Guardian Article - The rural renewal of Kathryn Findlay

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jul/19/kathryn-findlay-ushida-poolhouse-2

The rural renewal of Kathryn Findlay

She made a name for herself in the 1990s with eerie, alluring buildings like the Soft and Hairy House. Now Kathryn Findlay is back – and shaking up the slow-moving, bureaucratic world of rural architecture

Steve Rose
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 July 2009 21.35 BST
Article history

A mowable roof ... Kathryn Findlay's Soft and Hairy House. Photograph: Ushida Findlay
If there's a market to be cornered in poolhouses, especially thatched ones, then Kathryn Findlay is ahead of the pack. It's not a particularly lucrative seam, admittedly, but for a small domestic building tucked away in a village, Findlay's latest poolhouse is disproportionately significant.
For one thing, it marks the return of one of British architecture's most intriguing and influential figures. Ushida Findlay, the practice she ran with her now-ex-husband Eisaku Ushida, turned heads in the 1990s with a succession of wildly imaginative houses in Japan and the UK that seemed to have come from a different planet. But the rising practice somehow went bust in 2004. Secondly, this comeback project, Poolhouse 2, isn't just a fascinating collision of traditional craftsmanship and computer-aided design; it could also contain the germ of a new aesthetic for 21st-century rural architecture.

You don't have to be an expert to glean both influences in Poolhouse 2. Usually, when you see a thatched roof, there's a hefty cottage beneath it. Yet here, the walls are glass. Furthermore, this thatch curves and undulates in ways traditional structures don't. Although that wavy roofline brings to mind flowing water, or the back of a mythical creature, it was determined less by fancy than necessity: the poolhouse had to join two buildings, a 17th-century barn and a 16th-century farmhouse, that sit at an angle to each other, on different levels – and provide a handy place to swim, of course.

Findlay's friend Peter Cook, a pioneering British architect and her former tutor, calls her marriage of tradition and technology "digi-thatch". But why bother with a thatched poolhouse at all? Not, primarily, to make a quirky architectural statement. The real driving force behind the project, it turns out, was the local planning committee. The house is situated in the sort of village in the Chilterns that wouldn't look out of place in a National Trust calendar. Any remotely modern building would look out of place here. In fact, the planning committee objected to any new building on the site since it would block views from the village to the Teletubby-ish vales beyond. So the poolhouse's glass walls preserve the countryside views and the thatch preserves the village character. Findlay had to bring in various experts to win the committee over, including neo-classicist Robert Adam (an unlikely ally if ever there was one) and TV historian Dan Cruickshank. Altogether, the planning process took eight years. It's not easy being innovative in the great British countryside.

The result, though, is the perfect place to bathe away the stress of a lengthy planning battle. On the inside, the undulations of the roof give a rounded softness to the white ceiling. The overall impression is of monastic stillness. And that watery roundedness is picked up in other details: the columns supporting the roof, the tubular ventilation ducts, the curving balustrade of transparent rods running along the terrace outside.

The ramifications of Findlay's approach extend way beyond one wealthy client's swimming pool, though. Her ideas are in step with today's expectations of architecture, especially in terms of regional authenticity, low environmental impact and energy efficiency. And they could point the way to a compromise between the polarities of rural and urban, or traditional and modern. (Not that a swimming pool is the ideal standard-bearer for eco-buildings, however.)

Findlay, a Scot, first went to Japan in 1979, straight after she graduated from London's Architectural Association. There she worked for Arata Isozaki, a creator of extraordinary buildings who won Riba's gold medal in 1986. She set up practice with her husband in 1986, making a global impression with two small but memorable townhouses. First was 1993's Truss Wall House, a smooth, white object that seemed to be made out of one continuous, complex curve. A year later came the Soft and Hairy House, a cosier, more tactile home wrapped around an internal courtyard, with a planted rooftop garden that gave it a shaggy appearance. Both are beguiling and otherworldly – benevolent fantasies that bring to mind anyone from Gaudi to Salvador Dalí to Dr Seuss.

Ushida and Findlay's work is often bracketed in the nebulous category of "green" or "organic" architecture; but to Findlay, it was more about catering to their clients' practical and sensual needs, allowing the environment and the building methods to dictate the outcome. While she acknowledges that green tends to mean measuring energy consumption, she says there's also an eco-architecture "that's about a sensibility, a relationship to the landscape". Findlay likens her design process to a worm eating through an apple: carving spaces out of a solid mass, rather than making an object and filling it with something: "The shape is an outcome of the spaces and movement inside."

Findlay's progress looked set to continue on her return to the UK in 1999, despite the husband-and-wife team's separation shortly after they set up base in Edinburgh. Designs in the pipeline included a starfish-shaped home in Cheshire, which won a Riba competition, and a spectacular villa in Doha for Qatar's minister of culture, both of which gained a great deal of attention in architectural circles. Sadly, the practice went bust before they were built.

"It wasn't a lack of orders," she says of her bankruptcy. "An awful lot of companies go belly-up just because of cashflow problems. Trying to run an office in this country was quite different to being in Japan, and I didn't have the credibility that you need because I was new. And we had all our eggs in one basket – the Doha house – and no bread-and-butter stuff to keep us going." Having been a rising star, Findlay now found herself an unemployed mother. She got a teaching post at Dundee University and put her children in school near there.

Findlay resists playing the gender card, but she admits that being female in such a male-dominated profession has rarely put her at an advantage. "The Scottish architecture world is quite macho," she says. "You find you get overlooked by your peers, or when it comes to competitions or expressions of interest. I think it makes a massive difference, but one isn't supposed to say that."

She relaunched her practice on a more businesslike footing, in collaboration with Geoff Mann, a director of RHWL architects, and currently has a number of irons in the fire: a promising low-rise apartment building in Preston (with an undulating turf roof); a cultural institute in Kyoto; a school; another poolhouse. It's not exactly perfect timing for a comeback, when architects across the country are losing their jobs. But having already been through that, and survived the Japanese recession of the 1990s, Findlay is undaunted.

"In Japan after the recession, there was a kind of guilt. Everyone went back to being more minimal and simple. I think people here are going to be more careful about what they would like. And I think shape for the sake of shape will come under scrutiny. People will expect more value. They'll question more. It won't just be, 'That's cool' or 'That's interesting'. I think they'll wish for more than just material success. So maybe it's a good time to be starting again."