All work and play

Buildings are static but architecture creates journeys. Architects have to be more than just the travel agents – they have to be the storytellers, the playwrights, the movie directors.

While good architects have an intuitive understanding of the dramatic tension that comes from good architecture, they can be inarticulate narrators.

Which is ironic, because communication is ALL that an architect does. The thing that makes architects special is that they communicate using drawings as well as with words.

Drawings are for the communication of ideas and aspirations to clients.
Drawings are how architects communicate with themselves, and with other designers.
Drawings are how architects communicate with those craftsmen and professionals who are responsible for making buildings.

So with all this communication around why are new buildings often such dumb animals? Most corporate architecture is inert. Is it because it has nothing to say, or because the architect was so busy building the theatre that she forgot to write the play?

Through time even inert buildings will start to chatter and splutter – they start to give away secrets that only their owners should know. They tell visitors what its really like to work there, the truth behind the beautiful corporate jargon.

Buildings soak up the energy and experiences of those people who work in them. Like ghosts we all leave our imprint. Unhappy buildings tell tales.

Think about the average new-build office building in the UK. A lazy combination of easy-detail finishes to satisfy the minimum requirements of complacent employers. Some kind of nominally architectural curtain wall graphic over a frame hanging with services and all masked with a flimsy inner layer of Gyproc, carpet and ceiling tile. With fluorescent lighting, and a little tiling or some light oak in the reception area.

These are the bland backdrops against which people play out their lives, hoping for a game of golf at the weekend or an occasional after-work piss up.

Who sets the agenda? Well the money lenders of course – and the over-nourished property agents and other dull boys who suck the love out of life, in their semi-hibernation cells of suburban bungalows.

Graven Images has always been disrespectful of corporate banality. Nevertheless, some of our best friends are big companies and surveyors, and there are always good people in there somewhere!

Two projects, both of them with a past, and looking for a future:

Student Loans at Lingfield Point, Darlington…

This was a factory for the thread makers Patons and Baldwins. It is north-lighted and employed generations of local workers. The original building was created to optimise industrial production and as such it falls short of the usual criteria used for planning a modern office building. But once we started to work with it we realised that it offers a wonderful volume to perform all kinds of tasks. It is as flexible as a theatre, and invites dramatic interventions that make the usual interactions of work just a bit more enjoyable. The building is up-front about its past, and it tells its own story through the exposed structure and services and the images of its construction and former factory days. But it also talks to its new users to help them do their new jobs. It invites them to lunch together, sends them for a coffee on the way to a meeting, tells them when to talk quietly and when its OK to make a noise.

We were pleased when this was recognised as being one of the very best office environments in the UK last year. We were also thrilled to hear stories from the people who work there about their friends and family who used to be factory workers in the same place.

The Blythswood Hotel, Glasgow…

Blythswood Square is a square with a past! Not only was it the place where the Monte Carlo Rally left from in 1955, but the square was notorious as the centre of prostitution in Glasgow, the scene of Glasgow’s infamous poisoning case in 1857, and start or finish point for marches and demonstrations for years. So when we were invited to re-design the former RSAC building, converting it into a 5 star hotel, it was a bit like being asked to produce a sequel to an already famous and well-loved movie. As always we tried to make a series of spaces that reveal and invite its audience to get involved. There is an underlying suggestiveness that people often need to really have fun. Particularly in hotels, that experience is created through the exaggerated social rituals of meetings, conversation and service. Very little is about function and most is about people and how they behave in different circumstances. If we might coin a new dictum, “Form Follows Culture”.