Witherford Watson Mann Architects. Astley Castle nel Warwickshire
From Firenze University Press Journal: Firenze Architettura
In 2006 the London studio Witherford Watson Mann Architectswas awarded the competition for the renovation of a fortified manor house known as Astley Castle, near Nuneaton, in the north of County Warwickshire, in the Central Midlands of England. Continuous transformations had deeply changed the original Norman motte-and-bailey, which dates back to the 11th-13th centuries: during the 15th century the first additions to the rectangular layout were made, it was later rebuilt under the Greys in the mid-16th century, and finally its size was more than doubled between the 17th and 19th centuries. On April 3rd, 1978, it was largely destroyed by a fire.
In March 2010 the Landmark Trust — a British building conservation charity — raised 2.5 million Pounds for its restoration as a temporary residence. The building opened to the public in July, 2012, after 84 weeks of on-site work; the following year the project won, among six contenders, the 18th edition of the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize.
The proposal of studio WWM is based on a simple and unequivocal static-compositional principle. The consolidation of the existing shell is entrusted to a second continuous structure that is clamped onto the remaining stone masonry, which in turn supports a timber nucleus that is conceived as a subsequent ‘frame’ for the creation of the new interior spaces. This is an approach which the architects defined as «full contact», fully poetical in the double sense of the word: in terms of the doing, its constructive ratio, and of the more general vision that the project deploys. The first choice, generator of the design, was that of not restoring the conditions that existed prior to the devastating fire, and to proceed instead by reformulating the living spaces by carrying about a free interpretation of the latent vocations present among the remains of the building: «We have not restored Astley Castle; we have, rather, maintained the ruin and inhabited its core». In its vertical development the re-doing adapts to the heights of the 16th century, remaining under the crenellations and with a volumetric layout that is more reduced than it was toward the late 19th century. The strongest gesture was to preserve some of the existing gaps, in other words not envisaging a full repair; hence the intuition to occupy only the area of the fortified manor, ascribing to the 16th and 17th century wings the ambiguous role of courtyards or fore-courts, of enclosed spaces exposed to the elements. In this regard, William Mann recalls the pavilion of Le Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau, where a slender tree interrupts the continuity of the architecture by setting an eccentric coexistence of artifice and nature, of garden and house, yet we can also suppose the fascination for the Roman house, or more generally of the Mediterranean house with its active, continuous sharing of inside and outside, of enclosed and open: «Time is not just embedded in the walls, but alive in the constantly altering quality of daylight.
The castle is like a sundial, with the inner core illuminated through the perforated outer shell. It breathes out and in with the seasons: the sheltered courts welcome the guests into the warm summer air, but in winter allow in the rain and snow, seen but not felt in the warmth of the first floor hall»4. The walls that enclose the two courtyards terminate in a brief ring-shaped protrusion toward the interior of the space; this solution was adopted after a series of tests carried out at University College in London dispelled any doubts concerning the decrease of sunlight as a consequence of the said solution; the role played by the crown is to anchor the walls to each other, thus contributing to the support and protection of the masonry surfaces on which it is placed; this expedient seems to denounce the impossibility of fully carrying out the endeavour, the unattainability of completeness; and witness to this state of ten-sion is the restoration of the fireplace in a living-room where the everyday furniture and decoration compete with the sense of de-cay and loss.
The subtended drama is therefore spread open: the mixture of artifact and time, an envelope of pathos and resistance, as suggested by the architects; part of this drama are the dam-aged timber doors and windows and the battens of the shutters left hanging in their condition of remains, the patina and the corroded elements preserved in the facades, and above all other the creation of a platform under the false remains of a large window on the first floor which faces onto the stage-room of the consumption6. The connection between the remaining limb and the new wall-platform is ingenious: a T-shaped cement flitch beam inserted to the upper edge of window frames so as to permit the dematerialising of the corner between the northern wall (which dates back to the 16th century), and the one to the east (fortified nucleus), thus creating a perceptive connection and a temporal simultaneity between spaces that have always been separate.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/FiA-12230
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/fa/article/view/12230
