Dear Grandchild,
It is Tuesday evening, and this weekend was busy enough that I postponed writing you until today. Over the past week, work has been much more a matter of traditional design. On the Communique Headquarters, I developed the ground floor café plans of the building. The café is a significant element because it ensures that this private office building will have a public engagement with the neighbourhood.
One small victory for the functional brief of the building was the client’s decision to develop the entire area under the building as an outdoor café space. This means using what was formerly three parking spaces as a covered outdoor area, and fully glazing the two main sides of the ground floor. If executed well, the impact of this development on the neighbourhood should be substantial and positive.
At the same time, the dilemma for the architecture is the fact that a fully glazed café façade affords less possibility for sculptural architectural features. I have been grappling with the question of how best to frame the project in design terms each time the brief has changed.
I have also questioned how a façade pattern or re-cladding of a building in stone can have a strong sustainability and well-being story attached to it. There is a question of façade performance, certainly. But beyond that, is the design of a building envelope pattern mainly an aesthetic concern, particularly when the budget is so limited? This has been a difficult question for me to answer.
While it is true that architectural design touches on issues of human organisation, and that there is an opportunity to influence the way we live as human beings, design is at the same time a very aesthetic act. The shaping of matter, of space, of light, and shadow are truly fundamental to our discipline, and perhaps there are times when the rhetoric of sustainability must give way to the song of form.
Your grandfather. 28 October, 2014. London.
