Hello reader, flicking through a beautiful architecture publication. As the pages turn, you may find yourself drawn into an idea of architecture as a perfect act. The media itself, through its form, is massaging you into a particular understanding of architecture. The drawings that give an omniscient understanding, the photographs that exert a compositional organisation on the world, text that makes things clearer, the layout that frames this information, the structure that choreographs your experience. You might find yourself starting to believe things about architecture simply because of the sensations the media you are viewing it through creates.
But then all modes of architectural presentation present their own inherent fictions about architecture. The magazine, the monograph, the lecture, the exhibition, none are transparent views of the body of architecture. Rather each is an argument about architecture even before they have a subject to narrate. The medium, as they say, is the message. Media frames narratives about architecture even when the project itself might argue against that very idea.
The fantasy these modes indulge is one where architecture is seen as an autonomous thing taken out of context, removed from the struggles and complications of production or subsequent life. For example that architecture can be something complete, that a project is something that can be finished, that a building can be a resolved whole. You might begin to think of architecture as an autonomous act, you might understand that it has clear definitions about its authorship, you might forget the painful and comlex ways a project comes into the world, you might imagine that it has a direct and defined relationship with the world. As you feel these sensations though, remember that you are seeing acts of architecture through the lens of another kind of architecture.
But that is not to dismiss these ideas, rather to recognise media as an active agent in the construction of what architecture is, how it might be performed and what it can produce. That architecture itself is a form of representation, even a media. Which might mean that ‘architecture’ is something that oscillates between states, between building, image, drawing and text. But also between other forms of architectural representation and experience. The walk, for example, might also be considered an architectural medium. A way of both documenting and producing architecture.
Walking is a different way of bringing together (and also, perhaps, of taking apart). Think of the guide book entry, the instagrammed post, shards of memory for example). It has its own prejudices that might include: Asserting the architectural object within a wider whole; The prioritising of the view and experience; Buildings as contiguous with their environment; Space as something fluid rather than static; The walker as author; The journey as narrative; The city as a product of experience and so on.
The walk is more than just putting one foot in front of another. It has its own history as a form of architectural media, a distinct cultural history of its own. Each with its own idea of the movement of the body through space, each with its own idea of the body and space. The walk is no less freighted with ideas about architecture, no less innocent or authentic. And its own conceptions of architecture have been ideologically powerful enough to manifest its own idea of space into the world (the picturesque landscape, the processional route, the promenade, the ramble, the derive etc. Or think of the effect of the Baedeker guidebooks that were used to direct Luftwaffe bombing raids on Birish cities in WW2).
The walk as a form – unlike say printed media – always places architecture into relationships with things beyond itself. The object is dissolved or fractured, it is seen in motion, from afar and up close, and perhaps always seen in a mode somewhere between a focused gaze and distraction.
And our distractions begin before we’ve even started. I’m due to meet Tom and Steph for a walk through London taking in some of their oeuvre. But before we’ve even said hello, Paul Smith is taking us on his own tour of his shop. We’ve come to see the facade, but we’re looking at stools and jubilee contraptions as he gestures, points out details, shows us his phone, not quite selling to us but carouselling objects and stories as he spins us through the space.
It’s only looking back after we’ve left that we think about the patterned rusted elevation that 6a installed as a new frontage to the shop. It’s a thin panel that acts as a mediator between street and interior – its patinated texture, its decorative ribbing a kind of shield that asserts the flatness of an elevation, accentuating the remarkably few openings – the doorway, the curved glass vitrines that bulge into the street. The steel panels turn blankness into an asset, contrasting with the plate glass displays of the surrounding flagship stores, impermeability turned into an active pedestrian rhythm, a small part Johns Soanes black wraparound elevations for the Bank of England a larger part the corrugated iron that used to line the streets of pre gentrified London, and a little bit of the tailored detail you would find inside made part of the streetscape.
In Berkeley Square we detour to look at a William Kent frontage described by Pevsner as London’s “finest terraced house”. We’re not convinced it’s even a terrace in the first place, and anyway Steph is far more taken with the gnarly grey trunks of the trees in the square. These very trees it transpires are significant urban objects. Planted in 1789 they were the first of the ubiquitous London Plane trees.
Discovered in the mid-17th century by aristocrat and plantsman John Tradescant, the London Plane was a hybrid offspring of the American Sycamore and the Oriental Plane that grew in his nursery garden in Vauxhall.
They might be forms of organic life but the species is only part natural, a product of British imperialism, aristocratic dalliance and the ecology of the industrial city. Maybe because it was born in London, the tree thrives in a polluted atmosphere and so became a fixture of the London street scene.
As a writer, it’s too cute not to acknowledge this as a handy metaphor for 6a’s own way of thriving amidst the by-products of the city. Just up the street at the crest of the hill on Grosvenor Street, there’s Sadie Coles. Here 6a restored a stainless steel framed shopfront back to what looks like its original Michael Caine British Modernism form. Yet the big glass window acts not only as a glossy artspace frontage. Yet the plate glass view is perversely obscured by a huge raw chunk of concrete beam lying flat like a felled trunk over the door. A piece of excavated building in a museum case displayed as evidence of the complications that occur between architecture and life.
We’re heading back centrally now, and pop into a Larry Bell show at Hauser and Wirth, all delicate immaterial space. Through the tinted planes of glass, we can see back out across the street to where Oki-ni used to be, the project that really established 6a. All that’s left is the facade, now obscured by some ill fitting blinds with ghosted lumps of storage behind. Its lost interior loose fit ply surround, piles of felt, raw lighting above was loose yet sharp, hard but soft, raw but luxurious, casual but formally precise. A striking staging of retail experience, its angular wall creating a kind of minimalist picturesque promenade of an interior,
By the time we’ve reached Brewer St the crowds of Saturday afternoon Soho are out. It’s more bobbing and weaving than promenading. We’re stopping in on the JW Anderson store. Arranged as a fragmented set of references, placed one after the other like a Soho scrapbook: Overscaled red neon, and harsh fluorescent lights at the front, faux wood formica at the back and a kind of dreary loungy basement downstairs, all interrupted by a recreation of a staircase that once led up to a brothel. Its Jonathan’s tribute to the queer Soho that shaped him, given this disjunctive architectural form by 6a.
It’s a luxury flagship (the company is now part owned by LMVH) that feels like a flashback to the detritus and trash of a wild night out. Its physical reality feels like a manifestation of groggily remembered moments. Experience of the city not as things in space or coherent compositions but rather rooms and signs and surfaces one after the other. If the shop itself is like a collage of the city outside its door, there’s also discussion of how they might take out a window for a DJ to play to the street for Pride, dissolving the threshold between street and interior directly rather than rhetorically.
Walking itself can be a radical act – or at least a way of undoing the kinds of spatial logics that architecture imposes onto the world. Walking inherently crosses thresholds. It can trespass and claim territory, even temporarily. It’s an act that works against the authority of architecture as it smudges the red line where the legalities and economics of land ownership are precipitated into material force by architecture. An act too that reasserts the present moment over the claims to timelessness that architecture and property make. It gives agency to those doing the walking and using instead of those that legislate. Or at least it can offer a little resistance.
By now we’re thirsty, and heading into Holborn. Steph needs to drop off some plants she bought along the way and dump the bike that she’s been wheeling along the whole way. So we duck through an arched entrance and down an alleyway that leads to their home and onetime office. It’s a collection of spaces, a loose adhoc kind of domesticity that is also, it turns out, a route. Through the kitchen, out into the courtyard, through another door ducking under fronds of trailing plants and into the hallway of another building and out through its front door. London doesn’t normally work like this. Property normally doesn’t permit this kind of porosity, this kind of ambiguity between front and back or public and private.
We cross Lambs Conduit Street, and down another alleyway. It’s as if London were somehow still perforated by tracks and routes, as if rooms, doors, thresholds were just adjuncts to routes, rather than the primary organising spatial devices usually deployed to give hierarchy and impose order on space (and us). As if London is still yet to find its final form. The route takes us to Holborn House, a project so local to 6a that it’s in view of where they live and work. A project too that extends this idea of architecture dissolving into the city (or is it that the city dissolves into it?).
Simply, it’s a sports hall that’s kind of a sunken courtyard, with exposed trusses forming a roof above, letting strips of sky be glimpsed overhead so you don’t quite forget your connection to the world even sunk down like this. You are in a room, but you don’t quite forget that it’s a space produced by the city around it. The alleyway facade is glazed, but rather than being transparent, it’s etched as if it were a brick wall – An image of a wall as well as wall. This is an artwork by Caragh Thuring, who collaborated on other aspects of the building too, that acts like a kind of physical xray, as if you could see through walls. It’s etched too with words. Thuring has drawn from archives and journals of the original boys club, with local stories, names and so on, as if you were also x-raying the building’s history of use. Rendered like this the buildings exterior face is somehow light, text, document, material and building all at once.
The building trails outwards, its architecture as much the new paving to the alley, the carefully ad hoc planting along its edge that retains the sentiment of overgrownness, the hopscotch carved into the pavers, the tree at one end that becomes a kind of space in and of itself. Building and neighbourhood, interior and exterior slip from one to the other. The red line of the project is blurred like pavement chalk. The architectural object dissolves into elements all set in relation to each other and to the city. We are a long way from the building itself but they are still pointing to the changes the project has made to the area.
This feels characteristic somehow. That their mode of thinking is this blurry zone beyond the building itself. And if I were to characterise that further, perhaps Steph’s mode is the network. She describes things through people, though making connections between them, through the relationships between their own team, artists, collaborators, clients, consultants, builders and users. It stresses the wider social ecology of making a project, architecture produced collectively in dialogue rather than as individual expression. Tom’s mode might be the anecdotal, where things are described in stories that aggregate into an idea. Fragments of stories, experiences, histories and coincidences priorities the path towards rather than the destination. In both modes, the architectural thing itself is always described indirectly. They rarely say this is that. Instead, it’s about who and how. It’s the journey that is the idea, not the place or the form or the image or any of those more familiar modes of architectural production and product. If we were to extend the idea of a walk as a metaphorical thing, it’s this round about route, discursive rather than discorsive that underlies so much of the studio’s work, is so much a part of their approach to coaxing things into the world.
With exceptions (say their ‘Shapist’ mode of MK Gallery in the view from Campbell Park rather than the galleries themselves, the wedgey things at Design District and so on) 6A projects are things woven into the world – incidents and accidents, assemblages of things found, process that leaves their trace (or welcomes the trace of life onto its surface – art, rust, growth, marker pen or whatever), or maybe most of all conversations – between people, things, history, stuff and place.
These are ideas that oppose the usual idea of an object as something that asserts its identity as a fixed point in time and space. The architectural object even more so – most often imaging itself as something outside of space and time, as something oblivious to the invisible torrents that flow around it. An object traditionally likes to obey its own logic and remain unaffected by circumstance, policing its boundaries with a determined idea of what it will include and exclude.
Walking as a mode of experience loosens that boundary. The route we’ve taken, the partial view of projects, the conversation we’ve had through architecture and the city argues for something different. It declares the object as something that always exists in relation. Whose material presence emerges out of relationships with things beyond its boundary. That the thing is itself a register of the conditions that it participates in. It’s an argument – a gentle one – for architecture that reveals the complexities and contractions of its circumstance, that presents the problem of architecture itself not rhetorically but through the embodiment of its own complexities and contradictions. The projects we’ve seen are ways of looking at the world, where architecture documents and narrates its role in wider contexts, whose physical elements are also representations of the complexities of circumstance and context that are intrinsic to the act of architecture.
First Published in a+u