Patrick Lynch
Materiaphilia chapter 1 - unpublished (2011)
Going with your brother and my brother
To see your father die,
We arrived back in a fog of tears and fog,
And were lost.
“If you turn left three times you arrive
back where you started”,
you claimed.
But you described a spiral father,
When you thought you’d described a square.
Geometry and Love, Patrick Lynch 1993
When I was a young boy my father would sometimes care for me on his building sites, whilst my mother was busy shopping or doing errands. Thus my first encounters with bricks and with making brickwork walls were emotional ones. Bricks smell, of course. On a wet day in autumn they smell of rust, like blood. They discolour your hand, and when you touch them, your hand smells of blood and rust afterwards. Bricks smell of love to me.
My father was what is known as a ‘small builder’, which means that he undertook small domestic projects in the main, building extensions to large Victorian houses along the River Thames at Henley. Only once did he build a new house. Sometimes he just repaired and amended old walls. He was principally a bricklayer in a period when this was a common and well-respected trade, although he was apprenticed as a surveyor and trained at night school to achieve his OND certificates. But office life bored my father and he longed for outdoor work and the independence of his own building projects, and so he fell back upon skills learnt from his stepfather and used these alongside his draughting skills to gain planning consents for small projects which he subsequently built. In a rather obvious way, looking back, my brother and I fulfilled an unspoken ambition on behalf of our family, and we became architects. I guess bricks smelt of love and hope to us.
When my son was a few months old my wife and I took him to stay in Norfolk in a house we’d designed for a friend. We went in July and spent a week there beneath its timber tent and the brick chimney, frying in the hot sun; and then again, six weeks later, protected from the September rain.
At university the first building that I studied was the Villa Mariea, which the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto built for the Gullischen family in 1936. Aalto was a flamboyant womanizer and a drunk, and for a long time I felt that his magical imagination was tainted with a sort of sickness – a thwarted love that repelled and attracted me like a risky love-song. His designs are inscribed with plaster lines of longing; deep strokes of someone’s hand caress absences. The air thickens into the loss of form, shadows sit melancholically beneath windows, dragging them down like eyes. Deep raked joints in brickwork walls seem heavy with the gravity of being; forms rise up but matter falls down again, they seem to say to us.
Asked why he always used timber in his interiors he replied: ‘The origin of materia, is mater’, and wood ‘is most like human fibre’. When his mother died he was a young boy, and he claimed that the forest where his father worked as a Ranger, and in which he lived, became his playground; the trees were his friends. In the famous photograph of him in his own villa - which he called ‘the experimental house’ for tax reasons, Aalto is dousing a fire in the courtyard, which is essentially an outside hearth; the forest is again all around the fourth wall of this theatre of longing, and trees from it are burnt like sacrifices in the ancient barbecue pit. Barbecue is a word that derives from the Taino people of Caribbean – “barbacoa” meaning sacred fire pit. Wood smelt of love to him, I guess.
Aldo Rossi shows a photograph of a kitchen in an Italian farmhouse in his ironically entitled ‘Scientific Autobiography’. The earth floor sits beneath a timber sky, and furniture sets up a horizon of use and occasion between these two gravitational pulls on the human imagination, grounding common life on a weak and fibrous table lit from above. Bricks protect this.
Bricks protect timber, in almost all domestic architecture. Almost all British towns and cities are composed of brick, perhaps most strikingly in Georgian and Victorian buildings, protecting the timber structures within, enabling them to endure, making the timber almost immortal.
The great Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza speaks about ‘How to Live in a House’ in terms of never ending work and war. House Work is never done he says – like love, we have to keep it up for ever, whatever the weather. Caring for a house is a labour of love; and this love-work always defeats us in the end. In Siza’s early projects, clay tiles bake in the sun, reminding us that they are ‘terra cotta’, baked like the earth that they have been dug from. Bricks, of course, are baked earth, cooked earth, loved earth, worked earth. They require effort and skill to dig them up and to lay them down so that the material is transformed. In Siza’s hands, bricks are clearly individual parts of a bigger system, particular but nonetheless absorbed into a pattern, like words and sentences in flows of meaning. At F.A.U.P (the architecture faculty at Porto University) there is a miniature brick furnace behind the library that resembles the memory of a factory building, shrunk to become a synonym of industry and of burning, distinct from the white rendered walls of culture and learning.
Brick reminds Siza of labour I think, before it is converted via architecture into the apparently pure white light of ideas. White walls are the things rising in his buildings, terra cotta falling like roofs wet with rain, dripping down to the earth again. His architecture seems caught in this arc of rhythmic pull and pushing of the sky, floating forms are pummeled almost back into the ground yet are incapable of simply becoming earth again, separated from it by their original transformation.
Architects careers, too, seem typified by this metamorphic process. The makers of simple brick buildings become the potential creators of immortal objects. We are formed by the fire of imagination and ambition and something gets burnt off in making us; usually this is empathy and the power of memory. And so, many architects seek, through the very idea and actuality of bricks and brickness, a way back to something emotional and meaningful, although this is too often expressed as ‘materiality style’ than as a more resonant evocation of the mother of imagination, Materia itself. A few examples stick in my mind as being something more than simply style.
Tom De Paor designed the first Irish pavilion at the architecture Biennale in Venice in 2000, where he made a small room out of peat briquettes. Unburnt earth was laid out in bricks. Open to the sky, the room was effectively made of Irish land that was donated to Venice after the exhibition.
At Taka’s house in South Dublin, a concrete dining table sits in front of a brickwork wall into which a fresco of white glazed bricks seem to have been inlaid as if to indicate the fusion of the furniture with the architecture, of events with materials and action with time. Light falls from above through timber beams, or from the garden doors beyond. The table is long enough for the last supper or for a large family party, and has seen christenings and weddings. It’s big enough for a funeral Wake, strong enough to lay a coffin on. And like the chorus in an ancient play, the glazed bricks form an active background, elaborating on the scene, drawing your eye towards the fall of light, and towards the reflective ground of the table. And so the light is gently broken up into blue ripples; the sky is brought down to earth.
Dow Jones Architects have designed a number of dwellings in Suffolk over the past decade, using ‘medium red’ bricks from the Aldeburgh Brick Works. The bricks fired in the centre of the kiln are ‘burnt’ whilst the ones at the edge of the fire are ‘light red’. At Poplar Cottage, Alun Jones and Biba Dow created a garden room with a central fireplace that is open on two sides. It rises up from a red clay-tile floor onto which oak tables and door frames are set. At the Marshall House, the stair seems to hang, hardly touching the brick floor that folds up the far wall to form a fireplace beyond. Brick sets up a ‘ground’ here as well, on which furniture and perishable things move about.
Along with the inhabitants, furniture appears fragile in contrast to brick floor and walls – furniture suggesting human bodies, just as Aalto claimed. Chairs appear as caricatures of sitting figures or folded bodies, coiled against a brick background; tables mimic a crowd scene; doors are like upright figures, frozen in the act of leaving the scene. Brickwork protects all of this domestic drama and allows it to co-exist within another scale of time, where everyday events exist in a continuum with the seasons and momentous events, part of nature and part of the cultivated world. Bricks smell of love to me.