Venturi Scott Brown’s National Gallery extension and Neave Brown’s Alexandra Estate are among the 19 projects featured in an RIBA exhibition, Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds, celebrating architects’ ability to unleash their creativity when faced with a challenging site
‘I think architects like constraints,’ says Rowan Seaford, associate director of Carmody Groarke, whose Windermere Jetty Museum is featured in Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds, a new exhibition at the RIBA Architecture Gallery in London. ‘Certainly, in this context, the challenges enrich the design response.’
The museum is one of 19 projects in what is something of a celebration of the ability of architects to rise to even the toughest site challenges. While it’s rare to find any site without some form of difficulty, those found in this exhibition present particularly demanding conditions, whether highly sensitive urban, historic or natural landscape contexts, extreme space constraints, tricky reuse challenges, increasing flood risk – and sometimes a combination of several of the above.
Designed by vPPR, the exhibition is organised into thematic sections of Difficult Landscapes, Difficult Urban Spaces, and Difficult Reworkings. Featured projects span more than a century, from Ernest Gimson’s Arts and Crafts cottage Stoneywell in the rocky outcrops of Charnwood Forest (1898) to Knox Bhavan’s flood-resilient March House at Marlow (2022).
According to co-curator Charles Hinds, RIBA Collections chief curator and HJ Heinz Curator of Drawings, the most challenging sites ‘can provide a sort of intellectual workout that brings about great architecture, no matter whether the scale is huge, such as the Magna Centre, or small, like Stoneywell’.
He had the idea for the exhibition after visiting Ptolemy Dean’s Weston Tower at Westminster Abbey, and seeing how it successfully dealt with ‘a site so imbued with historical and cultural significance’. This led him to think about other sites where architects had come up with ingenious solutions.
The exhibition aims to convey a sense of the circumstances of the site and how the architects first responded to these, as well as the final design solution.
‘Architects face such a broad range of challenges before they even sit down to start the design process,’ says co-curator Pete Collard, adding that architects often produce some of their best work in challenging sites.
Difficult Sites includes a couple of the most contentious projects of recent times. Collard cites the extreme difficulties of the National Gallery extension in Trafalgar Square, where ABK’s competition-winning scheme was dropped in response to opposition from the future king, Prince Charles. An early development model of ABK’s scheme in the wider setting of the square is included, as well as the eventual design of the Sainsbury Wing by Venturi Scott Brown.
Also featuring is Colin St John Wilson and MJ Long’s contentious and long-running British Library project at Euston, completed in 1988, which appears in the Difficult Urban Spaces section. Previous unseen material from the practice’s archive – currently being catalogued – includes an early sketch showing the constraints of the Underground lines below the site. Other projects in this section include Neave Brown’s celebrated Alexandra Estate in London’s Camden, which deals creatively in providing social housing and public space in close proximity to a major railway line; and 28½ Lansdowne Crescent in Notting Hill, designed by Jeremy Lever in 1973, which squeezes a family home into a wedge-shaped gap site just 3.9m wide at the front.
Finding creative ways to deal with ‘scraps’ of sites is increasingly the norm in space-restricted urban contexts. The hugely constrained site for Caruso St John’s Brick House is described by the practice as of ‘almost insuperable difficulty’, overlooked by three taller buildings and reached by a carriageway through an adjacent terrace. The resulting design, completed in west London in 2012, was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize.
The biggest exhibit in the show is a 100kg folded copper model of Windermere Jetty Museum. Designing in such a picturesque national park location was always going to bring inherent challenges for Carmody Groarke but that wasn’t the only difficulty. Seeing the site flooded after two, 1-in-100-year storms early on in the project brought the issue of flood resilience into ‘close focus’ for the architects, says Seaford. As a result, the final design, with its copper cladding and sheltering canopies, is strongly driven by both flooding and weather resilience.
‘Constraints aren’t always limiting. Constraints are opportunities that you just don’t know about at the beginning of the process,’ she says.
Flood resilience is also at the forefront of Knox Bhavan’s March House, which is raised on a steel frame above the flood plain. The exhibition also reflects the topical theme of creative reuse, including WilkinsonEyre’s trailblazing reinvention of a former steelworks as the Magna visitor attraction, along with two ingenious residential projects: Tonkin Liu’s converted Water Tower and Witherford Watson Mann’s revival of Astley Castle as a holiday home.
Collard calls the exhibition something of a ‘best in show’ of buildings that work against very difficult sites to create ‘wonderful pieces of architecture’ spanning 125 years.
Hinds hopes that visitors will gain ‘an understanding of why architects are given a rigorous training, and why the best and most ingenious solutions come from architects who can think outside the box’.