Irénée Scalbert on the work of 6a architects: an architecture built not on style, signature or theory, but on metis, bricolage and craft.
About this book
6a architects have built a reputation on work that refuses to announce itself. In Never Modern, the London critic Irénée Scalbert sets out what that refusal actually consists of — not modesty, but a deliberate turn away from style, signature, theory and even concept. In their place he proposes metis, the ancient Greek form of practical cunning: an intelligence made of resourcefulness, timing, improvisation and accumulated craft. The argument moves through situation, intervention, making, comedy, bricolage, chance and anthropology, mirrored throughout by a visual essay of archive photographs, artworks, film stills and the practice's own projects. Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald's buildings — Raven Row, the South London Gallery, the fashion galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum — emerge as works of bricolage, assembled from what is to hand and drawing on history and the everyday to make something new. The book is designed to the proportions of a postwar French paperback novel.
Key features
- 64 black-and-white illustrations forming a visual essay that runs alongside the text
- Written by Irénée Scalbert, with contributions from Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald
- Covers Raven Row, the South London Gallery and the V&A fashion galleries
- Short-listed for the CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award, 2014
What you'll discover
- What metis means as an architectural method, and why Scalbert prefers it to style, theory or concept
- How bricolage operates as a working practice rather than as a critical label applied after the fact
- The role narrative, appropriation and craft play in 6a's approach to historically sensitive sites
- Why comedy and chance belong in a serious account of contemporary architectural practice
About the author
Irénée Scalbert is a French-born architecture critic and historian based in London. He taught at the Architectural Association from 1989 to 2006, was visiting design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2006, 2007 and 2011, and teaches at the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick. He has sat on the editorial board of AA Files since 1998. 6a architects was founded in London in 2001 by Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Dimensions: 14 × 21 cm
- Pages: 176
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783906027241
- Publisher: Park Books
- Publication date: 2013
Perfect for
Architects and students drawn to practice-led thinking over theory, readers following contemporary British architecture, and anyone interested in craft, reuse and the intelligence of working with what is already there.