last domestic project we would build before the maelstrom of the Pompidou Centre engulfed us.
My father was retiring from full-time medical practice, and my parents wanted to move somewhere that would enable him to continue to see some patients, but would also be single-storey, close to local shops and Wimbledon Common, and easy to maintain and flexible as they got older. The brief combined his rational approach to ageing with my mother’s delight in views, in colour, in light, and her growing interest in pottery.
A concept sketch of Parkside, completed in 1969, showing (from top left), Wimbledon Common, the road, the mound, the lodge, the courtyard, the house and the garden.
The structure is essentially very simple. Parkside is a discontinuous transparent tube, supported by eight 45-foot steel portal frames (five for the main building, three for the lodge). It is a tunnel of light, connecting its gardens to the beautiful open space beyond. The house mixes mass production with traditional on-site building techniques (we had hoped to prefabricate the whole structure but planning and building regulations made it impossible). Glass panels demarcate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ space – the main house, the garden designed by my childhood friend Michael Branch, the lodge – but also blur the distinction, creating the impression of a sequence of spaces, like a procession of courtyards or patios, rather than of fixed boundaries. The structure is open-ended; the central courtyard could be enclosed with the addition of two more portals, or the building could be extended, repeating its pattern out into the Common beyond.
The external walls were formed of two-inch-thick ‘Alcoa-brand’ insulated aluminium panels normally specified for refrigerated trucks, joined together with neoprene. As we experimented with new construction materials, John Young kept up subscriptions to numerous industrial magazines, and the inspiration for these panels – lightweight, highly insulated and mass-produced – came from one of them.
The succession of spaces in Parkside expresses a fundamental facet of architecture – the interplay of light, transparency and shadow. A famous essay by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky distinguishes literal transparency of light passing through glass or a void, and phenomenal transparency – the layering and organisation of built elements, light and shadow to create appearances of texture, of space, of continuity, of singularity – when light falls on them. The first is a transparency of seeing; the second a transparency of reading, of interpretation. As the visitor’s gaze passes through Parkside, these two forms of transparency – layering and penetration – coincide and contrast, creating a dialogue.
I love this play of transparencies. The special glass John Young developed with Pilkington for the Lloyd’s Building makes the light sparkle, breaking up the blackness of plain unlit glass, brightening the aspect from the outside, but providing privacy for those at work within. The Pompidou Centre turns expectations inside-out, its structure transparent and legible on the outside, but also enabling light to penetrate deep into its floorplates (the space available for use on each storey).
Pierre Chareau’s 1931 Maison de Verre in Paris lets light in through translucent glass bricks, creating a glowing wall, but only reveals its structure when you enter through the simple sliding glass door. The building was rediscovered in the 1950s. From the first time I saw it, I was captivated by this magic lantern off the Boulevard St Germain, tucked in under an existing building, and wrote my first article in Domus about it. Later I got to know the Dalsace family, who commissioned the building as a home to display their wonderful collection of modern art, books and furniture, with consulting rooms for Dr Dalsace on the ground floor. The interior of the building is even more radical than its steel and glass-brick exterior. Among its many magical and inventive elements was the beautiful steel staircase that led from the entrance to the double-height living space, its banisters leaning away from the stairs themselves, like a cow-catcher on the front of a train. The collaboration between Chareau, Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet and skilled metal worker Louis Dalbet created a building of carefully designed moving parts, with sliding screens and shelves adapting the house for different times of day and functions. The spaces and craftsmanship have influenced everything from the Pompidou Centre to the interiors of my house in Chelsea, and Renzo Piano’s Maison Hermès headquarters in Tokyo.
The Maison de Verre, designed by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet, epitomises inter-war modernism in its transparency, its industrial quality and the craft of its construction. The house, tucked beneath an apartment occupied by a recalcitrant tenant, was completed in 1932.
I wrote my first published article, for Domus in 1966, on the building; its transparency, its flexible use of space and its beautiful staircase all made a lasting impression on me.
This play of light and shadow creates scale, and all scale ultimately comes back to human bodies, to the fingers, hands, forearms, feet and strides that defined standard measurements in the pre-metric era – when man was literally the measure of all things.
Scale helps a building to communicate. I have always wanted to make the signals given off by buildings clear and unambiguous, to enrich the enjoyment of users and passers-by alike, to express buildings’ role in city and community. These signals should help people to understand the process of construction, navigate buildings and places, see the potential they offer for private and public life. All elements should give order, nothing should be hidden, everything should be legible – the process of manuacture and erection, the role everything plays in the building, how it can be maintained, changed, demolished, and what the building itself does or could do. Parkside has this simple expression – you can see the steel portals that hold up the house and the joints connecting the aluminium panels.
Parkside is also suffused with colour. The insulated aluminium walls are white, the internal walls are yellow and lime, as are the steel portals that form the heart of the structure. In post-war England, it sometimes felt as if colour itself had been rationed, and that only shades of grey and brown were permitted. In this monochrome world, my mother stood out; she had always dressed in bright colours – much to my embarrassment when she dropped me off at primary school. But she clearly made an impression on me. Later, in 1957, when my father had asked Su and me to help decorate the doctors’ dining room at St Helier Hospital, where he opened the renal unit and brought the first kidney dialysis machine to the UK, we choose bright yellow, bright green, bright blue and bright red, each wall painted a different colour. These were the colours of cubism, of the work of Mondrian, Matisse and Picasso that had seemed so bright in the gloom of post-war England.
Parkside viewed at dusk from the courtyard when my parents were living there, the steel frame and aluminium panels clearly visible.
The dining table and chairs designed by Ernesto Rogers, with the open kitchen to the left, and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames behind.
Inside Parkside’s bright living space, looking out from the open kitchen, with bedrooms and the library beyond the central dining space.
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