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Urban Figure

Part 2 Project 2007
Alexander Bank
 London Metropolitan University | UK
An awkward, decaying city-block interior towards Soho’s Piccadilly corner, offers the opportunity to build a contemporary figurative architecture at the centre of a city currently championed as the capital of the occidental world. The Urban Figure proposal argues for a redevelopment in the European intellectual tradition of humanism, exploring notions about continuity in architecture.

Conceived of in resistance to the ubiquity of mixed-use, object architecture and the relentless erosion of public spaces by commerce or traffic, the Urban Figure values restraint and a respectful disposition, emphasising inherent qualities of place through a sequence of well proportioned void-figures with varying degrees of permeability.

A sustainable public building that exceeds expectations, spatially rich and varied in character, a robust yet elegantly constructed architecture retains an independence from programme. Open to interpretation, this is an enduring and poetic architecture of possibilities to be judged over time on what it does for our ever-evolving city.



This year we have conducted a Design as Research project with students titled: Urban Figures. We continually asked the students, ‘What can the building do for the City?’ We are working with the idea of continuity in architecture, studying and making intelligent contemporary translations of good architectural precedents – some ancient, some contemporary. Students studied and designed urban figures at a variety of scales, from the city scale to the tactility scale.

Alex Bank was fully engaged in this discourse and has enjoyed it. He has a good eye, a good sense of proportion, and he draws and sketches well. He has made a sophisticated selection of architectural references: Bramante, Lewerentz, Hans van der Laan. Taking the Hotel de Beauvais in Paris as his main inspiration, he found a site in Soho, London where he designed an ensemble of well-proportioned public courtyards achieving a similar sense of public decorum and theatricality. This proposal for a new piece of city is delicately constructed.

2007
The Urban Figure sits tightly, but respectfully embedded in the fine and highly irregular grain of Soho. An easterly prospect offers up the Void-Figure, with its rigorous geometry, to the informality of London’s horizon.
Socially, politically and economically awkward, this Soho site at the edge of Piccadilly Circus has remained derelict for decades. The project adopts a lining-strategy that operates across three architectural scales: urban, void-figure and wall linings.
There are some unconventional and propositional moves, pinching, pushing and piggybacking, with the ultimate intention of binding together a cooperative of parts around meaningful public spaces, a series of void-figures, to create a successful city block.
Inventive reconfigurations of the traditional rural renaissance villa occupying highly contingent city plots, these grand urban residencies communicated to the city the social standing of an emerging bourgeoisie through their dignified cortiles.
The power of these typologies come from the delicate tectonic and order of an embedded courtyard experienced against the random happening of the city beyond.
The figurative embodies the notion of being in the world, a reminder that we are inextricably linked to those things around us. It is about re-establishing connections and continuing in an architectural tradition with a duty and care.
The Urban Figure is about thicknesses or thinness, hugging and even relining existing buildings. Perimeter elevations speak of the hierarchical relationship between the streets they address. The faces to the mews and Denman St are ordinary and unadorned.
In a similar way to the Romanesque L’Eglise Saint Leger in Cognac, the facade wraps around to reline the deteriorating sides of adjacent buildings and transform the widened street into a highly charged breathing space.
The structural logic of the building is generated and communicated within the austere yet delicate courtyard. Consistencies in material finish to the void-figures help this building of moments to read as a single entity.
The Urban Figure values the way things are made – joined, sized or finished – believing in the ability of construction details to communicate profound ideas and comment on inherent qualities of place.
Traditional construction methods are adapted to produce high quality and sophisticated architecture. This approach of reinterpretation informs the arrangement of rooms, their compositional order across the site and the use of the building over time.
A sustainable room-to-room plan without corridors lines the Void-figures. Most often multiple rooms deep, at times the built solid between void and city narrows to the thickness of a wall with blind windows.
The building comprises a series of public routes and enfilades of carefully proportioned private rooms, all the time offering short and longer views across various external city-rooms or back to the city.
The Urban Figure aims at elegance, but to also remain tolerant to various programmes with minor adjustments. In this way the architecture retains an independence and achieves a genuine sustainability.
Conceived of in resistance to object architecture formed by the forces of hard commercialism, the Urban Figure argues for a public building composed of delicately constructed voids in a city centre increasingly characterised by commerce or traffic.
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