A London office building by Witherford Watson Mann is shaped by care for those who built it, those who will occupy it, and those just passing by, finds Michael Badu

Words
Michael Badu
Photos
David Grandorge, Hélène Binet, Philipp Ebeling

Of all the works of man I like best
Those which have been used.
The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges
The knives and forks whose wooden handles
Have been worn away by many hands: such forms
Seemed to me the noblest. So too the flagstones round old houses
Trodden by many feet, ground down
And with tufts of grass growing between them: these
Are happy works.

Absorbed into the service of the many
Frequently altered, they improve their shape, grow precious
Because so often appreciated.
Even broken pieces of sculpture
With their hands lopped off, are dear to me. They too
Were alive for me. They were dropped, yet they were also carried.
They were knocked down, yet they never stood too high…
‘Of All the Works of Man’ , Bertholt Brecht

I was sent this poem by William Mann of Witherford Watson Mann Architects a couple of days after we met to discuss his practice’s new building, Brickfields, a managed small business centre in the east London borough of Hackney. Located right beside Hoxton Overground, it comprises 98 studios ranging from 12 to 400 square metres in size, housed in a faceted, stepped, six-storey volume of brown brick, its name emblazoned in orange glaze.

Approaching the building, I realised that I had actually seen it before on more than one occasion without ever considering that it might be ‘by somebody’.  It’s waxy prismatic bearing seems to deny the entropic ‘dust-to-dust’ character that one usually associates with brick in London, so evident in the soot-stained stocks of the adjacent Kingsland viaduct and particularly noticeable in the lilting mound of the Geffrye Museum, which from nearby Nazrul Street appears as some kind of subsiding grade-I-listed agricultural building, but which is in fact a modern extension to the original eighteenth-century almshouse, designed by Branson Coates in the 1990s.  The material quality of crumbly burnt earth is one that a certain kind of London architect has come to lean on quite heavily – sometimes to the point of fetish – yet in the hands of architects like WWM, the particularity of brick can evince an attitude to architectural culture more generally, in much the same way as the classical orders could for the architects of the Italian Renaissance.

Top, above: Views from the south along Nazrul Street and east along Cremer Street (phs: DG). 

According to Mann, Brecht’s poem expresses WWM’s concern as architects with “the souls of things”. It is possible however to read the poem in a different way, as a paean to the souls of human beings and their emotional lives.  The Branson Coates Geffrye Museum extension could have been inspired by this kind of a reading – architectural design as the emotional expression of its authors – in contrast to the apparent ‘interior monologue’ of Brickfields, where building culture and the DNA of the city appear to manifest unmediated.

Realism and Formalism are poles that dominated the creative life of Brecht, and he wrote lucidly of the problems of artistic work in relation to each. An artist practitioner and Marxist, Brecht firmly held that Realism should be the aim of art but that its achievement necessarily entailed wrestling with problems of form.  The question arises, do these poles also bear on architecture in the same way? The formalism of Branson Coates’ extension is perhaps obvious (perhaps not) but to what extent has WWM addressed the question of form in the making of Brickfields?

Image from project sketchbook; Geffrye Museum extension designed by Branson Coates; Amnesty International HQ designed by WWM (ph: Hélène Binet).

The early pages of the 216 page ‘sketchbook’ prepared by WWM as a record of its creative process during this project would appear to give the answer “a great deal” to this question.  The pencil drawings, first quite tentatively but gradually progressing in conviction – even while not yet approaching finality – detail how the building’s envelope was fashioned from designing street-level experiences of  its exterior. Kinks to the long elevations – two gentle turns to Nazrul Street and a single more powerful one to the eastern viaduct elevation – give rise to a coffin-shaped plan. Curved facades were briefly considered it seems, but the ‘barrel’ plan that would have resulted from a pair of convex facades would surely not have produced the lyrical confluence of matter and figure that the coffin plan would appear to offer, beautifully encapsulated in a little terracotta model cast by the brick makers.

The pencil drawings of WWM’s sketchbook have almost the unselfconscious utilitarian quality of a carpenter’s, but even a carpenter can’t escape the tyranny of ‘gestalt’, perfected form being the accepted insignia of well-crafted implements such as those rhapsodised by Brecht in his poem.

It isn’t very long (by page 20 of the sketchbook to be precise) before –  if you’ll permit me to paraphrase Mies in a way that he would certainly dislike – problems of form begin to give way to those of building. The coffin plan must be inhabited by useful rentable spaces for work.  Circulation must satisfy myriad technical, legislative and spatial requirements; risers and cores must be sized and positioned for structural stability and services distribution; natural light and air must be admitted deep into the centre of the deep plan in order to make an inhabitable interior; and eventually, there is the problem of materials – the what and the how.

Surely not only brick but also steel was unavoidable: steel because of the economic efficiency it offers when building something of this particular size; brick because the whole area is suffused with it. Nevertheless WWM eschewed what many would consider to be more evocative forms of the trusty fired clay, and this decision is something worth dwelling on.

Nazrul Street elevation detail (ph: DG); high-level brickwork (ph: HB).

The hard-fired vitreous purple-brown klinker from Bremen (two hues of it), laid on the barely-recessed cement mortar beds which WWM eventually settled on, makes walls that seem dematerialised, in stark contrast to the telluric character of not only Branson Coates’ expressionist extension over the road, but also of WWM’s first building, Amnesty International’s headquarters (2005) a short walk away in Shoreditch. This effect is heightened by the way the brick configuration morphs to suit the situation. There is English garden wall bond on three sides with stop-end brick reveals to openings on Cremer Street. Basket weave and slender piers (non-structural) give the oblique Nazrul Street view a playful sculptural quality. Cantilevered and stacked herringbone to the south-east corner respond to the muscularity of the viaduct. And, in the intriguingly landscaped outdoor seating area in front of the viaduct, low Flemish-bonded walls evoke the terraced houses that would have historically stood in this location, complete with tiled fire places and timber stair stumps – a modest landscape of supportive armatures for rest and relaxation, that are emotional as well as physical but importantly, not sentimental. Higher up, particularly evident in a facade that progressively steps back in order to take account of the rights-to-light of neighbours opposite, a vertically scored (but otherwise standard-sized) brick is employed in stretcher bond, which dematerialises and lightens these high-level walls even more than the ones below, approximating them to a tiled mansard roof running into the back of the distorted Flemish gable that is the Cremer Street facade.

Cremer Street entrance (ph: DG); view along Nazrul Street from the north (ph: DG).

This is all the result of a deliberate strategy Mann tells me, aimed at reducing the apparent mass of this new rather large building by employing the bricks’ reflectiveness, while at the same time exploiting their colour in order to get as close in feel as possible to the weathered stocks of its neighbours. “Using London stocks would have resulted in a very yellow building”, he explains. Although Brickfields is designed to be ‘long-life and loose-fit’ (even to the extent of having extra capacity for the additional servicing that will be ever-more needed in the future, as we become increasingly reliant on IT), it perhaps would have been asking too much of planners and the public alike to wait a couple of hundred years for those bricks to get dirty enough.

It isn’t uncommon today for architects to apply a layer of dirt on virgin brick artificially by way of slurries and the like in order to accelerate this process, but that would have been absurd, prohibitively expensive or both on a brick building of this size. But even if it were feasible – if they had had, say, the budget of your average Herzog de Meuron scheme – I get the distinct impression that WWM still wouldn’t have wanted to do it.

The outdoor seating area recalls houses that once stood on the site (ph: DG).

The Amnesty International HQ building, with its matt purple-blue bricks set in a consistent bond with flush lime-mortar joints, is much more a poetic commentary on the spec-built Georgian and Victorian terraced buildings which form the principal corpus of London’s (and Britain’s) ‘undesigned’ brick architecture  – for which Mann, like many London architects, expresses a strong admiration – but Brickfields probably has much more substantially to do with this category of building than Amnesty does.

Where Amnesty can perhaps be read as resisting prevailing building culture, Brickfields is much more a reflection of it. In much the same way that ordinary Victorian and Georgian buildings communicate something ‘essential’ about the ‘culture’ they grew out of, in decades to come Brickfields will do the same for the early twenty-first century.  In addition to the choice of brick, another important strategy used on the project was (very cleverly) taking the brickwork off the critical path by setting the windows in a metal stud-framed inner skin that is in turn set within the primary steel structure, with the whole dry assembly lying just behind the wet traded brick ‘overcoat’ (to borrow Sergison Bates’ term).  Building in this way means that you can quickly achieve a watertight envelope so that internal finishes and external brickwork can progress at the same time.

Although this means that the external brick wall doesn’t support the building as such, it otherwise retains as much integrity as WWM could imbue it with. Walls are a full brick-width thick, of ground-bearing construction, with only seven specials employed throughout. The approach adopted obviated the need for brick prefabrication techniques that might otherwise have been necessary on a building of this scale. A small team of brickies would have enjoyed the months spent crafting these walls and they now have the sort of proud and permanent testament to their handiwork that Georgian, Victorian and Babylonian bricklayers would have enjoyed as a matter of course.

How permanent the building will be one can never know – the previous building on the site was demolished after only a 30-year life – but accepting this possible fate, and wanting to cause future generations as little bother as possible, WWM has specified a weak cement mortar which should allow the bricks to be salvaged intact should Brickfields ever be demolished.

The essential construction of the building having been described to me by Mann, an expectation of the interior began to form in my mind. An image of HP Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange came to me – an interior founded on the poetic unveiling of tectonic truths. What I found was something much more rich, complex and human: a warm golden-brown sepulchre of anodised bronze, blonde and dark woods; a sort of civic cocoon of screens railings and partitions, informally strewn with sofas and coffee tables, ethereal and slightly theatrical (accentuated very much by the choice of light fittings and the end-grain wood block floors), rendering the exposed dark-grey painted primary steel structure beyond the immediate perceptual field, rather like a spotlight does to the rest of the stage when it shines on a performer, leaving them present yet greatly subdued.

The informality is, however, carefully choreographed. Every widening or narrowing of walkway, turn of stair, change in floor finish and balcony projection is designed to anticipate human interaction and predicated on an underlying order, albeit an additive and flexible one – material rather than abstract, gothic rather than classical.  Mann admits that he had initially dreamed of something more avowedly tectonic than what has resulted here, a pure language of tensility and trabeation. But in the end he prefers the tough ‘bolted-together’ pragmatism that eventually won out. “We don’t dictate to the constructor how he constructs”, he says. “Brunelleschi may have designed cranes, but we don’t do that today”.

Sketches reveal the early conception of the central light-court as the civic heart of the building, a space of mediation between the street and the work units themselves (which are spartan by comparison, though industrially characterful, particularly as the primary steel structure is allowed to carefully crash through their white plasterboard walls). The golden bronze stairs, platforms and walkways that form the light court are distributed to ensure that the high-level rooflights running the length of the building are always able to supply natural illumination to the deepest parts of the interior, and also to ensure that people can see each other and back through the front door to the pavement from multiple levels and positions, engendering a vital feeling of interconnectedness between fellow occupants and the outside.

All the units with the exception of those at the very top are accessed from the light court. Fire regulations mean that it is necessary for the top storey to function as a smoke reservoir, so the uppermost units (which face eastward) are sealed off from the light court and accessed from stairwells that occupy what would have been work units on the floor below. The walls which contain this smoke reservoir, providing fire and smoke protection to the adjacent units, and upon which the run of rooflights directly bear, are where we get the anticipated Berlage moment as brick and steel finally meet to poetic effect.

And this is precisely the point of the building.  Its strength is that it isn’t a tyrannical totality, but rather a series of moments. It is a building that unfolds itself to both user and passerby in episodic fashion. In this then, there is finally a laying of the cards on the table by WWM, no more apparent than in its trademark exposed precast concrete lintels (which continue the subversion of matter in that half of their working bulk has been hidden). As Donald Judd once said, “my aphorism is not that form follows function but that it never violates it”, function here being at root something akin to the human condition. Not disguising the lintels with brick slips somehow ‘honours’ the work of those brickies. A fully Berlage-esque interior would have oppressed the building’s users. If a formalism is at work then, it’s one that highlights the method of making, like a late, unpolished Michelangelo, distorting itself in favour of human experience, like the broken sculpture of Brecht’s poem.

This lack of absolute coherence is not then indicative of deficiency in design. It of course is somewhat expressive of an essential difference between the culture in which Berlage worked and where we find ourselves today, but it is also expressive of an ethical position.

When the Amsterdam Stock Exchange was built, the dream that societies as well as buildings could be hatched from the drawing board was in its infancy. The metropolis has since emerged triumphant, built by a divided labour necessarily producing divided artefacts of every kind.  Perhaps the chief merit of the kind of architectural practice that has engendered Brickfields is that it is eminently comfortable reflecting this ‘reality’ back to us while still celebrating building as both noun and verb.  With this, its first large building, WWM has demonstrated an ability to give voice to the various actors and interests that are necessary to the making of buildings, cities and societies today, without relinquishing or trivialising the architects’ role as professionals. This is a rare achievement of practice denoting a mastery of both technique and empathy, which in turn provides the foundation from which WWM can confidently embrace the uncertainty of outcome that must attend truly ‘public’ work.

All this discloses a vital tension that lies at the heart of architecture, reflected in the dichotomies of expertise and democracy, form and content, inner and outer life. It is a tension that preoccupied Brecht, and is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mann himself when he says that “buildings are born without a soul and can only gain one through use”.

Additional Images

Credits