Tony Fretton, a former AA Unit Master, discusses themes from his AA exhibition Architecture, Experience and Thought. The exhibition represents the architecture of the title. The schemes are exhibited in the simplest forms of architectural representation to show the complexity and excitement of events within which architecture is made, and the formal responses which we make to them. Tony Fretton Architects was formed in 1982. NB: Drawings are often difficult to see clearly.
Transcription:
Mohsen Mostafavi: We've been looking at practices that have continued the project of Modernism and have made a contribution to this project so to speak. We're part of this group of people who have thought in a very important ways. There is always a lot that is said on the question of minimalism and so on, and I think this has already been rehearsed many times, it is part of the stylistic operation and what I think is critical about the work of Tony is that he works in rather uncertain ways.
TONY FRETTON: Two things to start, one is to address why is the exhibition is called ‘Architecture, Experience and Thought’. I think this flies in the face of a lot of the way in which architecture has been proposing itself sometimes, which seems to entail a belief that there is a theoretical or rhetorical position which precedes making architecture, and then the work comes from that. But actually my experience, and I think the experience of many other architects is utterly different. The architecture is what you do, in the way that people that write would find that unexceptional. Because it is the internalization of all those things which surrounds you as an architect, and I would say also the ability to refract the things that please you outside architecture, all of those things that you see, read, whether they be finely wrote or simply pleasurable, comes with the architect. This aspect is best explained by showing you the work. But the second part of the title: the experience aspect is that, as I design a building, I experience it, I imagine it, i see it, it’s real to me. Then again there are aspects of it which we didn't consciously put it into that scheme.
It's very different to the practices that seek precision, let's say law or some aspects of science. Creative activity produces objects which then provoke, stimulate people to have ideas, impressions. I believe that the thoughts infused when you experience a piece of work or an object, a piece of music, produces genuine knowledge. Knowledge of a type which is re-interpretable, that is the key to me: it doesn't want to be more precise. So, the experience of it is a fundamental component of what we understand architecture to be in the office. Thought comes very very late, of course, you think as you make the building, as you make propositions for the building, and you reflect on your experience, but afterwards this experience that I’ve described eventually gives you a series of conclusions or deductions on what you’ve done. That is to explain the title of this lecture, which is ‘Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’ it’s a line from a poem that I like very much written by W. H. Auden, which I’m sure I’m misusing, but clearly, poetry and architecture and literature do make things happen, but in a very particular way, they’re not instrumental, and one of the curses of architecture is that it somehow places itself in the world of practicalities, and it isn’t, the world of practicality is actually one of agreements, and fictions, very necessary ones, but they are not as propelling as we think: the capacity of objects, events, or experiences like the ones just described, to act, I believe, on culture as a whole. If it works, it provides tiny components, which together with other tiny components from other fields—could be politics, or fine art—give us the things by which we think, gives us the ideas by which we think. Specially in architecture's case, gives us the means to see a city, it makes sense of the present, whether you like it or not, even if you design badly, you make the visual culture within the people see the city, and from which their can only escape by their imaginations. So, in the work that we do, we are very conscious of how… there is a particular role that I see that one would adopt, which is to consciously make objects which are highly created, very open to interpretation, and to which people can attach their imaginative self and their fantasies and live out their lives. It seems to me that there is a necessity to provide structure, but you have to do it in a way which is truly libertarian.
The project that we did in Sway, Hampshire, and some of these issues will become clear, I hope. Sway is 7 km or so from the South Coast of England, and it’s a suburb of Southampton, and I guess it was a rural town until the railway, which runs through here, and gradually it’s become a commuting town. My client on this project, lovely woman, who was the director of the gallery, was in the middle of her way to Los Angeles, and I did this drawing, which showed her town is like LA—that’s a joke—and she… liked Frank Gehry very much, I carried with me some books of Frank Gehry, which I’m not sure I ever got back, but that’s probably the price you pay, but in a funny kind of way the building has this sligh love of Gehry. It was a rural area, with some buildings from the Victorian times, also rather grose neo-vernacular, which, if you are British and you travel in this part of the country you would recognize. But also, very interestingly, there are some very eccentric and bizarre buildings in this area: there is a concrete tower and house, the owner of which I just met. So, within this area there is a degree of fantasy, even in buildings like the ones built by a speculator, there is this strange, rather repressed element of fantasy, also there is the ‘alpine fantasy’ so, you see all of these, highly fantastic, ubiquitous somehow absorbed and it controls the way we see the world. But it controls the world of this people in a different way, it’s become conventional and it’s that aspect which I was trying to touch on as I made a building which attached to an existing one. [Shows original] It’s a rather concocted style, badly concocted, very derivative of let’s say, of people like Norman Shaw, or the Arts and Crafts movement. And on the back of it we built this: an art’s centre, built with lottery money, one of the first, in the moment when lottery funding was producing work which was pretty good, which, I regret to say, isn’t the case now. The existing building’s ceilings were very low, and the demands for an art gallery require higher ones. What we were trying to achieve is that from every angle, this building which has rather two spaces in it, actually seems to be the same size of the other one, so it's an illusion. When we work on projects, we make a number of decisions, and those decisions have a pragmatic basis, but also they have an expressive basis. We had wanted for a long time to build in wooden frame structure, and the reason for that is that it has an ecological advantage: the construction or the fabrication energy is significantly… best graded, and it also has an expressive capacity, so we did this building entirely in timber frame. As I said earlier, I was very engaged with the work of Frank Gehry for a long time, it mystifies me, and I don't have that imagination to make this degree of expression of forms that he does. In a strange way, there is an expressionist building in here, but it's only to express itself through a fairly wood driven approach. We made this pyramidal roof and cut the top to make a roof light. We got this rather strange form on the roof, which looks at the other forms around it in a provocative way, I feel. There was a series of decisions: to make certain types of gallery spaces, one has a roof like a boy scout's hut… I'm going to use this photograph [front elevation] to illustrate the plans and the plans are entered in the same sense as the photograph. Whenever we are making decisions, we are always thinking about four or five different implications, for instance, the store, wc, entrance… these spaces, which can be quite low, can make this part of the building produce a volume which is the same size as the existing building. And the other spaces, which are taller, mass up behind them, so the initial impression is that the building is very very small. We wanted to do the building both present, evident and solid and yet sort of an abstract version of its half. There is a huge lesson from artists such as Carl André or (Sol) Lewitt, which is to dwell in the well known, to dwell in the mundane, to be very very similar to the average known objects, or in this case objects which are very similar to it, and yet, we wanted to maintain its presence and not be absorbed in the surroundings. You have to make a conscious effort to maintain a tension between that absorption and what you do. Some of this lecture is going to be very direct, I’m attempting something here which is to be almost pedestrian, I would say, in the sense that we are going to walk through the building. if you walk in you see the beginnings of this gallery, the attempt was to make the space recognisable by artists as art space, which they value—they would want to exhibit in those spaces because they have a high degree of legitimacy in relation to other art spaces. While at the same time those spaces would have an uncanny resemblance to other buildings, or even invented, rather neo vernacular buildings. There is a play here, which is: spaces that artists would want, and spaces which people would feel very much at ease in. Each of these spaces has a different kind of light, and each can have the daylight reduced with these blinds which interlock, so you can show video and film. One thing that is extremely important to do in a gallery space is to provide that range: from highly daylit spaces for sculpture, down to the light which allows you to see video, but still there is still enough room in the room so you can still see other people in the room, as you walk in you have a sense of the space. Although these spaces turn out to be not dark enough for certain displays. This section shows the office and the way in which new spaces and old spaces relate in that sort of pictorial way.
The hope here is that, as you can get complete and effective tension in the coexistence of art being art and life being life. There is a massive problem with local art culture tensions, this project can be very attractive to local artists and international artists to exhibit together, and specially local schoolchildren who use this project very much. Throughout the course of their life they see art of an extreme quality.
There is a desire, in the last gallery space, within the existing building, that what is old and what is new is ambiguously related. One photograph taken by a student of mine in Lausanne who last year was at the AA in 5th year, in diploma school, and this is the inside of the gallery shown before, but very charmingly showing a perplex person staring at an object. We also made another building on the other side of the site, art studios made from an existing building.
This images are by an artist called Diego Ferrari, whose work consists of making photographs of other artists with a camera that is modified so he can shoot continuously. That allows him to make a choice of either overlapping images, or making space between them. Through this process, he can develop a sense of time and space that is highly unique, and these are photographs of the building at the stage when it was being built.
This is a really strange project—we didn’t do it, it is by a military architect whose name I don’t have access to. This is the oldest living project in the practice, it has gone on forever, and it’s tiny, in Reading. Reading is an interesting place, but what is curious is that the ground floor of this building was a prison, and intensely oppressive place, with a very active exhibition program. In fact, it is the only contemporary art space in Reading. Yet, they have a very large invisible network of activity, they teach and exhibit very widely. So, in this godforsaken place,
The next photographs will show the character of this place, this area is rabidly militaristic, and it has this kind of polished quality. On the other side of the road there are miles and miles of dead housing of the worst kind you can ever imagine, and on the other side there is a war memorial.
What is striking about those buildings to which we are meant to attach something is that there is a style to them, a style used to depress you, it’s very strange, it has an absolutely clear stylistic presence, and when I look at it as a designer, tuned to how objects can be compelling, these are compelling—I mean, they are dreadful, because they have all this things that I truly dislike, so in this early scheme drawings, it was evident from the brief that we were going to do a very small building. It actually took us a very long time to figure out how we were going to do it, next to that big one. At the beginning I was going to make it a highly abstract object but that way we were going to get absorbed and used up. What we did is an experiment. We are going to make the front of the building glass, and we are going to have a very shallow space behind it, which will be an exhibition space. In front of it there will be a yard, which is normally a place where you can exhibit sculpture, but in reality, its main purpose is to be a highly abstract version of the surroundings. In a way, we are trying to get a hold of this eery, peculiar combination of the militaristic and the dead housing and the faint reminiscence of rurality that still exists on the road. In a way that I’m not going to be able to convince you here, but I know when we do it that it will exist; one aspect of the way in which we build is that it does finally exist when we build it because there are certain things you can’t convey by talking. That happened with the Lisson gallery. I’m convinced, confident in saying that this space will be both massively insignificant and highly effecting. It’s intended to be incredibly diagrammatic, and it’s floorplan will have a similarity with the existing building. While it’s peculiarly abstract, it is one of the most architectonic buildings that we’ve designed. It somehow points out the colossal insignificance of all that military architecture.
A lot of the work we are doing now is working with buildings which exist, and how do you approach that… some people put classy objects within them, I’m much more interested in how buildings that have been done by other people and used in different ways can be absorbed by people’s eyes: they are very very full of information, people have invested a lot of fantasy and imagination in them. To work in those kind of buildings is really exciting because if you want to be provocative and distant, which I always want to be, you can really fuck things up, so we’ve built hardy anything here. We’ve built a tiny piece of building here. [Explains buildings through photographs and other graphic material].
Questions follow.
Transcription by María José Orihuela, Architect, MA HCT at the Architectural Association.