Description

The House of the Religious Society of Friends stands in a complex in-between situation, bounded to the north by a railway cutting and to the south by raised-level road traffic. Any building on this terrain has to compete with an embankment and with a 19th-century church. Given these difficulties, the building was not built parallel to the road and the church, but was rotated by 45 degrees in order to achieve a prominent position for the house. The changing levels of the site provided an opportunity for two storeys each with their own separate entrances. What is below is of secondary importance: a multi-purpose, sub-divisible space of just under 58 square metres behind a triangular canopy. What is above is of primary importance: the Quakers’ meeting hall.

At its various levels, the architecture changes from square to octagonal to square. The fair-faced concrete façades rise in the four corners a little above eaves level. From outside, one has the impression of a compacted building, of a compressed “cathedral” with a “central tower” and “corner towers”. Despite its historical references, the building remains without pretension – a concrete box with a lid of wood and zinc. Floor and walls of the upper storey rest on four slab-shaped pillars at the sides and a support in the middle. The walls carry the weight of the roof; the roof carries the weight of the “lantern”. The vestibule is evidently not intended to be visible from the road. A windowless brick wall functions as a mediator to the residence on the left hand side. A low polygon opens up behind the entrance. Its five wall sections, rotated to the right, maintain distance from one another through the use of room-high glass and light strips. In this way, and through the gentle stepping of the ceiling, a spiral is suggested. The vestibule leads all eyes and feet into the hall, where the services take place.

Since the Quakers do not have clergy or rite, altar or ambo, this space remains empty but can be filled with up to a hundred chairs. The length and breadth of the hall measures 10 metres and the height from the cork-tiled floor to the underside of the tension rods of the roof structure is 3 metres. The four longer and four shorter walls of the octagons – plain concrete outside and blockwork inside – are finished in a smooth white plaster. Above the shorter walls are small rooflights concealed from view. In the space itself there is only one tall, narrow window. When one enters the hall and looks to the front, one looks onto the street from where one has just come.

The roof construction consists of four trusses that cross each other and narrow laths of redwood from the region of Lake Kara in Russia. The steel tension rods form nine subdivisions and allow the spatial arrangement of the room to be more clearly experienced. A huge “lantern” sits directly above the central area, a cube with edges of about 3 metres in length. The light fittings that hang from the four corners of the “lantern” are made of zinc.

The Architectural Review, no. 4/1973, pp. 265- | Concrete Quarterly, no. 101/1974, p. 5- | Trevor Dannatt. Buildings and Interiors 1951/72, London 1972, pp. 21- | McKean, Charles, Jestico, Tom: Modern Buildings in London. A Guide, London 1976, p. 81

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.