Thresholds and Encounters

how widespread such customs have been, just as we have become oblivious to the meaning of the word threshold as container for the precious harvest on which settled life depends. Among the Kabyle of North Africa the bride traditionally had to be carried by a foreigner to intercept evil forces, and having crossed the threshold she had immediately to be seated on a bag of grain, linking her fertility with that of the fields. This was placed against the female central column of the house whose forked legs supported the master-beam, an explicit representation of the house’s conjugal function. Pierre Bourdieu’s famous account further includes a long list of customs defined by the threshold, controller of the transition between two worlds: the outer male-dominated public world and the inner feminine family one.2 Although that example is unique in its detail, the anthropological record is full of parallel cases which show not only widespread social customs and prohibitions involving thresholds, but also that they have frequently been the sites of offerings and sacrifices.3 Transition between internal and external worlds has always been important, so entrances have consistently been foci of architectural expression. This need has not ceased in modern times despite much denial and abuse, for we continue to differentiate between public and private, requiring markers to define where trespass begins,

The entrance is the most sensitive place in a dwelling: it gives some idea of the identity of the inhabitants and of whether they want you to know about them or not. Not so long ago the window looking onto the street would display a vase, a plant set between glass and curtain, or a statue facing outwards. Even the hem of the curtain was turned inward, the best side being reserved for the street. Front doors had attention lavished on them, protected by a welcoming porch. The letter box was celebrated, the door-knocker a piece of craftsmanship: this is after all the frontier of tactile contact between the outside world and the family. Nothing was abstract, nothing done in a mean or contemptuous way. What has happened to this constructive display of ethnological expression? It is notably absent in the basic modern door with its miserable letter flap in sheet metal and industrial bell-push. Today it is a relief even to see the scrap of sticking plaster which a doctor has stuck under his bell to inform his patients of changes in his surgery hours. Lucien Kroll, 19861

Everyone knows about the idea of carrying a bride across the threshold to mark first entry to the home, but few realise

Thresholds and Encounters/Peter Blundel l Jones 155

3

The threshold at

Ropemakers Field

Thresholds and EncountersPeter Blundel l Jones

156 Proctor and Matthews Archi tects

and we still need in our dwellings a means to turn an outer face to the world. Thresholds must signal the transition as well as controlling it, and they are usually layered so as not to be too abrupt, including zones of negotiation where greetings, partings, and exchanges can be made. Aldo van Eyck wrote poetically about this in relation to the protracted thresholds of his famous orphanage in Amsterdam:

It was saved from being a bad house… by anchor(ing) the children’s large house/little city to the street, i.e. to the public sphere, where they enter and leave it, by introducing a large open square as a transition between the reality outside and that inside. It is an in-between domain leading the trail gradually in stages, helping to mitigate the anxiety that abrupt transition causes, especially in these children. Leaving home and going home are often difficult matters; to go in or out, to enter, leave or stay, sometimes painful alternatives. Though architecture cannot do away with this truth it can still counteract it by appeasing instead of aggravating its effects. It is human to tarry. Architecture should, I think, take more account of this.4

As zones of negotiation, thresholds must be clear but also gentle. Sometimes instead they are abrupt, unwelcoming, and deliberately so, and it clarifies our understanding to register the difference. An example that comes to mind is the entrance to the municipal prison in Chartres, France, which offers thresholds from different periods, both abrupt. The nineteenth century one in the Gothic style is severe yet not devoid of style, announcing its function on the tympanum with a moral stress on the possibility of ‘correction’. All the same, it is a door straight onto the street with no handle or means of contact, a door slammed

behind one when one is ‘banged up’. The twentieth century version is more utilitarian, requiring a large gate for prison vans and a setback from the street. The treatment is drab in the extreme, its function (Maison d’Arret) announced only in a small and eccentrically mounted brass plate high above the right-hand door.

Surveillance cameras, lights, and glass viewing panels in two of the doors speak of security, and the sole tiny moment of celebration is the shield and pair of small flags identifying it both as a national and as a European institution. Prisoners are hustled in without ceremony, and nothing is done for the family members who might dare to greet them on their return. This is a harsh threshold, almost devoid of architecture. The meanest, most unforgiving door is on the left, grey sheet steel flush with the grey rendered wall: no sign, no shelter, no thickness, no transparency; keep out.

Transparency can soften a threshold, allowing glimpses within, yet it can also be too soft. Frank Lloyd Wright, on visiting Philip Johnson’s Glass House, is reported to have walked about taking his hat off and putting it on at inopportune moments to ridicule the lack of definition between inside and out. But some of the clearest examples of this problem are provided by Jacques Tati in his satirical film Playtime, for which he built a large set of exaggerated Miesian architecture. Monsieur Hulot has his usual fun with glass doors and glass enclosed waiting rooms which are continuous with the street, but there is also at one point in the film a flat with a living room at street level and floor to ceiling glazing, where domestic life is enacted curtainless after dark, the inhabitants appearing to the outside world as if on stage, the window as proscenium.


Opposite left Aldo van

Eyck, Orphanage,

Amstelveenseweg,

Amsterdam

Opposite right Twentieth

century entrance,

Municipal Prison, Chartres

Top Jacques Tati,

Playtime, 1967

Bottom Nineteenth

century entrance,

Municipal Prison, Chartres

1 5 8 P ro c t o r a n d M a t t h ew s A rch i t e c t s

Because there is no two-way communication the viewer intrudes, becoming a voyeur. In Tati’s earlier film, Mon Oncle, the vernacular world of old Paris is presented by contrast as a complex series of thresholds, for Hulot reaches his room at the top of his house via a circuitous route which goes in and out, up and down, in a way that completely contradicts the logic of efficient circulation. But he is obliged to greet his neighbours on the way, and this seems to constitute his social life. Although this depiction is exaggerated and sentimentalised, the layering of territories and accommodation of multiple signs of life are true to tight-knit old towns that have been allowed to evolve idiosyncratically, with overlapping ownership where people share an entrance, a courtyard, a staircase, and mark the transition to their own space with a potted plant, a mat, or some ornaments before the door.

H o u s i n g , R o p e m a k e r s F i e l d

This introduction has served to draw attention to the nature and importance of thresholds, which have been a consistent and dominating concern of Proctor and Matthews, especially in their housing work. It was evident early on, with the row of 11 terraced houses in Limehouse in the East London Docklands of 1996. These are houses without gardens, for the rear ground level is taken up with garages and a gravel forecourt. It was therefore necessary to negotiate with the outside world mainly at the front, and to make the most of a narrow strip about three metres wide which lies between the inner edge of the public pavement and the outer wall of the house. At street level this zone of the plan divides into a series of small yards or gardens, protected by a breast-high brick wall topped with minimal railings, and entered by a low

steel gate with a shallow step up and change of paving. Although these gates are not locked, and seem often to be casually left open, each defines a private enclave which the residents have made their own through planting and other personal touches. It is so obviously private that one even feels intrusive taking photos. The house wall is rendered white as opposed to the brick elsewhere, bringing both light and an implied sense of insideness. Where the paired doors of handed houses would come together stands a tall slab of brickwork which extends to protect the balconies above. This both exaggerates the separation of adjacent gates and provides concealment for the cupboards to take bins and bicycles. The house front doors are tucked beneath the balconies, contained by sheltered porches in each corner to allow intimate

greetings and partings. The residents have not hesitated to personify their front doors, but the street effortlessly absorbs these minor variations. On the other hand, the naked brick and the brown staining of the timber frames which unify the appearance of the group of houses has been accepted as a defining communal feature, the residents deciding for themselves that this must be a consistent and shared element.

T h re s h o l d s a n d E n c o u n t e r s / P e t e r B l u n d e l l Jo n e s 1 5 9

The area between house and street is further exploited on the first floor with balconies on a shared timber frame, a kind of aedicule or ghost of a house standing in front of the main facade. The balcony provides another kind of transitional space, raised above the street and well-protected within its frame, roofed with a pergola on which plants can grow. Fretted screens divide adjacent balconies visually, though acoustic privacy is inevitably compromised. The whole apparatus of the big frame also helps screen the windows of the second floor, but its main job is to change the scale of the block as a whole, giving it an urban formality which plays down the individual houses for the sake of the street. Proctor and Matthews made the bold decision to group all the first and second floor windows of each house in a single timber frame, so that each is distinguished from a distance by what seems to be a single large window. The balcony frames stand in front, plugged into the centre of each of these, linking them with an alternating rhythm, though the formal impact is softened in most views through diagonal perspective. The formality of the facade as a whole and the play of scales are reminiscent of Georgian housing, the big windows working rather like the giant order used by Cubitt at Frederick Street, while the alternation of windows and frames are rather like the classical semis of the Lloyd Baker Estate where one pediment is shared between two houses. As in that case, one has to look twice to decide how the

rhythm divides. Also similar to Georgian architecture are the rusticated white base and the termination of the wall in a parapet, as opposed to the mansarded eaves at the rear. The threshold spaces between house and outside world do not stop with yard and balcony, for there is a generous and more secret roof terrace for each house set behind the parapet and invisible from the street, large enough to turn into a small roof garden. Gates at the ends of the dividing screens allow contacts between neighbours, as well as providing emergency escape. The back threshold is for vehicles, the garage doors blank and uninviting, but the play of rhythms and scales continues with narrower double-storey frames, the contrast between front and rear enhancing the identity of each. All in all, the houses are cleverly planned to make the most of every contact with the outside world and of the contrasting ways in which such contacts can be presented, whether through window, yard, balcony or terrace. The development cleverly combines a Georgian sense of urban decorum and street-making with a delicacy

Opposite top Jacques

Tati, Mon Oncle,1958

Opposite bottom

Threshold,

Ropemakers Field

Top Lloyd Baker estate

‘classical semis’

Middle Frederick Street

Bottom The

‘back threshold’

Ropemakers Field


of threshold that has persuaded the householders to participate and express themselves.

T he M i l len n iu m Vi l l a ge

The Greenwich Millennium Village came later and was much more ambitious, but it was also part of a masterplan devised by Ralph Erskine on a rather more informal and picturesque model, not harking back to the Georgian street like Limehouse, but engaging water and landscape at every turn and allowing variations in height from two-storey houses to eight-storey blocks of flats sometimes rising into towers. Cars were to be kept to the edges to make it a largely pedestrian realm, with peaceful paths and places for children to play. Erskine must have been a hard act to follow, as his genius at Byker and in his Swedish work had been to produce such endless variety in a large housing scheme, avoiding the dumb repetition which dogs the work of most contemporaries, and giving each part a new individual identity.5 But Proctor and Matthews soon demonstrated that they could play this game ringing the changes like the master, and also that they could take in their stride demands for prefabrication that might have increased repetition and made the housing appear mechanistic. Once again their house planning was deft and imaginative and they were able to develop a lively rhythm on the street, and once again they sought to articulate thresholds in a great variety of ways. A few examples will suffice to show how they reapplied and extended their techniques.

Many of the two- and three-storey houses have courtyards front and rear, but while the rear one is private and an almost square outdoor room, the front is open to the street and half the width, enclosed by a single-storey vestibule

extension, a treatment reminiscent of JJP Oud’s houses at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart of 1927.6 In some cases these little courts are paired, defined by a protective steel frame, a dividing column, and a pergola leading to the door, making an outdoor room. Paving treatments further define the territory, with cobbles on the frontier band, and an opportunity for planting between court and pedestrian street that has been accepted and exploited. In other cases the little courts are separate and the narrow extensions are of two storeys or more, so the whole space is sheltered. But again the ground treatment is definitive and includes planting areas that the residents have developed. Even when Proctor and Matthews are obliged to make no more than a door in the wall it has still proved possible to define the territory with a differently paved doorstep to which potted plants have been added, and to provide a sheltering canopy hung on an external frame. The horizontal wooden cladding in this case differentiates the two entrances with a continuous vertical band. The more private rear courts to some houses and flats were given a protective layer of gate and fencing with a planting bed in front, which has been so well exploited by some residents that they are now completely secluded. For the blocks of flats, balconies were provided with sun-shading devices that also add a sense of enclosure and protection. The higher blocks next to vehicle streets were pulled back from the pavement by a lawn and hedge-like planting, allowing a protected yard to

the ground floor surmounted by glazed balconies above, the whole carried by a steel frame set forward of the building in a larger version of the timber one at Ropemakers Field. At the back end of the development it was necessary to plan some difficult houses (live/work units) backing on to the two-level car park, their lower two storeys confined to a single aspect. The payoff here is a high-level roof garden linked to the top storey living room, which has been well exploited by residents.

P u bl ic a nd Urba n

Proctor and Matthews’ concern for thresholds and in-between spaces is not limited to housing, for the negotiation between public and private is something that affects all architecture, as even the most public buildings have their relatively more public and more private places. This is not only a matter of the difference between fronts and backs, but also of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, the concepts coined by Erving Goffman to describe common events in public life.7 Every shop has a frontstage counter where sales assistants deal politely with customers, and backstage stores or offices where they gossip or swear at one another. Similarly, when you take your car to the main dealer’s garage you pay the outrageous bill to the suited man in the frontstage office without seeing the violence done to your car by the backstage boiler-suited grease-monkeys. The restaurant and its kitchen are another example: it proves a potent concept once you start to apply it, and shows the necessary relativity involved between public and private, which we recognise by contrast and in their gradations.

A recent project in the seaside town of Hastings has caused Proctor and Matthews much debate about public and private, about the natures of different kinds of streets, and about the healing of the urban fabric. Their site lies between two streets. The major one, Havelock Road, dates from the mid-nineteenth century when it was set up in response to the railway, curving down the hill to link the station with the sea front. Behind, to the west, is Priory Street, a smaller back street diverging at an angle, which remembers in its name the long gone Medieval Priory whose grounds were there. Havelock Road had suffered a demolition gap like a knocked out tooth, and this (and more) the client (a government regeneration agency) wished to fill with offices, shops, and a sixth form college, a mix approved by the local plans, which would stretch through the block as far as the other street. Although the locality was devoid of actual listed buildings, it was a conservation area, originally built up with Victorian bay-windowed houses and redbrick public buildings which simply followed the street lines. This remains the background fabric, though like most English towns it has been damaged by twentieth century intrusions. Since the land falls towards the sea, a considerable difference of level existed between the two streets which had to be solved and exploited, adding to the sheer complexity of a site with varied neighbours and odd plan-shape. Clearly, no simple modernist set-piece could be appropriate, and if the building has turned out something of a chameleon, that is largely because of the very complex contextual conditions that it was obliged to answer to.


Opposite top JJP Oud,

Weissenhofsiedlung

houses, Stuttgart, 1927

Opposite bottom

‘Outdoor room’, Greenwich

Millennium Village

Right Model with communal

garden, Greenwich

Millennium Village



It is easiest to start with the plan. Havelock Road is to the right, and required a continuous new frontage taking up the curve, but Proctor and Matthews decided it would be possible to break it at ground level with a new pedestrian alleyway leading through to Priory Street, following a local tradition of such alleys, which are known as ‘twittens’. On Havelock Road this alleyway and its entrance canopy break the long elevation, allowing it to change level and angle, as well as showing the new building’s permeability. On the other side, due to the angularity of the site, it was possible to conceive a south–west facing public square partly foreseen in the masterplan, for the street was due to become a pedestrian zone. Proctor and Matthews explored many ways of exploiting the change in levels, but eventually settled on an arena-like angled flight of steps which can serve as seating in summer. The funnel-shaped square leads naturally through to the alley, but also to the most public of the buildings, the new college. In early design studies this occupied the north end of the site in one of the two parallel blocks with a semi-private intermediate courtyard. Its main entrance address was both the public square and the alley, and in a bid to unite the internal circulation with the public alley circulation, the two ran in parallel sharing the same floor plane and folding with the same steps, divided only by a glass wall. In this way the division between the frontstage part of the college and the fully public alley was reduced to the minimum, and the college would become part of the city. This configuration changed as the design developed and additional sites around the public square were acquired for redevelopment. The education component of the brief became the second phase of a university campus already established in the

town, and is now proposed for a site on the south side of the square at the rear of an existing 1930s Post Office building and entered via a gracious flight of stairs–a visual extension of the raking stepped profile of the square drawn into the building’s central atrium. The taller of the two ‘parallel’ buildings has become additional office space. In the final configuration, however, the initial spatial concepts remain in tact, with the vestiges of internal and external ‘twittens’ defining the principle pedestrian movement through both the semi-public entrance lobbies of the two office buildings and the public realm of the new Priory Square. The alley will be open 24 hours a day, and on the east side of the square a cafe is intended, so there is every chance for an animated public route. The view north from the mouth of Priory Street, framed by the new University building on the right, will provide a suitably large-scale public approach for the office buildings from the south allowing some breathing space for the taller nine-storey block. A transparent treatment of this tower-like building both celebrates the main entrance to the office space and makes a beacon of its board room and meeting spaces above, whose importance is celebrated with a big blue frame.

On Havelock Road the elevation is utterly different to fit in with the way that the rest of the street is composed. Proctor and Matthews produced a sequence of drawings to show the various rules that the facade is obliged to obey, showing that behind the collage-like effect is a good deal of hard and precise thinking. Hole in wall windows and a heavy cornice pick up the rhythms and levels of the Victorian neighbours, while switches between render and exposed brickwork repeat the mix of materials elsewhere in the street. A

Opposite left ‘Sheltering

canopy’ live/work units,

Greenwich Millennium

Village

Opposite right ‘Lawn and

Hedge’ threshold,

Greenwich Millennium

Village

Top Public Square, Priory

Quarter, Hastings

Bottom Glass wall and

folded floor plane, initial

design, Hastings


Photographic Study

Indicative Street Elevation

Building Demise

Rythm of vertical bays

Primary Horizontal Modelling

Primary and Secondary Horizontal Modelling

Cornice line

Openings Havelock Road Study of Existing Elevations

colonnade at ground level announces the building’s permeability and allows shops to step back, while a kind of folded plate projects at the angle change of the facade to proclaim the mouth of the alley. This is important, for facade, alley and square operate together as an unfolding sequence of spaces which both reinterpret the idea of the ‘twitten’ for the twenty-first century and bind the new University building and its office neighbours into the town fabric as a collection of semi-public spaces with soft thresholds.

People ver su s A n i m a l s

Proctor and Matthews have also recently earned a high reputation in the design of zoos, where ideas of thresholds and definitions of frontstage and backstage are rather different. Ever since the Royal Zoological Society went public in 1847 there has been a conflict between animal husbandry and the demands of public spectacle, for incarceration in small cages and exposure to the public gaze is hardly the most sympathetic treatment for our animal cousins, yet as we destroy their natural habitat our zoos have become increasingly necessary as repositories for preserving and breeding species on the verge of extinction. Captive animals also provide crucial subjects for zoological study and experiment, but their value as spectacle is far from exhausted. Even though David Attenborough’s programmes on television have given us all a much better idea of what wild animals are like and how they behave, there is still no substitute for seeing them in reality, hearing their roars and smelling their scent, and sensing some personal response in gestures or eye contact. Alec Guinness even used to visit London Zoo in search of characteristics for parts he might play, noting and imitating the poises and gestures of the creatures he encountered there.

London Zoo had long kept its apes in a series of long low pavilions built in the 1970s and equipped with small outdoor cages, which monopolised a fairly large site near the middle of the zoo, offering a fairly neutral architectural experience with a lot of public route. Proctor and Matthews were asked to revise this and to create rather more generous conditions for the animals, concentrating particularly on the gorillas.8 After some initial toying with an enclosed ‘biome’ structure, they decided to rework the site mainly as an open garden for the animals, achieving the crucial security requirement by making it an island bordered by a two metre deep artificial canal. They then reversed the traditional relationship in zoos by confining the people instead of the gorillas, obliging visitors to follow closely a prescribed route around the

edge of the island, along a ‘boardwalk’ and through a building which allows views into the gorillas’ indoor accommodation. Traditional prison bars and grilles were altogether avoided by substituting 40mm thick glass in places where stretches of water are lacking, This allows the gorillas to approach safely within inches of people if they choose to do so.

Having set up this general strategy, the whole onus of the project hung on the design of the boardwalk as an unfolding experience for the public, almost in a narrative or cinematic manner. Side glimpses of the island come first, as the gravel path winds in from the west to meet the boardwalk at a bridge where water crosses to enter the moat. A high side wall then encloses one to the right and a roof above, so one’s attention swings to the left and to the window onto the island, the glass wall and its roof supported by rhythmic groups of bamboo columns. As the space becomes more enclosed and the roof projects further, the view of the island switches to the interior of the day gym where gorillas are more likely to be found in bad weather. At the corner there is another threshold marked in floor and ceiling, and the space unexpectedly opens up. Light breaks through between the roofs and the turn is well controlled, the expanding space allowing room to linger before one moves on southward and out. There are more views into the gym on the right, then again across to the island as one leaves. Early concept sketches make the intention of this winding, changing route already clear, while sectional working sketches of parts of it show a concentration on changing boundaries, spatial adjacencies, visible structure, textures, and surface treatments. All this is thought through, architecturally layered and fine tuned, treated as ‘frontstage’ as opposed to the more relaxed and utilitarian treatment of the ‘backstage’ accommodation and technical areas required by the keepers, which were in any case required to be more flexible.

The undoubted climax of the show is the long double-height gallery where one first gets the chance to face the gorillas directly through the glass, and where they may also occasionally amble across a bridge above you to their secluded sleeping quarters behind. The floor is of rough sawn recycled ekki hardwood, with a gravelled border to warn of the impending glass. The supporting structure of bamboo columns is placed in angled groups of three with large black pads of steel at floor and ceiling. Bamboo is immensely strong besides being a somewhat exotic looking natural material, and gives something of the impression of moving through a grove.


Opposite Havelock Street

analysis, Hastings


The lower part of the back wall opposite is timber clad and broken with various exhibits, but the upper part and the whole ceiling are boarded rhythmically in plywood panels decorated with partly cut out linear patterns, beyond which is a transparent roof. The effect of this layered arrangement is to admit a dappled light which changes with the sun, creating an impression like being in a forest, but not too literally so. The surface pattern, fascinating in its variability and geometric freedom, is derived from African Kuba fabrics and therefore gives a hint of the gorilla’s original home. The figure-like arrangements in the original fabric must have local symbolic associations, but these are neither known nor translated. In the hands of Proctor and Matthews the pattern is rather used to give a crucial consistency to the main passage through the building as well as adding interest by filtering the light. It would be tedious to describe in detail the many variations in the treatment of the route around the island, and all the ways in which visual interactions between people and animals are handled and orchestrated, but even a glimpse

of the architects’ exploratory sections reveals their concern for the role of the building fabric in controlling and defining relationships. Arguably it is the same kind of concern that is visible in all their designs, whether people are looking at gorillas, passers-by in the new ‘twitten’ are glancing into the office lobbies of Priory Quarter, or people in the street are nodding to neighbours in houses at Limehouse or Greenwich. Hastings’ Priory Quarter, only recently completed in part, has yet to be tested, but the housing projects repeatedly demonstrate how residents have been able to declare their ownership and spill out into the public realm, while the architecture calmly accepts it. London Zoo’s Gorilla Kingdom has already proved popular with the public, but the animals too have profited from their new found freedom and variety of habitat, showing their enthusiasm in an orgy of sexual activity. Attempts to get them to breed in captivity had hitherto been unsuccessful, so if young are born, it will be a great compliment to the architects.


Opposite Gorilla

Kingdom, double-height

gallery early perspective

Top Gorilla Kingdom,

Gorilla Encounter

Bottom left Gorilla

Kingdom, initial concept

sketch with winding route

Bottom right Gorilla

Kingdom ‘working sketches’

ISBN 978 1 906155 60 5

Black Dog Publishing Limited10a Acton StreetLondon WC1X 9NGUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0)20 7713 5097Fax: +44 (0)20 7713 [email protected]

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.© 2009 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK, the artists and authors.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the necessary arrangements will be made at the first opportunity. All opinions expressed within this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher.

Footnotes:

1, Caption from page 27 of Kroll’s book The Architecture of Complexity, London: Batsford, 1986, translated by Peter Blundell Jones.2, Bourdieu, Pierre, The Kabyle House, in Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, also included in Mary Douglas, Rules and Meanings, Penguin.3, For a rich collection compiled in the nineteenth century see H Clay Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant.4, Aldo van Eyck, “The medicine of reciprocity tentatively illustrated”, first published in Forum April–May 1961, reprinted in Ligtelijn, Vincent, and Strauven, Francis, eds., Aldo van Eyck: Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947–1998, Amsterdam: Sun Publishers, 2008, p. 318.5, For the author’s analysis of Byker see Blundell Jones and Canniffe, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, Architectural Press 2007, Chapter 11, pp. 139–152.6, A conscious influence, according to Proctor. In Oud’s houses the tiny two-storey rear extensions define a kitchen court and contain laundry and drying rooms, see Peter Blundell Jones, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, Architectural Press 2001, pp. 21–22.7, The classic text is Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh 1956 and numerous Penguin re-editions.8, Colobus monkeys are also to be allowed on the island as they are compatible with gorillas and can come and go by different routes, but the two species have to be introduced to each other gradually.

Picture Credits:

P162, © Peter Bennett PhotograpyP157, (top), P158(top), © Les Films de Mon OncleP160, (top) Constanze LeibrockP156, © Spaarnestad Photo 2009/Louis van Paridon. All rights reservedP154, P159 © Morley Von Sternberg

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Thresholds and Encounters