Adam's House in Paradise

A cluster of 1960s courtyard houses in Lambeth, London. 

The courtyard house may be ancient, but it is still contemporary and modern. This became apparent to me on a recent trip to London, during which I was fortunate enough to stay with a friend who lives in an exquisite single-story L-shaped house with its own private courtyard. The house was originally built as part of the Cotton Garden housing estate in the 1960s and forms part of a cluster of 21 courtyard houses in a park.

Adam bought the house a decade ago and renovated it with the help of Cox Bulleid Architects, converting it from a compact and efficient three bedroom house into more of an open-plan house to suit his lifestyle. The remarkable thing about the renovation is its invisibility: The house barely looks like it's been renovated, updated or restored in any way. Such resilience attests to the exceptional quality of the original design, by none other than the Architect's Department of the London Borough of Lambeth. 

From the exterior, these houses barely look like houses. With their long stretches of one story high solid brick walls in which the only exterior door or window openings occur at offsets, and with trees poking out from behind, the architecture resembles a garden wall (which in fact it is, in part). The idea of unifying the architectural wall with the garden wall can of course be seen in ancient Pompeii, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion as well as his unbuilt courtyard housing schemes of the 1930s, and, in the 1980s, the Casa das Artes in Porto, Portugal, by Eduardo Souto de Moura.

It is worth noting, given the contemporary architectural climate, that there was once a time when talented architects sought to make well-designed housing accessible to a majority of people without seeking fame and notoriety. What a concept.

Cotton Garden Estate courtyard houses and tower blocks

Adam's house

The large sliding door into the courtyard is part of the renovation, as are the
doors of the other wing, which were previously windows.

Image courtesy brutalismandbooze.blogspot.com

The Politics of Crap

Architectural competitions to design *only* the facade of a building are increasingly commonplace in Germany, according to an op-ed piece in the German magazine Bauwelt. These kinds of competitions provide a compromise solution between a city's qualitative interest in maintaing a certain image on the one hand, and property developers' quantitative commercial interest in nothing but the maximum leasable floor area on the other. Architecture is thereby increasingly limited to superficial image, proving Philip Johnson right when he categorized it as "a branch of cake decoration." 


It also proves Peter Eisenman wrong when he says, as he so often does, that architecture built under rightist governments is better than that built under leftist ones. While indeed a very small élitist fraction may be better, the vast majority is utter crap. Perhaps the real question we should be asking this: in which part of the political spectrum does the most crap get built?