Supporter's Column: Ethan Loo

The Catford Constitutional Club building brings up questions of how to repair.

Saving the Catford Constitutional Club Building

 

We are often faced with the task, when refurbishing buildings, of managing the push and pull of all the constraints, attempting to make the best of them and moving towards an outcome that is the best for the building and its users. As we enter a time where the profession is questioning the production of new buildings, new industrial materials and the route to sustainable progress, our focus has been shifted towards a deeper understanding of what it means to make existing buildings healthy and well, fit for both the present and the future.

Aside from the rich debate concerning the language or contextuality of new interventions, there is the question of what to do with the existing, sometimes crumbling fabric. In an ongoing project at our practice, involving the refurbishment of the oldest extant building in Catford, a Georgian farmhouse is being extensively propped, its rotten timbers stripped and replaced, its brickwork stitched and re-pointed, and a new timber structure introduced to brace its walls.

Despite this complexity, and the extensiveness of the necessary repair, we do not believe that demolition and rebuilding is the right answer, even if it is argued to be cheaper and faster. Whilst, much like a doctor, we must know where and how to make the fabric safe, hygienic, and functional, we try not to lose sight of its history, and the making of its identity through its body of materials and the spaces it provides. Perhaps sustainability, whilst measured, is not felt in figures of embodied carbon; rather, in the memories and emotions retained in bricks, mortar, plaster and wallpaper, and in the haphazard accumulation of volumes, spaces and circulation.

Whilst developing the project, we were interested in people’s nostalgia about the ‘place’, in how it was felt to be special, and how its uniqueness and importance for the community was spoken of, often with a knowing glance. We are interested in a narrative architecture, one which is embodied and lived, and not resulting from a singular ‘correct style’ (as was intensely debated in the 19th century) nor in post-rationalised stories spun and sold using consumable terms such as ‘shabby chic’: narrative is a medium of shared experience.

We are interested in the accumulation and the traces of human intervention embedded in the fabric by those who built, extended and altered it, including the builders currently onsite. This building has stood for the last 250 years, and our hope is that it will last for another 250 years or more. Within such a timescale, we will have gone and been forgotten, but our thoughts, intentions, as well as current technologies and skills will be embedded and preserved in the building, perhaps often hidden in the finishes, and only revealed when the next refurbishment work takes place.

This is especially difficult as we move further away from the close interlocking of the act of designing and building. Due to the need to plan and quantify, and from the realities of contemporary procurement, the architect becomes increasingly expected to compose the whole and understand the final outcome in accordance with known treatments and specifications a priori. The builder has become merely responsible for executing the work, as is often worded, ‘in accordance with the contract documents’. Whilst certainty is necessary in controlling quality and ensuring compliance with the range of regulatory, social, and fiscal obligations of a project before substantial resources are committed to its construction, it is a way of working which often leaves the uncovering of hidden layers of history being seen merely in terms of ‘risk’ and ‘delay’. Flexibility in responding to conditions onsite thus becomes something to be cherished, and we prefer to remain open to the building’s real material and its users.

We think that we must look closely at a strong architecture resulting from realism and compromise: something robust enough to accept happy accidents and a narrative of accretion and change. This is not only a celebration of craftsmanship or the ‘beautiful’ in a narrow sense, but of the value in the stories buildings can tell, from ornate Victorian plasterworks and elaborate brickwork to, equally, a pockmarked 1950s concrete slab and patchwork stair spindles.

 

This article was written by Ethan Loo, Architectural Assistant at Hayatsu Architects.