CHARLIE SUTHERLAND

For this public lecture by PAM,

Charlie Sutherland, basically its more about this architect's work and design sharing with public. First, let me introduce about the architect, Charlie Sutherland.

A London architect , he studied architecture at Mackintosh school in Glasgow, Scotland. Charlie Sutherland established Sutherland Hussey Architects with his partners, Charlie Hussey and Collin Harris in year 1997. He can handle small scale and large scale building design very well.

From his sharing, we can clearly know that all his design is mostly work well with site context (natural elements in jungle or modern existing structure in city) and also humanity (human behavior).

I will elaborate more about two case studies from him below.

Making Space for Making Art

This is Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) which are an organisation that offers a base for artists, providing studios, exhibition spaces, workshops and accommodation.

Over the past 15 years they have been working closely with ESW to assist in their campaign to raise funds to move out of their draughty old railway shed and into a new, purpose built facility. We have done this in two distinct phases, representing two separate funding sources; one through publicly accessible sources such as the Lottery Fund and the second through the Arts Prize - an anonymous donation of £3m for an arts building in Edinburgh.

The two phases represent an exploration into the opposite sides of the ‘arts building’ coin. One, the hermetic, practical, messy side of the making of art and the open, accessible and extrovert of the gallery. They are The Bill Scott Sculpture Centre (Phase 1) and The Creative Laboratories (Phase 2) respectively.

This represents the internal needs of the organisation, and of the artist with the thinking and making spaces accounted for, as well as educational facilities which maintain ESW’s focussed creative programmes for the public to engage with sculpture and the arts.

Picture above show exploded axonometric model for ESW, we can see the layer of every floor and structure in a clearly way. Building this first allowed ESW to decant from their dilapidated shed on the adjacent site, freeing up the land for Phase 2 which is an altogether different building.

Twelve external sculpture bays divided by elegant concrete piers flank two sides of a sunken courtyard inspired by the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, with a public cafe and the laboratories themselves forming the remaining two sides. This adjoins a new public route from street level down into the previously abandoned railway cutting - now a forming a key component in Edinburgh’s green link cycle network.

The main elevation to the cycle path is clad in brick and metal screens, a reference to the sites industrial past that allows glimpses into the courtyard, revealing the process of making to the public and encouraging passersby to explore within.

The sequence is completed with a 28m tall campanile, left for interpretation by future visiting artists, acting as both a gateway and as a beacon visible to the wider city beyond.

ChengDu Museum

In 2007 Sutherland Hussey Harris, in collaboration with Beijing-based Pan­solution, won first prize in the international competition for the design of the new city Museum for Chengdu in Sichuan, China.

Tian-Fu Square was recently established in the historic core as a new central focus of Chengdu. The Existing Science museum forms the entire Northern edge with a giant statue of Chairman Mao saluting the main North-South city axis, and on the East side, a new concert hall is planned.

The New Chengdu Museum sits on the West side of the square and maximizes its profile to present a façade of commensurate scale and proportion to embrace and address the huge scale of this new square and establishes a strong formal relationship to it by forming a simple enclosing rectilinear profile. The building further enjoys and celebrates this relationship to this monumental public space by extending an internal promenade of public foyers and circulation behind the entirety of the veiled façade addressing Tian-Fu Square.

We can see that, Charlie had a good skill in designing with site context, he decide the height and the flow of building form according to the surrounding context.

The long narrow site is exploited using all the public areas to maximise a dramatic relationship with the new square, the remaining façades consequently enclose the largely hermetic exhibition halls, these are represented as a giant crafted artefact in the city cloaked in a precious skin of copper alloy rigorously profiled to play with light, shade and texture whilst accommodating all the technical requirements for ventilation grilles. Aside from the east face this skin is ‘lifted’ to reveal glazing at street level, allowing a more human scaled intimacy and a relationship to the interior.

The form envelopes a new undercover outdoor public space – a monu­mental gateway through the building, offering a large outdoor public space where people can gather, cultural events can take place, even the local street market extends through to the square. This gateway within the building also creates an important connection between the C16th Huang Cheng Mosque, the most significant in South West China, and the main square. The main entrances to the museum, theater and museum offices all connect with this route through the building.

As an architecture student, we should more concern about what is happening around our site and tackle the site issue through our design strategies which always benefit to the community and surrounding environment, like what architect Charlie Sutherland always do.