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The Architect's Journal No 03 Vol 228 June 2008 _ Research Engine
A recent stimulating visit to the much-admired and richly awarded addition to Reiach and Hall Architects’ Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney (AJ 05.07.07), raised expectations for the Beatson Institute. The Orkney building is an examplar of sensitive architectural coexistence and contextuality, gracefully taking its place among existing buildings. Its form, simultaneously justified by internal and external circumstance, is enclosed by a convincingly complex, responsive and relaxed carapace.
The same cannot be said of the Beatson Institute, situated in north-west Glasgow on the Garscube Estate (which was a private landed estate until 1948 and now houses University of Glasgow buildings). In fact, the Orkney arts centre and the Beatson building are sharply contrasting, revealing Reiach and Hall’s versatility and throwing a bright light on contemporary architectural schizophrenia.
The Beatson Institute’s preconceived Hi-Tech formalism suggests that any fraternising with pre-existing and adjacent developments on this site would interfere with its purpose, which justified its existence and form.
The new building sits on its own lawn within a walled garden, carefully concealing a rather odd corridor link to an existing building and a ‘plant stockade’, which is both discrete and discreet. Its elegant and highly ‘Modern’ style serves the apparent intention of separateness. Its don’t-touch external air invites respect but not affection; its interiors are beautiful, a machined research engine appearing to resist human violation. The image is that of a highly specialised and expensive institute intended to attract and retain top-quality researchers. If that is the client’s intention, it is a triumphant success, although one may feel the overtness of this intention is somewhat overstated.
Consciously or unconsciously, the building follows Foster’s Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich. In this case, the form is rectangular, but the buildings share a roundness, storey-high glass panels, extreme transparency and inevitable entry problems. The severe pre-emptive geometry of this pre-packaged formalism, combined with the absence of front or back, means that entry – an invariant element of architecture – continues to be unresolved. Modern architecture is particularly susceptible to this shortcoming, and typically buildings such as Niemeyer’s Brasilia Cathedral and Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin recklessly avoid the issue. The undeterred return to unsolved, or unsolvable, architectural problems is either heroic or foolhardy or both. In any event, it is a fascinating attempt to square this architectural circle.
Essentially, all buildings are parcels of single or closely-packed, multi-cell volumes of varied plan and sectional ordering. The wrapping, with the possibility of local variations in stiffness, thickness, transparency, colour and texture has an intense capability of artistic and functional orchestration, and thus an opportunity for combining artistic self-expression and public pleasure.
Recent and current practice is heavily into two types of packaging – a loose bubble or a tight stretch-wrap. While each is very different in form, their generality, and the priority given to technical performance, paradoxically manage to disassociate the façade from internal and external obligations. The highly seductive stretch-wrapping technique deprives architecture of much cultural and historic richness.
The choice by Reiach and Hall of a stretch-wrapped building, which largely delegates design outcome to friendly technologists and willing computers, is possibly unselfish and admirably unegotistical. The façade, while conceptually simplistic, is also a highly complex and technically brilliant tour de force that is essentially subcontracted to the glass-curtain-wall supplier. The design of the fritted glass wrapping is generously attributed to an artist but has the beauty of an industrial or product design. However, its perfect autonomy also divides it in a difficult-to-understand but easily recognisable way from architectural complexity. Its pristine ambition is vulnerable to pragmatic necessity and this exposes the manifest weakness of the current plethora of stretch- and bubble-wrapped buildings whose motivation is primarily image-making. The absence of strong top-ness, bottom-ness and end qualities in this genre gives this building an attractive, somewhat melancholy air of a gigantic, carefully neglected, abandoned aquarium. Oddly beautiful in an oddly non-architectural way.
This final form is also victim of a seductive but premature diagram, which results in an ingenious but flawed execution. It is surmisable that the form has been developed from a squarish doughnut ideal. This typology has no back or sides – its notional rear elevation normally subsumed within an atrium – and suffers from inevitable problems relating to locational legibility and contextual obligations, as well as the previously noted entry conundrum.
From the plan, it is possible to discern the remaining traces of a triple-nested racetrack layout and an obvious abandonment of rotational pinwheel symmetry. The schema is not robust or flexible enough to resist or absorb integral programmatic demands related to circulation and isolation. Nor is it immune to additional client requirements, budgetary limitations and other adjustments common in the realities of normal practice.
The placing of staircases and the consequent absence of hierarchal vertical movement also complicates the geographical and circulatory legibility. Apart from the subtle modelling of the elegant theatre floor, the section is devoid of any possible manipulation that might have mitigated small room proportions.
The adroitness and dexterity of the designers in sustaining a considerable part of their design intentions is both admirable and enjoyable, but does not repair or conceal the aforementioned damage caused by and to the original plan and sectional intentions.
The apparent repositioning of a laboratory results in the erosion of the pinwheel and other improvisations. Likewise, the apparently previously ‘empty’ ground floor has been skilfully taken over, but has created a ‘tunnel’ which bisects the plan and connects two equally valid entrances, named for ‘staff’ and ‘visitors’ rather than front and back. An ad hoc stair and some off-rectangular partitions and internal light wells suggest a tentative but unrealisable redesign.
The unusually high use of glass creates a transparent and friendly ambience, but one that may not survive any future dense use. Similarly, the unusual school-like open-plan laboratories – beautifully designed and inhumanly tidy – must prove their practicality under intense use.
This analysis of the Beatson building has deliberately focused on its inherent architectonics, in contrast to the operational and social review currently in the ascendency. As such it should be read as a critique of the disturbing superficiality of current architecture.
Not withstanding the above, the Beatson laboratory is certainly an enhancement to the Garscube Estate, and a worthy, if tempered, contribution to Scotland’s future architectural heritage.
Isi Metzstein
ISSN 0003 8466 _ copyright
The Architect's Journal 2008
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