Theme: Architecture

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These clips explore the importance of light and space at Kettle’s Yard, the development of the 1970s extension and the relationship between the building and the collection.

Kettle’s Yard · Theme: Architecture

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Actually the gap between architecture and living was not there, which it is in some contemporary buildings of that era, especially the kind of Brutalist ones. The architecture can often dominate the function of the building whereas here the whole thing really was welded together.

The design of the extension is very much in line with taste of the time. It’s much more modern than the architecture of the cottages. It’s a very, very skillful juxtaposition of old and new. Certainly, a lot of architects, even today, come and visit Kettle’s Yard. The way it works, is really as you walk into the extension, you find yourself in a space that’s quite similar visually to what you have just left. You have literally just walked through a room and a bridge which have large windows, that’s what you get here. The new element is the skylights that open up the space upwards and introduce light coming from above. As you move into the extension, it gets wider and then, further down, deeper as well so it’s a progressive opening up of the architecture and it’s a very successful way of doing it, it’s really quite striking architecture. So you’ll find yourself from quite narrow 19th century cottage rooms into a much bigger, much more airy and spacious room without really realising that that’s happened and all of a sudden you’re in an entirely different atmosphere. It’s really quite a striking feature of the house, this addition.

Kettle’s Yard seems to me to be somewhere that has a kind of devoted and rather reverential response from a lot of people which is great but I don’t think that that should stop critical thinking and it does seem to me that that is often put on hold in Kettle’s Yard because of the attractiveness of the aesthetic experience. Now, why is it attractive to us? I mean, it might not always be for people in the future but I think he created something there in the late fifties which actually became a kind of yardstick for middle class taste in the sixties and I think the kind of rustic modernism that’s employed in Kettle’s Yard, that’s one way of terming it anyway, is something that was picked up on or was developed, maybe quite separately, by [Terence] Conran and Habitat in the sixties: so the idea of having wooden floors with rugs on them; cool aesthetics; minimal amount of artifacts but those that are there are well chosen; the bringing in of natural objects into the home environment; the lack of fussiness about it, that kind of modernist aesthetic, rather minimal that one can see in modernist architecture, he brought to the interior of these old houses; the idea of knocking through even and, I mean, everyone was knocking through by the seventies and Jim had been doing it much earlier and the extension; its whiteness; its kind of, it was a way that we all, or most of the middle classes in the sixties and seventies aspired to, that kind of look.

[The brief for the extension] It was relatively minimal and it was to do with maximizing the use of the site within certain budgetary constraints with a clear need for wall hang space effectively, for the display of sculpture and the incorporation of furniture and the artifacts which were very much part of the ambiance of the house. A key decision, really, taken early on was that the existing arrangement whereby you rang the doorbell, you pulled the rope and entered the house up two steps almost into the sitting room of the converted cottages… A key decision really was that that should remain the way the visit started so the intention established fairly early on was that the house itself should be seen. There are three levels to the house, move through that, then move into the new building via that middle level of the house because there was a bridge across the passageway which is the public approach to the front door and, at that point, it would become then a question of transition. You’re moving from relatively small spaces and this is transition where the natural light levels would be changing, the spaces would be changing but that transition should be as gentle as possible.

There was a very interesting symmetry, if you like, because neither Jim Ede nor the University was the client, there was a twin client. So there was this symmetry between responding to the committee on the one hand, who I suppose ultimately had a final say, but there was also, could be, three or four times weekly response to a question, or a letter even, from Jim directly, saying that this or that was of interest to him. There was a period, looking back through the files, I found I’d written something like fifteen letters to Jim in response to material that he’d put down in print, handwritten notes, sometimes of several pages, sometimes deeply felt, agonizing almost over certain aspects of what he might or might not have and there would be consistencies and inconsistencies over a period of time but it was necessary to respond. To a large extent it was possible to convince all and sundry that one could get quite a substantial building on this site of a certain form and that was generally backed.

In order to get the roof lighting evenly illuminating the wall, it needed to be inset a certain amount and it needed to be protected from direct source of light so there needed to be baffles introduced to shelter the upward view against glare and to also direct the light towards. The effect of this, by having two at the lower level, the effect is the light can illuminate the walls on either side and at the upper level it can also illuminate walls on each side and between the two there is the double height space which prevents what I’ve called the ‘goldfish bowl effect’ of a very dark ceiling with highly illuminated side walls which is often the situation you see even in some classically derived galleries, certainly some of the nineteenth century, can have dark, slightly oppressive ceilings and the attempt was to open up the centre so that there is an even illumination base.