A Temporary House for a House
Andy Groarke

Reflections on Teaching
Andy Groarke 

Permanence is a Privilege
Andy Groarke, Kevin Carmody

Andy studied architecture at The University of Sheffield and worked at David Chipperfield before establishing Carmody Groarke in 2006 with Kevin Carmody.

In addition to the professional work of studio, Andy holds advisory and academic roles within the UK. In 2023, he was appointed to the Islington Design Review Panel and to the Advisory Board for the Gallery Climate Coalition. He has been a Visiting Professor of practice at The University of Sheffield since 2014 and an External Examiner at the London School of Architecture since 2021.

Founding Director 

Andy lectures internationally on the work of Carmody Groarke and has taught architecture at schools including the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), The Royal College of Art, Porto Academy in Porto and Versailles, The University of Stuttgart where he was a Visiting Professor, Cornell University where he was Gensler Visiting Design Critic, Harvard GSD where he was visiting design critic and Yale School of Architecture, where he was William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor.

Director Andy Groarke spoke to leaders from global art foundations as part of the annual World Art Foundation conference in Milan. He presented the studio's work on the decarbonisation of art and cultural spaces, from the 

Gent Waste Brick 

Design Museum Gent 

Special Exhibitions Gallery, Science and Industry Museum Manchester

Decarbonising Spaces for Art
World Art Foundation Conference

New Business and Communications Manager

The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester is housed within some of the most historically significant buildings and structures from the modern industrial era. As part of a site-wide development plan, the museum's existing buildings are being sensitively restored to repair their historic fabric, while orientation and access between buildings, which are separated by a network of Victorian railway viaducts, is being enhanced and galleries are being transformed.

The new gallery is situated in the west end of the Grade II heritage listed New Warehouse, built in 1882 by the Great Western Railway company. The Special Exhibitions Gallery creates a new visitor route, which improves access to the New Warehouse building, linking the Lower Yard with the busiest levels of the museum above.

A generous ramped entrance at Lower Yard rehabilitates the vaulted under-croft of one of the railway viaducts, which for several years has been a dark and uninviting space for visitors. Full height fibreglass panelled walls transform the visitor welcome from outside to inside, alleviating the visual weight of the brick structures above. Each new fibreglass panel has been hand-cast and tinted with a terracotta hue to complement the surrounding weathered Victorian brickwork.

The panels are subtly back-lit, revealing the maker’s marks in their surface and gently illuminating the spatial and decorative qualities of the historic cast-iron and brick jack-arch structures.

The front-of-house area has been transformed into a bright and welcoming open plan space that provides a point of orientation for visitors. At the same time this aids the museum in resolving a series of functional requirements of circulation, accessibility, staffing and environmental control.

New interventions within the Power Hall are transformative yet discreet, so that the heritage of architecture and collections are foregrounded. Entirely new visitor circulation improves accessibility and legibility; improvements to the existing building fabric optimise energy efficiency; and new interventions into the historic facades open up new views between the city outside and the collection inside.

The project establishes a clear and accessible new route across the site from the New Warehouse, through the newly landscaped Upper Yard, and into the Power Hall. Visitors now arrive through a new central entrance that aligns this journey along the east–west axis of the original goods shed. From this point, they can look west towards the railway rolling stock and east towards the steam engines, immediately revealing the working logic of the building.

Once a shipping shed for the world’s first inter-city steam-powered passenger railway, the Power Hall now houses the UK’s largest working collection of steam, gas, and electric engines. Carmody Groarke’s project returns the Museum’s biggest single-space gallery to its original clarity, reinstating a 108-metre-long hall spanned by distinctive timber roof trusses that divide the space into two parallel bays. This creates an intuitive and inspiring environment for visitors to engage with industrial heritage.

Updated lighting, circulation, heating and control systems place sustainability at the forefront of this transformation, preserving the hall’s historic character while significantly reducing its environmental impact.

The project restores key architectural features to their original form, reinterpreting them for accessibility and clarity. Re-laid cobbles and timber floor finishes are easy to navigate and echo the building’s industrial history, and the original timber roof structure has been faithfully restored. New structural interventions – kept deliberately minimal – sensitively integrate significant repairs into the historic fabric of the building, and a high-quality, consistent material palette creates coherence between old and new.

The reconfiguration of the hall was instrumental in enacting a reorganisation of the collections and exhibition experience. A new entrance has been placed at the centre of the building, designed to enhance visibility and draw in visitors from the newly landscaped Upper Yard and the New Warehouse.

Inside the hall, the layout of the exhibition space has been reimagined. At its centre is the reinstated raised central platform, which historically allowed goods to be loaded and unloaded between trains and carriages. Reintroducing this platform restores the shed’s original working diagram and provides a powerful organisational anchor for the visitor experience. Flanked by railway rolling stock to the west and steam engines to the east, the platform creates a clear central spine for movement and interpretation.

Threaded around this platform, gently ramped walkways unlock the possibility of experiencing the museum’s collections at different levels, and are key to appreciating how the original working building operated—with trains entering at the west and carriages taking goods into the city of Manchester to the east.

New rooflights above the entrance ensure a seamless transition into the exhibition space, bringing in light while minimising solar gains and UV exposure. These units extend the spine of rooflights that illuminate the central platform, casting it in daylight and emphasising its architectural significance.

Nuanced repairs and forward-looking infrastructure upgrades create a transformative visitor experience that unlocks access to the full scope of Power Hall’s unique architectural heritage, and produces an optimised environment for collection care.

Environmental upgrades are all invisible – from the new (fully insulated) roof to the site-wide water source heat pump, to transitioning the steam engines off coal power to green-sourced electric.

Carried out in partnership with Max Fordham, the new carbon-minimising measures are part of a wider decarbonisation scheme expected to save approximately 515 tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually, bringing the museum into alignment with the Manchester’s 2038 net-zero carbon target. The new, low carbon heating is concealed under the adapted central platform, and the open-loop heat pump and electric steam boiler provide a highly efficient, sustainable energy source to run the historic engines.

Inside and out, historic brickwork walls and decorative stone dressings have been restored. New interventions into the historic facades open views between the city outside, and the collection inside. The vast existing window openings receive new large-format glazing to improve daylight and views, flanked by smoky grey oiled Douglas fir natural ventilation panels that recall historic timber sliding doors. The new roof construction features natural wood fibre insulation above the rafters, making it vapour permeable and compatible with its historic ‘breathable’ condition.

The Power Hall is the second project Carmody Groarke have delivered for the Science and Industry Museum as part of its multi-million-pound regeneration project, following the success of the award-winning Special Exhibitions Gallery completed in 2021. The transformation of the museum site seeks to situate it within a wider cultural narrative. It builds upon Manchester’s broader cultural regeneration and makes connections to other cultural institutions, notably via direct access to OMA’s multi-use cultural space Aviva Studios, which opened its doors in 2023.

Power Hall, Science and Industry Museum Manchester

Precision in architecture is an uncertain concept—there is always a degree of approximation required. Approximation bridges gaps, both literal and metaphorical. Approximation bends and breaks to cater to circumstance. Used carefully, it can recognise the potential for chaos and wilfully integrate this within an ideal whole (perhaps the closest thing possible to precision). Used artfully, it can generate fresh meaning and reveal unexpected opportunities.

To be approximate is to be tolerant. Bethnal Green Road is a tolerant site, born from messy circumstances in a part of East London that was heavily bombed during the Second World War. The resultant context is pluralistic and ad hoc. It can tolerate architecture of various scales, forms and materials.

469 Bethnal Green Road is a utilitarian building, both in conception and construction. Originally designed as a warehouse, the building is speculative by its very nature. Its functional needs, whether loads, spans or spatial configuration, are tolerant anticipating any form of future use. Unlike its neighbour—a bank—it is not representational but innately approximate. 

In its construction, the building is also ad hoc. Grey brick and block walls delineate the plot. Punched ribbon windows draw the façade. Hollow clay pots span between T-beams to define the interior carcass. Concrete piers carry the weight of it all. It is a building that is thick and thin, plain and intricate. It deserves our curiosity.

The proposed intervention extends and doubles the existing volume. Externally, the new façade is a paraphrase of the existing. Its grid is inherited from the incumbent order which regulates everything from the height of the vertical piers to their width (and the space in between). Internally, the new floors are free-spanning to match the constructional logic below but shrink in plan to align with a new structural column line. The result is a completed whole, which takes approximate measurements from the grammar of the existing condition.

Within this logic, an infinite number of permutations are possible. The building envelope, dressed in thin folded sheets of galvanised steel, consists of a careful interplay between horizontal and vertical orders. Each component operates at multiple levels (structural, environmental, spatial, contextual and/or aesthetic). Deep projecting fins are placed directly above large sliding windows and hold the outer edges, compositionally suggesting the outline of the whole. Vertical fins provide a secondary order, which corresponds to the structural load bearing system and contains perhaps the most important generative element—the bay. The bay is subsequently repeated and adjusted in a game of precise approximations across each façade.

These approximations account for localised variations that occur at all scales and at every step. In some cases, they can be quantified and anticipated. In construction, an inherently complex and unpredictable process, they can be harder to define. Constant improvisation (or approximation) is required.

The brick, as a building unit, is approximate. It is a means of achieving an overall dimension unlike frame and panel construction, which can afford to be much more precise. At 469 Bethnal Green Road, what appears regular is irregular—chaos is very near. The width between each brick pier is slightly different. No two bays are exactly the same. These variations may be anticipated and captured within the construction drawings for the façade panels which are accordingly distorted. The new is adjusted to match the incidental nature of the old. Disorder is continued in an orderly manner.

In turn, hot dip galvanising demands precision. It is an archaic process—part art, part science. Before being dipped in molten zinc, the mild steel panels are propped, dangled and stripped to allow full adhesion. When dipped, temperature and speed are key—very hot and very quick. Once dipped, the time spent in the bath correlates to the number of microns of zinc coating and so, to the longevity of the panels. Afterward, the panels are lifted, dried and carefully packed to make their way to site.

Rather like glass, it is a dry form of construction (and also very fragile). It cannot be adjusted, sawn or chiselled on site like brick. Anticipation is required to bring order. Gaps and shadows create tolerance which is crucial. Such tolerance occurs at every joint between the façade panels. These are set to a minimum where flush, and to a greater threshold where interrupted—either vertically or horizontally. The shadows resulting from the articulation of the facade soften any perceived error arising from the fabrication process and allow for supple adjustments to be made on site. Chaos is kept at arm’s length within an evolving set of rules.

Beyond repetition, anticipation, and adaptation, there is exception. Exception is a form of approximation that generates its own set of rules, gives in to the possibility of something new and invents. The corner is an exception. Here, the rules are broken as circumstance takes over. The space between the verticals is stretched. The window is narrowly avoided. The sill is omitted. The brise-soleil is contorted and axially reoriented.

The corner—an invented piece—is more approximate and more precise (and more ambiguous, too). It embodies uncertainty and imagination. Always and already surprising. Allowing for the possibility of something completely different, which has everything to do with that from which it was born.

In search of precision, it is only natural to find approximation—from the number of microns of galvanic coating to the number of folds of metal that make up the façade. Rules exist to be pushed, pulled and (exceptionally) broken. This caters for circumstance, absorbs the mess and provides the basis for invention. And if, after each and every approximation, order is still in sight, then there can be greater certainty in the whole.

Precise Approximations
Jerome Wren

Part II Architectural Assistant

Senior Architect 

Architect

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. 

Testing Hot Dipped Galvanised Steel 

 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. 

Published in Domus n. 1100, 2025 - Courtesy of Archivio Domus - © Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Covent Garden Apartment
Domus

Together with Shedkm and MAX Architects, we have been granted planning approval by Wandsworth Borough Council for a major redevelopment of the old Wandsworth Gasworks.

The project aims to transform the former west London gasworks into 620 homes, a riverside park and entertainment space. Drawing inspiration from Wandsworth's history, the new design will rejuvenate the site with environment, community and heritage in mind.

Within Shedkm's wider masterplan, Carmody Groarke will contribute 178 homes and 789m² of retail space, reviving the previously derelict site.

Nestled into the bankside of a riverbend beside a railway bridge, the design is shaped by the confluence of natural and infrastructural components. The tall, multi-residential building aspires to nurture a place-making quality in response to its unique setting, while retail spaces tucked into the railway arches further encourage community activation.

Wandsworth Gasworks

Carmody Groarke has transformed a former 1970s textile workshop on Bethnal Green Road into a contemporary, low-carbon workspace, offering a compelling model for urban reuse. Once slated for demolition, our client Unity Land recognised the potential to retain, reuse and reinvent the building. The result is a deep retrofit strategy that prioritises sustainability, structural retention, and architectural clarity.

This part of East London was heavily bombed during the Second World War, resulting in streetscapes characterised by fine-grain plots that vary in height, style, and age. Its urban tapestry— born from the speculative development of irregular plots— is unquestionably part of London’s high street character but it also recalls parts of other cities such as New York’s Soho district, with its skinny-framed buildings jostling for attention.

The project preserves and extends a grey-brick warehouse, doubling its usable area with a lightweight galvanized steel and Douglas fir addition. Adding three new storeys to the height of the existing structure increases the presence and improves the proportions of the corner building. Set on a narrow site above a Central Line vent tunnel, the design for the corner site retains the full concrete frame and foundations which now support a materially distinct but spatially consistent structure that replaces concrete with more sustainable components.


The result is a building that balances robustness with adaptability. Approximately 2,200 sqm of flexible workspace has been created, with minimal intervention and a focus on long-term efficiency. A striking new galvanised steel façade — just 3mm thick — is shaped into deep window reveals and horizontal fins, providing passive solar shading and a sense of depth to the façades, giving the whole ensemble a new elegance and gravity with very sparing use of material. This new façade responds to and complements the retained grey-brick base, yielding a coherent architectural expression that is both contemporary and contextual.

Internally, the layout is designed for future-proof adaptability. Free-spanning floors, modular fit-outs, and restrained finishes contribute to reducing lifecycle costs while maximising flexibility. Natural light is prioritised throughout, achieved through the use of sliding doors as windows. Exposed galvanised steel and Douglas fir timbers reference the site’s industrial past while simultaneously creating a warm, modern working environment reminiscent of a contemporary warehouse.


The ground floor has been opened up to reengage with the street, transforming a once-closed frontage into an active edge. Designed with flexibility in mind, the commercial unit can support a range of tenants, creating a vibrant threshold between the building and its urban context.


The entrance sequence has been completely reimagined to promote accessibility and visibility. A newly introduced staircase links all levels, while provisions for active commuting — including secure bike storage, showers, and changing facilities — reflect the project’s sustainability ethos.

The environmental strategy combines passive and active measures. By retaining the entire concrete frame, the design avoids the significant embodied carbon of new construction, instead focusing on low-carbon materials and reversible construction. The extension's components are bolted and demountable, allowing for future disassembly and reuse. Passive measures such as internal insulation, optimal glazing, and natural ventilation support year-round energy efficiency, supplemented by electric and renewable energy sources.


A BREEAM Excellent rating is being targeted, with post-occupancy evaluation planned to assess real-world performance. Designed with a 50-year lifespan in mind, this project provides a replicable model for workspace regeneration in dense urban contexts.


As a project, 469 Bethnal Green Road is a strategic act of addition rather than erasure — redefining the role of the existing building within East London and extending its life and civic presence with minimal material use. It becomes a prototype for buildings found on every high street.

469 Bethnal Green Road

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.

LSE Bankside House

Architectural Assistant

Studio 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.

Bibliothèque nationale de France Conservation Centre 

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.

Carmody Groarke Contacts Book
RIBA Journal 

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.

Truman Brewery
Grow Places Podcast 

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, 

Taking Care of Matters
The Berlage, TU Delft 

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.

Aeschenplatz 6

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 pavilions with the rigging familiar to rock band roadies; or sheathing museums 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 national institutions.

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.

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

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.

Learning from Canary Wharf 
Peter Lee

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:

"The architects of the Renaissance established ways of going about things, which perhaps we unconsciously follow: for example between the idea sketchily stated and the commission for the permanent building came the stage-architecture of the court masque; the architectural settings and decorations for the birthday of the prince, for the wedding of a ducal daughter, for the entry of a Pope into a city state: these events were used as opportunities for the realisation of the new style; the new sort of space; the new weight of decoration; made real perhaps for a single day…the transient enjoyably consumed, creating the taste for the permanent."

If it can plausibly be claimed that Carmody Groarke has inherited this way of working, it demands noting that its clients are not dukes and popes. The legacies of projects like Studio East Dining and The Filling Station may not be as direct as that provoked by Lutyens' plaster Cenotaph, but it is not hard to trace ideas that Carmody Groarke trialled in these short-lived schemes that have gone on to form recurring themes of its subsequent work. The fragmentation of the Jetty Museum into a series of interlinked volumes, each oriented to a different view, builds on lessons learnt at Studio East Dining. The same building's repeated use of far overhanging canopies as a mediating device between room and landscape may, as the architects acknowledge, owe something to Mies's Neue Nationalgalerie but the more immediate source is surely The Filling Station's repurposed petrol station roof.

However, the most significant lesson that the practice has taken from these small, sui generis, projects is a spirit of fleet-footed entrepreneurialism. By looking beyond the expectations of the architect's usual role and interrogating the economic assumptions on which each brief is founded, Carmody Groarke has achieved considerable success in competitions for projects of far greater scale and longer life expectancy. Its recent competition-winning proposal for 

 on the site of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's celebrated Hill House in Helensburgh (1902-4) – now a publicly accessible visitor attraction in the ownership of the National Trust for Scotland – is one such example. For many years Mackintosh's building has suffered from the highly deleterious effects of its architect's specification of an impermeable cement-based harling. Cracks, resulting from frost action, have allowed water to soak into the sandstone wall behind, where it has been trapped and ultimately damaged the interior. The Trust has concluded that remedying this defect will require the harling to be removed and the house protected from the elements for a period of at least twelve years while its fabric is allowed to dry out.

Anticipating that this would be achieved through the introduction of an encompassing scaffold structure, it staged a competition in 2017 to find a design for a temporary interpretation centre that would stand alongside the house throughout the course of the works. Where other entrants proposed effectively incarcerating Mackintosh's building in a polycarbonate box, Carmody Groarke envisaged the creation of a larger but altogether more transparent enclosure that retains a reading of the house's form. This is achieved through the use of a bespoke structure of galvanised steel angles – essentially the technology used in the construction of electricity pylons – which, as with the cladding of the Jetty Museum, communicates a powerful sense of its assembly from manhandlable parts. Supporting a facing of chainmail, the structure occupies around a fifth of the depth of a scaffold-based solution but stands five metres away from the house's external wall so as to mitigate water penetration from driving rain. The gap then enables the creation of a public skywalk, allowing the newly exposed sandstone walls to be inspected at close quarters while also offering magnificent views out across Helensburgh's gridiron plan which extends, downslope from the house, towards the River Clyde.

The twelve year lifespan is ultimately no more than an estimate, which may well have to be revised in the light of the historic fabric's response to treatment. As such, this is a temporary structure that will potentially enjoy a longevity comparable to that of many buildings designed in no conscious expectation of their destruction. Unlike a scaffold structure, it makes no advertisement of its contingent nature, asserting its right to be read as an enduring work of architecture rather than a transient assembly of redeployable equipment.

Nonetheless, the projection of this monumental life-support machine over the ailing body of Mackintosh's building confronts us with a stark reminder of the Sisyphean futility of the architect's task. A building is never the immutable presence that its author might wish it to be: weather and wear abrades its fabric daily while the emerging needs and aspirations of its occupants give rise to more radical adjustments. Developments beyond the site also leave their mark. Our sense of a building's scale, of the propriety of its expression, of its modernity, are all moderated by the changing context against which it is experienced. 

While the painting has its picture plane, the drama its fourth wall, and the life of the novel unfolds behind a gauze of written words, architecture shares the space that we inhabit. That worldliness affords it a uniquely powerful hold over our imaginations but imbues it with a mortal fragility too.

Mortal Bodies
Ellis Woodman

In the 15 years since Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke started their practice in 2006, they have worked together through boom and bust, seen a recovery and then navigated their way through the pandemic. They have found themselves shaping projects with a design life of as little as three weeks, and others intended to last for as long as human culture on this planet survives. Their output has encompassed an improbable range of concerns, from pleasure pavilions to a memorial to the 52 lives lost in a terrorist outrage in London on the day in 2005 that the city was named as the host for the summer Olympics of 2012. They devised emergency protection for Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House in Scotland; a national monument in danger of being washed away in the rain. They have built artists' studios and exhibitions, designed a piece of infrastructure on a heroic scale in the shape of an as-yet unbuilt shipyard overlooking the Elbe in Hamburg's harbour, and embarked on remodelling a museum in the historic centre of Ghent. That they have given this apparently random sequence of commissions a convincing sense of purpose and meaning, in the face of the unpredictable day to day reality of architectural practice, is perhaps the most impressive of achievements. It is evidence of an underlying conviction about what the practice of architecture might constitute. If novelists can choose to use their own lives as the raw material for their work, those architects who want to build have no option but to function within the limitations and opportunities represented by the technical and other realities of their times.

Critics who have tried to contextualize Carmody Groarke's work cite a wide range of sources in the attempt to provide an insight into their motivations. The name of Cedric Price comes up more often than those of Peter and Alison Smithson, who have marked the careers of some of Carmody Groarke's contemporaries. That Andy Groarke was influenced by his professor at Sheffield, the eminent historian Peter Blundell Jones, and was fired up by his passion for the work of Hans Scharoun, Hugo Haring and other less celebrated 20th century pioneers, may account for a certain bluntness in their approach to planning - but also a fascination for landscape and materiality and the stronger flavours of architecture. Others have mentioned Lethaby, Ruskin and Voysey, and not only because Carmody Groarke have built a museum to accommodate a collection of small boats on Lake Windermere in the format of a scattering of robust sheds.

This lineage should not be taken as a suggestion that Carmody Groarke are in some sense a representation of 'Englishness'. They are better characterised as the products of post-millennial London, even though neither of the founders were born there. Carmody is from Australia, with an education influenced by the very particular architectural climates of Canberra and Melbourne. Groarke studied in Sheffield. Their office is staffed by a diverse range of talent, drawn to London from around the world - as indeed the city was, before the self-inflicted wound of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. "London is an incubator. Our practice is formed by a mix of opportunism and idealism. It is important not to let either one get out of kilter," they say. Carmody Groarke began their independent practice at the overheated extreme of the twist in London's property cycle in 2006 that has left both banks of the Thames lined with a continuous wall of questionable apartment buildings. It is a boom that triggered a sprouting crop of high rise towers, turning London's skyline into an unconvincing blend of Doha and Shanghai. While certainly exciting for a time, the long-term impact of this boom on the life of ordinary Londoners has not been uniformly positive. A burst of property speculation made much of London unaffordable for the teachers, nurses, police officers, restaurant workers, bus drivers and cleaners on which the city's survival depends.