An Interview With Stephen Witherford of Witherford Watson Mann Architects
Von Chua:
With The Courtauld being a university - the smallest University in the UK but home to the largest community of art historians and conservators, is there anything in particular with the students and the staff that affected how your team approached the project?
Stephen Witherford:
The way we approach the project, like a lot of projects we do, is to work backwards in time to understand how an organisation or an institution ends up becoming the way it becomes. You have to think backwards in order to help them think themselves forwards because there's always a strong culture, and that culture has a spatial manifestation. At The Courtauld, what we didn't understand is how the different departments were located together at Somerset House from where they used to be separated at Portman Square. In reality, they hadn't really come together. They hadn't really connected together to realise the benefits of being more interconnected.
…to work backwards in time to understand how an organisation or an institution ends up becoming the way it becomes. You have to think backwards in order to help them think themselves forwards because there's always a strong culture, and that culture has a spatial manifestation.
- Stephen Witherford, Lead Director for The Courtauld’s Refurbishment
When we talked to students and staff, a number of people expressed their concerns that although there was a Collection, they didn't feel they had much access or relationship with it. The Collection in the galleries, the conservation departments, and the teaching departments were close together, but they weren't frequently experienced together by the students, the staff or the visitors. We simply listened to that and explored why that might be the case.
We looked at The Courtauld’s original home from its beginning around 1932, when it occupied Home House. Every time an expansion was needed, they just rented the next house and grew in increments of house. At the back of the houses were the technical departments. The gallery was formed in a separate place at Woburn Square. Each activity had a defined spatial territory.
At Somerset House, the Strand Block was originally designed and built to house nine organisations in suites of rooms. In 1989 when The Courtauld moved in, they moved their different ‘houses’ and corresponding departments into the different institutional suites of rooms that existed. For example, the conservation department moved into the West Wing; teaching moved into the East Wing; the library moved into the basement vaults; the gallery occupied the centre. They brought their spatial divisions with them, which was really interesting. When we understood that, we thought about what our architecture could do to help realise the original Courtauld vision of integrating the sets of disciplines and activities together for the benefit for all.
We looked at unlocking the barriers, opening up thresholds and making a more porous building. This would enable the different departments to connect together, for the visitors and students to become more aware of each other, and open up opportunities for different kinds of awareness, collaborations, interactions or conversations. The staff, students and visitors all share a real love or interest in art, so there's this lovely shared interest. At the heart of this project, as architects, we just had to imagine how we could help unlock and support that.
We looked at unlocking the barriers, opening up thresholds and making a more porous building. This would enable the different departments to connect together, for the visitors and students to become more aware of each other, and open up opportunities for different kinds of awareness, collaborations, interactions or conversations… At the heart of this project, as architects, we just had to imagine how we could help unlock and support that.
- Stephen Witherford, Lead Director for The Courtauld’s Refurbishment
Von Chua:
From your deep research of the move from Portman Square to Somerset House, was there anything that revealed why they have literally moved their arrangement of departments as they had previously existed? They had the intention to bring the school together but why didn't they do more at that time?
Stephen Witherford:
It’s not a question we could easily answer but what I would say is, in institutions, departmental divisions are usually part of the makeup of most organisations, and certainly in a lot of cultural institutions. The different departments quite often don't integrate or come together enough. I don't know what the psychology of that is. Some of it is spatial and some of it is cultural. When The Courtauld moved from Portland Square to Somerset House, the gallery team and the teaching team each appointed their own architects.
Von Chua:
That there is possibly a huge hint.
Stephen Witherford:
I can't tell you why the departmental differences and divisions occurred but the fact is that they didn't have a single architect acting for both of them. Part of the culture at The Courtauld is that they're a fiercely independent-minded organisation. They are the smallest University in the UK but home to the largest community of art historians and conservators; they didn't want to be part of a big university at that stage and wanted to pull themselves away. They want to think differently about art, to think differently about the context in which art is made. And maybe that means that the fiercely independent nature of the individuals means collaborative thinking doesn't come easily - it's almost the opposite of what their skills are.
Another way of looking at our project is that it is the first time The Courtauld picked one architect to carry out a project for the whole institution? In their history, they'd always remained quite independent. The Courtauld had always been spatially divided since its origins in Portman Square. The gallery was in a separate building that was partly completed and the idea was The Courtauld would later build the other half so that the gallery would then occupy the whole roof. An architect designed the gallery but not integrated with the teaching departments, even back then. History repeated itself with the move to Somerset House. Finally, through our work, The Courtauld will be unified through a single set of actions and thinking.
Von Chua:
This appears to be a huge turning point for The Courtauld?
Stephen Witherford:
I think time will tell if it has worked or not. We always say that institutions can change their buildings to suit them, but they also have to change to use their building.
The Transformation at The Courtauld
Von Chua:
It has been about six months since the completion of Phase I, have you received any initial feedback?
Stephen Witherford:
Some of the teaching staff and students have visited the new galleries and the collections. They’ve felt quite inspired and motivated by the quality of what’s been done. Of course, they would like that same quality for the teaching and research part of the building. We’ve had a little bit of feedback not in terms of how the whole thing could work in the future, but in terms of the level of ambition, the quality, the sense of openness, the sense of light, diversity of the new spaces and how they feel.
The other big change is access. The original building had something like 52 changes in level. The idea with this project is it really transforms accessibility, providing access to anyone who has limited mobility. It is also an important part of Phase II that the level of accessibility and openness is delivered to the same as Phase I so that opportunities for staff, students and visitors to attend lectures, research forums, educational programmes, etc, just as much as the gallery. There's an issue of consistency and of integrity, where the ethos of an organisation is to make sure that things like access and openness are delivered across the entire project. They're not just where the public money is or where the public philanthropy is - they also have to be where the educational ambition is to become more accessible to different kinds of students, tutors and also visitors.
Von Chua:
On top of the complex connections, you also have the challenge of working with a Grade I listed building. How did you and your team address this sensitive work? Did it lead to any interesting solutions that would not have otherwise been built?
Stephen Witherford:
Somerset House is a significant building in Britain. It has a Grade 1 listed status which is the highest level of protection and restrictions on what you can alter. The Courtauld occupies an integral and essential part of the Somerset House complex, which is one of London's most notable Georgian set pieces - one architect, one vision, one funder, one site and a set of buildings that have remained in government control largely, so have not been altered much over the centuries. It's an incredibly unified project. Therefore, there were a lot of concerns about what one might do and how one might make the changes which we sought to make.
In a way, the changes are quite radical. Here is a building designed to separate nine organisations, and now there is a need to connect more, that is going to involve some destructive acts. We worked closely with Westminster Council and Historic England in a series of workshops. We went through the entire story for this project, what it sought to achieve and then all the things you might have to change to enable that to happen. We had to negotiate all of those things before submitting an application to be assessed. For me, that process was extremely positive; it was an incredible exchange of experiences, ideas and thoughts about best practices and involved some interesting debates.
When you're outside The Courtauld building, there's a covered area called the vestibule, where there are three vaults extending between the Strand and the courtyard. The Courtauld’s entrances are off that space. Previously, you couldn't access either entrance if you were in a wheelchair, so we've adjusted the levels by removing steps and creating shallow ramps. We were able to source the same stone used in the mid-18th century, excavated from the same quarry in northern Sweden to ensure that the adjustments could be made without undermining the original architecture.
A lot of people didn't actually see what had changed but there's an immense amount of work. It looks like it could always have been like it is now. There were huge engineering works and thousands of small skillful details to make things feel like they didn't undermine that historic architecture. It requires a lot of patience and collaborative working to achieve that quality.
Some people might be demonstrative about what they change to let you know ‘we were here’. In the context of this project, we looked to radically transform something in a slightly gentler way. The old and the new are in a dialogue with each other and each is informing the other t. The new is changing the old but the old is informing the new. It feels much lighter, fresher and open as a building. It feels more contemporary but its real qualities are that its historic characteristics and features are more present now.
The ambition is that the new additions and rooms have correspondences with the historic conditions but are made in a contemporary way. For example, the new staircase we built is a traditional cantilevered stone staircase but it's more modest in detailing than Chambers’ stairs. There's a subservience but then there's also a conversation going on. The new things feel very new but also feel like they belong in this building. In certain places you wouldn't even really be able to quite tell, you'd have to look very hard to know what has changed.