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Castle Overload: a trip to Cardiff and Swansea, Wales

Wales has a slogan that is something along the lines of “Wales has more castles per square mile than probably anywhere else in the world.” While they do use the “probably,” (to avoid a lawsuit I’m sure) I did manage to see four of them on a three day trip last week.

The trip began with a short (about two hour) train ride from Paddington to Cardiff Central last Wednesday evening to meet up with my wife who had already arrived to attend a conference. Our hotel, cleverly named “Sleeperz” could not have been any closer to the train line running into the station:

The hotel was actually very nice, and the location near the station is well-situated for walking around Cardiff. The windows were nearly soundproof, so the trains weren’t an issue and allowed me to see a wide variety of passenger trains that seemed to be far more eclectic than what you’d typically see in London.

I ventured to Cardiff Castle on my first full day in town. The first line of its Wikipedia entry summarises its history beautifully:

Cardiff Castle (Welsh: Castell Caerdydd) is a medieval castle and Victorian architecture Gothic revival mansion, transformed from a Norman keep erected over a Roman fort in Cardiff, the capital of Wales.

The Castle also has a small museum where a portion of the original Roman wall has been excavated, and there is a Welsh military museum in the basement. On the castle ground, the keep was (quite literally) the high point of my visit. It was once connected at high level to the outer wall, but when landscape architect Capability Brown was hired to re-plan the grounds approximatley 200 years ago he had many of the ancient structures on the site dismantled and had the moat around the keep filled in (it’s since been re-watered).

Moving indoors, the house at the Castle has seen the most drastic changes over the years. While Henry Holland made changes in the late 18th Centrury, it was the Third Marquess of Bute and his architect William Burges that reinvented it during the Victorian era. The lavish interiors have recently been restored to most of their original beauty. This tightly-cropped shot shows the ceiling in the “Arab Room,” which was often used as a guest bedroom:

For a more complete history of Cardiff Castle, there is an excellent archeological summary here, provided by Cardiff University.

I spent most of the rest of the day wandering around Cardiff. It’s hard to miss Millenium Stadium by Populous Architects (formerly HOK Sport)- it’s wedged between the Taff River and the city. I’d probably like the stadium more if it weren’t for the fading coloured panels that encircle it, it already looks dated. In any case, here it is poking out from behind a number of other buildings:

The rest of the day was a whirlwind tour of Victorian and Edwardian arcades:

Followed by a trip to Cardiff Bay:

While nearly every photo of the Millenium Centre (designed by Capita Architecture) shows only the enormous front facade with Welsh lettering cut out of metal panels above the entrance, I think it’s important to show the surroundings. The area surrounding the development at Cardiff Bay is pretty decrepit, and I question spending so much money building a shopping/culture/entertainment area when there are numerous underused older buildings standing literally across the street. The Millenium Centre is not impressive as Architecture, it’s poorly detailed and built from a cacophony of external material that come together awkwardly at the corners:

The back of the building is a sea of red brick and security devices:

The high security is owing to it’s location next door to the Senedd, the National Assembly for Wales (by Richard Rogers):

I’ll reserve judgment on this building for now. I am sure it looks better in nicer weather, and I didn’t get to go inside.

The following day, I traveled via train to nearby Caerphilly where I saw Caerphilly Castle:

That’s not the real Castle, it’s a model that stands across the moat from the “real” thing:

The word real is in quotes because much of the castle was built in the 1930s as part of an extremely ambitious restoration (reconstruction) process funded by several of the Marquesses of Bute- the same family behind the work done at Cardiff Castle. Replica siege engines have been built, and the Great Hall has been restored. Not only were demolished buildings at the Castle rebuilt, a large part of the town that had grown up around the Castle walls was torn down in order to re-water the moat in the mid 20th Century. The Castle was originally built in the 1200s, and is one of the largest in the UK. It’s an early example of a concentric castle- the combination of outer walls and lakes would have made the castle very difficult to approach.

The next day, my wife and ventured over to Swansea, an hour from Cardiff by train. The remnants of a castle site next to a fountain and central square which had a temporary merry-go-round set up:

Note the exceptionally hideous BT Tower that sits directly behind the castle. It appeared that some condos were under construction about four metres from the side of the ruins as well, but it was hard to tell whether they’d been stalled by the recession or not.

We also ventured to Mumbles by bus. Mumbles (don’t you love the name) was a Victorian seaside resort and has the requisite pier to prove it. Too bad they couldn’t install some Old-Timey wrought iron CCTV cameras:

Mumbles, in reality, has a history that stretches back far beyond the 1890s- the area has been inhabited for about 3,000 years. Neighbouring Oystermouth contains the ruins of a castle (aptly named Oystermouth Castle). We saw people in costumes running around inside and assumed they had broken in to play a role-playing game, but I later discovered that they were most likely rehearsing for one of the open air Shakespeare productions that take place inside during the summer.

I’ll leave you with a final image of “The Big Apple” in Mumbles, tragically damaged by a reckless driver (according to the bus driver who dropped us off there). It is supposedly under repair:

The House of the Future is in Your Pocket

In their short essay “But Today We Collect Ads” of 1956 Allison and Peter Smithson make the case that architecture has become irrelevant in the face of advertising:

“Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,
Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,
And Charlotte Periand brought a new
object to the office every morning,
But today we collect ads.”

They incorporated the spirit of mid-century advertising into their work through their plastic “House of the Future” they prepared for the “This is Tomorrow” exhibit of 1956 (while proposed a seamless plastic home,  in reality it was even less substantial- the mockup was built by a contractor out of bits of wood and plaster and covered over with glossy paint).

Beatriz Colomina, in her essay about the House of the Future titled “Unbreathed Air 1956″ quotes Allison Smithson:

“A house designed like a car is at some disadvantage, for the appliances would be so closely integrated into the structure, that to change the refrigerator would be like getting a larger glove compartment in a ‘Volkswagen’ dashboard—it would be simpler to get a new car.” (Colomina 37)

Colomina correctly points out “the house becomes expendable, a throwaway object” because it would be impossible to adapt it as the occupants’ needs changed. Architecture is now, in 1956, seen as a mass-produced commercial product. They were ready to move beyond the age of the monumental grain elevator and into a glossy, disposable future. The 1950s were a time of increasing prosperity in Britain as rationing came to an end. Colour magazines and television were available, and American consumer products were being imported along with the American idea of planned obsolescence (Andrew Jackson talks about this era in his Designing Britain series here).

Critic Reyner Banham was  similarly seduced by successful consumer goods- particularly American ones. Even more specifically, he is in love with self-contained gizmos like the outboard boat motor, transistor radios and portable welding kits. His essay “The Great Gizmo” goes as far as to praise Americans for one-upping Archimedes because “the American gizmo can get by without any infrastructure.” Banham praises devices that “leave craftsmanship behind at the factory” and attributes Sears and Roebuck to making the West “habitable and civilized.” This is all coming from a man who spent a large portion of his career writing about infrastructure, from grain elevators to the Los Angeles freeway system. “The Great Gizmo” was written in 1965, about a decade after the Smithsons’ piece.

Allison and Peter Smithson’s experimentation with a plastic future only lasted a brief moment, they returned/continued with Brutalism  (a term they had created just a few years earlier in 1954). This essay shows them struggling with societal change and architecture’s response by embracing the new. However, their resulting architectural output, their House of the Future, was nearly forgotten. The work that became best known and subsequently defined their place in architectural history were the heavy concrete buildings of the 1960s and 1970s:

Robin Hood Gardens, by Allison & Peter Smithson

Banham differs in his approach, as he deals with the consequences of technology in his essay. He points out the weakness of American domestic architecture when compared to industrial architecture conceived for production, and discusses the shortcoming of contemporary American cars built for the newly expanding freeways. In this instance, he accuses the infrastructure (the freeways) of causing the gizmos (the cars) to become dependent on them and therefore, worse. He points out that the temporary and unrefined nature of American homes may be a temporary phase until a “definitive shape… emerges to fix the style of the gizmo-residence.” He recognizes that the gizmo itself is intrinsically related to the rest of society.

While Banham readily admitted that there would ultimately be a form housing would take that would be complementary to technology, the Smithsons suggest embracing all that is new immediately and making a home that responds to the very minute. “Collecting ads” seems in actuality to be a call to embrace the consumerist impulse of the moment and build a world out of it.

The buildings the Smithsons built did not lend well to adaptation, and a lack of commitment to long term maitenance and government policy changes prevented Brutalist housing from living up to its potential. The Smithsons’ own Robin Hood Gardens is under threat of demolition and other Brutalist landmarks (the movement they named) have already been torn down. In some cases, they are being ‘regenerated’ by developers  (Own Heatherley tackles the regenerationof Park Hill in Sheffield in an excellent piece for The Gaurdian). In the end, the housing Allison and Peter Smithson built because as disposable in the eyes of the mass public as the House of the Future they suggested in the mid-1950s (though most people think Brutalism is fine for the wealthy and nobody is calling for the demolition of the Barbican). Many of the grain elevators they saw as relics of the past inthe 1950s will outlast Robin Hood Gardens.

Today, there is little discussion about what a House of the Future would look like- in fact, the most famous example (by Monsanto at Disneyland) dates from the 1960s and resides at yesterland.com. The typical home of today in both Britain and the United States is still a traditional-looking shell (though often made of vinyl and fake brck) and enabled by technology. The gizmo has won out over the building and the “gizmo-residence” is anywhere with WiFi or 3G wireless service.

The iPod is the (present) ultimate in self-contained gadgets- it requires no hard-wired infrastructure connection, mouse, keyboard or peripherals. In fact, it doesn’t even provide you with a method for connecting them. While the Evinrude outboard motor that Banham loved may have allowed you to mount a motor on any boat with  little in the way of skill or tools, the iPhone is limited only by what software developers create for it (and manage to get approved by Apple, of course).  Banham focused on mechanical devices that did specific tasks and failed to see that in the future you wouldn’t need a “precise gadget” to deal with a variety of tasks- one gadget can now function as your phone, camera, research library, file cabinet, Rolodex and more. Social networked and augmented reality applications allow another world to be created on top of the physical one.  Banham believed the most futuristic home (circa 1965) was the recreational vehicle that allowed its residents to be endlessly mobile. Instead of needing a traveling home, we live our lives in virtual space enabled by a gizmo that fits in your shirt pocket. I think Reyner Banham would approve.

Today, you don’t need a new environment to live or work in. You just need a new application.

1. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The Appliance House,” Design (May 1958): 47. Reprinted in A. and P. Smithson, Changing, 116 cited in “Unbreathed Air 1956″  by Beatriz Colomina, MIT Press Grey Room Spring 2004, No. 15: p. 37. K. Beckman et al. ed.

#lgnlgn

Timber Frame Construction: What’s wrong in the UK?

I spotted this article in Building Magazine about insurers threatening to pull cover for timber frame buildings.This, combined with highly publicized recent fires in London on building sites in Camberwell and Peckham. While investigations are ongoing, the whole thing seems a bit strange to me. Nearly all non-high rise apartment buildings in California are timber frame, due to the high seismic performance, low cost and environmental benefits of this form of construction. At the job I worked at prior to moving to London, I was did construction administration on a site composed of 15 timber-framed buildings in Oakland, California. Despite the its location in a statistically high-crime, urban area, nobody considered building in timber a high-risk proposition.

Why is there paranoia about fire on construction sites in the UK, whereas it is not a problem in California?  I have a feeling it is because large construction sites in urban areas in California have security on the job site 24 hours a day. It is very common for large buildings to be constructed on tight urban sites up to five stories tall entirely out of timber. While arson may be more common in the UK, it seems that with proper alarm systems and supervision it is entirely possible to prevent these sort of incidents from happening. The benefits of timber construction seem too great to rule out the method due to poor implementation so far.The biggest part of the problem seems to be that timber is unfamiliar to many contractors, and proper precautions are not taken because the disconnect between timber frame contractors and the general contractor (on many jobs in the US, the lead contractor is responsible for the timber frame).

7 acres of Timber Frame construction at Tassafaronga Village, Oakland CA

Hopefully, many of these problems can be worked out. Interest in this type of construction in the UK is high in light of the desire to reduce CO2 in construction- it seemed that innovative methods of timber construction were everywhere at last week’s Ecobuild conference here in London.

Timber frame under construction in Oakland