Kiefer technic showroom elevations12/28/2022 This architecture is a literal evocation of the limestone bones of its landscape, yet also a mysterious found object that invokes subtler ideas and reactions. So, too, is the way the building not only evades typological labels, but radiates ‘otherness’. The physical dramas of geology obviously fascinate Skene Catling: her practice’s Hidden House scheme on a steep hillside at Formentor, Majorca, makes a visible virtue of the rock-face behind the building.Īt Flint House, the direct contextual expression, using brusque materials, is gripping. Towards the highest portion of the wedge, flint gives way to an ‘evaporation’ of chalk facings earth to sky, solid to immaterial. ‘Here, a team were brought together and challenged to combine the full vocabulary of flint techniques as they progressed from the base to the top of the building.’ ‘Flintwork is usually focused on the restoration of existing buildings, rather than innovation in new structures,’ she says. Skene Catling conceived the base of Flint House as being ‘almost ripped raw from the ground’, with large galleted flints and black lime mortar at the lowest layer, rising in smooth, finely jointed square flint blocks through increasingly pale layers. This is very clear in the layered materiality of the elevations. This interest in bigger pictures is evident in Skene Catling’s critical writing, where there is a focus on issues to do with cities, humanity and the digital age: Venezuelan slums, for example the resilient complexity of London’s historical and commercial development the super-visual virtual world versus the ‘hyper-haptic’ reality of buildings.įlint House falls into the hyper-haptic category – a direct expression of the soil and geology from which it juts. ‘Flint House falls into the hyper-haptic category – a direct expression of the soil and geology from which it juts’ Her practice, co-founded with Jaime de la Peña, has produced mainly small-scale work for private or branded clients, though in one project – as part of a team designing a masterplan for a creative community on the edge of Doha – the scale and environmental innovation is considerable. She believes that this degree of intense investigation of context should apply to any architectural or place-making situation. This often gets lost. A lot of architects work from superficial ideas. She describes the development of the design as ‘a combination of a forensic examination of a place, looking for triggers for a creative process that gets transformed into architecture. Our early discussions were not about architecture, but about the landscape, and how a building could reveal some fundamental quality of the site.’ You could almost have been embedded in a deep forest. The site was overgrown and you couldn’t see it through the trees. ‘The fields were ploughed, and the site itself was very strange. ‘We first saw it in the middle of winter,’ Skene Catling recalls. The narratives and allusions at play in the design are the work of a finely tuned, thoroughly inquisitive creative mind. But the building is more than geological mimicry. ‘Flint House’s design development was a combination of a forensic examination of a place, looking for triggers for a creative process that gets transformed into architecture’įlint House is metaphorically tectonic: its cast concrete and blockwork frame sits above a chalk fault line that runs for 200 miles between Bournemouth and King’s Lynn. In the simplest terms, it is a composition of two domestic buildings, Flint House and its annexe, in the form of stepped wedges, set some 50m apart in a narrow swale – unploughable with a rill of water running through it – in the fields below the Rothschild Archive on the Waddesdon Manor estate. This project saw Charlotte Skene Catling shortlisted for the Women Architect of the Year Award 2016 ‘The house seems, by turns, sophisticated and unsophisticated, crude and beautifully crafted, artful and occult’
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