COMMENT
Material success leads to beautiful buildings
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor - BMJ
A
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
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t this stage of the proceedings, none of us has the faintest idea what is going to happen come the end of March when the Uk is scheduled to leave the EU. Not least the people - on either side of the Channel - charged with making sure that it happens.
What is guaranteed, however, is that building materials will still be manufactured, builders merchants will still sell those materials and builders will use them to construct buildings. In many cases, very, very beautiful buildings.
Which brings me onto the Heavyside Focus feature that we wrote this month. Regular readers of both this column and its electronic sister, will know that I am a sucker for a good bit of architecture. I loath badly designed, badly thought-out buildings, but I love those that have been designed with sensitivity, with purpose and with the idea that they need to complement their surroundings rather than clash with them.
That’s not to say that you have to have rows and rows of matchy-matchy houses or that rural settings only suit choclotate-box cottages or Georgian piles. Far from it. A setting can be enhanced by a building that stands out starkly from it, if the design and the building are good enough.
The RIBA House of the Year Awards always gets me interested and is compulsory viewing in my house when Channel 4 features it on the Grand Designs TV programme. This year, the award was sponsored by Forterra for th first time, and the thing that struck me about most of the entries was that they were all built with materials that builders merchants sell every single day.
Architcture is a very personal thing so there are always going to be entries to competitions like this
that polarise opinions. Some of my favourites from the long list didn’t make it to the final shortlist, but then I’m looking at it from a perspective of houses I could live in. There was one that I could move into tomorrow had I the wherewithal - Duncan Cottage, a modern extenstion to a Georgian pile near Bath. Utterly gorgeous, but, I suspect, not quite architecturally daring enough to have made it beyond the long list.
The ultimate winner was Lochside, a small-scale, sustainable home on the edge of a loch in the Highlands. It looks as though it has been there forever, almost as though it had been grown there. Which, I guess is partly what made it the winner. Other entries struck me as hideous or just fancy for the sake of it, but then they won their places because of their clever use of architecture, rather than appealing to the masses.
One of the things about this award, and the programme that goes with it, that strikes you is just what amazing things can be achieved if you throw enough skill, determination, imagination and, yes, cold hard cash, at a project. Big budgets of this sort are the exception rather than the rule. However, that doesn’t mean that the same principles can’t be applied to buildings of a smaller scale. One of the best things about being involved in this industry is that what gets made and sold really matters. The products that come out of our building material factories and go through builders merchant yards and warehouses en-route to their final resting place make homes. Real homes for real people What this industry does is to allow the construction of beautiful buildings that people can then live, work and build their lives in. What’s not to love about that?
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January 2019
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