Three additional reflections on John Mayson Whalley by colleagues and friends who worked with him in the Manchester office of DLP
RODERICK EDWARDS
Some thoughts on John Mayson Whalley who sadly died on June 11 this year 2020 and with my sympathy to Gillian his wife and family.
‘Sacré-Cœur’ John exclaimed, pointing up hill to the gleaming white domed magnificence of the basilica, France’s devotion to the Sacred Heart watching over Paris from its highest point, and seen from the steep streets and through the canopies of plane trees on our walk through Montmartre.
This adventure was John’s plan to put Andrew Donaldson and me though our paces, as a break from a busy week working at the studio of the Parc de la Prefecture at Cergy-Pontoise Ville Nouvelle, 35 km North of Paris.
Cricket and hockey were John’s sports, playing for local teams at Preston in Lancashire. But besides being a sportsman John was a talented designer, illustrator and a compelling narrator with an eye for a good painting and a wide experience of America, Europe and Japan. His qualifications, as an architect, landscape architect and town planner, made for a multi-talented designer, rounded off at the University of Pennsylvania. And beside all this, John was a quietly friendly and persuasive professional business person, but a bit of a petrol head on the road!
The Parc de la Prefecture was the subject of an international design competition and as winners, we were working with John Whalley’s pal Allain Provost to achieve the realization of the project.
We were based at the project’s main contractor’s site offices at Cergy, with his team of architects, engineers, surveyors and the project administrators of the New Town. The site for the park was as it said in the title – a park setting for the Town Hall. The prefecture had been mainly built, but we found its setting was a wide, gently falling slope across once agricultural land, stony, dusty and vacant of any trees or hedges. There was little else built or functioning in these early days of the new town. On site our task was to transform our winning drawings to working drawings; mainly Andrew and I, but occasionally John would join us. Hence our roaming around and getting to know Paris.
Eating lunch was and is a French ritual and so sitting all together with the team and its leader on long tables in the construction offices, we ate and conversed in John’s declaiming French, and our very pedestrian ‘O’ level pidgin – wondering did ‘radier’ mean hardcore and ‘terra firma’ mean good ground for foundations?
It wasn’t long before John and his pal Allain Provost spotted another competition on a site at La Courneuve, a district north of Paris, close by Le Bourget airport. The Parc Georges- Valbon, an established formal park, with adjacent undeveloped land, was the challenge.
Paris was going through a boom in office buildings, and excavations for foundations and basements was to generate massive quantities of subsoil. SNCF needed a new high speed rail link from the north to central Paris and it was to pass through the site so ‘cut and cover’ was the chosen solution. See it now on Google Earth and after several decades the Parc within La Courneuve is a sight to amaze. And seen from the ground, today’s experience is of French panache coupled with English countryside dreams.
Now some of John Whalley’s intuitions on competition design - with the keys played in no particular order (Eric Morecombe):
· Find in the meaning of the competition brief’s diplomatic language its hidden desires
· Always have time on site to develop ideas
· Use your eyes to make memories and meanings, not your camera
· Form up a good plan image, simple, memorable and contrasting, that fits all practical needs
· Find and refer to relevant community needs and aspirations – pleasure and pride of place
· Avoid slick images of just anywhere - illustrate the meaning of the composition in hand
· Limit the presentation’s colour palette for legibility and ensure the landscape composition has a purpose
· Romantic images of landscape are more persuasive that grandiose formality – unless needed for a definable reason
· Most people cannot read a plan or imagine its purpose – so simple messages have the greatest impact. And a purpose for every space, in words, is meaningful
· In illustrations that show a landscape dependant on primary contrast and context, include a good sky and cloudscape to contrast the ground-shape and waterscape – even to capturing the wind in the trees – to meld the reality with the concept proposal.
So back to reality and it was the day that the Liverpool Everton Park competition was due. Last minute finessing of the designs and details had been carried on overnight and it was time to get it in, on time, and with a client signature confirming a valid submission. It was also a chance to show that a Manchester man could face up and equal a Liverpool gentleman!
John Whalley, Alfa Romeo warmed and ready, had parked near the office at Pall Mall Court in Manchester as I ran down stairs with the pack of boards and drawings, ready to dash to city centre Liverpool, about an hour away. The infamous A580, the East Lancs road, was the motorway of that time and no real challenge for the Italian sports coupe’s snarling engine.
Needless to say we were in time and in years to come ‘Top Gear’ would have caught some of John’s dash and confidence as he demonstrated his devotion to his trusty if skittish Alfa Romeo.
As other competitions were attempted – some lost, some won - John Whalley was the inspiration and driving force, and his team of ‘back room’ boys and girls were faithful and enthusiastic apprentices.
So as I write this short personal admiration of a man who shaped Landscape Architecture and turned many dreams into a better reality, I realise that he initiated endeavours at just the time Landscape Architecture showed a bright and dynamic future to students and young people. The chance to change the world for the better was within our grasp, as more and more schools introduced a vocational education in landscape.
John Whalley shaped our professional lives and as we all moved on, Andrew Donaldson, Nevil Farr, Stephen Bridge and I had great benefits from his leadership and hope that we have taken his message forward.
Post script
When Andrew Donaldson and I left DLP we formed DEP with later recruits of Nevil Farr, Steve Bridge, Helen Neve, David Withycombe and many others over the years. All was the result of JMW’s understanding that good original imagination and tenacity were better than chance. Latterly as DLP grew, new personalities stepped in to join the most creative firm in UK and worldwide, and we are fortunate to have had visionaries such as John Whalley.
Roderick Edwards PPLI Dip LA Glos FRSA, Retired from the Donaldson Edwards Partnership 4 August 2020
Julien Hodson-Walker
As a second-year student at Manchester Polytechnic in the mid 80’s looking to gain some hands-on practical experience, I approached John as the Principal Partner at the Manchester office of Derek Lovejoy Partnership. He was extremely welcoming, and I shall be eternally grateful for him allowing me to attend the office every other Wednesday during term time, which I dutifully did. I subsequently worked in the Manchester office during holidays and for the year of my practical experience and later for a period following my Post Graduate Diploma; part of which coincided with John’s term as president of the Landscape Institute.
John was always a whirl of energy and a very personable and engaging gentleman. He also possessed a wonderful hand in pen and ink sketching. It was a fabulous learning environment and the engagement it afforded me not only with John, but also with Will Williams, Ron Jones, Hilary Smith, Richard Eaves, Albert Bertram, Steve Whitely and others within that fabulous office played a major part in forming the foundation of my professional outlook and persona.
His passing was sad news to read from afar and his presence and energy will be greatly missed.
Julien Hodson-Walker CMLI, Founder and Managing Director of Walrus Design, Malaysia 14 September 2020
francesco vio
In 1971, after gaining my PhD in architecture at the Iuav University of Venice and passing the state examinations, I joined my fiancée Marylin in the Canary Islands where I worked in an architectural studio which gave me the opportunity to build a decent portfolio of projects. In the autumn of 1972 I walked into the DLP office in Manchester looking for a job. John looked through my portfolio and immediately took me on. I began my work with a restaurant project for Cergy Pointoise Park and various buildings for La Courneuve Park in Paris.
To my surprise, just about a month later, John asked me to join the team to go to Paris where I began the concrete design of the buildings for La Courneuve Park. In 1983, when I had already returned to Venice to live and work, John called me out of the blue to ask me to go and help DLP with the IGA competition for Munich. another very satisfying experience.
Photo: Francesco Vio
John was like a “professor”, one of those who never leaves you, who always guides you to elevate your work from “sufficient” to “good”, from “good” to “great”…
He was a true master and friend. Conversations with him, even the most insignificant, and his sketches of projects have always taught me something that is now part of my cultural background. His skill consisted in making you think so that he could get a thousand answers from a simple conversation.
Almost 50 years of friendship and collaboration have now become history. I always thought of John as generous, independent, full of love for what is beautiful, sensitive to urban and environmental issues and open to collaboration and participation. This great friend and intellectual companion has gone and I cannot find the words to express the emptiness his passing has opened up. He loved the idea of a Venetian “ombra”, a glass of wine drunk in the shadow (“ombra” in Italian) of the bell-tower in St Mark’s Square. It had become our signature way of parting.
His design philosophy was always precise and current. For him the best landscape designs are as much a science as they are works of art. Those fundamentals were always given equal weight and this was also valid for architectural design. I think this is very evident in the last project we were working on, the Glass House for Osaka in Japan.
It remains a great regret that we were not able to carry out his last dream of completing his vision and the remarkable Glass House project which, if completed, would have been a great example of how architecture can blend with the landscape.
Unfortunately, even Japanese bureaucracy with its innate “politeness” does not forgive. The same design proposal was submitted to Portsmouth City Council. In the end, PCC also proved to be an empty visionless box.
There is no better description and recollection to use than the one John himself wrote for my 70th birthday:
JMW MEETS FRANCESCO + MARILYN
…IN THE BEGINNING! I was the founding partner of an architects’ practice based in the centre of the city of Manchester. The practice, Derek Lovejoy and Associates, had been founded in 1962 by a Harvard landscape architecture graduate, Derek Lovejoy. Having just returned myself from another Ivy League college, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia I was subsequently invited to join Derek a an Associate at his Caterham office. I was, at that time, working as architect/landscape architect for a practice in Preston in Lancashire (my home town) which was soon to become Building Design Partnership. I joined Derek with the proviso that, after one year in the South, I would return North to open my own office in Manchester. It was an exciting prospect to have this chance of developing a professional office in the centre of such a vibrant city as Manchester and the practice began to take off! Work was varied but the bias soon turned towards landscape architecture projects. There were two national landscape competitions during the sixties and DLA won both of these: Everton Park Liverpool and Town Moor, Newcastle upon Tyne…… we were on our way!
In the mid nineteen-sixties the Manchester office also won its first international competition for an urban park in France - to the North of Paris - Cergy-Pointoise. This was followed by another international competition win for a major regional park, again in France - La Parc de la Courneuve. As design partner for the practice my objective was to now translate a concept design into reality! The Manchester office was now, principally, a landscape architecture practice with very few appropriate architects on the books! I had to recruit immediately another architect to work with us on this signature project. I myself had been recently married and one evening before returning home I visited my elderly mother and explained my urgent need for additional professional and imaginative help towards ‘getting this exciting show on the road!’ My chances, at the time, of finding the right person to join me appeared very slim - true architects needing a job were thin on the ground in Manchester - I was despondent! As I left for home my mother’s parting words were - I have always remembered them - “ I will pray for a miracle for you, John”. Mums are allowed to do this!
Next morning back at the office my routine was interrupted by my secretary, Pam, who announced the arrival in reception of “a young Italian architect who is looking for a job”! This young chap - with a bulging portfolio - was shown in and was introduced as ‘Francesco Vio from Venice’ . Over coffee, probably, he began to uncover a series of drawings, one better than the other. He explained two reasons why he was in Manchester: one because he had a girlfriend studying at Manchester University (Marilyn, I presume!), secondly, if he remained in Italy after graduation, he would be immediately drafted for military service! I knew very well his concern, myself, about this latter reason - I had a similar problem before leaving for my own studies in the US a decade before! His work was outstanding and I had no hesitation in offering him the job he requested, starting “tomorrow”! I seem to remember we both went off for lunch at a super Italian restaurant around the corner from the office in King Street… . This could be considered ‘miraculous’!
Francesco soon became part of the DLA Manchester team and together we developed designs for a number of projected buildings planned, eventually to be incorporated into the ‘parc’s’ master plan. I became a Member of the French Order of Architects after a further collaboration with another Italian architect now based in Paris - Alberto Cuggiani. Alberto was an officer veteran of the Italian Navy during WW2 with a magical studio almost facing Place Pigalle in the heart of Paris. This had become the one time apartment of the legendary French Gypsy jazz guitarist of the famous Quintet of the Hot Club of France - Alberto’s lunches were magic! Francesco now developed designs for a range of buildings including a lakeside restaurant, ‘Guingette’ (café/dance hall) and, most importantly, a ‘Serres’ (Conservatory/Tropical House). Another member of our team was a Chilean architect, Rudolfo Giardach later to return to revolutionary Chile and where both Francesco and I fear was killed by the brutal Pinochet’s regime in the later 70’s. By now the construction of the park was well under way but budgetary problems hinted that far fewer buildings than first planned would actually materialise on the ground. Sadly all the buildings that Francesco had designed fell foul of this cost cutting exercise! All that did appear was a small ‘Abri bateaux’ (sailing club). This was a great disappointment to both myself and Francesco… c’est la vie!
Park La Courneuve
It is now mid 1973 - I am uncertain whether Francesco is still working with me in Manchester but I am certain that my wife, Gillian, and myself were delighted to receive an invitation to a wedding soon to take place in Midhurst, in the South of England, between Francesco and Marilyn. Happy days! I lost touch with Francesco soon after the wedding as he and Mayilyn decided to return to Venice to begin their new life together. However, some few years later I was contacted by Francesco to see if I was interested in joining him in entering a ‘Concorso Internazionale’ (international competition) for the design of a new park for the Comune di Venezia at San Giuliano… yes, lets go! My wife and I drove from Lancashire to Venice - our car an Alfa Romeo GTV, pleased to be returning to Italian soil! Francesco, his small team of architect friends and myself happily worked together on this exciting project for two weeks, say, with Gillian meeting Francesco’s father Romano and his mother. Gillian spoke no Italian, Signor Romano, no English but communicate they did - very happily! The outcome appeared to have been clouded in political indecision and, sadly, the park never materialised.
Following this episode, direct contact was put aside by Francesco and myself as we pursued our individual careers and aspirations in our hinterland bases. As a founding partner of Derek Lovejoy Partnership, my Manchester office continued with both domestic and other international projects until the early 1990s when Lovejoy retired from the practice followed by myself in 1993. Sadly Derek didn’t live long to to enjoy a relaxed retirement. Retirement for me was never on the agenda and I decided, instantly, to reinvent myself as the sole practitioner in my own new practice: JMW International, working from my home in Preston, Lancashire, as a studio.
This was the beginning of a new era. Earlier work carried out from Manchester on projects in Japan was re-activated and during the past twenty three years I have concentrated on a small portfolio of landscape design work located throughout Japan. Any required computer graphics elements were covered by the former Lovejoy practice - now subsumed into ‘big business’ in 2008 by the acquisition of Lovejoy by Capita Symonds and now based in London and Birmingham. Moving on… . Early in February 2013, I received out of the blue, from the City of Venice, a formal invitation to the opening of an exhibition marking the centenary of the birth of the eminent sculptor, Romano Vio, Francesco’s father. The venue being the Palazzo Ferro Fini situated between Piazza San Marco and Academia. It was a great joy for myself and my wife to have this chance of meeting once again, on their home soil, Francesco and Marilyn. The occasion was doubly significant as part of the event was a video link with the State Capital building in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Pamela was sharing in the celebration connected with the sculpture of George Washington by Romano Vio, carried out some years ago. Incidentally, Gillian and I spent two nights of our stay at our honeymoon hotel - Pensione Academia!
Later in 2013, July to be accurate, Gillian and I shared in a memorable and very surprising occasion: Francesco and Marilyn’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Pamela had secretly, for Francesco and Marilyn, arranged a most enjoyable dinner at - surprise, surprise, an Italian restaurant ‘Nicolino’s’ at Emsworth for many old friends - or should I say friends of long standing! Our appearance from Lancashire was, we understand, another surprise to ‘the happy couple!’
To bring this reminiscence up to date, I go forward to July this year (2015). I am in Osaka, Japan, on further business with a good friend and colleague Takemoto-san. We are discussing my earlier park project in Paris and in particular the main conservatory building Serres referred to earlier in this story. I relate to him the history of the park development and how this signature piece of architecture was never built, because of lack of funding. Why not consider another chance to realise the project in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games as well as for the Rugby World Cup (2019)? The idea has taken root and I considered this exciting prospect as a great opportunity to discuss my ideas for the realisation of an exciting ‘Glass House’ project in time for both the Rugby World Cup in 2019 and the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020. Our design team will be reinforced by a prominent Osaka architects/engineers practice - all we need now is to find an enthusiastic sponsor(s) with a commensurate budget!
On my part, it is a great pleasure to have re-established professional contact with Francesco and we both look forward to this exciting prospect developing in 2016. A fitting contribution to his won special birthday celebrations!
JOHN MAYSON WHALLEY