Wilkinson tells a story

Chris Wilkinson was elected to the Royal Academy in April 2006. His firm Wilkinson Eyre cemented itself in the top league of architects when it won the Stirling Prize for the best building designed by a British architect in 2001 and 2002 – the only practice to win twice. Its work reflects Wilkinson’s formation in the ‘high tech’ tradition of British architecture into which he was initiated during stints with three leading Royal Academician architects — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins. Wilkinson Eyre’s early reputation depended on large, long span, low cost structures, but from the mid 1990s it was at the forefront of bringing a new architectural sensibility to bridge design. More recently it has added museums to its growing range of special skills. Wilkinson’s work is the featured Architecture on the Ramp at the Royal Academy (19 July-13 November 2006) and is lecturing at the Academy on 9 October 2006.

Chris Wilkinson RA, Study Model for Tower

Architecture and storytelling
‘The three projects included in Architecture on the Ramp [at the Royal Academy of Arts] tell a story about how my practice Wilkinson Eyre makes buildings,’ says Chris Wilkinson. ‘The Mary Rose Museum is at a very early stage and only tells the first part of the story. King’s Waterfront in Liverpool, under construction, takes the story forward while the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea brings it to the point where users take over from architects.’

Each also tells its own story deriving from its location and function. ‘The museum in Swansea is about Welsh culture in the past, present and future, especially its maritime and industrial legacies. Old Ordnance Survey maps show the site was covered with railway lines and cranes. We tried to bring that dynamism into the architecture, recreating the railway lines in some form to create a pattern across the site which is not just a historical reference but a visual one too.’

‘On a very different site, the Mary Rose Museum shares the same philosophy and approach. Its context is HMS Victory. The buildings around it vary in quality and are tame in comparison with the boats. Our building inevitably has to relate to the ship. It seeks to recreate the feeling of the original boat, only half of which survives, so one side is the original and the other a glass replica of it. Our design then tries to find a form to enclose those shapes.’

Kings Waterfront Liverpool by Wilkinson Eyre Architects ‘King’s Waterfront will be a focal point for Liverpool’s celebrations when it is the European Capital of Culture in 2008. With a 10,000 seat arena, a 1350 seat auditorium, exhibition space and a large public plaza, King’s Waterfront expresses its many functions in a series of visually unified forms that relate to its neighbours on the Mersey’s famous skyline.’

Tall buildings
After decades of opprobrium tall buildings are now back in favour. Chris Wilkinson put models for towers, one in Guangzhou and another for an undefined site on London’s South Bank, on display in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2006. His interest in tall building started some years earlier when Wilkinson Eyre were asked to design one on Fenchurch Street in the City of London. ‘We came very close to achieving planning permission,’ Wilkinson remembers. ‘We managed to convince the City Corporation that the site was a good location for the tower when they were looking for sites that would work with their overall planning strategies. Our tower was very sculptural. We were pushing the idea of two, slipped curves that would reduce the visual impact, make a benefit to the skyline and be very beautiful. It got a lot of interest and suddenly we had other opportunities.’

Modernist towers tend to be ‘very perfect forms and rely on repetitive cladding. But in today’s environmentally-conscious world it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the north elevation to be the same as the south, so we try to create excuses to introduce difference. There are games you can play, such as curves, but the client for the South Bank tower did not want curved forms, so we are looking at a more angular geometry and breaking up the façade into planes. Putting diagonal crease lines in it is the easiest description, like cars where a very fine crease line catches light differently so it changes the appearance. Guangzhou has pretty homogenous treatment, an apparently smooth skin on the outside with horizontal and vertical louvres. We are thinking about each diamond in the exo-skeletal frame separately so we get the optimum arrangement for each.’

On beauty in architecture
‘We look for a combination of efficiency and visual pleasure in our designs. I think that there is something in beauty that goes beyond the subjective. An extraordinary number of people agree about beauty in the natural world, for example what’s special about an orchid or a tree. There are certain aspects of beauty which relate to traditional architectural values, such as proportion. We are conditioned from a very early age to accept and like certain forms and proportions in the natural world, and the built world inevitably relates to that. So I think there is common ground in the aesthetics of buildings, but opinion is divided.’

‘For myself, I’ve always been interested in modernism. But if you take a minimalist building, stripped to its essence, its proportions and detail have to be excellent because there is so little else to go on. We try new things and push boundaries as part of form-finding in our designs, throwing out a composition and trying to put it back together in a different way. We like games of contrasts as well, between light and dark, hard and soft, glazed and solid. They all help to give complexity and interest. A very important point is not just what a building looks like but how it feels. Going into a building can affect your emotions; some buildings and spaces just make you feel good.’

The challenge of universal space
‘When I was working for Norman Foster at the end of the 1970s,’ remembers Chris Wilkinson, ‘we had two or three large sheds in Milton Keynes. I wanted to see where they fitted into the overall architectural field because they were rather different, multi-purpose, multi-use spaces. I started research and got commissioned to write my book Supersheds. In my book I referred to Mies van der Rohe’s concept of ‘universal space’. I was interested in his collage of an aircraft factory where he overlaid planes with works of art and could see the relevance of that juxtaposition. Our first large-span building was the Stratford Market Depot for maintaining Jubilee Line trains. It was the first building on the extension and the client wanted a generous building which was representative of the organisation but restricted access because what they’re doing there is so secret. So we built a small entrance pavilion with meeting rooms closely related to it. You don’t realise what lies behind; I found you can make a mystery out of a shed.’

On bridges
Having won the Stirling Prize in 2001 for the Magma Science Centre outside Rotherham, Wilkinson Eyre carried off the award for a second time with their Gateshead Millennium Bridge — a taut, gossamer web that tilts to open and give clearance for ships to pass up the River Tyne. Chris Wilkinson explains how bridge design became a specialism for his firm. ‘It started with wining the first competition run by the London Docklands Development Corporation for a bridge over South Quay near Canary Wharf. Not many architects were involved with bridges then [the mid 1990s] and the London Docklands Development Corporation was looking for a practice which could turn its hands to them.’ A string of elegant footbridges followed, built and unbuilt, which culminated in Gateshead and led to bridges for traffic.

Floral Street ‘Bridge of Aspiration’ for the Royal Ballet School by Wilkinson Eyre

‘We’ve now got a lot of bridge projects in the United States, several footbridges in New York, and the Tappan Zee Bridge where we are working with Arup. It connects New York State with New Jersey and is a major route in and out of the New York City. It’s a terrifically difficult problem, more to do with volume of traffic than length of span. It needs either another bridge alongside it or a replacement.’

Painting and architecture
‘I started painting when my wife went to art school as a mature student,’ says Chris Wilkinson. ‘She became very involved with the process and when she was painting I joined in. She moved onto sculpture and ceramics but I stayed with painting. Relaxing is not the word for it, but it is a release mechanism for the brain. The problem with architecture is that it stays in the brain. I carry around past projects, current projects, competitions. It’s always there. People have different ways for releasing the brain — you can’t think of architecture when you’re playing football but I’m a bit past that, but I do find painting is totally involving and it puts my mind at peace which is good.’

‘Painting has an enormous effect on my approach to architecture but it is not visible to anyone else — for example with colour. Most architects are very nervous about colour because there is no implied logic behind its choice. You just need confidence and attitude which you get with painting. Painting also helps with the process of decision-making. My experience at Fosters, Rogers and Hopkins was a very rigid approach. With painting you have to use a different part of the brain, take a risk and not worry about getting it right first time.’

• Royal Academy of Arts