Sketch of Exedra at Entrance

A FREEHAND SKETCH OF THE 'EXEDRA' PROPOSED FOR THE ENTRANCE.

The clover-leaf 'Tholos tombs' are seen to the left, and the Administration building to the right of the Exedra. There is a roof garden, accessed from the Curator's apartment, hidden behind the Exedra shell. The windows in it allow him, and his guests, to look through the half dome down onto the Entrance.

This is designed to make the entrance clearly stand-out as people drive or walk to it from far away in the Park. The magnification of an entrance is not so necesary in the close confines of a street - although it is often done to great effect. But I thought it useful here for two reasons. The first, as I indicate, is because the building is visible from far away. The second, which is more important, is that my composition (being of the English Romantic Landscape kind) is made up of many small buildings. Each of these, being of 'Classical' antecedents, can be 'read' as Houses, or even Temples. Any House is capable of having its own entrance door. So the magnification of the entrance by this huge semi-dome, making it into a giant cave-form, is designed to signal that the entrance, instead of being where it might be expected, down by the Lake, is tucked-away up round the side.

This peculiar position would not strike a 20C Architect as strange, so accustomed are they to give mechanical utility precedence over intelligibility. But they are the only kinds of human beings to entirely discount the desires and needs of non-Architects to find an entrance 'in the front' and 'in the middle' of a building!

The more mural, less columnar architecture of this Entrance would have looked good in the kind of brickwork that JOA have made their own, in recent years, in Rice University, Houston, and Den Haag in Holland. Today, due to our invention of the 'Working Order', JOA are able to use this, the most cost-effective of all external cladding materials, on Columns as well. This unifies the humbler Architectural elements of wall and window, with the more noble column and door.

(Medium: drafting pen on tracing paper. Size of the original 200 mm wide)

The Competition Design for the Burrell Museum, Glasgow.