Cultural

Windermere Jetty Museum

Historic

Hill House Box

Writing

Permanence is a Privilege
Andy Groarke, Kevin Carmody

Carmody Groarke 
A+U 264

Workplace

British Library, Boston Spa 

Research and Innovation

Experiencing Culture

Urban

Science and Industry Museum Masterplan 

Adaptive Reuse
Lukas Barry 

Residential

Milan Giovenale 

Urban Heritage

Dulwich Picture Gallery 

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 

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 

Covent Garden House 

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

Tackle the Type: Filling Stations
EPFL University 

Highgate House
Architecture Today 

Black Forest Visitor Centre

Work 

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.

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.

The hand-made quality of the screen was achieved by the layering of rolled-on resin and glass fabric sheets into a mould. The shape and profile of this plywood mould created the structural integrity of the GRP panel’s cast form. Forming the material against this mould results in a clear smooth face on the side in contact with it, and on the other a rough texture that bears the layers of resin bound fabric. The imperfections incurred by this hand-laid process refract incident light, highlighting tiny bubbles and giving an opalescent tone reminiscent of the material’s petrochemical origins. The artisanal effect challenges the perception of plastics as a pristine, mechanically engineered material.

The completed project showcased GRP as an innovative and unique option for architectural finishes. Against materials more typically used in external cladding or decorative applications, GRP becomes an attractive option due to its high durability, aesthetic variability, and relatively low cost. Its cost is derived from GRP being the composite of two relatively inexpensive materials, plus its low fabrication threshold.

The material characteristics of the binding resin gives each panel a high resistance to water absorption (0.2%) and a low UV deterioration rate. Furthermore, the lamination of strong glass-synthetic reinforcement with the high strength of set resin gives the material a resilience to impact, and shatter resistance. In the context of the Filling Station, with its high volume of passing traffic, these performance characteristics made GRP the choice material.

The strength of the material is created from the chemical bond that occurs when thermosetting resin creates irreversible cross-link bound polymers, which fuse together with the fabric sheets. This gives the material its long life and durability, but it is also its significant drawback. Thermoset plastics such as epoxy resin are impossible to re-shape or reuse – unlike thermoplastics which can be melted and reformed. Perhaps more concerning is the potential long-term environmental impact of microplastics, which essentially never go away. This is an important consideration when thinking of the sustainable possibilities of GRP as architectural finish. The proposed application of a material with an extremely long-life span on a temporary project raised an obvious contradiction.

Repurpose, retrofit and wider applications

If we are to use material components that long outlive the spaces they serve, we must consider the many ways in which they might be repurposed. In 2016, three years after the Filling Station opened, our studio was appointed to design another ‘meanwhile’ project, this time for Maggie’s – a charitable organisation that builds well-designed spaces to provide therapeutic care and support those living with cancer. With an extremely limited budget, our brief was to build an interim centre that could last up to 15 years at a hospital near Liverpool. To make the project possible, we improvised with many ‘readymade’ construction methods and materials including portacabins and temporary works, but we also reused the GRP screens from the Filling Station – thereby giving them a new lease of life.

 borrows existing structures, in this case site cabins, arranged efficiently together around mature trees on the site. The Centre is enveloped in the same curvaceous GRP screens, creating a mixture of inside and outside spaces. The design for the Maggie’s centre re-used approximately 150 of the Filling Station panels, braced by scaffolding in much the same way as its precursor. The nature of the site, with its open setting, increased the potential for strong contrasts in light. As a result, the scaffolding structure became visible through silhouettes as one moved around the centre – an unintended but pleasant consequence of the screens being placed in a new environment.

This reincarnation of material components – especially one as identifiable as the GRP panels – raises an interesting question about architectural identity. The reuse of a humble brick from one wall to another is seen as virtuous, so why not a bespoke architectural finish such as a GRP screen? Its use on temporary projects remains in question, but we are in no doubt of its ability to form a strong architectural identity. Both it’s aesthetic qualities – varying in response to light, both natural and artificial – and its plastic qualities – the way it can be formed into bespoke shapes – have been adopted into the lexicon of our permanent projects.

In 2018 we completed a refurbishment of the 

 which used GRP screens as a form of backlit fascia within a cantilevered canopy, announcing a bold new entrance under Waterloo Bridge. More recently, the same technique has been used to great effect in our new entrance space for the 

, similarly announcing a new public entrance in a dark under croft. The material’s ability to transmit light and its unusual textural quality were both important in our choice to use GRP for these important institutional entrances.

Challenges of using GRP as an internal finish in a public building

Having experimented successfully with GRP in external settings, the opportunity arose to use the same material as an internal wall-lining finish, which presented new challenges. Most recently, as part of a masterplan for the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, we have designed a new Special Exhibitions Gallery, reinvigorating the under crofts of its historic railway viaducts – which date back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The location of the new gallery was in a part of the site that was not immediately obvious or signposted as an entrance point, so the architectural challenge was to create a legible and engaging welcome to the new gallery.

With our experience of exploiting the formal and aesthetic qualities of GRP, we felt that this was an ideal material to inspire curiosity in visitors to the Science and Industry Museum. In addition to which, we thought GRP would be tough enough to hold its own architectural presence beside the robust historic fabric, and could be back illuminated to make the railway arches more welcoming.

The two challenges in this latest project were to give the GRP an appropriate fire-rating for use in public building and to experiment with colour tinting so it could take on a terracotta hue in correspondence with its historic context. To address these two criteria the specialist subcontractor experimented with multiple ‘recipes’ to achieve a unique composition and effect. By integrating a clear fire retardant into the resin mix, prior to its application in the mould, we were able to achieve a compliant Class 1 specification (which is the second highest surface spread of flame categorised by UK Building Regulations) whilst retaining the material’s textured translucency for artificial lighting. By further adding colour pigments to the GRP and transforming its appearance with low-energy LED backlighting, we were able to create a harmonious composition of old and new materials, each reinforcing the presence of the other. The result is a highly unusual and intriguing material quality that invites the visitor to investigate further – which seems fitting for a museum dedicated to the subject of scientific endeavour and experimentation.

In our research and implementation of GRP, in architectural projects of very different character and purpose, we have been impressed by the versatility of this very low cost and unorthodox material. We must be mindful of our environmental responsibilities in using such materials, which have their origins in industrial processes, and were developed to be resistant to the natural processes of weathering and decay. Unlike other more building materials used in the construction industry – such as brick, timber, or steel – there are indeed limits to GRP’s ability to be recycled again and again because of its highly specific, cast form. However, its longevity, robustness, and high-quality artisanal appearance can indeed be seen as a virtue and – as some of our projects have proved – can be creatively repurposed to serve more than one building project.

Roller application of resin compound onto glass-fibres. The ‘cast’ is made against a plywood former which was used to create tens of GRP scalloped-shaped moulds.

The scallop-shaped moulds were strapped to a scaffolding substructure beneath the petrol station canopy to create the unique identity of the Filling Station for its short three-year lifespan in London’s King’s Cross.

By day the GRP had a monolithic, solid, almost cementitious quality to the surface. By night the GRP was back-illuminated to give the Filling Station its ‘events’ identity.

Following the end of the Filling Station’s project life the GRP panels were repurposed in a temporary Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Liverpool.

Back-illuminated GRP was again used to give a bold new identity for the frontispiece to the British Film Institute’s new entrance building facing the River Thames in London.

GRP panels made with a unique terracotta pigment recipe harmonise with the Victorian viaduct and form the new Special Exhibitions Gallery entrance to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester.

Canary Wharf was probably the most significant addition to London's landscape over the latter half of the 20th Century. Built under Thatcher's 'Urban Enterprise Zone', the first phase of the vast development was completed at once, from the ground up, with no historic building fabric retained. SOM, under Bruce Graham, led the masterplan and many of the buildings, including 

. The masterplan established key urban qualities – axes, building datum heights and covered colonnades etc – but left the stylistic resolution of each building to the individual building designers. The result is an eclectic mixture of various styles and historic references applied to modern large-scale commercial office buildings. Unique in London, the scale of the development has its own, often maligned, character and over the ensuing decades has developed its own sense of place.

Since the first phase of buildings the estate has progressively grown as the demand for commercial space in London has continued. With the first generation of Canary Wharf buildings nearing thirty years old, their building services are approaching or indeed past their service life. This means that for the first time in its history, buildings of the estate will be re-appraised, refurbished in some capacity, or completely replaced. This renewal of the city fabric is an aspect of the life of cities which has been peculiarly absent from Canary Wharf in its current incarnation.

Canary Wharf largely arose from a need for more high-quality office space in London, in particular for huge open plan spaces suitable for trading floors and other financial services. Cabot Square fulfilled this need for American style office spaces with deep floor plates of varying size – the largest over 45,000 sq ft. The ‘American’ model was also followed through to the method of construction, with structure and services allocated separate ‘zones’ in construction, resulting in incredibly deep floor zone build-ups which are over 2m deep in some instances. Indeed, the building was largely designed from SOM’s North American office, with some resulting peculiarities such as the inclusion of Canadian snow loading allowances.

Built at a time of low energy prices and little concern for sustainability, the original buildings of the estate were realised against a completely different backdrop to today’s state of Climate Emergency. The existing system had no heat recovery, and all heating and cooling was done by treating fresh air to the required temperature – a hugely inefficient way to control the building’s environment.

Since the building was completed in 1991, Canary Wharf and London more broadly have seen huge changes. When completed the area was only served by a limited DLR network, with the majority of commuters driving. The original design of the building reflected this, with a dedicated ‘chauffeur lane’ cutting through the ground floor plan. Today, with the addition of the Jubilee underground line, and a vastly extended DLR service, the majority of commuters use public transport or cycle. The proposals have transformed the building to reflect this, with the chauffeur lane re-purposed, new cyclist facilities, and new gyms added to accommodate the needs of modern tenants.

In addition to changes to the architectural spaces and finishes, the way in which they are used has been re-considered. The fully glazed façade to the foyer creates an open and welcoming entrance to the building. Public functions such as a flower kiosk and café have been added, and the prominence of security staff and monitoring has greatly reduced. The approach to the office floor space has similarly developed from one originating in the 1980s to one providing a more progressive workplace. This has seen amenities for tenants greatly increased from basic water coolers, to the addition of external roof terraces, reflecting improved concerns of health and wellbeing, and allowing for greater flexibility in working environments and patterns.

The brief for the re-development of 25 Cabot Square called for the image of the building to be 'refreshed' to give a more contemporary appearance. As pioneers of large-scale commercial architecture in mid 20th century America, the work of SOM – under Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Toit in particular – seemed to offer clues towards a refreshed building image, drawn from the building's heritage. Starting with the rigorous structural and planning grid that underpins the original design, the ground floor foyer has been completely re-imagined and extended, with the finishes and lighting continued into the colonnade, resulting in a vastly increased sense of space and light. The building service systems have been comprehensively refurbished and replaced to modern BCO standards, while also providing the required separation to allow the building to become multi-tenanted – a break from its original single occupancy status. This involved the introduction of new risers threaded throughout the building, the replacement of heating and cooling systems, replacement lifts, and upgraded fire systems – all while the incumbent, multinational, investment-bank tenant remained on site and fully operational.

Following detailed investigation, the existing building's structural frame was found to have a redundant structural capacity. This created the opportunity to add additional floor space and roof terraces, for which two distinct proposals were developed, both achieving planning permission. The more modest option was chosen, and sees a single storey and roof terrace added to each element of the existing building. The extensions continue the existing language of the building, and culminate in a new pediment floor to crown the building and reinforce the classical tripartite hierarchy of the elevations. These extensions provide both additional office space, and new external amenity spaces – unique in its extent in Canary Wharf – with spectacular views of London's skyline.

Alongside Museum Director Katrien Laporte, Andy Groarke and Neil Michels spoke to museum professionals at the International Museum Construction Conference in Antwerp about the low-carbon design strategies used to build the new museum wing of the 

Rubbish Buildings 
International Museum Construction Congress


Studio East Dining
Architectural Review

The external cladding of Carmody Groarke's 

 (2011-18) comprises a tent-like skin of copper sheet that has been pre-oxidised to lend it a matt black finish. Before the decommissioning of Britain's coal-fired power stations, the material would have rapidly acquired a verdigris coating through its reaction with sulphur-infused acid rain. Patination through contact with carbon dioxide and water is a slower process: over the next five years the copper will begin to present a milky fleck but will only turn fully green well after the architects' lifetimes. The rate of transformation will differ between the building's roofs and its walls and also between its leeward and wind-ward sides. The sensitive copper surface provides a register of both good workmanship and of every accidental scratch and ding. The eschewal of invisible clasp-fixings in favour of widely-spaced, face-fixed brass screws generates more local variation. Soon, bimetallic action between cladding and fixing will provoke a fine overlay of oxide dribble: a phenomenon that will consolidate a reading of the surface as a textile-like mesh when seen in conjunction with the facades' recessed string courses.

"Cladding needs a set of parameters to stop it being limitless," Andy Groarke argues. "We were looking to ways in which a building like Alvar Aalto's Pensions Institute deals with the problem and have tried to achieve a similar sense of a surface made of pieces and which has a way of behaving over time that reinforces the humanity of how it has been made. It is deliberately not shiny and frictionless. It embeds the museum in its place and supports the idea that this is a cultural building.”

The notion of an architecture that might change its appearance over time was not immediately welcomed by the local planning authority. The architects presented a series of artificially oxidised models to suggest a range of potential conditions but the question of whether consent was being sought for a penny-coloured or an apple green-coloured building remained problematic. "The planners certainly couldn't get their heads around a pink copper building on the lake even though there used to be a copper mine just across the water," Groarke recalls. "So in the end we agreed to black oxidise it, which gives the material the finish it would acquire naturally after five years of exposure. We undertook a metallurgical test to prove that over 60 years it would kind of keep this hue and they were reassured that they were getting something predictable.”

The fact that such controversy should attach itself to a building located in the English Lake District is not without irony. As the native landscape that most readily exemplified Edmund Burke's categorisation of the sublime, this mountainous region, in the far north of the country, played a central role in shaping the romantic imagination of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popularised through the poetry of Wordsworth and the paintings of Turner, it became the focus of a cult of nature-worship that stood in pointed opposition to the physical and social changes that were then being wrought by industrialisation.

Among the region's most ardent devotees was the critic, John Ruskin, who was first taken there as a five year old in 1824 -an experience that he would later describe as representing "the creation of the world for me" – and who would go on to spend thirty years of his life in a house overlooking Lake Coniston.

The interests of this great polymath were far from exclusively focussed on the natural world but whether addressing questions of aesthetics, faith or social reform, Ruskin was invariably guided by conviction that Nature provided a model on which all human activity might fruitfully be based. His application of an organic analogy to the field of architecture proved a particularly radical reframing. In opposition to the fundamentally classical idea of the work of architecture as an abstract schema, conceived in the imagination of the architect and mechanically translated into brick and stone by others, Ruskin argued for an understanding of buildings as living matter – each, a testament to the labour of individual craftsmen; to a history of physical adaptation; and to the effects of weathering and decay. The stasis implied by symmetrical composition and the even surface he saw as anathema to such a temporally – constituted architecture. 

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life," he wrote. "It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress of change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent."

Carmody Groarke belongs to a long lineage of adherents to Ruskin's organic analogy. The first were the architects of the English Arts and Crafts movement, who beat a path out of the stylistic eclecticism of the late nineteenth century in pursuit of what WR Lethaby termed a culture of "sound, honest human building", aimed at direct articulation of the means of its construction and of the specificities of its programme. Rather than originating form, the Arts and Crafts architect sought it out through a close reading of material and social conditions. One of the movement's crowning achievements, CFA Voysey's house, Broad Leys House (1898), happens to stand a short distance along the waterfront from the Jetty Museum and served as a significant reference for the new building's dominant, undercut roof forms. In common with other Arts and Crafts architects, Voysey maintained a close interest in vernacular precedent, but the associations conjured by Broad Leys House ultimately lie beyond historical tradition. "His means of expression are of the simplest so there is always an air of primitivism about his houses," Hermann Muthesius wrote of Voysey in his epic survey of English domestic architecture, Das Englische Haus (1904). That Carmody Groarke should sense an affinity is hardly surprising given the frequency with which its own projects have presented a primal image of shelter, whether through the definition of an encompassing wall or umbrella-like roof.

The publication of Das Englische Haus secured the organic model a new generation of converts in Muthesius's native Germany, among the most significant of whom was the then twenty two year-old Hugo Haring. When, two decades later, Häring wrote that "life is not given to the work by fashioning the object, the building, according to a viewpoint alien to it, but by awakening, fostering and cultivating the essential form enclosed within it," he was articulating values with an unmistakably English genealogy. Haring's concept of essential form was central to a philosophy that he termed New Building and which found its most powerful articulation within his own modest built oeuvre in the Gut Garkau farm (1923-26). These were buildings set in fundamental opposition to the universal architecture of the then ascendant International Style: no geometric armature restricted their responsiveness to functional contingency while the hygienic abstraction of the white painted surface was rejected in favour of materials that wore discernibly hand-crafted and which would go on to mellow sympathetically with age.

As a student at the University of Sheffield in the early nineteen nineties, Groarke studied under Peter Blundell Jones, the author of major biographies of both Häring and his close friend and intellectual ally, Hans Scharoun. The experience of assisting Blundell Jones in constructing a large-scale model of Scharoun's unbuilt competition entry for the Mannheim Theatre, Groarke cites as particularly formative. "Peter was transfixed by the alternative tradition to the modernism of Mies, which Häring and Scharoun exemplified" he recalls. "It is a modernism in which architecture is seen as a negotiation between the individual’s experience and the particularities of a place, one with an appreciation for the way a village might have taken form around a drinking trough or a twist in the road.”

In the free siting of the five volumes that house the Jetty Museum we find just such a sensibility at play. Accommodating an internationally significant boat collection, the museum had operated formerly from a complex of ramshackle sheds on the same site. These have been demolished but much of the existing manmade topography has been incorporated and directly informs the new facility's disaggregated plan. The impression is of a settlement that has accrued over time and which may readily continue to do so. Its arrangement is made more specific still through the rotation of volumes in response to the navigability of the lake and to particular views. "Each volume has a specific use and they are arranged in a very free manner," Kevin Carmody acknowledges. "What is consistent is a perceptual idea about relating interior and exterior space. Every volume is conceived as a nave, with a service space to one side and an undercroft to the other and it looks towards a window facing the water. The visitor never loses a sense of connection to the place." Central to that understanding is the heightened awareness of the presence of nature and of the passage of the sun that a building of such panoramic aspect affords. We are invited to recognise our situation not only in space but also in time: as witnesses to the long and ongoing history of the site's inhabitation, to the inexorable transformation of the building's fabric, and to seasonal and diurnal cycles too.

As a student at RMIT University in his native Melbourne, Carmody experienced a very different architectural education from that of his future business partner. He recalls the early nineteen nineties as a period when considerations of national identity came to dominate the discourse. "Philip Drew's book about Glenn Murcutt, Leaves of Iron (1985), had just been published. It associated Murcutt's work with a bush mythology and presented those buildings as offering a language and identity for Australian architecture, an idea that was strongly resisted at Melbourne, where figures like Peter Corrigan were developing an aesthetic, strongly influenced by Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi, 1966, that offered a take on the ugliness of suburbia." Nonetheless, Drew's observations about the relationship of architecture, territory and identity made a lasting impression on Carmody. "He was asking you to think about the way trees cast shadow in strong light and define rooms as much as buildings do," he recalls. "The relationship between shelter and landscape that he foregrounded has been a central theme of many of our projects too."

On graduating, Carmody and Groarke gravitated to London and ultimately to the office of David Chipperfield, where they collaborated on a number of projects, most notably a studio for the sculptor Antony Gormley. "Working with Antony was particularly critical in forcing us to develop an attitude to materials," says Carmody. "He wanted to know the temperature of the galvanising bath, its chemical combination, whether you were doing it in the morning or evening - every factor that would determine the exact size of the spangle that we were going to get. The point of galvanising is preservation of the original material, so every hole had to be pre-drilled. We had long conversations with him about how you make a 3mm bent steel panel completely ready so that you just put the screws in when it arrives on site and it is then robust enough to survive when you back a truck into it. He wanted us to reinforce the material's nature and purpose at every stage of thinking, to the point that it attained an adamantine quality."

Carmody and Groarke established their own office in 2006 and soon found their commercial feet, securing commissions for a 

 in the more well-to-do parts of London. However, within eighteen months, two events occurred that reshaped the nature of the practice in profound ways. The first was its appointment to design 

 to the victims of the suicide bombings perpetrated by Islamist terrorists in London on the morning of 7 July 2005 (2007-9). The commission for a memorial confronts an architect with the question of how their work can embody time with singular directness. As Carmody puts it: "You have one task which is to stop people forgetting." For the young practice, the intense dialogue about the relationship between endurance and meaning that the commission engendered represented a significant moment of self-discovery.

The project was the subject of a competition that Carmody Groarke entered with Gormley attached to its team as artistic advisor. If the artist's name got them on the shortlist, what won them the commission was that, uniquely among the competitors, they chose not to present a fixed proposal but rather a method of consultation with the victims' relatives. "We had 52 family members as client and they all wanted the name of their loved one engraved on a gravestone essentially," Carmody recalls. "We knew it couldn't be that. It had to mean something in 50 years to people with no knowledge about the event. It was a project that made us acutely aware that we had responsibilities which extended far beyond those that we owed to our immediate client."

From six months of discussion, a design emerged that delicately negotiates competing demands that it speak of collective tragedy and individual loss. Sited in a secluded area on the edge of London's Hyde Park it takes the form of a field of 52 stainless steel stelae, each of which represents a life taken. Of a common height, they are closely distributed in parallel rows, but divided into clusters articulating the death toll of each of the four coordinated attacks that took place in different central London locations over the course of just under an hour. The concept is supported by the casting of a terse piece of text, midway up the height of each post, that details the time and location of an individual fatality. However, in the absence of names or any more explicit indication of its function, the initial impression that the memorial makes on the uninitiated visitor is highly enigmatic. Only once they have worked their way to the back of the field, where they are presented with an explicatory plaque listing the victims in alphabetical order, do they come to understand the significance of the journey that they have made.

Critical to the memorial's success in leading visitors to that point of discovery is the positively magnetic quality of its physical material. Each column was created by pouring 850kg of molten stainless steel into an open-top, sand- formed trench where, in six seconds, it solidified. The suddenness and unpredictability of that change of state is inscribed the end product, Unique on each side and particularly expressive on the face left exposed, the stellae's richly pitted surfaces invite metaphorical association between the means of their fabrication and the violence of the events that they commemorate. While escaping all association with the world of highly polished shop-fittings, the stainless steel remains sufficiently reflective so as to imbue the memorial with a luminosity capable of captivating a distant passersby. Drawing closer they invariably reach out and touch the mysterious surface, the oil from their fingers further contributing to its variation. Occasionally, the stellae have been subjected to more active misuse in the form of Islamist graffiti. "The families are understandably horrified,” says Carmody, "But we find it fascinating that this is one of the ways that people are culturally making sense of their times. It is a nexus for opinion, supporting a sub-cultural as well as high-cultural life.” While the design offers evidence of the architects’ interest in American minimalist art of the nineteen sixties, they maintain that this greater acceptance of use and misuse represents a fundamentally different value system. "This is not like a John McCracken sculpture that comes with a care-kit and an instruction manual,” says Groarke, "When you are making public architecture you are necessarily in the realm of the chance encounter."

A photograph that has become something of a positional touchstone for Carmody Groarke captures the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, immediately after the inauguration of the Cenotaph, Britain’s official war memorial, on 19 July 1919. Lutyens is shown striding towards the camera as, behind him, a crowd of onlookers descend on his newly unveiled project. It is a depiction of an architect setting his work free in the world where it must contend with interpretations, uses, and physical changes beyond his control or imagining. Rafael Moneo addressed this critical moment of relinquishment, and the obligations for the architect that it implies, in an interview with the editors of Perspecta in 1988.

"For those architects who believe that the most important issues at hand concern their own ideas, the problem of ephemerality is of no importance; you simply keep records of those ideas in other media. Others would argue, however, that by defining a project, you are providing life to a building, creating this new being that is going to be itself. Then the idea of lasting – the idea that this being must support itself – means that you are connecting the idea of permanence with the idea of architecture. If you believe that you are providing life to something that did not exist before, you are naturally trying to provide the longest life. From this point of view, I would say that I am trying to provide a long life to the buildings I have conceived. The idea of permanence has for me a value. Architecture is not simply the brilliant expression of an idea. After the architect has finished his work, the idea which motivated it is somehow dead, and at the same time, kept alive by the reality of the building. I believe that this reality of the building idea transcends into a new thing that should be sustained by itself."

Much as the practice shares this concern with the capacity of enduring materials to carry collective meaning, Carmody Groarke maintains that permanence is, at best, a relative condition. "We may be working towards something lasting a couple of days or a couple of hundred years," says Carmody, "but architecture is always essentially temporary." In fact, only a very small number of the practice's built projects have been conceived in the expectation of a long life. This might have been otherwise were it not for the second significant event to impact on the practice shortly after formation: the economic crash of 2008. The contraction of state expenditure on capital projects that followed – and, which remains place today – has curtailed British architects' capacity to contribute to public life profoundly. Along with a number of their contemporaries, Carmody Groarke recognised that one way of responding to the new situation was through a significant expansion of disciplinary boundaries. "The recession shook us into realising there is a lot of interesting research on the periphery of architecture that can come back to the middle and really make a change," Carmody says. "We might not have come to terms with that were it not for the fact that we had had the experience of competing for the 7 July memorial against a field of artists." The practice's readiness to engage a broader cultural terrain has brought it commissions for myriad exhibition installations, pop-up restaurants and pavilions for assorted art fairs and festivals. Most have stood for no more than a few months.

Two of the more prominent of the practice's short-life structures were commissions from the restauranteur, Bistrotheque. The first was 

, a restaurant that stood on the roof of a partially constructed multi-storey carpark in Stratford, East London, for three weeks during the summer of 2010. From this elevated position, the pavilion offered visitors a privileged view across the fenced off construction site of the forthcoming Olympic Games and provided a venue for a series of celebratory dinners marking this major milestone in the city's development. It engaged the vast territory extending in front of it both through its form and fabric. A series of interlinked dining spaces, each scaled around a single refectory table and oriented towards a different feature of the rapidly transforming context, contributed to a Hydra-like plan. The short lifespan informed the use of low-cost, recyclable materials of a kind more commonly employed on construction sites like the one seen outside. Scaffolding provided the structure, which grew increasingly ecclesiastical in height as it extended towards the views. Rough-sawn scaffold boards formed an internal lining while industrial grade polythene sheeting was employed for both the external walls and roof. In the absence of windows, each spur terminated in a pair of polythene curtains that could be tied back to reveal the view and through which guests could pass onto a covered terrace. As dusk fell, far-hanging chandeliers made of bundled construction lights transformed the translucent assembly into a glowing beacon.

The following year, Bistrotheque commissioned a second short-term venue, in the form of 

 (2011-14). This time the task was the adaptation of a disused petrol station in King's Cross, an area of central London that had historically accommodated activities associated with the railways and was now undergoing a comprehensive mixed use regeneration. Operating as a restaurant and cultural space for the course of a three year lifespan, the Filling Station provided a bridge between the site's two very different incarnations. Carmody Groarke's primary intervention was a wall of pleated fibreglass panels, which extended to just below the soffit of the petrol station's retained canopy. Extending for 200 metres it wrapped two pre-existing single-storey structures, the larger of which was adapted to accommodate a kitchen and restaurant. However, the wall's more fundamental role was to provide a barrier between the forecourt in the middle of the plan and the noisy arterial road to the south, by which the petrol station had previously been accessed. By this means, the structure was given a new orientation to the towpath of the Regent's Canal that lay to the immediate north. The forecourt was reconceived as a widening of this public route – a covered space, where lectures, concerts and exhibitions could be staged or where people could gather for an after-work drink, served by an outdoor bar.

"More than once in lectures people have asked whether we are disappointed that the Bistrotheque projects aren't still there," says Carmody. "The reality is, no. If we were designing a building in one of these locations with the aim of it lasting 50 or 100 years it would look very different." And yet there remains the potential for projects of such short lifespan and limited responsibility to serve as testing grounds for ideas that may find longer-lasting application later. As Carmody puts it: "There are a number of our projects that you could describe as prototypes or 1:1 models." One aspect of the Lutyens photograph, that the practice finds particularly resonant, is the fact that the Cenotaph featured in the image is not the Portland stone monument that stands on Whitehall today but rather a temporary timber and plaster structure, commissioned, designed and built over the fourteen days preceding the peace celebrations. It was only when this work of "architectural journalism" proved such a popular success that its author was able to persuade the authorities to commission a second subtly modified, version in stone, which was completed, twelve months later, in November 1920.

In the decade that followed, projects of short-lifespan would go on to play a critical role in the development of the early Modern Movement. Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich's Berlin Silk Exhibition (1927) rehearsed, in cloth, the ebony, onyx and glass world of Mies's Tugendhat House (1930). Le Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925) previewed a domestic ideal that Le Corbusier would develop at Garches (1927). Melnikov's Pavilion of the Soviet Republic – another contribution to the Paris Exhibition – brought the constructivist dream to life for a summer, remaining that movement's most developed articulation.

Discussing this dynamic exchange in a lecture entitled Staging the Possible, Alison and Peter Smithson argued that the transfer of ideas between projects of varying lifespan has a long history:

Work

Windermere Jetty Museum

Hill House Box

Permanence is a PrivilegeAndy Groarke, Kevin Carmody

Carmody Groarke A+U 264

British Library, Boston Spa

Science and Industry Museum Masterplan

Adaptive ReuseLukas Barry

Milan Giovenale

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Truman BreweryGrow Places Podcast

Scaffold, Episode 78Architecture Foundation

Design Museum Gent

Taking Care of MattersThe Berlage, TU Delft

London Wall

Cabot Square