong architectural frame is necessary to
stand up to the setting, and the views it offers inside, it
might be expected to dominate any but the most monument and
robustly pompous furniture. This has not proved true. It is
furnished mainly in the light and elegant pieces - many by
Josef Frank - that the clients previously owned. After
skilful arrangement the effect is of a flattering symbiosis
between house and furnishing. But then a house like this is
the joint creation of architect and discerning and
determined client. Part of the triumph here is that the
result seems an exact reflection of the tastes and concerns
of both parties."Peter Buchanan:
The Architectural Review (June 1986)
On the Storm Water Pumping Station, Isle of Dogs, London: 1
The irony of Outram's position is that he is seen as esoteric and individual. Yet he is, in a sense, the truest traditionalist, reviving a fundamental quality of the architecture of the past nowadays utterly neglected in favour of style or other abstractioins. In an architectural world cursed by random prejudices, architecture as rooted as Outram's is very much the exception rather than the rule. Rowan Moore, The Independent newspaper, 29 November 1989
Storm Water Pumping Station, Isle of Dogs, London: 2
"A classical temple to sewage.
A boisterous and gaudy merry-go-ropund designed to excite the senses.
A robustly moulded compositiion of solidly crafted and durable building components.
An innovative yet richly worked creation of a romantic imagination.
A spiritual offering to the rediscovered primeval origins of architecture.
All this -and much more-in one tiny, lowly, water-pumping station in London's Docklands. The London Docklands Development corporation - purveyor of fast junk-architecture in the Isle of Dogs-can breathe a small sigh of satisfaction. The one building in the area that it has commissioned and developed for itself is an appetising and nutritous feast. Martin Spring, "Building Magazine" 15 July 1988
On the Computational Engineering Building (Duncan Hall), Rice University, Houston: 1
"In Duncan Hall, the architects have devised a new 'order' which they christened a 'working order', that combines the three Vitruvian functions with the single (trabeated) element of column and beam. The effect of this is to revise radically the idea of Functionalism as the predominant style of Modernity. Instead of functionality flowing from designing space so as to make it 'work better' it simply flows from a radically redisigned 'architectural order'. The room spaces are 'served' directly by the order and their level of functionality is defined mainly by what the order provides. This is because the working order is a circulation corridor, an electromechanical service duct and both frame and field to 'iconic enginering'. These three functions: of engineeriing the social, the physical and the conceptual environment correspond to the three Vitruvian functions of commodity, firmness and delight.
This design strategy liberates the room spaces from the restrictive straitjacket of specific and peculiar form sought by the architectural philosophy of Functionalism. This liberation of the room space is a licence for it to be either dull and neutral or wild and surprising. Whatever forms rooms take the 'service order' ensures that they will be provided with as much functionality as the budget can afford. The accessibility of the order, in its role as duct, also allows services to be added and changed, so increasing the functions available in any room.
The Architecture at Rice University is proof that the taboos of 20C Modernism can be broken exploded and discarded. The supposedly useless device of an architectural order can be redesigned to be, instead of a mere ornament, the essential provider of all the utilities. The supposedly impossible task of decoration - to promulgate ideas that are shared by all who live today - can be solved aesthetically by using the Supermarket graphics descended from normative 20C Art whether abstract or cubist in concept. The problem of their content can also be solved by employing current ideas in science and metaphysics. One would have no problem with redesigning the conceptual environment, should that radically change, in just the way one iinstalls a new service provider. This is why, while some people might regard the building's ceiling, designed by John Outram himself, as 'art', the architects prefer to call it 'iconic engineering'. Martin Pearce, "University Builders", Wiley-Academy, 2001.
Profiles:
" John Outram is an architect who defies classification
within the labelling demanded by the modernist or
post-modernist camp. His designs, built and unbuilt, since
starting practice in 1973 have a freedom of expression which
could be compared with the most non-conforming 19th century
architects as portrayed by Goodhart-Rendell...John Outram's
verve is also dedicated to exploring the potential of
materials, both in terms of constructive skill and visual
delight....
The architectural language attempts to bridge the "great
divide" between the past and the present. A concern with
colour, pattern and ornament has been recreated and made
part of the delight experienced in architecture and not
simply as an adjunct to firmness and structure.
John Outram can be said to be a modernist who has put
decoration at the cutting edge of architecture. The Judge
Institute in Cambridge is a major commission where the
cumulative skills developed over the past 20 years have come
to fruition."
Alan Blanc, CONTEMPORARY
ARCHITECTS, (a comprehensive anthology ) St James.
Press 1994.
John Outram gave a brilliant performance in his lecture
to architects in Prague at last weekend's big
conference,also featuring Foster Hopkins, Farrell, Kaplicky,
Jiricna and Chipperfield. Moving at breathtaking speed
between technical, artistic, mythical and poetic
explanations of his work, the former RAF Pilot revealed why
Bladerunner is an important film for him: "It is about the
iconography of Rome", he declared. He also told the audience
that he liked to use galvanised steel occasioinally "to
prove my modernist commitment".
Report in Building Design 29th
April 1994.
" According to the British Tourist Authority, 23.7
million tourists came to Britain in 1995, 13 per cent more
than in the previous year. They also spent more money:
£11.9 billion, a rise of 16.6 per cent in real
terms.
While Britain's heitage tradition and countryside continued
to exert appeal, new generations of tourists were more
attracted to by the country's recent innovations in design,
pop music and nightlife.
Promotional campaigns in 36 countries now gave high
prominence to rock bands such as Blur and Oasis, "Britfash"
designers such as Paul Smith and John Galliano, and style
gurus such as Sir Terence Conran.
Architects Nicholas Grimshaw (creator of Waterloo's Eurostar
Terminal) and John Outram (Cambridge's Judge Institute) are
similarly praised." DAILY
TELEGRAPH 27th September 1996
* JOA can be reached by E-Mail at anthony@johnoutram.com , by telephone on +44 (0)207 262 4862 or by fax on +44 (0)207 706 3804. We also have an ISDN number : +44 (0)207 262 6294.
