Ellis Woodman offers probing questions to Alsop's Goldsmith's College. Is it art, architecture, or just scribble? | BD


Scribble theory
By Ellis Woodman

Will Alsop hasn't much truck with theory. “A theory gives comfort to the unconfident practitioner,” he opines on the Alsop Architects website. “To obtain a post-theory form of practice requires courage, as inevitably the ultimate proposition is one that cannot be defended.”

And so we are invited to embrace Alsop as just such a maverick spirit, unbridled by doctrine, answerable only to the callings of his own muse. Opinions will differ as to what proportion of this confident practitioner's make-up is noble and what proportion savage but may I at least suggest that he is not the most obvious choice to design a building for the Visual Arts Department of Goldsmiths College.

Under the professorship of Michael Craig-Martin and subsequently Victor Burgin, Goldsmiths has become the training ground for successive generations of artists whose practice is informed by some bracingly opaque cultural theory. What can the famed Alsop consultation sessions have been like on this one? One wonders what a room full of aspiring Turner Prize winners made of being asked to put down their copies of The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, break open the Chablis and get the crayons out.

The new building is the first product of Alsop's appointment in 2002 to build an arts complex on the Goldsmiths campus. Nominally, the initiative is aimed at providing the visual arts department with expanded accommodation. But perhaps more crucially, the two-phase development will enable the university to significantly reconfigure its relationship to the community within which it is set.

The Goldsmiths campus is sited in New Cross — one of south-east London's less salubrious corners. Actually, “campus” is pushing it a bit. In the years since its founding in 1891, the university has spread out from its grade II listed main building, colonising a rag bag of terraced houses, the former Deptford Town Hall and even a 19th century swimming baths which has been converted into studio space.

The site manifestly fails to project a cohesive identity.

Yet neither does it feel constructively integrated with its surroundings. Goldsmiths occupies land set behind a decent stretch of New Cross Road — the area's principal shopping street. However, the only purpose-built university building on the street itself is Allies & Morrison's 1997 information technology library. Without it you would be hard pressed to know Goldsmiths was there at all.

The new arts complex is designed to radically enhance the university's street presence. It is conceived as two adjacent blocks forming a square with a number of existing university-owned buildings. It is proposed that together this assembly will provide a gateway to the campus, while supporting a range of uses that might engage the wider community of New Cross.

The newly completed phase one building — named after Ben Pimlott, the former warden of Goldsmiths who died during its construction — will ultimately close the back of the square.

Currently its relationship to the street is an uneasy one, compromised by the presence of some shabby, single-storey teaching blocks that are only to be removed when the second phase works are undertaken. However, even given this impediment there is no missing Alsop's building. Deceptively, it is only seven storeys high. However, given the building's elevated position — upslope from the street — and the fact that the upper studio floors are provided with a 4.5m clear head height, it towers over its neighbours.

The massing is actually very convincing. The fact that New Cross lies on a hill had become obscured by the dense wall of development that cuts off Goldsmiths, on the upper reaches of the slope, from the rest of the community, lower down. Set deep within the campus, but commanding a strong presence on the street, Alsop's building goes a significant way towards giving New Cross its hill back.

The scheme's urban contribution is perhaps most compelling when the building's distinctive L-shaped profile is seen from the surrounding territories of Deptford and Surrey Quays. From here, it comes as a real surprise to discover that New Cross — an area not overly blessed with a sense of genius loci — has suddenly been provided with its own idiosyncratic skyline.

A shallow (15m deep) plan and fully glazed north elevation ensure that the building's internal life is presented to the street as through a shop front. The ground floor is split between studio space, meeting rooms and a lecture theatre; the first floor —incongruously — houses laboratories for the psychology department; the second is an administration level; while the upper four floors are studio space. Generous dimensions, simple planning and a non-prescriptive structural strategy should enable this arrangement to be easily modified in the future.

Adaptability was identified as a particularly pressing concern in the brief for the studios. These spaces need to be comprehensively reconfigured at least twice a year: in October to accommodate the undergraduate students' anticipated working requirements and in June to allow for the installation of the annual degree show.

To provide the maximum flexibility, the studios have been equipped with a basic demountable partition system that can be secured into fixings cast in the exposed concrete soffit. (These fixings also allow the possibility of suspending artworks from the ceiling.)

Throughout, the assumption that the studios are going to suffer some serious wear and tear has informed a no-nonsense approach to the detailing. Walls are lined in painted plywood, while a raised floor of inexpensive chipboard was specified on the basis that panels may need to be replaced regularly.

The quasi-industrial aesthetic that characterises the building's interiors is also pursued in the treatment of the facades. In contrast to the fully glazed north elevation, the other three external walls are minimally fenestrated and faced in a skin of Kalzip — an aluminium standing seam cladding system.

With the exception of the external escape stair that has been slung off the south facade, the architect has clearly struggled to find means of relieving the austere cliff-like elevations. The solution to this quandary takes the form of a family of sculptural appliques that are clipped to the standing seams of the cladding. Two of these reliefs are in place on the south facade, with another to follow on the east elevation — the design of which is the subject of a competition open to Goldsmiths alumni.

But who did Britain's premier art college commission to produce the first two pieces? Perhaps one of the five Turner Prize winners that it counts among its past students? No. Bewilderingly, that task was given to the building's architect.

This modern-day Michelangelo is also the author of the 9m-high steel “scribble” sculpture that sits like a gigantic bird's nest on the fifth floor roof terrace. If one is feeling generous, it might bring to mind an earlier temple of the avant-garde: Olbrich's Vienna Secession Building (1898) with its gilded, foliated dome perched on top. Like that structure, Alsop's scribble is pitched as a kind of hymn to artistic fecundity.

Without presuming to comment on the man's talents as a sculptor, I was struck that the relationship between Alsop's contributions as artist and architect is a strangely uneasy one. From the upper floors of the new building one can see the new Laban Centre, lying less than a mile to the east on Deptford Creek. It offers a telling comparison. Its design is the product of a collaboration between an artist and architect where the artist's contribution is fundamental to the building's conception.

By contrast, the Ben Pimlott Building carries its “art” as a building of half a century ago might. As John Lewis' Oxford Street store carries its Hepworth or Coventry Cathedral carries its Epstein: as a crutch propping up some distinctly anaemic facades.

Take away the 3D-supergraphics and one is left with a work of shed-like gaucheness. As a piece of urban scenography, it is undoubtedly effective. But look at the junctions (or lack of them) between materials. Look at the scattered windows cast aimlessly adrift in a sea of Kalzip. The art ultimately serves to disguise Alsop's lack of interest in advancing the building's expression through tectonic means.

Through Goldsmiths patronage, his credibility as an artist may be assured. However, faced with such diversionary tactics, I was left wondering whether he is altogether an architect.

No matter. In the heady sphere of post-theory practice, I dare say the term carries little weight.