The Experience of Architecture by Plummer Henry

Author:Plummer, Henry [Plummer, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2016-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Herman Hertzberger, Centraal Beheer (1972), Netherlands, interior pedestrian street with alcoves and seats

Herman Hertzberger, Centraal Beheer (1972), Netherlands, axonometric of rooftop plaza over cafeteria

Herman Hertzberger, Muziekcentrum Vredenburg (1978), Utrecht, balustrade shelf and bench alcove along the staircase

Herman Hertzberger, Muziekcentrum Vredenburg (1978), Utrecht, balustrade stretched into a seat

The subtle infusion of voluntary options without making forms overly explicit reverses the now-common physics of power between buildings and people, redirecting control to the latter. In this regard, Hertzberger draws a correlation between architecture and a musical instrument. A piano or flute ‘essentially contains as many possibilities of usage as uses to which it is put – an instrument must be played’, he wrote. ‘Within the limits of the instrument, it is up to the player to draw what he can from it, within the limits of his own ability. Thus instrument and player reveal to each other their respective abilities to complement and fulfill one another. Form as an instrument offers the scope for each person to do what he has most at heart, and above all to do it in his own way.’ 89

Analogous to the construction of a violin, Hertzberger sought to broaden and deepen the instrumental range of each built component, including its most easily stereotyped parts, often by simply folding an edge to insert a place for people to sit. Foundations of walls crease into ledges, structural columns flower into tiny balconies with curved benches, concrete footings rise from the earth to provide shallow cylindrical seats, floor edges are slightly raised to offer footrests, metal balustrades are pleated into shallow benches and ledges and solid walls are indented with alcoves lined with warm woodwork and places to settle.

In his understated inclusion of play in unexpected places, Hertzberger knowingly drew from architectural history and the unnoticed details of many celebrated buildings, including the stone seats at the foot of columns in a portico and concave miradores of the upper roadway at Gaudí’s Parc Güell, and the two facing window seats hollowed from a brick wall in the conference room of Sigurd Lewerentz’s church of St Peter in Klippan, Sweden. Edging a path below the rampart of Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum is a low wall that turns from a parapet into a high seat, then a low ledge and finally, within the wall itself, a footrest for a window seat overlooking the river. In a similar vein, the wood-framed glazing around the perimeter of Louis I. Kahn’s Phillips Exeter Academy Library (all p. 144 ) expands into back-to-back window desks, whose surface is bent into an ‘L’ for diverse ways of working, complemented by a sliding shutter to control light, outlook and introspection.

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