Newspaper Article

ARTS: It's a vision thing ; A stark block of studios near Poole perfectly meets the artistic needs of its occupants

Merrick, Jay

2005

Overview

[Tony Fretton] talks of space itself becoming vivid, and of how 'buildings, vehicles and objects collide with enormous frankness and no detail, and the fiction of the city is revealed'. The idea of a fictional condition binds Fretton's quest for an architecture of almost Zen-like bareness; rooms and spaces where the soft scrape of a shoe, or a cough, or the thump of one's pulse might be accentuated; small dramas that highlight the larger ramifications of lives and spaces. And so, not quite empty architecture after all, but milieux thronged with alt.phenomena emphasising human engagement rather than a self-regarding presence of form. We might think of Fretton's extreme architectural clarity as modernist, but it must lie somewhere else; between the idea of Platonic archetypes, the physical rigour of the Bauhaus, and the performance space. It has nothing to do with either architectural minimalism or postmodernism. Fretton dares us to exist in spaces, or lean against walls, or pass from one plain room to another, without comforting props or progressions. To scenographically inclined architects, he must seem a shadowy and faintly unnerving priest, a detached conscience, a walking absolution with attitude. The studio spaces are simply finished and whitewashed; light falls into them from the glazed, north-facing juts in the roof. In these rooms \" still, monastic \" we're completely cut off from the heather, the ferns, and the stag standing stock still a quarter of a mile away, beyond the 13 oaks in the shade of Holton Clump. Fretton's simply achieved complexities have produced a striking architectural moment here that recalls the abstractions of both Ben Nicholson \" his 1935 White Relief, for example \" with the positive- into-negative solid forms of Rachel Whiteread.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Fretton, Tony