Spotlight on Jan Kaplický

 

There are very few Londoners (and international cricket fans) who are not familiar with the Media Centre at the Lord’s Cricket Ground. Designed by avant-garde Czech architect, Jan Kaplický, this is one of his most renowned ‘spacecraft-like’ architecture projects. Completed in 1999, it received the RIBA Stirling Prize for its futuristic design and has become one of the icons of the sporting world. Kaplický provides us with inspiration here at RISE Design Studio, not only for his futuristic work but also for his interest in his later years in nature and the incorporation of organic shapes in his work.

RISE Design Studio Jan Kaplicky drawings

A new life in London

After beginning his career as an Academic Architect in Prague, Kaplický fled to London in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He described a need to escape a country where empowerment was very limited at the time and it was “impossible to achieve anything that was even slightly out of the ordinary”. Not allowed to go to university, buy books, or exhibit his work in public, his move provided him with creative freedom and he soon found himself working on the design for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, under the direction of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano before they relocated to the French capital.

He set up his own architectural practice in London – Future Systems – in 1979, and produced many intricate drawings of orbiting robots and homes transportable by helicopter. Although none of these drawings became real buildings, they drew a lot of attention to his ‘elegantly radical’ ideas, opening the doors for him to design the Lord’s Media Centre and later the Selfridge’s shopping store in Birmingham in 2003. Described as “the ultimate rejoinder to what was then Birmingham’s reputation as a decaying concrete jungle”, Kaplický’s work once again brought inspiration through his visionary designs.

From outlandish to organic

In the mid-1980s, Kaplický suddenly started to look to nature for organic inspiration for his architecture. Perhaps as a result of the death of his mother around that time – she was a well-known illustrator of plants – he had a renewed appreciation of the value of his mother’s work, using shapes of cobwebs, sea shells, mushrooms, flowers and other plants in his later work. Blending these shapes with a harsh and often controversial futuristic edge created a unique style that interrogated the relationship between nature and technology.

The business of buildings

Kaplický’s designs were generally not possible to build using conventional techniques. For example, the Lord’s Media Centre is an aluminum semi-monocoque shell – a sort of ‘boat shape’ – and there was no standard contractor in Britain who could build it at the time. Instead, Kaplický and his life partner, Amanda Levete, found a boatyard contractor in Cornwall to do the work. Combining Levete’s business experience with Kaplický’s designs worked well for several years.

In his later years, Kaplický designed a National Library building for Letná in Prague. Despite the work winning an international competition, its construction was blocked by the Czech authorities and caused much public and political debate. In interviews with Kaplický before his death, it was clear that he was sad not to have been able to build something in his home country.

The legendary Richard Rogers retires

 

A few weeks ago, Richard Rogers retired from architectural practice. One of the UK’s top architects, this marks the end of an illustrious career portfolio which includes the striking, modern landmarks of the Lloyd’s building and the O2 arena in London. In this post, we look back at some of his key works and what these meant for architectural practice more broadly.

Richard Rogers Madrid airport

Born in Italy, Rogers moved to the UK as a young child. As he grew up, his architectural skills were honed at a range of institutions, including the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and Yale School of Architecture in the USA. At the latter, he met fellow student Norman Foster, with whom he set up an architectural practice with in England in the 1960s.

Early projects

In the late-1960s, Rogers was commissioned to design a glass cube house in Essex, framed with I-beams. This modernist, hi-tech style continued in subsequent works into the 1970s, including the use of standardised components to make energy-efficient buildings.

Perhaps most well-known at this time was his design of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which he developed with Italian architect Renzo Piano. The unique way in which the services for this building (water, heating, etc.) are located on the exterior allows the internal spaces to remian free from clutter. Although the building attracted widespread shock among Parisians when it was built, it is generally a widely-loved Parisian landmark today.

The Lloyd’s Building in London, which Rogers designed in the 1980s, was also subject to some controversy. Again, the building’s services, including lifts, staircases and water pipes, are on the outside of the structure, leaving open space inside. The building was Grade I listed in 2011 in recognition of its fame.

How cities are used

In his later career, Rogers devoted a lot of his attention to sustainability and the ways cities are used. He became quite vocal in political discussions about urbanism, setting up the Urban Task Force at the request of the UK government in the late 1990s to identify causes of urban decline and set out a vision for the future. The task force wrote a white paper, ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’, which set out more than 100 recommendations for future city designers.

In the early 2000s, Rogers continued to work closely with government, advising mayors of London and Barcelona on urban design strategies.

His later works

Alongside his political engagements, Rogers created additional works that were, like his earlier works, simultaneously popular and criticised. Of particular note was his design of the then Millennium Dome (now the O2 arena), which received widespread criticism in the run-up to the new millenium due to its cost.

The ‘inside-out’ works of Richard Rogers remain icnonic to members of the public and architects alike. The way his designs strive for uncluttered, well-lit internal spaces has provided inspiration in our work and we wish him all the best in his retirement.