Status Symbol
A View on O’Donnell & Tuomey’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for The London School of Economics & Political Science
I used to work for the Capital Development branch of the London School of Economics Estates Department. In the office, a finely crafted wooden model of the yet to be built LSE Student Centre (as it was then to be known) took pride of place and at that scale, the building looked sure to be a world beater. I remember John Tuomey walk into the office 2 or 3 times for project team meetings, carrying materials samples and massive bound volumes of details and design solutions. As the preparations for the ensuing D&B building contract accelerated, it was clear that the LSE — as is their wont- were pulling out all the stops to get the highest quality product possible. Figures like £30 & 40 million were mentioned in hushed tones in reference to the proposed budget, ‘barmy-seeming’ given that this was during the height of the longest deepest recession the country has witnessed in living memory, but for a ‘Rolls Royce’ institution like the LSE which operates at the high-end of the higher-education market, it was not only an economically sensible investment, but a necessary one.
The LSE doesn’t have the tweed, bathstone or red-brick clout of older universities, but it perhaps more than makes up for this in other ways. Built on the backs of great names like Sir George Bernard Shaw, who co-founded it and strategically ‘dug-in’ between Lincolns Inn Fields- one of most historically prestigious parts of London-, the striking hemi-circle of the Aldwych thoroughfare, the exciting energetic Theatre-land and the precarious and imminent river Thames. The Royal Courts of Justice, St Clements Danes (of oranges and lemons nursery rhyme fame), Fleet Street-the spiritual home of London’s press-, Paul Smith’s atelier and the BBC’s World Service (at the time) are all within a stone’s throw of the LSE’s main campus on Houghton Street where the new building is located. It’s difficult to imagine a more highly charged, and exciting location. It’s strange because I’m sure that if George Bernard Shaw were witness to this dizzying ‘mish-mash’ (whose constituents in fact somehow seem as expertly choreographed as a high quality dramatic production) he would surely fail to recognise any genuine wealth producing apparatus, as well as any real affinity (may I naughtily suggest) with the Socialist convictions he espoused.
Seriously, how does the High Court, The LSE itself and newspapers generate the kind of economic bedrock that one would’ve expected-particularly in early 20th Century England- to precede and underpin that kind of hustle and bustle? Ostensibly, the theatres and Paul Smith are swapping services and goods (respectively) for cash, but Shaw himself might rather have seen this tertiary activity as the economic equivalent of a vampire drinking its own blood; mildly ameliorative in straightened times, tolerable in small doses at best, but not true sustenance. Maybe it’s a case of more ‘hustle’ than bustle? But in any case, the big picture has changed since Shaw’s time. Paul Smith, Theatre-land and even the LSE itself are magnets for foreign money.
High Holborn and Aldwych are peopled by a superclass of wealthy, well-dressed and well-honed foreigners, clutching the Louis Vuitton accessories that contain their MacBook Air’s and iPad’s, while they strut their stuff on their way to a Starbucks to complete an assignment — because quite a lot of these people are in fact students of the LSE (Kings College is a stone’s throw away too, but it’s students don’t tend to rock ‘Louey Vee’). Also, Shaw would not recognise the centrality that sophisticated ‘mathematics’ and advanced number crunching capacity, now have to our firmly entrenched era of ‘Derivative’ and ‘Future(s)’ value, whereby we can’t really now balance the books of our present-day mature industrialised society, without mortgaging it’s future.
This is a paradigm shift that O’Donnell & Tuomey’s new building seems to exemplify. It’s the latest addition to the LSE’s increasingly comprehensive set of architectural ‘pieces’; Victorian, Modernist, Postmodernist, Brutalist, Foster-ist, ad even ‘1990's-it seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-ist’, are all represented as exhibits and make no mistake, the LSE is an institution that demands exhibits and will pay top-dollar for them. Like the ‘nouveau riche’ far-easterners recently discovered taste for French hi-fashion and fine art collecting, the LSE’s spending policy is informed by a sophisticated understanding of the ‘status’ attached to certain objects (as opposed to the intrinsic value of those objects). This is a strategy that can be seen even in their recruiting of staff, Richard Sennett and Niall Ferguson are both on the payroll, but I never met anyone who knew how much actual teaching they did at the LSE.
Thus the building had to be an icon from the start, It had to look good on university prospectuses; standard fare perhaps for clients like the LSE, who are in a sector that is increasingly market driven. All universities need to continue to attract fee paying students, but where the LSE leaves virtually all of its competitors in the dust, is in its insistence that the impression must be maintained beyond the brochure, it must also be apparent on arrival at campus. For the fees LSE charge, nothing less will do.
To this end, the LSE’s new Saw Swee Hock Student’s Centre is both a modern economics lecture and the image ‘made flesh’. It’s impossibly sheer, perforated, scored and folded ‘cliffs’ of brick- the architypal London building material- are designed- just like the recruiting of Niall Ferguson and Richard Sennett- to give the institution iconic status and ‘cachet’ with an increasingly wealthy, demanding and savvy clientele i.e their students. Brick is stretched here beyond reasonable limits to create a vision of the future authentically rooted in the past, an aim which is well served by the decision to keep the wonderfully grubby Victorian, brick St Philips building in place immediately in front of the Saw Swee Hock. Working backwards, the brief seems to have been no less than to create an image of the ‘seemingly’ infinite possibilities upon which central educational programme of the LSE is contingent and a monument to human ingenuity as well something new, exciting and fine for the student who has (or will have) everything.
Does the new building succeed in doing all this? Undoubtedly, and that’s really my problem with it. I wonder how much my impression of the building is imprisoned by my professional knowledge of the way buildings are constructed. I’m currently reading the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture’ by John Ruskin, a man who had as much to say on economics as he did on architecture and who was a major influence on Shaw. What jumps out at you when reading ‘Seven Lamps..’, apart from Ruskin’s iconoclasm, is his singular powers of visual acuity and analysis. He did in fact predict a time when advanced technology could be central to architecture and attempted to lay down the rules for it’s use. By the same token, one is somewhat awakened to the reality of the hopelessly blunted post-industrial attention span, bombarded as we are with endless, disposable, visual stimuli. We have only the ability now, most of us it seems, to look at things for a brief period and with a bite-sized perspective. If the building hasn’t been designed with these things in mind, it could have been, being properly executed a brick’s width -and no more- beyond what the average ‘i-generation’ brain is likely to register as authentic, actually no mean feat in fact given the complexity of the form involved.
For the newly arrived student to receive the same impression of the building that he/she would’ve first had from it’s photograph, it was essential that an unusual concentration of resources in terms of architectural design time, money and building ingenuity be ‘thrown’ at the facade. This is undoubtedly what has happened as there are no real problems with it (ugly mastic joints aside). Excepting the fact that it really shouldn’t exist at all, the façade is a triumph and projects as much authenticity as can reasonably be expected. What is lacking is a sensible response to Louis Kahn’s question ‘what does a brick want to be’. It’s an ethical question and as such it demands an answer, but Saw Swee Hock -perhaps only reflecting society at large- doesn’t play ball. In my view, it’s one thing for Zaha to invent a material that has the qualities required to produce her ‘zany’ forms; it’s quite another for architects like O’Donnell & Tuomey to determinedly make zany forms out of a material like brick. Ordinarily, a design like this would have made extensive use of prefabrication in order to make it viable but apparently this was not the case here, with the brick façade having been largely hand-laid on site, a testament to the architect’s commitment to imbue it with as much integrity as possible, something that Ruskin would have no doubt appreciated even if he would have been horrified by the central role technology surely played in producing the 100+ special bricks required to make the joints work out and the now-all-too-common ‘sham’ of apparent brickwork being in fact only veneer (the true material of the building being concrete), as much steel ties and bolts as fired clay and mortar.
Once inside, it becomes clear that the major consequence of the extravagant external treatment is an internal poverty of means-and not in an entirely negative sense. Looking at that early timber model, I wondered about the skeleton underneath the contorted skin, now inside the completed building-I wasn’t allowed past the ground floor- I can see there isn’t one really, not in any conceptual sense. From inside the entrance foyer, it’s clear that the structure of the building is formed of poured concrete floors and groupings of both canted and upright dark red-painted circular steel columns-almost certainly filled with concrete.
The lean of the canted columns seems to follow that of the façade and seeks to resolve itself in the entrance canopy, which is composed of the same red painted members. The arrangement doesn’t suggest the preoccupation with order that usually permeates the design of such aspects in a project of this status. There is a ‘looseness’ here that belies the necessary neurosis of the facade. Combined with the square Iroko draught-lobby, the adjacent ‘billowing’ concrete enclosing wall of the spiral stair (leading down to the basement), the stainless-steel and vitreous enamel (dark red to match the columns on this floor, other colours as you go up) of the lift-core and the changing floor finishes (brick/terrazzo/matting)-all high quality robust materials-, the lack of tectonic order lends a provisional/messy character to the internal spaces, like a New York loft apartment or, dare I say it, a student dorm.
No doubt this is to a large extent a deliberate strategy (an impression only reinforced by the integrated steel ‘beer-stands’ dotted playfully around the entrance canopy) and seems an entirely appropriate way to approach the design of ‘student-space’, nevertheless even in the ‘lovely mess’, the visible stainless steel bolts holding the decorative Iroko canopy in place above the security desk and the ‘afterthought’ radiators adjacent to the stairs are a little troubling to say the least. Having said that though, the impeccably detailed exposed concrete, confers authenticity in the way that only exposed concrete can, ameliorating the ‘cheapening’ effect that such ‘loose-threads’ might have had. There is also an evident ‘recycling’ of some of the best design ideas from the O’D &T office with the ‘walking-handrail’ of the stair, the red-painted steel bridge and even the all pervading angular geometry being things that we’ve seen in their previous work. All these elements work well enough and seem appropriate to the general ‘un-precious’ orchestration of space and detail that seems to lie behind it all.
Thus the building is a strange but appropriate combination of irreverence and probity, but there is also something of Frankenstein’s Monster about it. There is a sense that what has been carried out here really shouldn’t have been and that some important values of architecture have been subverted by the money power and economic aims of the LSE. There is a sense that somehow, sometime, somewhere, there will be hell to pay because of this, a bit like the way in which we are now paying for the invention of derivatives in the ‘80’s.
I think Ruskin sums up my feelings about this building, a consummate product of contemporary architectural culture, in a poetic turn that John Tuomey would probably appreciate :-
“The stirring which has taken place in our architectural aims and interests within these few years, is thought by many to be full of promise: I trust it is, but it has a sickly look to me. I cannot tell whether it be indeed a springing of seed or a shaking of bones..”
