P and M
ARCHITECTURE
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
AAT Brasenose College, 'we tried to treat the jAnew work not as a separate building but as another piece of the existing jumble.' At Gospel Oak, the houses 'bristle with life and overgrown gardens and garden sheds and washing and every- day mess. . .
Philip Powell made these two remarks in a talk at the Royal Institute of British Architects last year. Few architects manage to see their own buildings with anything like this layman's detach- ment; and few can describe their precious archi- tecture, even after it has left its pristine state on the drafting board, as part of a complex scene. It is unlikely that this steady view of life is what makes the partnership of Powell and Moya one of the best in Britain, but it is perhaps what gives the firm's work a special flavour. Compared with the prima-donna qualities of the great, monu- ment-raising, world figures of architecture, their approach has a touch of folksiness, but it overlies a highly professional attitude to building design.
Powell and Moya's way can be clearly seen in the addition they have just made to St John's College, Cambridge. For the most part it contains rcoms for undergraduates, with a few flats for fellows as well. The building is a long, buttressed zigzag of Portland stone and glass running out from the college into the Backs behind New Court, Rickman and Hutchinson's notorious 1830 wedding cake. It is fused into the college by the simple but, in this case, artfully handled method of using the new building to form three- sided courtyards with the old ones, keeping roughly to their height and carrying on their tradition of bumpy and spiky rooflines.
The outcome is a series of spaces which hides the fact that this is one of the biggest addi- tions to an old college built in Cambridge since the war. Only on the roof, laid out as a pro- menade and sundeck, can one appreciate the full eight-hundred-foot length of the building as it snakes off into a clump of trees. I have been on only one other roof that lifted my heart so, and that was on top of Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles. Naturally enough on that juggernaut of a building, the Unite's roof is equipped with ventilator cowlings and other structures of a size that would not look out of place on the boat deck of a 50,000-ton liner. These enable it to handle its isolation between the distant Alpes Maritimes on one side and the Mediterranean on the other without seeming lost.
Powell and Moya's Cripps building at St John's has none of this scale or isolation. Its roof is, therefore, a wandering footpath punctuated by little pavilions which contain the tops of the staircases and the bedrooms of some of the student rooms on the floor below. Also a pair of fellows' flats. The scale is not that of a liner but of a village street. As one passes the pavilions they temporarily mask the view iii one direction so that the Cambridge roofscape of spires and spikes and gables and chimney pots keeps re-emerging from different viewpoints. If the idea of putting people and vehicles at dif- This is the first of a series of articles by Terence Bendixson on contemporary architects. ferent levels in cities takes root, this surely is how it should be done.
It is characteristic of Philip Powell that he claims his firm got the job because theirs was a more ordinary building than its rival—a pair of ziggurats by Denys Lasdun. 'I think the college was a bit frightened by them,' he explains. This constant self-mockery seems calculated at first, but it crops up so persistently and in so many ways that it hardly can be. For instance, most architects of any standing, and many without, try to rent premises that reflect their judgment in matters of building design. P and M inhabit part of a humdrum post-war office block in the Tot- tenham Court Road. As you emerge from the lift at the fifth floor there is a thumping plaque advertising some branch of the Ford Motor Company straight in front of your eyes, and above it, hardly noticeable, a minnow of a sign saying 'Powell and Moya.'
Powell laughs also at his becoming an archi- tect. 'I had always imitated my elder brother. If he had become an estate agent, my ambition would no doubt have been to become an estate agent. He became an architect so I wanted to be one,' he told the RIBA. And just to show that this bumbling is not confined to himself he added that up to the last minute Moya had been destined to become a bank clerk.
There is a corresponding absence of pomp and monumentality in the firm's work. Nothing like Sir Basil Spence's bombastic, Union Jack- splashed pavilion for the 1967 Montreal world's fair could come out of the P and M office. Their approach to exhibitionism is exemplified by the Skylon, the 'vertical feature' they designed for the Festival of Britain. Its elegant tapering spire supported on a tripod of stays and struts was a nice combination of wit and symbolism. It also caught the fancy of the Marquis of Bath suffi- ciently for him to want it as a folly at Longleat. The hope was that a helicopter would be able to swoop down on it there but this proved too costly so the idea was abandoned.
Powell talks about things like this entertain- ingly for all his shyness. Odd remarks have the effect of depressing some internal soda syphon lever and laughter and giggles come splashing out. His ruffled, tweedy appearance gives no sign of his being an architect and his conversation has none of the earnest agony about buildings that characterises his successors, the generation of architects who did their training in the strained years immediately after the Second World War.
The job that put the firm on the map was Churchill Gardens, the huge neighbourhood they designed in the 1940s for Westminster City Council across the Thames from Battersea Power' Station. They won a competition to get it and this jumped them at one stroke from struggling to successful architects. Since then Powell and Moya's luck seems never to have let them down, as new hospitals or Oxbridge college buildings come rolling their way.
Their first hospital, Princess Margaret at Swin- don (which led to others at Slough and High Wycombe, with work in progress on a fourth at Wythenshawe, Manchester), followed the 'matchbox on a muffin' layout worked out by American architects after the war. Its uni- formly-sized wards are piled on top of one another to form a slab—the matchbox—which stands on a low building containing theatres, clinics, kitchens and other eccentric elements— the muffin. At Wexham Park, Slough, P and M scrapped this fashionable American plan, took another look at war-time bungaloid hospitals and concluded that bungalow wards planned like a fishbone were good in principle but needed de- velopment. The result is a highly intelligent adaptation which perfectly demonstrates their ability to be original without being outré. May- field School, Putney, is another P and M job— a comprehensive for 2,000 children, which feels comfortable because the buildings are low and planned so they cannot all be seen at once. Of their Oxbridge colleges it is perhaps enough to say that the addition to Brasenose became a cause celebre, sufficient to win over such discriminating and status-conscious clients as St John's, Christ Church and Corpus Christi, Oxford.
Another enviable job, and a recent one, is the new Museum of London which they are design- ing for the Barbican. On top of it will be the last of the phalanx of glass-box office towers that have been built along London Wall. It will be interesting to see how they handle curtain wall- ing, since smooth architectural packages have never appealed to them. Their penchant has been for a more complex and sinewy architecture in which the frame is made an object of delight and not tucked carefully out of sight like the chassis of a car.
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