St. Michael's cloister courtyard garden

In 2007 we completed a new hall and performance space for the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Barnes. This was the first phase of a plan to create a courtyard space around which would be clustered other buildings housing counselling rooms, church offices etc.

Although the proposed courtyard had already been mapped out in the overall development plan, submitted as part of our competition winning scheme in 2002, the details were far from fixed. The eventual design was worked out over a period of months of intense work with the church building committee. There were two main matters of debate, of which the first was to do with the style of the cloister. We used a number of card and wood models, at different scales, to develop the design which began as a rather minimal glass affair but, ultimately, became a much more substantial and ‘tectonic’ design. The models not only helped the committee members envisage what was proposed but were very helpful to us as designers. They were particularly good for exploring the second much debated question - the degree to which the courtyard should be ‘open’ and visible from outside. The exact height of the back of the stone benches, for example, was carefully worked out in the models to prevent a direct view from outside but nonetheless to give some sense of the interior of the courtyard.

The role of the of the courtyard itself, although not providing any accommodation, is key in the relationship of the church to the community.

St.Michaels Church is a large and powerful barn of a building. However, its rather forbidding Victorian exterior is included as an enclosing edge of a new and welcoming exterior space, symbolising the current vision of an open and accessible church. In urban terms the scheme has created a new kind of outdoor space for the community. Although it is easily accessed off a public footpath it is nonetheless defined and relatively enclosed. It serves as a meeting space for receptions, church functions and for nursery school use. Like a cloister it will work as a means of access, providing a covered route connecting the buildings around it. When I see people pass through and stop off in the cloister for a coffee or cigarette I feel that the public and inviting character of the space is doing exactly what we had in mind.

The architectural role of the courtyard is nicely summed up in this extract from Alan Power’s essay about it-

In relation to the theme of place-making, it would be hard to find a better example of intervening in an already crowded corner of a city and weaving everything together so that the whole becomes so much greater than the sum of the parts, but in saying this, one acknowledges that the newcomer to the party is actually the belle of the ball.

Location: Barnes, London
Status: Completed 2011