Feed: Culture | The Guardian
Posted on: Sunday, March 20, 2022 2:01 PM
Author: Rowan Moore
Subject: The Marshall Building, London review – brutalist brilliance
| The LSE's new £145m project is a triumph of multipurpose design, be it for study, work, sport or music, and whose playful asymmetries only add character to its structural heft "Architecture's role," says Shelley McNamara of the Dublin-based Grafton Architects, "is to heighten where you are. It makes you more aware of the place you're in." It cannot, that is to say, cook a meal or mount a party or write a book, but it can profoundly affect your experience of eating or celebrating or studying. It cannot make a natural landscape or direct the course of the sun, but it can frame views or catch shadows in ways that make them more or less beautiful. Which is what McNamara, her business partner, Yvonne Farrell, and their practice have collectively done with the Marshall Building at the London School of Economics, a £145m project partly funded by the hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall. They have made a place for teaching and for study, for gathering, work, sport and music, as well as for passing through, thinking thoughts and doing nothing in particular, all against the background of a varied and intricate part of London. They don't take the most direct route to doing so, but have some fun and diversions along the way. |