Upper LAWN Pavilion - documento completo PDF

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INTRO POUR COMMENCER :

The Upper Lawn Pavilion (also known as the Solar pavilion) was Alison and Peter Smithsons’ weekend home in Wiltshire in the countryside in South-West England. The building is an important moment in the architects’ research on alternatives to suburban (residencial) houses, on the combination of found structures with contemporary, prefabricated materials and on the way a dwelling might translate the “art of living”.

EN BREF LES ARCHITECTES : Wife and husband pair Alison (22 June 1928 – 16 August 1993) and Peter Smithson (18 September 1923 – 3 March 2003) formed a partnership that led British Brutalism through the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with a vocabulary of stripped down modernism, the pair were among the first to question and challenge modernist approaches to design and urban planning. Instead, they helped evolve the style into what became Brutalism, becoming proponents( promoteur, advocate) of the "streets in the sky" approach to housing.

❖ WHAT IS BRUTALISM Its one aspect of the International style of architecture that was created by le Corbusier and his leading fellow architects Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and that demanded a functional approach toward architectural design. The name was first applied in 1954 by The English architects Peter and Alison Smithsons to the post 1930 style of the major french architect LECORBUSIER.

❖ WHAT ABOUT THE CONTEXT Born in Stockon-on-Tees, Peter began studying architecture in Newcastle, then part of Durham University, but was interrupted in his studies by the outbreak of the Second World War. Enlisting in the army and fighting as an engineer in India and Burma, he met Alison Gill upon his return to Durham University after the war ended. After the completion of Alison's own architecture degree, the pair married in 1949 and initially joined the architectural department of London County Council, then in charge of a wide range of powers including city planning and council housing.

The disruption of the war led to huge changes in society that gave the Smithsons their break. A new expansion of education following the passing of the 1944 Butler Education Act created an entirely new form of school; the Secondary Modern. The baby boom and this new schooling system required new, architecturally bold school buildings on a massive scale—winning the commission while still in their early twenties, the Smithsons were able to use the boost to set up their own practice. Hunstanton School, a starkly stripped-down formal building, immediately attracted attention from critics for its resolutely formal plan and for going against the prevailing method of easily replicated modular school buildings. The building was nevertheless pragmatic and a relative success, proving cheap, well planned and popular with staff, although severe problems with glazing and heating emerged over time. Using the cachet provided by Hunstanton to join Team X's challenge to modernism from within the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and form their own design philosophy, the Smithsons helped form the core tenets of Brutalism: low cost modularity, material focus and purity and, most importantly for the Smithsons, buildings that reflected their inhabitants and location, ones that fostered community—Modernism with a Human Face. Ambitious and defiantly avant-garde, the pair's impact on the architectural scene in Britain was enormous.

COMPARISON

UPPER LAWN PAVILION On the pre-existing exterior wall they mounted a very simple structure, like a box, with floor-to-ceiling windows acting as walls. The windows are framed in wood, which is exposed in the interior and covered in zinc on the exterior side. The structure of wooden beams is supported by the existing exterior wall and in the interior by a beam of concrete, poured on-site and anchored to the wall of the old chimney. At both extremities there are square columns placed at a 45° angle. This system permits the façades not to be supported on the floor and, in this way, allows the sliding doors to be used the length of the façade which leads to the garden.

SMITHDON HIGH SCHOOL This is a two-storey, flat roofed, roughly symmetrical rectangular block with two internal courtyards and a central double-height hall spanning two main ranges. The classrooms are all on the first floor reached by individual stair columns- or columns that service at most 3 classrooms. This was done to prevent the perceived noise and disruption caused by long corridors. The classrooms were fully glazed, with obscured panels below cill height. It was built using a galvanised steel frame with buff sandlime brick infill. The steel framed windows were fitted without subframes. There were single storeyed workshops and kitchens to north. A feature is the steel framed water tower with steel tanks, built between the blocks....