KASA Open Lecture - Graham Stirk
Last Tuesday evening (7 April) at the Kent School of Architecture proved to be a fitting climax to the KASA (Kent Architecture Students Association) spring lecture series with students, staff, and a good number of outside visitors, enjoying a lecture from Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
Graham has worked with Richard Rogers since the early eighties and began his talk with a grainy black and white picture of himself, on his first day, visiting a site that was to become the Rogers office in Hammersmith. He then proceeded to show a terrific range of their built and unbuilt projects which encapsulate many of the key ideas underlying their work. Grouping them around themes such as movement, flexibility, hierarchy, and context he incorporated images of some of modern architecture’s most recognisable buildings such as the Pompidou Centre, Lloyds of London, the Millennium Dome, and Madrid’s Barajas Airport along with particular favourites including 88 Wood Street in London and the wonderful Penafiel Winery in Spain. There is, of course, a recognisable architectural style here which is underpinned by the desire to celebrate how things are put together. But this expression of tectonic clarity, responsive to climate and context, brings a delicacy of scale and resulting humanity, particularly with the increasingly frequent use of timber for structural and cladding components.
Another common theme running through their work has been how their buildings relate to the public realm. Extending, connecting and making decent civic space remains of central importance to the practice, often beyond the clients’ initial intentions: the wonderful space in front of the Pompidou was not in the original brief, nor was it the developer’s intention to have such an extensive or high public space under the Leadenhall office building in the City of London (one hopes the interruption to the building’s progress will be temporary).
The work remains progressive, democratic and visionary - an optimistic architecture - which was, on this spring evening in Kent, warmly received!
Jef Smith