Londres | Rivington Place | David Adjaye

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07 September 2007


By Ellis Woodman


With an OBE and a place on last year’s Stirling shortlist David Adjaye has a level of fame that could be seen as disproportionate to his achievements. But his latest building, a base for two cultural organisations in east London, should help redress this imbalance.

Over the next couple of months, Adjaye Associates has four major buildings due to open, its first since the completion of the two Idea Stores in 2004 and 2005. In the interim, the practice’s fame had escalated exponentially. There has been a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, a couple of monographs have been published, the Whitechapel Idea Store was shortlisted for last year’s Stirling Prize, and David Adjaye, at the age of 41, has been awarded an OBE. Concurrently, the east London-based office has established outposts in New York and Berlin, and undertaken commissions in Russia and China. The practice is now, undeniably, a global player.
This stratospheric rise hasn’t passed without criticism. The glamorously austere residences with which the practice first found fame also met with a steady flow of sceptical letters in the architectural press. A number of the early houses certainly represented a challenge to received notions of good urbanism, and as the bloody fallout of Street-Portergate made clear, of good detailing, too.
To his critics, Adjaye was a man in a hurry, prepared to run roughshod over the best interests of his clients in pursuit of a startling architectural effect. That antagonism was undoubtedly compounded by his readiness to appear on camera and, one fears, by his ethnicity too.
In the course of the four-and-a- half years I have been at BD, I have written about Adjaye’s work on two occasions. On both, I have received pained letters from readers convinced that his inclusion in these pages represented an act of tokenism. Doubtless, Adjaye has been both victim and beneficiary of the profession’s embarrassment at the fact that he is our only prominent black architect: an invidious situation to which his only possible response can be to make very good work.
Many of us had hoped the Whitechapel Idea Store would put the matter to rest, but the building was not all it should have been. The project’s gestation was difficult, and sacrifices were made. One of the escalators was chopped, leaving a staircase little more generous than a fire escape as the principal means of circulation: a sticky outcome for an architect whose rhetoric focuses on matters of social interaction. The logic of the facade treatment was also dissipated along the way, resulting in a capriciously distributed melange of coloured glass and painted metal panels.
Whatever criticisms one might care to level at the houses, loss of nerve would surely not be among them. The Idea Store begged the question of whether the practice could translate the singularity of purpose that characterised its early works to a bigger scale.
“Some of the early houses certainly represented a challenge to received notions of good urbanism”

Rivington Place, the first of the new batch of projects to be completed, unequivocally proves it can. Located on the practice’s home turf of Shoreditch, the building provides a shared home for two established cultural organisations. Autograph ABP and the Institute of International Visual Arts are both agencies concerned with developing and promoting the work of artists from ethnically diverse backgrounds. Autograph ABP’s particular focus is on photographic arts, while Iniva’s brief extends to supporting the work of scholars and curators. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall played a central role in the formation of both.
Closing the end of a terrace, the building is long and thin, presenting an 11.4m elevation to Rivington Street and a 35m elevation to the cul-de-sac from which it takes its name, Rivington Place. These two public facades sport a common treatment: a chequerboard grid of black pre-cast concrete panels, infilled with glazing or polyester powder-coated aluminium. Our experience of this materiality proves less than stable. The aluminium is black and glossy, so that under certain light conditions it is indistinguishable from the concrete, and in others, indistinguishable from the glass.
Deceptive scale

The scale is also deceptive. The eight rows of windows relate to five storeys of accommodation, with the effect that the building appears taller than it actually is. This uncertainty is compounded by the chequerboard’s elastic dimensions. Towards the top of the building, the openings grow shorter, while along the length of the Rivington Place facade, they widen. Both of the streets the building addresses are unusually narrow, so our views of the facades are always close and tangential. The false perspectives set up by the concertinaing of the windows is thus read as very pronounced indeed.
From an urban point of view, the logical place to site the front door is on Rivington Street, this being by far the more heavily trafficked of the two routes. However, the building’s depth is such that the only tenable location for the vertical circulation is midway down the plan. Meeting both objectives would have involved sacrificing a large part of the ground floor to corridor, which the architect was understandably reluctant to do. It is a quandary, and one that the adopted solution doesn’t altogether resolve. The front door has been sited some 20m down the side street, where it is accommodated in minimal fashion within a strip of floor-to-ceiling glazing that also provides a small café with its frontage. Here it gives onto a foyer from which the lifts and stair can be accessed directly. For passers-by on Rivington Street, the only real clue to the door’s presence is an aluminium sign mounted above it that hinges out to address them.
Meanwhile, the shorter elevation also has a door, and one which, at 4m in height, is considerably grander. It is intended for use at exhibition openings and as a means of installing large art works in the gallery, which we can see from the street through a wall of full-height glazing. The scale of these apertures powerfully communicates the building’s public role, but it also consolidates a reading of the Rivington Street elevation as the principal one.
“We can see into the gallery from the street via a wall of full-height glazing”


That sense is further confirmed by the saw-tooth skylights that march along the roof, presenting their gable ends to Rivington Place and their vertical faces to Rivington Street. We are left with an impression confusingly at odds with the building’s true organisation. The road and pavements on Rivington Place are due to be exchanged for a level surface, and a number of the ground floor windows on the other side of the street are to be turned into French doors as part of a remodelling by Wells Mackereth Architects. Rivington Place will, therefore, soon read as something more than an alley, and I do wonder whether the building shouldn’t have been oriented emphatically towards it.
The atrium is of modest dimensions in plan but extends for a full three storeys. These are the publicly accessible levels, reached by a stair that flexes around the edge of the space. The couple of windows that provide daylight are augmented by recessed light boxes set behind the aluminium panels, thus maintaining a reading of the metre of the facade. The pattern is wrapped partway onto the side walls in the form of internal windows, which allow the foyer to be overlooked. Adjaye likens the arrangement to the courtyard of an Arabian house — a fanciful analogy, perhaps, but the sense of social animation that has been engineered impresses nonetheless.
At £8 million for 1,445sq m, the budget was less than lavish, and the internal finishes are accordingly basic. Plasterboard predominates, painted in seven shades of grey, which are graduated up the height of the building. That transition is most readily discernible in the foyer, and invests the space with something of the concern for illusion that characterises the exterior.
On the ground floor, the foyer gives onto the café and the gallery. Sited at the back of the plan, the café impinges minimally on our first impressions of the building. After such recent calamities as the Starbucks grafted onto the front of the Hayward Gallery, this is welcome indeed.
Startling sight

The gallery is a generous half cube, dominated by the view across the street through the wall of full-height glazing. It is a startling sight, and doubtless artists will make work that is conceived in relation to it. However, most of the shows to be staged here will have originated elsewhere, and I wonder how many will be well served by such a level of exposure. The potential is there to screen off the view with blinds or to build a partition wall against it. I’ll bet that opportunity will be exploited more often than not.
“It is when we move upstairs that we begin to understand the real magic trick that the building pulls off”

It is when we move upstairs that we begin to understand the real magic trick the building pulls off. The logic of the window distribution may have nothing to do with practicality, but the relationship between the fenestration and the building’s unusually varied range of interiors is always, somehow, a convincing one. That has a lot to do with the fact that although the proportions of window and wall are continually adjusting, their relative dimensions remain essentially equal. As such, the system recalls the way that the windows of a Georgian house vary in size from floor to floor while the ratio of window to wall rarely strays from 50:50.
In terms of detailing, the spaces are generic, but each is distinguished by the singularity of its proportions and the proportions of its glazing. The first floor education room enjoys the largest windows. They wrap around two faces, and on the north elevation frame a resplendently baroque piece of graffiti on a neighbouring wall — a particularly happy accident in a building devoted to marginal cultural expressions. Air-handling kit is neatly recessed into those apertures that are faced externally in aluminium.
On the next storey, the floor-to-ceiling height is jacked up to accommodate an auditorium and library. Sitting to the north of the plan, the auditorium is afforded the more horizontally proportioned windows, while the library at the south end takes an incessant parade of vertical openings. Here the windows sit between bookshelves in birch-faced ply, a material that extends up the walls’ considerable height as a lining.
The foyer stops at this level, so the final two floors are served only by the building’s enclosed escape stair. Here the two organisations have their offices, and Autograph ABP its photography archive. In addition, a substantial area is to be let to other cultural agents with like-minded agendas.
The top floor is distinguished by the saw-tooth skylights, which contract in width as they process from north to south, but these turn out to be rather different from what they at first seem. In truth, there is minimal need for top light, so they are in large part solid.
What light there is comes from an array of small Velux windows which extends across the pitched surfaces. The gesture might be considered superfluous, but it is communicative of the fact that we have reached the top, and enjoyable for that alone.
By no means a perfect building, then, but one of singular and challenging convictions, to which it remains impressively true. It is also a project that suggests how far Adjaye has moved from the concerns of the British architects of his generation. The perverse ingenuity at play is closer in sensibility to a practice like Sanaa than it is to, say, the artful contextualism of Caruso St John or Sergison Bates.
Still to come are the Stephen Lawrence Centre and the Bernie Grant Centre in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Once those are completed, we will be able to assess whether the quality of Adjaye Associates’ work has caught up with the level of its celebrity. Rivington Place is certainly a large step in the right direction.

- Client Autograph ABP/Institute of International Visual Arts
Architect Adjaye Associates
Project manager Bucknall Austin
Service engineer Michael Popper Associates
Structural engineer Techniker
Main contractor Blenheim House Construction

Fonte: bdonline