Harmonic scale: in Hertfordshire, an extension of a music school is sensitive to its Victorian context while providing a tranquil and spiritually inspiring setting - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Penny McGuire

MUSIC BUILDING,

HITCH IN, ENGLAND

ARCHITECT

PATEL TAYLOR ARCHITECTS

The Benslow Music Trust, established in the Late 1920s in the grounds of a late nineteenth-century house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, runs residential courses for musicians. Until the addition of Patel Taylor's beautifully resolved and crafted courtyard scheme (won in competition and built with Lottery money), accommodation was contained in an old stable block, and performances took place in a recital hall built in the 1970s. Victorian gardens spreading over the top of a hill are romantic, and musicians were -- and are -- encouraged to use them.

Patel Taylor's site is to the north of the main house and stable block. To the east is an orchard, and to the west, the main entrance to the grounds. A car park runs around the north side of the site and its southern perimeter is formed by the back wall of the stables.

Patel Taylor's architecture, quiet, controlled, and infused with material poetry, deploys quite a complex vocabulary of layering, interlocking planes, and changing textures. By such means are relationships between interior and exterior, between exterior and the wider context subtly indicated and routes defined. One of the most beguiling aspects of this practice's work is the way order is quietly subverted by random expression and pattern.

The plan of the Hitchin scheme gives an indication of how intricately it has been put together. The two-storeyed courtyard complex, that provides a rehearsal hall, four practice rooms, six bedrooms and kitchen, fits into the loose arrangement of outdoor rooms -- formal stable yard, informal garden enclosures and orchard -- that already existed. Lined by a glazed cloister, the new courtyard becomes, on summer days, a delightful place in which to rehearse. On the east, an old brick tower (divested of a lean-to and once used for drying lavender), marks passage to the orchard, and a glazed canopy lightly covering a link to the stable yard flies into the courtyard at cloister level.

Like a hard shell with a smooth luminous centre, the complex has a protective outer skin of textured red brickwork and precast banding which, giving way to softer white render inside the courtyard, alludes to the brick and stone dressings of the main house and to the rough warmth of a garden wall, now demolished.

Since accommodation is diverse - extending from small rooms (some enlarged for disabled people) to the big volume of the recital hall - the architects felt it necessary to impose order in the form of a building grid. Externally, it is realized in the standardized brick panels that form the crust, but any hint of dullness is avoided by recessing some to create a textured surface, and by the apparently random pattern of openings that indicate different volumes inside. Another layer of coherence derives from uniformly designed oak framing around windows and ventilators. Glazing dissolves the eastern corner, so that the interiors of a ground floor practice room and the bedroom above flow into the garden.

The curving mass of the recital hall, bursting away from the orthogonal on the west, denotes its status as a public hall and signals entrance to the courtyard. Surmounted by a copper cone, the interior is illuminated by a rooflight around the cone's edge, so that daylight spills down the walls of the asymmetrical volume, the bulge neatly embracing a grand piano or chamber orchestra. For acoustic reasons, the chamber is lined by free-form wooden screening, and the ceiling rises in random steps. Both devices diffuse sound, but the visual effect is to lend a sculptural dimension to the space. Overlooking it is a first floor gallery with wooden coping slanted to take sheets of music.

An intervening knuckle - a curving foyer inside a circular staircase - links the hall to studios and bedrooms and is, with the courtyard, one of two incidental spaces for practice.

As in previous schemes by Patel Taylor, detailing is constantly intriguing (AR August 1999). Materials - York stone, black brick, white render, wooden screening - spilling from one area to another establish continuity; and oak floors have pleasing textures and patterns, consisting as they do of random strips between regular ones concealing services. Outside in the courtyard, a handsome slab of wood supported by a waterspout forms a bench over one of the two rectangular pools; and you are prevented from having accidents by quotes about music inscribed in white across glass doors.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect Patel Taylor Architects, London

Project team Pankaj Patel, Andrew Taylor, Adam Penton, Tim Riley, Paul Allen

Structural engineer Alan Conisbee & Associates

Services engineer Arup Cardiff

Photographs Martin Charles