John Outram

Judge Institute Cambridge, by John Outram

James Dunnett reviews Geraint Franklin’s study of the Post-modern architect

To review a book about the noted Post-Modern architect John Outram for DOCOMOMO is no simple matter, especially for a reviewer with a long-standing orientation towards the Modern Movement – like reviewing Das Kapital for The Spectator perhaps? But the conclusion might not be quite what one might expect.

It has long seemed anomalous at Cambridge that the Law Faculty is housed in a sleek glass managerial tube, seemingly deliberately designed by Foster + Partners to disperse the cobwebs often associated with the law, whereas the contemporary – 1993-95 – Judge Institute of Management Studies (or Business School) is housed in a quirky building full of arcane imagery and learned references designed by John Outram, defying any perception of Business Administration as a culture-free zone. Doubtless those who commissioned them in each case were intent on precisely the impacts achieved, and in fact it appears from this thorough book that Simon Sainsbury, who funded the Judge Institute, more or less insisted, with the encouragement of his architectural adviser Colin Amery, that Outram be employed to design it. One cannot regret the result which, with all its idiosyncrasies, appears to defy the trend to an overly corporate character in Cambridge as a whole with a warmer more personal ethos.

Foster and Outram are near contemporaries, Outram being the older by a year (an exact contemporary of Michael Graves). Would it be provocative to ask which of their work represents  a  truer development of the Modern Movement? National service in the RAF did not have the same impact on Outram (which was his second name at birth rather than his surname) as it did on Foster – he has not chosen to celebrate the lightness of aircraft construction and has been keener to hide technology away in his outsize hollow ‘robot columns’ than to put it on view almost as the theme of his architecture. Yet the fundamental roots of his architecture lie in the Modern Movement, and especially in the work of Louis Kahn. The drum-like ‘robot columns’ are reminiscent of Kahn as are the shallow brick-faced vaulted roofs of his first significant independent commission, the McKay Trading Estate near Heathrow of 1976, and shallow vaults were to feature on many schemes thereafter, also evoking Le Corbusier’s Maisons Monol. Outram’s polychromy arguably also picks up an important theme of the work of Le Corbusier, whose friend and exact contemporary Juan Gris equally provided an inspiraton for Michael Graves.

Isle of Dogs pumping station, by John Outram

Outram’s training at the Regent’s Street Polytechnic and then under Pater Smithson and Arthur Korn at the AA, where his student work was published in Archigram, and his subsequent employment in the GLC, gave little indication of the direction he would take. But his marriage to a Greek Cypriot followed by close immersion in Mediterranean classical culture and subsequent employment at Louis de Soissons began to bring out his distinctive interests, visible already in his entry to the Burrell Collection competition in 1970.  In this case one cannot help being glad that Meunier and Gasson were the victors, but Outram went on to receive the patronage of ‘Modernists’, such as Ted Hollamby who was instrumental in his being awarded the Isle of Dogs Pumping Station of 1985.

Robot column with structure and services

Franklin struggles gamely to explain the esoteric philosophies that Outram evolved to inform his elaborate pattern and detail, the sincerity of which one need not doubt – but nevertheless one feels an overlying jokiness in his work that can now be hard to take. Outsize capitals on super-fat columns supporting corrugated-iron pediments, all picked out in polychrome may have been amusing forty years ago, but architecture is not a good medium for jokes because it tends to hang around and, as we know, there is nothing less funny than an old joke. Lutyens could carry off architectural jokes, but can Outram? The jokes in Post-Modernism tend to be too obvious, too in-your-face, even in Stirling’s No.1 Poultry, whilst those in Lutyens, such as his disappearing pilasters with only a capital and a base and nothing in between, almost pass notice. Terry Farrell’s jokes on the MI6 building are hardly amusing any longer and his eggs-in-cups have long since been demolished.  I find Piers Gough’s jokes funnier.

Judge Institute, Cambridge, robot column

Given the lifespan of a building, does an architect have the right to inflict so idiosyncratic a language on the users of his buildings, likely to span several generations, as of the columns of Outram’s New House, with their earth/water/air/fire symbolism? The parti of his buildings can often be handsome enough, such as the elemental Isle of Dogs electricity substation, but the iconography or imagery elsewhere, and increasingly, is surely oppressive… and dated? However, it seems each generation has its quota of ‘wild’ architects, and if they can find clients and get their visions built, in due course they come into sympathetic focus. One has to admire the sheer human determination to do it, and it is this human dimension to which I would like to return in answer my own question about the heirs of the Modern Movement.

At a time when we were being encouraged by Richard Rogers and the ‘Bowellists’ to put the services on full view, Outram had the courage to say ‘no! – let us give them all the space they need [in his robot columns] and then close the door…’  Human values for him came above the expression of technology. Franklin in his searching Introduction points out that ‘The stuff of Outram’s architecture is not structure and space, but substance and surface’.  Structure and space, however, are arguably the human tools of the Modern Movement, space as a means to human liberation. In that sense the weightedness of Outram’s work has moved away from the Modern Movement, especially evident in his urban projects such as for Paternoster Square - but so too, I would argue, have Foster and Rogers, admirable though their work has been in many respects. Housing and its social concerns, rather than houses, has not figured prominently in the work of any of them. But the answer to my question about who have been the heirs of the Modern Movement would tend rather to focus on Outram because of the human basis of his work, which to me seems more truly in the spirit of that of individual creative figures such as Le Corbusier.

A single series of monographs with a uniform format covering such a wide diversity of architects as does this Twentieth Century Society/Historic England series, is bound to leave one feeling that the individuality of each subject is to some extent compromised. One can imagine a book about Outram’s work more fully embodying in its format his very distinctive outlook. But a consistent series does, on the other hand, have a value of its own, and this book is a very valuable addition to the canon.

The book can be bought from the C20 Society shop for £30