Writing

Covent Garden Apartment
Domus

Residential

Historic

Covent Garden Apartment

Cultural

Dulwich Picture Gallery 

Experiencing Culture

Hill House Box

Permanence is a Privilege
Andy Groarke, Kevin Carmody

Carmody Groarke 
A+U 264

Workplace

British Library, Boston Spa 

Research and Innovation

Urban

Science and Industry Museum Masterplan 

Adaptive Reuse
Lukas Barry 

Milan Giovenale 

Urban Heritage

Bibliothèque nationale de France Conservation Centre 

Talks and Teaching

Truman Brewery
Grow Places Podcast 

Scaffold, Episode 78
Architecture Foundation

Design Museum Gent 

Taking Care of Matters
The Berlage, TU Delft 

London Wall 

LSE Bankside House

Windermere Jetty Museum

Cabot Square

Decarbonising Spaces for Art
World Art Foundation Conference

Repurposing and transforming existing buildings

'Not Forever'
Yale School of Architecture 

BFI Southbank 

 7 July Memorial 

Two Pavilions 

University of Leeds Archive Building 

Playhouse Theatre 

Hill House: Not Forever 

Learning from Canary Wharf 
Peter Lee

Grossmarkt Theatre Pavilion

Studio East Dining 

Carmody Groarke A+ Bozar
Architecture in Belgium

The Filling Station 

Gormley Studio 

Research into Circular Building Materials with Imperial College 

Nea Paphos Mosaic Shelter 

Historic Sites and Contemporary Access
Design Museum London



Dock 10 

Aeschenplatz 6

Teatro Oficina
Harvard GSD

Gent Waste Brick 

Highgate House 

Carmody Groarke 
AMAG 23

Carmody Groarke Contacts Book
RIBA Journal 

Glass reinforced plastic: architectural uses for an industrial material
MIT Material Science Conference 

Fitzrovia House 

Maggie's Merseyside 

V&A Members Room 

Meaning through Making 
Edwin Heathcote 

Double Club 

Artist Studio, Hoxton 

Windermere Jetty Museum 
The Guardian 

Public Art and the Built Environment
Lisson Gallery

Reflections on Teaching
Andy Groarke 

7 July Memorial Tavistock Square 

Room, City, Building 
Kevin Carmody 

White Cube at Glyndebourne

Underground Spa 

Windermere Jetty Museum
Architectural Review 

Rectory Farm 

House and Studio Lambeth 
Wallpaper*

Surreal House 
The Barbican 

Steindamm Ensemble 

'An Incomplete Performance'
Harvard GSD

Carmody Groarke 
El Croquis 195

Bauhaus Art as Life 
The Barbican 

Milan Giovenale
Casabella 946

Frieze Art Fair 

Grossmarkt Theatre Pavilion
Architecture Foundation

Gent Waste Brick 
Architects' Journal 

Design Museum Gent: a Story of Necessity and Ambition
Pieter T'Jonck

Milan Giovenale
Architects' Journal 

Dulwich Picture Gallery 
In View 

Skywalk 

Blind Light 

A Sense of Time
José Manuel Pedreirinho

Saving the Hill House 
National Trust for Scotland 

Postmodernism Style and Subversion 
V&A

Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House 
The Observer 

Retain, Reuse, Reinvent
Cambridge University 

Scaffolding for Dinner
Abitare 

Norfolk House 

In Conversation with David Chipperfield
El Croquis

Designs of the Year
Design Museum London 

Basquiat Boom for Real 
The Barbican 

Abstract Expressionism
Royal Academy of Arts

Architecture Foundation 

Arquitectura Viva
Carmody Groarke 

Windermere Jetty Museum
RIBA Building Stories

7 July 2005 Memorial 
Antony Gormley

Artists and Architects
Antony Gormley

Special Exhibitions Gallery
Wallpaper*

Chair 182
Dezeen


Seating Plan
Glenn Adamson

Evangelical Campus Nuremberg 

Rectory Farm: Depth of Field 
The Guardian 

Circular Building Design 
Design Fest Gent 

House and Studio Lambeth 

Drawing Studio 

Bistrotheque

Short-Term/Long-Term
Peter Blundell Jones

Topping off Design Museum Gent, April 2025 

469 Bethnal Green Road

On site at Dulwich Picture Gallery, March 2025 

On site at British Library, Boston Spa, July 2024 

Windermere Jetty Museum features in latest RIBA exhibition 

Carmody Groarke appointed to work on the redevelopment of Truman Brewery

Lecture on 'Dynamic Conservation' at Harvard GSD

On site at London Wall 

On site in Covent Garden 

University of Leeds Archives study

New Carmody Groarke Website 

Modes of Production
Ruth Lang

Tackle the Type: Filling Stations
EPFL University 

Kevin Carmody appointed to the Architecture Foundation Board of Trustees

A Temporary House for a House
Andy Groarke

Sacred Spaces
Cornell in Rome

Since the beginning of our practice we have worked with artists, museums, galleries and institutions to design cultural spaces, buildings and places. From unusual 

Architects' Journal
Climate Champions Podcast 


Gent Waste Brick wins two Henry Van De Velde Awards 

Carmody Groarke named on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2023

Testing Hot Dipped Galvanised Steel 

Construction begins at Design Museum Gent 

Developing circular materials with Local Works Studio at London Wall 

Our approach to making architecture stems from a broad understanding of climatic, social and economic challenges. We work closely with clients, creative and technical experts to find innovative and sustainable solutions to face these challenges. From a low-energy archive building for the 

 to new circular building materials at the 

Building Centre Retrofit 24: Bethnal Green Road 

LSE Bankside House 

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Amiens

Visiting Versailles
Porto Academy 

Nuremberg Theological College design competition 

Our projects examine the physical and cultural history of urban buildings and spaces. We are inspired by the relationship between old and new, from working with and adapting historically significant or 

Through our collaboration with artists and material experts we have tested and experimented with the possibilities that hot-dipped galvanising can provide, to reveal a material finish which offers exceptional longevity and a unique visual appearance.

Unlike ‘applied’ finishes to metal, such as polyester powder coating (PPC), hot-dip galvanising creates a metallurgic reaction which effectively fuses the molten zinc to the base steel, and becomes integral to the steel. The primary benefit of this is to increase the corrosion resistance of the steel, but it also creates a highly unique visual finish, created by the ‘spangle’ of crystalised zinc that forms on the surface of the steel.

 furthered our material research into galvanising, in the form of a small workshop building which was entirely clad in galvanised steel, extending the artist’s existing studio facilities in London.

The use of hot dipped galvanised steel as a cladding material was chosen because of its ability to be both robust as well as create an intriguing aesthetic appearance. This was achieved through a rigorous research and prototyping process, with direct engagement with galvanising plants to understand how the process of hot dip galvanising could be controlled to achieve the desired precision of panel junctions and visual appearance.

To reach the desired material finish, each galvanising test refined the base steel specification and optimised the pre-folded form of the panel, so that the finished result yielded long lasting corrosion protection and an elemental, sculptural like quality to the finished building. Newly galvanised steel appears initially bright and reflective, but slowly softens as the surfaces oxidises, increasing its atmospheric resistance over time and mellowing into its setting. The research and development of this material technique has been applied to our project in Bethnal Green, which applies the same principles on a larger, city scale. 

 has been featured in Domus' April 2025 issue which focuses on the theme of 'Metal'. Entitled 'Leggero Equilibrio/Lightweight Equilibrium', the article explores the project's innovative use of aluminium and was selected for the issue by Domus' 2025 guest editor, Bjarke Ingels. 

Occupying a corner plot on Bethnal Green Road, in a rapidly changing area of East London, the existing 1970s textiles workshop is a robust, yet unremarkable three-storey masonry building. In response to the client’s brief to provide new creative workspaces, the ambition was to create a high-quality, low-energy and materially rich office building.

The design draws on the building’s spatial and material qualities, retaining the masonry-clad steel frame and doubling its form with a new lightweight three-storey extension. New facades are made from hot-dipped galvanised steel plates, designed to be harmonious with the existing silver-grey brick base. 

The proportions of the building’s architectural grammar – eaves, windows sills and reveals – are deliberately accentuated to counterbalance the mass of the base and create passive solar shading over the large, scaled ribbon windows. The reuse of the existing building will reduce carbon in construction while passive architecture detailing will help to lower the building’s energy in operation, creating an exemplar of environmental sustainability.

A competition winning proposal by Carmody Groarke and Sheppard Robson for the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) reimagines Bankside House as a place for affordable, healthy and socially rich student life. The project responds to LSE’s ambition to provide exceptional student accommodation in one of the most vibrant parts of London, directly behind Tate Modern. The building will positively contribute to the London skyline marking a visible commitment to high-quality student living in the heart of the city.

At the centre of the proposal is a simple but powerful question: how can a large group of students live well together? The response is both architectural and social. Rather than a single structure, the accommodation is conceived as three distinct buildings—three ‘houses’—each forming a community of around 650 students. Together they support a diversity of experience while fostering a strong sense of belonging.

This tripartite structure allows the project to maintain the intimacy and identity of smaller-scale living while meeting the large-scale demands of the brief. Each building will have its own character and its own social heart allowing students to identify not only with the wider LSE community but also with their own ‘house’.

Together, the three houses form a new urban cluster, cascading to frame the Tate Modern chimney as the centrepiece of the Southbank composition from Millenium Bridge. The spaces in between the houses are aligned to relate to major city landmarks of St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Modern.




The houses are given a unified composition against the city skyline by their light-coloured precast facades and are grounded by a continuous base of Portland stone, whilst the pavilions are made from wood, giving a warm, welcoming character inside.

The triangular plan form of each house is composed of three bars, with each bar made up of different student room types. A student common room on each level is orientated to panoramic views of the Thames, from the Houses of Parliament to the City of London.

Between these three houses, two-storey pavilions at ground level accommodate the entrance hall and shared student amenity spaces. These pavilions bring the buildings to the ground, reinforcing the architectural rhythm and providing a communal threshold between each ‘house’.

A shared entrance, a collective threshold


Although expressed as three separate buildings, the scheme is unified at ground level by a shared arrival sequence. All residents and visitors enter through a single entrance hall—accessed via multiple doors—which acts as a collective threshold between the city and the student community. Oriented between the LSE campus and Tate Modern, this generous 24-hour ground floor is conceived as a ‘living room’.

Amenity and social spaces are distributed across the three buildings, supporting smaller, more manageable clusters within the larger whole. The interconnected lower floors and accessible garden terraces extend this sense of shared community and continuous movement through the site.

The design aspires to the highest standards of environmental and social sustainability. It targets Passivhaus certification, BREEAM Outstanding and WELL certification. These ambitions speak to a broader vision of student life that values comfort, health and long-term environmental responsibility as foundations for academic success and personal wellbeing.

Architectural Assistant

Founded in the 14th century, the BnF houses the French national library collection, comprising over 40 million documents including 15 million books and journals, as well as manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, coins, medals, videos and sound documents. The collection is stored within two central locations in Paris and a network of smaller sites throughout the city. 

Over the past three decades, the facilities have struggled to keep apace with evolving standards of collection care, and with the repositories projected to reach capacity, the BnF requires a completely new archive to accommodate the growing collection. In response to these challenges, the new conservation centre aims to create a world-class archive for the preservation of French cultural heritage, setting a new standard for excellence in library conservation and management.

The project comprises two buildings within a 11,000m2 masterplan: a 180m-long passive archive building for state-of-the-art collection storage and a bespoke timber framed office building for people and conservation processes. Located on the former Amiens hospital north site, the initiative forms part of an urban plan to establish a new cultural centre to the north and create a civic landmark in Amiens.

The archive building will store and protect the renowned French national library collection, one of the oldest in the world. The building will contain a vast single room with fully automated storage and retrieval systems operated by state-of-the-art robotic technology. It will provide over 280 linear kilometres of storage space within a low-oxygen environment to protect the collection from fire and water damage. 

The building will be highly airtight to create passive temperate control, significantly reducing energy consumption in operation. Externally, the building features an expressive steel exoskeleton encased in stainless steel mesh. The super-airtight and lightweight structure provides all-weather protection for the collection inside and gives the building a distinctive identity and presence. 

Innovative engagement strategies will increase public interaction with the collection by incorporating a viewing gallery into the west end of the building. The gallery will offer visitors and users a unique opportunity to look into the archive, revealing the robotic automation systems within.

The workplace building is strategically placed in front of the archive with elevated views back to the city centre landmarks. The building will allow for modern digitisation of the historic collection and day-to-day collection care and management. The building will be structured with low-carbon timber and will feature a large courtyard in the centre to provide natural light, open green space and better connectivity between floors.

Director Andy Groarke was interviewed by Pamela Buxton for the RIBA Journal Contacts Book series, where he discussed the practice's focus on materiality and craft, highlighting key collaborators.

Andy mentioned the practice’s work with Hargreaves Foundry and Local Works, emphasising their role in material innovation, as well as long-time partner Harry Montresor for specialist façade design. He also recognised Elemental for their airtightness solutions, showcasing how these collaborations have been instrumental in shaping the practice's projects.

Associate Director Lukas Barry recently spoke to Tom Larsson, Grow Places and Dominique Staindl, South Facing, discussing the unique challenges and wider creative opportunities within the historic Truman Brewery site and our approach to heritage, conservation and environmental sustainability.

Director Andy Groarke recently delivered a lecture at The Berlage, Tu Delft entitled ‘Taking Care of Matters’.

The lecture began with an introduction to a number of key themes and guiding principles that run through the studio's work, including the lifespan of temporary and permanent projects, the adaption and reuse of existing buildings, the relationship between artists and architects and the accumulation of references and precedents that influence the character of a building.

This was followed by a conversation on the design and construction of two significant projects, 

The proposal retains as much of the existing 1980s office building as possible. Strategic zones of the highly optimised pre-stressed concrete structure are removed to introduce light and air into the deep floor plan.

The three-storey timber extension and new five-storey pavilion building maximise the potential loading of the existing structure without major alterations to the existing foundations.

The existing building presents itself as a fortress to the city, raised on a podium above ground level that prevents any access through the site. Three new ramps connect the surrounding streets to a podium level courtyard filled with low level planting, semi-mature trees and new public uses.

Dual aspect apartments are arranged around a series of garden courtyards and roof terraces. Generous external decks create space for sociable chance encounters between neighbours.

Three new legible street addresses connect visitors to four levels of existing basement. Cavernous existing spaces previously built as plant rooms and car parking are accessible for new public and cultural activities.

The existing commercial identity of the building is altered by wrapping balconies around its perimeter and the addition of duplex apartments as a barrel-vaulted crown. The highly rusticated solid horizontal bands provide each apartment with its own external balcony and create an acoustic buffer from the road below.

The site that Warnford Court sits on dates from the mid 17th Century, when the Square Mile emerged as a major centre of trade and commerce. Today the current four-storey stone building, built in 1884, is overshadowed by the post-war commercial developments that have been increasingly superimposed onto the historic scale of streets and alleyways that surround the Bank of England. Warnford Court remains as an outlier in architectural scale and character and provides rare streetscape views with open skies and connection to one of the few remaining pocket gardens within the City.

The project doubles the useable area of the existing office building, through the addition of a stepped ziggurat roof extension. The proposed building form minimises overshadowing to the street and provides richly planted external terraces, as well as much needed greening to the City.

The building’s environmental performance will be upgraded to modern use, with the new floors designed to be naturally ventilated spaces. The proposals maintain the legibility of the historic building, threading new structure through the existing rear lightwells, and balancing lightly on the perimeter loadbearing stone walls.

Structural innovation and façade composition

The façade reconciles the formal character of the new frame above with the intricate pattern of windows and pilasters below. The façades will be made from limestone ashlar with a high fossil content, in contrast to the smooth face of the existing stone, giving a sedimentary hierarchy to the new masonry.

Warnford Court 

When faced with the common challenge of an architectural brief with high ambitions and a low budget, young practices often resort to unorthodox ways of making a project happen.

One such strategy is using materials that were not intended for the building industry. At Carmody Groarke, this curiosity in experimenting with unexpected or even ‘low-culture’ materials has helped us stay close to the craft of making architecture: whether it’s improvising architectural 

 with the rigging familiar to rock band roadies; or sheathing 

 in the industrial chainmail used in abattoir protective equipment; or even taking glass reinforced plastic (GRP) from the boat-builder’s yard to adorn our 

We first experimented with the use of GRP as an architectural finish on our project for a temporary events space - the 

, completed in 2013. The Filling Station was located within the heart of the King’s Cross district in London, an area undergoing massive regeneration, shifting from its post-industrial past to become a vibrant mixed-use office and higher education hub. The site, alongside the Regent’s Canal, was a long and thin triangular plot located at the junction of two busy roads. Formerly used as a petrol station, it had a simple and pragmatic character. The brief for the project was to transform the residual structures into a hospitality space, featuring a small restaurant and outdoor space for cultural events.

The central architectural challenge was to create an inspiring and usable events space in an otherwise inhospitable location. Through design studies the idea of using a ‘screen’ emerged, which could offer both acoustic protection from the traffic and prevailing winds as well as create an arresting visual identity for the temporary project. The screen was intended to partially envelop the open forecourt of the former petrol station, creating a semi-enclosed space that utilised the existing canopy as a roof.

In order to create an optimum level of comfort, it was determined that the protective screen should be over 3m (10ft) high. Due to the presence of shallow petrol storage tanks and transport tunnels under the ground slab, which prevented structural anchors being placed into the ground, the screen would need also to be structurally self-supporting. Furthermore, the Filling Station was conceived as a ‘meanwhile’ project – the temporary and opportunist use of a vacant lot, later to be ‘permanently’ developed as part of the wider Kings Cross redevelopment. The budget and construction process needed to be proportionate therefore to its lifespan of between 3-5 years.

We tested several materials for the screen, from corrugated metal sheets to stretched textiles – each discounted due to its lack of durability or structural integrity, or excessive cost – before the chance encounter with a boat builder led us to the idea of using Glass Reinforced Plastic.

Glass Reinforced Plastic (GRP) or ‘Fibreglass’ as it is commonly known, is a composite plastic material made from the combination of a synthetic glass strand fabric sheet bound together with a thermosetting resin plastic – often an epoxy resin. The flexible synthetic glass fabric can be laid in sheet form or into complex moulds, with the resin applied to cure-in-place the GRP into bespoke shapes. The resulting composite material gains strength from the hard-setting resin which is reinforced with the synthetic glass strands, rather like structural concrete with reinforcement bar. However, unlike other hard-setting structural materials, the recipe of GRP can be adapted to be vividly coloured, transparent, translucent, or opaque, and has fascinating optical qualities because of its material makeup.

The designs developed for the screen exploited the material characteristics of GRP, which were elevated in turn to form the architectural identity of the project. To solve the problem of the site’s enclosure we needed to create a screen height of over 3m without significant sub-structure, in a form that would give integrity with as little weight as possible. Through the physical testing of forms which at 3.5m high could be rigid and self-supporting, the concave shape with flange returns was evolved. When repeated to make a contiguous screen, this resulted in a continuous, lyrical, fluted architectural form.

The material density of GRP is extremely low – around 1.4g/cm3 (compared to concrete at 2.3g/cm3, glass at 2.70g/cm3 and steel at 7.75g/cm3) – and it has a relatively high tensile strength, meaning it can be made into large rigid shapes which touch the ground relatively lightly. Furthermore, because of the way it is made – as a composite of laid glass textiles and bound with clear resin – it has a high light transmission, usually over 50% (depending on the resin used).

It was this light transmissive quality that became the architectural identity of the project. The materiality of the translucent screens took on very different characteristics in natural and artificial light and provided a strong identity for the site, by day and by night. By day, the GRP panels had an unexpectedly solid, cementitious appearance. At night however, a lamp backlit each panel to make them appear to glow, revealing their textile buildup.

Design Museum Gent

Covent Garden Apartment

Bibliothèque nationale de France Conservation Centre

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Topping off Design Museum Gent, April 2025

Adaptive ReuseLukas Barry

469 Bethnal Green Road

LSE Bankside House

Truman BreweryGrow Places Podcast

Milan Giovenale

On site at Dulwich Picture Gallery, March 2025

On site at British Library, Boston Spa, July 2024

British Library, Boston Spa

Science and Industry Museum Masterplan

Windermere Jetty Museum

Grossmarkt Theatre Pavilion

Windermere Jetty Museum features in latest RIBA exhibition

Carmody Groarke Contacts BookRIBA Journal

Taking Care of MattersThe Berlage, TU Delft

Carmody Groarke appointed to work on the redevelopment of Truman Brewery

Lecture on 'Dynamic Conservation' at Harvard GSD

On site at London Wall

On site in Covent Garden

Research into Circular Building Materials with Imperial College

University of Leeds Archives study

New Carmody Groarke Website

Carmody Groarke A+U 264

Modes of ProductionRuth Lang

'An Incomplete Performance'Harvard GSD

Carmody Groarke El Croquis 195

Carmody Groarke AMAG 23

Carmody Groarke A+ BozarArchitecture in Belgium

Tackle the Type: Filling StationsEPFL University

Permanence is a PrivilegeAndy Groarke, Kevin Carmody

Kevin Carmody appointed to the Architecture Foundation Board of Trustees