"THE BROOKESTEAD BLOCK"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"A FILM SCRIPT, WRITTEN IN 1995, TO DESCRIBE THE JUDGE INSTITUTE BUILDING"

 

 

 

Click once on the pictures to enlarge them to full screen size and bring up the Captions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIS TEXT WAS WRITTEN SIX YEARS AGO AND REPRESENTS THE TECHNICAL TERMINOLOGY WE HAD ACHIEVED TO DESCRIBE OUR ARCHITECTURAL DEVICES IN 1955.

AN ADVANCE HAS BEEN MADE, SINCE THAT TIME, IN THE ECONOMY OF MEANS AS WELL AS THE CONCEPTUAL PENETRATION OF THE TERMS WE NOW USE. THE READER IS REFERRED TO THE "INNOVATIONS" PAGE TO TEST THIS ASSERTION.

HOWEVER THIS 'FILM SCRIPT' HAS TWO ADVANTAGES. THE FIRST IS THAT IT REFERS SPECIFICALLY TO THE JUDGE BUILDING. THE SECOND IS THAT THE TERMS ARE MORE CONCRETE AND GRAPHIC AND BEING MORE CLUMSILY WROUGHT ARE BOTH EASIER TO GRASP AND MORE REVEALING OF THEIR MANUFACTURE.

 

OLD ADDENBROOKES PROJECT FILM SCRIPT PAGE 1 JUNE 1995

 

INTRO. We introduce some new techniques to Modern Architecture: The Robot Order and its larger employment in the figure of the Stead, the Republic of the Valley and the disposition of its surrounding masses in the form of the Solar Spiral, and the Occluded Temple, with its vertical extension, the Acropolis Lantern. These represent respectively, a way of organising 'Firmness', or the mechanical services in a building, a way of organising 'Commodity' or the workplace and the lifespace of an Institution, and a way of using a building to create 'Delight' or an intellectual environment. These are all techniques of varying novelty to Modernism. But few of the ideas behind them are entirely new to the 9,000-year old history of Architecture. They may seem novel today because aspects of these techniques were rejected by Modernism, mainly because it was thought that it was necessary to abandon them in order that a Modern Architectural technique should be born. Whether this was actually true is best left to the historians of the 20C. Our proposition, here, is simply the pragmatic one that if Modernism can be fused with these ideas it will be a more effective tool with which to shape our lifespace.

P.1. We begin our story, here, in Regent Street, Cambridge, England, in the summer of 1995, looking through into the surprisingly informal entrance to what we may call the Enlightenment Arcadia of Downing College's early 19C campus. Going in we find a new college Library that was designed by Quinlan Terry. It can be dated by the radio telescope carved upon one of its metopes. It is supported upon huge Doric columns of solid stone. Looking past a wing designed, in 1930, by Blore, who introduced an unscrupulous little row of windows into the entablature, enabling him to squeeze in an additional floor of accommodation, we can just see, rising up on the far side of the campus, some tall columns that support a roof over a, seemingly empty, Gallery. This vision, looking like a temple, is the crown, a temple of light, to a labyrinthine design-process that uncoils and recoils below it, out of our sight for the moment. At night the temple glows, revealing its inscribed ceiling to the streets that surround it.

P.2. If we walk further into Downing College we find ourselves facing a wide lawn that is more like a Transatlantic Campus than the courtyards of the conventional Cambridge college layout. We can see the whole of this new temple and how its roof floats, like a raft, upon its columns. A larger campus, developed in this way, could be crowned, at intervals, by such Galleries. They would act as lanterns to the building below them, drawing daylight down into themselves. But they would also act as lanterns to the site around them, projecting the images upon their ceilings up into the sky. A sufficiency of such ceilings can project a conceptual superstructure above a campus that can become permanently installed as a virtual canopy of ideas in the form of images.

P.2A. The advantage of this site strategy is that it functionalises the old architectural idea of the tower or the spire by investing it with a new use. In our negotiations with the Master of Downing College he allowed us to lift the roof of this new roof above the roof of the old Hospital, in order to get cross-ventilation to suck hot air out of the Gallery in summer, providing that we did puncture this roof with effluent tubes of naked stainless steel, as had the Biochemistry Laboratories. We agreed, both because our flues were in the body of the old hospital, and because it is intellectually flaccid to flaunt a necessity created by the accidents of physical use as the primary source of architectural form.

P.2B. We should do our technical best to avoid filling our towers with flue gas, lift motors or water tanks. But if we have to do this, then we should over-top them with 'vertical features', as does the Judge, that are purely intellectual 'high points': such as sculptures or galleries of glass with painted ceilings. This can give a campus, a town and a city a vocabulary of metaphors and concepts that can not only stimulate the individual imagination but provide a University, or any other Institution, with ideas and images that are placed into common circulation. The more of these "lamps", or "Acropolis lanterns", shining out upon the city, that we create, the less each one of them can impose its own ideas. The same goes for their internal composition. The more plural their meanings, the more richly they can feed the individual imagination, and the more they serve the purpose of establishing a realm of ideas that is both public and diverse. 'Towers' should be beacons of intellectual freedom before they are water tanks. But why should anything prevent them from being both!

P.3. Closer still, we see another of Downing's Post- modern classical buildings by Quinlan Terry and look up to see the sharp northern prow of the acropolis-temple rearing high up above other buildings that seem to mass at the foot of the hill upon which it is built.

P.4. Our propylea to this mysterious Acropolis, raised unaccountably upon the level alluvium of Cambridge, is round the back of the only modern building that one can find on the Downing campus. This is a beautiful combination room designed by Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis, in the nineteen-seventies, that proposed architecture as the Primitive Hut of some Japanese fisher-folk skilled in the constructive arts of ferroconcrete.

P.4A. This version of architecture should have been rendered incredible by the work of Buckminster Fuller, who proved, in the 1950's, that the 'architecture of structure' ended with triangulated domes. To prove his point he offered to enclose New York in one of his geodesic bubbles. In the 1930's Fuller had proposed planning towns by bombing them from airships before planting skyscrapers like mature trees. Each floor of these would be a circular terrace, walled in glass and fed, like a flower, from a central tube of mechanical services. The peculiar thing with all of this high-tech architecture is that it seems to impel people to remove their clothing. Here is the Venus de Fuller, collapsed upon a daybed presumably studying the operational manual for the Villa Dymaxion and wondering how to open the wardrobe. And here is Reyner Banham, Britain's most famous architecural critic of the mid century, practising what he preached to his Architectural public, which was to "shed their cultural load". This particular glass bubble plays out some suburban variant of the story of Noah's Ark, here regressed to an amniotic sac which appears locked onto its rocky Ararat while the freshly denuded infant grows a beard and receives messages from the exterior through his citizen band hi-fi set.

P.4B. The best thing about all these pneumatic utopias is that they disposed of the long running notion of the Venetian Friar Lodoli, first coined in 1750, that architecture was efficient anti-gravity structure. It became clear that if architecture was about cubic spaces framed out with columns and beams, then it was about one of the least efficient structural systems that man had created. This is why good structural engineers are so valuable to Architects. One can reasonably assume that, after this denouement had emptied Modern Architecture of all credible intellectual exercise, the Dons tired of it and returned to the Hellenic Katharevousa of Quinlan Terry.

P.5. Standing back in the goods entrance to Downing, we can see that the Temple rears-up behind a lower structure that also has a glazed tile roof like the Gallery. It is a cubic block whose surface is inscribed with, what is called, a giant order of sixteen, five-foot wide, columns. These rest upon a two-storey base containing bulk goods deliveries to the surrounding BioChemistry Campus. To the left are the MBA study rooms and to the right, two lecture theatres stacked one on top of the other. These show their sloping floors by allowing their windows to step down and break through the horizontal divisions of the outer walls. The air to ventilate the Lecture Theatres is sucked-in through the columns, which are hollow. We can see the machinery inside the masonry skin. Here is the fitter placing the louvered cover. The Castle is so named because it recalls a building standing upon a mound. The bricks of its base, are a well-fired blue that is slightly glazed. This makes them a hard, smooth, workaday material, that is easy to wash.

P.5 A. The intellectual meaning of the form, however, does not relate to fortification but to the Asherath, a Mesopotamian figure that recalls the idea that the land emerged from the sea under the influence of the sun. The blue base is the '"khumba", which is both the ocean and the water-clad mountain. The yellow and white columns are the "stambhas" of the crucifrom cities on their sandy soil and the blitzcrete plugs are the fiery suns, or "chakras".

P. 6. The secret of the Acropolis to the Brooke's Complex, begins to be revealed as one stands in the courtyard of the adjacent Biochemistry Building. The lower windows, of the Castle Block, have deep white reveals to reflect light into the rooms. We can see this if we stand inside and look out. We can also see the big rounded mullion between the upper windows, that is designed to give a good, solid, soundproof, bedding to the end of an internal partition wall. To the left of the Castle in this view, we can see the end of the 19C Hospital building. We can see how the Acropolis Gallery thrusts its sharp prow above the buildings massed below it. Notice the geometry of the capital to the column. It breaks free of the Entablature to each side in a way that could only have been composed in the 20C.

P. 7. If we stand in Tennis Court road we can see the bungaloid bulk of the "design and build" Bio-Chemistry building, that not even a Business Park would allow onto its territory, and pull the camera slowly across the diverse forms of the Castle block. We see the small ventilation holes and doors into the Inflammable materials store and, cut into the battered wall of Ketley blue engineering bricks, the lowest window of the Lecture Theatre. The blue wall is topped by a torus moulding in the shape of a birds beak that supports cubic pedestals to the giant order columns. The columns are framed in vertical white stones, like 'opus Africanum', providing a soft centre which can be used to site mechanical apparatus. This changes to a complete brick column for the top storey before the necking in white and a capital in glazed black concrete with three echinus-fillets, carry the blue 'logs' with fiery "blitzcrete" ends , green 'saddles' and a night-blue aluminium gutter in the shape of a corona moulding. Note how the gutter is split at the corner. This allows it to overflow externally, and publicly, if it gets blocked, and recalls the animal horns that are congruent with this moulding-form.

P. 7A. The circular window is surounded by a relieving arch in two rows of Keymer creasing tiles. These lights pivot horizontally so that they can remain open in bad weather and be cleaned from inside. A circle of this size is at the the outer limits of opening light technology because the glass of larger circles sags down when the window pivots to horizontal. The small, square, lower window is also part of the same room, the Debating Chamber. The spandrel under this window is dressed with herring-bone brickwork to recall the lattices of crossed spears that originated the figure of the balustrade as well as the woven matting that covers the raft of logs that can be seen supporting each floor.

P. 7B. The lowest circular 'window' was filled-in solid late in the design development so as not to distract the audience from the speaker in the lower Lecture Theatre. But, in conformity to the principle that it is always the form that is transgressed that brings the idea of it most strongly to mind, we record this idealised circular opening by showing it filled in, as a 'tragic' expedient, by a contrasting masonry. Below this we find the deeply-recessed door to the bottled gas store. It is surmounted by a log lintel with a row of dentils. The blue bricks carry on up the central bay of this northern side of the Castle, with an increased verticality of slope. This backs-up the panel that carries the screens and the teaching wall to the two, 'double'height', Lecture theatres.

P. 7C. A narrow alley leads into the base of the interior Gallery between the battered wall of the Castle and the patterned bricks of the Ark Block. We can see the big black planter-capitals that will hold trees and bushes so as to found the columns of the Acropolis temple upon what Corbusier called the "sol artificiel", the new earth. This is established upon the entablature of the four-storey 'Ark" Block, which contains the Professor's Offices.

P. 7D. Leon Battista Alberti advised that in the the centre of every city there should be a library and a temple and a secret and flowery garden. He called this the Scholar's garden and recommended that it should be hidden from easy view, although located in the very eye of the metropolitan storm. What better place than on a low roof, surrounded by the pitched slate slopes of surrounding buildings, like gentle mountains ringing a hidden valley. Here, on the roof of the Ark, the Scholar's garden rides above the blue waves of the precast balustrade, like a new-born earth. It also performs the role of the source in the 'classical landscape' that we will later see has been inscribed into the body of this building.

P. 7E. There are two gardens in the Brookestead Complex. One is this roof garden, which I call a "Balcony Garden" because it is half way up the building. The other is the 'front garden to the other side of the building, which is converted out of the old hospital's forecourt. Both are welcome pieces of verdure in a city. But this Balcony-Garden is by far the most important because one of the reasons that the the modern multi-level city has failed is that people do not like leaving the ground. Even the Ground Floor is often no longer signified by the letter 'G' but abstracted to an '0' that comes between layers of +1,2,3 to +'n' and -1,2,3 to -n'. This upper-level garden signs a determination to humanise the multi-level city and re-introduce the Classical idea that every floor is a 'ground' floor.

P. 7F. We can see how this used to be signified by the meander or guilloche moulding that is so typical of inscribed classical urban decoration. It means, as on this facade in the Viale de Governo Vecchio in the Campo Marzo in Rome, that here are the stone flags of a New Earth being born from the sea. The clatter of buckets and the swish of mops recalls, in the fresh morning sunlight, the inundation of the 'flood' and its rapid retreat under the glancing rays of the low sun.

P. 8. The walls of the Ark building are patterned as if woven out of cloth, with ten different kinds of brick. This was a very early way of decorating a wall, as we can see from the patterns painted on this Egyptian wall that record the cords that would be needed to stretch the woven cloth. We can see that the Ark building is situated in a narrow street.To save space the columns do not project forward from the surface of the building at all. In fact we can see that the spandrels push out in front of the columns like vestigial balconies that used to crowd out over mediaeval alleys. Their white sills hang down to a point as if absolutely dedicated to forming little drips on their extremities.

P. 8 A. Our patterning begins at the bottom with blue engineering brick and glazed brick which can both be cleaned off from the dirt thrown up from traffic. The base is blue, to represent the ocean again and the first colour above that is yellow, to represent the 'fiat lux', the big bang. Then the black cross on the white ground is both duality splitting and coupling, the four- square cubic earth, and an alarm signal for traffic. One technical point is that the only way to make a brick pattern symmetrical on the corners is to use symmetrically sized corner bricks. Above it there is a plat-band of green Blitzcrete that is made from crushed bricks set in chrome oxide and Criggion green granite concrete. This is the mat of vegetation that carried the fire, which is a pyramid of red bricks above it. Then the patterns above the glazed brick are in soft sandy colours. This is the element of air, it is the zone of settlement on the fertile soil of the Delta, with the continuous lattice of the brick colours recalling the four-square divisions of fields and streets.

P. 8 B. The top of the column and the wall in between, that we will call the Entablature of the Ark, returns to glazed brick because it needed to recapitulate the glazed base, and point-up the element of 'fire' and create more contrast against the sky. The main figures on the column are a red triangle under a green platband in order to create a 'capital' that is associated with the element 'fire'. These are joined by the two undulating waves of the thick blue balustrade and the glazed brick entablature, that are both the sea out of which 'rises' the garden of the Ark as well as a serpentine line in black, which is deep space, and the blue of the sky. These are all concepts of the outer limits of the boundaries of the human lifespace. Here, again, we have the figure of the raft carrying a fire. In this case they are the fire and smoke of the Hearth, represented by the attributes of Hestia/Vesta. Her conical form is translated into the red balusters of fire tipped with black cylinders of smoke. The yellow wooden lattices are both the crossed spears of the balustrade and the raft on which to support the fires upon the primordial ocean prior to the 'grounding' (of the type of Noah) that is the moment when stability is achieved for the new foundation. The trees, when they come, will grow out of the black and have their footing in the green: the two colours of regeneration.

P. 9. The windows are our own technical design. They are made of hardwood, which is pleasant to touch as well as an effective insulator against heat transfer and the internal condensation that bad insulation brings. These dark colours are the sort that industriual buildings used to be painted in Clerkenwell and late 19C London. They are very beautiful. However wood fibres are degraded by the ultra-violet in daylight, so we have shielded them by a polyester coated external rain and sun screen of rolled aluminium. This is fixed by screws so that it can be removed after 20-30 years and returned to the factory for industrial coating The design of the glazing divisions of these windows is reversed and the bottom panel is of sand-blasted cavity glass in order to prevent overlooking in this narrow street.

P. 10. We will now climb up to get a better view of how the different buildings fit together. Starting on the right we can see the Northern end of the Hospital. Next to it we see the full height of the Gallery. Its Acropolis-temple is the top of a columnar space that plunges deep into the centre of the whole Brooke's complex. To its left we can see the detached block of Professor's Offices, the little Ark block with its decorated columns awaiting the 12'0" high enamelled aluminium statues, in the manner of three-dimensional L:ichtensteins, on rotating bases that will stand embedded in greenery, above the great black, planter-capitals. We also have to imagine the floor of the roof garden lush with thick grass, like a flowery mountain meadow from which spring the huge columns of the Acropolis-temple. To the far side of the mountain meadow we see the pyramidical roof, in glazed sea-green clay tile, of the Castle Block.

P. 10A. These four buildings, three new and one old, are all at different heights, from the four storeys of the Ark to the effective nine of the Gallery. One of the reasons for this is that we use the surrounding buildings to passively control the entry of the sun into the glazed Gallery building at their centre. The sun is low in the morning and in the evening. It is high when shining from the South at mid-day. The energy emitted by the sun is most useful in the early morning. By mid-day it is already too powerful to be allowed to enter directly through a roof except in very small amounts. Equally, in a building that has a large input from working machinery and a large population, the heat energy from these sources will build up towards the end of the day and the afternoon sun must be controlled and not simply allowed to enter through a large area of glass. Finally a North face of glass does give light without allowing the sun to enter, thus avoiding solar heat gain. But the light is cold, shadowless and grey. It is dull and boring light.

P. 10 B. We always plan a building complex so that it has a large, multi-level, central space in which to build the social space required to engineer the "Republic of the Valley". It is enclosed by Accommodation buildings on each of its four sides. The "Solar Spiral" is the name that we give to the the form of these enclosing sides when we consider their relation to the energy and direction of the sun. The spiral begins with the lowest building, the Ark, which is to the East, from whence the sun is basically welcome in our cool climate, so as to help the building to warm-up in the morning. The next highest building is the Castle, which is to the South. This can be accepted provided "light shelves" are used on glazing to reduce the incidence of the sun as it climbs higher into the sky, and increases in energy. The soft, rounded, bulk of the Robot columns act as vertical sunbreakers, blocking but also reflecting the raking rays that would otherwise enter a flatter facade by sliding behind and to the side of the fixed light shelves. In this way all solar shading is effected without moveable or mechanical parts, and with an optically stimulating variation in the qualities of reflected light.

P. 10 C. The highest side is that of the old Hospital. This is to the West. Here the Gallery is protected. the sun only reaches into it through very high level windows. Yet because the Hospital is shallow, the low sun finally penetrates, by reflection off the floor, into the Gallery. Direct sun into the Old Hospital building has to be controlled by retractable external fabric blinds fixed to windows at each floor; where they can be easily maintained. The heights of the Accommodation buildings enclosing the central Gallery climb up in the form of a spiral, governed by the incidence of the sun and the need for the building to admit, or refuse, but always to enjoy, its modulated rays as they pierce, or reflect, into its interior.

P. 11. The ability to vary the heights of the buildings grouped around the central Gallery, or Acropolis Temple, is helped by dividing the site into separate parts, each occupied by a separate building. Each of these is adapted from an inherited structure, or newly-designed to both suit and exploit its part of the site. The first building we see, in this computer simulation, is the almost free-standing Castle block, the second is the Ark block. Then the Gallery can be seen stitching them together. Finally the existing Hospital is put into place, obscuring the new buildings behind its huge facade.

P. 11 A. Another reason for dividing the project into separate buildings is to reduce its parts to the same scale as the surrounding structures. We design their exteriors to suit the place into which they are put, narrow street, wide street or little plaza. We allow pedestrians to circulate better by making a big building more porous to access and traverse. These are the most basic techniques of site planning. We call them "Blockscaping". They design a large modern project so that it conforms to an older part of the city whose urban qualities descend from a period when buildings were constructed from more modest capital investment structures than can be deployed today.

P. 11 B. Yet, at the same time that the project appears to be being dismembered and divided, we can also see how the separate buildings are operationally united into one large building by being pinned down by a central building, the Acropolis , or Gallery, building, that is able to step into their columnar footprints. Adjacent buidings of different heights and architectural character end by sharing the same row of giant Robot columns, joined to each other by their vertebra, like Siamese twins, the walls between them dissolve.

P. 12. We can do this because the columns of the Gallery-building transform downwards into those of the 19C Hospital. Then the columns of the Castle transform upwards into those of the Gallery. On the inside of the building, the columns of the Gallery transform down into those of the Ark and, next to them, the columns of the Castle again transform upwards into those of the Gallery. What this means is that even though these huge columns give us an unprecedented ability to impart a measured harmony to a large new site, their modernist aesthetic also allows us to manipulate them at a level of detail that can adapt them to a complex urban site and old buildings of architectural quality.

P. 12 A. These columns can best be thought of as segments of varying form and property which can be plugged into each other like code words in a 'concrete' sentence. They pin different buildings to each other by allowing their footprints to overlap. They also act as hinge-points which allow adjacent buildings to rotate at angles other than 90û. Yet the interior service duct passages down the Robot Columns are preserved intact through all of the formal manipulations required to intersect whole, discrete, buildings. We will explore the technical aspect of this when we describe what we call the "Plug-in, Technostyle or Robot, Order".

P. 13. We have decided to name this general site planning technique, including Sitescaping, the Solar Spiral, the Balcony garden and the Acropolis Lantern: the "Brookestead Block". This is not only because it was realised first on the site of the old Addenbrooke's Hospital, but because it combines a reference to a Brook, and so a river, and to our use of the Classical Valley as the basis of the "Republic of the Valley". It also refers to the Stead, a figure that refers to the architecture of the Homestead.

P. 14. The idea of the "stead" is our interpretation of what is called, in Classical Architectural Theory, the "Primitive Hut". The Abbe Laugier published this drawing, in the late 18C, of Mistress Architecture revealing its most fundmantal image, the origin of Classical Architecture, to the infant Architect . Unfortunately we now know, as with so many catchy fragments of Architectural theory, that both words are nonsensical. It is neither a Hut, as these are, nor is it the dwelling of anyone whom it might have been thought, even at that time, to be a 'Primitive'. Yet we should not discard the "Hut" because of that. It is still a key figure within the practice of architecture and we have recovered it to perform its essential function.

P. 15. A more plausible understanding of the figure of the "Primitive Hut" is, as is often the case with Science, obvious to someone who has not left his "living", as the Goncourt Brothers did, to their servants, while they lived amongst books. This "hut" is simply every young human being's idea of a "house". It is an idea-picture, called an ideo-gramme, a logo-graph, or a logo-gramme. But the infant is not a camera. He is not drawing the outside of his house. Few adults can even do that. Even Iranian children who live in domed mud houses draw them square. This is because the infant is not a Polaroid camerawith a brain made of silver iodide crystals. She is drawing her "idea" of home.

P. 16. This is the interior of her home, a solid, secure, four-square space that will not roll around or rock from side to side. She is in it with her first experience of society, that of her family. Its first quality is spatiality and stability, as expressed by its cubic form, Its second quality is to have a door. A small house has one door because it has one room. A large building has many doors, each drawn upon the paper as if it was high up on its facade (which it is not) to signify its plurality of rooms. The third quality of the room is that it is sheltered by a roof. This little girl records that a cottage is a house in which one can sleep in the roof. This is to say that the roof can also be a room.

P. 17. The fourth quality of this room is that it has a chimney. This may surprise those who know that an open fire has become a rare event during the last 40 years in Britain. Discharging black smoke from a chimney will bring the clean air inspector around to tell one such things are no longer allowed. But this 'chimney', as one must learn to expect with ideograms, is not the object that a camera records. It is instead, a sign that says, as this little girl records, that the social space is a "kitchen". The primary experience of social space remains the same as from time immemorial. It is the space of the blood family, and of food, and of the hearth. Food is still hot, even when it is microwaved.

P. 18. The 'Primitive Hut' of 18C Classical theory is not so much primitive as primal. We have chosen to call this figure the "Hearth-stead" to record its wider extension to the territory of the homestead which includes lands, as well as its connection to the more intimate scale of the bedstead . TheStead is both the footprint of its site as well as its 'framed-out', three-dimensional, space. We can now percieve that the function of the figure of the "primitive hut" is to render this primal volume, of the Hearth-Stead, into architecure. It might be more revealing to rechristen it the "Primal Hut".

P. 19. The Primal Hut is used throughout our work. We employ it to represent what the child understands when he or she draws it: that this is a "Hearth", a place protected by all the taboos that the Hearth implies, a place of security where one can relax and feel safe amongst people who would treat one as a member of their clan or family. This sign is of importance, because it is only those who feel secure who will be the real adventurers, striking out and making a future that is original.

P. 20. The Modernism that descended from Adolf Loos abolished all figures of this sort when it proscribed architectural ornament. It erased all of the ways that an architect divides a surface, sculpts a surface and decorates a surface with smaller details. It abolished the abstract measures that allow one to dispose of forms as symbols rather than as things in themselves. In short, by destroying the grammar of architectural ornament it destroyed the linguistic capability of the surface forms of architecture. Loos was deliberate in this act of vandalism. He advised that there was nothing worth saying in a proletarian, mass- culture.

P. 20 A. One may be allowed to suggest, alternatively, that this ugly arrogance obscured the fact that the architectural theory of his day was incapable of explaining the medium even to an 'expert' like himself, let alone the newly literate, better fed, more mentally active Public of the newspapers and journals he despised. All that it could muster was a Nietschean apprehension of a dreadful sublimity and Camillo Sitte's engaging admittance that the Humanist Urbanism that he had spent his life studying and describing was a lost cause due to the inadequate supply in "Modern Man" of some mysterious "x"-factor.

P. 20 B. However, instead of ushering in a sweet world of modest silence or dumbstruck decadence, according to one's interpretation, this politically incompetent response to an intellectual embarrassment, after giving Architecture to be murdered by the Fascists and the Commissars, was finally forced to acquiesce, after the war, to our present regime of absolute licence in which mere grossness is the only measure of quality. Architecture today is either a totally ordered absence of meaning, like these skyscrapers, or a totally disordered absence of meaning, like this building by Frank Gehry.

P. 20 C. Yet the disappearance of Architecture as a medium is neither historically inevitable nor driven by Public demand. It is mainly due to the fact that it can not be explained. It is one of the greater intellectual mysteries why, after so many millenia of successful practice, there still remains no persuasive explanation for either the Architecture of the past, nor a reasoned guide for the Architecture of the future. However it is now clear that the lack of such a theory, in the almost entirely bureaucratised system of lifespace procurement that we now effect, is leading to the elimination of the practice of the medium. It is this failure of theory that has led, during this century, to the incapacity of our culture to extend the real, powerful, ordered, disciplined, ornamented, fully-coloured medium, into the present day.

P. 21. It is a principle of Classicism that scale is more important than size. The reason for this is that Classicism proposes that a building is always, in its essence, a Primal Hut, however large it becomes. If we take this idea literally, today, with modern, low, ceiling heights, this either results in the repetition of little huts, one upon the other, per ardua ad nauseam, or the attachment of functionally redundant, free-standing hut-portico decorations like the stone one on Downing's Library, or the withered steel fragment that dangles limply, like a flayed skin, from the vestigial portico of the Law Library.

P. 22. If, however, we use the idea of the Giant Order, first developed 400 years ago, by Michaelangelo, then we can use some big beams and columns to inscribe the figure of the Primal Hut upon these large buildings, and set the real rooms free to be themselves. The Giant Order is so powerful that it even sets them free to break through its framework. We can see this on the outside of the Castle, where their circular and square windows break through the floor lines of the facade as they follow the sloping floors of the interior. This, also, is not a new idea. We can see how the idea of composing a comfortably and loosely adapted building within a given structure having an "eternal", timeless, or archaic figure was previewed 400 years ago in this little detail from a painting by Mantegna. 

P. 23. We can return now to a more detailed look at the separate buildings that we h ave joined together into the Brookestead Block. We begin with this ancient tower, like the outworks of a Roman fortress made of the Cambridge white brick, now manufactured no longer. It used to contain the Hospital wash rooms. Its floors have been kept, but a free-standing steel stair has been cut through them to fall 80'0" in seven floors. Six floors of this wing of the old Hospital, have been designated for the Libraries of the Institute. Only three of them exist at present. However the height of the 19C floors is such that mezzanines can be inserted when the need arises. Meanwhile, to carry the maximium load of documents, and the potential Mezzanines, a new steel structure has been inserted inside the old walls. The columns have been arranged in the shape of a boat enclosing a hearth in the shape of the free-standing, back to back fires that used to heat the old Wards. We were required to keep them by the City Planning Committee. Here is an old photograph of what they look like, and here is the Ward before we recovered it for its new use.

P. 24. Meanwhile the rather insecure old brick walls, constructed, in the 19C, with partially second-hand materials, for the ageless reasons of economy, have been partially cleaned so as not to lose all of their patina, and lined internally with insulation, and the windows repaired or re-made, for them all to receive another lease of life. 

P. 25. The massive, solid brick buttresses occur every 4.5 metres, or 15 feet. We adopted this module for the new work. But this was almost the only thing we copiedfrom the 19C. We like to be polite to our forbears but, really, they were primitive, not only in their technology but in their understanding of architecture, which went no further than the ability to merely reproduce received forms. We will show you that after we join the old to the new, everything is very different, both on the surface as well as below it.

P. 26. Let us, for example, look at the first of the new columns, next to the old walls. Underneath its bricks it is a steel lattice mast. Inside this is an air duct, insulated from the exterior temperature, whose function is to pull air down 80'0" or 26 Metres, so as to keep the temperature even throughout that height. The air blows out from these back-lit cannons called Krantz nozzles. Then, due to the brilliant engineering of the late John Condon, of the F.J.Samuely Partnership, the mast is clad in 4" (100 mm). masonry for its whole height and joins the well-dressed company of its columnar fellows.

P. 27. Each of these columns has a common size, a diameter of 1.5M or 5'0", and shares a common height. But each of them performs a different function when we look inside them. We can guess this by noticing the variety of the holes in their exterior. They are punctured wherever we want to gain or lose some air or lose some fluid or proffer a light. These eruptions help us to understand that the Robot Order is a real, mechanical, working column and beam system. It functions mechanically and it functions symbolically. It is not just another rehearsal of the ancient dance of the trabeated 'Orders' that is exhibited, in polite society, whenever anyone says "Architecture".

P. 28. Then there are the coupled or "double-bubble" columns. These are named after the 'figure-8' fuselage of the Boeing Stratocruiser that crossed the Atlantic in the 1950's. They merge the 4.5 M (15'0") modules of the old Ward Blocks with the incompatible module of the arcuated verandah. The two pairs of coupled columns also emphasize the central axis of the old hospital block and the crossing of the vertical and horizontal narratives of the new building, up which rises the new social stair.

P. 29. The glass wall between the columns is fitted with metal light shelves. These are a white sheet with a perforated red sheet below: so as to dissipate heat. They prevent the mid-day, summer sun from entering the interior. This makes for broad mullions and transomes dividing the panels of glazing. These are clad, on the interior, by curved metal sheets in a pale water-green colour which lead the eye gently from the bright sky to hard shadow, preventing the glare that ruins all large modern window designs that have forgotten the optical function of a deep reveal in a thick wall. The circular windows at high level are powered to open and close so as to ventilate the Gallery by natural convection and aerodynamic cross ventilation at high level. When combined with the air recirculating masts, and the solid roof, the Gallery remains cool, without artificial refigeration, even when it was 85 degrees outside. A glass roof would require air-conditioning.

P. 30. The whole array of 22 columns supports a solid roof, which, as we saw in the long view from Downing, rests upon them like the entablature of a temple. We have derived the metaphysic of the roof from its history as a raft that flies or sails across its medium, to land upon the Ararat of this Institution. We derive this idea from the oldest sources: those of Mesopotamia, whence comes this cylinder seal that pictures two figures, that were later formalised into columns, who bear a winged disk. This disk is both the sun as well as the "sun at night", which is to say the light of the imagination. Thirdly the disc is also the fire of the circular Hearth, set inside a space defined by four columns, as recorded by Schliemann in Tiryns. It is the fire of sacrifice.

P. 31. The Ancient Greeks painted the ends of their stone rafters blue and cut blue-painted "drops" (stagwnes(stegones), guttae (like gutter) in Latin) below them. These rafters, called triglyphs, they bound with red "thongs" (taenia). We have built our "raft" of cylindrical blue logs and printed the mark of the foaming breakers, or the swirling clouds, upon them to show that they wing across the sky. This is a new concrete technology, which we have christened "Doodlecrete", invented by JOA working with "Techcrete Ltd. of Dublin. We use rubber moulds to inlay concrete of one colour into another. Blue is also a new colour. It has only been available for use in the alkaline environment of concrete for the last 15 years. The light-fast Bayer Blue 100, is blue all the way through the body of the log. The white inlay is 12 mm (1/2") thick, and is pressed into undercut grooves that key it in.

P. 32. The tips of the blue logs are finished with a concrete made from fragments of brightly-coloured crushed brick that dance like the glowing embers of a fire within a crystalline white body. This was first developed by JOA and Dave Knowles of Diespeker Concrete in 1982 for the Rausing House In Wadhurst, Sussex, that was voted the best country house to be built in Britain since the War. The use of this "White Blitzcrete" to plug the 'canonic' logs represents the idea that the inner core of these rafters and columns , the trabeated framework of our architecture, is a generalised and abstracted energy or "power" (the most abstract meaning of the Latin trabes). We will look at this idea some more when we go inside and walk into the inside of these big columns. We are planning to tip the logs with real spotlights to light the streets around a building in the Hague, Holland.

P. 33. The blue logs each carry a pair of green wings that help them to fly the raft. However they also read as arms reaching out from the raft-log to form the flat platform of the New Earth. Corbusier called this the Sol Artificiel. This was the massive entablature upon which he planned to build his metallic sky-cities. It is a play on ciel, sky. He thought that the promise of the 20C was to install Mr. and Mrs Everyman into the sky, like Gods. Then he went and left behind this cryptic drawing which said" all life is lived under the pilotis".

P. 34. The Sol Artificiel is also the earth that Noah, and all colonists, carry to the new foundation. They also take the fire, with its 'earthy' ashes, from the old hearth and preserve it so as to build the new (civic) hearth and sacrifice upon it before eating together. We can see in this very typical rendition of Noah's altar, in this case by Athanasius Kircher, that the fire, in the guise of Hestia, or Vesta, the enforcer of the sacred taboos that protect the hearth, is a cone of logs and ashes raised upon a table. The table-top is the raft of Noah's Ark itself, and the four legs of the table are the submarine columns that give it support after the arduous voyage of the Founders. The pyramid of logs that Laugier has Mistress Architecture display to her infant professional, is, in the main, this pyre of the Hearth, resting upon its raft of rounded logs.

P. 35. Free. 

P. 36. Our raft is over-topped and surrounded by a classical "cyma-recta" moulding in dark blue fixedwith brilliant stainless bolts. This is a 2'0" (600 mm)-wide rolled aluminum gutter, hung from above so that the straps do not show and fixed with stainless bolts so that it can be easily taken down for recoating after several decades. This may seem a little oversized for a gutter! But we can say that it has been waiting in our design armoury for the moment when it will receive the five inches of rain that can fall in a single day in Houston, Texas. Who said that Classicism could not be extended into an universal language. It rains water everywhere!

P. 37. Kyma means wave. The Kymata are the waves that one finds when one is far from the shore. The land has dipped out of sight and the world undulates without a firm footing anywhere. Martianus Capella, writing in the 5C a.d., extends his use of the word to denote the hollow spheres that both enclose as well as delimit the extreme limits of the creation. We colour our Kyma-recta gutter dark blue and fix it with oversized stainless bolts and washers, that glitter in the sun, so as define an architectural congruence between the edge of the world of the building, and the 'limits' of the world as a whole: the labyrinthine, lightless, boundary of "outer space" as we know it, studded with fiery stars.

P. 38. A sloping roof is a dry roof. Interlocking clay tiles with a glazed surface shed water and protect the clay from frost. Problems are resticted to the gutter, which lies outside the building envelope. This is my preferred building technology. The pyramidical roof is also an Ark, a chest, or "coffre" in French, from whence we get the name of the figure of the coffer. The Coffer is a proscenium, a 'theatrical' opening, or view from below looking upwards into the space that lies above the ceiling and below the tiles. It is typical of the coffer to show a gilded star or flower upon a blue ground. This blue is often, but not always dark. This gilded object is one, or all of the three different kinds of fire being carried by the Mesopotamian winged disc. the fire of the sun, the fire of the the imagination and the fire of the hearth.

P. 39. The Ark, or Coffre is being carried by the raft. Its form, here, is pyramidical. Its exterior, the glazed blue green of the tiles recovers, each time that these waves glisten with the rain, the history of the first pyramid of earth that rose from the sea.

P. 40. There are two kinds of traditional 'window' into the interior of the Ark. We have already talked of the coffer, the view upwards through the ceiling. There is also the view into its pyramidical body 'through' the gable. The Greeks, as we can see from these remaining paintings from the Propylea to the Athenian Acropolis, painted the fiery star in their coffers. But so far as I know, they did not depict the human body, as did the Renaissance. However the Pediments were treated differently. Here the Greeks allowed their heroic cargo to display themselves like the inhabitants from some supernatural ship which the efforts of the Polis had managed to impale, like successful 'wreckers', upon the 'reef' of the peripteral collonnade.

P. 41. We have here, again, the type of the story of Noah, and all voyagers to a new foundation. The Raft carries the inhabitants, occasionally historical, more properly mythic, of the conceptual landscape of the new life-space. They hide inside their Ark, like aliens inside a Trojan horse, beached on their Ararat of submarine supports: the columns webbed with watery glass. Unlike invading Greeks, however they will remain obscured unless conjured out by being invited, by the mediation of an artist, to descend into the imaginations of the students and professors of the Institute. This is the idea behind the vaulted ceilings of the Renaissance. The rule is that when the ceiling is level, flat and intact, it acts as a screen and the 'contents of the vault', above it, remain invisible. To be strict, a flat ceiling should carry no natural forms: only abstracted emblems signifying the hidden contents of the Ark. Only when the ceiling plane is drawn back, and the vaulted interior revealed, should one depict the 'Arcane' contents in a fully realised aesthetic.

P. 42. The tradition here is to depict the contents of the Ark as the ideas, values and principles that the Founders of the Institute wished to install as its conceptual superstructure. We could find the propagandist echoes of this to be disturbing today, especially as we exist in an atmosphere of increasingly vigilant "political correctness". Nevertheless the fact is that every society, firm and institution has cohered around shared ideas. Our problem is not to invent a new sort of society that needs no common ideas (for I fear that is impossible) but to invent, or adapt, our founding ideas so that they are more shareable. This is a great, fascinating, and largely ignored project in the fine arts, maybe because, again, it has been so polluted by political and commercial propaganda. But, if there is a will, it can be recovered and architecture is the only theatre in which that recovery can be orchestrated.

P. 42 A. We have suggested, therefore, that we radicalise the idea of the Ark into the Earth itself, but take that part of the Earth which is most readily identifiable as the Ark for us humans. This we have adentified as the "Valley". We justify this by arguing that a valley formed the physical cradle of many human cultures, from Mesopotamia, Egypt and China through to the Greek Polis, which Glotze identifies precisely as congruent to a valley running down to the sea, and on, through the rational statecraft of the new politics of the Renaissance, through to modern times. We represent this 'ideal' or 'classic' Valley by translating its parts into abstract emblems. We explain later what these are and how it was done. We then populate each of these "stations of the valley" with a being or protagonist who can, either separately or together, embody it by acting it.

P. 43. Without further explanation we show some progress, here, towards a version of such a "dramatic ceiling" for this Brooks Complex. It is a 3 metre-long painting, done in tempera technique at a scale of 1:12. The technology already exists to have it faithfully photographed and enlarged, by computerised printing, onto sheets of canvas 9 m (30'0") long x 3 M (10'0") wide. We used this technique for our large ceiling in the exhibition in the V & A Museum in the summer of 1994, describing the work of the 19CArchitect, A.W. Pugin. These sheets of canvas can then be bonded into the curved ceiling.

P. 44. If this ark-bearing acropolis-temple' is the original structure, the carrier of the first beings, then the Balcony Garden on the top of the Ark Block is properly the recuperation, in the urban world, of that original 'unspoilt' ground on which it, 'originally', stood. However this plane is also accessible to the real, living, historic, Members of the Institute. The Balcony Garden then becomes the theatre upon which we, the natural creatures of historic time, can meet the primordial creatures of mythic time, if we choose to do in the forms prescribed by Art: which are statues and dramas, in this case of enamelled aluminium and whatever the 'dramatists' of the Institute prescribe!.

P. 45. We also developed the idea that this process of the "installation of the superstructure" of the firm or institute could be a ritual that could formalise the periodical affirmation or alteration of the founding ideas. The ideas could be debated, through their emblematic representation, and then made the subject of a new graphic composition that would then be printed and re-erected. 

P. 46. In theory this could become something that was acted-out in the way that these Japanese schoolchildren are able to create this most brilliant emblem of London, that is also a timeless architectural figure. They bore it around Hyde Park in an act that dramatises their collective support for the idea of my city. There are, of course, precedents for the carrying of objects upon rafts or tables, such as the event depicted in this painting by Mantegna. Whether such a game can be played by our more individualistic culture remains to be seen. 

P. 47. This superstructure, or entablature, of the Castle, is also carried upon its sixteen giant order columns. Like wires cutting through cheese, their forms carry through into the interior of the solid block of the Lecture Theatre. The inner half of the robot column is cut away to expose the two structural pillars, which are then rounded and dressed as columns. The duct between them is accessed by doors and contains all of the services, which run up and down, and includes the ventilation. They carry their entablature in the form of the same blue logs and green saddles which hang like a hammock, supporting the raking seating of the Debating Chamber above. Lights and speakers are carried in the hollow interior of its 'Robot' beams and its centre is withdrawn to reveal a place for the emblematic signification of the 'arcane' cargo of this subsidiary Ark.

P. 47A. The difference between classicism and functionalism is that this room retains its classical concept of itself as a regular, cubic, primal hut, in spite of the avalanche of carpet and seats that floods into it to turn it into an auditorium with a raking floor. The windows ride up upon this sloping wave, cutting through the horizontal divisions of the wall. This 'tragic history' keeps before us both the 'primal room' and the drama of its transformation by circumstances. Functionalism without Classicism only reports the slope without the ideal cubic chamber. It is a mere poleaxed fatalism before the forces of chance that then seeks to turn disaster to account by exhibiting its wounded, mis-shapen, form as the sign of its honest 'truth to materials and function'. Functionalism without classicism seeks to shock us with its 'honesty' concerning its illiteracy and architectural incompetence. But one has become too jaded by these faux naifs, this ingenuous primitivism of the salons and galleries, to laugh any more.

P. 48. Let us now walk out of the Auditorium and pass down the single flight of new stairs to the Hall. Undergraduate students attending lectures can reach this room very easily and do not need to penetrate further into the Institute. We can look up and see the new Gallery passing between the row of new columns with their collars of Krantz nozzles, to pass out of the old arches of the verandah to the preserved and renovated Facade of the old Addenbrooke's Hospital.

P. 49. We can look up and explore the largest single public facade in Cambridge. As we do, and before we tell you its story, I want to say something about colour. New buildings should always look too strongly coloured because the ydirty and fade. We use patterned surfaces, such as the inlays of Blitzcrete and Doodlecrete, to overcome the effects of the uneven 'weathering'. The inlay, and the ideas behind it, stay the same, even when the material changes. Nonetheless our use of colour is probably the part of our work that is the least conventional.

P. 50. We introduce colour in order to make it clear that building, like the rest of human activity, while arguably 'natural' to Mankind, is unnatural to the rest of Nature. We do well to understand ourselves and follow our own, human, nature. Yet we must also reflect that the culturally-mediated way that we have always lived, for thousands of years, will be artificial when compared to the way of a flower, or a cloud, or a hyena eating carrion, is "Natural". We need to be clear about this, especially today, in order to obtain the confidence required to re-gain control over our own life-space and design it to suit our revised concepts of Nature. Having said this, colour should be used as a stain rather than a paint. This way we obtain the benefit, both technical and intellectual, of exposing the material, while also indicating that it has left the sphere of Nature and entered that of Culture.

P. 52. As examples for study of colour we can look back into history and discover that these are the real colours that the Greek temple was painted. These are the colours of Chinese buildings, of Egyptian buildings, and of Indian buildings.

P. 53. It may be polemical to say that none of the great architectural languages in history ever exhibted its forms as constituted from a 'natural' , or raw, material. But the truth would appear to be that an architecture that obtains its decorative surfaces from the visual effect of raw materials, is an architecture that is intellectually decayed. We can see it happening in late Roman art and we can see it in the lush marble interiors of 19C Classicism. We can see it continued in the gross interiors of Adolf Loos and in the apalling vulgarity of the Turkish onyx wall of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, whose cost was 20% of the entire building.

P. 53 A. Any architecture worth the name has had the human wit to invent its own decorative richness and complexity out of its own ideas, positively inscribed. But then, since the last war, those who commission buildings in the West, have had no ideas that they wished to share with the Public. Ideas, since they were befouled by totalitarian demagogues, have been off the agenda. But why should we, in the West, fear to publish ideas? It is not we who degraded them but those who tried to obtain the qualities of our civilisation by using violent and morally corrupt methods. The founts of 20C art have been our Western ephemeral media. The ideal of Modernism was to admit popular art to the 'Galleries'. This was the appeal of Corbusier's myth of the Hellenic Mediterranean, that it would be both a folk as well as a 'high' art. But to read what he wrote concerning the Parthenon, in Vers une Architecture at least, is intellectually embarrassing. To latch onto the records of the meaningless wanderings of silicate ions and annual growth rings is to record the intellectual bankruptcy of the Architectural medium.

P. 55. When we won the competition the old hospital was all that existed. The City of Cambridge, after a public campaign, had placed a preservation order on it, forcing the University to maintain its body. This was not done by any very high regard for Digby Wyatt's facade. It was driven by the fear of what the University would put in its place. Such as the new Biochemistry building behind the Hospital. The remarkeable thing about this building is that there is no part of its facade that can not be lifted by hand. Even the lintels are divided into handy little pieces. This is of course the secret of the economy of housebuilding bungalows. It is undoubtedly the biggest bungalow in Cambridge.

P. 56. Even so, everyone disliked the floor that had been built, around 1920, on top of the three 19C floors. All were agreed to demolish it. But it was 25% of the floor-space and had the best daylighting and the best views out over Cambridge. No one wanted to rebuild it in a 19C manner. The received opinion was that there were only two alternatives to this. One was to replace it with something from "outer space". The other was to build something "modest and unassuming". This is because restoration architects do not like to do any work that clearly asserts that it is their own, new, original, invention. Contrary to this, modernist architects do not like to do any work that looks old., or as if it was influenced by tradition. The one refuses to be original, the other refuses to be traditional.

P. 57. Restoration and Reproduction architects like to restrain their vocabulary to the re-use of the forms of previous architectures, thereby gaining their clients the benefit of the intellectual culture built into those forms. We can instance the new Library for Downing, by Quinlan Terry, in the Double-Breasted Doric style. But this has the effect of excluding both present and the future.

P. 58 The Grey Flannel Futurist Architect, on the other hand, likes to restrain his vocabulary to either the virtual invisibility of Nihilism, what Scheerbart called Glass Architecture all of 90 long years ago, or to imitate forms from worlds that are alien to the urban lifespace, such as ships and aircraft. This not only deliberately excludes what they call "the past", but, as if by an unfortunate oversight, also eliminates what most people continue to recognise as Architecture. We can instance here, another Cambridge Library, for the Law Faculty, by Sir Norman Foster.

P. 59. Britain seems increasingly divided into two mutually exclusive, but perfectly compatible, states: the Britain of the Past and the Britain of the Future. They are constituted of monuments to a past that never really happened (the Ancient Greeks would not recognise themselves in the Neo-Grec) and monuments to a future (of blobs and bubbles) that will never come to pass. This is not because of its eccentric ideas about technology, but because it aggressively rejects, and mocks, tradition, and so will be refused by too large section of the public. The effect of this partition of Britain is to "freeze" and fossilise our lifespace. We can not be said to be truly alive, in the present moment, if all that we do is cross, and re-cross, a hairline boundary from a world of perfectly creased togas to a world of silver-anodised magnetic boots.

P. 60. This tendency to suppress the present and oscillate between fictional pasts and futures is the latest version of the quality of indecision, of muddle, and of a political consensus not to rock the boat that went by the name of the British disease (well, at least it was not so virulent that it caused us to kill each other, as other National Afflictions do). Whereas during the period of Post-War Consensus Politics, our method was to cultivate a consensus of mediocre Contemporaneity, The New Establishment now excludes the contemporary completely and substitutes either a distant Past or a remote Future. What is interesting is that they have been able to escape from the mediocre, by this foray into fantasy, and achieve a rather high level of aesthetic quality.

P. 61. Yet the price is too high. We need to be alive today. We need to achieve a similarly uninhibited pursuit of the highest qualities of the human spirit that is set in the present time. It is for this reason that we, in JOA, avoid the use of futuristic materials, like shiny metal skins, or the cut limestone, raw metal and polished hardwood that are the preferred materials of the hip-replacement school of architecture. This building by Michael Hopkins, for Emmanuel College, shows what happens when high-tech invents its idea of history: a limestone airship lands: exhibiting the steel ties that one finds in collapsing ruins: as if the Venus to Milo proudly exhibited the prosthetic stainless pins that would preserve her arms intact agains the accidents of time. Perhaps she would have kept them if a Gravitationalist Architect had designed them. Then, again, maybe no-one would have troubled to Museumise the results.

P. 61 A. We do our best to advise our Clients that one should use the materials of the present day, such as brick, concrete, plywood, woven wire, flakeboard and galvanised steel, combined with modern techniques of decoration. It is an uphill struggle. Our flake-board covered doors were rejected. All galavanised steel was banished. Wood, towards the end of the projected had to be stained a folksy bierkeller brown. People especially people who are architecturally illiterate, or who build for the first time, think the best uses the costliest materials. They would buy paintings by the cost of the paint and poetry by the cost of the paper.

P. 62. The essence of 20C Architecture was that it was going, after the unrepeatable yet brilliant plagiarism of the 19C, to avoid all reproduction of given styles. It was going to be Futuristic, welcoming modern technology and, above all, modern art. It was going to be popular, even vulgar, if needs be, but, at the same time, to be 'true'. That is to say it aimed to be philosophical, exhibiting a deep and arcane knowledge of the medium. The clearly declared purpose in all this was to create a humane lifespace that all could share. This is an ambition that has not yet been widely fulfilled because it would appear too full of contradictions. But contradiction of meaning has never inhibited a poetic, providing there was a medium capable of carrying the poet's thoughts.

P. 63. Our solution to the problem of this unloved 20C floor poised, like a brick Portacabin over a mediocre 19C one (not my words but those of Nicholas Pevsner), was to apply our knowledge of Classical thinking. The top floor is called the Attic. But 'Attic' comes from Attica, in Greece. Greek, in Classical Architectural theory used to mean "the best". But attics are small and mean and full of children and maids. On the other hand, an Attic in Rome is a good floor, like the Altana, a high belevedere with a roof garden looking out over the flying statues and domes of the city. So what if we call it penthouse? But pente means slope in french. Floors under sloping roofs are also mean and low. 

P. 64. Then we thought of Serlio. Serlio said that the original building was the meeting hall of Athens. It was a 100 column hypostyle hall, ten columns by ten columns. Attic not only means the best, it means the best because "the original", the first one. So that was why people put children in the Attic, this was the place of the beginning. So what we were looking for was a floor that was "original". This was why it should be smaller in stature than the lower floors. Yet it should also be more primitive, more innocent. The floor needed a dado, to make it look smaller. Furthermore a big cornice, if it was in scale to the whole building, would both reduce the apparent height of the top floor from above as well as unite it to the floors below. 

P. 65. So we gave this 20C 'brick porta-cabin' an applied dado of green wave-like leaves resting on a base that was made of cement as grey as the ashes from which it is literally made. The ashes and the leaves recall the fire of sacrifice as well as the final pyre, from which derives the pyramid that so often crowns a building. The 'Attic Floor' rides upon the undulating profile of this dado like an Ark. The new design allows it to endlessly reiterate and rehearse its settlement upon the 19C Ararat of Digby Wyatt.

P. 66. The big, new, 1995 cornice begins with three bands of dark green glazed concrete that wrap the top of the walls like cords or cushions so that they could support the weight of the cubic blue beams of the raft, each with its core cut away to show a fiery red interior. The core of every architectural beam, we will show later from our reading of trabes , the Latin origin of trabeated architecture, is power. We represent this as raw energy and light. The blue raft carries a scotia moulding, as green as the earth, before being completed by the space-blue kyma with its glittering, stainless, stars.

P. 67. The centre of the long 19C facade was a superimposed arcade on three storeys. We rebuilt the 20C fourth storey and changed the balustraded flat roof to a pediment, giving a view "into the Ark". We placed below this a "window of appearances" framed between two new columns and giving onto a balcony. We imagined that it could prove the ideal vantage for the officials of the annual hospital bed race to which the new school of Management might like to challenge the, newly sub-urbanised, Medical Students, carrying on an old tradition of the City.

P. 68. The new Pediment completed the possibility of reading the facade of the Hospital as a river valley, This could be seen to source in the new window of appearnces, inside, or below, the mountain of the little pediment, coursing down the facade between the trees of the arcade columns, which are flanked by the mountains of the more solid Ward blocks to each side. This central river then passes under the glazed-in balcony of appearances of the 1st floor Common Room before exiting, on the Ground Floor, through the arched doors of the bridge to spread out into the Delta of the front garden and "flow", finally, into the Ocean of Trumpington Street.

P. 69. This completion of the traditional figure of the valley on the Facade of the Old Hospital telegraphs its existence in the interior as a fully realised sequence of spaces, which we can now describe.

P. 70. Before we do so, we need to explain what we mean by the figure of the Valley.

P. 71. It was at the Exhibition of the paintings of Claude Gelee, also known as Claude Lorrain, at London's Hayward Gallery, in 1969, that I was able to recover a technique whereby the architectural tradition had organised diverse components into parts of a larger complex that was more than a mere arbitrary figure, a conceit dredged from a reservoir of personal obsessions, as was the case with the abstracted site planning schema common to this century.

P. 72. What drew me, spellbound, to the paintings of Claude was, something even more mysterious than their well known beauty. It was the depiction of a system of logographs, icons constituting what I had regarded, up till then, as exclusively architectural elements. His scenes always deployed the parts of what can be recognised as the "classical valley". He always stood at the head of a valley, looking down to the sea. The foreground was dark, to increase the sense of spatial depth and conjure the idea of the cave from which the river sprang. There was always a rustic bridge in front of him, Then there was a grassy clearing in the valley, a level stage on which the mythic or biblical protagonists of the scene performed their drama. Their aristocratically-elongated figures were drawn at a small scale, so as to allow their situation within the valley to obtain the vast horizon, a vertitable ecstasy of amplitude, for which Claude is justly admired.

P. 73. A ruin was drawn to the side of the rustic 'stage'. Its entrance door was often walled-up or carved as a blind opening, like that of a tomb. It was frequently cylindrical. Taken together, all of these are signs that lead the mind to travel up and down a vertical axis, a shaft of narrative that is imprisoned behind a wall that has no horizontal admittance. We call this the "displaced crossing".

P. 74. Further down the valley there was nearly always a bridge, with towers to guard it at one or both ends. The river flowed under its arched openings as through a gate, doors in a wall that separated the darker foreground from the lighter background. Beyond that, as the river fanned-out over the lowlands of the triangular Delta (after the Greek letter 'D') to reach the ocean, the painting was suffused with light. Claude's reputation was partly based upon this ability to paint the light effects generated by facing straight into a low sun.

P. 75. His harbour scenes could be said to describe the portus, the gate, or mouth of his valley as it met the sea. But he also organised the spaces of his ports to show the arched screen, guarded by a tower, that described a door between the foreground and the background of the painting. Thus the event in these scenes although an embarcation of a ship, still occurs behind a door, inside a wall, that is upstream of the division between the exterior and the interior. We can say that the "port" scenes place the portus inside the porta.

P. 76 The port-scenes locate the Ocean in the position of the Delta of the Valley scenes. Both lie 'outside the gate'. Both ar e subject to inundation, or flooding. The one is the locus of the perennial Flood, the other is permanently under water. It is a matter of degree only. 

P. 77. This sequence of elements, as abstracted in this drawing, is the same as those in a disparate variety of extended architectural compositions. We can map it on to Renaissance villa sequences, like that of d'Este , Christian cathedrals, Roman Houses, The Korean city of Seoul, Le Corbusier's houses, like the one for Dr. Curruchet in Buenos Aires, Stirling's StaatsGalerie, and even my own narrow-gutted early 19C London terrace-house and its garden square.

P. 78. Gustave Glotze, writing, in 1929, in "The Greek City and its Institutions", did not regard what we would call a town or a city as the 'architecture' of the life space, of the Ancient Greek City-State. He proposed that each Ancient Greek Polis occupied a localised space, more or less defined by ranges of hills or mountains that divided one river-basin from another. This watershed-form was their 'Polis', a word we can only translate into English as city-state.

P. 79. This remains true, even to this day. The World Bank, prompted by the Government of Cyprus to integrate their projects in that island, so that a new school would relate to an electrification project, or a new dam, or a road, making a combined effect greater than that of its parts, hit upon the idea of using the individual valleys of the island, as they led from the central massif of the Troodos mountains down to the sea. They also found marked differences in the culture and customs of the villagers who occupied each valley. In one the women were accustomed to go to work in the towns. In its neighbour they were not. The valley-Polis continues to function as the architecture of community for places of Greek culture.

P. 80. In 1972, we entered the competition for the Burrell Art Gallery in Glasgow, with a project that began to use some of these ideas. The plan fitted around the exhibits and promenaded through time, stepping down the hill of Pollok park. It was the only neo-classical design in the whole competition, placing it several years ahead of Leo Krier. In 1986 we took the ideas further with our entry for the competition to rebuild Bracken House for the Financial Times. This was the first time that we had been invited to do a big competition. Our competitors were Rogers, Stirling and Hopkins, who won and went on to build for the the Ohbayashi Corporation of Japan. It was for this project that we invented the architectural language that, ten years later, we have finally built in Cambridge and are now raising in Texas.

P. 80 A. Carl Laubin did a painting in the style for which he has subsequently become famous, responding to my request to represent, as literally as possible, the meanings of my architecture so that everyone could understand them. His painting took the long section through the project and mapped onto it the source of the river and its passage down a steep slope to finally drop down to the irrigated fields in the valley bottom of the Atrium. Here he paused and painted the mythic origin of the Ordine Robotico as ceramic veins and tubes inside the giant columns. The river flowed on under the bridge of the Entrance Hall into the Ocean of Cannon Street. The roof of the isola, or island-block, was shown verdant with its aboriginal forest and complete with the habitations of the primordial beings that occupied the entabled "Sol Artificiel". This he drew as the typical 'tholos'-structure, with its closed walls and vertical axis, into which Claude both imprisoned and hid a cosmic axis in his narrative so that it would not engage too readily with the naturalising tendency of his time.

P. 81. Yet it should be recorded that the waterfall was planned as a a river of steel, an escalator, in the real building. To make it of real water would have been kitsch. Much art today is either kitsch, dumb or a violent assault upon convention. It has lost the art of mediating meaning. It either replicates things as themselves, or as nothing. This is very curious, because the reason that it has taken this route is partially due to the influence of Stephen Greenberg who perceived that, in the commercialised and politicised ethos of the 1930's, that Art was becoming either advertising or propaganda. Yet his cure, which was to advise the avoidance of all meaning reduced art to something that De Kooning proved could be achieved with almost no living cerebral tissue. Art needs to recover the ability to communicate complex ideas before it just dies away out of pure boredom.

P. 82. Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh, the man who invented regional planning in Britain, regarded the river and its valley as the basis of his understanding of the ideal or balanced society. Finally the watershed of the valley has been recognised, since the beginning of the interest in pollution, in the 1960's, as the fundamental physical element of ecological planning. One need look no further than the valley to recover a figure with a long history in architecture as well as a broad spread of current relevance. 

P. 83.

P. 84. We can begin the translation of how we have built the topography of the classical valley into the Judge project by noticing that the street in front of a building, which is always the Ocean, is, in the case of Trumpington Street, literally constituted of its element: water! Hobson's Conduit (pronounced "cundit") flows down both sides of the road. Roads are, traditionally, black, and footways white. As in this road at the foot of Trajan's Market, in Rome. We continue this tradition with asphalt and stone or precast paving, Our road paving material of preference is black stone slabs set on the diagonal. This is because, as in this rainswept street in Rome, they recall the pattern of flowing water. Such stony coverings also recall the scaly back of a giant serpent. The net of streets, representing the infinity of space that lies outside and around the defined 'egg' of the building, is perfectly signified by this figure representing time and space and by this Sumerian double-coiled serpent-net found in Mesopotamia. We can see here, in these drawings of Rome, how the very precise floor-scape of the building contrasts with the chaotic scaly, serpentine streets that beat upon their shores like the Ocean of Infinity.

P. 85. If we look at the overall design of the front garden to the Institute we will see a composition formed from three boat-shapes. The boat-shape nearest to the road is filled with water and its central thwart is a bridge over which one must walk to reach the Institute . The names of all of those who set out many years ago, generating support from every side, are carved upon the granite flanks of this boat. This is the "ship of the original founders" of the Institute". It has been pulled up onto the sand of Trumpington Street, as was the vessel of Aeneas, painted, here by Claude, landing at Pallentum.

P. 86. The second boat is turned through 90 degrees so as to form a path from the first to the third. At its centre it has a focus. In Antiquity this would have been the hearth fire, which is the Latin meaning of 'focus'. The founders would have lit their first fire on this new hearth, and kindled it with the flame that they had brought from the old city. To make sense of this we planned a curved a bench seat to be placed round the sides of this 'boat'. Members of Faculty and Students can sit on this to see who is coming in and who is going out.

P. 86 A. The Greek language is one of the oldest in the world that is still spoken and the Greeks retain, in their contemporary culture, traces of these ancient events. We can see, for example, the modern, Christian version, of the ritual of the Ancient Greeks, when they put out their domestic hearth-fires and then ceremonially re-lit them from the civic focus, carrying the flame home as do the congregation of the Orthodox Greek Cathedral at Moscow Road in London. 

P. 87. The Third boat is a stone vessel, "moored" to the lowest colonnade of the Institute that brings the voyager to his fInal harbour.

P. 88. This colonnade of the Institute is used by members to extend the area of hard paving from the interior to the exterior. This is the "portus" to the porta of the arches of the bridge over the river that is the road of entry to the interior of the valley of the Institute. Let us go inside and look back at this row of deep red-painted arches that defines the outer wall of the Institute. 

P. 89. The superstructure of this bridge acts as the balcony of appearances. It is, in the case of the Judge, reminiscent of the Septizonium of Ancient Rome that was erected, with nothing at all behind it, to impress travellers coming into the city from the port of Ostia. We have inherited only four such superimposed storeys of columned belvedere and might, therefore be dubbed a 'Tetrazonium'. However the critical level, both socially as well as aesthetically, is the Piano Nobile. After a long discussion with the Planners, during which we weere obliged to publish a short illustrated history of the glazed balcony, we were able to persuade them to allow us to glaze-in this arcade and use it, together with the one hundred foot long room behind it, as the Common Room of the Institute.

P. 90. The huge concrete cylinders, that enclose two new stair towers which are half-embedded inside the bulk of the old building, emerge at both ends of the balcony of appearances to recall the formality of the Western Gate. This composition, so typical of Christian churches, first appeared on the 6C church at Turmanin, in Syria. The balcony of appearances over the big arched door, bridging over the torrential flood of steps, are also present in this canonic building.

P. 91. The Common Room is the central social space of the Institute. We have already seen how it looks outwards to the Street with its balcony of Appearances. It has even more balconies to the internal landscape, that of the Gallery. Here there are eight "seminar balconies" in which up to eight people can work. Standing in them, we can look down over the ground floor, to see who is coming and going, or look upwards to the Roof garden on the top of the Ark Block.

P. 92 The interior of the Judge Gallery is like a building that a surgeon, from the Old Addenbrooke's Hospital, has cut in half and sewn together with stairs and bridges around just enough space to allow its inhabitants to view each other as if they were all upon a stage, a Gallery whose 'pictures' are the Members of the Institute. The "seminar-balconies" sail out into the space but are moored by the bridges that pass within touching distance. Conversation is easy across the Gallery-void and up to 200 people can sit-out in this three-dimensional intellectual cafe-society: a dealing room of ideas. We call this kind of space: "A Crossing". By this we associate it with the crossing of the horizontal narrative of the Valley, with its flow of historic time, and the vertical narrative of the Acropolis with its flow of infinite time.

P. 93. This is our solution to the problem set by Professor Stephen Watson of the Judge Institute. Yet it is not eccentric. It is an idea that went on to win the commission for us to design this new $M17 engineering faculty in Rice University, Houston , Texas. Not many British firms get asked to build in the States because of their ideas on how to organise a work-space. The basic idea is that, in the Research Institute , everyone is his own boss and has to have his own private space to work up new ideas with no-one looking over his shoulder. Then these ideas have to be brought out into the open, into "the street" and worked on in an absolutely public place that 'belongs' to no one. The portability of the computer allows this, while the Robot Column and the Robot Table, both wired for power and data offer shady corners upon the forested slopes of this theatrical valley, where the Faculty can look around and see if there are any other interesting-looking wild animals in the groves of Academeus.

P. 93A. This "Republic of the Valley" serves another need, perceived more clearly by those commissioning our project in the USA. This is to compensate for the emergence of the virtual communities of the talking heads of cyberspace. The potential of this infinite space to remove the hearts and minds of the members of the institute, as if into a black hole, has created an equal and opposite need. This is clearly conceived by the University at Rice as some kind of place where the "heads with bodies under them", the Members of the Institute, or the Firm, that is to say the community that actually mans the ship that pays the salaries, come together in a 'fully embodied' condition, and experience the "incorporated" Institute at a level of reality denied to even the most virtual of illusions.

P. 94. The Director, and everyone else, circulates around this "market place, or dealing room of ideas". Interventions are casual and informal. No one stands upon ceremony. The Director can keep in touch, and keep an informal control, while allowing the Institute to develop a 'critical mass' of 'patent, self-informing, self-regulating' activity. The big, wide, foot-ball field, open plan office is the opposite of this idea, because it denies privacy while at the same time territorialising the work-space.

P. 95. The centre of the crossing in the Brooke's Complex is the social stair that spirals up and down around the central axis of the building between a set of four giant columns. Its circular motion corresponds to both the round dance and the traverse of the seasons, as depicted on the ceiling-graphic as one of the Stations of the Valley. It circles around the figure of a boat, inlaid in black marble into the floor that we soon leave far below. It sails across an Ocean of white marble inlaid with an abstracted 'knot' pattern that recalls the spiral twinning of DNA, or the pair of coupling serpents in the Ocean of the Nun, that forged creation. Interlinked serpents are the oldest pattern ever found, carved on limestone floor slabs in Jericho. This figure also ties the old hospital to the new business school via the iconography of the staff of Asclepius, held by Hermes, the Fixer, up in the ceiling, Patron of Business, Writing, Architecture and all of the arts of persuasion rather than the brute force and ignorance of the remainder of the Pantheon.

P. 96. This boat 'sails', like the boat in the floor of the Conservatory in Sussex, between the black world and the white world, voyaging eternally between the polarities whose endless opposition represents the idea that reality, and knowledge, lies in the voyage between opposites rather than within the enclosed spheres of either. The boat sails across a void which is depicted here, in Sussex, more literally, as the sea.

P. 97. This craft, engraved into the marble floor of the Institute, is no longer the 'founder's' vehicle that the colonists pulled up on the shores of Trumpington Street. It carries in its centre, the emblem of the Institute and its focus, the light of the hearth-fire that came from, and with, the Founders. The Founder's have done their job by the stage that the boat has been laid into the building. The Institute is now staffed and launched upon its way. It crews the craft. The Institute would have its Foundation Dinner on this boat, in the Ocean, to recover the history of both the voyage, the landing, the foundation, and the continuing voyage. Speeches could be given from the 'poop decks' , the stairs that rise up on each side.

P. 98 We must now leave any further exploration of the many other rooms of the Brooke's Complex to a real visit. So we can turn to understand how this architecture works and what this new technology means.

P. 99. What is a building really? When a client gives an architect his requirements he makes a list of rooms. This is the list for the Judge Institute. What really matters to him is the size and number of these rooms. He calls them by a name, but he does not want to find that in two years time what he calls a professor's room can not be a seminar room, or a secretary's room or a print room. He just wants a room of a certain size. There are very few rooms with a completely fixed function. These are usually rooms with a raked floor, like auditoria.

P. 100. Then what he wants is the greatest amount of electrical and mechanical servicing that he can afford, plus all the duct space he will ever need in the future. There is usually only one limitation on all of this which is money. These are matters which everyone can understand.

P. 101. This is a good diagram of what a building really is. It is a cubic lattice, drawn out by the kinds of pencils that Clients and Architects used to use on the backs of envelopes. All that we, in JOA, have done is to change the pencils into powered members that plug into each other. These are the columns and beams of what we have christened the "Robot Order". With the "Ordine Robotico", we can put Architecture back into Working Order.

P. 102. An architecture of columns and beams is called trabeated. Let us look up trabes in the Latin Dictionary. It means a beam, or a ridge pole or a boat's keel. But its final and most abstracted meaning is simply power. Colums and beams are more than some primitive, twiggy, shelter that might, and might not, be erected by shepherds to shelter sheep, or was it shepherdesses? They were a matrix of 'power' used to carve space out of thin air in the shape of rooms.

P. 103 We have spent the past 22 years creating an architecture that enables us to plan buildings in a way that fuses the technique of Durand and De Stijl. The means is a constructional nano-technology that enables one to build a building like the human body. These are drawings by Vesalius, done in the --century that show the limbs of the body are more than bones. In the same way, our columns and beams are more than anti-gravity structure. Like human limbs they also contain services and have an epidermis, or skin. Here is a plan through one of the columns in the Gallery. Here is a picture of an Android, whose limbs are constructed from machines. This enables us to create an Architecture that recovers measure, order and harmony by re-creating the medium that was destroyed 80 years ago. We do not regard trabeation as a mere symbol of power. We have found that, because it is the means by which rooms are created out of space, it is also a literally functional system for distributing material power to them.

P. 104. Let us look inside one of these big columns. and welcome the strength of steel and concrete. It makes structural pillars good and thin. Nothing, due to the excellent Engineering of the Felix Samuely Partnership, has a footprint larger than 300 mm ,or 12" ,square in this eight-storey building. So we can split our structural frame into two and place one pillar on each side of our column. The structural pillars and beams are painted red. Here they are on the big Gallery Columns and here they are on the Ark, cantilevering out in what we call the "surf boards".

P. 105. This makes us a space between the structural frame that is three feet wide in Cambridge England and four feet wide in Houston, Texas. This space is large enough to be inhabited by the Engineers and Fitters who climb around in them to install and maintain the mechanical, electrical, drainage, fluid supply and air ventilation services of a modern building. Here is a fitter, sitting inside a Gallery Robot Column, while he wires up the local branch of the electronic building management system.

P. 106. Here is the back of one of the Ark robot columns, with the surfborads cantilevering out to support the access deck around the Gallery. As we walk into the Ark, we find some fitters installing wiring. If we follow the services across the building in a hollow beam , we find that they connect to another hollow column in the outside wall. Here we can see the quite simple services of this little building in which the Professors work: Data, power, and hot water. But the drains for the roof garden above also fall into this hollow beam and then leave the building without penetrating the floor slab. The services also come out of the sides of the beams.

P. 107. I call this my pact with the engineering professions. I build them this beautiful network of big hollow ducts, all over the building. There is a door into every duct, in every room, on every floor. We open these doors, we show the engineers in, and then we shut them. I can not imagine an engineer taking an architect very seriously who comes up to him and says I am sorry, I do not like the yellow wires being next to the green ones. It looks really bad. With the Ordine Robotico one never has to say this. One can leave the engineers alone. They have their world to themselves, free from amateurs.

P. 108. The Robot Order system takes advantage of the fact that engineering, especially physical engineering, is, as Newton said, unconcerned with what he called the secondary realities of colour and so on. These are properly the "black arts". They are properly located inside this system of dark passageways around the building. Engineering tends, as it develops, to use less and less material. So it gets smaller. So it gets easier to put away inside the columns and beams of the Robot Order. This the tendency of all technology towards nano-technology. But then engineering services also seem to multiply in scope. So we can safely assume that these passages are never going to be empty.  

P. 109. The Robot Order has other important effects, as important as providing an extensive system of service ducting.

P. 110. Putting all of the services into columns and beams, with their own duct doors, means that the columns, beams, ceiling and the floor are all the real, solid concrete structure. This means that they will all work as a thermal flywheel, balancing out the temperature changes and saving energy. It also means that because we will never have to lift the floor or tear down the ceiling to get at the building services, we can afford to cover the floor in an attractive, durable finish like wood. If we look around a typical professor's office we can also see that the ceiling is given a flat cornice which frames out a centre that could be given a beautiful decorative graphic.

P. 111. If we look at the section through the project, we can see that we have introduced two new floors into the height of the Nightingale Ward floors of the old hospital. This has resulted in a 9'6" floor to floor height. However, because there are no false ceilings or floors, the height under the beams is 8'0" and to the ceiling is 9'0".

P. 112. This is all right for small rooms. But come into the Lecture Theatre and see how such low floors have helped the design in the big rooms. We have been able to make the large rooms two storeys high. This has three advantages. Firstly it allows the disabled to access at both the front and the back of a room with a raked floor. Secondly it allows us to plan a window in two parts. The lower part is small, to give a view out of the Auditorium that is not too distracting. But the upper part is large so as to allow plenty of natural light deep into the room. Both can be blacked-out independently. Thirdly, making big rooms so high collects the vitiated air well above head height. This allows us to ventilate them without using refrigeration, thus saving energy again. These are the air inlets and this is the air extract above the A/V room.  

P. 113.

P. 114.

P. 115. However the truly liberating aspect of the Robot Order is that we have virtually banished, dissolved and liquidated a wandering architectural thrombosis called the "service core". This collection of ludicrous little rooms has been, like the nonsensical idea that architecture is structure, one of the main 'props' of Modern Architectural Composition in this century. These things clogged-up the central spaces of the buildings of the 1950's and 60's, creating slabs upon whose narrow ledges the office-workers of the day perched like starlings looking out onto the unutterably illiterate landscapes of these urban termite towers.  

P. 116. The public rose in revolt against these silos for roasting inoffensive typists in excess daylight and, during the 1980's, buildings were forced to stop proclaiming the inane reductio ad absurdum of the skyscraper. The skyscrapers became 'ground-scrapers'. They developed a so called "Atrium". In reality this was nothing but a hole in the middle of a deep building across which the view was, if anything, even more inanimate, illiterate and and dull. The service cores, meanwhile went walkabout. Some, reaching critical mass, as in the Lloyds Building, crashed right out of the building envelope and "went architectural". But the high cost of this tactic meant that only the very rich could afford 'architectural' ductwork, toilet pods and fire escapes.

P. 117. It is with some relief, therefore, that we can report that the Robot Order means that not only can we now divide and order space with columns and beams of a size proportional to modern projects, but that by enclosing the services within them, the service core is abolished. The centre of the Brooke's Complex is filled with space, light, air and decoration. Its Robot Columns surround the void of the Gallery like beads on a necklace. Yet they lie in the centre of the Brooke's Complex. distributing their services to the surrounding buildings. We have christened this open-centred "service core" either a necklace core, or a Basilican core.

P. 118. The "Basilican core" of rounded robot columns also gives us a very natural basis for projecting large balconies out into the space of the Gallery. These are well-shielded from each other, yet sufficiently open to communicate visually with each other and across the narrow Gallery. When one crosses through the ring of basilican columns and sails out into the tall space of the Gallery one should obtain the idea that one is leaving the mundane building and suspending oneself inside a huge three-dimensional library of images that exends the imagination into infinite horizons of time and space. The basis of this technique is discussed later.

P. 119. Planning buildings now becomes governed by simple rules. Here is the ground plan of the site of the Judge project when we came to it in 1991. It had a wide forecourt, which sets it aside from the collegiate form of the University. This is because the City Hospital, like the Town Hall and the Railway Station, is a major Civic building. We were required by the Planners, to preserve the two 19C Nightingale-type Ward Block wings, together with the central arcaded verandahs. These areas are shaded dark. Then we had to add as much new accommodation as the site could take.

P. 120. The big problem was that the old hospital had floors that were very high, but not high enough to take a mezzanine. There had been an attempt to plan three new floors to every two old ones. This area is shown shaded in pale gray. The result was a chaos of floor levels. There was an impasse. It seemed that the preservation of the old hospital had landed the University with a problem that could not be solved. It was decided to hold an invited design competition and find a new architect.

P. 121. On examining the situation, with a fresh eye, the Competitors discovered a plan, by the University, to build a single storey "break-bulk" building for deliveries, in and out, to the whole ex-hospital campus of mainly biochemical faculties. We suggested that the Judge Institute site might be allowed to enlarge so as to build on top of this proposed structure, incorporating it into its new ground floor level. This would, anyway, make for a better urban composition along Tennis Court Road, where a single storey structure would have looked makeshift.

P. 122. My own opinion is that the decision to allow us to do this was the single most important move of the entire history of the design for it allowed us to open-up the interior of the building and physically detach the Ark and the Castle from the old Hospital, thereby creating the space of the Gallery.

P. 123.

P. 124.

P. 125.

P. 126. At this point we were able to design an appropriate Robot Order for each of the the three new buildings. The Ark is very narrow. So it is serviced by a narrow Robot Column which is in proportion to its floor to wall ratio. The Castle is deeper and so it needed a larger column to reflect its needs for enhanced services, principally ventilation. We used this fact to give more external modelling and establish its more sculptural presence, set back from Tennis Court Road. The discipline of the Classical order known as the "taxis" embodied in the hypostyle of columns, passes through the whole complex, being recorded everywhere, on floors walls and ceilings, as we can see here in the Castle. Finally the Gallery received its Order, full and round, both packed with services feeding outwards to its surrounding spaces, and scaled to its height of 24 Metres, or 80' 0".

P. 127. With this we were able to complete a plan which is both spatially complex yet rigorously governed by the proportionality and harmony of a 'mode, modus or module. Its proportion was a simple 1:2. Five feet for the diameter of the column and ten feet for its inter-columniation. This planning system re-opens the door to the beauty and sophistication of the Beaux Arts while retaining all of the flexibility of Cubism. One could call it 'Durand-Stijl'

P. 128. A trabeated, Classical, architecture has two elements, columns and beams that make a frame, and panels, fields or picture-planes, that appear within the frame. The trabeated frame in architecture is like the silence that surrounds music or the darkness around a film. The power of the 'trabes' can not only conjure rooms out of thin air, it can also conjure 'views' into other, neighbouring, 'rooms'. It is a power that creates a localised void within the seamless continuity of being. The limitations of the silence that engenders music, or the frame that reveals the view into a painting, is that it both banishes circumstance and is of limited extent. It opposes reality, and for that reason is incapable of modifying it. The beauty of architecture is that, handled well, the force of the trabeation can conjure concepts that lie in the same bed as circumstantial realities, marrying the two as no other medium can. Architecture both opposes reality and interpenetrates it, creating a third term: culture. The evil of Architecture is that, in the hands of a megalomaniac, it can be used to push the real world over the horizon, beyond the park boundary or the palace gates, precipitating the giant bureaucracy that surrounds the ruler into a state of autodestructive criminality. Albert Speer had this relation to Hitler.

P. 128 A. Corbusier's advice on this subject was to utter the magic word "crack" while seated in an arm chair gazing out upon the sugar loaf mountain in Rio. This would ensure that his prospect upon that ideal conjunction of sea and mountain that constituted a sort of New World Acropolis, a Brazilian Athens of Latin Futurism, would be rendered onto a wall-to-wall photonic receptor (whose technology is only today becoming possible in the home of Bill Gates) that would, as L.C. put it "Inscribe Nature within the Lease". From that moment on, Kitsch reigned. Architecture, as a medium for organising intelligible images, died and was replaced by the Picture Window and Landscaping. Henceforward; the late Sir Alistair Pilkington and Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe would be the creators of the intelligible dimension of architecture while my ancient profession were reduced to optical plumbers, manipulating view, daylight and window aperture, together with radiator position, sunblind, heatloss, heatgain and all of the other superfluous technical incongruities of this collapsed visual culture.

P. 128 B. For it was not that Architecture, herself, died, turning into a vast project in Techno-Kitsch, Landscaping reality into Utopia, but that the death of Painting put her onto the street, without respectable employment.

P. 129. The view into the picture, the virtual space or room, that is framed by architectural members went 'out of focus' around 100 years ago and was an important reason for the invention of Modern Architecture. Modernism invented a way of composing space that destroyed the trabeated frame, with its columns and beams, so as to avoid creating picture planes that could no longer be animated. The picture, that is the "painting", lost its frame at the same moment, becoming a mere slice of flatness hung onto a flat wall. These 'surfaces' 'depicted' the flattened space of cubism. Foreshortened silhouettes overlapped each other in a game that pitted memory against amnesia, confusing the two around the twin poles of outline or profile, and patterned 'fill'. This 'blindness', this inability to view the interior of the space in the frame, still afflicts architecture. It can be seen in the Rothko chapel in Houston where, after building an octagonal 'baptistery' and hanging its walls with eight, huge, jet- black canvases, the painter, Mark Rothko, ended his life. The picture plane, for him, was still a real door into a real transcendent reality, which for him, could only be entered through his literal decease. Perhaps this should encourage us to regard metaphor and representation with more 'real' seriousness than we are wont to. After all, a more enlightened sense of reality would have saved his life, apart from producing a more illuminating art than these lightless daubs.

P. 129 A. Rothko could only 'celebrate' the death of a transcendent reality by stepping through into an eternal blackness. The least that we can do to respect his last rite is to recognise that his action releases us from any further consideration of the category, notwithstanding that millions, in spite of the existence of Science, still believe in it, together with its multitudinous Agents who must be variously ensnared, cajoled and propitiated. For it is only when the death of the transcendent is truly accepted that we will be able to recover painting and architecture together with the means that they offer to shape our human lifespace.

P. 129 B. The trabeated frame has hung-on in the work of such an Architect as Mies. But the tendency has been to 'naturalise it, making it of iron or wood, while his walls were made of real glass and looked out upon a real garden. One can hardly be surprised that this Kitsch Utopia became the architecture of the great corporate bureaucracies, framed within landscaped voids in which even the colour of the cows was prescibed to conform to aesthetically purified palettes.

P. 129 C. The Architect who exemplifies the strongest opposition to this terminal degradation of the 'ars trabea' or the Theatre of Virtual Space, is the late Jim Stirling. He was, from his very beginning (stated clearly in "This is Tomorrow"), committed to the abolition of painting, and what he called 'Art', in favour of an art (which may, or may not, be called architecture) of 'objects'. His work never achieved the level of terminal agression towards the architectural tradition that we find in Gehry and Eisenmann, but it may come to be regarded (maybe wrongly) as its validation. His untimely death precludes an answer to the question, what would he have done to have remained supreme? Melsungen is so much better than anything Eisenmann will ever do. But then Eisenmann's successors would have no desire to assimilate its culture, regarding all figuration, that is ideality in an object, as mere historicist dross to be siphoned off to clarify an (architectural?) culture of unambiguous negation dedicated to universality, non-violence and perfect materialist congruence to the cosmos.

P. 129 D. My own work does not participate in this culture of "installations", in which a building becomes a nest in a ladies hat, overwhelming the hat itself. For the maquette of the house of the bird, together with its feathered occupants, has become the preferred object, residing in the Gallery (a bombproof Bunker of raw concrete authenticated by bolt holes) that is attached to the Architect's studio while the full-sized replica decays and degrades, for some indeterminate period, performing a dubious role, in an exposed position, on some hectic frontage, or frontier, of urbanistic consumption.

P. 129 E. The 'room' inside the 'hat' remains my genesis, and the architectural tradition the intellectual code by which one engineers new thoughts in the mind that is both protected and denoted by its woven crown of straw.

P. 130. It has become easy to forget, so long is it since columns and beams were decorated, that the frame , also, can also carry an idea that is inscribed upon it. Yet what has been the most complex and costly part of the history of architecture for the past several thousand years but the inscription of the framing with complex mouldings and carvings? We have chosen this medium for the vertical planes of the central Gallery of the Brooke's complex, rather than the walls of the adjoining buildings that one sees behind or between their peripteral 'necklace' of Basilican columns. The ceiling and the floor of the Gallery, however, remain large, undivided, picture planes.

P. 131. We can entertain the idea of inscribing the architectural frame because we have recovered, through the creation of the Robot Order, an architecture of ample columns and beams. We have also, over the past 22 years, put together a technology to cover these members in materials that, while solid and comfortable, can also be made any shape, as well as coloured integrally (all the way through) and inlaid with shapes, colours and figures that can not be erased by wear and tear.

P. 132. We have already had a look at the technology of cast, coloured, concretes that we use externally. Now let us see what we can use inside. We have spent around £250,000 of our fees over the last 10 years, experimenting and researching with different internal finishes until coming up with the perfect system. This works as follows: -

P. 133. The Robot Columns are clad with curved plaster tiles. These are made the size of an A3 sheet. A process called mono-printing has been developed, by Meta-Mark Associates, that can melt the fused powder pigment on the surface of a colour laser copy and transfer it to the surface of the plaster tile. The result is a well bonded light-fast pattern that has been tested in the laboratories of the Printing Industry Research Association to over Blue Wall 6. This is as good as a heavy-duty wall paper and will last for upwards of 50 years inside a building.

P. 134. Software like "Live Picture" can handle graphic files of 2 gigabytes. A single graphic design up to 50 square feet can be manipulated on the Apple Mac. These are then cut into individual 'tiles' and downloaded to the Canon colour laser printer. The design can flood across the wide-jointed tiled surface achieving a delightful play between an overall design and a local abstraction that is "aleatory", which means entirely accidental. We used this technology on these columns in the Exhibtion celebrating the work of A.W. Pugin, at the V & A Museum in 1994 where 128 tiles were cut from a single computer file.

P. 135. 4,000 such 'tiles' have already been designed, on computer, for printing the Judge Gallery in this Brooke's Complex with logograms that begin with the genesis of vital processes at their bottom and end with solar and spatial processes at the top. The practical advantages of this system are several.

P. 136. Anything that can be got onto a computer can be transferred onto the wall. Damaged tiles are simply reprinted from computer disc and then re-monoprinted. The paper is discarded, leaving only pigments that are light-fast and plaster-smooth yet slightly distressed. As in any printing process, not all of the pigment is transferred. Curved access doors, into the columns, are made from plywood. These are grooved with the 'stones' or 'tiles' and mono-printed. The patterns help to camouflage their existence. We have named the technique "Video-masonry" and "Video-Secco".

P. 136 A. It is difficult or an architect, a critic, and, possibly, most of all for a member of the public, to think of the skeleton of a building as anything other than a strong structural frame. Yet, as we have argued throughout this film, this was an idea, albeit quite old and created by an Italian cleric, that is as intellectually unrewarding as it is technically illiterate. The powers summoned by the trabeated matrix are artificial, cultural and conceptual, not natural (like the force of gravity). The maternal generatrix of this architectural device is not the power, that 'exists' but the power 'in which we believe'. This must be, today, be the power of Science, or that which Science shows us to be true and real. These are the powers that should be inscribed upon the matrix of the trabea if we wish to transcribe the gross material act of merely supporting a room and supplying it with vital fluids, into the making of a landscape for humans.

P. 137. The base of the column is imprinted with a figure representing photons, as red arrows falling out of a yellow sky, striking the unitary egg, in the form of the primordial, blue-green, pre-organic, ammoniacal 'soup' and splitting it into two halves, each complete with two abstracted chromosome sequences. This figure is also congruent with the myth of Apollo stiking down the coiled, and therefore watery, Python with one hundred (solar) arrows (does this prefigure the hexastylar hypostyle that is the generatrix of architectural space?) and the similar Vedic history in which Indra's spear, an axial column of (solar) fire, begins creation by striking the (liquid) serpent Vrta as it coils around the, as yet, submarine mountain.

P. 138. The register above this, which is still within the Ground Floor of the Gallery, recalls the two coils of an intertwining helix. This figure is congruent with the Egyptian myth of the two snakes copulating in the primordial liquid and bringing forth creation. It also depicts the Vedic history of the cone of ashes setting down on a submarine mountain. The cone is one arm of the twining, or 'twinning", that is banded fiery red and ashen white. The sea is held in a bowl contained in the coil of an orange serpent spotted with black stars, an inversion of the timeless, starry, sky. The serpent symbolised both time, and endless infinity when it returned and held its tail in its mouth, and the 'liquid' or formles void that surrounded the bounded vessel, the jar or egg of created space. Architecturally, this bowl recalls the "khumba" the jar that is represented at the base of certain islamic columns that derive from an older Persian, or Vedic, iconography.

P. 139 B. These are the two registers appropriate to the liquid, or formless state, known in Classical physics as "Water" and, in Classical iconography, as "Ocean".

P. 140. Going to the opposite end of the Gallery columns, we find the uppermost register, some 80'0" off the ground, hard under the jet-black shiny capital. This describes the passage of the sun. Its rays are denoted at morning, rising out of the sea, at noon, vertically above us, and at sunset, sinking back into the horizon. Its place at night is shown as a red circle inside a cone of shadows, or a fire buried inside a black pyramid, or mountain. This latter figure was the emblem of intelligence, or vision, the light that could shine without natural light, in the darkness of the mind. It is also one of the ideas behind the figure of the golden flower in the coffered ceiling that underlies the ceiling design of the Gallery.

P.140 A ; The register below this, corresponding to the 6th floor, is a composition of triangles divided by bars of red, black and white. The triangle is the sign of fire, because it is the shape of the pyre, or pyra-mid and because the triangle is the figure of three, the trinity that embodies consumes both unity and division. The sides of the triangles are interrupted with a jagged sign like lightning, figured in yellow, outlined in black on a red ground.

P.141 This leaves the two, temporally sequent, central registers of the second and third floor and the fourth and fifth floors. The lower one, corresponding to the second floor and the Common Room, is a figure derived from the leaf of the Pipal tree. This is the logograph for woman and for agricultural land in the script of the Indus valley civilisation. It could be one of the origins of the emblem of the lotus whose unfolding describes the emergence of the formed out of the fluid 'ocean'. I have used it to create a figure signifying a "climax vegetation", of seeds, leaves and formed plants emerging from swampland.

P.141 A ; The upper register in this double height floor, equivalent to the third floor of the new buildings, is a sign which reverses the idea of dryness emerging from wetness as portrayed below it, and shows the four rivers flowing from a circle that is alternately the red sun and the blue sea. This is the desert watered by the atmosphere, which is a pump operated by the sun and the sea. The cross in a circle is also also the sign of settlement in Ancient Egyptian script and the figure of the cardo and decumanus, the cardinal point axes, that underlie all town planning from Greece and Rome onwards. This figure also calls to mind the 'hypostyle', the endless, autogenetic, (scalar) field of columns that the Renaissance considered to be the original 'materia' of architecture.

The register comes above and therefore 'after' the figure of wild vegetation below it. It figures the emergence of settlements out of the agricultural field below.

These two floors correspond to the solid state, or, in Classical physics, "earth".

P.142 ; The final two floors, the fourth and fifth, lie between the solid and the energetic or "fiery" state of the topmost floors. These are the floors of the gaseous state, or the Classical "air". The register of the fifth floor is figured with a simple sign, that of a freely disposed white spiral on a blue ground. This is also the figure which is inlaid into the solid blue concrete of the "logs" which form part of the exterior entablature. It is a straightforward portrayal of the idea of gas and airiness. It is however, probably, the most aesthetically appealing of all the figures and so we must allow it to exist in all of its monosemantic simplicity!

P.142 A ; We make up for this with the figure below it which is the most complex of all of the registers. This is because air is the medium of speech and human life above all the other elements. We can do without heat and water and food for some time. The need for air is more urgent. The figure represent the idea of speech by placing an eye inside an open mouth that is the palm of the hand with its five fingers. The sense of it is that speech issues out on the medium of air, from the mouth, but is the product of an interaction between the eye and the hand. It corresponds to the Vedic idea that the "word" is the "subtle body". This an insubstantial object that is as real as the physical object but without its weight, solidity, and corporality. This figure, of the eye in the palm of the open hand, bridges the gap between the word as abstract idea and as the sensual embodiment of its object.

P.143 ; These are what one might describe as my basic inscriptional logography. Each of the four registers has been multiplied by two to make eight. This process can continue for other conditions that may require more or less divisions. But the underlying processes of composition are the same, drawing upon an architectural culture to create forms can be used to inscribe the columns and beams of the gross framework of a trabeated architecture. The panels of inscribed pattern are themselves framed within a massive armature of concrete. This is stained so as to retain the patterns of open blowholes that show the material is concrete. Its colour is Venetian Red, recalling the (now prohibited) red lead of Heroic Period Constructivist steelwork. The great drums of these colums are deliberately rendered insubstantial, or rather transcribed into a register that is intellectual rather than material. Yet the figure of the concrete armature belies this, satisfying our need to experience the power of weight and the structure that resists it. The figure of the A3 panels of Video-masonry mediates between the material and intellectual categories, turning the columns like stone pages, or drawers, each of which holds a filing cabinet of ideas referenced under its logographic sign.

P.143 A ; The uplighters in the columns evoke this idea as they slide out on filing cabinet runners, propelled by an invisible hydraulic ram, to reveal the lamps that will illuminate the ceiling.

P.144; These eight registers fit onto the eight floors of the Gallery. They distinguish each of its levels vertically, but unite together the columns that surround it. However both the Ark, the Castle and the Old Hospital appropriate some of these columns, bringing the materials and patterns of their external surface into the interior of the Gallery. They do this to show that they are united by the Gallery, joining into a seamless Institutional whole. The architectural devices of the "Robot Order" enables the different buildings to literally collide with each other and displace each other while still remaining intact and beautiful, undamaged by either the intellectual flaccidity of 'Deconstruction' or the masochistic enthusiasms of 'Functionalism'.

P.145 ; The next stage in the development of the column inscriptions was to overlay the basic vertical registers with another set of figures that relates to the plan form of the space. The purpose of these was frankly aesthetic in the beginning. Some of the opinion that we received found it visually disturbing that we divided the columns horizontally, into eight registers, and inscribed them with figures that were so different in colour and outline. My problem with this criticism was that although I had invented the figures according to a clearly thought out system of meanings, I was reluctant to publish these meanings which, for me, 'unified' the different registers intellectually, if not visually.

P.145 A ; Some people will find it eccentric to combine Scientific physics and biology with Ancient Egyptian and Vedic ideas, figures, and cosmognies. The general public is still unfamiliar with "collage" as an art form, even after all of the art of the 20C from Eliot to Picasso. Most people still hanker after the photorealistic view of Renassance perspective. In the case of the picture-planes of our architecture we do not repudiate this. But in the case of the trabeated, or Robotic, members, we insist that the inscriptions have to be two-dimensional and collage is an appropriate 20c compositional technique for this type of graphic medium.

P.145 B.: So we invented figures that would be the same on each register from top to bottom. These would then be over-printed, while still within the computer, on selected columns. The columns were selected so that they defined areas and events, namely:

1. the entrance.

2. the 'room' of four columns around the main social stair.

3. the whole rectangular room defined by the vaulted ceiling.

4. the south pole, literally the southernmost column isolated in the centre of the angled south side.

5. the north pole, literally the northernmost column isolated in the centre of the angled north side.

P.145 C; The remainder of the columns, which occur in relatively short sequences, are not overprinted. They serve as a reminder of the basic figures underlying the more camouflaged figures that have been 'printed' ,or inscribed, twice.

P 146. The figure for the entrances is developed from the history of the "apotropaic" or guardian column. One of the most original of these are the stubby, cubical, masonry columns, mounted with bulls horns, that guarded a sanctuary in Catal Huyuk, 9,000 years ago. I rotated four horns into a figure with four vectors to signify the cubic geometry of their supporting columns and coloured them red to signify alarm and sacrifice. Howeve r these proved, graphically, to be too violent. Then I overprinted the horn with the figure of scales or feathers, depending on which way up this is. This made the horns into wings as if they were four-winged guardians. The horned guardian and the winged guardian are both commonplace figures in the history of apotropaic figures. This softened the figure and made it aesthetically acceptable. Now the central cubic mass of black was too solid and violent, overpowering the figures it overprinted. The solution here was to take the iconography of the cube and develop it into a dialogue between the cube and circle: the Classical figures for the bounded and solid Earth and the unlimited Universe. This degree of 'perforation' again allowed the under-figures to read through and be followed by the eye.

P 147. The figures overprinted on the four Robot-columns that marked-out the space up which wound the social stair were developed from the figure of th column in Egyptian hieroglyphics. I know of at least four logographs for column in this language, so central to the history of Western Architecture. They are firstly: the forked stick that supports an horizontal pole, and also the sky!; secondly what Gardiner calls the "the linen basket" (or mummy case, like the diagonally over-bound 'Columna Stolata' of Francesco de Giorgio). Thirdly there is the "tenoned shaft" whose cubical peg appears in the 'V' cut into the head of the column and fourthly there is the figure of the upright "sceptre".

P 148. I have used the logograph for Heliopolis, which I found on a mummy case one afternoon in the British Museum. It combines the "sceptre", or mace, with the "tenoned shaft" by inserting the one inside the other like the backbone inside the rib-cage. I have also made the body of the "tenoned shaft" into a "cow-skin" to signify that the sky was supported by such columns in Egyptian cosmology. The sky, ususlly figured by the Goddess Nut, was also figured as a cow whose twinkling teats were the stars. Was this the remote origin of the naming of the "Milky Way"?

P 149. The figure for the four columns that support the corners of the vaulted ceiling was also developed from Gardiner's curious idea of a column as a linen-basket. The blue, five petalled, flowers of flax are overprinted onto the tenoned head of a columnar shaft. The column is tied with a ribbon, or sash, as are the battlemented towers that guard the passages through the underworld which the boat of the sun must pass when it travels under the ground each night. This recalls the history of the "light in the rock", figured in the topmost of the under-figures.

P 150. The overprint figure for the singular column denoting the south pole of the Gallery was developed from the story of a sundial made by the 16C savant Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was interested in many things, but his chief interest, for an architect, lies in the drawings that he made. He indicates that, for instance, that the Ark that carried mankind to a new beginning (a reiteration of creation) was not a boat, but a raft. This is supported by an older, Vedic, creation mythology that describes a floating vehicle as a "nest of reeds" that came to rest upon a submarine mountain described in the Vedic texts. From this we can explain the habit of the Ancient Greeks to paint the ends of their 'rafters' blue and to carve drops (of water) below them.

P 151. Kircher, in one of his more 'scientific' experiments planted a sunflower in a boat and placed it into a bowl of water. He found that the flower rotated the boat so that it faced ito the sun. We have abstracted this and developed it as the overprint for the South Pole. The black centre of the flower recalls the black spot that remains in the eye after it has been looking into the sun, or any bright light source. It has been displaced from the central point of its rays and exhibits a circular void through which the under-figure is visible.

The overprint figure for the North pole has yet to be developed.

P 152. It can be seen that the genesis of all of these figures is very various. Architecture is an ancient medium, being older than painting, which is older than writing. Architecture originates in the demarcation of human lifespace, ordering its social, physical and intellectual aspects. It is unrewarding to repudiate this extensive history when we can, if we treat it as a living part of the medium, use it to help us, like any history, and even archaeology, to understand what we inherit so that we may approach our future more creatively.

P 153. The idea of overprinting the original eight registers was brought on by a criticism of the design that was purely aesthetic. The critics were not aware of the meaning of the eight original designs and the way that the one related to the other intellectually within the unity of Nature and the elements. There was a desire for a purely aesthetic unity to the column that I would maintain was intellectually trivial, as if every line in a text should rhyme.

P 154. Yet the fact is that the majority of those viewing the designs will not know anything of their story. So it is, perhaps, legitimate, on the ground of practicality, to take account of a narrowly aesthetic response. Interestingly, the result has been an increase in the richness and complexity of the designs that is pleasing to both the aesthetic and intellectual faculties. The collage designs for each floor-level register, of which there are two per floor, use up to 35 tiles. These are prepared on the computer as a whole multi-gigabyte composition. This is then "tiled" into A3-sized units, all 4,000 of which will each form an independent and arbitrary abstract composition, some of very great beauty. We may have to stand guard over the best of them to stop art-lovers from prising them loose. Fortunately all 4,000 tiles will remain in an electronic archive ready to be automatically reprinted at any time that they are plundered.

P 155. The tall columns carry the major part of the inscriptions on the "robot members" in the Gallery. The only others that are intended for 'inscription' are the parts of the Entablature that is carried by the columns. Here we see that the cylindrical beams are imprinted with the white spiral figure, on a blue ground, that we used on the columns in the register denoted "air". These "logs" as we call them, carry a pair of wings, or "saddles". These are made from Criggion green granite concrete on the exterior of the buildings. Above the Gallery, and taking advantage of our more flexible monoprinting technology, we have designed a figure for them which signifies that time is regular but nature is not. The sun moves across a landscape , of desert sand and green rivers, that is measured by a scale of black and white marks which, nevertheless, signify light and dark, like day and night. This perimeter of time surrounds the vaulted ceiling in the way that the Meander figure does in the Classical iconography, only in that case using the figures of the river and the snake.

P 156. The interior of every "robot member", be it column or beam, is mechanical and electrical energy. This is the contemporary expression of the much older idea that the columns, especially, were energetic elements. I signify this by indicating that the core or central axis of all beams and columns is light, energy or fire. This is the meaning of the "plug" of "Blitzcrete" that projects from the ends of the "logs" like solidified sparks of fire. However the "logs" that support the Entablature are rafters, and once floated in the primordial fluid. This is why they are inscribed with the wave, or fluid, figure of spirals.

P 157. An architectural member can tell a story in two ways, by being present and by being absent, yet known to the imagination. Often the flood that is absent fills the void over our heads more effectively, by virtue of our imagination, floating the Ark of our re-born hopes to settle upon the Ararat of our labours.

P 158. Part of the capitals of my "Orders" have always been jet black. Sometimes the whole of them is black, as in the Rice CEB and the Cambridge JIMS. Sometimes only the neck, or abacus is black, and the capital is colourful, as in the Harp Heating and the IOD Pumping Station. The capital is the first thing we look at in any building that has them. It is the head of the column and so it is its anthropomorphic face as well. I usually do them black because, even after all of these years of striving I, and the world that I work for, are seldom ready to colour them. Notwithstanding all of the colour and inscription that I use on my buildings, the face on the head of the column is still veiled and shrouded, awaiting its epiphany.

P 159. This describes all of the proposals to inscribe intelligible figures into the "Robot members", the "major trabeation", of the Gallery. The other physical parts, the cantilvered galleries and the bridges and balustrades all receive a colour or an exposed material, such as a species of wood. The natural materials of course mean nothing at all, being nothing but themselves. This is why they are preferred by those who wish to avoid the problems exposed by the recognition that the human lifespace is artificial, the product of many sorts of manipulation. The plain colours are capable of beautiful harmonies. Beauty is not to be decried. It is the solace of the illiterate.

Grey paint, on the other hand, is a blind that falls between a material that is ashamed to declare what it is and a mind that refuses to recognise what it imagines.

P. 160. To transcribe the trabeated lattice into an intellectual framework that describes a reality that we can conceive of as extending beyond the mere material bounds of the columns and beams of the Institute, is to empower the final ritual of the architectural medium. This is the delineation of the landscape of virtuality that the trabea unveil between their members. This is the same technique, that of pictorial space, which collapsed when it became too difficult to continue to believe in the existence of a transcendent dimension of reality. So let us go on to suppose, at least in certain definite cultures and parts of those cultures, that there is no longer any residual belief in the existence of any transcendent dimension. All that then remains is to rid the architectural medium of the idea that the depiction of a virtual space, peopled by virtual objects, describes a space that is anything but purely imaginary, purely conceptual, ie. as Science, itself, would describe it: a virtual place. This latter matter is essentially a matter of codes and conventions, reinforcing the idea that the space depicted, the 'room' unveiled, is an imaginary one.

P. 161. However, although the 'scenes' in this space are as virtual as television. or film, their purpose, like the two-dimensional inscription of the trabeation, is to engender the idea, primarily through the medium of vision, of a reality that exists outside the narrow sensory compass of the building itself. Also the technique of this medium has to avoid being merely photographic, even though it has to be capable of depicting natural bodies, and especially our own.

P. 161 A. The traditional vehicle for this technique was, for many years, that of the figures and events described in what has come to be known as Greek Mythology. No one has sacrificed to the Greek gods for almost 2,000 years. They are devoid of transcendent embodiment. Yet they do remain bodies, like ourselves, and more valuable for that than for almost any other reason. Their personality enjoys a continuity from the earliest times, well before their canonisation in Ancient Greece, through all the twists and turns of Western art and culture, to the present day. These remote origins allows one to relate them to virtually every form of embodiment, in any culture, both religous, mythic and fictional. Their ability is, in short, to occupy a virtual realm in ways that make it accessible to ideas as well as to contingent reality. They can transcribe the one into the other and act, paradoxically for beings that are neither computable nor measureable, to reify ideas created by Science.

P. 161 B. Yet they are denied to us in any "straight" form and can only be part of the wider culture of both writer and reader today. Like many things, one has to know them and forget them if one is to make a move into reality.

End of "Brookestead Block film script ",

Return to "Judge Institute"  

 

 

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