In a new book on Adam Richards Architects’ Nithurst Farm, Charles Holland finds that the building’s austere interiors and casket-like symmetry challenge the conventions of domesticity, engaging with themes of death and timelessness
There is a drawing in Here We Are, Home At Last – a new book about Nithurst Farm, designed by Adam Richards Architects – which depicts the building in the manner of a 17th-century perspective. Not only is the false perspective of the building’s plan revealed, but so is something more unsettling. The house is drawn with its roof missing, along with most of the elements that might define the everyday life within, giving the interior the quality of a ruin. A fragment of external wall is rendered as a double cross, and the kitchen island appears as an altar or a mortuary slab on which lies a naked body, laid out as if recently deceased. It’s fair to say that this is not a homely image.
Ruins recur throughout the history of architecture, a ghostly counter-image to one of positive inhabitation. The early 20th-century architect Adolf Loos claimed that only two types of building – the tomb and the monument – belonged to the realm of art. Of these, only one is inhabited, and that is by someone who is no longer living. For architecture to reach the status of art, it seems that it also needs to divest itself of the everyday, ordinary demands of life – to become, instead, about death.
Nithurst Farm is not actually uninhabited. It is lived in by Richards and his family. But it has the quality of both a tomb and a monument, as well as a church, a castle, a folly, and numerous other building types, none of which are houses and none of which are about everyday domesticity. Loos went on to say that the house is an essentially conservative building type, concerned as it is with issues of comfort and security. So how do we approach a house that takes as its inspiration buildings that are not only not houses but ones in which austerity and a rejection of creature comforts are essential? This book – published by Lund Humphries and featuring texts by writer Geoff Dyer, architect Takero Shimazaki, and historians Corinna Dean and Jeremy Musson – only adds to the mystique of this uncompromising but fascinating building.
Even without its cinematic narrative underpinnings – the book makes reference to films including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death – Nithurst Farm comes across as a densely illusive and elusive work. It is hard to think of a recent building so deeply steeped in architectural history: references to Palladio’s villas on the Veneto (which were also farms), the baroque mannerism of John Vanbrugh, as well as a less specific but pervasive sense of classical antiquity, hang over it. To this one could add the powerful brick forms of Louis Kahn, the archetypal elementalism of Aldo Rossi, and the dreamlike intensity of Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte.
Nithurst Farm occupies a beautiful site on the Petworth estate in the South Downs National Park. It is constructed from a poured in-situ concrete shell, left exposed for the most part on the inside but clad in a brick outer skin. Formally, it consists of three roughly cubic volumes that step up in scale to form something like the section of a giant brick staircase. The volumes are punctured by large, arched openings. The detachment of the brickwork from the concrete structure behind renders these openings as dark voids, allowing the exterior to read more as an empty, possibly uninhabited shell.
The exterior red brick walls also have patterned areas of darker brick clustering around the arched openings. These appear almost like puffs of smoke which, combined with the tall, mast-like central chimney, gives the house the quality of a brick boat chugging imperceptibly slowly along its dry riverbed. As an object, it is enigmatic and somehow scaleless.
Inside, it is organised spatially around six concrete ‘towers’ that both order the interior and provide a very Kahnian separation between served and servant spaces. Bathrooms, WCs, and utility spaces are secreted away in these seemingly monolithic blocks, which are organised in section quite differently to the rest of the house. This results in a particularly bizarre relationship between the bedrooms and their en-suite bathrooms, which are accessed via narrow, cranking staircases.
The interiors are tough, uncompromisingly stark and – with their hanging tapestries and deep window reveals – have the air of a baronial castle, or a church. Nithurst shares clear affinities with Richards’ other buildings, a personal language of thick, brick walls, tapered, standing seam roofs, and a subtly fragmented geometry. His buildings are monumental but, while certain elements are expressed for their mass and solidity, others – like the metal eaves – are reduced to razor-sharp edges. The result is that the roofs appear recessive and seem to disappear, an effect that heightens the sense of the buildings as uninhabited ruins.
There is another way to read the building, though, which is that of a mausoleum. The lack of conventional signifiers of scale or domesticity on the outside, the coffin-like nature of the brick shell, and the powerful symmetry of the interior – not to mention the plan form itself, which is unmistakably like that of a casket – have funereal qualities. In this sense, the house connects strongly to the work of Sir John Soane, specifically the house-cum-mausoleum that he built for himself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Tombs, caskets, and urns are placed throughout Soane’s house, reminders of mortality. Crucially, too, in Soane’s house the use of mirrors and screens dissolves boundaries between interior and exterior, making it part of a more continuous, labyrinthine landscape. At Nithurst, the tapering walls of the plan project the house outwards, into a virtual realm of experience beyond.
Like the building, this book is produced with impeccable elegance. Designed by Rosa Nussbaum, it takes the form of a walk through the main spaces accompanied by a series of essays. In its welter of references, its symmetries (it starts and ends with a series of sepia-printed photographs), and its allusions, the book mirrors the architecture. The essays are excellent. Takero Shimazaki provides a spare but perceptive spatial description. Jeremy Musson contributes a fascinating dissection of the plan of the house via a history of country house typologies, while Geoff Dyer – a self-declared Tarkovsky obsessive – connects the house back to its primary narrative source. Corinna Dean traces the symbolic importance of the objects and artefacts within. Each comes across as enraptured by the building and its layers of reference and meaning.
The title of the book, the borrowings from Stalker and A Matter of Life and Death, and the formal organisation of the house all relate to the idea of a journey and of a destination. There is a journey to the house but also one within it, which terminates in the family living room. In turn, this points to an enclosed garden space beyond, one shaped by hedges that taper in line with the house. It is a vanishing point, to take the title of Richards’ own essay, which is also the point where everything disappears. Nithurst Farm is a coming home and an ending, though the precise nature of that ending is unclear. Following Loos, does arriving home mean the end of architecture? And if so, what does it mean to design a home so preoccupied with endings, with finality, and ultimately, death?
Nithurst Farm offers an uncompromising engagement with architecture in all its spatial, material, and symbolic richness. It is a seriously good building and an intense, personal architectural statement. It is without doubt one of the most interesting new houses built in the UK in the last few decades and a statement of a very singular approach to architecture.
No comments yet