![]() Avoiding glare and overheating – without homogenising one’s experience the interior. We wished to manipulate the surface of the building – sheltering it from direct northern light and filtering the southern light into the interior. These elements particularise – we hope, in a subtle and enjoyable way. We created a very ambient building, where the individual can really identify with the nature of his or her activity – thus the studio pads, scoops, decks and corners – though based on a clear hierarchy and system – have significant shifts of direction or variations of size. In welcome contrast a majority of the filtering ‘wraps’ and ‘insertions’ are of a softer, more translucent character. These ‘tectonic rafts’ together with the central ‘spine’, quieter study areas and dramatic ‘scoops’ define the building’s rocky core. How does a free form sit on the ground? How does one enter or fenestrate such flowing volumes? What can the structure of a doubly-curved surface be like in a construction industry dominated by planar linearity? What skin finish gives supple continuity, with merged walls and roof? And with no columns, and no apparent structure as a discipline, how do you articulate a monocoque? CRAB’s job architect Jenna Al-Ali has made all this look easy, and the Drawing Studio resolves these issues comfortably within its own language.Image credit Peter Bennetts, courtesy of CRAB Studio.įrom this ‘street’ the faculty’s studios and large gathering spaces spread out onto a terraced deck – which itself melts into a re-vegetated hillside garden. The language of free forms, with its unique ideological and technological challenges, has been most spectacularly manifested in the works of Zaha Hadid and her team. These past roots have borne fruit in a new conceptual response to current student needs, and the Drawing Studio has a unique real-world presence as it sits, smiling, on the grass. From the capsules and pods of Plug-In City and Walking City to the Cushicle, the Suitaloon, Rock Plug-Log Plug and the well-serviced outdoor environment of architecture without buildings, Archigram ranged continuously across the built and non-built landscape, commenting, questioning, drawing and evoking alternative visions of the architectural world around us.īournemouth’s friendly alien seems to encapsulate these 50 years of ideas, polemic, sumptuous graphics and alternative architecture. More than half a century ago Cook co-founded Archigram, a group of like-minded radicals who carved out a unique identity through writing, drawing, modelling, publishing and exhibiting a fresh alternative to the prevailing architectural orthodoxy. The free-flowing space is flooded with daylight from a grand northlight window which drinks in the external world of sky and trees, imbuing it with luminous neutrality, a perfectly smooth matt back-ground, with nothing to lure the eye away from a drawing in progress – a fitting background for Cook’s own favourite pastime. In contrast to the all-blue exterior of the Drawing Studio, the interior is seamlessly and spectacularly white. If Cook’s Kunsthaus Graz, designed with Colin Fournier in 2003, was a ‘friendly alien’, then this cheerful, enigmatic, wonderfully blue blob is its diminutive, extra-terrestrial progeny. If the brief had asked for a building with no surface detail or relief whatsoever, with the same colour and texture all over, with hardly a straight line in sight and with one giant round window, it would have been ridiculed – but that is what has arrived, and it is a triumph. Rather, it is a cheerful presence – a grand froggy surprise that has just hopped onto the campus. While contrasting with its neighbours it is not an aggressive arrival. The commission – for a new Drawing Studio serving the needs of the university’s arts, architecture and design students – was awarded by an enlightened vice-chancellor to CRAB Studio, whose co-founder Peter Cook is Bournemouth’s best-known architect alumnus. the blob represents a complete departure from the language of the campus as a whole. Sitting on a lawn amongst birch trees, autonomous and unconnected to its neighbours. ![]() Tucked into the campus of the Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) – with its varied collection of buildings each sporting the architectural style and detailing of its era – nestles a brand new, bright blue blob.
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