CHECKING IN
AUGUST 2017
In July, following a recent opportunity to begin designing a concept store for fashion brand HiPanda, two of the NMLA team were lucky enough to travel to Tokyo for a site visit.
After leaving the airport, we begin driving through the narrow Tokyo streets as the dizzying cityscape towers upwards. Some things seem similar, but always more…vertical. Stepping out of the car the humid air quickly envelops, reminding us we are certainly not in Camden anymore. Pure overstimulation.
Stepping into Hotel Okura’s lobby the chaos of the megalopolis washes off and is replaced with Zen. Passing the immaculately stacked wall of umbrellas, the ‘bell captain’ gracefully bows with a slight smile seeing how large my eyes have become. The dimly lit mirage of greens and browns is so consistently assembled it seems to hum. While the giant world map hanging on the wall is supposed to remind us of the new time zone, it instead seems to catapult us back 5 decades, straight into a scene from Madmen. The hotel’s 60s style interior has remained completely untouched. And it’s marvellous. Even the impeccable uniforms of the staff match the muffled beige palette. While at each turn there are plethora patterns and textures, it still feels incredibly understated.
Designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi and Hideo Kosaka in 1962, the modern design clearly references more traditional Japanese forms and palettes. Unfortunately, the original Northern Wing of the hotel (which was arguably the most authentic and impressive of the two) was demolished in 2015 to make way for a much larger tower ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Despite widespread outcry to try and save the adored modernist relic, the Northern Wing fell to the wrecking ball .
Yet so many aspects of the Southern Wing still hold endless charms and we were so lucky to experience them. Warm timber and brass detailing forms the backdrop to lighter elements like shoji screens and ornate wall hangings. The wide low spaces are punctuated by dangling hexagonal pendants and potplants. When standing in the space you can instantly see why writers have been inspired to set their scenes within these walls. James Bond spent a night or two here, while local writers seem equally enamoured, and Haruki Murakami sends Aomame here in his unnerving and fantastical 1Q84.
While Tokyo charges ahead into the future almost everywhere you look, it was so special to witness this elegant design, perfectly frozen in time.
FIAT-MIRAFIORI
NOVEMBER 2014
FIAT-MIRAFIORI, Turin, Italy
Located in a suburb of post-industrial Turin, once the ‘Fordist world’s most prototypical town’, the proposal is for a campus university sited within the endless 20m x 20m concrete grid of Fiat’s behemoth Mirafiori plant (1939). The proposed high-speed railway link between Lyon, Turin and Budapest is seen as a driving agent in re-establishing the city and its traditional expertise in manufacturing within a wider European context. The project is an exploration of the open-plan, balancing the generic with the particular by interweaving new programmes and functions into the repetitive matrix of the existing concrete frame.
The design focuses on the sectional distribution of the master plan, with workshops, offices, lecture theatres and public squares at ground level, and housing, communal facilities, nursery schools and shared gardens inhabiting the building’s roof. Occupying a site equivalent in area to Turin’s historic centre, the project envisages Mirafiori as a new city quarter articulated by the shifting presence of production, research, commerce and living.
The images above depict an installation built as a 1:500 representation of the site. Conceived as a simple armature, the model afforded a large-scale, neutral, three-dimensional surface that momentarily held the light and colour cast by a moving, digital projection. I was interested in how this plain surface could take the role of both narrative device, upon which the dynamic history of the building’s conception, construction and early operation could be retraced and re-recorded, and serve as a framework within which to test differing scenarios for the site’s re-inhabitation.
Reflecting on the experience of making this installation, I have now come to realise that what had started out as process of historic site analysis, drawn to scale and illustrated through light, had become (quite unintentionally) suggestive of a proposed architecture. Experienced at 1:1, the installation produced a dreamy environment of diaphanous surfaces, coloured light and whirring sound. Whilst the subject and intent of the installation was still historical, it no longer just retold but ‘produced’ a shifting architecture, temporary in nature and formed through the lightest touch of light, colour, diffraction and shadow. Exploring this disjunction between intent and outcome a bit further, I can now recognise that through the initial planning, fabrication and composition, activities that at the time I only understood as a means to an end, I had already made a series of decisions about the installation’s form, scale and materiality. The subsequent processes of animation, projection, filming and finally editing footage and sound together, added further faculties of decision, critique, editorship and importantly chance or accident. Each, in turn, contributed an iteration – an opportunity to reflect, develop and transform – which, slowly but surely, transformed a representation of the past into a proposal for the future.
Alastair Browning is a member of the Auckland Castle team at Niall McLaughlin Architects. His thesis project FIAT-Mirafiori, undertaken whilst studying with Unit 17 at the Bartlett and tutored by Niall McLaughlin, Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Michiko Sumi, has been selected as one of 11 highly-achieving postgraduate projects from across London’s architecture schools to exhibit at the Architecture Foundation’s Futures in the Making Exhibition.
Futures in the Making is being held at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Twenty Tottenham Street, London W1T 4RF ( Until the 28th November 1.45 – 6pm)