'The Central School of Speech & Drama is a wonderful
mess of buildings at Swiss Cottage, north London, huddled
around the Embassy Theatre. This is an area where cultural
flotsam has washed up on the shores of residential Belsize
Park for some time: the Odeon cinema, the Hampstead Theatre
and Basil Spence's library and pool building to name a few.
'Architect Cullum & Nightingale has been working on the
CSSD site since 1991, when a feasibility study determined
that onsite development was the most effective way to meet
the school's long-term property needs.
'The practice has managed to finesse a phased plan
of considerable intricacy that can be achieved with minimum
disruption, and which is sensitive to the drip of the funding
tap. By 1994 it had completed a five storey extension to
the Embassy Theatre housing production, art and design, and
wardrobe facilities, as well as two studio theatres. The
building, in a relaxed and faintly Scandinavian style, won
well deserved praise ( RIBAJ,
July 1994 ).
'That building sat well with its immediate surroundings,
and with the buildings it inevitably barged into. At the
interfaces with as yet unbuilt phases Cullum & Nightingale
has delighted in leaving naked blockwork walls as a promise
of future connection.
'The latest completed phase to the east of the Embassy
Theatre is the first of the new buildings to have a presence
on the street, at the interface between the civic and the
residential land uses of Swiss Cottage and Belsize Park.
The architect has handled it masterfully with a rather dour
three-storey red brick facade set over a Portland stone base,
and with a recessed attic floor in white render echoing the
dominant material of the earlier phases.
'The planning discussions must have been hellish, but
the result carries no whiff of compromise or dither. The
simplicity of the facade successfully avoids competing with
the adjacent Embassy Theatre or the handsome Tuscan villas
on the other side.
'The plan of the building is basically a box to house
two floors of staff accommodation over a two-storey library.
The lower ground level houses a computer room and a student
common room which opens on to the street with an attractive
stoop sure to be popular in the summer. If this plan sounds
a bit too polite for an imaginative architect, it is not,
because the ground floor - the main library space - extends
back to fill the 'garden space' with a wild polygonal form
housing an excitingly rooflit reading room.
'There is an old style brutalist whiff to the building
which is not unpleasant. The insitu concrete frame and soffits
are unadorned, the detailing, particularly in the washrooms,
reminds one of the Smithsons: product appropriation touched
by a slightly manic passion. This is not all about 'honesty',
because the details themselves are frequently whimsical in
conception and evidently loved to death, at least by the
architect. It shares with many architects an inability to
see detailing as an integral part of making the building
work; for example there are no skirtings because the practice
does not like them, despite the fact that everywhere cleaning
machine marks remind one of the need for them.
'This could be fixed eventually, and where it matters
Cullum & Nightingale gets it right: the external wall
is in solid Flemish bond a full brick deep (drylined internally),
which gives the facade welcome heft as well as the rhythmic
magic of property brickwork: I just wish for a more relaxed
and matter of fact approach to internal detailing - it is
not necessary to invent everything, including designing most
of the light fittings.
'This may seem unfair on an architect which is very
good on the larger scale issues of bringing light into the
building, of providing spatial legibility and a coherent
palette of major elements. Actually, it is not the architect's
fault. The impulse to invent detail is fuelled by the pathetically
inadequate and complacent building product manufacturing
which still prevails in Britain. My advice is to keep it
simple and if in doubt do it traditionally - it will probably
work, and your clients will thank you.
'Hugh Cullum and Richard Nightingale are good architects,
and interesting in that they came out of the Cambridge 'new
humanist' school of Colin Wilson, but strongly touched in
their final year by the arrival of Dalibor Veseley in 1978.
His influence has infused their work with a wit and poetry
which gets beyond the solipsism of much of the Cambridge
School output, beyond the echoing of Kahn and Aalto.
'What is good about CSSD is that the architect is alert
to the need for the buildings to have a life of their own,
an intrinsic character. It sees the dangers of the built
diagram, and that is a real achievement in such an intricate
planning exercise where the temptation is to stop at the
diagram.
'The buildings the practice has built so far are full
of incident, are tolerant of the odd joke, and feel well
inhabited by staff and students. When all phases are finished
it will still be a fine old mess of building, but it will
definitely have a strong sense of place, and will provide
an unforgettable setting for several generations of student
thespians.'
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