John Outram
| John Outram | |
|---|---|
| Born |
21 June 1934 Taiping, Malaya |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Practice | John Outram Associates |
| Buildings | ANNE & CHARLES DUNCAN HALL, Rice University, Houston, Texas |
John Outram is a British architect. He established a practice in London in 1974 and produced a series of buildings in which polychromy and Classical allusions were well to the fore. Among his works are the temple-like Storm Water Pumping Station, Isle of Dogs, London (1985–8), the New House at Wadhurst Park, Sussex (1978–86), the Judge Institute of Management Studies in Cambridge (1995), and the Computational Engineering Building (Duncan Hall), Rice University, Houston, Texas (1997).
The house was completed in 1986, and was described by a British critic as "probably the best house built since the war. It is inspired by classical proportions, yet is absolutely original." In 1999–2000 he added a Millennium Verandah to the house, featuring columns inspired by Indian, Sumerian, and other cultures.
In the mid 1980s, the London Docklands Development Authority awarded contracts for three storm-water pumping stations to Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Outram. The buildings are unoccupied and secure. Outram built a "monumental temple" with which he hopes to situate the viewer "within a Landscape of Symbols".
The extensions and re-organization of Digby Wyatt's Addenbrooke's Old Hospital as the Judge Institute of Management Studies (now called the Cambridge Judge Business School), Cambridge (1993–5), combines the language of Classical architecture with the engineering components necessary in a modern building.
Services, along with access ladders, were incorporated within what Outram has called the ‘Robot Order’ (Ordine Robotico), described by a critic as "the invention of a Sixth Order, an act of sheer Architectural terrorism'), and by another as "...a collection of places, at once archaic and hypermodern", neither exposed nor hidden away, but used to validate a new architectural order visible throughout the building as the columns and beams large enough to contain the mechanisms needed by Modernity. The reason for this novel re-invention of the "tabooed" Architectural Order was to restore to Architecture the "literate decorum" that was also placed under a taboo after WWII.
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