reiach and hall architects

Mac Journal 5 : New Scottish Architecture

An essay by Alan Johnston

Neil Gillespie : A CRYSTALLINE : REFLECTION

The work of Neil Gillespie, Design Director, Reiach and Hall, has probably a diversity of role and function atypical of most contemporary architects, in this short essay I would like to accept that as an established factor and focus on his work with artists. Primarily on the spaces where artists show their work, and in particular. The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. It is apposite that these spaces are conceived and built without the notion of architectural pretension, or style.

'Art needs space. But artists and architects often have wildly differing notions of what constitutes ideal exhibition space for art’. Although the discussion about buildings to house art is perhaps almost completely dominated by the architects' viewpoint’.¹

In Gillespie’s practice, what he is doing is very different from the assertion above, Gillespie is carefully emphasising the conditions for dialogue, and within that process he is in a way reconstructing the relationship between the artist and the architect. He is on more than one level taking away architecture, to bring a ‘Space for Art’ , not a space where the function of ‘social’ improvement, property value enhancement, etc, can often mean a melange of spatial confusion. A situation where, ‘architecture became taxidermy’.² The nature of Gillespie's approach is integrative in terms which can be seen in the associations and influences of its the genesis. From an early point an engagement with the spatial fundamentals was evident, ‘the art of building’ was accompanied by an ‘absence of architecture’. Bringing the form closer to the aesthetic, rather than ‘the decorated shed’. A general characteristic of Gillespie's work has been a paring a way layer by layer of the facade of form to leave in a visual resolve, a pertaining residue, which avoids the ‘artificial’ as the artist Ulrich Rückriem describes appositely, talking about his ‘halls’.

'I wouldn't like to refer to my halls as architecture at all. I'd rather talk about structures. To me, architecture sounds too demanding and, on the other hand, it always makes me think of too much contrasting, artificial, unnecessary form. A structure is historically and locally oriented, built with the simplest, reliable materials and constructions that local craftsmen can master. A structure is so to speak, cleansed with architecture, I find that pleasant, in principle, for artistic room though it is the only attitude that I can accept.' ³

What is particularly interesting here, given the nature of Rückriem’s work, is his use of ‘local’, which of course has a particular pertinence in Scotland. What Rückriem implies, within his statement is the idea of 'Local' has a qualitative emphasis. It has not been adulterated by a process of denial. The materials are in his case familiar, not directly ‘local’. His tradition and I think Gillespie's, has still a continuity with locality, place and excellence, something which I believe has its roots in the idea of Baukunst (Building Art).⁴ The ideal of a local architecture of quality, in say the products of the contemporary Basel school are articulated in a confident continuity with sources that for example that relate, to civic interpretations of a pooled ideological resource. In the Basel case they are Schmidt, Mayer, Taut and contemporary artists such Federle and Zaug.

These artists and ‘Architects’ have a keenly held notion of civic and intellectual identity, they are part, in their locality, of a European tradition of a creative polycentric, ‘locality’ . But when it comes to the imperative description of an ‘acceptable local' architecture, local architecture in Scotland can only seen as a fundamental aspect of kitsch, a 'Blanket Conservation' of the vernacular. However the practical tradition interpreted as beyond style but as part of a Utopic/ Aspirant/Developed form, as is say, the Swiss model, is a far from alien prospect. The idea of this local identity developed through civics and a comparative reading, ‘placed’ here in Scotland as a contemporary civic one would be regarded with bewilderment, by what constitutes the architectural establishment.

Yet these ideas are no strangers to the Scottish city, look to the sources of Patrick Geddes. Who regenerated the utopic ideas of Thomas Reid, as much the scientist, the generalist philosopher, the developer, the aesthetician. He drew in Huxley, Kropotkin, Le Play, D’ Arcy Thompson, and of course, the artists.

’For vital effect, the whole has to be infused by a common idealism, at once artistic, philosophic, and social, and applied towards the enrichment of the city’s life. through the diffusion of its past Heritage, and the appreciation of its opening Future.’ ⁵ This sums up his commitment to link past and future as a matter of course, and make this link in the context of art, philosophy, and society, (a truly “civic” context), not in the context of a commercialised “ heritage industry’.⁶

For most architects here the aspiration in making space for art is being able to interpret trends, eg magazines or London orthodoxies, The ‘featured’ gallery architecture is designed to emphasise the ‘feature’, and cafe/bar, which was described by a recent gallery designer as the centre of the building. Yet Gillespie in his reading of the city and the gallery as a visual thought/dialogue point has implicitly brought to his form, a very Geddesian sense of civic dialogue. This is a natural Interdisciplinary approach bringing the artist and architect together. The two developments in Edinburgh, Stills, The Collective, contrast effectively as art space against the architecture of other recent quotations. As they are in overall complex part of a street dialogue,⁷ the feature is within an ambulatory experience, yet the glass Collective, revealingly and essentially of a prismatic-geometric form, particularly echoes a crystalline residue of memory, which invokes, perhaps, a flash of self reflection, which replaces and then relocates perceptions of space, a self reflection that invokes, the potential, bringing the sharing of reflection, an exteriorisation of the internal, that also engages within the space with yet another layer of perception and mirroring, the art. This brings a consideration of the reflective to the local, and focus to the contemporary relationship between works of art and space, in this case, the street, the natural civic expression of space. Within this, the crystalline encasement, ‘space for art’. The primary concern of the artist is articulated within the notion of 'building art', not an architecture of feature, but also in this context is an accreted form of layered reflection. This is a place where the polemical considerations of the artist can be contained within the dialogue space, in sense a neutrality. A friend of Gillespie’s, the Japanese architect Shinichi Ogawa puts this very succinctly,

‘Architecture must be freed from all styles or concepts and be neutral. Existing styles or concepts alone are not enough to produce architectural space. By reassembling architecture on an abstract level liberated from architectural concepts or vocabularies, space becomes all things yet nothing, thereb acquiring greater freedom. Malevich’s Suprematism suggested an absolute non-representationality that transcended even abstract painting. It did not recreate anything ; at the same time , it presented an unlimited space and universe. It provided a place where space in a liberated condition was generated. Architecture did not assert itself as a thing. Space itself was neutral, and the diverse flows of things and information were unimpeded. The convertibility of functions and forms permits the simultaneous development and parallel coexistence of all things and a high degree of choice. A neutral space becomes the foundation promoting the exchange of human thoughts, emotions and actions and a horizon generating diverse interpretations, view points and functions’ .⁸

This neutrality, as referred to above, infers a reflective role in its engagement with civics. In 1997, through Gillespie's urbanist interests, an exhibition of Thomas Struth’s photographs was held at Reiach and Hall. This project presented in a fascinating perspective the architect looking at cities through the eyes of another. These interests refer to the centrality of ‘seeing’. This again fits this mode or role in reconstructing the form of the built in the wider context of civics. There is a very strong reflection in Struth’s work of Gillespie's fascination for the ‘mirroring’ of ‘visual thinking’.

Yet this place of seeing is a space,and in Struth’s work it is a modern one and a photographic one. It reflects as George Elder Davie reflects in the quotation above ⁹ about the very nature of reflection itself. This represents a transformation from the world of Renaissance totality and completeness, to a fragmented contemporaneity. However within that contemporaneity there is a sense of that reflection which provides aspirational quality and challenge. This is perhaps the unconscious space that Struth seeks and Davie alludes to, and that depth experience in vision which Merleau-Ponty describes as the ‘most existential of all experiences’. Thomas Struth’s¹⁰ photographs provide an idealisation of the realities of place and an exploration of our senses in recognising the nature of our own perceptual abilities and responsibilities. They represent at this particular time a continuity of ‘civics’ and yet provide a view into that late 20th century phenomenon the fragmented form of ‘the universal metropolis’.¹¹

The reflective engagement within the contemporary, brings the issues of the alienated and fragmented into a fresh focus, the meaning of engagement becomes quite clear. The format of what we define as ‘Heritage’ is challenged by a construct very much removed from the dismal evocation of a ‘dead past’ through a ‘dead conservation’ all too familiar with its commitment to a city frozen in a political definition well beyond any notion of the active. It a system contrary to that, ‘of place’, that place where the interdependent reading of art and building art creates revelatory depth within a new psychological insight,’ in that the culture of these people is represented not only in their public spaces but in their relationships.’¹² The parallel with Adam Smith’s moral unconscious and Struth’s ‘Unconscious Places’ is intriguing, in fact it underlines the modest scaled but ideally purposed art space of Baukunst to provide the visual metaphor for discourse. Smith writes,

‘All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance or behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into and when they disapprove of, his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind’.

Recent development has produced the feature of ‘art and the coffee bar’ in attempt to avoid the revelatory challenge of art and proceed to the commercial occupation of space for art. For example Gerhard Merz has observed,

‘I am interested in architecture, like art altogether, only in an impragmatic way. I don't have any suggestions to make about life either. That today one has to think of everything practical prevents exactly the image of architecture as an ideal, even in the case of museum buildings. Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin had neither a cloakroom nor a cafeteria’. ¹³

The form of Gillespie's most recent art space, has that interactive core, the avoidance, of the utilitarian remit. That remit implies of course the supplication of art to entertainment within an architectural ‘ show piece’, which in all fairness to the point raised above by, Siegfried Sellitisch, it seems to be an issue that most architects apparently indicate a deference for, ie, the feature rather than dialogue. However we should see Gillespie’s work as an articulate expression of dialogue and place, built in the light of a non-progressive, canonical, Modernism¹⁴, a counter to the vulgar. An ambitious restraint, within a technical coherency and purpose, fitting the natural plan of accreted civic form.

‘When the visible world passes away only a heavenly, crystalline matter and form of the world remains’ ¹⁵

Alan Johnston

Mac Journal Issue 5

ISSN 1355-3046

Notes:

¹ Siegfried Sellitisch, ‘Raume der Kunst’, Verlag Anton Pustet, Vienna, 1997.

² Miriam Gusevich, ‘Purity and Transgression’, Discourse : Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 10, no 1 (Autumn-Winter 1937-8), pp.90-115,109.

³ Ulrich Ruckriem, ‘Raume der Kunst’, Verlag Anton Pustet, Vienna, 1997.

⁴ Alan Reiach, a founding partner of Reiach and Hall also drew on these sources.

⁵ Patrick Geddes, ‘Dramatisations of History’, Bombay and Karachi, 1923.

⁶ ibid

⁷ Murdo Macdonald, ‘The Visual Thinker : Patrick Geddes’ Edinburgh-Yamaguchi Symposium Papers, 1995.

⁸ Both Art Spaces are in Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, appositely part of the Old town, where Geddes centred much of his activities.

⁹ Shinichi Ogawa, Transbody/Super traffic 8 Codes’, Space Design, Tokyo, Number 6, 1999.

¹⁰ This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinise the propriety of our own conduct. Here we find the metaphor of light and the looking-glass which are ruled out by Derrida and by Rorty as self-evidently nonsense, and we find that like Smith, Hume too has recourse to the same analogy when he is trying to clear up the relations of language and of consciousness. “The minds of men are mirrors to one another………….only in so far as they are accompanied by a reflection of which custom renders us insensible”. George Elder Davie, ‘A Passion For Ideas’, Polygon, Edinburgh.

¹¹ Alan Johnston, ‘Thomas Struth : The Looking Glass City’, Reiach and Hall, 1997.

¹² Thomas Struth, ‘Unconscious Places’, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 1988.

¹³ Gerhard Merz, ‘Raume der Kunst’, Verlag Anton Pustet, Vienna, 1997.

¹⁴ In a sense this non progressive pattern is a Vocivian one, in its stasis, its concern with spatial fundamentals.

¹⁵ Jacob Boehme, ‘On the Supersensual Life’, 1622.