The Wildflower Centre

Some days stay with you. I remember clearly walking into the competition site in Court Hey Park. I immediately saw a line. A line of disparate context. At one end trees, at the other a very long wall, and in the middle a small single story brick building set at an angle of its own. I later found out it was the rangers hut. 

Whilst studying at the RCA I had become obsessed with cutting straight lines through complex, messy, unpredictable reality. My final project had a 4m wide, very long tube of light slicing through and out of a 60's brutalist concrete building in a park. The building had been used for animal experiments. The tube contained books. A penetration of light and enlightenment - into the heart of a beast.

When I got back to the office, it's before mobile phones and Google Earth, I checked the site survey and the long brick wall aligned with the angled corner of the rangers hut, continuing on to terminate on a huge mature horse chestnut tree. What more confirmation does one need? This did bring up a problem. The competition rules included a red line site boundary somewhere in the middle of the site. This was where Stephen Hodder and I aligned - he had no problem with risking disqualification for breaking the rules.

The park was naturally split in two by this imaginary line. I thought of it as a dead zone of slightly overlapping invisible boundaries. By placing an object into the dead zone, the new building would act like the central spine of a book. Acknowledging separation whilst unifying two pages with different things written on them. And - within the length of the line, another dimension, disparate contexts would be connected.

The working drawing package and build were intense and exhausting. Whilst on site, I didn't have a day off for six months. I still shudder for my young naive self standing on a sea of steel reinforcement measuring where to nail blocks of wood to the top of the ply shutter so that the top pivots for floor-sprung doors could be recessed into the structural concrete roof slab. Or telling the eight foot grizzly bear that he had to kanga out 12m of concrete wall because he'd put six bolt holes instead of four in each panel. It was mid winter and I'm sure he was thinking of putting me into the foundation that was dug next to where I was standing and pouring concrete over me. 

Architecture lecturers - young and old, and students seem to love the Wildflower Centre. During a recent lecture about it at the Architectural Association I pondered the appropriateness of personal, abstract architectural ideas. Should we take experimentation out and design conventional buildings that we already know will work? Does demolition prove failure? It is true that the building was used for seventeen years. Putting tons of soil onto an asphalt roof with 150mm upstands, designed with conventional drainage, was never going to end well. What is also true is that unusual architecture requires unusual thinking. It's unrealistic to expect the council to think this way, they live in a completely different world. I did try - property developers I know attempted to speak with them. No response came. Office headquarters, very unusual residential - were thought about.

Another approach put forward by the 20th Century Society was to strip the building back to its concrete structure and let it stand as a folly. A sculpture, a memory of an architectural idea. Obviously I love this notion. I always saw the project in two ways. Its geometry generated from the wider context - a resolution of the whole park. And then within the diagrammatic line there is space. The line has thickness. The thickness of concrete. You sculpt out space, cut incisions into its mass. The purest expression of the idea is to have zero interior space, no glass, no internal finishes, no sheath of green oak cladding. A pure form providing some shelter, a way to walk high above the park.