Barclay Road

Services
Design
Fabrication
Installation

Project Description +

This pergola was designed to work hard. It performs a number of functions in protecting delicate pieces of furniture from the bleaching effects of direct sun; it gives privacy to the internal spaces from overlooking (from both sides of a canyon of second-floor dormer windows on adjacent streets); it gives dynamic light and shade enabling a wider variety of plants to grow under and upon it and, most importantly it defines a place between the room and the garden. In making an enclosure, tension is created that holds the space between the pergola and the ground and declares, “this is where you sit to enjoy the garden”. You are no longer in the house, but you are not yet in the garden, and therefore can conceive it in its entirety.

This notion of place-making is often (and rightly) used as the driving force behind large urban or public projects, but also has a role to play in the most basic construction (here; a matrix of columns and beams) and in the simple domestic project.

The thirty-degree tilt to the louvres (in section) responds to the orientation of the sun, while in the plan the diagonal arrangements of the beams break the orthogonal grid of the interior - the man-made building, in preparation for the capricious and organic garden beyond.

Taking the opportunity to make a pergola that is more than a pergola brings to mind the writings of Kenneth Frampton and his ideas and teaching of tectonics. In the introduction to a lecture series he gave in 1995, he sighted the definition of tectonics given below by K.O Müller, a German scholar. We think that this captures the spirit of what makes the difference between simply building and creating Architecture and is therefore relevant here.

“..a series of arts which form and perfect dwellings and places of assembly. We call this class of artistic activities ‘tectonics’ Their highest point is architectonics which rises above the trammels of necessity and maybe become powerfully representative of deep feelings.”

– Karl Otfried Müller

Project Summary +

Client Private
Location Walthamstow, London
Sector Residential
Scope Interior Alterations & Pergola
Value n/a
Area n/a
Status Complete