Peter Liddle (b.1940) is a British Landscape Painter and Sculptor. During his formative years in London he painted abstract works often experimenting with the optical effects he found fascinating in Vasarely and Seurat. Since then he has lived in both Cornwall and Cumbria where he allowed the wild and rugged natural beauty of his surroundings to enter his imagination. However, the optical potential of colour remains significant in Liddle’s work and one can often spot a lay line flashing across his canvases.

Liddle has a keen interest in Renaissance techniques of composition and has entertained tour groups in the galleries and streets of Florence with his stories of Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Donatello.

Liddle also spent many years teaching life drawing and painting at evening classes at Ullswater Community College in Penrith.  He made a big impression on his students, so much so that one of the many pupils who later became professional artists said he might never have considered a career in art had it not been for Liddle’s classes.  I was one of his students too and have had a passion for art ever since.  We kept in touch after I left Ullswater and often discussed our latest projects and trips – his to the wild places of the British Isles and mine to the galleries of continental Europe.

While an architecture student I had often wanted to design an exhibition space for Liddle but the opportunity never arose and it took several years for me to begin the project in earnest.

Satellite image south west of Penrith, Cumbria. Top left Ullswater, bottom left Haweswater

Satellite image of house, garden and farm buildings

At the time I began designing, Liddle lived at a remote cottage on a fell near Askham, between Penrith and Shap.  The natural site for the project was a barn adjacent to the property.  However I was in Austria for a period of months and had to begin with only a vague memory of the existing building and no survey drawings.  So I started designing an entrance and entry room.

Watercolour of doorways

I had become fascinated by aquiline ripples after staring for hours at the reflections of an alpine lake and designed the portals in a way to capture the essence of moving water.  I imagined I could do this by casting the form of striations found in sandy beaches.   The first sliding doors would be turquoise glass etched or cast with ripples and the second pivoting doors would be of bronze (the first Renaissance reference).

Below are some studies I completed in lead from the beach at Allonby, West Cumbria, where Liddle often goes to collect drift wood for sculpting.

Beach Casts lead ø10” & 8”x14” (2011)

Watercolour of entrance room

I envisioned the entry room as a decompression chamber where you might stop or a least slow down and prepare yourself for the experience. For that reason it is the most richly coloured and textured space featuring several kinds of natural stone including the highly prized, local Shap granite which has a beautiful pink pattern with large crystals.

Once back in England, I resumed work on the project and began deciding out how to integrate the entry into the existing barn and how to utilise the rest of the space.

In order to accommodate the height needed for two floors, the eaves had to be raised and I took the opportunity to reorganise the roof.  A flat roof would be inserted over the entrance and planted with meadow flowers and grass to give the impression of a ruin.  The main part of the roof would be reinstalled with a radical twist.

Several considerations informed the design of this roof.  I wanted to introduce north light and had been taken by a sky light in a Hans Scharoun building where the roof appeared to bubble up to form an opening similar to an eyelid.  I also wanted to continue the wave motive and make a dramatic architectural statement to counterpoint the relatively simple interior.

In order to maximise the drama of the interior and particularly the roof I wanted the upper storey to take the form of a gallery or balcony – opening up the space.

The floor of the exhibition space is a dark grey concrete, bordered and broken by bands of carrera marble (another Renaissance reference.)

The furniture is all bespoke, each a celebration of materials: timber, brass and steel.

The video below explains Liddle’s work, the site and includes a detailed walk-through.

You seem fascinated by the bold sculptural opportunities afforded by digging buildings into the ground and much of your work is defined by clean lines and platonic forms; circles, squares, rectangles and uniform modular façades.  The asymmetric exoskeleton of the New Mariinsky Theatre proposal is a notable exception to this rule. How does the question of form impact upon your design process?
	The New Mariinsky proposal, St. Petersburg

When designing a building you have to think of its future, during its first ten years an expressive form can be exciting but after that it can become a little bit disappointing.  You can imagine expressive forms changing over time, they don’t appear fixed.  However, in the end you are left with the original form.  But if you use some very radical geometry you expect that tomorrow it will be the same, it’s more eternal.  Anyway I’m more interested in other factors; materials, geography, infrastructure, how people will use a building.  I prefer this approach because in the future a building’s function might change and I find radical forms produce more flexible buildings.  All is possible in one box if it can create a special relationship between the context and the volume itself.

	The New Mariinsky proposal, Dialogue with Context

If you analyse the Mariinsky Theatre proposal, the inside of the building itself is very geometric, it’s like an instrument, very functional, very radical.  The form of the cupola is a manipulation if you like from the historic cupola, fitting with the presence of the historic Mariinsky on the one side of a canal and some urban housing around the theatre.  There’s a conversation between the very geometric historic cupola and the new one which is a little bit distorted, a little bit different.  But for me it’s not a new style or a new form.

Two of your most famous projects, the Olympic Velodrome and Swimming Pool in Berlin and the Bibliotèque Nationale de France, integrate large areas of public garden. Whereas the Bibliotèque Nationale takes the form of a tree filled void surrounded by towers the Velodrome and Swimming Pool take the form of sunken nodes surrounded by apple trees and public space. Can you explain to us the various reasons for and implications of these opposing arrangements?

The Velodrome and Olympic Swimming-Pool, Berlin

The main question for me is the status of the void in the city.  If you consider Grand Projets like the National Library or the Velodrome, there’s a lot of public money invested, giving us the chance to promote the building to a greater degree through a special public space.  And for me that’s more important, it’s harder to create a place with a special quality and specificity, than a building.  And this specificity is to create a void more or less like a public space, while at the same time working with the building to give a physical presence around the void because a void is not nothing but it is nothing if the building doesn’t work and use this void to exist, to get a presence physically.

Biblioteque Nationale de France – Sketch – Dominique Perrault

Many of your projects are at an urban scale and even smaller projects often offer a public element.  You have even described empty space in a town centre as “precious”.  Was this the case with the Pudong project Shanghai?

With Pudong yes. I started to work with this district a long time ago.  I tried to make a copy of the historic centre of Shanghai core and the new part f the city on the other side of the river.  But with the opposite statement.  The historic core is very dense, very dense indeed.  The average housing area is just 6m², so they must also use part of the street as an extension to their living space.  So I imagined making a copy like an inverse situation.  The core would be a park, a void, we developed a district around and in the end finally they keep this idea.

Pudong urban restructuring, Shanghai – Model

Did the Town Hall and Urban Rebuilding in Innsbruck have any similarities?

In Innsbruck it is very different because it’s in the historic town centre.  It’s a very interesting project because it was a political commitment to create in the core of this district a shopping centre, a restaurant and a new Rathaus.  Normally in a historic city you have a square and the Rathaus and sometimes a church that open onto the square.  In Innsbruck it’s more complex.  You have a historical district with a network of many passages, big and small.  And the strategy was to develop this network with some new passageways and the existing ones.  At the crossroads of the main passageways you have the tower of the Rathaus.  In Innsbruck the idea from the Mayor Vanstar was totally new, he would like to create a citizens’ centre fitting and working with urban activity.

Eva Guttmann:  And it works.  I am from Innsbruck and I think it works very well.  Everything changed, also the connection between Maria-Theresien-Straße and Adolf-Pichler-Platz, It’s totally new.

Dominique Perrault:  It’s a new world

Eva Guttmann:  Yes it’s a new world but it’s great.

Dominique Perrault:  They expect 3,000 people per day sometimes 10,000 occasionally even more.  It has a very friendly atmosphere, there are no questions, people walk in and use the public buildings or the new shops, the new car park or the green square.  It’s very interesting.

Town Hall and Urban Rebuilding, Innsbruck

From the ESIEE Engineers’ School in Marne la Vallée to the Bibliotèque Nationale you have shown a special interest in using woven materials architecturally.  Please explain how you have used a textile net in your proposals for the hotel in Tenerife?

In Tenerife you have some mountains and you have the beach with white sand, some trees with the water; it’s like in the Caribbean.  But this landscape is totally artificial and it was built in the 70’s because the sand in Tenerife is not white, it’s black.  They moved in sand from the Sahara Desert 100km away.  For me it’s a very important education because to everyone it feels like a natural space but in fact it’s anything but.

The idea of the project is to extend the presence of the beach and also to rebuild a small hill at the entrance of this landscape with a hotel.  And we wrapped this hotel in a huge mesh that flowers can grow up.  The silhouette, the skyline, of this building is a hill.    With this kind of material it is possible to give protection from the sun but also you are creating a new landscape a new geography or maybe a return to the original topography.

This type of textile architecture is not like Frei Otto, who was a fantastic architect, but in this case you don’t know exactly where the building is, you see something.  It’s a building but also in fact it’s a landscape and for me it’s very exciting to build a landscape not a building.

Eva Guttmann:  An artificial landscape again.

Dominique Perrault:  Well for me the natural landscape doesn’t exist on this planet.  Now it’s another world.  Nature has disappeared because we know all parts of the planet, there is nothing to discover, no new place to visit.

Hotel, Tenerife

Eva Guttmann:  Is the issue of sustainability as big in France as it is here in Austria and in Germany?  I feel we are in a period of changing attitudes.  Do you think the issue of sustainability in a broad sense will lead to changes in architecture?

In Austria, also Germany, sustainability has for a long time been a part of the culture.  In France it’s a little more difficult because although everyone speaks about sustainability, no one is willing to pay for it.  And so you develop a project within sustainable parameters and get past the stage of building permission and then the client says, “It’s too expensive, or “It’s impossible, we have no time.”  So in France the balance between the programme and sustainability of the project is very good at the beginning but   in most cases by the end nothing is left.  This situation might change but I don’t expect it to change fast.

Also I think in France we have a very bad commission structure.  The architect is the leader and the engineers are subcontractors.  In Austria you have an architectural commission with the client directly and the engineer another commission directly from the client, which is much better.  In France due to this kind of relationship when the architect speaks with the client there must follow a debate with the engineering team and subcontractors.  I prefer having a contract for the architecture and the engineer having a contract for the engineering, this way everyone has a responsiblitydirectly to the client.

Dominique Perrault Spoke to Eva Guttmann and Craig Chamberlain on behalf of the HDA, Graz, 27th April 2011.

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12►

Evening, 11^th November 2009 Graz, Austria.

A crowd of eager students and professionals gathered tightly into a crowded lecture hall of the Graz Technical University. People were packed right to the back, filing up the stairs, across the floor and even out down the corridor. All were present in anticipation of Valerio Olgiati’s arrival. He was billed to talk about his philosophy, professional approach and his latest architectural projects.

The presentation was in German and so my understanding was rather limited, but the visual presentation was clear and I was able to confer with colleagues afterwards. Taking the stage, Olgiati quickly made his charms known with a series of well timed and evidently popular jokes, delivered as he was fitted with a series of microphones.

Olgiati is well regarded world wide. He is associated with an impressive list of eminent teaching institutions and sporting an ever-growing catalogue of elegant and imaginative built work. And so it was something of an event for him to be speaking in Graz – not to detract from its own healthy regional scene which has long been of international significance.   [For a detailed history of it's most famous expressionist 'schule' and more minimalist practices see Peter Blundell Jones’ excellent, ‘Dialogues in Time’ published by the Graz HDA (Haus der Architectur). who, in co-operation with the university, organised the evening’s lecture.]

Olgiati began with a rather unapologetic announcement that his buildings, or at least their representation, are non-contextual.  He supported this assertion with a series of slides taken at an exhibition of his work where large white models of competitions and realised projects, detached from site and locale, were assembled in the beautiful haupthalle of the Semper designed Zurich University/ETH building.  I was immediately sympathetic to this approach.  In his later explanations, particularly of the EPFL, Lausanne University building, it was apparent that context could be a key factor in his design strategy but he never let the issue tyrannise or develop into empty rhetoric.  Consequently, it would seem his buildings stand for themselves without making excessive demands on their immediate environment and without forcing a single or even multifaceted interpretation of the human life and history that surround them.  They simply do their thing quietly and proudly in a provocatively self-resolved fashion.

‘Nächste’ was one of the few words I could pick out consistently but I felt I was following as he lead us through his projects. Firstly was a museum for the Swiss National Parc in Zernez – two symmetrical towers of monolithic insulating-concrete with only a few spare fixtures in bronze. All six floors are physically identical although none are true repetitions as they occur at different elevations or are reflections of a twin. The near identical cubic towers are mirrored diagonally across a shared corner, another square where vertical circulation also occurs. The window cases are brought inside the matching 190cm high apertures and fixed to the internal face of concrete walls. Olgiati reasoned this on the disparity of the required tolerance of metal fabrication and the comparatively ambiguous tolerances one must expect from concrete. This disparity is most commonly absorbed by silicon or expanding foam but not here. As the concrete is itself the insulation there is no need to detail around cold bridges and the frame is simply mortared to the wall.

A similar system is used in ‘House for a Musician’ although here the concrete is coloured red and is divided by an insulated cavity. More is made of the treatment of the concrete too. The walls and their rosaries, which make the building so distinctive, are cast in hand carved wooden forms no-less.

There was also a little time for an explanation of his favourite projects and how they had informed his philosophy. We saw a palace from Schinkel – laberthine behind an ordered façade – the spiritual path of Hindu, Mughal and Shinto temples and their materials of hot red stone or transient wooden frame. Everything linked elegantly back to his built work, most notably to his new studio, a black wooden box hovering in a concrete tray over a black asphalt yard come basement. Just as in the Shinto shrine, this otherwise loose structure is stiffened by a central column. Similarly, the path through spirals clockwise whereas in the shrine it had circled.

After the talk concluded a short pre-filmed interview was screened. Olgiati sat and watched with the rest of us and did so encouragingly but he flinched perceptibly on occasions, particularly when making affirmations of his desire for totality within each project. That is totality of material, totality of construction and totality of the expression, although with Olgiati they often become inseparable. He insisted that such was the order of this totality that he wished a project would break to pieces, crumble, if a single element were removed or altered. There is something enchantingly medieval about this alchemy. Materials matter not only for their preciousness but because ideas, work and personality are teeming within them. They have a life of their own.

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