BOB ALLIES

︎︎︎Rowan Mackinnon-Pryde

RMP
Anything that we make in the world creates relationships between that and something else, whether that be an object or a space or a person. And I’ve been thinking about ‘order’ as the means by which we define, or make legible, those relationships. I think this is related to the ideas you’ve written about regarding continuity in the urban context.

BA
Sometimes when I give lectures about our work I actually use the title, ‘designing relationships’. Because I think that that’s essentially what we do as architects. We do it at every scale: the relationship of the window to the wall, or the frame to the door, or one space to another, of inside to outside, or of the building to the street.  It’s an inherent potentiality of architecture and it shapes the way we think and work.

In any relationship between two elements, or conditions, there’s always an interface, and it’s often that transitional piece which is the most interesting. What’s on either side can look after itself, but it’s that bit in between which you really have to work at.

We (Allies + Morrison) have certainly been particularly interested in urban relationships, and we probably do always begin from the position that how you relate to what is already there is as important as whatever it is you’re going to add. That, in other words, you’re always participating in something bigger than your individual project.

The word ‘order’ is interesting. Whether it’s a kind of urban order to do with the public realm, or whether it’s an architectural order, to be found within a building. If you’re interested in relationships, then you have to look harder at what is there, to understand how it works and what its order is.

I sometimes think about this because of the work I’m now doing in Bath...

RMP
As Architect in Residence?

BA
Yes. I’m trying to influence various things currently happening within the city. One thing that I’m aware of, or something that I worry about, are those parts of the city which still, to my mind, remain unresolved. I suppose I’m always interested in how it might be possible to resolve these situations, to find a higher order. Sometimes I do reflect and ask myself “Do I really need to worry about that?”. I don’t know, but certainly I am very interested in those parts of the city where something has happened historically to disrupt the continuity of the urban fabric, and the underlying order has been lost as a result.

So this kind of order is essentially about continuity: formal continuity, functional continuity, all different types of continuity.

This is where an individual project can resolve things, make things better than they were before.

I realise though that perhaps there are other aspects of the idea of order that we should be considering...

One is the situation where you have two different orders running in parallel, right? There’s an external order you’re inheriting, or responding to, but then you’re fusing it with an internal order emerging out of the logic of the building you’re designing. And then you try and find some sort of dialogue. Sometimes the relationship might resolve itself completely calmly, almost without noticing it happening, but sometimes you might take pleasure in the discord.

RMP
This makes me think of the works of Dom Hans Van der Laan that I’ve recently been looking at through the research of Caroline Voet. He used this term Superimposition which might refer to the relationship between, for example, two spatial rhythms that are overlaid, or in relation to one another, in an unexpected way that’s not necessarily consistent throughout the whole piece.

I’ve not visited any of these buildings, but when you look at a plan some of these shifts are very subtle. It sets up less obvious relationships between spaces, and generates layered views and diagonal movement.

BA
Yes, that’s interesting. I was impressed, and influenced, some years ago by an earlier book on him, which I reviewed, by Alberto Ferlenga and Paola Verde.

RMP
I find that in architecture today there is in some sense a reaction against the word order. It’s perceived as control, oppression, perhaps human control over the natural world. Whereas if we look at its history, for example in Classical Greece, order is about creating things that exist in harmony with the found condition. Participating with something, as you might say.

BA
When you talk about Greek architecture, I think of the Parthenon where you have the order of the temple, with its internally driven logic: an incredibly subtle and ingenious order. But then you have the order that arises out of the way the buildings are positioned within the site, don’t you? This is another type of order, but one which again is all about relationships, about the position of one object relative to another and about the experience derived from that relationship. And it’s not coincidental, it’s very deliberate.

RMP
Yes, it’s not just an architectural object with its own internal order and relational logics. It exists within this more complex set of relationships.

BA
Yes. And this is something that we get caught up in.
And in our work we’ve always tried to find a very strong underlying order.

Figure 1. St Thomas' Hospital (1966-1975), Yorke Rosenberg Mardell.


Figure 2. The Austrian Post Office Bank, Vienna (1904-06 and 1910-12), Otto Wagner.


Figure 3. Entrance, British Embassy, Dublin (1997), Allies and Morrison. ©Allies and Morrison.


Figure 4. Exterior, British Embassy, Dublin (1997), Allies and Morrison. ©Allies and Morrison.



Figure 5. Staff entrance, British Embassy, Dublin (1997), Allies and Morrison. ©Allies and Morrison.

In the 1980s, when we were just beginning, we did a competition entry for YRM, Yorke Rosenberg Mardall, who Graham (Morrison) used to work for. They were a brilliant Modernist practice founded in the 1930s. In the post-war period, they were designing large projects like airports and universities and  hospitals. A lot of their buildings at that time were clad in tiles, both inside and outside, and they had incredibly rigorous rules about not cutting tiles. So there was a dimensional certainty about everything they were doing. It was obsessive, but powerful too. By the time Graham joined them, that approach was already kind of disappearing.

The competition we did for them was Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square. We didn’t win. The jury took a very cautious approach, a classical building which has since been built on the south-east corner of the square. But we did get into the final stages of the competition. Our scheme had a very clear elevational logic, inspired by Otto Wagner’s Post Office Building in Vienna, which of course possesses a very rigorous order.

This was before the widespread use of computers and the logic that goes with them, so we were drawing by hand. But we were drawing every layer of the facade on a different piece of tracing paper, each one overlaid on the other. So the elevations had this kind of inexorable internal logic. And this approach to drawing informed the way in which we designed all our facades at the time, with a clear set of rules determining which material was on which plane. An advantage of this method was that you could explain it all very clearly. It had its own internal logic, which everybody could understand. So it carried us through conversations with other people working on the project within the office, and it became the way we started to develop buildings like the British Embassy in Dublin.

It’s funny though. Because, although we would be desperately pursuing this rigorous order within the facades, we were always prepared for it to give way to accommodate some programmatic requirement.

RMP
Interesting.

BA
So it was never enough to just find that single order in the building. It was never universal.

RMP
But the programmatic is interesting, because I sort of think, or let’s say, here’s a question about contemporary work. A lot of it, I would say, either uses repetition in a way that becomes monotonous, or it’s overly responsive to another aspect such as programme or material, which creates a sort of collage.

There may be underlying orders, but they’re not legible.

So perhaps the task is to find a balance between both of those things. And the question in the methodology of designing, how do you make those judgements? Because if you create that set of grids and rules and logics defining the application of materials etc. You have to have contingencies built in for where it doesn’t work.

BA
Yes, and then you develop a sort of sub-language or something.

RMP
A sensitivity or a set of principles. And somehow, they are perhaps more difficult to describe?

BA
Yes, you’re right. Well, also, you don’t want to feel that the building has become a kind of system over which you’ve lost control – that it’s taken over, you know? You can’t get out of it, you can’t escape it.

All architects have their own internal rules which they impose on themselves. We are currently collaborating with Rogers Stirk Harbour on the new station at Euston. They can’t understand why we always put our cores on the inside of our buildings. And we can’t understand why they always put their on the outside. And you are both trapped in the way that you do things. These self-imposed rules are very hard to escape.

RMP
You indoctrinate yourself.

I think that also comes down to intuition because intuition doesn’t come from nowhere to do with a constructed experience and pattern of response. But then it becomes inescapable to not draw the line in that particular way because it’s become habituated.

BA
Yes, yes.

Figure 6. The Mound, Ediburgh (1983), Allies and Morrison. ©


Figure 7. The Mound, Ediburgh (1983), Allies and Morrison. ©

RMP
I think that leads to another of my questions – or perhaps I have two kind of interrelated thoughts. What you’re describing is related to the idea of authorship. I get the sense that there can be a fear, or a kind of resistance towards engaging in that participatory way of working because it may not stand out as unique and special. I think that is maybe related to that subtle balance of repetition and variation - where you can still read that somebody has been involved in this part and somebody else has been involved in this part, but they’re not shouting for attention.

It’s perhaps difficult to talk about in a big practice like yours, but is there any kind of sense that you need to claim authorship? To be able to stamp it as ‘somebody did this’?

BA
Well, it’s definitely a complicated question. There are projects where one of us has a stronger claim to authorship than the other, but in most cases it’s not like that. And then there are a lot of buildings where other people in the practice have played a major role. Ideally when you’re working together you’re trying to explore the implications of the idea – wherever it came from -  and find ways of intensifying it through its detailed development, and that’s often best done through conversation.

And in our case, our ideas remain quite abstract for quite a long time. So we were never very driven by materials: we didn’t start a project by thinking we should design a strong brick building: we would tend just to talk about material A, B and C and their relationship to each other. So the design of the building could go quite a long way before we got to that. It could be talked about abstractly for a long time.

RMP

Do you think that’s still true in the practice? Or do you need to reach that more quickly nowadays?

BA
No, I think, actually, it’s still a very useful thing.

We learned it quite early. The first building Graham and worked on together outside A&M was a housing scheme, and we designed it all with blockwork cavity walls, and detailed it on that basis. We were then amazed to find that the tender was won by a timber frame manufacturer. And of course the whole logic was different. We had brickwork in places where it didn’t make sense anymore. And on other projects, where we had assumed the structure was going to be steel it would turn into concrete or vice versa. I think though that we found that flexibility useful and maybe that’s coloured the way we felt a bit about materials too.

But the practice has evolved now, you know, with another generation of people. Our first employees became our partners. Paul Appleton was the very first. He trained in Edinburgh. And he worked on the Mound. He spent his whole life with us, and now he’s retired. So that generation kind of grew up with us and in the end we all shared a way of thinking.

The generation who are now taking the practice into this next phase, although they have probably been with us for 20 years, they’re more individual in a way. I mean, they are tending to work more from their own individual ideas.

One thing about Graham and I was that we were always working together, so there was always this communication between us. We had to argue our cause with each other. It wasn’t enough to think something’s going to be ‘nice’, you know, it had to have a clear logic, which we could explain to each other, and then explain to other people. So I think when you have two people working together it can change the way your work develops.

RMP
I think we find that in our practice. Maybe it’s a resistance to invite other people in because we’re not sure if we’ll speak the same language, but you’ve got to either accept that there’s going to be another strand to that conversation. Or you’re going to bring somebody in and train them in a school of thought.

BA
Yeah. I think we were lucky with people. I think because we had this quite strong sense of where we were going, they were probably all prepared to get behind us. They weren’t competing to do things. It was only really after about fifteen years, that suddenly they became interested in developing their own version of what we’re doing - let’s put it that way. I can see a Paul Appleton building, you know, I can identify the things he did. But he wouldn’t have done them like that had he not been working with us all this time. Even as he was making his own decisions, they were, I think, always indirectly influenced by the practice.

I think the way we use order is something we all really discovered through practice. It wasn’t something I feel I learned at university, in my education.

It’s weird now though that you can effectively produce images of buildings from nothing. You can create things that look like buildings now, without really having to think through all the decisions. Are buildings being impoverished, because there’s not more to them than just simply an image?

RMP
And that working through of it is important, isn’t it? And maybe it comes back to the idea of the Parthenon’s two logics that have to be worked through: the found condition has to be understood in order to respond to it. That series layered drawings that you described that have that really rigorous internal logic that creates the architectural object, has to then co-relate with that condition you find. It seems to me that that’s the hard bit and maybe that’s something only the architect can do.

BA
Yeah, exactly. I’m currently on the RIBA Awards Group with Andy Groarke of Carmody Groarke and I’ve heard him say more than once, when we’re looking at a building and we’re trying to work out whether it should win an award, “you just feel it hasn’t been drawn enough”. His point is that you can see that there is an architectural idea  there, but without that sort of repetitive exploration it hasn’t been fully realised. So there’s a kind of thinness, or lack of intensity.

RMP
I think it’s a complexity that comes out of refinement.

BA
Yes.

RMP
This does lead into another thought related to ideas of the Modern and Postmodern.

Latour’s idea of the Non-modern - that simultaneously takes into account the ideas of separation and categorisation of modernity, and the hybrid of postmodernism – seems to me to be closer to the inter-relational approach of the Classical. Non-modern might be capable of searching for or generating a logic, whilst also relating to broader complex ideas of the city or existence or environment.

BA
Postmodernism, and more specifically, post-modern classicism, were emerging exactly at the time we started the practice. We didn’t really want to align ourselves in that way, but certainly I felt we couldn’t really avoid being, kind of, postmodern. Because the way we thought about everything was, in a sense, a consequence of, a reaction to, Modernism. So it seemed reasonable to me. We weren’t continuing Modernism, and I knew it didn’t feel like we were cutting ourselves off from it either. It was definitely the world we were in, one where the way we thought about everything was a consequence of Modernism. It was either informing and shaping what we did directly, or in the way we were reacting against it. That, at least, is how I resolved that for myself.

‘Both, ‘and’ is always interesting. When I’m making a PowerPoint for a lecture, I sometimes  put the words ‘generic’ and ‘specific’ together on the screen just to acknowledge the fact that both of those things are important to us. We recognise the importance of the generic aspects of space, the need for buildings to be more open-ended and indeterminate, We see that as a quality. On the other hand, you also have to accommodate the particular. That’s the reality of architecture. Architecture is to do with the world, isn’t it?

Figure 8. London College of Fashion (2023) Allies and Morrison with V+A East (2026) O’Donnel and Tuomey in foreground. ©Allies and Morrison 


Figure 9. London College of Fashion (2023) Allies and Morrison. ©Allies and Morrison


Figure 10. Upper garment studio, London College of Fashion (2023),  Allies and Morrison. ©Allies and Morrison

We’re working currently with O’Donnell and Tuomey on the cultural quarter at East Bank in the Olympic Park. It’s interesting to see how their buildings are so much more complex and generated through a different conceptual process.

RMP
Does that come from a narrative led approach, do you think?

BA
Yes, I think it does.

Their V+A building has an orthogonal structure in the middle of it and then a free-form envelope which wraps around it. All the circulation is in the space between the two. This produces a spatial complexity which is probably is beyond where we would feel able to go.

When I talk about the London College of Fashion, though, I do sometimes use the title: ‘Can simple be complex?”. It’s the idea that a building has an order that you can describe in a very simple way, but once you set it going, the outcome is surprisingly complex. We’re not the artist shaping the final form. We’re defining a set of rules and setting the game in motion, and what comes out of it, is to some extent out of our control. Spatially, the LCF is about as complicated a building as we’ve ever designed. And yet the order of it is ruthlessly simple. It’s completely on a regular grid, there’s a column on every grid line, there are four types of bay, and eight types of infill panel.

RMP
This takes me back to the classical. Although all their interrelated proportional systems had to really be tight, they also accepted the fact that things needed to be adjusted to control the optical illusion of perspective.

BA
Right.

RMP
And I know that’s a different thing to what you’re describing, but it’s related to the idea that the appearance or legibility of simplicity requires a certain level of complexity.

BA
And maybe the fact that somehow technological or constructional logic doesn’t get you far enough. There’s always another layer... and sometimes a grid isn’t always quite enough.

RMP
I like it, “a grid isn’t always quite enough”. I think I could be a good T-shirt.