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TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE
"FRANK'S CAFE" - p1(of 2)
"SOUTHWARK
LIDO"
IMPROVISED OPEN-SITE: ("THE NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
IMPROVISED VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
ALLOTMENT IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE: ("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")
VERNACULAR - PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE BARNS & HOUSES)
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - LIV-RM
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - HOUSE
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES
ART - GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC
ART - 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA
INTRODUCTION
FRANK'S CAFE - p1
FRANKS CAFE - p2 - DRAWINGS ...
in process
SOUTHWARK LIDO
...
in process
.
INTRODUCTION
There is a mode of architecture that is intermediate between 'instant' self-initiated pragmatic improvisation and the type of design work that is detached from clients and potential users. Temporary-architecture usually fulfills a simpler need and thus often results from a closer cooperation with its client than either the unique monuments of architectural artists or buildings designed for speculation and strangers; it is opportunistic, must be of maximum economy, can be adventurous, often uses an existing structure as a basic resource, adding its new function(s) to it and using its features to suggest enable and support its own construction.
As is proper to all artifacts, the designer of temporary-architecture must realise a structure that uniquely fits, serves and defines a purpose - and which thus achieves maximum economy. However this absolute value is tempered by complex contingencies. For instance it befits a temporary provision symbiotic on an enduring site to practice two modes of economy: the first is to be in itself as economical as is functionally/physically possible; the second is conservation and exploitation of the configuration of its site - unlike a new building on its assigned plot, it must respect its supporting site's independence and continuance, use it as a borrowed resource - but not passively: to solve its economics design-intelligence must replace the routine choices an empty plot allows, must notice opportunities the existing site presents: features to be exploited but not changed.
Temporary structures (if not completely un-legal like those based on squatted sites [Ref: IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE and IMPROVISED VILLAGES]) are - under UK temporary-building regs - only allowed to survive for a maximum of 28 days, however though this apparently applied to EXYZT's "Southwark Lido", Lettice and Paloma's "Franks Cafe" was considered 'so inherently temporary' / 'could be quickly dismantled and removed' / 'requires no permanent alteration to its host building' that a 28 day restriction did not apply.
.
LETTICE DRAKE, PALOMA
GORMLEY
http://www.practicearchitecture.co.uk
"FRANKS
CAFE" (opened 30-6-2009 - closed 27-9-2009) - p1
MULTI-STORY CAR-PARK
(LEVELS 10+9+8), CERISE ROAD, PECKHAM, LONDON
[Written:
from 10-2009]
FRANK'S CAFE - p1
FRANK'S CAFE - p2 - DRAWINGS ...
in process
This is the first building achieved by this working partnership: two ex-students of Cambridge Architecture Faculty. They employed the cheapest, most immediately available and easiest to use materials/construction methods commensurate with the project's function, fabrication and subsequent removal, and the structural opportunities presented by its bizarre site. Their structural initiatives are perfectly adapted to its site and purpose - a bar/cafe that, because of its extra-ordinary location on the top level of an almost abandoned multistory car-park attracts all seekers of novelty, for whom it provides a furnished and awninged terrace, which extends onto a huge 3960m
2 concrete strolling-scape accented with large artworks [1], whose balustrade edges an astonishing 180 degree cyclorama of London's city and sky.Thus the town's multistory 'eyesore' - whose inadequate lifts, absurd demands on driving skills, and location in a backwater of a suburb famous for thieves and wreckers, ensure that its ten vast floors are always empty above level 2 - has become a huge plinth for the most gratuitously inventive of all the town's public provisions - topping even Alsop's Library building ... in that here the community has much more directly initiated and transformed its own means! [2]
The carpark's two stacks of open tray-like decks, which stagger up 10 levels in half-height steps alternating across its width, linked by a cascade of tunnelled ramps, are crowned by a marvelously apt device. Threaded through a huge rectangular scarlet canopy and tensioned over three rows of plank-posts are nine #m long straps that completely encircle like tightened belts the car-park's topmost deck.
From the car-park's approach road the cafe is first glimpsed as a row of posts supporting stretched straps projecting over the top balustrade. All is then lost to view as we mount the corkscrew of levels. The cafe next appears in quite different guise, as a row of thin red straps tightly stretched across the massive concrete underbelly of the final deck - suggesting something clinging to its upper side. Having reached deck-9 (the first beneath the open sky) we see these straps emerge through a slot beneath deck-10, reach upwards and thread into the cafe's canopy, stretching over the tops of angled posts along that deck's south edge. Up a last ramp we top this stack of floors and confront the whole cafe, its kitchen and bar behind a row of pillars and its tabled terrace soaked in pink light, diffused through the canopy's red . From the canopy's front edge the taut straps emerge again and cross an open space to the angled posts of the north edge, which bend them to the underfloor below. Leaning on the north balustrade, gazing down between these posts, we join with our first glimpse of the cafe from the road below.
Typical of many discoveries and inventions, the cafe's final form-solution - though obvious in hindsight (and an obvious potential in many previous drawings) - finally rose into view through layers of subconscious prevarications, disguised as a somewhat ludicrous suggestion, shortly before construction was due to begin. One evening, at a bus stop 'after hours of design discussion', Lettice 'joking' said to Paloma "It could go the whole way round !" - Paloma immediately grasped it as the practical/obvious solution, they then parted and 'didn't talk for a while' - later this final insight 'collapsed' all previous partial solutions and their correlative functions into an obvious simplicity and unity. All Lettice and Paloma's previous drawings show them marooned on top of their deck, blind to its boat-like wholeness, bunching and anchoring the straps to its edge in spite of providing posts angled over the balustrades to resist their pull. Thus a part of a subliminal idea can be performed and still the whole, which justifies that part, eludes seeing !
Apart from the myriad steel joining items, mainly bolts and screws, the building's main ingredients are wood and PVA. Used scaffold-planks are layered for strength and bolted together to make the posts that support and tension the PVA canopy and its straps. Secondary structures such as the Kitchen and Bar and the "Bench" of double-level seating that encloses the west end, are formed of frames of new wood clad in horizontal planking. Also cut from planking are all the various types of furniture.
NOTE :
These artworks constituted the exhibition "Bold Tendencies III" organised by the Hannah Barry Gallery [Ref: Hannah Barry Gallery].
The resourceful intelligence that saw the opportunity and value of this neglected and 'forgotten' council provision, and obtained its use for art displays and associated cafe, was Hannah Barry's.
.
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THE SITE AND PRIMARY STRUCTURE
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SECONDARY-STRUCTURES, FURNITURE & FITTINGS
There are three main secondary-structures: the Kitchen, the Bar plus the "Bench", the Toilet block.
Under the canopy - sharing a continuous shelving and storage system that runs their whole length across the rear of the building - is first the Kitchen, a separate unit which spans two post-bays at the east end, defined by two scaffold-board fasciae that wall it from the terrace, protect a brought-in food-cabinet, and enclose a breeze block and metal stove built against the east balustrade; secondly the long Bar that continues as the "Bench" a rectangle of two-level seating at the west end. The Bar and the so-called "Bench" are basically a single large object whose plan was finalised and drawn in chalk on the deck only after the centre post-frame was raised. Its form is "one long snake" of four plank-faced frames with a continuous top level. The final portion of the "Bench" is the "Arm" which terminates the building's west end: a ##m long seat/low wall whose length (and the shape of its ending), because no essential practicality ruled it, was an aesthetic/sensation problem concerned with the flow of space between the open terrace and covered bar
The location of the seperate toilet block was planned "from the start" to mask an existing CCTV microwave ariel enclosure in the NE corner.
.
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SITE AT NIGHT
FRANK'S
CAFE: VIEW OF CITY FROM TERRACE AT NIGHT |
FRANK'S
CAFE: THE CAFE AT NIGHT |
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.
SOCIAL USE
In order to show the cafe in its condition of maximum social use, many of these pictures are from the opening day of the Hannah Barry Gallery organised art exhibition.
FRANK'S
CAFE: OPENING DAY - ALL FROM ABOVE |
FRANK'S
CAFE: OPENING DAY - ALL FROM LEVEL-10 DECK |
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CONSTRUCTING
The building's two main ingredients (apart from the myriad joining items - mainly bolts and screws) are used scaffold-planks and plastic sheeting (with its plastic tensioning straps).
When these pics were taken the construction was in its primary wood-structures stage. Sawing and bolting together planks to make 3 and 2 layered posts; screwing them together or onto sawn-wood frames to make 'fascia-items': surfaces, built-in seats and/or shelves. Batch-producing ingeniously structurally-economical tables, chairs, high bar-stools and low-stools.
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REMOVING & STORING
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IMPROVISED OPEN-SITE: ("THE NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
IMPROVISED VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
ALLOTMENT IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE: ("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")
VERNACULAR - PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE BARNS & HOUSES)
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - LIV-RM
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - HOUSE
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES
ART - GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC
ART - 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA