Amanda Levete on the Home of the Year

Given all the attention our Home of the Year is getting, we thought many of you might be interested in hearing some of the thinking behind the jury's decisions. 

The Home of the Year jury was made up of HOME editor Jeremy Hansen, Gary Lawson of four-time Home of the Year winners Stevens Lawson Architects, and Stirling Prize-winning London architect Amanda Levete. 

Here, Jeremy talks to Amanda about the judging process. This interview was conducted in mid-March, soon after judging of the Home of the Year was complete. 

Architect Amanda Levete. Photo: Peter Guenzel.

JEREMY HANSEN Let’s start by talking about the winning project: Eyrie, the black cabins by Nat Cheshire of Cheshire Architects.

AMANDA LEVETE That project was very finely tuned, such a poetic response to its site. It was a complete merging of idea and form. And there’s a narrative behind it that’s as poetic as its realisation. The idea that an architect would negotiate with planners to allow a smaller and much more modest footprint on the site is a fantastic inversion of expectations: it captures the mood of the world right now by demonstrating a greater respect for modesty and a reining in of consumerism. It shows how much you can do with so little and still hold such resonance.

The landscape it’s situated in was not the most beautiful or most dramatic of the sites we saw – far from it – but it had a sensibility of its own. You could sense this through the success of the dialogue between the client and the architect. It felt like there was a complete synergy between architect and client, and that is quite rare. It feels like the relationship with the client pushed the architect to go beyond his repertoire and explore ideas and an attitude that perhaps hadn’t been expressed in his work before. You need that input from a client, you need that challenge – and you need that energy and inspiration to make your work better. It’s those kind of relationships and moments that push an architect to develop and become great.

The cabins were beautifully detailed in a very simple way but every move, every line held the idea of the house. The tiny brass recessed kitchen area, which was like a little jewel in this simple black container, lifted it from being prosaic to something exceptional. The cabinets around the kitchen, which used a crude black-painted form-board, had chamfered edges that revealed the colour of the ply behind it, a tiny shadow line that, because the space was black, had a lustre almost like there was a light behind it. And what was so revealing about that space was that it was a black interior and black exterior but it didn’t feel oppressive. You were drawn into the space by the light and felt uplifted and serene and at one with the world and with nature.

The Home of the Year 2014, designed by Nat Cheshire of Cheshire Architects.
Photo: Darryl Ward.

JEREMY HANSEN What made the other homes worthy of inclusion? Let’s go from north to south, and start with the house by Herbst Architects. 

AMANDA LEVETE This house expressed very clearly how the forces of nature can drive design, with a clever layering of openings between indoor and outdoor spaces. There was a very strong relationship between a deep gabion wall and the passage between the bedrooms and the main spaces of the house, an outside but protected area that reinforced it as a beach house, so whatever the weather and time of year, you have to go outside to get inside, and that was very charming.

The Castle Rock House by Herbst Architects. Photo: Patrick Reynolds.

JEREMY HANSEN On Waiheke Island we visited a home by Wendy Shacklock. What did you enjoy about that?

AMANDA LEVETE This was an incredibly difficult site and a huge amount of thought had gone into exploring ways in which you could liberate it. That’s been achieved in a way that appears effortless, thanks to much of the site engineering being invisible – but it was far from straightforward. There was also a delicacy about the use of materials and the contrast between the solidity and brutality of the concrete wall and the openness of the elevations looking down at the water. The clients wanted the house to feel like a nest, and it did feel very protective and precarious at the same time. 

Te Kohanga, a home on Waiheke Island designed by Wendy Shacklock in association with Paul Clarke. Photo: Samuel Hartnett.

JEREMY HANSEN How about the small house by Andrew Simpson?  

AMANDA LEVETE This was a studio house, just 50 square metres in which every little square foot was accounted for and exploited. There was a wonderful, huge opening up of a view on a very difficult site. What I loved was the ambition and endeavour that was invested into such a complicated site. That endeavour was palpable and real – the architect built much of the interior – and it shows again how much you can achieve with a modest budget, which is always refreshing. 

The Nine Tsubo House by Andrew Simpson of Wiredog Architecture.
Photo: Paul McCredie.

JEREMY HANSEN On Banks Peninsula, we visited the Scrubby Bay Farmhouse by Pattersons.

AMANDA LEVETE I found this house incredibly beautiful. Proportionally there was a real kind of magic about the delicacy of these barn-like forms that just slipped one in front of the other in a strong sectional relationship sited in a completely spectacular bay. The plan of the house was understated and restrained, and that restraint was very powerful when matched by such a spectacular backdrop. The house also made beautiful use of wood, with a subtle scent of the macrocarpa cladding inside that was just magic for me.

The Scrubby Bay Farmhouse by Pattersons. Photo: Simon Devitt

JEREMY HANSEN We saw homes on beautiful sites, but the suburban house by LO'CA in Wanaka was different.  

AMANDA LEVETE This is a house for a retired couple with a brief that was far from glamorous, but the architects managed to lift it by creating a kind of respect for the span of a couple’s life, and I was very touched by that. It wasn’t just the clever planning but the way in which the clients’ lives – their past as well as their future and the present – were mapped into the planning; I’ve never seen that done before. It made me think how important houses are as containers for your life and your history. Some of the houses we saw had an absence of the soul of the owners, and a house needs soul. This one had it.

The Lovell House by Tim Lovell and Ana O'Connell of Lovell O'Connell Architects.
Photo: Patrick Reynolds.

JEREMY HANSEN This is your first visit to New Zealand. What are your impressions of the country's architecture after a week here?

AMANDA LEVETE It’s clear that the bach is a powerful genre, and we’ve seen it interpreted differently in extraordinary settings that are very particular to New Zealand. There is an incredible and inventive use of woods, which has been inspiring to me, and makes me want to explore that in our own work. But I worry that there’s a kind of complacency in New Zealand’s architecture. I have seen some of the most spectacular sites in the world on this trip and some of the most extraordinary pieces of landscape – I don’t think I’ll ever see anything more beautiful. With that goes a huge responsibility to respond with an ambition that matches that drama and the beauty of the location. That responsibility is sometimes taken too much for granted. I think architects need to remind themselves what a privilege it is to design in a piece of nature that is unsurpassable.

Clients, too, need to have that same sense of ambition and responsibility in selecting their architect and in their own briefs. It’s not just about designing a house. You have to respond to the magnitude and power of nature at its most beautiful. Houses are relatively modest in scale but historically they have defined an architectural era, and not enough architects here feel that sense of potential. Architecture here is quite self-referential and it shouldn’t be, because what we’ve seen in this last week is a fantastic abundance of talent and inventiveness and clever thinking. Architects in New Zealand should be more ambitious in terms of their place internationally – you have a great tradition of house design that could be defining and having an influence on the rest of the world.

JEREMY HANSEN Lastly, do you have any thoughts about awards like this in general?

AMANDA LEVETE The Home of the Year award is important because it’s not just about applauding excellence; it’s about marking turning points in architects’ careers. The purpose of awards is to recognise talent and to lift the standards and advance the debate. The cross-section of projects we’ve selected for this, the Home of the Year issue, is testament to all of that.  

Amanda Levete travelled to New Zealand thanks to the support of Altherm Window Systems, our Home of the Year sponsor.

Architect Amanda Levete is coming to New Zealand

We're delighted to announce that the Stirling Prize-winning London architect Amanda Levete will travel to New Zealand be the international member of our Home of the Year 2014 jury. She will give lectures in Auckland (on Monday March 10) and Christchurch (on Wednesday March 12) about her remarkable work. Tickets to the lectures can be purchased here. We're grateful for the support of Altherm Window Systems, our Home of the Year sponsor, whose generosity has made Amanda's visit possible.  

Amanda Levete in her London office. Photograph by Peter Guenzel.

HOME editor Jeremy Hansen met Levete at her office in London last June. Here's his profile of her from the current issue of the magazine:

Amanda Levete almost didn’t become an architect. Expelled from school for sunbathing naked on the roof when she should have been at biology class, she had no idea what she was going to do next. “I got so embarrassed that all my friends were going to university that I did an A-level in art and art history and a foundation year at art school,” she told Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian. “That’s when architecture came across my radar, and when it did, I realised that I work best when I’m doing something creatively, but have a boundary to push.”

Levete (pronounced Lev-eet) has been pushing boundaries to create remarkable buildings ever since. For 20 years she was one-half of the innovative firm Future Systems with her then-husband, the late Jan Kaplický. Together they designed the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground, a curvaceous pod of white aluminium that almost bankrupted them but then won the 1999 Stirling Prize, Britain’s most prestigious architecture award. Their subsequent design for Birmingham’s Selfridges store, a swoop of a building covered in circular aluminium discs, was hailed as a symbol of the city’s regeneration. Kaplicky stormed out of the Selfridges opening because the finished structure wasn’t as pure as their original design. Levete was more pragmatic. “I don’t devalue the power of conceptual thinking, but for me the thrill of architecture is to see your ideas realised – to struggle against the problems out there and overcome them,” she told Jeffries.  

An aerial rendering of what the EDP Cultural Centre in Lisbon will look like on completion.

A rendering of the EDP Foundation Cultural Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, designed by Amanda Levete Architects and currently under construction.
 

The EDP Cultural Centre is a dramatic swoop on the Tagus River with a rooftop walkway.

A rendering of the cultural centre's exterior and its
specially designed tiles.

Levete and Kaplicky had a son, Josef, but divorced in 2006 – “a very public falling out,” according to  Levete. Kaplicky, who was Czech, died in Prague in 2009 at the age of 71, just after visiting his second wife, Eliska, and their newborn daughter in hospital. He and Levete had continued working together after their divorce, but had agreed to separate their architectural practice four months before his death, which is when Levete established Amanda Levete Architects.

Anyone who wondered if she had been riding on the coattails of Kaplický’s genius (a word Levete uses to describe him) has since been thoroughly silenced. In 2011, Levete won an international competition to build an extension to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The 1,500-square-metre gallery for temporary exhibitions will be the biggest new art space in London since the Tate Modern; the project also involves the design of a new entry to the building from Exhibition Road. An earlier scheme by Daniel Libeskind was abandoned seven years earlier after encountering a storm of public option. “It was an iconic building, but the time for iconic buildings has passed,” Levete told The Guardian. Her design is currently under construction.

A rendering of Amanda Levete Architects' competition-winning scheme for a new entry and gallery space for London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Another rendering of the V&A project, which features a courtyard connected to Exhibition Road.

 

Two views of the new subterranean gallery spaces that are
currently under construction at the V&A.

Other major projects are nearing completion: a waterfront cultural centre in Lisbon that reads as a dramatic bulge in the landscape; a shimmering high-rise hotel and shopping centre in Bangkok which Levete will attend the opening of on her way home from helping to choose our 2014 Home of the Year. She has also designed furniture for London’s Established & Sons and writes regularly about architecture, design and urbanism for The New Statesman (you can read her articles here). Her office, a non-descript semi-industrial building in London’s northeast, now employs more than 50 staff, who pad around on the immaculate space’s bright carpet in socks (the office’s no-shoe office rule means you are greeted by an archipelago of footwear when you arrive at reception).  

Two views of Amanda Levete's London home, photographed by Gidon Fuehrer.

This will be Levete’s first visit to New Zealand. Her husband Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, will accompany her. She has already reviewed the entries in the 2014 Home of the Year with us, and will help choose a winner when we visit the shortlisted homes in person. 

First impressions? This year’s entrants are notable for their “modesty in scale and materials and technology, and within that they’re searching for something quite profound and poetic,” she says. That seems promising.

We’re looking forward to showing her the best New Zealand homes of the past year. Please come along to Levete's Auckland and Christchurch lectures: it’s a rare chance to hear a remarkable talent reveal more about her remarkable work.