Façades in our buildings come about through our interest in what those buildings can say or do in relation to the world around them.
My physicalized and experiential approach to architecture has lead me to notice how buildings and constructional materials themselves embody social ideas and values, rituals of use and other cultural information directly in their fabric. From this I have understood how to make architecture in which there is a productive tension between its roles as art and basic human communication and use.

Lisson Gallery, London (1992)
By using a steel framed structure we were able to make the building very open to and present in the surrounding city, and by exposing the constructional concrete as the finish of the floors to make its physical presence be felt.
Very large sliding windows span across the open structure to bring north light and views to the exhibition spaces from across the street and open schoolyard, and to provide for the installation of artworks.
In essence, the façades consist of the activity in the interior and reflections of the surrounding trees, buildings, and sky onto which the windows and entrance doors of the exhibition spaces are sketched very minimally.
These doors and windows mimic the arrangement of display window, entrance door to the shop and door to the apartment above in the 18th century building next door.
Gallery floors align with those of its neighbour and a shift in the vertical axis of the façade starting at first floor makes the façades of the two buildings seem similar in size. In the larger scale, elements in the Gallery façade rhyme with elements of the school and high-rise building nearby.
Exhibition spaces in the Gallery were given the unforced character and aesthetic of spaces that had occurred in the surrounding neighbourhood by accident, and their proportions were made imperfect and unequal so that the artworks would be more visible than the architecture of the room. Details and spaces of the building are completed by events from the world outside, and in turn, the building makes a public place for the eye in the neighbourhood.

The Red House, Chelsea, London (2000)
In the Lisson Gallery, we sought to make architecture from the detritus of the city. In the Red House, architecture itself and its strange provenance in British society were the subjects.
Its location, a street from the late 19th century of houses and artist studios, where Oscar Wilde and Whistler lived, is sometimes, but not always, elegant and historically significant, but possesses no connecting style or overall urban design.

These conditions allowed us to make the Red House even more different from its neighbours, while at the same time giving order and composition to the street, if only momentarily, by relating it to the form of surrounding buildings and the street, things which were both aleatory and full of significance.
At the edge of the pavement, the façade consists of a screen wall punctured by entrances with a central bay window above it, all aligning with the building on the right. Behind this the main façade aligns with the house to its left and extends up to a substantial cornice that is approximately level with the houses on either side.
The effect of this simple configuration is to maintain the intensity that the houses on either side give by standing at the very edge of the pavement, while creating a completely different, far more overt type of volume than is found in the locale in the façade above.
Uniform red limestone in the façades and sliding doors to the garage, and bronze coverings to the windows and ventilators increase the abstractness and difference of the façade in relation to its neighbours.
The interior of the house begins in the open-air planted entrance court behind etched glass in the ground-floor screen. Rooms proceed away from here and the street towards a deeply planted private garden behind the house.
As in an Amsterdam canal house or Venetian palazzo, parts of the interior and ceiling are visible from the street while the occupants are not, so that despite its luxury the Red House is a part of the life and fabric of its surroundings.
Motifs from the past are freely used in the Red House, but it is a building of these times, and in fact a work of modernism in the vein of Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky where things from the past are modified and incorporated into contemporary experience.

Faith House, Holton Lee, Dorset (2002)
Faith House is located in an extensive rural territory of heath land, copses, meadows, and agricultural fields that leads eventually to the sea at Poole Harbour in Dorset. In a number of buildings across the site, including Faith House, a charitable foundation works in Holton Lee with disabled people using personal growth, the arts, spirituality, and exposure to nature as therapy. Our design for Faith House was an essay in how location and the techniques of low-cost, sustainable construction can be used symbolically. Significance is given to the building by placing it at the end of the long straight road that leads in through the estate and placing it on a slight rise in the garden of the existing farm house from which it looks out to the fields. As it is approached, the sky and land can be seen through and around the building, symbolically locating it and the occupants in the natural world. The main façade is intentionally ambiguous, offering images of a primitive rural temple, an agricultural building or a piece of sculpture. A porch on the left provides an open air shelter from the rain, with a discrete door leading to a room for quiet contemplation, painted silver and containing a circle of cut trees.

A more evident door leads from the porch to an interior lobby, which looks back over the garden through a sheet of glass in the central bay of the façade. From the lobby a door leads to a large room for exhibitions and meetings, which opens through glass doors to the fields. Symbolism here is careful, neither ironic nor emotional, and people have said that it lets them take over the building as their own imaginative property.

Tietgens Grund, completion of the square around Frederiks Kirke, Copenhagen (2007-8)
Frederiks Kirke, or the Marble Church as it is also known, was planned as part of the new city quarter of Frederikstaden, which commenced in the mid-1750s with four very fine Rococo sandstone palaces around an octagonal plaza that connected to the church by a street of stucco apartment buildings in a similar style. Frederiks Kirke and its surrounding square of apartments were only completed in 1894, by the developer C F Tietgen, which is reflected in the less refined 19th century classicism of the apartment buildings. Tietgen however was unable to buy a small area of land in the southeast corner, and this area of the square has remained incomplete, with the earlier vernacular buildings of the city standing on it to this day. Part of that land was recently purchased by the architectural foundation Realdania, who commissioned us to make a building in the style of these times that binds together the apartment buildings of the square and the remaining vernacular buildings. The façades of the apartment buildings are ordered with a system of pavilions, projections, and pilasters over a fenestrated and ornamented surface, and yet they contain a large number of exceptions. Entrance doors are not always where expected and balconies are sometimes omitted or differently constructed. And despite their stateliness the apartment buildings have come to contain a rich and varied mixture of domestic life, small businesses, and recreation, and the courts and railed areas in front of them to be used as entrances, bicycle parking, and communal gardens. In contrast, the vernacular buildings are minimal and austere, and used in an ad-hoc manner by their occupants who have built informal garden terraces between their roofs. Our design establishes meanings for the new building through similarities and contrasts with the buildings around it. A founding decision was to adopt the design system of the apartment buildings in the façades of the new building. Cities like Paris, Berlin, or Barcelona show that their type of generic urban classicism produces habitable, well-scaled districts while easily allowing variations such as those of Gaudi or Perret, or our scheme here in Copenhagen. The new building is the same size and height as the pavilion that ends the apartment buildings opposite it, has a similar pattern of pilasters and window lines and selectively borrows and omits elements such as balconies. Pilasters and windows are then powerfully geometricized as a frame that is filled with windows and open loggias, giving an abstract quality that connects with the minimality of the vernacular buildings standing next to it. Ornamentation is replaced with tectonics, façade making, and exaggeration in the depth of projecting balconies and pilasters. Social contextuality is provided by the mixture of apartments, shops, and restaurants that the building accommodates, which are planned with very wide angles of view so that their interiors become part of the city. Shops and the restaurant have windows and entrances directly to the street. The apartments are entered from the square through an open-air loggia enclosed by railings. These railings extend beyond the building and enclose the garden in front of the adjacent vernacular buildings to finally complete the landscape design of the square. Loggias in the upper floors of the new building continue the pattern of informal roof gardens found in the buildings next door. Although looking as if made of stone, the 19th century apartment buildings in the square are in fact cement stucco and their balconies concrete, and we have in turn made the new building of an artificial material. Pre-cast concrete cladding, finely made with sandstone aggregate will cover the new building, each panel differing slightly in tone, giving a secondary scale and tectonic treatment to the building frame. Seen side by side with the 19th century apartments, the new building reflects the transition to a liberal and democratic society in the 20th century and the part in it played by the modern movement in architecture. Balconies that were merely gestures in the 19th century are now places to live in public. Windows that gave a very measured relation between interior and exterior are replaced with extravagant areas of glass bringing an abundance of light to the interior. The attic, where servants were concealed in the 19th century, becomes a penthouse from which to look out and be part of the whole city.

Regional Art Museum at Fuglsang, Southern Denmark (2006-7)
The project is located within the buildings of a former farm, on a site of exceptional beauty. Here the land extends completely level through sparsely delineated trees and fields to salt marshes at the edge of the sea that are a reserve for wild birds. The scheme is planned so that the landscape will be the first thing that visitors see as they drive into the site and then walk to the building, which is placed discretely to the side. Since the building will be first seen obliquely, strong profile and massing is given to the main façade by three tall diagonal roof lights grouped above a sheer and windowless enclosing wall. This configuration also composes with the primary forms of two very old and high roofed barns nearby and the façade of the Manor House that has three tall gables. All the farm buildings are of brick, and one barn is over-painted white, the other red. Brick will be used in the new building and finished with a white translucent glaze, making the Museum seem both deeply situated in its location and unearthly.

Aus der Ausgabe 12-2005