The value of voids

摘要

The current planning application from Nicholas Grimshaw to build a new block for the Royal College of Art on Kensington Gore raises fundamental questions of architectural and urban sensibility. At stake is not only the integrity of Cadbury Brown's elegant listed design of 1959, but of one of the major urban compositions in London. The Modern Movement ― of which the RCA is a sophisticated post-war example ― posited a new kind of city, a new kind of urbanism, one not based on the traditional concept of the closed spaces of streets and squares, but on a composition and contrast of forms in space. The spatial continuum was not simply to be neutral (the misapprehension of the designers of many tower block estates), it was to be moulded, manipulated, and articulated by the structures within it. This more open and dynamic spatial character was a response not only to the desire to separate the various transport modes previously channelled together in the 'corridor street', but also to extend the greater spatial openness advancing constructional technology was encouraging within architecture itself, and to counteract the grimy deserts of the sprawling industrial cities with a sense of the openness and greenness of nature. In this, it took forward the social and spiritual objectives of the 'Garden City' planners. A sense of that space, and the freedom it offered, was central to the Modern architectural ideal. Space was to be recognised as having a value, a presence, as real as the buildings themselves.